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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Unicorns
+
+Author: James Huneker
+
+Release Date: March 12, 2012 [EBook #39116]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNICORNS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Ewa "czupirek" Jaros and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the
+exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also
+inconsistently spelled words. The full list of both changes to the
+text and the inconsistencies in spelling can be found at the end of
+this file.
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
+
+PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+     UNICORNS. 12mo, _net_, $1.75
+
+     IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     NEW COSMOPOLIS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE. 12mo, _net_, $2.00
+
+     FRANZ LISZT. Illustrated. 12mo, _net_, $2.00
+
+     PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     OVERTONES: A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC. With Portrait. 12mo, _net_, $2.00
+
+     VISIONARIES. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     MELOMANIACS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+
+
+
+                UNICORNS
+
+
+
+
+                UNICORNS
+
+                   BY
+
+             JAMES HUNEKER
+
+
+    "I would write on the lintels
+      of the door-post, 'Whim.'"
+                          --_Emerson_
+
+
+                NEW YORK
+
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+                  1917
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, by
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+  Published September, 1917
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY THE NEW YORK HERALD COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY THE RIDGEWAY COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1911, 1916, 1917, BY THE SUN PRINTING AND
+        PUBLISHING CO.
+  COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1915, 1916, BY PUCK PUBLISHING CO.
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY NORTH AMERICAN
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL
+
+
+
+
+  THIS BOOK
+  OF SPLEEN AND GOSSIP IS INSCRIBED
+  TO MY FRIEND
+  EDWARD ZIEGLER
+
+
+                            "Come! let us lay a crazy lance in rest
+                            And tilt at windmills under a wild sky."
+                                                  --_John Galsworthy._
+
+
+    "He is a fribble, a sonsy faddle, whose conceits veer with the
+    breeze like a creaking weather-vane. As the sterile moon hath
+    her librations, so must he boast of his oscillations, thinking
+    them eternal verities. A very cockatoo in his perched-up vanity
+    and prodigious clatter...."
+                                [_From "The Velvet Cactus." Anonymous.
+                                  Printed at the Sign of the Cat and
+                                  Cameo, Threadneedle Street, London.
+                                  A.D. 1723. Rare._]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                         PAGE
+
+      I. IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS                                       1
+
+     II. AN AMERICAN COMPOSER: THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL       6
+
+    III. REMY DE GOURMONT: HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND        18
+
+     IV. ARTZIBASHEF                                                33
+
+      V. A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES                                      53
+
+     VI. GEORGE SAND                                                67
+
+    VII. THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL                                   82
+
+   VIII. THE CASE OF PAUL CÉZANNE                                   96
+
+     IX. BRAHMSODY                                                 106
+
+      X. THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS                            111
+
+     XI. STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE                         121
+
+    XII. THE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLD                            139
+
+   XIII. ON REREADING MALLOCK                                      151
+
+    XIV. THE LOST MASTER                                           161
+
+     XV. THE GRAND MANNER IN PIANOFORTE PLAYING                    171
+
+     XVI. JAMES JOYCE                                              187
+
+    XVII. CREATIVE INVOLUTION                                      195
+
+   XVIII. FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS                                  203
+
+     XIX. O. W.                                                    212
+
+      XX. A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS                            218
+
+     XXI. THE CLASSIC CHOPIN                                       228
+
+    XXII. LITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITY                              241
+
+   XXIII. THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE                          261
+
+    XXIV. PILLOWLAND                                               277
+
+     XXV. CROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE               283
+
+    XXVI. MORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNER                                300
+
+   XXVII. MY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTURE                               317
+
+  XXVIII. VIOLINISTS NOW AND YESTERYEAR                            323
+
+    XXIX. RIDING THE WHIRLWIND                                     339
+
+     XXX. PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING                                   353
+
+
+
+
+UNICORNS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS
+
+    "The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
+    The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town." ...
+
+
+In the golden book of wit and wisdom, Through the Looking-Glass, the
+Unicorn rather disdainfully remarks that he had believed children to
+be fabulous monsters. Alice smilingly retorts: "Do you know, I
+always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one
+alive before!" "Well, now that we _have_ seen each other," said the
+Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a
+bargain?" "Yes, if you like," said Alice. No such ambiguous bargains
+are needed to demonstrate the existence of Unicorns. That is, not
+for imaginative people. A mythical monster, a heraldic animal, he
+figures in the dictionary as the Monoceros, habitat, India; and he
+is the biblical Urus, sporting one horn, a goat beard and a lion's
+tail. He may be all these things for practical persons; no man is a
+genius to his wife. But maugre that he is something more for
+dreamers of dreams; though not the Hippogriff, with its liberating
+wings, volplaning through the Fourth Dimension of Space; nor yet is
+he tender Undine, spirit of fountains, of whom the Unicorn asked:
+"By the waters of what valley has jealous mankind hidden the source
+of your secrets?" (Cousin german to the Centaur of Maurice de
+Guérin, he can speak in like cadence.)
+
+Alice with her "dreaming eyes of wonder" was, after the manner of
+little girls, somewhat pragmatic. She believed in Unicorns only when
+she saw one. Yet we must believe without such proof. Has not the
+Book of Job put this question: "Canst thou bind the Unicorn with his
+band in the furrow?" As if a harnessed Unicorn would be credible. We
+prefer placing the charming monster, with the prancing tiny hoofs of
+ivory (surely Chopin set him to musical notation in his capricious
+second Etude in F; Chopin who, if man were soulless, would have
+endowed him with one) in the same category as the Chimera of "The
+Temptation of St. Antony," which thus taunted the Sphinx: "I am
+light and joyous! I offer to the eyes of men dazzling perspectives
+with Paradise in the clouds above.... I seek for new perfumes, for
+vaster flowers, for pleasures never felt before...."
+
+With Unicorns we feel the nostalgia of the infinite, the sorcery of
+dolls, the salt of sex, the vertigo of them that skirt the edge of
+perilous ravines, or straddle the rim of finer issues. He dwells in
+equivocal twilights; and he can stare the sun out of countenance.
+The enchanting Unicorn boasts no favoured zone. He runs around the
+globe. He is of all ages and climes. He knows that fantastic land of
+Gautier, which contains all the divine lost landscapes ever painted,
+and whose inhabitants are the lovely figures created by art in
+granite, marble, or wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Betimes he
+flashes by the nymph in the brake, and dazzled, she sighs with
+desire. Mallarmé set him to cryptic harmonies, and placed him in a
+dim rich forest (though he called him a faun; a faun in retorsion).
+Like the apocryphal Sadhuzag in Flaubert's cosmical drama of dreams,
+which bore seventy-four hollow antlers from which issued music of
+ineffable sweetness, our Unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those
+who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets. When angered he
+echoes the Seven Thunders of the Apocalypse, and we hear of
+desperate rumours of fire, flood, and disaster. And he haunts those
+ivory gates of sleep whence come ineffable dreams to mortals.
+
+He has always fought with the Lion for the crown, and he is always
+defeated, but invariably claims the victory. The crown is Art, and
+the Lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by its glitter,
+not the symbol. The Unicorn, an idealist, divines the inner meaning
+of this precious fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher's
+stone, and the most brilliant jewel in this much-contested crown.
+Eternal is the conflict of the Real and the Ideal; Aristotle and
+Plato; Alice and the Unicorn; the practical and the poetic;
+butterflies and geese; and rare roast-beef versus the impossible
+blue rose. And neither the Lion nor the Unicorn has yet fought the
+battle decisive. Perhaps the day may come when, weariness invading
+their very bones, they may realise that they are as different sides
+of the same coveted shield; matter and spirit, the multitude and the
+individual. Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish the tyrannies of
+superannuated superstitions, and give the people vision, without
+which they perish. The divine rights of humanity, no longer of
+kingly cabbages.
+
+The dusk of the future is washed with the silver of hope. The Lion
+and the Unicorn in single yoke. Strength and Beauty should represent
+the fusion of the Ideal and the Real. There should be no anarchy, no
+socialism, no Brotherhood or Sisterhood of mankind, just the
+millennium of sense and sentiment. What title shall we give that
+far-away time, that longed-for Utopia? With Alice and the Faun we
+forget names, so let us follow her method when in doubt, and
+exclaim: "Here then! Here then!" Morose and disillusioned souls may
+cry aloud: "Ah! to see behind us no longer, on the Lake of Eternity,
+the implacable Wake of Time!" nevertheless, we must believe in the
+reality of our Unicorn. He is Pan. He is Puck. He is Shelley. He is
+Ariel. He is Whim. He is Irony. And he can boast with Emerson:
+
+    "I am owner of the sphere,
+    Of the seven stars and the solar year,
+    Of Cæsar's hand and Plato's brain,
+    Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+AN AMERICAN COMPOSER
+
+THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL
+
+
+Whom the gods love----!
+
+Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica may recall the last
+movement, in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on
+tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief of MacDowell that
+nothing is more sublimely awful than "to heighten the darkness of
+tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph." This
+he accomplished in his first sonata, and fate has ironically
+transposed to the life of its composer the cruel and tragic drama of
+his own music. Despite occasional days brightened by a flitting
+hope, the passing of Edward MacDowell has begun. He is no longer an
+earth-dweller. His body is here, but his brain elsewhere. Not mad,
+not melancholy, not sunken in the stupor of indifference, his mind
+is translated to a region where serenity, even happiness, dwells.
+It is doubtless the temporary arrest of the dread mental malady
+before it plunges its victims into darkness. Luckily, with the
+advent of that last phase, the body will also succumb, and the most
+poetic composer of music in America be for us but a fragrant memory.
+
+Irony is a much-abused word, yet does it not seem the very summit of
+pitiless irony for a man of MacDowell's musical and intellectual
+equipment and physical health to be stricken down at the moment
+when, after the hard study of twenty-five years, he has, as the
+expression goes, found himself? And the gods were good to him--too
+good.
+
+At his cradle poetry and music presided. He was a born tone-poet. He
+had also the painter's eye and the interior vision of the seer. A
+mystic and a realist. The practical side of his nature was shown by
+his easy grasp of the technics of pianoforte-playing. He had a
+large, muscular hand, with a formidable grip on the keyboard. Much
+has been said of the idealist MacDowell, but this young man, who had
+in his veins Scotch, Irish, and English blood, loved athletic
+sports; loved, like Hazlitt, a fast and furious boxing-match. The
+call of his soul won him for music and poetry. Otherwise he could
+have been a sea-captain, a soldier, or an explorer in far-away
+countries. He had the physique; he had the big, manly spirit. We are
+grateful, selfishly grateful, considering his life's tragedy, that
+he became a composer.
+
+Here, again, in all this abounding vitality, the irony of the skies
+is manifest. Never a dissipated man, without a touch of the
+improvidence we ascribe to genius, a practical moralist--rare in any
+social condition--moderate in his tastes, though not a Puritan, he
+nevertheless has been mowed down by the ruthless reaper of souls as
+if his were negligible clay. But he was reckless of the most
+precious part of him, his brain. He killed that organ by overwork.
+Not for gain--the money-getting ideal and this man were widely
+asunder--but for the love of teaching, for the love of sharing with
+others the treasures in his overflowing storehouse, and primarily
+for the love of music. He, American as he was--it is sad to speak of
+him in the past tense--and in these piping days of the pursuit of
+the gold piece, held steadfast to his art. He attempted to do what
+others have failed in, he attempted to lead, here in our huge, noisy
+city, antipathetic to æsthetic creation, the double existence of a
+composer and a pedagogue. He burned away the delicate neurons of the
+cortical cells, and to-day he cannot say "pianoforte" without a
+trial. He suffers from aphasia, and locomotor ataxia has begun to
+manifest itself. It would be tragedy in the household of any man; it
+is doubly so in the case of Edward MacDowell.
+
+He has just passed forty-five years and there are to his credit some
+sixty works, about one hundred and thirty-two compositions in all.
+These include essays in every form, except music-drama--symphonic
+and lyric, concertos and sonatas for piano, little piano pieces of
+delicate workmanship, charged with poetic meanings, suites for
+orchestra and a romance for violoncello, with orchestral
+accompaniment. As a boy of fifteen MacDowell went to the Paris
+Conservatoire, there entering the piano classes of Marmontel. It was
+in 1876. Two years later I saw him at the same institution and later
+in comparing notes we discovered that we had both attended a concert
+at the Trocadero, wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant brother
+of Anton, played the B flat minor concerto of a youthful and unknown
+composer, Peter Illyitch Tschaikovsky by name. This same concerto
+had been introduced to America in 1876 by Hans von Bülow, to whom it
+is dedicated. Rubinstein's playing took hold of young MacDowell's
+imagination. He saw there was no chance of mastering such a
+torrential style in Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany. He had
+enjoyed lessons from Teresa Carreño, but the beautiful Venezuelan
+was not then the virtuosa of to-day.
+
+So MacDowell, who was accompanied by his mother, a sage woman and
+deeply in sympathy with her son's aims, went to Frankfort, where he
+had the benefit of Karl Heymann's tuition. He was the only pianist I
+ever heard who could be compared to our Rafael Joseffy. But his
+influences, while marked in the development of his American pupil,
+did not weaken MacDowell's individuality. Studies in composition
+under Joachim Raff followed, and then he journeyed to Weimar for his
+baptism of fire at the hands of Liszt. That genial Prospero had
+broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted himself to the culture of
+youthful genius and his own compositions. He was pleased by the
+force, the surety, the brilliancy and the poetic qualities of
+MacDowell's playing, and he laughingly warned Eugen d'Albert to look
+to his laurels. But music was in the very bones of MacDowell, and a
+purely virtuoso career had no attraction for him. He married in 1884
+Marian Nevins, of New York, herself a pianist and a devoted
+propagandist of his music. The pair settled in Wiesbaden, and it was
+the happiest period of MacDowell's career. He taught; he played as
+"guest" in various German cities; above all, he composed. His entire
+evolution is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic
+monograph. It was in Wiesbaden that he laid the foundation of his
+solid technique as a composer.
+
+I once asked him during one of our meetings how he had summoned the
+courage to leave such congenial surroundings. In that half-smiling,
+half-shy way of his, so full of charm and naïveté, he told me his
+house had burned down and he had resolved to return home and make
+enough money to build another. He came to America in 1888 and found
+himself, if not famous, at least well known. To Frank van der
+Stucken belongs the glory of having launched the young composer, and
+so long ago as 1886 in the old Chickering Hall. Some would like to
+point to the fact that America was MacDowell's artistic undoing, but
+the truth is against them. As a matter of musical history he
+accomplished his best work in the United States, principally on his
+farm at Peterboro, N. H.--hardly, one would imagine, artistic soil
+for such a dreamer in tones. But life has a way of contradicting our
+theories. Teaching, I have learned, was not pursued to excess by
+MacDowell, who had settled in Boston. Yet I wish there were
+sumptuary legislation for such cases. Why should an artist like
+MacDowell have been forced into the shafts of dull routine? It is
+the larger selfishness, all this, but I cling to it. MacDowell
+belonged to the public. Joseffy belongs to the public. They
+doubtless did and do much good as teachers, but the public is the
+loser. Besides, if MacDowell, who was a virtuoso had confined
+himself to recitals he might not----
+
+Alas! all this is bootless imagining. He launched himself with his
+usual unselfishness into the advancement of his scholars, and when
+in 1896 he was called to the chair of music at Columbia the
+remaining seven years of his incumbency he gave up absolutely to his
+classes. A sabbatical year intervened. He went to Switzerland for a
+rest. Then he made a tour of the West, a triumphal tour; and later
+followed the regrettable difference with Columbia. He resigned in
+1904, and I doubt if he had had a happy day since--that is, until
+the wave of forgetfulness came over him and blotted out all
+recollections.
+
+As a pianist I may only quote what Rafael Joseffy once said to me
+after a performance of the MacDowell D minor concerto by its
+composer: "What's the use of a poor pianist trying to compete with a
+fellow who writes his own music and then plays it the way MacDowell
+does?" It was said jestingly, but, as usual, when Joseffy opens his
+mouth there is a grain of wisdom in the speech. MacDowell's French
+training showed in his "pianism" in the velocity, clarity, and
+pearly quality of his scales and trills. He had the elegance of the
+salon player; he knew the traditions. But he was modern, German and
+Slavic in his combined musical interpretation and fiery attack. His
+tone was large; at times it was brutal. This pianist did not shine
+in a small hall. He needed space, as do his later compositions.
+There was something both noble and elemental in the performance of
+his own sonatas. At his instrument his air of preoccupation, his
+fine poetic head, the lines of which were admirably salient on the
+concert stage, and his passion in execution were notable details in
+the harmonious picture. Like Liszt, MacDowell and his Steinway were
+as the rider and his steed. They seemed inseparable. Under the
+batons of Nikisch, Gericke, Paur, and Seidl we heard him, and for
+once at least the critics were unanimous.
+
+When I first studied the MacDowell music I called the composer "a
+belated Romantic." A Romantic he is by temperament, while his
+training under Raff further accentuated that tendency. It is a
+dangerous matter to make predictions of a contemporary composer, yet
+a danger critically courted in these times of rapid-fire judgments.
+I have been a sinner myself, and am still unregenerate, for if it be
+sinful to judge hastily in the affirmative, by the same token it is
+quite as grave an error to judge hastily in the negative. So I shall
+dare the possible contempt of the succeeding critical generation,
+which I expect--and hope--will not calmly reverse our dearest
+predictions, and range myself on the side of MacDowell. And with
+this reservation; I called him the most poetic composer of America.
+He would be a poetic composer in any land; yet it seems to me that
+his greatest, because his most individual, work is to be found in
+his four piano sonatas. I am always subdued by the charm of his
+songs; but he did not find his fullest expression in his lyrics.
+
+The words seemed to hamper the bold wing strokes of his inspiration.
+He did not go far enough in his orchestral work to warrant our
+saying: "Here is something new!" He shows the influence of Wagner
+slightly, of Grieg, of Raff, of Liszt, in his first Orchestral
+Suite, his Hamlet and Ophelia, Launcelot and Elaine; The Saracens
+and Lovely Alda, the Indian Suite, and in the two concertos. The
+form is still struggling to emerge from the bonds of the
+Romantics--of classic influence there is little trace. But the
+general effect is fragmentary. It is not the real MacDowell,
+notwithstanding the mastery of technical material, the genuine
+feeling for orchestral colour, which is natural, not studied. There
+are poetic moods--MacDowell is always a poet--yet no path-breaker.
+Indeed, he seemed as if hesitating. I remember how we discussed
+Brahms, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. The former he admired as
+a master builder; the latter piqued his curiosity tremendously,
+particularly Also Sprach Zarathustra. I think that Tschaikovsky made
+the deepest appeal, though he said that the Russian's music sounded
+better than it was. Grieg he admired, but Grieg could never have
+drawn the long musical line we find in the MacDowell sonatas.
+
+The fate of intermediate types is inevitable. Music is an art of
+specialisation: the Wagner music-drama, Chopin piano music, Schubert
+songs, Beethoven symphony, Liszt symphonic poems, and Richard
+Strauss tone-poems, all these are unique. MacDowell has invented
+many lovely melodies. That the Indian duet for orchestra, the
+Woodland Sketches, New England Idyls, the Sea Pieces--To the Sea is
+a wonderful transcription of the mystery, and the salt and savour of
+the ocean--will have a long life, but not as long as the piano
+sonatas. By them he will stand or fall. MacDowell never goes
+chromatically mad on his harmonic tripod, nor does he tear passion
+to tatters in his search of the dramatic. If he recalls any English
+poet it is Keats, and like Keats he is simple and sensuous in his
+imagery, and a lover of true romance; not the sham ecstasies of mock
+mediæval romance, but that deep and tender sentiment which we
+encounter in the poetry of Keats--in the magic of a moon half veiled
+by flying clouds; in the mystery and scent of old and tangled
+gardens. I should call MacDowell a landscape-painter had I not heard
+his sonata music. Those sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse, and
+Keltic, with their broad, coloured narrative, ballad-like tone,
+their heroic and chivalric accents, epic passion, and feminine
+tenderness. The psychology is simple if you set this music against
+that of Strauss, of Loeffler, or of Debussy.
+
+But it is noble, noble as the soul of the man who conceived it.
+Elastic in form, orchestral in idea, these sonatas--which are looser
+spun in the web than Liszt's--will keep alive the name of MacDowell.
+This statement must not be considered as evidence that I fail to
+enjoy his other work. I do enjoy much of it, especially the Indian
+Orchestral Suite; but the sonatas stir the blood, above all the
+imagination. When the Tragica appeared I did not dream of three such
+successors. Now I like best the Keltic, with its dark magic and its
+tales of Deirdré and the "great Cuchullin." This fourth sonata is as
+Keltic as the combined poetic forces of the neo-Celtic renascence in
+Ireland.
+
+I believe MacDowell, when so sorely stricken, was at the parting of
+the ways. He spoke vaguely to me of studies for new symphonic works,
+presumably in the symphonic-poem form of Liszt. He would have always
+remained the poet, and perhaps have pushed to newer scenes, but,
+like Schumann, Donizetti, Smetana and Hugo Wolf, his brain gave way
+under the strain of intense study. The composition of music involves
+and taxes all the higher cerebral centres.
+
+The privilege was accorded me of visiting the sick man at his hotel
+several weeks ago, and I am glad I saw him, for his appearance
+dissipated the painful impression I had conjured up. Our interview,
+brief as it was, became the reverse of morbid or unpleasant before
+it terminated. With his mental disintegration sunny youth has
+returned to the composer. In snowy white, he looks not more than
+twenty-five years old, until you note the grey in his thick,
+rebellious locks. There is still gold in his moustache and his eyes
+are luminously blue. His expression suggests a spirit purged of all
+grossness waiting for the summons. He smiles, but not as a madman;
+he talks hesitatingly, but never babbles. There is continuity in his
+ideas for minutes. Sometimes the word fits the idea; oftener he uses
+one foreign to his meaning. His wife, of whose devotion, almost
+poignant in its earnestness, it would be too sad to dwell upon, is
+his faithful interpreter. He moves with difficulty. He plays
+dominoes, but seldom goes to the keyboard. He reads slowly and, like
+the unfortunate Friedrich Nietzsche, he rereads one page many times.
+I could not help recalling what Mrs. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche
+told me in Weimar of her brother. One day, noticing that she
+silently wept, the poet-philosopher exclaimed:
+
+"But why do you weep, little sister? Are we not very happy?"
+
+MacDowell is very happy and his wife is braver than Nietzsche's
+sister. One fragment of his conversation I recall. With glowing
+countenance he spoke of the thunderbolt in his wonderfully realistic
+piano poem, The Eagle. There had been a lightning-storm during the
+afternoon. Then he told me how he had found water by means of the
+hazel wand on his New Hampshire farm--a real happening. As I went
+away I could not help remembering that the final words I should ever
+hear uttered by this friend were of bright fire and running water
+and dream-music.
+
+    [The above appeared in the New York _Herald_, June 24, 1906,
+    and is reprinted by request. Edward MacDowell died January 23,
+    1908.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+REMY DE GOURMONT
+
+HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND
+
+     "Je dis ce que je pense"--R. DE G.
+
+
+I
+
+Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar
+yellow cover a new book, with card enclosed from "Remy de Gourmont,
+71, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris." Sometimes I received as many as
+two in a year. But they always found me eager and grateful, did
+those precious little volumes bearing the imprint of the _Mercure de
+France_, with whose history the name of De Gourmont is so happily
+linked. And there were post-cards too in his delicate handwriting on
+which were traced sense and sentiment; yes, this man of genius
+possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality. His personal charm
+transpired in a friendly salutation hastily pencilled. He played
+exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument, and knew the value of
+time and space. So his post-cards are souvenirs of his courtesy, and
+it was through one, which unexpectedly fell from the sky in 1897, I
+began my friendship with this distinguished French critic. His
+sudden death in 1915 at Paris (he was born 1858), caused by
+apoplexy, was the heroic ending of a man of letters. Like Flaubert
+he was stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no more fitting
+end for a valiant soldier of literature. He was a moral hero and the
+victim of his prolonged technical heroism.
+
+De Gourmont was incomparable. Thought, not action, was his chosen
+sphere, but ranging up and down the vague and vast territory of
+ideas he encountered countless cerebral adventures; the most
+dangerous of all. An aristocrat born, he was, nevertheless, a
+convinced democrat. The latch was always lifted on the front door of
+his ivory tower. He did live in a certain sense a cloistered
+existence, a Benedictine of arts and letters; but he was not, as has
+been said, a sour hermit nursing morose fancies in solitude. De
+Gourmont, true pagan, enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had,
+despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean soul. But of a
+complexity. He never sympathised with the disproportionate fuss
+raised by the metaphysicians about Instinct and Intelligence, yet
+his own magnificent cerebral apparatus was a battle-field over which
+swept the opposing hosts of Instinct and Intelligence, and in a
+half-hundred volumes the history of this conflict is faithfully set
+down. As personal as Maurice Barrès, without his egoism, as subtle
+as Anatole France, De Gourmont saw life steadier and broader than
+either of these two contemporaries. He was one who said "vast things
+simply." He was the profoundest philosopher of the three, and never,
+after his beginnings, exhibited a trace of the dilettante. Life soon
+became something more than a mere spectacle for him. He was a
+meliorist in theory and practice, though he asserted that
+Christianity, an Oriental-born religion, has not become spiritually
+acclimated among Occidental peoples. But he missed its consoling
+function; religion, the poetry of the poor, never had for him the
+prime significance that it had for William James; a legend, vague,
+vast, and delicious.
+
+Old frontiers have disappeared in science and art and literature. We
+have Maeterlinck, a poet writing of bees, Poincaré, a mathematician
+opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space; solid matters
+resolved into mist, and the law of gravitation questioned. The new
+horizons beckon ardent youth bent on conquering the secrets of life.
+And there are more false beacon-lights than true. But if this is an
+age of specialists a man occasionally emerges who contradicts the
+formula. De Gourmont was at base a poet; also a dramatist, novelist,
+raconteur, man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and,
+lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering were his
+accomplishments. He is a poet in his Hieroglyphes, Oraisons
+mauvaises, Le Livre des Litanies, Les Saintes du Paradis, Simone,
+Divertissements--his last appearance in singing robes (1914); he is
+a raconteur--and such tales--in Histoires magiques, Prose moroses,
+Le Pèlerin du silence, D'un Pays lointain, Couleurs; a novelist in
+Merlette--his first book--Sixtine, Le Fantôme, les Chevaux de
+Diomède, Le Songe d'une Femme, Une Nuit au Luxembourg, Un C[oe]ur
+virginal; dramatist in Théodat, Phénissa, Le vieux Roi, Lilith; as
+master critic of the æsthetics of the French language his supremacy
+is indisputable; it is hardly necessary to refer here to Le Livre
+des Masques, in two volumes, the five volumes of Promenades
+littéraires, the three of Promenades philosophiques; as moralist he
+has signed such works as l'Idealisme, La Culture des Idées, Le
+Chemin de Velours; historian and humanist, he has given us Le Latin
+mystique; grammarian and philologist, he displays his learning in Le
+Problème du Style, and Esthétique de la Langue française, and
+incidentally flays an unhappy pedagogue who proposed to impart the
+secret of style in twenty lessons. He edited many classics of French
+literature.
+
+His chief contribution to science, apart from his botanical and
+entomological researches, is Physique de l'Amour, in which he
+reveals himself as a patient, thorough observer in an almost new
+country. And what shall we say to his incursions into the actual,
+into the field of politics, sociology and hourly happenings of Paris
+life; his Epilogues (three volumes), Dialogues des Amateurs, the
+collected pages from his monthly contributions to _Mercure de
+France_? Nothing human was alien to him, nor inhuman, for he
+rejected as quite meaningless the latter vocable, as he rejected
+such clichés as "organic and inorganic." Years before we heard of a
+pluralistic universe De Gourmont was a pragmatist, though an
+idealist in his conception of the world as a personal picture.
+Intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words, he might have
+fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that some one would write a History of
+Ideas. At the time of his death the French thinker was composing a
+work entitled La Physique des M[oe]urs, in which he contemplated a
+demonstration of his law of intellectual constancy.
+
+A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was like most Frenchmen an ardent
+patriot. The little squabble in the early eighties over a skit of
+his, Le Jou-jou--patriotisme (1883), cost him his post at the
+National Library in Paris. As a philosopher he deprecated war; as a
+man, though too old to fight, he urged his countrymen to victory, as
+may be noted in his last book, Pendant l'Orage (1916). But the
+philosopher persists in such a sorrowful sentence as: "In the
+tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte." To show his mental
+balance at a time when literary men, artists, and even philosophers,
+indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Jugements his calm admission
+that the war has not destroyed for him the intellectual values of
+Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He owes much to their thought as
+they owed much to French thought; Goethe has said as much; and of
+Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer was a disciple. Without being a
+practical musician, De Gourmont was a lover of Beethoven and Wagner.
+He paid his compliments to Romain Rolland, whose style, both chalky
+and mucilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated and spun-out series
+Jean-Christophe. Another little volume, La Belgique littéraire, was
+published in 1915, which, while it contains nothing particularly new
+about Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, Van Lerberghe, Camille
+Lemonnier, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is excellent reading. The French
+critic was also editor of the _Revue des Idées_, and judging from
+the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Querlon as long ago as 1903,
+he was a collaborator of numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson,
+English humour, or Thomas à Kempis with the same facility as he
+dissected the mystic Latin writers of the early centuries after
+Christ. Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by the plodding
+crowd of college professors, his general adversaries. But his
+erudition could not be challenged; only two other men matched his
+scholarship, Anatole France and the late Marcel Schwob. And we have
+only skimmed the surface of his accomplishments. Remy de Gourmont is
+the Admirable Crichton of French letters.
+
+
+II
+
+Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably expected from this
+diversity of interests, yet the result is quite the reverse. The
+artist in this complicated man banished confusion. He has told us
+that because of the diversity of his aptitudes man is distinguished
+from his fellow animals, and the variety in his labours is a proof
+positive of his superiority to such fellow critics as the mentally
+constipated Brunetière, the impressionistic Anatole France, the
+agile and graceful Lemaître, and the pedantic philistine Faguet. But
+if De Gourmont always attains clarity with no loss of depth, he
+sometimes mixes his genres; that is, the poet peeps out in his
+reports of the psychic life of insects, as the philosopher lords it
+over the pages of his fiction. A mystic betimes, he is a
+crystal-clear thinker. And consider the catholicity evinced in Le
+Livre des Masques. He wrote of such widely diverging talents as
+Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Paul Adam; of
+Henri de Régnier and Jules Renard; of Huysmans and Jules Laforgue;
+the mysticism of Francis Poictevin's style and the imagery of
+Saint-Pol-Roux he defined, and he displays an understanding of the
+first symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, while disliking the
+personality of that abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of
+new talent literally made visible and vocal by our critic? It is a
+pleasure to record the fact that most of his swans remained swans
+and did not degenerate into tame geese. In this book he shows
+himself a profound psychologist.
+
+Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive his chimeras in double
+harness and safely. His best fiction is Sixtine and Une Nuit au
+Luxembourg, if fiction they may be called. Never will their author
+be registered among best-sellers. Sixtine deals with the adventures
+of a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In Un C[oe]ur virginal we
+touch earth, fleshly and spiritually. This story shocked its
+readers. It may be considered as a sequel to Physique de l'Amour. It
+shows mankind as a gigantic insect indulging in the same apparently
+blind pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also shows us the
+"female of our species" endowed with less capacity for modesty than
+the lady mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting, too,
+is the psychology of the heroine's virginal soul, not, however,
+cynical; cynicism is the irony of vice, and De Gourmont is never
+cynical. But a master of irony.
+
+Une Nuit au Luxembourg has been done into English. It handles with
+delicacy and frankness themes that in the hands of a lesser artist
+would be banished as brutal and blasphemous. The author knows that
+all our felicity is founded on a compromise between the dream and
+reality, and for that reason while he signals the illusion he never
+mocks it; he is too much an idealist. In the elaborately carved
+cups of his tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and nectar,
+there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He could never have said with
+Proudhon that woman is the desolation of the just; for him woman is
+often an obsession. Yet, captain of his instincts, he sees her
+justly; he is not subdued by sex. With a gesture he destroys the
+sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist and marches on to new
+intellectual conquests.
+
+In Lilith, an Adamitic Morality, he reveals his Talmudic lore. The
+first wife of our common ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the
+accomplice of Satan in the corruption of the human race. Thus
+mediæval play is epical in its Rabelaisian plainness of speech.
+Perhaps the Manichean in De Gourmont fabricated its revolting
+images. He had traversed the Baudelairian steppes of blasphemy and
+black pessimism; Baudelaire, a poet who was a great critic. Odi
+profanum vulgus! was De Gourmont's motto, but his soul was
+responsive to so many contacts that he emerged, as Barrès emerged, a
+citizen of the world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did not long
+content him, although he never relinquished his detached attitude of
+proud individualism. He saw through the sentimental equality of J.J.
+Rousseau. Rousseau it was who said that thinking man was a depraved
+animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth. Man is an affective
+animal more interested in the immediate testimony of his senses than
+in his intellectual processes. His metaphysic may be but the
+reverberation of his sensations on the shore of his subliminal self,
+the echo of the sounding shell he calls his soul. And our critic had
+his scientific studies to console him for the inevitable sterility
+of soul that follows egoism and a barren debauch of the sensations.
+He did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His artistic
+sensibility was his saviour.
+
+Without being a dogmatist, De Gourmont was an antagonist of
+absolutism. A determinist, (which may be dogmatism à rebours), a
+relativist, he holds that mankind is not a specially favoured
+species of the animal scale; thought is only an accident, possibly
+the result of rich nutrition. An automaton, man has no free will,
+but it is better for him to imagine that he has; it is a sounder
+working hypothesis for the average human. The universe had no
+beginning, it will have no end. There is no first link or last in
+the chain of causality. Everything must submit to the law of
+causality; to explain a blade of grass we must dismount the stars.
+Nevertheless, De Gourmont no more than Renan, had the mania of
+certitude. Humbly he interrogates the sphinx. There are no isolated
+phenomena in time or space. The mass of matter is eternal. Man is an
+animal submitting to the same laws that govern crystals or brutes.
+He is the expression of matter in physique and chemistry. Repetition
+is the law of life. Thought is a physiological product;
+intelligence the secretion of matter and is amenable to the law of
+causality. (This sounds like Taine's famous definition of virtue and
+vice.) And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical laboratories?
+It is not the rigid old-fashioned materialism, but a return to the
+more plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism of the Dutch
+botanist, Hugo de Vries. For De Gourmont the Darwinian notion that
+man is at the topmost notch of creation is as antique and absurd as
+most cosmogonies; indeed, it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of
+creation. Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian symbols. Voilà
+l'ennemi! said De Gourmont and put on his controversial armour. What
+blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his!
+
+Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many scientists that
+bird life came later on our globe than the primates from whom we
+stem. The law of thermal constancy proves it by the interior
+temperature of birds. Man preceded the carnivorous and ruminating
+animals, of whom the bodily temperature is lower than that of birds.
+The ants and bees and beavers are not a whit more automatic than
+mankind. Automatism, says Ribot, is the rule. Thought is not free,
+wrote William James, when to it an affirmation is added; then it is
+but the affirmation of a preference. "L'homme," asserts De Gourmont,
+"varie à l'infini sa mimique. Sa supériorité, c'est la diversité
+immense de ses aptitudes." He welcomed Jules de Gaultier and his
+theory of Bovaryisme; of the vital lie, because of which we pretend
+to be what we are not. That way spells security, if not progress.
+The idea of progress is another necessary illusion, for it provokes
+a multiplicity of activities. Our so-called free will is naught but
+the faculty of making a decision determined by a great and varied
+number of motives. As for morality, it is the outcome of tribal
+taboos; the insect and animal world shows deepest-dyed immorality,
+revolting cruelty, and sex perversity. Rabbits and earthworms
+through no fault of their own suffer from horrible maladies. From
+all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual constancy.
+The human brain since prehistoric times has been neither diminished
+nor augmented; it has remained like a sponge, which can be dry or
+saturated, but still remains itself. It is a constant. In a
+favourable environment it is enriched. The greatest moment in the
+history of the human family was the discovery of fire by an
+anthropoid of genius. Prometheus then should be our god. Without him
+we should have remained more or less simian, and probably of
+arboreal habits.
+
+
+III
+
+A synthetic brain is De Gourmont's, a sower of doubts, though not a
+No-Sayer to the universe. He delights in challenging accepted
+"truths." Of all modern thinkers a master of Vues d'ensembles, he
+smiles at the pretensions, usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of
+so-called "general ideas." He dissociates such conventional grouping
+of ideas as Glory, Justice, Decadence. The shining ribs of
+disillusion shine through his psychology; a psychology of nuance and
+finesse. Disillusioning reflections, these. Not to be put in any
+philosophical pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the eclecticism
+of Victor Cousin as from the verbal jugglery and metaphysical
+murmurings of Henri Bergson. The world is his dream; but it is a
+tangible dream, charged with meaning, order, logic. The truest
+reality is thought. Action spoils. (Goethe said: "Thought expands,
+action narrows.") Our abstract ideas are metaphysical idols, says
+Jules de Gaultier. The image of the concrete is De Gourmont's
+touchstone. Théophile Gautier declared that he was a man for whom
+the visible world existed. He misjudged his capacity for
+apprehending reality. The human brain, excellent instrument in a
+priori combinations is inept at perceiving realities. The "Sultan of
+the Epithet," as De Goncourt nicknamed "le bon Théo," was not the
+"Emperor of Thought," according to Henry James, and for him it was a
+romantic fiction spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster, greyer
+world is adumbrated in the books of De Gourmont. He never allowed
+symbolism to deform his representation of sober, every-day life. He
+pictured the future domain of art and ideas as a fair and shining
+landscape no longer a series of little gardens with high walls. A
+hater of formulas, sects, schools, he teaches that the capital crime
+of the artist, the writer, the thinker, is conformity. (Yet how
+serenely this critic swims in classic currents!) The artist's work
+should reflect his personality, a magnified reflection. He must
+create his own æsthetic. There are no schools, only individuals. And
+of consistency he might have said that it is oftener a mule than a
+jewel.
+
+Sceptical in all matters, though never the fascinating sophist that
+is Anatole France, De Gourmont criticised the thirty-six dramatic
+situations, reducing the number to four. Man as centre in relation
+to himself; in relation to other men; in relation to the other sex;
+in relation to God, or Nature. His ecclesiastical _fond_ may be
+recognised in Le Chemin de Velours with its sympathetic exposition
+of Jesuit doctrine, and the acuity of its judgments on Pascal and
+the Jansenists. The latter section is as an illuminating foot-note
+to the history of Port-Royal by Sainte-Beuve. The younger critic has
+the supple intellect of the supplest-minded Jesuit. His bias toward
+the order is unmistakable. There are few books I reread with more
+pleasure than this Path of Velvet. Certain passages in it are as
+silky and sonorous as the sound of Eugène Ysaye's violin.
+
+The colour of De Gourmont's mind is stained by his artistic
+sensibility. A maker of images, his vocabulary astounding as befits
+both a poet and philologist, one avid of beautiful words, has
+variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant, a quality that has
+informed the finer intellects of France since Montaigne. His
+literary equipment is unusual. A style as brilliant, sinuous, and
+personal as his thought; flexible or massive, continent or coloured,
+he discourses at ease in all the gamuts and modes major, minor, and
+mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a Latinist; a classic,
+not a romantic style. His formal sense is admirable. The tenderness
+of Anatole France is absent, except in his verse, which is less
+spontaneous than volitional. A pioneer in new æsthetic pastures, De
+Gourmont is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though the gift of
+tears nature--possibly jealous because of her prodigality--has
+denied him. But in the curves of his overarching intellect there may
+be found wit, gaiety, humour, the Gallic attributes, allied with
+poetic fancy, profundity of thought, and a many-sided comprehension
+of life, art, and letters. He is in the best tradition of French
+criticism only more versatile than either Sainte-Beuve or Taine; as
+versatile as Doctor Brandes or Arthur Symons, and that is saying
+much. With Anatole France he could have exclaimed: "The longer I
+contemplate human life, the more I believe that we must give it, for
+witnesses and judges, Irony and Pity...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ARTZIBASHEF
+
+
+I
+
+Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away
+from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most
+of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent to-day, and
+invisible, and almost spiritual...." This is a plea for his own
+spiritualised art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions
+within emotions, the shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into
+crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of
+the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there
+has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence, that
+must be disconcerting to Maeterlinck.
+
+It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama, and fiction.
+That vast land of promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out
+place for the theories and speculations of western Europe; no other
+nation responds so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit,
+no other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of
+contemporary thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most
+emotional among living peoples.
+
+Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much
+Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of
+ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt,
+pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were
+bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not
+invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters,
+Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of
+the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new
+fermentation.
+
+Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless
+lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic
+Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov,
+Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the
+romancers)--not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and
+Ivanov--are the men who are fighting under various banners but
+always for complete freedom.
+
+Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young
+man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring
+of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it.
+He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy,
+though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's
+overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony
+which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky,
+despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared
+with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only
+swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism
+incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the
+middle-class and proletarian.
+
+To André Villard, his friend and one of his translators, the new
+Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colourless,
+dreary, bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern
+Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef is of Tatar, French, Georgian,
+and Polish blood. His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the
+Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a retired officer, was a small
+landowner. In the lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His
+youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its
+horrors--he has written of them in his first story, Pasha
+Tumanow--and he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for
+a literary weekly in the provinces founded by a certain Miroliuboff,
+to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at
+the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev, Kuprin, and other young
+men who, like Artzibashef, have since "arrived."
+
+His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him
+recognition. This was in 1904. But the year before he had finished
+Sanine, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till
+1908. This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that
+those critics were astray who spoke of the book as a naturally
+pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born
+in the bones of the author and he needed no external stimulus to
+provoke such a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is happier,
+healthier, whether he has married and raised a family, we know not.
+Personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them
+objective.
+
+The world over Sanine has been translated. It is a significant book,
+and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women in the
+Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the
+censorship, and in Germany it had to battle for its life.
+
+It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed
+immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of
+its "defamation of youth," its suicidal doctrine, its depressing
+atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests
+from the clergy, from the press, from society itself.
+
+In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied libelling the younger
+generation. "Sanine," he says, "is the apology for individualism:
+the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still
+new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong
+representative of the new Russia." And then he adds his own protest
+against the imitators of Sanine, who "flooded the literary world
+with pornographic writings." Now, whatever else it may be, Sanine is
+not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its
+influence has been harmless. We should not forget Werther and the
+trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But
+Sanine is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if
+it be "dangerous," then all the better.
+
+Test all things, and remember that living itself is a dangerous
+affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage,
+individualism more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and
+the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sanine
+is a call to arms for individualists. And recall the Russian saying:
+Self-conceit is the salt of life.
+
+
+II
+
+That Artzibashef denies the influence of Nietzsche while admitting
+his indebtedness to Nietzsche's forerunner, Max Stirner, need not
+particularly concern us. There are evidences scattered throughout
+the pages of Sanine that prove a close study of Nietzsche and his
+idealistic superman. Artist as is Artzibashef, he has densely spun
+into the fabric of his work the ideas that control his characters,
+and whether these ideas are called moral or immoral does not
+matter. The chief thing is whether they are propulsive forces in the
+destiny of his puppets.
+
+That he paints directly from life is evident: he tells us that in
+him is the débris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish
+his ambitions because he had not money enough to buy paper, pencil,
+colour. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush
+of Artzibashef. I may make one exception, that of J.-K. Huysmans.
+The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his
+material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the master of "the
+intensest vision of the modern world"; but Huysmans lacks the
+all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering
+mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist, a love that
+is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men
+prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life.
+
+The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and profound. The leading
+motive of his symphony is as old as Ecclesiastes: "The thing that
+hath been, it is that which shall be." It is not original, this
+theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity; but it has been
+orchestrated anew by Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen,
+Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no
+hidden angles of the truth, at least its illusion in terms of
+terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. With
+such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of life must soon be blasted.
+His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace
+and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura
+of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Artzibashef
+you wonder that the question, "Is life worth living?" will ever be
+answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer
+says, hasten hellward from their birth.
+
+The corollary to this leading motive is the absolute futility of
+action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the
+penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev, in an
+essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed
+of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in
+the present; a Norwegian philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, has said
+that he lives forward, thinks backward; he aspires to the future.
+An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to
+disillusionment. He discounts to-morrow.
+
+Russian youth has not always the courage of its chimera, though it
+fraternises with the phantasmagoria of its soul. Its Golden Street
+soon becomes choked with fog. The political and social conditions of
+the country must stifle individualism, else why should Artzibashef
+write with such savage intensity? His pen is the pendulum that has
+swung away from the sentimental brotherhood of man as exemplified
+in Dostoievsky, and from the religious mania of Tolstoy to the
+opposite extreme, individual anarchy. Where there is repression
+there is rebellion. Max Stirner represents the individualism which
+found its vent in the Prussia of 1848; Nietzsche the reaction from
+the Prussia of 1870; Artzibashef forestalled the result of the 1905
+insurrection in Russia.
+
+His prophetic soul needed no proof; he knew that his people, the
+students and intellectuals, would be crushed. The desire of the clod
+for the cloud was extinguished. Happiness is an eternal hoax. Only
+children believe in life. The last call of the devil's dinner-bell
+has sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is only mirage. The
+moonlit air is a ruse of that wily old serpent, nature, to arouse
+romance in the breast of youth and urge a repetition of the life
+processes. We graze Schopenhauer, overhear Leopardi, but the
+Preacher has the mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says none
+of these things outright. The phrases are mine, but he points the
+moral in a way that is all his own.
+
+What, then, is the remedy for the ills of this life? Is its misery
+irremediable? Why must mankind go on living if the burden is so
+great? Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and no matter how
+brilliant we may live, we must all die alone. Pascal said this
+better. In several of his death-bed scenes the dying men of
+Artzibashef curse their parents, mock at religion, and--here is a
+novel nuance--abuse their intellectual leaders. Semenow the student,
+who appears in several of the stories, abuses Marx and Nietzsche. Of
+what use are these thinkers to a man about to depart from the world?
+It is the revolt of stark humanity from the illusions of brotherly
+love, from the chiefest illusion--self.
+
+Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With
+a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch
+he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls
+emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will
+be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only--why must I
+die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life.
+But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than
+annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef
+is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.
+
+He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo,
+Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually
+failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist
+and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of
+truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan
+Lande--now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire--where we
+see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the
+love of his fellows.
+
+It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus
+can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your
+other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and
+heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog,
+a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to
+the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who,
+in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A
+ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur
+Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through
+race suicide.)
+
+But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to
+the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of
+disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is
+worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist
+or royalist--your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of
+silence--a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a
+brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to
+the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic
+fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.
+
+
+III
+
+But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world
+of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have
+only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with
+which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to
+be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the
+blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the
+impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag
+without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to
+draw a moral.
+
+There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome
+young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the
+return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his
+mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister
+Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is
+surprised to note her development. He admires her--too much so for
+our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the
+moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a
+type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto
+might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the
+fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of
+Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of Frederic Moreau; he
+displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes
+him seem an idler on the scene.
+
+When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister
+has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she
+attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but
+philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words.
+Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer
+to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches
+his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows
+out his brains. A passive rôle is Sanine's in the composition of
+this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us
+as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while
+about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is
+always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind
+whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.
+
+A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read
+him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his
+style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the
+language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again
+perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I
+am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea
+of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating into
+Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert.
+
+Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of
+Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss
+the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned
+Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though,
+naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must
+protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point
+which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in
+which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the
+monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we
+could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it
+was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the
+nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain
+to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given
+fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's,
+whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his
+genius.
+
+The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and
+honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef,
+unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the
+courageous manner--and artistic, too--with which the Russian pursues
+the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a
+psychologist as well as a painter, the exquisite recoil of the
+cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness.
+Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least
+sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a
+flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will
+never bend the bow of Balzac.
+
+Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book
+there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is
+self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and
+her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and
+differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the
+teacher, are extremely attractive.
+
+Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless
+Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be
+bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially
+indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande--who is
+evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever
+Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the
+evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make
+love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like
+candles.
+
+As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that
+the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay
+episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party,
+and pastorals done in a way which would have extorted the
+admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his
+peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a
+meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement--related with
+blasting irony--and drinking festivals which are masterly in their
+sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions,
+landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises,
+revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You
+fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days.
+
+Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked
+as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers
+and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov
+the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new
+order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch
+who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it
+minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most
+latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with
+Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius.
+
+I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left
+for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary
+Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of
+the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal
+sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression. The
+end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in
+one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not
+paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet
+the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving
+family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this
+sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly
+etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire.
+
+This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian
+in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its
+interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to
+self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is
+autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar
+schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but
+infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young
+people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic
+conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the
+other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A
+stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling.
+The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province
+town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot
+down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is
+a time for tears; though I cannot quite believe in this doctor,
+who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the
+Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar
+intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with
+wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only
+interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions
+or their causes.
+
+Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood
+Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by
+the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right,
+ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and
+the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In
+these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and
+despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these
+poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born.
+Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field
+and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has
+been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest
+story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.]
+
+Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan
+in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not
+confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor
+details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and
+crowded, the motivation subtly managed. As is the case with his
+novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the
+steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the
+place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you
+are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to
+Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of
+imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness
+and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or
+four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin
+or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also
+the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish
+writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the
+"chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch,
+and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical.
+
+There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death.
+Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you
+meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not
+be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight
+deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of
+the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of
+mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of
+suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may
+eat roast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to
+the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a
+nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful
+to the last--they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start.
+
+There is a nihilistic doctor--the most viable character of all about
+whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy--a particularly fascinating
+actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by
+a young painter (a Sanine type, _i. e._, Max Stirnerism in action),
+while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly
+pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin
+in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily
+vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and
+boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most
+poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose
+complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is
+reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet
+it compels reflection and rereading. Why?
+
+Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting
+the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is
+lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The
+little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows.
+However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation
+where sanity and cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But
+I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the
+mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that
+most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray
+as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O
+Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to
+believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night,
+beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient
+faith."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES
+
+
+I
+
+In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during
+the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably
+chronicled. News from the various battle-fields took precedence over
+the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected.
+Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American
+citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still
+prevails, when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More
+English than the English, he only practised what he preached, though
+tardily in the matter of his British naturalisation. That he did not
+find all the perfections in his native land is a personal matter;
+but that he should be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply
+the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no
+need of indignation in the matter. Time rights such critical wrongs.
+Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of Henry James is for the
+future.
+
+James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding,
+Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The
+Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions that will influence future
+novelists. In our own days we see what a power James has been; a
+subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul Bourget, Edith
+Wharton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His
+later work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse, is the prose
+equivalent of the seven arts in a revolutionary ferment. A marked
+tendency in the new movements is to throw overboard superfluous
+technical baggage. The James novel is one of grand simplifications.
+
+As the symphony was modified by Liszt into the symphonic poem and
+later emerged in the shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so
+the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's Sentimental Education,
+which, despite its "heavenly length," contains in solution all that
+the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the
+prodigious Rougon-Macquart series; Daudet found therein the
+impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant and Huysmans
+delved patiently and practised characteristic variations. Flaubert
+is the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism. His
+excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric
+significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry James
+disliked Sentimental Education--like other great critics he had his
+blind side--yet he did not fail to benefit by the radical formal
+changes introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of
+Wagner in the music-drama. I call the later James novel a
+simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed
+with; many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice-barren
+modulations from event to event are swept away; unprepared
+dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive
+padding--that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at
+every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method
+James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oblique psychology
+is partly derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal both
+Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their
+psychological splendour. Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not
+to mention that of Jane Austen.
+
+Possibly the famous "third manner" of James was the result of his
+resorting to dictation; the pen inhibits where speech does not.
+These things make difficult reading for a public accustomed to the
+hypnotic passes of successful fiction-mongers. In James nothing is
+forestalled, nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning the curve
+of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its
+bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn of the
+Screw is an exception.) You rub your eyes as you finish; for with
+all your credulity, painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a
+pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation reveal magic in
+their misty attenuations. And there is ever the triumph of poetic
+feeling over banal sentiment. The portraiture in Milly Theale
+and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Milly's life is a miracle, her
+ending, art superlative. The Wings of a Dove is filled with the
+faintly audible tread of destiny behind the arras of life. The
+reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a
+crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is
+more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound of the big drum
+and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the
+novelist concerning causes that do not seem final has been amply
+dealt with by Mr. Brownell. The question whether his story is worth
+the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered; what most
+concerns us now in the James case is his manner, not his matter. All
+the rest is life.
+
+As far as his middle period his manner is limpidity itself; the
+later style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions,
+repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in
+which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at
+the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues
+long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering is this peculiarly
+individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose.
+Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken. His dissonances cannot
+be resolved except in the terms of his own matchless art. His
+meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a
+lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind
+its sister arts I can't say; possibly because every pothouse
+politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter any one who has
+dipped into the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century
+literature, must realise that nowadays we write a parlous prose.
+However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed. The son of a
+metaphysician and moralist--the writings of Henry James, the elder,
+are far from negligible--the brother of the greatest American
+psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, it need
+hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this
+novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, or the
+fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page
+of James than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For Flaubert, who
+modelled his magnificent prose harmonies on the Old Testament,
+Shakespeare, Bossuet, and Châteaubriand, the final test of noble
+prose is the audible reading thereof. Flaubert called it "spouting."
+The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and
+overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical variety. Henry
+James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the
+books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy
+adventure, cheap historical vapidities, and still cheaper
+drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. (But, like the poor,
+the stupid reader we shall always have with us.) In the fiction of
+the future a more complete synthesis will be attained. An
+illuminating essay by Arthur Symons places George Meredith among the
+decadents, the murderers of their mother tongue, the men who shatter
+syntax to serve their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to this
+group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected.
+In his ruthless disregard of the niceties and conventionalities of
+sentence-structure I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet no matter
+how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges
+from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not
+his obscurity (his prose, like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is
+packed with too many meanings), but that his character always speaks
+in purest Jacobean. So do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric
+world. So the men and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the
+fault--or virtue--of all subjective genius; however, not a fault or
+virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy. All in all, Henry James
+is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary
+power and divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the
+cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in
+Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic, his
+deep-veined humanity may be felt by those who read him aright. His
+Americans abroad suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of
+achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Verver. Henry
+James is a faithful Secretary to Society--the phrase is Balzac's--to
+the American afloat from his native mooring as well as at home. And
+his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction.
+
+
+II
+
+Before me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend
+Doctor Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21 East
+Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: "I am not one of 'The
+Bostonians,' but was born in this city April 15, 1843. Believe me,
+truly yours, Henry James." Although he died a naturalised
+Englishman, there seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in
+the minds of his English critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical
+study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James "began
+in New England in 1843." He was born in America in 1843, then a land
+where culture was rare! That delightful condescension in foreigners
+is still extant. Now this isn't such a serious matter, for Henry
+James was a citizen of the world; but the imputation of a New
+England birthplace does matter, because it allows the English
+critic--and how many others?--to perform variations on the theme of
+Puritanism, the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamental
+Puritan--one is forced to capitalise the unhappy word! Apart from
+the fact that there is less Puritanism in New England than in the
+Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous
+New England conscience. He would have been the first to repudiate
+the notion. For him the Puritan temperament has a "faintly acrid
+perfume." To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues and
+refinement, sensibility, intellectuality, is a common enough
+mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good
+things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans.
+He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly
+speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great
+artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he is our first great
+"immoralist," a term that has supplanted the old-fashioned
+amoralist. And he wrote the most unmoral short story in the English
+language, one that also sets the spine trilling because of its
+supernatural element as never did Poe, or De Maupassant.
+
+Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of
+distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr.
+Moore said: "Henry James went to France and read Turgenev. W. D.
+Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." To lend poignancy to
+this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes it, substituting the name of
+De Maupassant for Turgenev's. A rather uncanny combination--Henry
+and Guy. A still more aged "wheeze" bobs up in the pages of Mr.
+Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William
+James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None
+of these things is in the least true. With the prudishness and
+peanut piety of puritanism Henry James has nothing in common. He did
+not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote of him with more
+sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire;
+and Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the
+Russian's or the American's fiction. Furthermore, James is a
+masterly psychologist and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest
+English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.
+
+Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields, he
+writes with authority, though too often in a superlative key. But
+how James would have winced when he read in Mr. Hueffer's book that
+he is or was "the greatest of living men." This surely is a
+planet-struck phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed with startling
+things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about
+Flaubert, whose Sentimental Education is an entire Human Comedy. He
+thinks ill of "big business," that "business and whatever takes
+place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not worth the attention
+of any intelligent being. It is a manner of dirty little affairs
+incompetently handled by men of the lowest class of intelligence."
+But all this in a volume about the most serene and luminous
+intelligence of our times. Mr. Hueffer also "goes for" James as
+critic. He once dared to couple the name of the "odious" George
+Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away, but,
+after all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who was Henry
+James say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of
+writing? As to the "cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats--all human
+life is there," of The Madonna of the Future, we need not take the
+words as a final message; nor are the other phrases quoted: "The
+soul is immortal certainly--if you've got one, but most people
+haven't! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through,
+but it never is." Mr. Hueffer says that James "found English people
+who were just people singularly nasty," and who can say him nay
+after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends on the right note: "And
+for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases
+intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers--a glory
+that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes, and the
+Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national." Neither
+Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential
+Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells, who
+is our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision. And Trollope, by the
+way, will loom larger in the future despite his impersonality and
+microscopic manner.
+
+The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence. To alter his own
+words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a
+portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary
+pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or
+cloud-shadowed; yet in whose depths there is a moving mass of
+exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under hum of
+humanity. We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said of Walter
+Scott: "His works, taken altogether, are almost like a new edition
+of human nature." But we can follow with the coda of that same
+dictum: "This is indeed to be an author." Many more than the dozen
+superior persons mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James novels. His
+swans are not always immaculate, but they are not "swans of the
+cesspool," to quote Landor. There is never an odour of leaking gas
+in his premises, as he once remarked of the D'Annunzio fiction. He
+has the cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gait.
+Like Renan, he abhorred the "horrible mania of certitude" to be
+found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not
+always dot the "i's" of his irony, a subrisive irony. But the
+spiritual antennæ which he puts forth so tentatively always touch
+real things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense he boasts. He
+peeps into the glowing core of emotion, but seldom describes it.
+His ears are for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the obvious,
+of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novelist has kept his ear so
+close to quotidian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in
+his crumbling cadences? Not even that virtuoso of the ugly,
+Huysmans, than whom no writer of the past century ever "rendered"
+surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity,
+is as clairvoyant as James.
+
+Fustian and thunder form no part of the James stories, which are
+like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill
+the listening ear. He is an "auditive" as well as a "visualist," to
+employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute
+senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to
+comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite; but, like
+Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single
+wire. Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to
+pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness.
+However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny
+plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and
+end in another. If it's to be pork and molasses or "hog and hominy"
+(George Meredith's words), then let it be these delectable dishes
+through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his
+theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals spin and bathe in
+the blue he weaves a web of gold and lace, and it is marvellously
+spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown from a
+variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther
+Cary has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does
+not take the mechanism of his marionette apart, but lets us examine
+it in completeness. As a psychologist he stands midway between
+Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling, rather than fact.
+
+Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his rhythmic moments of
+libration; he then reveals his other side, a profoundly human,
+emotional one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he holds in
+horror the facile expression of the sentiments. It's only too easy
+to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas
+Huxley calls "sensualistic caterwauling." In the large, generous
+curve of his temperament there is room for all life, but not for a
+lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of
+mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity.
+There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns, for
+patterns there are, though the figure be difficult to piece out. His
+route of emerald is elliptical; follow him who dare! A "wingy
+mystery." He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues.
+His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. His is not
+"the shadow land of American fiction"; simply his supreme tact of
+omission has dispensed with the entire banal apparatus of fiction
+as commonly practised. To use a musical example: his prose is like
+the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art, like
+music, is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique
+melodramatics, set developments and dénouements, mastodonic
+structures. The sharp savour of character is omnipresent. His very
+pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into
+remoter harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality.
+Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him
+sympathetically one recalls the saying of Maurice Barrès: "For an
+accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue, that between our two
+egos--the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which
+we strive." For Jacobeans this interior dialogue, with its
+"secondary intention" marches like muted music through the pages of
+the latter period. Henry James will always be a touchstone for the
+tasteless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+     Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called
+     George Sand!
+                                                --MRS. BROWNING.
+
+
+I
+
+Who reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her
+centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in
+gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French
+literature. Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman, in
+her psychology, than in her interminable novels. The reason is
+simple; her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never
+created a vital character. Her men and women are bundles of
+attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was
+a wonderful journalist, one is tempted to say the first of her sex,
+and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a shriller
+propagandist, yet she accomplished no more for the cause than her
+French neighbour, not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or
+wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin
+didn't exactly practise what she preached and George Sand did. For
+her there was no talk of getting the vote; her feminism was a
+romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand
+should be enshrined as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no
+means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of
+the intellectual men she met, she had an enormous vogue. Her
+reputation was worldwide.
+
+We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently
+published by Vladimir Karénine (the pen-name of a Russian lady, Mme.
+Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow). This writer has brought
+her imposing work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848, and, as
+much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect
+at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable.
+She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with
+Sand. She has at first-hand from friends and relatives facts
+hitherto unpublished, and she is armed with a library of documents.
+More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the
+fecund writer, and actually analyses their plots, writes at length
+of the characters, and incidentally throws light on her own
+intellectual processes.
+
+Mme. Karénine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking
+historian. While some tales of Sand are worth reading--The Devil's
+Pool, Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all, her
+autobiography--the rest is a burden to the spirit. Her facility
+astounds, and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing
+was like the turning on of a water-tap, the stream always flowed, a
+literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her
+task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant
+shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene,
+flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles
+Baudelaire, and admired by Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais.
+Baudelaire remarked of this "best seller" that she wrote her chefs
+d'[oe]uvre as if they were letters, and posted them. The "style
+coulant," praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked
+accent, relief, individuality. "She is the Prudhomme of immorality,"
+he said--not a bad definition--and "she is stupid, heavy, and a
+chatterer." She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted
+to the intelligent wife of the concierge and the sentimental harlot.
+Which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his
+prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognised
+by all her associates.
+
+Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau--he might
+have added Byron, also--she is false, artificial, inflated,
+exaggerated; ... her style is of a variegated wall-paper pattern.
+She betrays her vulgarity in her ambition to expose her generous
+feelings. She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferable
+artist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and--wrote. Nietzsche,
+like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the
+irresponsible sex. And her immorality? Père Didon said that her
+books are more immoral than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted
+as they are with false ideas and sentiments. George Sand immoral?
+What bathos! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality.
+As well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral. This literature of
+gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the
+Ibsen plays or Æsop's fables.
+
+Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of the downtrodden shop
+girl are the stigmata of the Sand school. She has written many
+memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such masters as Sainte-Beuve,
+Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and
+Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable
+charm. But her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned--there
+is a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as Ibsen maintained,
+all truths stale and die after two decades, how much less life may
+be allowed a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as evanescent
+as last year's mist.
+
+Mme. Karénine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation,
+so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject;
+indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a
+prude and, if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece
+under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George
+Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of
+lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas
+fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no
+temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of
+Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a
+perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could
+devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose
+delectation! A "cold devil"--à la Félicien Rops. I doubt this.
+Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a
+metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic
+accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many
+poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some
+of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness.
+Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and
+Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same
+kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the
+Sargossian seas of British prudery.
+
+In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was
+neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has
+fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful
+grandmother. She had the featherbed temperament, and soothed
+masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules
+Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She
+died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and
+the idol of the literary world.
+
+How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant
+virtues--save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to
+her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly
+in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of
+morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to
+go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist
+she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she
+didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was
+thrust upon her. At Nohant, her château in Berri, there was usually
+a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy
+dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their
+blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his
+famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the
+Shelley-Godwin gatherings.
+
+
+II
+
+George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men;
+with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with one eye
+open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of
+Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor
+hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did
+approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the
+Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to
+toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her
+affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual
+thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight
+days, and Mérimée is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he
+tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning
+making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old
+dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish
+Prosper at once grew frigid.
+
+A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en
+compote." And she was incorrigibly naïve--they called it "Idealism"
+in those days--witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The
+first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed
+poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she
+had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering
+from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of
+himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike
+Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can
+reread him.
+
+But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six
+years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred
+consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than
+artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man.
+He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This
+sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers
+for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same.
+George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was
+only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in
+disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten
+years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the
+Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled
+with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue
+stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the
+world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than
+from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin
+before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage--and
+the wisdom--to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more
+genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And
+Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.
+
+The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study
+of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly
+perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him
+from her mother--truly a Gallic triangle--but she so contrived
+matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to
+marry her lover, Clésinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme.
+Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would
+side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the
+deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto
+by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her
+young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the
+news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.
+
+Clésinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his
+ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand
+suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of
+her own. Her husband, François-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country
+squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his
+dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with
+Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband
+five hundred thousand francs.)
+
+But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her
+desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copious
+soul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as
+metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with
+her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised.
+She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography
+is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for
+she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that
+women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some
+man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand
+wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a
+multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know
+too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.
+
+
+III
+
+Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of
+Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million
+things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not
+without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering
+with their family duties. But they continued, did these same
+refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make
+mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they
+were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices.
+They loved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in
+the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the
+prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a
+blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her
+innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes
+of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our
+days, Sand's is positively idyllic. She is one parent of the Woman
+movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She
+acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to
+do--and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And
+George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the
+courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man
+she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a
+literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the
+New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation
+that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males,
+other tales.
+
+She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was
+the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the
+slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging
+the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed
+to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert
+the kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better
+cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test
+applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed
+herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's
+mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines
+of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with
+Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of
+ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern
+democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was
+always æsthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering
+litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her
+fiction. Her Indianas, Lélias, and the other romantic insurgents
+against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and
+rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her
+stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap.
+
+
+IV
+
+George Sand was not beautiful. Edouard Grenier declares that she was
+short and stout. "Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close
+together." Do you recall Heine's phrase, "Femme avec l'[oe]il
+sombre"? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at
+once of unpolished marble and velvet. "Her nose was thick and not
+overshapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very
+quiet." With these rather negative physical attractions she
+conquered men like Napoleon. Even prim President Thiers tried to
+kiss her and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled
+in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. (Did you ever see
+the Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?) Liszt never
+wholly yielded to her. Mérimée despised her in his chilly fashion.
+Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de Musset--who,
+when he was short of money, would dine in an obscure tavern, and,
+with a toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the entrance of some
+fashionable boulevard café--seems to have loved her romantically,
+the sort of love she craved. What was her attraction? She had brains
+and magnetism, but that she could have loved all the lovers she is
+credited with is impossible.
+
+There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules Sandeau, who was followed
+by De Musset; after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello--who was jilted
+when he followed her to Paris; Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux,
+Félicien Mallefille, Chopin, Mérimée, Manceau, and the platonic
+friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship; the
+correspondence proves it. She went to the Magny dinners with
+Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet. Her influence
+on the grumbling giant of Croisset was tonic. It was she who should
+have written Sentimental Education. But where is that sly old
+voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve, or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many
+tales), or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period,
+notwithstanding Mme. Karénine's denial? She denies the Leroux
+affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say?
+
+Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw and Sand
+buried them at Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks, has
+been corroborated since by Mme. Karénine. What a loss for
+inquisitive critics! George was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she
+was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal
+ancestors. In her mature years she became optimistic, proper,
+matronly. She was a cheerful milch cow for her two children. It is
+delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against
+actresses. Solange she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the
+sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art-for-art.
+
+Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in
+Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left
+Clésinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis
+Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in
+Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Hervé,
+Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the critic who describes her as having
+the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She,
+too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home,
+in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.
+
+Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she
+was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister
+of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell
+into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old
+gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch,
+arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a
+charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly
+said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that
+amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the
+French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name
+of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have
+ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the
+candied thunder of Sand herself.
+
+De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians,
+did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by
+Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly
+called--Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the
+reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that
+interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
+
+
+I
+
+When the supreme master of the historical novel modestly confessed
+that he could do the "big bow-wow strain," but to Jane Austen must
+be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsmanship, there was then no
+question upon the critical map of the so-called "great American
+novel." Sir Walter Scott--to whom such authors of historical novels
+as Châteaubriand and his Martyrs, the Salammbô of Flaubert, and that
+well-nigh perfect fiction, The History of Henry Esmond, by
+Thackeray, yield precedence--might have achieved the impossible: the
+writing of a library, epitomising the social history of "These
+States"--as Walt Whitman would say. After Scott no name but Balzac's
+occurs to the memory; Balzac, who laid all France under his
+microscope (and France is all of a piece, not the checker-board of
+nationalities we call America). Even the mighty Tolstoy would have
+balked the job. And if these giants would have failed, what may be
+said of their successors? The idea of a great American novel is an
+"absolute," and nature abhors an absolute, despite the belief of
+some metaphysicians to the contrary. Yet the notion still obtains
+and inquests are held from time to time, and the opinions of
+contemporary novelists are taken toll of; as if each man and woman
+could give aught else but their own side of the matter, that side
+which is rightfully enough personal and provincial. The question is,
+after all, an affair for critics, and the great American novel will
+be in the plural; thousands perhaps. America is a chord of many
+nations, and to find the key-note we must play much and varied
+music.
+
+While a novelist may be cosmopolitan at his own risk, a critic
+should be ever so. Consider the names of such widely contrasted
+critical temperaments as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, De Gourmont, Matthew
+Arnold, Brandes, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, Henry
+James, Gosse, and W. C. Brownell; all cosmopolitan as well as
+national. The sublime tenuities of Henry James, like the black music
+of Michael Artzibashef, are questions largely temperamental. But the
+Russian is all Slavic, and no one would maintain that Mr. James
+shows a like ingrained nationalism. Nevertheless, he is American,
+though dealing only with a certain side of American life, the
+cosmopolitan phase. At his peril an American novelist sails eastward
+to describe the history of his countrymen abroad. With the critic we
+come upon a different territory. He may go gadding after new
+mud-gods (the newest god invented by man is always the greatest),
+for the time being, and return to his native heath mentally
+refreshed and broadened by his foreign outing. Not so the maker of
+fiction. Once he cuts loose his balloon he is in danger of not
+getting home again.
+
+Mr. James is a splendid case for us; he began in America and landed
+in England, there to stay. Our other felicitous example of
+cosmopolitanism is Henry Blake Fuller, the author of The Chevalier
+Pensieri Vani and The Châtelaine de la Trinité, who was so widely
+read in the nineties. After those charming excursions into a rapidly
+vanishing Europe Mr. Fuller reversed the proceeding of James; he
+returned to America and composed two novels of high artistic
+significance, The Cliff Dwellers and With the Procession, which,
+while they continued the realistic tradition of William Dean
+Howells, were also the forerunners of a new movement in America. It
+is not necessary to dwell now on The Last Refuge, or on that
+masterly book of spiritual parodies, The Puppet-Booth. But Mr.
+Fuller did not write the great American novel. Neither did Mr.
+Howells, nor Mr. James. Who has? No one. Is there such a thing?
+Without existing it might be described in Celtic fashion, this
+mythical work, as pure fiction. Let us admit for the sake of
+argument that if it were written by some unknown monster of genius,
+it would, like Lewis Carroll's Snark, turn into a Boojum.
+
+Henry James has said that no one is compelled to admire any
+particular sort of writing; that the province of fiction is all
+life, and he has also wisely remarked that "when you have no taste
+you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste," and may
+we add, when you have no discretion you perpetrate the shocking
+fiction with which America is deluged at this hour. We are told that
+the new writers have altered the old canons of bad taste, but "plus
+ça change, plus c'est la même chose." A liquorish sentimentality is
+the ever-threatening rock upon which the bark of young American
+novelists goes to pieces. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.) Be
+sentimental and you will succeed! We agree with Dostoievsky that in
+fiction, as well as in life, there are no general principles, only
+special cases. But these cases, could they not be typical? even if
+there are not types, only individuals. And are men and women so
+inthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism in life? Have the
+motion-pictures hopelessly deranged our critical values? I know that
+in America charity covers a multitude of mediocrities, nevertheless,
+I am loath to believe that all one reads in praise of wretched
+contemporary fiction is meant in earnest.
+
+Well, chacun à ses dégoûts! The "thrilling" detective story, the
+romantic sonorities of the ice cream-soda woman novelist?--with a
+triple-barrelled name, as Rudyard Kipling put it once upon a
+time--or that church of Heavenly Ennui, the historical novel--what
+a cemetery of ideas, all of them! An outsider must be puzzle-pated
+by this tumult of tasteless writing and worse observation. However,
+history in fiction may be a cavalcade of shining shadows, brilliant,
+lugubrious, dull, or joyful happenings; but where Thackeray
+succeeded multitudes have failed. Who shall bend the bow of that
+Ulysses? Native talent, subtle and robust, we possess in abundance;
+thus far it has cultivated with success its own parochial
+garden--which is as it should be. The United States of Fiction.
+America is Cosmopolis.
+
+
+II
+
+As to the Puritanism of our present novels one may dare to say in
+the teeth of youthful protestants that it is non-existent. The
+pendulum has swung too far the other way. And as literary artists
+are rare, the result has not been reassuring. Zola seems prudish
+after some experiments of the younger crowd. How badly they pull off
+the trick. How coarse and hard and heavy their touch. Most of these
+productions read like stupid translations from a dull French
+original. They are not immoral, only vulgar. As old Flaubert used to
+say: such books are false, nature is not like that. How keenly he
+saw through the humbug of "free love"--a romantic tradition of
+George Sand's epoch--may be noted in his comment that Emma Bovary
+found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Ah! that
+much-despised, stupid, venerable institution, marriage! How it has
+been flouted since the days of Rousseau--the father of false
+romanticism and that stupefying legend, the "equality" of mankind.
+(O! the beautiful word, "equality," invented for the delectation of
+rudimentary minds.) A century and more fiction has played with the
+theme of concubinage. If the Nacquet divorce bill had been
+introduced a decade or so before it was in France, what would have
+become of the theatre of Dumas fils, or later, of the misunderstood
+woman in Ibsen's plays? All such tribal taboos make or unmake
+literature.
+
+So, merely as a suggestion to ambitious youngsters, let the novelist
+of the future in search of a novelty describe a happy marriage,
+children, a husband who doesn't drink or gamble, a wife who votes,
+yet loves her home, her family, and knows how to cook. What a
+realistic bombshell he would hurl into the camp of sentimental
+socialists and them that believe a wedding certificate is like
+Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin--a document daily shrinking in
+happiness. Absurdities make martyrs, but of all the absurd and
+ineffectual martyrdoms that of running off with another's wife is
+usually the crowning one. "I don't call this very popular pie," said
+the little boy in Richard Grant White's story; and the man in the
+case is usually the first to complain of his bargain in pastry.
+
+However, categories are virtually an avowal of mental impuissance,
+and all marriages are not made in heaven. In the kingdom of morality
+there are many mansions. When too late you may sport with the
+shade--not in the shade--of Amaryllis, and perhaps elbow epigrams as
+a lean consolation. That is your own affair. Paul Verlaine has told
+us that "j'ai vécu énormément," though his living enormously did not
+prove that he was happy. Far from it. But he had at least the
+courage to relate his terrors. American novelists may agree with
+Dostoievsky that "everything in the world always ends in meanness";
+or with Doctor Pangloss that all is for the best in the best of
+possible worlds. An affair of temperament. But don't mix the values.
+Don't confuse intellectual substances. Don't smear a fact with
+treacle and call it truth. Above all, don't preach. Impiety is an
+indiscretion, yet, don't be afraid to tell the truth. From Jane
+Austen and Walter Scott, the parents of the modern English novel, to
+many modern instances, fiction has thrived best on naked truth. All
+the rest is sawdust, tripe-selling, and sentimentalism. Didn't Mr.
+Roundabout declare in one of his famous papers that "Figs are sweet,
+but fictions are sweeter"? In our land we can't get the latter sweet
+enough. Altruism, Brotherhood of Man Uplifting. These are the
+shibboleths of the "nouvelles couches sociales." Prodigious!
+
+
+III
+
+J.-K. Huysmans declared that in the land of books there are no
+schools; no idealism, realism, symbolism; only good writers and bad.
+Whistler said the same about painting and painters. Setting aside
+the technical viewpoint of such dicta, we fancy that our "best
+sellers" do not preoccupy themselves with the "mere writing" of
+their fictions, but they have developed a formidable faculty of
+preaching. Old-fashioned fiction that discloses personal charm, that
+delineates manners, or stirs the pulse of tragedy--not melodrama, is
+vanishing from publishers' lists. Are there not as many charming men
+and women perambulating the rind of the planet as there were in the
+days when Jane Austen, or Howells, or Turgenev wrote? We refuse to
+believe there are not; but there is little opportunity, in a word,
+no market, for the display of these qualities. The novel with a
+purpose, generally an unpleasant purpose, has usurped the rule of
+the novel of character and manners. Boanerges, not Balzac, now
+occupies the pasteboard pulpit of fiction.
+
+I quoted Henry James to the effect that all life is the province of
+the novelist. Nevertheless, the still small garden wherein is reared
+the tender solitary flower does but ill represent the vaster,
+complicated forest of common humanity. The ivory tower of the
+cultivated egoist is not to be unduly admired; rather Zola's La
+Terre with its foul facts than a palace of morbid art. Withal, the
+didactic side of our fiction is overdone. I set it down to the
+humbug about the "masses" being opposed to the "classes." Truly a
+false antithesis. As if the French bourgeois were not a product of
+the revolution (poor bourgeois, always abused by the novelist). As
+if a poor man suddenly enriched didn't prove, as a rule, the hardest
+taskmaster to his own class. Consider the new-rich. What a study
+they afford the students of manners. A new generation has arisen.
+Its taste, intelligence, and culture; its canned manners, canned
+music--preferably pseudo-African--canned art, canned food, canned
+literature; its devotion to the mediocre--what a field for our
+aspiring young "secretaries to society."
+
+Cheap prophylactics, political and religious--for religion is fast
+being butchered to make the sensational evangelists' holiday--are in
+vogue. They affect our fiction-mongers, who burn to avenge wrongs,
+write novels about the "downtrodden masses," and sermons on social
+evils--evils that have always existed, always will exist. Like the
+knife-grinder, story they have none to tell. Why write fiction, or
+what they are pleased to call fiction? Why not join the brave
+brigade of agitators and pamphleteers? The lay preachers are
+carrying off the sweepstakes. For them Mr. Howells is a
+superannuated writer. Would there were more like him in continence
+of speech, wholesomeness of judgment, nobility of ideals, and in the
+shrewd perception of character.
+
+Fiction, too, is a fine art, though this patent fact has escaped the
+juvenile Paul Prys, who are mainly endeavouring to arouse class
+against mass. It's an old dodge, this equality theory, as old as
+Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. When all fruit fails, welcome envy and
+malicious slandering. When you have nothing else to write about,
+attack your neighbour, especially if he hath a much-coveted
+vineyard. Max Stirner, least understood of social philosophers,
+wrote, "Mind your own business," and he forged on the anvil of
+experience a mighty leading motive for the conduct of life. But our
+busy little penmen don't see in this golden motto a sufficient
+sentimental appeal. It doesn't flatter the "masses." Mr. Bryan a few
+years ago told us that we were all middle class. What is middle
+class? In Carlyle's day it was a "gig-man"; in ours is it the owner
+of a "flivver"? But in the case of Snob vs. Mob, Snob always wins.
+
+This twaddle about "democratic art" is the bane of our literature.
+There is only good art. Whether it deals with such "democratic"
+subjects as L'Assommoir or Germinie Lacerteux, or such "aristocratic"
+themes as those of D'Annunzio and Paul Bourget, it is the art
+thereof that determines the product. I hold no brief for the
+sterile fiction that is enrolled under the banner of "Art for Art."
+I go so far as to believe that a novelist with a beautiful style
+often allows that style to get in the way of human nature.
+Stained-glass windows have their use, but they falsify the daylight.
+A decorative style may suit pseudo-mediæval romances, but for
+twentieth-century realism it is sadly amiss. Nor is the
+arterio-sclerotic school of psychological analysis to be altogether
+commended. It has been well-nigh done to death by Stendhal,
+Meredith, James, and Bourget; and it is as cold as a star. Flaubert
+urged as an objection to writing a novel, proving something that the
+other fellow can prove precisely the opposite. In either case
+selection plays the rôle.
+
+The chief argument against the novel "with a purpose"--as the jargon
+goes--is its lack of validity either as a document or as art. A
+novel may be anything, but it must not be polemical. Zola has been,
+still is, the evil genius of many talented chaps who "sling ink,"
+not to make a genuine book, but to create a sensation. Such writers
+lack patience, art, and direction. They always keep one eye on the
+box-office. Indeed, the young men and women of the day, who are
+squandering upon paper their golden genius, painfully resemble in
+their productions the dime novels once published by the lamented
+Beadle or the lucubrations in the Saturday weeklies of long ago.
+But in those publications there was more virility. The heroes then
+were not well-dressed namby-pambies; the villains were villainous;
+the detectives detected real crimes, and were not weavers of
+metaphysical abstractions like your latter-day miracle-workers of an
+impossible Scotland Yard; and the girls were girls, neither
+neurasthenic, nor did they outgolf all creation. The "new" novelists
+still deal with the same raw material of melodrama. Their handling
+of love-episodes has much of the blaring-brass quality of
+old-fashioned Italian opera. They loudly twang the strings of sloppy
+sentiment, which evoke not music, but mush and moonshine. And these
+are our "motion-masters" to-day.
+
+
+IV
+
+There can be no objection to literature and life coming to grips.
+Letters should touch reality. Many a sturdy blow has been struck at
+abuses by penmen masquerading behind fiction. No need to summon
+examples. As for realism--I deny there are commonplace people. Only
+those writers are commonplace that believe in the phrase. It is one
+of the paradoxes of art that the commonplace folk of Thackeray,
+Flaubert, or Anthony Trollope who delight us between covers would in
+life greatly bore us. The ennui is artistically suggested, though
+not experienced by the reader. It is the magic of the novelist, his
+style and philosophy, that make his creations vital.
+
+Dostoievsky says there are no old women--to be sure he puts the
+expression in the mouth of the sensualist Karamazov--and as a
+corollary I maintain that nothing is uninteresting if painted by a
+master hand, from carrots to Chopin. As for the historical novel,
+there is Sentimental Education as a model, if you desire something
+epical in scale and charged with the modern ironic spirit. A
+Flaubertian masterpiece, this book, with its daylight atmosphere;
+the inimitable sound, shape, gait, and varied prose rhythms of its
+sentences, its marvellous gallery of portraits executed in the Dutch
+manner of Hals and Vermeer, its nearness to its environment, and its
+fidelity to the pattern of life. It is a true "historical" novel,
+for it is real--to employ the admirable simile of Mr. Howells.
+
+No need to transpose the tragic gloom of Artzibashef to America; we
+are an optimistic people, thanks to our air and sky, political
+conditions, and the immigration of sturdy peasant folk. Yet we, too,
+have our own peculiar gloom and misery and social problems to solve.
+We are far from being the "shadow-land" of fiction, as a certain
+English critic said. When I praise the dissonantal art of Michael
+Artzibashef it is not with the idea that either his style or his
+pessimism should be aped. That way unoriginality lies. But I do
+contend that in the practice of his art, its sincerity, its
+profundity, he might be profitably patterned after by the younger
+generation. Art should elevate as well as amuse. Must fiction always
+be silly and shallow? It need be neither sordid nor didactic.
+
+William James put the matter in a nutshell when he 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 flavours." And on this fundamentally sound note I must end my
+little sermon--for I find that I have been practising the very
+preaching against which I warned embryo novelists. But, then, isn't
+every critic a lay preacher?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CASE OF PAUL CÉZANNE
+
+
+The case of painter Paul Cézanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a
+surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen
+for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a
+corpse, and though Cézanne died in 1906 he is still a living issue
+among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment:
+fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Cézanne question,
+is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often
+misrepresented; Brahms, known now as a Romantic writing within the
+walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist;
+Cézanne, not a revolutionist, not an innovator, vastly interested in
+certain problems, has been made "chef d'école" and fathered with a
+lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if
+he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist! cried
+Paul Gauguin--whose work was heartily detested by Cézanne; but truth
+is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well or
+swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about
+Cézanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followers
+raise a clamour over the banality of "representation" in art, and
+their master is the one man in the history of art who squandered on
+canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to
+the soil. Huysmans was called an "eye" by Remy de Gourmont. Paul
+Cézanne is also an eye.
+
+In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon a picture by Maurice Denis
+entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly
+inspired by Manet's Hommage à Fantin-Latour. The canvas depicted a
+still life by Cézanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard,
+Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard.
+Himself (as they say in Irish) is shown standing and apparently
+unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at
+the Autumn Salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far
+made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special Salle, so had Eugène
+Carrière; Cézanne held the place of honour. The critical press was
+hostile or half-hearted. Poor Cézanne, with his naïve vanity, seemed
+dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give
+him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious
+and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of
+the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha. In
+The Sun of 1901, 1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death)
+appeared my articles on Cézanne, among the first, if not the first,
+that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to
+the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why
+not? When juxtaposed with most painters his pictures make the others
+look like linoleum or papier-mâché.
+
+He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas,
+and aspects of his generation. In 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 a bull's foot, but who go off at
+half-trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a
+painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting
+idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These
+fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabanel, Bouguereau and
+Henner, too, were idolised 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 become a tower of strength in the
+eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical
+fancy. Sincerity is strength; Cézanne is sincere to the core; but
+even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of
+masterpieces. Before he attained his original, synthetic power he
+patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and several others. He
+achieved at times the foundational structure of Courbet, but his
+pictures, so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans linear
+pattern, sans personal charm. But "Popularity is for dolls," cried
+Emerson.
+
+Cézanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless one. His early
+modelling in paint was quasi-structural. Always the architectural
+sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times and he betrays a
+predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given
+to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third; tactile values
+are here raised to the _n_th degree. His colour is personal and
+rhythmic. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century ago,
+he spoke of Cézanne's work as containing the prodromes of a new art.
+He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric,
+dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital
+and charged with character. And he often thinks profoundly on
+unimportant matters.
+
+When you are young your foreground is huddled: it is the desire for
+more space that begets revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing
+his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all these sporadic outbursts;
+and while a creative talent may remain provincial, even parochial,
+as was the case with Cézanne, a critic must be cosmopolitan or
+nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life
+long, yet paint like an angel; but a provincial critic is a
+contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it
+can't cut butter. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even
+Cabanel has his good points.
+
+The tang of the town is not in Cézanne's portraits of places. His
+leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded
+retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of
+bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore,
+Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica. There is no sex
+appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the
+Empress Eugénie that in front of Courbet's Les Baigneuses (Salon,
+1853) she asked: "Est-ce aussi une percheronne?" Of the
+heavy-flanked Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the
+canvases of Cézanne. The remark of the Empress appealed to the
+truculent vanity of Courbet. It might not have pleased Cézanne. With
+beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don't care
+for his graceless nudes you may console yourself that there is no
+disputing tastes--with the tasteless. They are uglier than the
+females of Degas, and twice as truthful.
+
+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
+slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a
+score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle sonorities, what colour
+chords are in his best work. I once wrote in the Promenades of an
+Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth.
+Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he painted
+an onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would have dramatised
+it. When Cézanne painted one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be
+sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board of my
+sensibility.
+
+The supreme technical qualities in Cézanne are volume,
+ponderability, and an entrancing colour scheme. What's the use of
+asking whether he is a "sound" draughtsman? He is a master of edges
+and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke of his defective
+eyesight; but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The
+abnormal vision of Cézanne gave him glimpses of a "reality" denied
+to other painters. He advised Emile Bernard to look for the
+contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practised what he
+preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by
+those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cézanne the
+"temperament" that he was always talking about? If so it was not
+decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he
+seldom "finished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually
+painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited the spot. The
+pictures do not resemble it; which simply means that Cézanne had the
+vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations
+filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus. And he had
+the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament.
+
+In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate,
+personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky
+and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its
+vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this
+mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master.
+You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire
+series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence,
+as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlésienne. He sought
+for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato,
+and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract"
+painter--as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a
+legitimate trompe-l'[oe]il on the optic nerve. His is not a
+pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient
+delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother
+Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and
+gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the
+orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as
+analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cézanne never becomes truly lyrical
+except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of
+smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him
+is as beautiful as a naked woman. And he possesses a positive
+genius for the tasteless.
+
+The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical
+fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may
+be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever
+wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I
+saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed
+since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official
+Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety.
+He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch
+of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the
+Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with
+technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as
+some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic
+diabetes. 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, A rare impersonality, I should say.
+
+There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by
+propagandists of the New Æsthetic. As if form had not always been
+significant. No one can deny Cézanne's preoccupation with form; nor
+Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre
+flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he
+seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern
+mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a
+solid structural sense. But Cézanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his
+feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of
+the skeleton.
+
+Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise
+a master. The limitations of Paul Cézanne are patent to all. He is a
+profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far
+from the territory he called his own then we should not complain,
+for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism
+defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding
+Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems
+monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of
+Cézanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic,
+symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one
+born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes
+recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour
+is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music
+flows as if from a secret spring.
+
+What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam
+majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led
+black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our
+taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow
+more colours than one. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter
+who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No
+man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+BRAHMSODY
+
+
+After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high
+priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a
+wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a
+musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,"
+cried Von Bülow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion
+and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore
+years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first
+cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who
+dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same
+couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms
+wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves
+rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance,
+fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and
+the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach
+guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars.
+And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful
+harmonies. In his music the formulist finds perfect things.
+Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His
+architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he
+strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms
+and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.
+
+The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anæmia, leaving the
+world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius
+since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the
+revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the
+mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future,
+gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois.
+Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew
+aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of
+romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and
+subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even
+Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and
+Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly
+empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short,
+stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the
+Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic
+tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely
+believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But
+how symbolical of Brahms to fall asleep at the very onset of his
+career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of
+the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It
+is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned
+philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great
+composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There
+are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in
+omphalic meditation.
+
+Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A
+dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of
+wings--wings of great, terrifying monsters; hippogriffs of horrid
+mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your
+imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave
+moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician,
+spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and
+concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at
+certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit
+tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often
+dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of
+lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry:
+"Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our
+thirsty eyelids!"
+
+Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three
+piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music--are they not all
+living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a
+great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and
+Théophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a
+Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed
+upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas,
+noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a
+great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet,
+flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He
+is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the
+geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway.
+Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his
+native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a
+disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the
+unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano
+pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of
+childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by
+desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few
+men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first
+rhapsodies--true soul-tragedies--how they unearthed the core of
+pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer
+in himself, thus a believer in men and women.
+
+He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed
+humanity, the dramatic--yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric--modes
+of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their
+ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses
+his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He
+gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared
+wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A
+great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty
+mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths;
+Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the
+company of both giants.
+
+Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern
+soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS
+
+
+A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of
+playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free
+exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this
+charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the
+most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great
+master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His
+detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like
+Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition,
+Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman
+tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be
+left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same
+class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not.
+Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in
+their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for
+documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because
+of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's
+natural repugnance to such vulgar material. They were aristocrats.
+Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal
+side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff.
+Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less
+acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He
+loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps
+the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive,
+forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and
+religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life
+to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable Æsthetic of
+the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the
+pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue
+sensibility with a repelling misanthropy.
+
+In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K.
+Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some
+intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social
+ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries;
+indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes
+contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which
+is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a
+roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the
+account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming
+and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and
+even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and
+Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable
+phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life
+and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled
+bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a
+literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured
+the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a
+model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the
+Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for
+his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour,
+yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the
+irascible among decorated philistines!
+
+"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
+stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes
+monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility;
+the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your
+eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes,
+but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a
+touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every
+sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or
+an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused
+look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for
+human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur
+Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking
+letters.
+
+Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot
+found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his
+tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very
+restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of
+indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero;
+as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack--published in Zola's
+collection, Les Soirées de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules
+Lemaître describes them collectively as: a young man with the
+dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness--the critic
+used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in
+Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste
+chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the sadistic
+Bluebeard--these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his
+conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious
+faultfinder.
+
+No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city
+abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His
+critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious
+confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written
+in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraits of
+certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the
+critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as
+the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered
+Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in
+enamelled prose. Whistler, Chéret, Pissarro, Gauguin were praised by
+him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic
+criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for
+Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he
+praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't
+highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent
+pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops
+attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly
+enough. With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is only for the
+connoisseur.
+
+Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first
+critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cézanne, who, he asserts,
+contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one
+who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early
+as 1877.) He found the Cézanne still-life brutally real; above all,
+a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's
+tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot,
+Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cézanne millstone. The
+Provençal was a rusé, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old
+age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber,
+ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientèle in
+both professions.
+
+American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the
+matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself
+intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of
+Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception
+of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He
+employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true
+primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of
+the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion is his
+idol. Huysmans's opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is
+stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a
+rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis
+Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in
+prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont
+called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than
+to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is
+pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a
+perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time.
+
+Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same
+literary yoke. His opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them.
+Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group,
+Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude
+notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his
+famous preface to Là Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was
+the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called,
+the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than
+either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But
+he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediæval
+vileness of Là Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Léon
+Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a
+friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the
+eccentric company of Barbey d'Aurévilly, in whose apartment he said
+that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did
+not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg
+Saint-Antoine."
+
+Of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke
+with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs."
+His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist,
+left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty
+volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Théophile Gautier
+did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and
+diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans believed
+in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something
+disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the
+theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou,
+Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no
+feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and
+deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the
+stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"),
+he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by
+dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even
+theatrical.
+
+Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical
+Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as
+well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That
+giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought
+Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling
+salesman--Balzac's Gaudissart--and would play his own Homais, being
+addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer
+Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture.
+Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde
+nationale."
+
+From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux
+maître," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great
+men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepid water always
+flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it
+would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules
+Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one
+of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel
+Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't
+bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y
+connaît, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se défile!" The style and
+thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls
+Maurice Barrès "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that
+exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand
+Brunetière as "constipé," a sound definition of a shrewd,
+unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are
+not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic
+vision deformed ideas as well as objects.
+
+In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anæmic
+hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English
+taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode;
+Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he
+wished. Brunetière, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny
+bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular
+vaudeville, Le Voyage à Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need
+not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire by the
+Crépets (Eugène and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To
+become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire
+frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank
+whisky, read _Punch_, and also sought the company of English grooms
+in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as
+Brunetière detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly
+Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French
+literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than
+loved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE
+
+
+I
+
+Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense
+and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with
+cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking;
+witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal
+man[oe]uvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as
+Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three
+writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy
+of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long
+been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose
+commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in
+literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its
+amber, and it is a brevet of immortality--that is, as immortality
+goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoeblack part of
+the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for
+schoolmarms in male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains?
+The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is
+direct, plain, and simple. The writer's keyboard is that humble
+camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of
+movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an
+impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own
+individuality does not always constitute style; for individual
+opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance
+in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here
+occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.
+
+Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice.
+Apes and peacocks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly
+synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric
+message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical
+personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The
+lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes;
+as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond
+compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly
+limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our
+written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird
+in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay
+Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose
+pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid.
+The American critic registers the variations in style and
+sensibility of the Scotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his
+writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility
+is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his
+personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boëthius
+would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas
+Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not
+to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because,
+like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist,
+though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a
+clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable
+controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the
+fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have
+forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose
+may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.
+
+If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to
+do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a
+chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a
+humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life,
+the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by
+the college professor--the Eternal Sophomore--about fleeing
+"journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York,
+Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most
+succinct prose, prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare
+to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose,
+"numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of
+English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the
+Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers,"
+as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy
+Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey,
+Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And
+not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of
+Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H.
+Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Châteaubriand of Atala,
+without its hateful note of morbid egotism.
+
+Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be
+patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the
+peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow
+such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the
+Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor
+Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more
+than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of
+Châteaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for
+French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled
+concision of Mérimée or the dry-sherry wit of Voltaire are surer
+guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are
+preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the
+Boanerges.
+
+Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of
+English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh,
+"O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou
+hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the
+sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, shine; for thy
+light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which
+is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ...
+utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85,
+hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury.
+And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir
+Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of
+Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest
+and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and
+cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water
+tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other
+harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by
+immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and
+condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous
+"run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton and his
+majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
+nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..."
+and then fall down and worship, for we are in the holy of holies.
+Stevenson preferred the passage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and
+cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has
+written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in
+Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls
+the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k"
+through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and
+classic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word)
+perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says,
+"must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting
+them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity,
+musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and
+rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of
+logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs
+he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.
+
+Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save
+a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor
+Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of
+moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises.
+He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic
+tradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once
+fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the classical creed,
+to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can
+never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be
+repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality."
+The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in
+a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic
+as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have
+undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of
+fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a
+stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those
+of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the
+"unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the
+melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born
+simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours.
+Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and
+languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as
+Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved
+ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the
+solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of
+flutes, peacocks, and pomegranates.
+
+No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose a finer art than
+English, though admitting that in the richer, denser harmonies of
+English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so
+eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of
+distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but
+it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in
+common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts
+by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length
+but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.
+
+But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity
+nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of
+linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting
+one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels
+saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in
+rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we
+are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural
+style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase,
+confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the
+idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham
+Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a
+writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native
+literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of
+classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate
+deliquescence of prose form. For practical every-day needs the
+eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible
+is the Golden Book of English prose.
+
+Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts,
+and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose
+should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the
+monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose
+Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank
+verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the
+metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor
+Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his
+English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl
+of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle
+cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study
+is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on
+Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the
+Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed
+Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by
+Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than
+followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.
+
+He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society,
+medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not
+music-criticism, not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as
+metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even
+the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not
+altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks
+of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is
+better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and
+Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our
+teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to
+lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist,
+like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years
+without knowing it.
+
+
+II
+
+Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a
+music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in
+disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with
+excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts
+easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is
+Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the
+Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose,
+marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you
+doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning these words, because they
+don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a
+sentence and practically tested it by declaiming--spouting, he
+called it--for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase
+adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose
+assonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such
+a phrase as Châteaubriand's in Atala: "Elle répand dans le bois ce
+grand secret de mélancholie qu'elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes
+et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as
+George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech
+the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.
+
+If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted
+and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does,
+and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his
+magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very
+finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That
+is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather
+puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy
+Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have
+rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis
+Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in
+Literature: "The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure
+but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose
+must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it
+must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse."
+(Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers
+libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than
+"anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the
+Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the classical languages,
+be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical
+combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your
+"ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William
+Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs,
+bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and
+proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our
+eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely
+half the story."
+
+The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to
+indorse the axiom of Remy de Gourmont that style is physiological,
+which Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest
+artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor
+Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical
+literature of a much-debated theme, Prose Rhythms, and this without
+minifying the admirable labours of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver
+Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the New York University. One of
+the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its
+strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor
+of a highly organised musical ear, even if he be not a practical
+musician. He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum that the key to
+literature is music; _i. e._, number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss
+Dabney's study, The Musical Basis of Verse, dealing as it does with
+a certain side of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is
+different. It is less "literary" than psychological, less
+psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remy de
+Gourmont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. "Rhythm,"
+he writes in his preface, "is thus regarded as first of all an
+experience, established, as a rule, by motor performance of however
+rudimentary a nature." Here is the man of science at work.
+
+He speaks of the "lost art of rhythm," adduces syncopation so easily
+mastered by those born "timers," the Indians and Negroes,
+pertinently remarks that "no two individuals ever react exactly
+alike. The term 'type' is in many ways a highly misleading fiction."
+Prose Rhythm, he continues, "must be classed as subjective
+organisation of irregular, virtually haphazard arrangement of
+sounds.... The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however,
+is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest upon a series of definite
+temporal units."
+
+Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms: "one the regular
+sound-room belonging to the department of psychology at Columbia;
+the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound-proof cabinet built
+into one end of an underground room belonging to the department of
+physics."
+
+It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it not? Padded cells
+and aural finger-prints!--to make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called
+John Ruskin a Torquemada of Æsthetics. Professor Patterson might be
+styled a Tonal Torturer. But the experimentings were painless. "The
+first object," he informs us, "was to find out, as far as possible,
+how a group of twelve people, ten men and two women, differed with
+respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated
+roughly as the 'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked
+according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in
+various tests, one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease
+in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records on a
+phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pater, a sentence from Henry
+James, a passage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of
+words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes, were tapped upon
+a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph. The
+words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each
+syllable. 'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats. The notes
+were tapped according to their designated time-values. Observer No.
+1, having had long training as a musician, found no technical
+difficulty in the task. The remaining eleven observers, without
+being told the source of the records, heard the five series of
+drumbeats and passed judgment upon them. The most significant
+judgment made was that of Observer No. 7, who declared that all five
+records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large
+number of the observers, especially on the first hearing, found all
+of the records, including even the passage from Chopin, elusive and
+more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of
+accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little
+organisation each observer could be brought to feel in the beats
+corresponding to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage of
+haphazard musical notes." All the data are carefully set down in the
+Appendices.
+
+The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen from his essay on Leonardo
+da Vinci, in The Renaissance. "It is the landscape, not of dreams or
+of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a
+thousand with a miracle of finesse"; subtly rhythmic, too much so
+for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas
+Browne or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the
+former case, the coda from the Urn Burial, or even that
+chest-expanding phrase, "To subsist in bones, and to be pyramidally
+extant is a fallacy in duration." Or, best of all, because of its
+tremendous intensity, the passage from Saint Paul: "For I am
+persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
+principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
+nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
+separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
+Lord." The drum-beat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not
+marked as in the pages of Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in
+Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of common or four-four time,
+and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a
+coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all latter-day composers
+flee as dulness-breeding. The base-rhythm of English prose is, so
+Professor Saintsbury writes, "the pæon, or four-syllabled foot,"
+and, he could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears.
+Variety in rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely quotes from
+Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: "A picture composed in substitutional
+symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus
+more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry." And this
+applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very
+kernel of the art of Paul Cézanne; rhythmic irregularity,
+syncopation, asymmetry.
+
+De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal
+Newman's Grammar of Assent were included among the tests. Also one
+from Henry James; in the preface to The Golden Bowl: "For I have
+nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of
+interesting prose depend all on withheld tests." If, according to
+lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding "purple panels" of
+Bossuet, Châteaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and Ruskin, the
+cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be "spouted"; nevertheless, the
+interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin
+nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1,
+simple in rhythmic structure though less interesting than its sister
+nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in common, the second in
+six-eighths time). Professor Patterson knows Riemann and his "agogic
+accent," which, according to that editor of the Chopin Etudes, is a
+slight expansion in the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.
+
+In his treatment of vers libre our author is not too sympathetic. He
+thinks that "in their productions"--free-verse poets--"the
+disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a
+mountain" is suggested. "For those who find this task exhilarating
+vers libre, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle
+cadence, however, which has been claimed as the chief distinction of
+the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have
+surpassed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of
+Walter Pater." They have not, despite the verbal ingenuity,
+banished the impression of dislocation, of the epileptic. In French,
+in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Régnier,
+Stuart Merrill, Vielé Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are
+supple, the assonances grateful to the ear, the irregular patterns
+not offensive to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation from
+form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian
+language than to the English. Most of our native vers libre sounds
+like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the
+sidewalk. However, "it's not the gilt that makes a god, but the
+worshipper."
+
+For musicians and writers the interesting if abstruse study of
+Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the
+results in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we have been, all
+of us, talking rhythmic prose our life long.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLD
+
+
+The way the story leaked out was this: A young Irishman from Sligo,
+as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty
+stamped by nature herself, had served two customers over the bar of
+the old chop-house across the street from the opera-house. To him
+they were just two throats athirst; nothing more. They ordered
+drinks, and this first attracted his attention, for they agreed on
+cognac. Now, brandy after dinner is not an unusual drink, but this
+pair had asked for a large glass. Old brandy was given them, and
+such huge swallows followed that the bartender was compelled by his
+conscience to ring up one dollar for the two drinks. It was paid,
+and another round commanded, as if the two men were hurried, as
+indeed they were, for it was during an entr'acte at the opera that
+they had slipped out for liquid refreshments. Against the bar of the
+establishment a dozen or more humans were ranged, and the noise was
+deafening, but not so great as to prevent the Irishman from catching
+scraps of the conversation dropped by the brandy-drinkers. Their
+talk went something like this, and, although Michael had little
+schooling, his memory was excellent, and, being a decent chap, there
+is no need to impeach the veracity of his report.
+
+The taller man, neither young, neither old, and, like his friend,
+without a grey hair, burst out laughing after the disappearance of
+the second cognac. "I say, old pal, who was it wrote that brandy was
+for heroes? Kipling? What?" The other man, stockily built,
+foreign-looking, answered in a contemptuous tone ("sneering-like,"
+as my informant put it):
+
+"Where's your memory? Gone to rack and ruin like your ideals, I
+suppose! Kipling! What do such youngsters know? Doctor Johnson or
+Walter Savage Landor was the originator of the lying epigram; after
+them Byron gobbled it up, as he gobbled up most of the good things
+of his generation, and after him, the deluge of this mediocre
+century. When I told Byron this, at Milan, I think it was, he vowed
+me an ass. Now, it was Doctor Johnson."
+
+"Cheer up, it's not so bad. I remember once at Paris, or was it
+Vienna, you said the same thing about----" and here followed a
+strange name.
+
+"And, anyhow, you are mixing dates; Landor followed Byron, please,
+but I suppose he said it first. I told Metternich of your bon-mot,
+and, egad! he laughed, did that old parchment face. As for
+Bonaparte, upstart and charlatan, he was too selfish to smile at
+anybody's wit but his own, and little he had. Do you remember the
+Congress of Vienna?"
+
+"Do I--1815?"
+
+"Some such year. Or was it in 1750 when we saw Casanova at Venice?
+Well--" At this point the alarm-signal went off, and the mob went
+over to the opera. The young bartender's heart was beating so fast
+that it "leapt up in his bosom," as he described it. Two middle-aged
+men talking of a century ago as calmly as if they had spoken of
+yesterday flustered him a bit. He heard the dates. He noticed the
+perfectly natural manner in which events were mentioned. There was
+no mystification. For the first time in his life Michael was sorry
+the between-act pause was so short, and he longed for the next one,
+though fatigued from the labours of the last. Would these gentlemen
+return for more cognac? In an hour they came back with the crowd,
+again drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about a lot of
+incomprehensible things that had evidently taken place in the
+sixteenth or seventeenth century; at least, Michael overheard them
+disputing dates, and one of them bet the other that the big fire in
+London occurred in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Peppers,
+or Peps--some such name.
+
+"Ah, poor old Pepys," sighed the dark man; "if he had only taken
+better care of himself he might have been with us to-day instead of
+mouldering in his grave."
+
+"Oh, well! you can't expect every one to believe in your Struldbrug
+cure," replied his friend dreamily. "Even Her Majesty, Queen Anne,
+would not take your advice, though Mrs. Masham and Mr. Harley begged
+her to."
+
+"Yes, about the only thing they ever agreed upon in their life.
+Where is Harley to-day?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose in London," carelessly replied the other. "For a
+young bird of several centuries he's looking as fit as a fiddle; but
+see here, Swift, old boy, your bogy-tales are worrying our young
+friend," and with that Michael says they pointed to him, heartily
+laughed, and went away.
+
+He crossed himself, and for a moment the electric lights burned dim,
+so it seemed to the superstitious laddie-buck. But he had had a good
+chance to study the odd pair. They were not, as he repeated, old
+men, neither were they youthful. Say thirty-five or forty years, and
+he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions, the
+brilliancy of their eyes. They were just gentlemen in evening
+clothes and had run across Broadway without overcoats, a
+reprehensible act even for a young man. But they were healthy,
+self-contained, and hard-headed--they took, according to the
+statistician behind the bar, about a quart of brandy between them,
+and were as fresh as daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they?
+"Blagueurs," said I, after I had carefully deciphered the runic
+inscriptions in Michael's mind. (This was a week later.) Two
+fellows out on a lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy. But what
+was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternich, or Mr. Harley to him? Just
+words. Bonaparte he might be expected to remember. It was curious
+all the same that he could reel off the unusual names of Mrs. Masham
+and Casanova. The deuce! was there something in the horrid tale? Two
+immortals stalking the globe when their very bones should have been
+dissolved into everlasting dust! Two wraiths revisiting the glimpses
+of the moon--hold on! Struldbrug! Who was Struldbrug? What his cure?
+I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the worthies of the
+eighteenth century. Struldbrug. Swift. Struldbrug. Sir William
+Temple. Struldbrug--ah! by the great horn spoon! The Struldbrugs of
+the Island of Laputa! Gulliver's hideous immortals--and then the
+horror of the story enveloped me, but, despite my aversion to
+meeting the dead, I determined to live in the chop-house till I saw
+face to face these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity was
+soon gratified, as the sequel will show.
+
+Just one week after the appearance of this pair I stood talking to
+the Irish barman, when I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here
+are my men. I was not mistaken. Two well-built and well-groomed
+gentlemen asked for brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were
+polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare. No wonder I stared.
+They recalled familiar faces, yet I couldn't at once place the
+owners. Presently they went over to a table and seated themselves.
+Loudly calling for a mug of musty ale, I boldly put myself at an
+adjacent spot, and continued my spying tactics. The friends were
+soon in hot dispute. It concerned the literary reputation of Balzac.
+I sat with my mouth wide open.
+
+The elder of the pair, the one called Swift, snapped at his friend:
+"Zounds, sir! you and your Balzac. Hogwash and roosters in
+rut--that's about his capacity. Of course, when your own dull stuff
+appeared he praised you for the sake of the paradox. You moderns!
+Balzac the father of French fiction! You the father, or is it
+grandfather, of psychology--a nice crew! That boy Maupassant had
+more stuff in him than a wilderness of Zolas, Goncourts, and the
+rest. He is almost as amusing as Paul de Kock--" The other, the
+little man, bristled with rage.
+
+"Because you wrote a popular boy's book, full of filth and
+pessimism, you think you know all literature. And didn't you copy
+Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyagers, and Defoe? You satirise every one
+except God, whom you spare because you don't know him. I don't care
+much for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did treat me
+handsomely in praising my Chartreuse----"
+
+"Good God!" I groaned, "it's Stendhal, otherwise Henry Beyle, laying
+down the law to the tremendous author of Gulliver's Travels." And
+yet neither man looked the accepted portrait of himself. Above all,
+no Struldbrug moles were in view. I forgot my former fear, being
+interested in the dispute of these two giant writers who are more
+akin artistically than ever taken cognisance of by criticism. Dead?
+What did I care! They were surely alive now, and I was not dreaming.
+I didn't need to pinch myself, for my eyes and ears reported the
+occurrence. A miracle? Why not. Miracles are daily, if we but knew
+it. Living is the most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion
+proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he wrote:
+
+"Enough, friend Beyle. You are a charlatan. Your knowledge of the
+human heart is on a par with your taste in literature. You abominate
+Flaubert because his prose is more rhythmic than yours."
+
+"I vow I protest," interrupted Stendhal.
+
+"No matter. I'm right. Mérimée, your pupil, is your master at every
+point."
+
+I could no longer contain myself, and, bursting with curiosity, I
+cried:
+
+"Pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting such a luminous
+altercation, but, notwithstanding the queerness of the situation,
+may I not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift and Henry
+Beyle-Stendhal?"
+
+"Discovered, by the eternal Jehovah!" roared Swift, adding an
+obscene phrase, which I discreetly omit. Stendhal took the incident
+coolly.
+
+"As I am rediscovered about every decade by ambitious young critics
+anxious to achieve reputations, I am not disturbed by our young
+friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted. Pray, join us in a
+fresh drink and conversation." But I was only thirsty for more talk,
+oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendhal, who regarded me with
+cynical eyes, all the while fingering his little whisker: "Did you
+ever hear Chopin play?"
+
+"Who," he solemnly asked in turn, "is Chopin?"
+
+"He was at his best in the forties, and as you didn't die till----"
+
+"Pardon me, monsieur. I never died. Your Chopin may have died, but I
+am immortal."
+
+"You venerable Struldbrug," giggled Swift. I was disagreeably
+impressed, yet held my ground:
+
+"You must have met him. He was a friend of Balzac--his music was
+then in vogue at Paris--" I stumbled in my speech.
+
+"He probably means that little Polish piano-player who dangled at
+the petticoats of George Sand," interpolated Swift.
+
+"I knew Cimarosa, Rossini I saw, but I never heard of Chopin. As for
+the Sand woman, that cow who chewed and rechewed her literary
+cud--don't mention her name to me, please. She is the village pump
+of fiction; water, wet water. Balzac was bad enough." My heart
+sank. Chopin not even remembered by a contemporary! This then is
+fame. But the immortality of Stendhal, of Swift--what of
+that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps Balzac, Sand, Flaubert
+were still alive. I propounded the question. Swift answered it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes, they are alive. My Struldbrugs are meant to symbolise the
+immortality of genius. Only stupid people die. Sand is a barmaid in
+London. Balzac is on the road selling knit-goods, and a mighty good
+drummer he is sure to be; but poor Flaubert has had hard luck. He
+was the reader to a publishing house, and forced to pass judgment on
+the novels of the day--favourable judgment, mind you, on the popular
+stuff. He nearly burst a blood-vessel when they gave him a Marie
+Corelli manuscript to correct--to correct the style, mind you, he,
+Flaubert! The gods are certainly capricious. Now the old chap--he
+has aged since 1880--is in New York reading proof at a daily
+newspaper office. He sits at the same desk with Ben de Casseres, and
+every time he mutters over the rhythm of a sentence Ben raps him on
+the knuckles, and says:
+
+"'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop Flaubert! Some night I'll
+take you over to Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to teach
+you what brilliance and Bovarysme really mean.'" I was shocked at
+this blasphemy, and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to keep my
+temper.
+
+"But isn't Mr. Swift joking?"
+
+"Mr. Swift is always joking," was the far from reassuring reply. To
+fill in the interval I called for the waiter. The ghosts again
+demanded cognac. Stendhal looked like the caricature by Félicien
+Rops, in which his little pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose,
+and protuberant eyes are shown dominating some strange Cosmopolis of
+1932. In life--or death--he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He
+glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in the sad existence of
+the mighty prose master, but he smiled superciliously when I
+reproached him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic fantasy of
+the gods of Greece, alive, and still in hiding, was not precisely
+convincing in the present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion
+ensued, and finally I arose and said good night to my very new and
+very old friends. Swift's picture of the Struldbrugs was realised,
+and it was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should never be seen; in
+their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated
+humour; Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and
+superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my
+dismay.
+
+"You're disappointed. So sorry!" said Swift ironically. "At first I
+was vastly intrigued at the opportunity of talking with one of you
+modern persons, but I see I'm mistaken--ha! Beyle, what d'ye say?"
+
+Stendhal pondered. "Cimarosa, Rossini, and Haydn I knew. Correggio I
+admire, but who was Chopin?"
+
+Stung to anger, I retorted: "Yours is the loss, not Chopin's."
+Whereat Michael, the bartender, merrily laughed, and the company
+joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My head was on the
+chopping-block, and Stendhal was the executioner. Forgetting the
+respect due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger under
+Stendhal's upturned nostrils: "You may be a couple of impostors for
+all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily
+I dislike your petty carping criticisms. Better oblivion than
+immortality for your lean and sinister souls." Again hysterical
+laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful accents, as
+if his vanity had been wounded:
+
+"This saucy Yahoo reads our books and believes in them, but when we
+talk he doubts us. As Sam Johnson used to say, 'The reciprocal
+civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce
+of life.'"
+
+Stendhal boomed out: "He is dead himself but doesn't know it yet.
+All critics are stillborn. But _we_ live on for ever. Garçon! some
+more brandy."
+
+Out on crowded, expressive Broadway I stood, dazed and irritated.
+After all the palaver of authors, it is the critic who has the last
+word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the originality of the idea, I
+went my wooden way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+ON REREADING MALLOCK
+
+
+It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name
+of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most
+discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth
+Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference
+to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth
+Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier
+was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the
+lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's rôle was that of a philosophical novelist
+and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not
+with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious
+indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of
+castigation, irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific
+dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put
+them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the
+world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer
+burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an
+individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned
+in the seventies--he occupied then a place midway between Bentham
+and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe
+to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society,
+therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side;
+witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass
+and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas
+were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet
+to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of
+print--which is equivalent to saying, out of mind.
+
+With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the
+literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste,
+a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely
+cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the
+individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type.
+Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as
+immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the
+Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong
+family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was
+discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love
+the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is
+demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is
+the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the
+intrigue less intense, and the characterisation more human. The
+unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not
+duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second
+edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no
+apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not
+as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction,
+but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and
+Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
+see God," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode
+ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the
+leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the
+present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid
+sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a
+scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is
+also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham
+philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has
+abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these
+qualities would make him unpopular in our present century.
+
+What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew
+Arnold, Professor Jowett--a fine character etching--Huxley, Tyndall,
+Carlyle, Pater--rather cruelly treated--Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs.
+Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane--how the author juggles
+with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest
+parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely
+related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the
+priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord
+Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about
+town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of
+Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The décor is always
+gorgeous--Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with
+milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces
+there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who
+anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking
+the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls,
+charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered
+calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs.
+Norham, "celebrated authoress and upholder of the people." One of
+the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the
+Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins--a complete picture-gallery
+may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry,
+tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity
+for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman,"
+lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a
+daguerreotype.
+
+But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist
+is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons
+in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such
+polemics. In the moral world there are analogies to the physical,
+and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications,
+its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries,
+the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to
+the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl--now reduced to the
+exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to
+the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have
+their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones
+of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands
+of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign
+catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the
+idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Büchner, and at the
+base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer
+the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds
+about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George
+Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and
+the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is
+your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your
+gaseous invertebrate god? Surely there is sadly required in the
+cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar
+Saltus as its first incumbent.
+
+Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on
+parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the
+bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive
+rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary
+metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day
+thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world
+has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis, the
+modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms
+in molecules--a renewed geology, astronomy, palæontology, biology,
+embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last
+but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn
+evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de
+Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also
+proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And
+the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become
+another organ. Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish biologist, with his
+neurons--little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred
+to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory
+nerves--has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of
+metaphysicians.
+
+That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?"
+may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock
+acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the
+individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the
+individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual.
+And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the
+colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of
+vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells,
+else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself
+to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory
+Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr.
+Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with
+great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little
+feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may
+take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a
+modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable
+nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded
+not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a
+pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities.
+Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never
+was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the
+socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content
+that comes with sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling
+over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.
+
+Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing
+survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do
+what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will.
+But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion
+to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most
+pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that
+doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there
+never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott
+wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we
+have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain
+the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which
+think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is
+possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists
+and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it
+is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A
+fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without
+vision, old as well as young limp through life.
+
+Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last
+superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From
+Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry; from Werther to Sanine
+it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of
+temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an
+issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth
+living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on
+the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal
+formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually
+a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet
+has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life."
+Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, æsthetic and ethical;
+nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the
+close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle
+the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the
+self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist
+upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable
+annihilation. The holy name of Altruism--social emotion made
+functional--has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of
+discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of
+universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the
+subconscious--what else is his intuition?--is set before the lovers
+of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that
+the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't
+reason! Just dream! The poet Rogers replied to a lady who asked his
+religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is
+that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr.
+Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still
+worth rereading.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE LOST MASTER
+
+
+"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted
+by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think
+of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting
+at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line
+swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus
+as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the
+watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was
+asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared.
+"You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your
+art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus
+Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the
+grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all
+cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The
+painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We
+sat still, hoping against hope.
+
+"See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse
+expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not
+fair." "I didn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the
+reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of
+holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather
+realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told
+you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives
+a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the
+Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would
+you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown?
+Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He
+is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers
+have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued
+in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't
+show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to
+him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints
+for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the
+Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's
+story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's
+Frenhofer--is that the chap's name?--than Browning's Waring. He is
+the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred
+masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we
+stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to
+critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but it rose afar.'"
+"Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend
+of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter,
+now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of
+our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll
+take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.
+
+The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in
+front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle.
+You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus
+far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or
+business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us
+westward until we reached a warehouse--gloomy, in need of repair,
+yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway,
+traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before
+a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so.
+Approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and
+keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The
+eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most
+magnificent I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance.
+If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted
+animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of
+this stranger. We turned anxiously to to our friend. He had
+disappeared. What a trick to play at such a moment. "Who do you
+wish?" rumbled a mellow voice. "Albertus Magnus?" we timidly
+inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute.
+"Ah!" was the reply. Silence. Then, "Come in, please; don't stumble
+over the canvases." We followed the old man, whose stature was not
+as heroic as his head; and we did not fail to stumble, for the way
+was obscure, and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of
+bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets, wretched furniture, and
+all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not
+sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room
+that doubtless concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely
+smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by
+another door, he explained; and, without noticing our discontented
+air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he
+looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the
+biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the brain that came out
+of his wonderful eyes, were as young as to-morrow.
+
+"Isn't he a corker?" irreverently demanded our friend. "He is not
+even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he
+drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he
+calls himself an idealist." The old painter smiled. "I suppose I
+have been described as Waring to you, because I knew Robert
+Browning. I did vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but
+only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or
+kingship, like the original Alfred Domett, called Waring in the
+poem. But when I returned from Italy I was a stranger in a strange
+land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri.
+Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time fashions change in art
+as in dress, and nowadays no one understands me, and, with the
+exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the
+Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines; his line is as
+beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love gold more than did Facino Cane of
+Balzac. Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters.
+Tell me, do you love Titian?" We swore allegiance to the memory of
+Titian. The artist seemed pleased. "You younger men are devoted to
+Velasquez and Hals--too much so. Great as painters, possibly
+greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil
+like runaway balloons. They miss height and depth. Their colour
+never sings like Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of
+their sitters, but never the secret surprised by the Italian. I sat
+at his feet, before his canvases, fifty years, and I'm further away
+than ever--" Our friend interrupted this rhapsody.
+
+"Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas,
+don't you think you are playing on your visitors' nerves, just to
+set them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for
+the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably
+noticed that you had a trump of your own up your sleeve. You love
+Titian. Well, admit it. You don't paint like him, your colour scheme
+is something else, and what you are after you only know yourself.
+Come! trot out your Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or, better
+still, that landscape with a river-bank and shepherds." The old man
+gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light, placed a big easel in
+proper position, fumbled among the canvases that made the room
+smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath.
+"Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt, was the inspiration," murmured
+the master.
+
+The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail
+bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays,
+so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was
+massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not
+even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and
+smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never
+happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into
+air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown.
+Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned
+the restless soul of Vanderdecken pacing his quarter-deck, cursing
+the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic
+composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the
+strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that
+flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the
+storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such
+sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend,
+the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it
+only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then,
+credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the
+reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar
+photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic
+gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all,
+the grip! Only Turner--" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on
+the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a
+new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic
+prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to
+describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in
+which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that
+set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations
+in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged
+triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque;
+then followed apocalyptic visions, in which the solid earth
+staggered through the empyrean after a black sun--a magnetic disk
+doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished."
+Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold
+undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt,
+faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was
+our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not
+help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both
+in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the
+time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the
+belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial
+quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the
+whites--ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche
+hermine"--the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows--what were all
+these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were
+mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity"
+obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare
+as a lyric by Shelley or the playing of Frédéric Chopin.
+
+What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus
+only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited
+at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our
+embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he never
+exhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more
+money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is
+a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one
+female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old
+Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint.
+His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this
+beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse
+such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this
+curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus--" "But I must,"
+expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here
+if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who
+think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My
+chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer.
+While I go nowhere--I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years.
+What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we
+took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known
+to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is
+that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders
+and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured
+him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we
+sneered.
+
+Then we crossed over to the club and talked art far into the night.
+Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his
+paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who
+knows? As the Russians say--_Avos!_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE GRAND MANNER IN PIANOFORTE PLAYING
+
+
+Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of
+every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable
+stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats.
+Despite cunning reproductive contrivances the executive musician has
+no more chance of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is
+brief, but brilliant. Glory, then, is largely a question of memory,
+and when the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away then he has
+no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not
+interpretative, art endures. Better be "immortal" while you are
+alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write
+their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while
+the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be
+some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters
+mundane.
+
+Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws of Anton Rubinstein caress
+the keyboard shall never forget the music. He is the greatest
+pianist in my long and varied list. Think of his delivery of the
+theme at the opening of Beethoven's G major concerto; or in that
+last page of Chopin's Barcarolle. It was no longer the piano tone,
+but the sound of distant waters and horns from elf-land. A mountain
+of fire blown skyward, when the elemental in his profoundly
+passionate temperament broke loose, he could roar betimes as gently
+as a dove. Yet, when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining
+pupils of Chopin declared that he was brutal in his treatment of
+their master. He played Rubinstein, not Chopin, said Georges Mathias
+to me. Mathias knew, for he had heard the divine Frédéric play.
+Nevertheless, Rubinstein played Chopin, the greater and the
+miniature, as no one before or since.
+
+To each generation its music-making. The "grand manner" in
+piano-playing has almost vanished. A few artists still live who
+illustrate this manner; you may count them on the fingers of one
+hand. Rosenthal, D'Albert, Carreño, Friedheim--Reisenaur had the
+gift, too--how many others? Paderewski I heard play in Leipsic in
+1912 at a Gewandhaus concert under the baton of the greatest living
+conductor, Arthur Nikisch, and I can vouch for the plangent tone
+quality and the poetic reading he displayed in his performance of
+that old war-horse, the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore, my
+admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer was considerably
+increased after hearing his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikisch.
+How far away we were from Manru. Joseffy, who looked upon
+Paderewski, as a rare personality, told me that the Polish Fantasy
+for piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its seeming
+simplicity in figuration. "Only the composer," enthusiastically
+exclaimed Joseffy, "could have made it so wonderful."
+
+But the grand manner, has it become too artificial, too rhetorical?
+It has gone out of fashion with the eloquence of the old histrions,
+probably because of the rarity of its exponents; also because it no
+longer appeals to a matter-of-fact public. Liszt was the first. He
+was dithyrambic. He was a volcano; Thalberg--his one-time
+rival--possessed all the smooth and icy perfections of Nesselrode
+pudding. Liszt in reality never had but two rivals close to his
+throne; Karl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton Rubinstein, the Russian.
+Von Bülow was all intellect; his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms
+were cerebral, not emotional. He had the temperament of the pedant.
+I first heard him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of Music.
+He introduced the Tschaikovsky B flat minor concerto, with B. J.
+Lang directing the orchestra, a quite superfluous proceeding, as Von
+Bülow gave the cues from the keyboard and distinctly cursed the
+conductor, the band, the composition, and his own existence, as
+befitted a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh! he could be fiery enough,
+though in his playing of the Romantics the fervent note was absent;
+but his rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible. You need only
+recall the pungency of his reading of Beethoven's Scherzo in the
+Sonata Opus 31, No. 3. It was staccato as a hail-storm. Two years
+later, in Paris, I heard the same concerto played by Nicholas
+Rubinstein at the Trocadéro (Exposition, 1878), the very man who had
+first flouted the work so rudely that Tschaikovsky, deeply offended,
+changed the dedication to Von Bülow.
+
+Anton Rubinstein displayed the grand manner. His style was a
+compound of tiger's blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip
+about his "false notes" (he wrote a Study on False Notes, as if in
+derision), he was, with Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was
+not always in practice and most of the music he wrote for his
+numerous tours was composed in haste and repented of at leisure. It
+is now almost negligible. The D minor concerto reminds one of a
+much-traversed railroad-station. But Rubinstein the virtuoso! It was
+in 1873 I heard him, but I was too young to understand him. Fifteen
+years later, or thereabouts, he gave his Seven Historical Recitals
+in Paris and I attended the series, not once, but twice. He played
+many composers, but for me he seemed to be playing the Book of Job,
+the Apocalypse, and the Scarlet Sarafan. He had a ductile tone like
+a golden French horn--Joseffy's comparison--and the power and
+passion of the man have never been equalled. Neither Tausig nor
+Liszt did I hear, worse luck, but there were plenty of witnesses to
+tell me of the differences. Liszt, it seems, when at his best, was
+both Rubinstein and Tausig combined, with Von Bülow thrown in. Anton
+Rubinstein played every school with consummate skill, from the iron
+certitudes of Bach's polyphony to the magic murmurs of Chopin and
+the romantic rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann. Beethoven,
+too, he interpreted with intellectual and emotional vigour. Yet this
+magnificent Calmuck--he wasn't of course, though he had Asiatic
+features--grew weary of his instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the
+stars in their courses by composing. But his name is writ in ivory,
+and not in enduring music.
+
+Scudo said that when Sigismund Thalberg played, his scales were like
+perfectly strung pearls falling on scarlet velvet; with Liszt the
+pearls had become red hot. This extravagant image is of value. We
+have gone back to the Thalbergian pearls, for too much passion in
+piano-playing is voted bad taste to-day. Nuance, then colour, and
+ripe conception. Technique for technique's sake is no longer a
+desideratum; furthermore, as Felix Leifels wittily remarked: "No one
+plays the piano badly"; just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably. Mr.
+Leifels, as a veteran contrabassist and at present manager of the
+Philharmonic Society, ought to be an authority on the subject; the
+old Philharmonic has had all the pianists, from H. C. Timm, in
+1844--a Hummel concerto--to Thalberg and Rubinstein, Joseffy,
+Paderewski, and Josef Hofmann. Truly the standard of virtuosity is
+higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals
+with programmes that are staggering. The Chopin concertos now occupy
+the position, technically speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn
+concertos. Every one plays Chopin as a matter of course, and, with a
+few exceptions horribly. Yes, Mr. Leifels is right; no one plays the
+piano badly, yet new Rubinsteins do not materialise.
+
+The year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, was a
+memorable one for visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von
+Bülow, but also two beautiful women, one at the apex of her artistic
+career, Annette Essipoff (or Essipowa) and Teresa Carreño, just
+starting on her triumphal road to fame. Essipowa was later the wife
+of Leschetizky--maybe she was married then--and she was the most
+poetic of all women pianists that I have heard. Clara Schumann was
+as musical, but she was aged when I listened to her. Essipowa played
+Chopin as only a Russian can. They are all Slavs, these Poles and
+Russians, and no other nation, except the Hungarian, interpret
+Chopin. Probably the greatest German virtuoso was Adolf Henselt,
+Bavarian-born, though a resident of Petrograd. He had a Chopin-like
+temperament and played that master's music so well that Schumann
+called him the "German Chopin." Essipowa, I need hardly tell you,
+communicated no little of her gracious charm to Paderewski. He
+learned more from her plastic style than from all the precepts of
+Leschetizky.
+
+On a hot night in 1876, and in old Association Hall, I first saw and
+heard Teresa (then Teresita) Carreño. I say "saw" advisedly, for she
+was a blooming girl, and at the time shared the distinction with
+Adelaide Neilson and Mrs. Scott-Siddons of being one of the three
+most beautiful women on the stage. Carreño, still vital, still
+handsome, and still the conquering artist, till her death last
+spring, was in that far-away day fresh from Venezuela, a pupil of
+Gottschalk and Anton Rubinstein. She wore a scarlet gown, as fiery
+as her playing, and when I wish to recall her I close my eyes and
+straightway as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear her; for her
+playing has always been scarlet to me, as Rubinstein's is golden,
+and Joseffy's silvery.
+
+The French group I have heard, beginning with Theodore Ritter, who
+came to New York in company with Carlotta Patti; Planté--still
+living and over eighty, so I have been told by M. Phillipp;
+Saint-Saëns, whom I first saw and heard at the Trocadéro, Paris,
+with his pupil, Montigny-Remaury; Clotilde Kleeberg, Diémer, Risler;
+the venerable Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin; Raoul Pugno, who
+was veritably a pugnacious pianist, Cécile Chaminade, Marie Jaell,
+and her corpulent husband, Alfred Jaell.
+
+Eugen d'Albert, surely the greatest of Scotch pianists--he was born
+at Glasgow, though musically educated in London--is another
+heaven-stormer. I heard him at Berlin some years ago, in
+Philharmonic Hall, and people stood up in their excitement--Liszt
+redivivus!
+
+It was the grand manner in its most chaotic form. A musical volcano
+belching up lava, scoriæ, rocks, hunks of Beethoven--the
+Appassionata Sonata it happened to be--while the infuriated little
+Vulcan threw emotional fuel into his furnace. The unfortunate
+instrument must have been a mass of splintered steel, wood, and wire
+after the musical giant had finished. It was a magnificent
+spectacle, and the music glorious. Eugen d'Albert, whether he is or
+isn't the son of Karl Tausig--as Weimar gossip had it; Weimar, when
+in the palmy days every other pianist you met was a natural son of
+Liszt--or else pretended to be one--has more than a moiety of that
+virtuoso's genius. He is a great artist, and occasionally the magic
+fire flares and lights up the firmament of music.
+
+I think it was in 1879 that Rafael Joseffy visited us for the first
+time; but I didn't hear him till 1880. The reason I remember the
+date is that this greatly beloved Hungarian made his début at old
+Chickering Hall (then at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street); but I
+saw him in Steinway Hall. Another magician with a peculiarly
+personal style. In the beginning you thought of the aurora borealis,
+shooting-stars, and exquisite meteors; a beautiful style, though not
+a classic interpreter then. With the years Joseffy deepened and
+broadened. The iridescent shimmer was never absent. No one played
+the E minor Concerto of Chopin as did Joseffy. He had the tradition
+from his beloved master, Tausig, as Tausig had it from Chopin by way
+of Liszt. (Tausig always regretted that he had never heard Chopin
+play.) Joseffy, in turn, transmitted the tradition to his early
+pupil, Moriz Rosenthal, in whose répertoire it is the most
+Chopinesque of all his performances.
+
+And do you remember the Chevalier de Kontski, Carl Baermann, Franz
+Rummel, S. B. Mills--who introduced here so many modern
+concertos--the huge Norwegian Edmund Neupert, who lived at the Hotel
+Liszt, next door to Steinway Hall, Constantin von Sternberg, and Max
+Vogrich, the Hungarian with the Chopin-like profile?
+
+In the same school as Joseffy is the capricious De Pachmann; with
+Joseffy I sat at the first recital of this extraordinary Russian in
+Chickering Hall (1890). Joseffy, with his accustomed generosity of
+spirit--he was the most sympathetic and human of great virtuosi--at
+once recognised the artistic worth of Vladimir de Pachmann. This
+last representative of a school that included the names of Hummel,
+Cramer, Field, Thalberg, Chopin, the little De Pachmann (he was then
+bearded like a pirate) captivated us. It was all miniature, without
+passion or pathos or the grand manner, but in its genre his playing
+was perfection; the polished perfection of an intricately carved
+ivory ornament. De Pachmann played certain sides of Chopin
+incomparably; capriciously, even perversely. In a small hall,
+sitting on a chair that precisely suited his fidgety spirit, then,
+if in the mood, a recital by him was something unforgettable.
+
+After De Pachmann--Paderewski. Paderewski, the master-colourist, the
+grand visionary, whose art is often strained, morbid, fantastic. And
+after Paderewski? Why, Leopold Godowsky, of course. He belongs to
+the Joseffy-De Pachmann, not to the Rubinstein-Josef Hofmann, group.
+I once called him the superman of piano-playing. Nothing like him,
+as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano-playing
+since Chopin. He is an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a
+contrapuntalist. Bach and Chopin. The spirit of the German cantor
+and the Polish tone-poet in curious conjunction. His playing is
+transcendental; his piano compositions the transcendentalism of the
+future. That way, else retrogression! All has been accomplished in
+ideas and figuration. A new synthesis--the combination of seemingly
+disparate elements and styles--with innumerable permutations, he has
+accomplished. He is a miracle-worker. The Violet Ray. Dramatic
+passion, flame, and fury are not present; they would be intruders on
+his map of music. The piano tone is always legitimate, never forced.
+But every other attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten
+independent voices recreating the ancient polyphonic art of the
+Flemings. He is like a Brahma at the piano. Before his serene and
+all-embracing vision every school appears and disappears in the
+void. The beauty of his touch and tone are only matched by the
+delicate adjustment of his phrasing to the larger curve of the
+composition. Nothing musical is foreign to him. He is a pianist for
+pianists, and I am glad to say that the majority of them gladly
+recognise this fact.
+
+One evening Godowsky was playing his piano sonata with its subtle
+intimations of Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and its altogether
+Godowskian colour and rhythmic life--he is the greatest creator of
+rhythmic values since Liszt, and that is a "large order"--when he
+was interrupted by the entrance of Josef Hofmann. Godowsky and
+Hofmann are as inseparable as were Chopin and Liszt. Heine called
+the latter pair the Dioscurii of music. In the Godowsky apartment
+stood several concert grands. Hofmann nonchalantly removed his coat
+and, making an apology for disturbing us, he went into another room
+and soon we heard him slowly practising. What do you suppose? Some
+new concerto with new-fangled bedevilments? O Sancta Simplicitas!
+This giant, if ever there was one, played at a funereal tempo the
+octave passages in the left hand of the Heroic Polonaise of Chopin
+(Opus 53). Every schoolgirl rattles them off as "easy," but, with
+the humility of a great artist, Hofmann practised the section as if
+it were still a stumbling-block. De Lenz records that Tausig did the
+same.
+
+Later, Conductor Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera dropped
+in, and several pianists and critics followed, and soon the Polish
+pianist was playing for us all some well-known compositions by a
+certain Dvorsky; also an extremely brilliant and effective concert
+study in C minor by Constantin von Sternberg. From 1888, when he was
+a wonder-child here, Jozio Hofmann's artistic development has been
+logical and continuous. His mellow muscularity evokes Rubinstein. No
+one plays Rubinstein as does this Harmonious Blacksmith--and with
+the piety of Rubinstein's pet pupil. I once compared him to a
+steam-hammer, whose marvellous sensitivity enables it to crack an
+egg-shell or crush iron. Hofmann's range of tonal dynamics is
+unequalled, even in this age of perfected piano technique. He is at
+home in all schools, and his knowledge is enormous. At moments his
+touch is as rich as a Kneisel Quartet accord.
+
+At the famous Rudolph Schirmer dinner, given in 1915, among other
+distinguished guests there were nearly a score of piano virtuosi.
+The newspapers humorously commented upon the fact that there was
+not a squabble, though with so many nationalities one row, at
+least, might have been expected. As a matter of fact, if any
+discussion had arisen it would not have been over politics, but
+about the fingering of the Double-Note Study in G sharp minor of
+Chopin, so difficult to play slowly--the most formidable of
+argument-breeding questions among pianists. A parterre of pianists,
+indeed, some in New York because of the war, while Paderewski and
+Rosenthal were conspicuous by their absence. Think of a few names:
+Joseffy--he died several months later, Gabrilowitsch, Hofmann,
+Godowsky, Carl Friedberg, Mark Hambourg--a heaven-stormer in the
+Rubinstein-Hercules manner--Leonard Borwick, Alexander Lambert,
+Ernest Schelling, Stojowski, Percy Grainger--the young Siegfried of
+the Antipodes--August Fraemcke, Cornelius Ruebner, and--another
+apparition in the world of piano-playing--Ferruccio Busoni.
+
+This Italian, the greatest of Italian piano virtuosi--the history of
+which can claim such names as Domenico Scarlatti, Clementi,
+Fumigalli, Martucci, Sgambati--is also a composer who has set agog
+conservative critics by the boldness of his imagination. As an
+artist he may be said to embody the intellectuality of Von Bülow,
+the technical brilliancy of the Liszt group. Busoni is eminently a
+musical thinker.
+
+America probably will never again harbour such a constellation of
+piano talent. I sometimes wonder if the vanished generation of piano
+artists played much better than those men. Godowsky, Hofmann, the
+lyric and most musical Harold Bauer; the many-sided, richly endowed,
+and charming Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Hambourg, Busoni, and Paderewski
+are not often matched. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a
+prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel
+(not a negro minstrel, for a chalk-burner is necessarily white),
+Mme. Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler--a pianist! The contemporary piano
+hierarchy might be thus classed: Josef Hofmann, a king; Paderewski,
+a poet; Godowsky, a prophet; Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, a sibyl;
+D'Albert, a titan; Busoni, a philosopher; Rosenthal, a hero, and
+Alexander Lambert--a pianist. Well, Mr. Lambert may be congratulated
+on such an ascription; Doehler was a great technician in his day,
+and when the "friend of pianists" (Lambert could pattern after
+Schindler, whose visiting-card read: "l'Ami de Beethoven") masters
+his modesty an admirable piano virtuoso is revealed. So let him be
+satisfied with the honourable appellation of "pianist." He is in
+good company.
+
+And the ladies! I am sorry I can't say, "place aux dames!" Space
+forbids. I've heard them all, from Arabella Goddard to Mme.
+Montigny-Remaury (in Paris, 1878, with her master, Camille
+Saint-Saëns); from Alide Topp, Marie Krebs, Anna Mehlig, Pauline
+Fichtner, Vera Timinoff, Ingeborg Bronsart, Madeline Schiller, to
+Julia Rivé-King; from Cecilia Gaul and Svarvady-Clauss to Anna
+Bock; from the Amazon, Sofie Menter, the most masculine of Liszt
+players, to Adèle Margulies, Yoland Maero, and Antoinette
+Szumowska-Adamowska; from Ilonka von Ravacsz to Ethel Leginska--who
+plays like a house afire; from Helen Hopekirk to Katharine Goodson;
+from Clara Schumann to Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Olga Samaroff, and
+the newly come Brazilian Guiomar Novaes--the list might be unduly
+prolonged.
+
+I heard Paderewski play last spring. Surely he has now the "grand
+manner" in all its dramatic splendour, and without its old-fashioned
+pretentious rhetoric. Nor has he lost the lusciousness of his
+touch--a Caruso voice on the keyboard--or the poetic intensity of
+his Chopin and Schumann interpretations. He is still Prince
+Charming.
+
+Not only do I fear prolixity, but the confusing of critical values,
+for I write from memory, and I admit that I've had more pleasure
+from the "intimate" pianists than from the forgers of tonal
+thunderbolts; that is--Rubinstein excepted--from such masters in
+miniature as Joseffy, Godowsky, Carl Heyman, De Pachmann, and
+Paderewski. I find in the fresh, sparkling playing of Mischa
+Levitski, Benno Moiseivich, and Guiomar Novaes high promise for
+their future. The latter came here unheralded and as the pupil of
+that sterling virtuoso and pedagogue, Isidor Phillipp of the Paris
+Conservatory.
+
+It is noteworthy that only Chopin, Liszt, and Von Bülow were
+Christian born among the supreme masters of the keyboard; the rest
+(with a few exceptions) were and are members of that race whose
+religious tenets specifically incline them to the love and practice
+of music.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+JAMES JOYCE
+
+
+Who is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn,
+who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present
+residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good health--his eyes
+trouble him--and that he was once a student in theology, but soon
+gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of
+the new group of young Irish writers who see their country and
+countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the
+most beautiful and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the
+Isle of Saints for those iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who
+happens to write English, though he often thinks in French; Bernard
+Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the
+Londoners; while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic, and both
+poets. Yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen, who mingles
+angels' pin-feathers with rainbow gold; a magic decoction of which
+we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet, and a realist
+of the De Maupassant breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with
+a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as truthful as Tchekov, and as
+grey--that Tchekov compared with whose the "realism" of De
+Maupassant is romantic bric-à-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce
+is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the
+sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of middle-class life, and he
+sometimes suggests the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical
+methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.
+
+Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair
+traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the
+water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a
+tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries
+is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed
+thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too
+often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls
+easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may
+result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris
+resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it
+depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so
+persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh
+heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a
+hell of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land
+of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but
+you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the
+heart of the peasantry, and Yeats and Lady Gregory brought back
+from the hidden spaces fairies and heroes.
+
+Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish
+priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce
+representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of
+contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic
+character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the
+pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in
+George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew
+Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is
+a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is
+nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and
+Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which
+king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their
+unhappy temperaments.
+
+The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always
+interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the
+daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait
+of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive
+of what follows; also a title that seems to have emerged from the
+catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the
+artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college,
+from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's
+apron-strings to coarse revelry, the hero is put to the torture by
+art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do
+not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of
+J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company
+of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of
+reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and
+the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace
+of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked.
+This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so
+joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of
+richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must
+chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to
+everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.
+
+Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tells
+his student friend about his father. These were his attributes: "A
+medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting
+politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good
+fellow, a story-teller, somebody's secretary, something in a
+distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present a praiser of his
+own past." He could talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a
+turkey--as they say up Cork way. The portrait is well-nigh perfect.
+The wild goose over again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became
+violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of
+riotous living he was transformed into a militant Catholic. The
+reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist, but
+his mind was too speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing.
+To analyse the sensibility of a soul mounting on flaming pinions to
+God is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral
+recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not
+again sink into the slough of Dublin low life. Cranly, the student,
+saw through the hole in his sceptical millstone. "It is a curious
+thing, do you know," Cranly said dispassionately, "how your mind is
+supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." A
+profound remark. Once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic,
+particularly if you are born in Ireland.
+
+Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He neither abuses nor praises. He
+is evidently out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of the
+Jesuits with affection and admiration. The sermons preached by them
+during the retreat are models. They are printed in full--strange
+material for a novel. And he can show us the black hatred caused by
+the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of
+this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with
+verity. At a Christmas dinner the argument between Dante (a certain
+Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father
+carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man and
+woman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles,
+watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his
+temper--he has had several tumblers of mountain dew and is a little
+"how come you so?" He bursts forth: "No God in Ireland! We have had
+too much God in Ireland! Away with God!" "Blasphemer! Devil!"
+screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his
+face. "Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!"
+The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly bowed his head on
+his hands with a sob of pain. "Poor Parnell!" he cried loudly. "My
+dead King." Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted
+that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of
+Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman
+unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab.
+
+There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful.
+Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching
+acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable to the average
+reader. There is relief in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a
+saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr. Joyce. There is no
+ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a
+full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he
+wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and
+the portrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity--as an artistic
+performance--and its passionate personal note, is bound to give
+offence in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish;
+not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales entitled Dubliners
+reveals a wider range, a practised technical hand, and a gift for
+etching character that may be compared with De Maupassant's. A big
+comparison, but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as The
+Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or Two Gallants, and be
+convinced that we do not exaggerate.
+
+Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery.
+Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes.
+From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to Dalkey or Drumcondra;
+from the Monument to Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip
+is unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with Dublinesque
+anecdotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of
+the town. The slackers who pester servant-girls for their shillings
+to spend on whisky; the young man in the boarding-house who succumbs
+to the "planted" charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the
+matrimonial trap--only De Maupassant could better the telling of
+this too commonplace story; the middle-aged man, parsimonious as to
+his emotions and the tragic ending of a love-affair that had hardly
+begun; and the wonderfully etched plate called The Dead with its
+hundred fine touches of comedy and satire--these but prove the claim
+of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A
+malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he
+could say--oh, terrifying irony!--that "mankind is not necessary" in
+the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he may become
+mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of "life's
+more bitter flavours." Insipid novelists are legion. He is
+Huysmans's little brother in his flair for disintegrating character.
+But yet an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a
+vision that too often vanishes before he can pin its beauty on
+canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humour of
+such a story as Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, which would bring to
+a Tammany heeler what Henry James called "the emotion of
+recognition." Ah! the wild goose. The flying dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CREATIVE INVOLUTION
+
+
+Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to
+the _Strand Magazine_ and later reunited in a book bearing the
+happy title Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers as being
+significant chiefly in their self-revelation. What they tell of
+themselves is of more value than what they write about. Whether
+Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of
+an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes
+widely after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L. Williams,
+M. S., with an apposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams
+deals with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension of Space
+(what we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalised).
+Speculative as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter, a Christian
+Scientist, or a member of any of the other queer rag-tag and bobtail
+beliefs and superstitions--fortune-telling, astrology, selling
+"futures" in the next life, table-rapping, and such like. Cora
+Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the
+brilliant, unhappy Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then, are not
+verbal wind-pudding, but have a basis of mathematics and the
+investigations of the laboratory, where "chemists and physicists
+are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals
+is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity."
+
+We have always enjoyed the idea of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. The
+fact that it is an _x_ in the plotting of mathematicians in general
+does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J. K. F.
+Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved to his own satisfaction the existence
+of a Fourth Dimension when he turned an india-rubber ball inside out
+without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable
+melancholy. No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's Flatland,
+or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford,
+you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion,
+squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of
+the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the
+cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on
+machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of
+positivism craves more spiritual nourishment to-day. Hasn't the
+remarkable mathematician Henri Poincaré (author of Science and
+Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method) declared that
+between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth
+there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary
+elimination which have necessitated such inferences? Note the word
+"free"; free-will is restored to its old and honourable estate in
+the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron determinism of the seventies
+and eighties has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Büchner and
+Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly Intuition--a
+dangerous vocable--rules over mere mental processes. (There is, as
+George Henry Lewes asserted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox:
+_i. e._, there are more false facts than false theories current.)
+Science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and
+relativity of things--no mean intellectual feat, by the way--but not
+of the things themselves; one must join, adds Poincaré, to the
+faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy. In a word,
+Intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable,
+and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann are as legitimate as
+Euclid's. And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble
+and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles
+now?
+
+Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension. Time may be in two
+dimensions. Heraclitus before Bergson compared Time to a river
+always flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged from this
+stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, would it
+not signify that Time has two dimensions. And where does music stand
+in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical
+structure and melody with its horizontal flow proof that music is
+another dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion of the Fourth
+Spatial Dimension is a spiritual one. Creative Involution is to
+supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution
+described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All
+roads lead to religion. Expel religion forcibly and it returns under
+strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions. Yet religion
+without dogma is like a body without a skeleton--it can't be made to
+stand upright.
+
+Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor,
+just as philosophy is the diversion of professors. Modern science,
+said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's stage when it denied
+religion. But matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become
+spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to
+revise the conclusions of his once famous Belfast address in the
+presence of radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the essential thing
+is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of
+form. From a macrocosmic monster our gods are become microcosmic;
+god may be a molecule, a cell. A god to put in a phial; thus far has
+the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is "a sum of
+scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," says
+Salomon Reinach in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations in
+vain. All is vanity, even doctrinal fluctuations. Goethe has warned
+us that "Man is not born to solve the mystery of Existence; but he
+must nevertheless attempt it, in order that he may learn how to keep
+within the limits of the Knowable." Goethe detested all "thinking
+about thought." Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation.
+
+Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The
+psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different
+from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental
+workings of a jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a
+jury-box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment
+is, as a rule, that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted
+this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant humour) fashion, adding
+that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the
+Great, candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees
+salvation for the single soul in the collective soul--not
+necessarily socialistic--nevertheless warns parents against the
+dangers in our public-school system, where the individuality of the
+child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by class teaching.
+Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the
+ego. Yet to collective consciousness may belong the future. It is
+all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification, the result,
+and the prop of limited class interests. (This was years ago.)
+Stately, sedate, stable is the class that won't tolerate war; a
+class of moral lollipops. War we must have; it is one of the prime
+conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetich,
+taboo is the basis of all superstitions, so the superstition of
+yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's
+Golden Bough--James Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social
+Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a
+glass to hold it; and if patriotism is a crime of lèse-majesty
+against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and
+patriotism are precious essences in the scheme of life, and we shall
+always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a
+timely one. At school our children's souls are clogged with bricks
+and mortar, instead of being buoyant and individual.
+
+She quotes--and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt
+quotations--with evident approbation from Some Neglected Factors in
+Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English thinker: "Organic
+life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of
+waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that
+one on which we ourselves, the organisms of to-day, and the human
+societies to which we belong, are swept onward. Here we must
+necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm
+which has brought life so far will carry it on to still greater
+heights in the unknown future?" Rhythm, measured flow, is the
+shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of
+plant and ghost. "I teach you Beyond-Man (superman); Man is
+something that will be surpassed ... once man was ape, and is ape in
+a higher degree than any ape.... Man is a rope connecting animal and
+Beyond-Man." "Believe that which thou seest not," cries Flaubert in
+his marvellous masque of mythologies ancient and modern, The
+Temptation of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same centuries before
+the Frenchman: Believe what is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is
+the price we pay for cognition.
+
+Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though she appreciates his
+plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a
+mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to
+answer Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott's three questions: "1. Bergson
+says, 'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.' Where is the
+specimen on which this allegation is founded? 2. Consciousness is to
+some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson
+thinks he is disproving a crude theory of localisation of mental
+qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from
+local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life
+that intellect can never give. Will Professor Bergson furnish
+instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where
+intellect has failed?" (From Modern Science and the Illusions of
+Professor Bergson, 1912.) These "metaphysical curiosities," as they
+are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lankester in his preface
+to this solidly reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of numerous
+persons, dilettantes, with a craving for an embellished theory of
+the Grand Perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken
+sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the
+air--which, like the earth, hath bubbles, as was observed by the
+greatest of poets--she plants her feet on tangible affirmations. And
+to have faith we must admit the Illative sense of John Henry Newman.
+Thus "the wheel is come full circle." Creative Involution will
+please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author somersaults in
+the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS
+
+
+Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there
+were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his
+philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbed the
+contemporary wisdom of Wittenberg. And let it be said in passing
+that their knowledge did not lag behind ours, metaphysically
+speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet, if he had lived longer, might have
+said that no philosophy would ever solve the riddle of the sphinx;
+that we never know, only name, things. Noah is the supreme symbol of
+science, he the first namer of the animals in the ark. The world of
+sensation is our ark and we are one branch of the animal family. We
+come whence we know not and go where we shall never guess. Standing
+on this tiny Isle of Error we call the present, we think backward
+and live forward. Hamlet the sceptical would now demand something
+more tangible than the Grand Perhaps. My kingdom for a fulcrum! he
+might cry to Horatio--on which I may rest my lever and pry this too
+too solid earth up to the starry skies! What the implement?
+Religion? Remember Hamlet was a Catholic, too sensitive to send
+unshrived to hell's fire the soul of his uncle. Philosophy? Read
+Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and realise that if he were alive to-day the
+melancholy Prince might be a delicate scoffer at all fables. A
+Hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What then the escape? We all need
+more elbow-room in the infinite. The answer is--the Fourth Dimension
+in Higher Space. Eureka!
+
+After studying Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius, or
+the selections in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, even the
+doubting Thomas is forced to admit that here is no trace of rambling
+discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stammered enigmas; on the
+contrary, the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces
+with crystalline clearness the veil of the visible world. As
+literary style we find sharp contours and affirmations. Mysticism is
+not all cobweb lace and opal fire. Remember that we are not
+stressing the validity of either the vision or its consequent
+judgments; we only wish to emphasise the absence of muddy thinking
+in these writings. This quality of precision, allied to an eloquent,
+persuasive style, we encounter in Claude Bragdon's Four Dimensional
+Vistas. The author is an architect and has written much of his art
+and of projective ornament. (He was a Scammon lecturer at the
+Chicago Art Institute in 1915.) He is a mystic. He is also eminently
+practical. His contribution to æsthetics in The Beautiful Necessity
+is suggestive, and on the purely technical side valuable. But Mr.
+Bragdon, being both a mathematician and a poet, does not stop at
+three-dimensional existence. Like the profound English mystic
+William Blake, he could ask: "How do you know but every bird that
+cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your
+senses five?"
+
+What is the Fourth Dimension? A subtle transposition of precious
+essences from the earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in a world
+of three dimensions, the symbols of which are length, breadth,
+thickness. A species of triangular world, a prison for certain souls
+who see in the category of Time an escape from that other
+imperative, Space (however, not the Categorical Imperative of Kant
+and its acid moral convention). Helmholtz and many mathematicians
+employed the "n" dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful in
+some analytical problems, but it is not apprehended by the grosser
+senses. Pascal, great thinker and mathematician, had his "Abyss"; it
+was his Fourth Dimension, and he never walked abroad without the
+consciousness of it at his side. This illusion or obsession was the
+result of a severe mental shock early in his life. Many of us are
+like the French philosopher. We have our "abyss," mystic or real.
+Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician Bolyai, who in 1823
+"declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels, 'I
+will draw two lines through a given point both of which will be
+parallel to a given line.'" Space, then, may be curved in another
+dimension. Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though he does not
+attempt to prove it, as that would be impossible; but he gives his
+readers the chief points in the hypothesis. The "n" dimension may be
+employed as a lever to the imagination. Even revealed religion
+demands our faith, and imagination is the prime agent in the
+interpretation of the universe, according to the gospel of mystic
+mathematics.
+
+Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is interesting to note the
+imagery of transcendentalism through the ages. It is invariably
+geometrical. Spheres, planes, cones, circles, spirals, tetragrams,
+pentagrams, ellipses, and what-not. A cubistic universe. Xenophanes
+said that God is a sphere. And then there are the geometrical
+patterns made by birds on the wing. Heaven in any religion is
+another sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes, many mansions
+for the soul at its various stages of existence. The Bible, the
+mystical teachings of Mother Church--why evoke familiar witnesses?
+We are hemmed in by riddles, and the magnificent and mysterious
+tumult of life asks for the eye of imagination, which is also the
+eye of faith. The cold fire and dark light of the mystics must not
+repel us by their strangeness. Not knowledge but perception is
+power, and the psychic is the sign-post of the future. What do all
+these words mean: matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules,
+electrons, but the same old thing? I am a colony of cells, yet that
+fact does not get me closer to the core of the soul. What will? A
+fourth spatial dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a poetic
+concept.
+
+He calls man a space-eater. Human ambition is to annihilate space.
+Wars are fought for space, and every step in knowledge is based upon
+its mastery. What miracles are wireless telegraphy, flying-machines,
+the Roentgen ray! Astronomy--what ghastly gulfs it shows us in
+space! Time and space were abolished as sense illusions by the
+worthy Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley; but as we are up to our
+eyes in quotidian life, which grows over and about us like grass, we
+cannot shake off the oppression. First thought, and then realised,
+these marvels are now accepted as matter of fact because mankind has
+been told the technique of them; as if any explanation can be more
+than nominal. We shall never know the real nature of the phenomena
+that crowd in on us from lust to dust. Not even that synthesis of
+the five senses, the sixth, or sex sense, with its evanescent
+ecstasy, cuts deeply into the darkness. There may be a seventh
+sense, a new dimension, intimations of which are setting advanced
+thinkers on fresh trails. But there is as yet no tangible proof.
+Philosophers, who, like some singers, bray their brainless
+convictions to a gaping auditory, ask of us much more credence, and
+little or no imagination. As that "old mole," working in the ground,
+gravitation, is defied by aeroplanes, then we should not despair of
+any hypothesis which permits us a peep through the partly opened
+door. Plato's cavern and the shadows. Who knows but in this universe
+there may be a crevice through which filters the light of another
+life? Emerson, who shed systems yet never organised one, hints at
+aerial perspectives. A flight through the sky with the sun bathing
+in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid finite world. In such
+perilous altitudes I have enjoyed this experience and felt a
+liberation of the spirit which has no parallel; not even when
+listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin. Music, indeed, is the
+nearest approach to psychic freedom.
+
+Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Goethe's expression "frozen music,"
+applied to Gothic architecture. (Stendhal appropriated this phrase.)
+For us the flying buttress is aspiring, and the pointed arch is a
+fugue. Our author is rich in his analogies, and like Sir Thomas
+Browne sees "quincunxes" in everything; his particular "quincunx"
+being Higher Space. The precise patterns in our brain, like those of
+the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us to perceive and build the
+universe (otherwise called innate ideas) are geometrical. Space is
+the first and final illusion. Time--which is not "a stuff both
+resistant and substantial," as Henri Bergson declares--is perhaps
+the Fourth Dimension in the guise of a sequence of states, and not
+grasped simultaneously, as is the idea of Space. That Time can
+shrink and expand, opium-eaters, who are not always totally drugged
+by their dreams, assure us. A second becomes an æon. And space
+curvature? Is it any wonder that "Lewis Carroll," who wrote those
+extraordinary parables for little folk, Through the Looking-Glass
+and Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A topsy-turvy world;
+it is even upside down as an optical image. The other side of good
+and evil may be around the corner. Eternity can lurk in a molecule
+too tiny to harbour Queen Mab. And we may all live to see the back
+of our own heads without peering in mirrors. That "astral trunk"
+once so fervently believed in may prove a reality; it is situated
+behind the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the planet Saturn,
+and by its aid we should be enabled to converse with spirits! The
+pineal gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence us in at
+every step. We fill our belly with the east wind of vain desires. We
+eat the air promise-crammed. This world is but a point in the
+universe, and our universe only one of an infinite series. There was
+no beginning, there is no end. Eternity is now; though death and the
+tax-gatherer never cease their importunings.
+
+All this Mr. Bragdon does not say, though he leans heavily on the
+arcana of the ancient wisdom. The truth is that the majority of
+humans are mentally considered vegetables, living in two dimensions.
+To keep us responsive to spiritual issues, as people were awaked in
+Swift's Laputa by flappers, is the service performed by such
+transcendentalists as C. Howard Hinton, author of The Fourth
+Dimension; Claude Bragdon and Cora Lenore Williams. Their thought is
+not new; it was hoary with age when the Greeks went to old Egypt for
+fresh learning; Noah conversed with his wives in the same
+terminology. But its application is novel, as are the personal
+nuances. The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may be likened to
+a fresh lens in the telescope or microscope of speculation. For the
+present writer the hypothesis is just one more incursion into the
+fairyland of metaphysics. Without fairies the heart grows old and
+dusty.
+
+The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating shapes. As for the
+paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an
+eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush,
+and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired pawnbroker. The
+Eternal Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse for life is
+its brevity. Why, then, do we yearn for that unending corridor
+through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed
+by the burden of our chimera--our ego? I confess that I prefer to
+watch on the edge of some vast promontory the swift approach of
+a dark sun rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar
+spaces to the celestial assignation made at the beginning of Time
+for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the
+populous path of the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding
+with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that apocalyptic
+flare-up--surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing
+in greasy bliss--Higher Space may be manifested and Time and
+Tri-Dimensional Space be no more. The rest is silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+O. W.
+
+
+It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a
+martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a
+label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar
+Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway
+Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in
+the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with
+his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less
+insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss
+to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class
+morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If
+he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the
+clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people
+who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in
+reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory
+of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he
+tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an
+unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but
+the note of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was
+the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more
+welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far
+more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender
+volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of
+the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and
+facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana--or
+Oscariana--which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early
+portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a
+boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He
+was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers
+think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy,"
+his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and
+"horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as
+was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he
+gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other
+hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know
+him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and
+if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and
+spongers, his end might have been different.
+
+I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was
+Barbey d'Aurévilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably
+modelled--lace cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations.
+But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every
+twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out
+in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the
+man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when
+he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care
+so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne--(in the wholly
+admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to
+O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a
+harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as
+tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his
+Jumbos")--Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter
+Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion
+element, is poor Huysmans's--just look into that masterpiece, A
+Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salomé
+is Flaubert in operetta form--his gorgeous Herodias watered down for
+uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece--which
+limps dramatically--would never have been seriously considered if
+not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted
+essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, _i. e._,
+it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical
+anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in any particular. His
+Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The
+fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an
+excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in
+Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the
+hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as
+fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error,
+yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer
+them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very
+gay fancy.
+
+He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed à la Byron and Baudelaire;
+but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid
+or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old
+wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever
+inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book
+gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind
+prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and
+very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more
+witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing
+Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own
+anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing
+an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and
+amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a
+plagiarist from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter
+and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too
+seriously--I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde
+was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't
+knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the
+tragic dénouement that has been thrashed to death by those who
+know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he
+called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw
+Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave
+attitude--always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to
+leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though
+neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry
+conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in
+cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a
+second Jesus Christ--which latter statement stuns one. (The
+Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not
+unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as
+quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after
+dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts
+below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me,
+he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne,
+Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readers
+would only take the trouble to study the originals there might be
+less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any
+disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man.
+Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called æsthetic
+movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically
+perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true;
+but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and
+playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the
+"Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly
+individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not--nothing but his
+astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS
+
+
+Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it
+has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed
+success, though the æsthetic principle at the base of his theory is
+eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and
+the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very
+titles are significant--a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is
+the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his
+scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye;
+truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino
+had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young
+man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet
+from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other
+ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at
+Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to
+Japan--only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent
+of armpits--of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New
+York audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese
+crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Théâtre d'art, Paris,
+and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made
+with all the arts--except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary
+Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music,
+lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the
+stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple.
+The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and
+greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly
+on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet,
+Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in
+all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black;
+E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in
+his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch
+the ears of credulous ones. René de Ghil invented an entirely new
+system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet.
+I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that
+music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands
+of an anarch composer like Illowski--or Richard Strauss. And now New
+York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine.
+It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave
+conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while his
+brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed
+down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a
+wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the
+truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not
+optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since
+I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his étude in D sharp minor.
+Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it.
+I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did
+not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either
+Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its
+composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate
+twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled
+Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious
+premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus,
+the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his
+electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often
+undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously
+practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of
+cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; principally,
+Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if
+not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his Light
+Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. In
+Paris the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows
+with perfume symphonies.
+
+A quarter of a century ago I visited the Théâtre d'art, in Paris;
+that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed
+theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't
+enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the
+nombril button, took my Rig-Veda--a sacred buggy--projected my
+astral being, and sailed through space to the French capital, there
+to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts,
+eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were
+deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was
+maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my
+arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of
+violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The
+dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid
+counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a mélange that appealed
+to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that
+the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge,
+yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the
+duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly
+cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little
+rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried (astrally, of
+course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by
+Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic."
+
+The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into
+little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor,
+scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo,
+sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this
+chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was
+one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it
+was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that
+made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The
+bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the
+hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion)
+smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the
+lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of
+jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours
+seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips
+glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and
+received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin,
+though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of
+my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I
+touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might
+hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. So
+evidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again
+inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously
+raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort
+of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed
+my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was
+the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your
+pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one
+can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to
+make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed.
+
+Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a
+shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the
+orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The
+steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the
+trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing
+something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to
+Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the
+music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of
+art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the
+ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away,
+but, full of gumbo soup as I was--and you have no idea how soup
+discommodes the astral stomach--I was anchored to my seat, and
+bravely determined not to leave till I had some clew to the riddle
+of the new evangel of the seven--or seventeen--arts. The stage
+remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their
+hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my
+tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish,
+dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and,
+turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely
+asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play,
+piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony,
+cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I
+had appealed looked fearfully about him--I had foolishly forgotten
+that I was invisible in my astral shape--then clutched at his
+windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still
+another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly
+vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too
+absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a
+slow, putrid silence.
+
+Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat
+down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of
+actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the
+orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E
+flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets.
+Suddenly the lights went out, and we were plunged into a blackness
+that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A
+smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we
+were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were
+tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glacé, and orchids, and
+the soup supply shifted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these
+contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced.
+Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall
+old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandishing
+aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the
+Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland,
+was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the
+slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly
+the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer
+brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives,
+and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help
+wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My
+cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing
+young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge
+carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must
+have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the
+Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetrated the air, the
+electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to
+the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these
+composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an
+odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse,
+making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing
+the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock,
+with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and
+burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the
+orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs,
+and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac
+steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di
+bassetto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and
+coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical
+banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve
+was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention!
+When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell
+simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis
+of the arts? Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not too much
+time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward,
+wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and
+nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I landed at the Battery it
+was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun
+was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky.
+New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old
+hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my
+cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of
+ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers
+and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE CLASSIC CHOPIN
+
+
+That Chopin is a classic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is
+classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature;
+but that he is of a classical complexion as a composer from the
+beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox.
+Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained
+now, since old party lines have been effaced. To battle seriously
+for such words as Classic or Romantic or Realism is no longer
+possible. Cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once
+wrangled over doctrinal points; as if the salvation of mankind
+depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation
+or consubstantiation. Only yesterday that ugly word "degeneracy,"
+thanks to quack critics and charlatan "psychiatrists," figured as
+a means of estimating genius. This method has quite vanished
+among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another
+misunderstood vocable--decadence. Wagner is called decadent. So is
+Chopin. While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of
+musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis:
+
+"Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a
+classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic
+style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian
+phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful
+because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is
+beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.... Swift's
+prose is classic, Pater's decadent.... Roman architecture is
+classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely
+decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in
+art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest
+degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the
+bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic ... is
+decadent.... All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a
+rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes."
+
+I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth a profound but not
+widely appreciated fact. In art, as in life, there is no absolute.
+Perhaps the most illuminating statement concerning the romantic
+style was uttered by Théophile Gautier. Of it he wrote (in his essay
+on Baudelaire): "Unlike the classic style it admits shadow." We need
+not bother ourselves about the spirit of romanticism; that has been
+done to the death by hundreds of critics. And it is a sign of the
+times that the old-fashioned Chopin is fading, while we are now
+vitally interested in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopin the
+romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous, morbid, and Chopin
+the pianist, need not enter into our present scheme. He has appeared
+to popular fancy as everything from Thaddeus of Warsaw to an exotic
+drawing-room hero; from the sentimental consumptive consoled by
+countesses to the accredited slave of George Sand. All this is truly
+the romantic Chopin. It is the obverse of the medal that piques
+curiosity. Why the classic quality of his compositions, their
+clarity, concision, purity, structural balance, were largely missed
+by so many of his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of his
+obviously romantic melodies he was definitely ranged with the most
+extravagant of the romantics, with Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt; but, as
+a matter of fact, he is formally closer to Mendelssohn. His original
+manner of distributing his thematic material deceived the critics.
+He refused to join the revolutionists; later in the case of Flaubert
+we come upon an analogous condition. Hailed as chief of the
+realists, the author of Madame Bovary took an ironic delight in
+publishing Salammbô, which was romantic enough to please that prince
+of romanticists, Victor Hugo. Chopin has been reproached for his
+tepid attitude toward romanticism, and also because of his rather
+caustic criticisms of certain leaders. He, a musical aristocrat _pur
+sang_, held aloof, though he permitted himself to make some sharp
+commentaries on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz. Decidedly not a
+romantic despite his romantic externalism. Decidedly a classic
+despite his romantic "content." Of him Stendhal might have written:
+a classic is a dead romantic. (Heine left no epic, yet he is an
+indubitable classic.) Wise Goethe said: "The point is for a work to
+be thoroughly good and then it is sure to be classical."
+
+But it is not because of the classicism achieved by the pathos of
+distance that Chopin's special case makes an appeal. It is Chopin as
+a consummate master of music that interests us. In his admirable
+Chopin the Composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley considers Chopin and puts
+out of court the familiar "gifted amateur," "improvisatore of
+genius," and the rest of the theatrical stock description by proving
+beyond peradventure of a doubt that Frédéric François Chopin was not
+only a creator of new harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but
+also a musician skilled in the handling of formal problems, one
+grounded in the schools of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; furthermore,
+that if he did not employ the sonata form in its severest sense, he
+literally built on it as a foundation. He managed the rondo with
+ease and grace, and if he did not write fugues it was because the
+fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps the divination of his own
+limitations is a further manifestation of his extraordinary genius.
+This does not imply that Chopin had any particular genius in
+counterpoint, but to deny his mastery of polyphony is a grave
+error. And it is still denied with the very evidence staring his
+critics in the face. Beethoven in his sonatas demonstrated his
+individuality, though coming after Mozart's perfect specimens in
+that form. Chopin did not try to bend the bow of Ulysses, though
+more than a word might be said of his two last Sonatas--the first is
+boyishly pedantic, and monotonous in key-contrast, while the 'cello
+and piano sonata hardly can be ranked as an exemplar of classic
+form.
+
+Of the Etudes Kelley says:
+
+"In this group of masterpieces we find the more desirable features
+of the classical school--diatonic melodies, well-balanced phrase and
+period-building--together with the richness afforded by chromatic
+harmonies and modulatory devices heretofore unknown."
+
+Indeed, a new system of music that changed the entire current of the
+art. It was not without cause that I once called Chopin the "open
+door"; through his door the East entered and whether for good or for
+ill certainly revolutionised Western music. Mr. Hadow is right in
+declaring that "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not as far from
+each other as the music of 1880 from that of 1914." And Chopin was
+the most potent influence, in company with Beethoven and Wagner, in
+bringing about that change. I say in company with Beethoven and
+Wagner, for I heartily agree with Frederick Niecks in his recent
+judgment:
+
+"I consider Chopin to be one of the three most powerful factors in
+the development of nineteenth-century music, the other two being, of
+course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute originality of Chopin's
+personality, and that of its expression through novel harmony,
+chromaticism, figuration justifies the assertion. And none will deny
+the fact who takes the trouble to trace the Polish master's
+influence on his contemporaries and successors. The greatest and
+most powerful composers came under this influence, to a large
+extent, by the process of infiltration."
+
+Kelley gives us chapter and verse in the particular case of Wagner
+and his absorption of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the
+late Anton Seidl many times for my particular benefit.
+
+However, this only brings us to Chopin the innovator, whereas it is
+the aspect of the classic Chopin which has been neglected. "As far
+back as 1840 Chopin was employing half-tones with a freedom that
+brought upon him the wrath of conservative critics," writes Hadow,
+who admires the Pole with reservations, not placing him in such
+august company as has Kelley and Niecks. True, Chopin was a pioneer
+in several departments of his art, yet how few recognised or
+recognise to-day that Schumann is the more romantic composer of the
+pair; his music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness; his
+Carneval the epitome of romantic musical portraiture--with its
+"Chopin" more Chopin than the original. Contrast the noble Fantasy
+in C, Opus 17 of Schumann, with the equally noble Fantasy in F
+minor, Opus 49 of Chopin, and ask which is the more romantic in
+spirit, structure, and technique. Unquestionably to Schumann would
+be awarded the quality of romanticism. He is more fantastic, though
+his fantasy is less decorative; he strays into the most delightful
+and umbrageous paths and never falters in the preservation of
+romantic atmosphere. Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin,
+who, no matter his potentialities, never experimented in the larger
+symphonic mould, and as fully imbued with the poetic spirit as
+Schumann; nevertheless a master of his patterns, whether in
+figuration or general structure. His Mazourkas are sonnets, and this
+Fantasy in F minor is, as Kelley points out, a highly complex rondo;
+as are the Ballades and Scherzos. Beethoven, doubtless, would have
+developed the eloquent main theme more significantly; strictly
+speaking, Chopin introduces so much new melodic material that the
+rondo form is greatly modified, yet never quite banished. The
+architectonics of the composition are more magnificent than in
+Schumann, although I do not propose to make invidious comparisons.
+Both works are classics in the accepted sense of the term. But
+Chopin's Fantasy is more classic in structure and sentiment.
+
+The Sonatas in B flat minor and B minor are "awful examples" for
+academic theorists. They are not faultless as to form and do sadly
+lack organic unity. Schumann particularly criticises the Sonata Opus
+35 because of the inclusion of the Funeral March and the homophonic,
+"invertebrate" finale. But the two first movements are distinct
+contributions to Sonata literature, even if in the first movement
+the opening theme is not recapitulated. I confess that I am glad it
+is not, though the solemn title "Sonata" becomes thereby a mockery.
+The composer adequately treats this first motive in the development
+section so that its absence later is not annoyingly felt. There are,
+I agree with Mr. Kelley, some bars that are surprisingly like a
+certain page of Die Götterdämmerung, as the Feuerzauber music may be
+noted in the flickering chromaticism of the E minor Concerto; or as
+the first phrase of the C minor Etude, Opus 10, No. 12, is to be
+found in Tristan and Isolde--Isolde's opening measure, "Wer wagt
+mich zu höhnen." (The orchestra plays the identical Chopin phrase.)
+This first movement of the B flat minor Sonata--with four bars of
+introduction, evidently suggested by the sublime opening of
+Beethoven's C minor Sonata, Opus 111, does not furnish us with as
+concrete an example as the succeeding Scherzo in E flat minor, (for
+me) one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's exquisite formal
+sense. While it is not as long-breathed as the C sharp minor
+Scherzo, its concision makes it more tempting to the student. In
+character stormier than the Scherzo, Opus 39, its thematic economy
+and development--by close parallelism of phraseology, as Hadow
+points out--reveal not only a powerful creative impulse, but
+erudition of the highest order. No doubt Chopin did improvise
+freely, did come easily by his melodies, but the travail of a giant
+in patience--again you think of Flaubert--is shown in the polishing
+of his periods. He is a poet who wrote perfect pages.
+
+The third Scherzo, less popular but of deeper import than the one
+in B flat minor, is in spirit splenetic, ironical, and passionate,
+yet with what antithetic precision and balance the various and
+antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed. And every measure
+is logically accounted for. The automatism inherent in all passage
+work he almost eliminated, and he spiritualised ornament and
+arabesque. It is the triumph of art over temperament. No one has
+ever accused Chopin of lacking warmth; indeed, thanks to a total
+misconception of his music, he is tortured into a roaring tornado by
+sentimentalists and virtuosi. But if he is carefully studied it will
+be seen that he is greatly preoccupied with form--his own form, be
+it understood--and that the linear in nearly all of his compositions
+takes precedence over colour. I know this sounds heretical. But
+while I do not yield an iota in my belief that Chopin is the most
+poetic among composers (as Shelley is among poets, and Vermeer is
+the painter's painter) it is high time that he be viewed from a
+different angle. The versatility of the man, his genius as composer
+and pianist, the novelty of his figuration and form dazzled his
+contemporaries or else blinded them to his true import. Individual
+as are the six Scherzos--two of them are in the Sonatas--they
+nevertheless stem from classic soil; the scherzo is not new with
+him, nor are its rhythms. But the Ballades are Chopinesque to the
+last degree, with their embellished thematic cadenzas, modulatory
+motives, richly decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable
+"content"; above all, in their amplification of the coda, a striking
+extension of the postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning as the
+main themes. The lordly flowing narration of the G minor Ballade;
+the fantastic wavering outlines of the second Ballade--which on
+close examination exhibits the firm burin of a masterful etcher; the
+beloved third Ballade, a formal masterpiece; and the F minor
+Ballade, most elaborate and decorative of the set--are there, I ask,
+in all piano literature such original compositions? The four
+Impromptus are mood pictures, highly finished, not lacking boldness
+of design, and in the second, F sharp major, there are fertile
+figurative devices and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic
+organ-point is original. Polyphonic complexity is to be found in
+some of the Mazourkas. Ehlert mentions a "perfect canon in the
+octave" in one of them (C sharp minor, Opus 63).
+
+Of the Concertos there is less to be said, for the conventional form
+was imposed by the title. Here Chopin is not the Greater Chopin,
+notwithstanding the beautiful music for the solo instrument. The
+sonata form is not desperately evaded, and in the rondo of the E
+minor Concerto he overtops Hummel on his native heath. As to the
+instrumentation I do not believe Chopin had much to do with it; it
+is the average colourless scoring of his day. Nor do I believe with
+some of his admirers that he will bear transposition to the
+orchestra, or even to the violin. It does not attenuate the power
+and originality of his themes that they are essentially of the
+piano. A song is for the voice and is not bettered by orchestral
+arrangement. The same may be said of the classic concertos for
+violin. With all due respect for those who talk about the Beethoven
+Sonatas being "orchestral," I only ask, Why is it they sound so
+"unorchestral" when scored for the full battery of instruments? The
+Sonata Pathétique loses its character thus treated. So does the A
+flat Polonaise of Chopin, heroic as are its themes. Render unto the
+keyboard that which is composed for it. The Appassionata Sonata in
+its proper medium is as thrilling as the Eroica Symphony. The
+so-called "orchestral test" is no test at all; only a confusion of
+terms and of artistic substances. Chopin thought for the piano; he
+is the greatest composer for the piano; by the piano he stands or
+falls. The theme of the grandiose A minor Etude (Opus 25, No. 11) is
+a perfect specimen of his invention; yet it sounds elegiac and
+feminine when compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's C
+minor Symphony.
+
+The Allegro de Concert, Opus 46, is not his most distinguished work,
+truncated concerto as it is, but it proves that he could fill a
+larger canvas than the Valse. In the Mazourkas and Etudes he is
+closer to Bach than elsewhere. His early training under Elsner was
+sound and classical. But he is the real Chopin when he goes his own
+way, a fiery poet, a bold musician, but also a refined, tactful
+temperament, despising the facile, the exaggerated, and bent upon
+achieving a harmonious synthesis. Truly a classic composer in his
+solicitude for contour, and chastity of style. The Slav was tempered
+by the Gallic strain. Insatiable in his dreams, he fashioned them
+into shapes of enduring beauty.
+
+You would take from us the old Chopin, the greater Chopin, the
+dramatic, impassioned poet-improvisatore, I hear some cry! Not in
+the least. Chopin is Chopin. He sings, even under the fingers of
+pedants, and to-day is butchered in the classroom to make a holiday
+for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique. Sometimes the whole
+in his work is subordinated to the parts, sometimes the parts are
+subordinated to the whole. The romantic "shadow" is there, also the
+classic structure. Again let me call your attention to the fact that
+if he had not juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanct tonic and
+dominant, had not distributed his thematic material in a different
+manner from the prescribed methods of the schools, he would have
+been cheerfully, even enthusiastically, saluted by his generation.
+But, then, we should have lost the real Chopin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+LITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITY
+
+
+BARNEY IN THE BOX-OFFICE
+
+_First Scene._ It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is
+in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the
+Savoy (remember this is a play, and the unusual is bound to happen).
+In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science, two
+figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted façade. The
+doors are wide open, a thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking
+to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are as sandy as his wit.
+The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one
+clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his
+face. They are the two Maxes--Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:
+
+"Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?" "By jove, it is, let's
+go in." "Hasn't he a new play on?" "I can't say. I'm only a critic
+of the drayma." "No cynicism, Maxixe," urges Nordau. They approach.
+In unanimous flakes the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard
+on recognising them:
+
+"Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended. I'm giving my
+annual feast in the Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one
+scene. No one may enter, least of all you, Nordau, or you, Sir
+Critic." "Why, what's up, George?" asks in a pleading mid-Victorian
+timbre the little Maxixe. "Back to the woods, both of you!" commands
+George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. "Besides,"
+he confidentially adds, "you surely don't wish to go to a play in
+which your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view." "On
+view!" quoth the author of Degeneration. "Yes, visible on a short
+furlough from Sheol, for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies
+and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest show on earth. I'm in
+it. Lively, please!" A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the
+snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. "I'm no
+Maxixe," he murmurs, "if I can't get into a theatre without paying."
+Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only
+the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.
+
+_Second Scene._ On the stage of the theatre there are two long
+tables. The scene is set as if for a banquet. The curtain is down.
+Some men walk about conversing--some calmly, some feverishly.
+Several are sitting. The lighting is feeble. However, may be
+discerned familiar figures; Victor Hugo solemnly speaking to Charles
+Baudelaire--who shivers (un nouveau frisson); Flaubert in a corner
+roaring at Sainte-Beuve--the old row over Salammbô is on again.
+Richard Strauss is pulling at the velvet coat-tails of Richard
+Wagner, without attracting his attention. The Master, in company
+with nearly all the others, is staring at a large clock against the
+back drop. "Listen for the Parsifal chimes," he says, delight
+playing over his rugged features. "Ape of the ideal," booms a deep
+voice hard by. It is that of Nietzsche, whose moustaches droop in
+Polish cavalier style.
+
+"Batiushka! If those two Dutchmen quarrel over the virility of
+Parsifal I'm going away." The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his
+newest Moujik costume, top-boots and all. In his left hand he holds
+a spade. "To table, gentlemen!" It is the jolly voice of the Irish
+Ibsen, G. B. S. Lights flare up. Without is heard the brumming of
+the audience, an orchestra softly plays motives from Pelléas et
+Mélisande. Wagner wipes his spectacles, and Maurice Maeterlinck
+crushes a block of Belgian oaths between his powerful teeth. But
+Debussy doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly strikes
+his soup-spoon on a silver salt-cellar and immediately jots down
+musical notation. "The correspondences of nuances," he sings to his
+neighbour, who happens to be Whistler. "The correspondence of
+fudge," retorts James. "D'ye think I'm interested in wall-paper
+music? Oh, Lil'libulero!" All are now seated. With his accustomed
+lingual dexterity Mr. Shaw says grace, calling down a blessing upon
+the papier-mâché fowls and the pink stage-tea, from what he
+describes as a gaseous invertebrate god--he has read Haeckel--and
+winds up with a few brilliant heartless remarks:
+
+"I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods, and demigods, alive or
+dead, to remember that you are assembled here this evening to honour
+me. Without me, and my books and plays, you would, all of you, be
+dead in earnest--dead literature as well as dead bones. As for the
+living, I'll have a shy at you some day. I'm not fond of
+Maeterlinck. ["Hear, hear!" comes from Debussy's mystic beard.] As
+for you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at bettering
+Shakespeare, and, for Richard Strauss--well, I've never tried
+orchestration, but I'm sure I'd succeed as well as you----"
+
+"Oh, please, won't some one give me a roast-beef sandwich? In Russia
+I daren't eat meat on account of my disciples there and in
+England--" It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes him with an
+indignant look, he, the prince of vegetarians: "Give him some salt,
+he needs salting." In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading of the
+confessions of Huysmans. The band, on the other side of the curtain,
+swings into the Kaisermarch. "Stop them! Stop it!" screams Wagner.
+"I'm a Social-Democrat now. I wrote that march when I was a
+Monarchist." This was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up his
+tall, lanky figure, he began: "You mean, Herr Geyer--to give you
+your real name--you wrote it for money. You mean, Richard Geyer,
+that you cut your musical coat to suit your snobbish cloth. You
+mean, the Wagner you never were, that you wrote your various
+operas--which you call music-dramas--to flatter your various
+patrons. Parsifal for the decadent King Ludwig----"
+
+"Pardieu! this is too much." Manet's blond beard wagged with rage.
+"Have we assembled this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or
+are we met to do honour to the only man in England, and an Irishman
+at that, who, in his plays, has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen,
+Nietzsche, Wagner? As for me, I don't need such booming. I'm a
+modest man. I'm a painter." "Hein! You a painter!" Sitting alone,
+Gérôme discloses spiteful intonations in his voice. "Yes, a
+painter," hotly replies Manet. "And I'm in the Louvre, my Olympe--"
+"All the worse for the Louvre," sneers Gérôme. The two men would
+have been at each other's throats if some one from the Land of the
+Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened. It was Henrik Ibsen.
+
+"Children," he remarks, in a strong Norwegian brogue, "please to
+remember my dignity if not your own. Long before Max Stirner--"
+Nietzsche interrupted: "There never was such a person." Ibsen calmly
+continued, "I wrote that 'my truth is the truth.' And when I see
+such so-called great men acting like children, I regret having left
+my cool tomb in Norway. But where are the English dramatists, our
+confrères? Ask the master of the revels." Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops
+in his head at a practicable door.
+
+"Who calls?"
+
+"We wish to know why our brethren, the English playwrights, are not
+bidden to meet us?" said Maeterlinck, after gravely bowing to Ibsen.
+Smiling beatifically, Saint Bernard replied:
+
+"Because there ain't no such thing as an English dramatist. The only
+English dramatist is Irish." He disappears. Ensues a lively
+argument. "He may be right," exclaims Maeterlinck, "yet I seem to
+have heard of Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Barrie--well, I'll have to
+ask the trusty A. B. C. Z. Walkley." "And the Americans?" cries
+Ibsen, who is annoyed because Richard Strauss persists in asking for
+a symphonic scenario of Peer Gynt. "I'm sure," the composer
+complains, "Grieg will be forgotten if I write new incidental music
+for you." Ibsen looks at him sourly.
+
+"American dramatists, or do you mean American millionaires?" Manet
+interpolated. "No, I fancy he means the American painters who
+imitate my pictures, making them better than the originals, and also
+getting better prices than I did."
+
+"What envy! what slandering! what envious feelings!" sighs
+Nietzsche. "If my doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things
+sublunary is a reality, then I shall be sitting with these venomous
+spiders, shall be in this identical spot a trillion of years hence.
+Oh, horrors! Why was I born?"
+
+"Divided tones," argues Manet, clutching Whistler by his carmilion
+necktie, "are the only--" Suddenly Shaw leaps on the stage.
+
+"Gentlemen, gods, ghosts, idols, I've bad news for you. Max Nordau
+is in the audience." "Nordau!" wails every one. Before the lights
+could be extinguished the guests were under the table. "No taking
+chances," whispers Nietzsche. "Quoi donc! who is this Nordau--a spy
+of Napoleon's?" demands Hugo, in bewildered accents. For answer,
+Baudelaire shivers and intones: "O Poe, Poe! O Edgar Poe." Silence
+so profound that one hears the perspiration drop from Wagner's
+massive brow.
+
+_Third Scene._ It still snows without. Max, the only Nordau, stands
+in silent pride. He is alone. The erstwhile illuminated theatre is
+as dark as the Hall of Eblis. "Gone the idols! All. I need but crack
+that old whip of Decadence and they crumble. So much for a mere
+word. And now to work. I'll write the unique tale of Shaw's Cave of
+Idols, for I alone witnessed the dénouement." He spoke aloud. Judge
+his chagrin when he heard the other Max give him this cheery leading
+motive: "I saw it all--what a story for my weekly review." "How
+like a yellow pear-tree!" exclaims the disgusted theorist of mad
+genius. Nordau speeds his way, as from the box-office comes the
+chink of silver. It is G. B. S. counting the cash. Who says a poet
+can't be a pragmatist? The little Maxixe calls out: "Me, too,
+Blarney! Remember I'm the only living replica of Charles Lamb." "You
+mean dead mutton," tartly replied Bernard. The other giggled. "The
+same dear old whimsical cactus," he cries; "but with all your faults
+we love you still--I said still, if that's possible for your tongue,
+George, quite still!" Curtain.
+
+
+THE WOMAN WHO BUYS
+
+She (entering art gallery): "I wish to buy a Titian for my
+bridge-whist this evening. Is it possible for you to send me one to
+the hotel in time?" He (nervously elated): "Impossible. I sent the
+last Titian we had in stock to Mrs. Groats's Déjeuner Féroce." She
+(making a face): "That woman again. Oh, dear, how tiresome!" He
+(eagerly): "But I can give you a Raphael." She (dubiously):
+"Raphael--who?" He (magisterially): "There are three Raphaels,
+Madame--the archangel of that name, Raphael Sanzio, the painter, and
+Raphael Joseffy. It is to the second one I allude. Perhaps you would
+like to see--" She (hurriedly): "Oh! not at all. I fancy it's all
+right. Send it up this afternoon, or hadn't I better take it along
+in my car?" (A shrill hurry-up booing is heard without. It is the
+voice of the siren on a new one hundred horse-power Cubist machine,
+1918 pattern.) She (guiltily): "Tiens! That is my chauffeur,
+Constant. The poor fellow. He is always so hungry about this time.
+By the way, Mr. Frame, how much do you ask for that Raphael? My
+husband is so--yes, really, stingy this winter. He says I buy too
+much, forgetting we are all beggars, anyhow. And what is the
+subject? I want something cheerful for the game, you know. It
+consoles the kickers who lose to look at a pretty picture." He
+(joyfully): "Oh, the price! The subject! A half-million is the
+price--surely not too much. The picture is called The Wooing of Eve.
+It has been engraved by Bartolozzi. Oh, oh, it is a genuine Raphael.
+There are no more imitation old masters, only modern art is forged
+nowadays." She (interrupting, proudly): "Bartolozzi, the man who
+paints skinny women in Florence, something like Boldini, only in
+old-fashioned costumes?" He (resignedly): "No, Madame. Possibly you
+allude to Botticelli. The Bartolozzi I mention was a school friend
+of Raphael or a cousin to Michael Angelo--I've forgotten which.
+That's why he engraved Raphael's paintings." (He colours as he
+recalls conflicting dates.) She (in a hurry): "It doesn't much
+matter, Mr. Frame, I hate all this affectation over a lot of musty,
+fusty pictures. Send it up with the bill. I ought to win at least
+half the money from Mrs. Stonerich." (She rushes away. An odour of
+violets and stale cigarette smoke floats through the hallway. The
+siren screams, and a rumbling is heard in the middle distance.) He
+(waking, as if from a sweet dream, vigorously shouts): "George,
+George, fetch down that canvas Schmiere painted for us last summer,
+and stencil it Raphael Sanzio. Yes--S-a-n-z-i-o--got it? Hurry up!
+I'm off for the day. If any one 'phones, I'm over at Sherry's, in
+the Cafe." (Saunters out, swinging his stick, and repeating the old
+Russian proverb, "A dark forest is the heart of a woman.")
+
+
+SCHOOLS IN ART
+
+"Yes," said the venerable auctioneer, as he shook his white head,
+"yes, I watch them coming and going, coming and going. One year it's
+light pictures, another it's dark. The public is a woman. What
+fashion dictates to a woman she scrupulously follows. She sports
+bonnets one decade, big picture hats the next. So, the public that
+loves art--or thinks it loves art. It used to be the Hudson River
+school. And then Chase and those landscape fellows came over from
+Europe, where they got a lot of new-fangled notions. Do you remember
+Eastman Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you remember the
+Fortuny craze? His Gamblers, some figures sitting on the grass?
+Well, sir, seventeen thousand dollars that canvas fetched. Big price
+for forty-odd years ago. Bang up? Of course. Meissonier, Bouguereau,
+and Detaille came in. We couldn't sell them fast enough. I guess the
+picture counterfeiters' factories up on Montmartre were kept busy
+those times. It was after our Civil War. There were a lot of
+mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a chromo from a Gérôme.
+Those were the chaps we liked. I often began with: 'Ten thousand
+dollars--who offers me ten thousand dollars for this magnificent
+Munkaczy?' Nowadays I couldn't give away Munkaczy as a present. He
+is too black. Our people ask for flashing colours. Rainbows.
+Fireworks. The new school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon
+men have had their day. Mind you, I don't claim they are falling
+off. A few seasons ago a Troyon held its own against any Manet you
+put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer in the market, and the
+picture cranks are beginning to tire of the dull greys, soft blues,
+and sober skies. The Barbizons drove out Meissonier and his crowd.
+Then Monet and the Impressionists sent the Barbizons to the wall. I
+tell you the public is a woman. It craves novelty. What's that?
+Interested in the greater truth of Post-Impressionism? Excuse me, my
+dear sir, but that's pure rot. The public doesn't give a hang for
+technique. It wants a change. Indeed? Really? They have made a
+success, those young whippersnappers, the Cubists. Such cubs! Well,
+I'm not surprised. Perhaps our public is tiring of the Academy.
+Perhaps young American painters may get their dues--some day. We may
+even export them. I've been an art auctioneer man and boy over fifty
+years, and I tell you again the public is a woman. One year it's
+dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or hats. Silks or satins.
+Lean or stout. All right. Coming--coming!" Clearing his throat, the
+old auctioneer slowly moves away.
+
+
+THE JOY OF STARING
+
+Watch the mob. Watch it staring. Like cattle behind the rails which
+bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its
+equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece, only
+to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a
+thrice-stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is
+the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the People.
+Our brethren! Mighty idea--but a stale one before Noah entered the
+ark. "Let us go to the people," cried Tolstoy. But we are the
+people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the
+people surge before a picture which represents an old woman kissing
+her cow. Or, standing with eyeballs agog, they count the metal
+buttons on the coat of the Meissonier Cuirassier. It is great art.
+Let the public be educated. Down with the new realism--which only
+recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence.
+(Are we not all middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic?
+Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph--pictures that act.
+Squeaking records. Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness of
+Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical machines. Or chromos.
+Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your "step," watch the
+mob.
+
+
+A DILETTANTE
+
+He is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze over the pupils of
+his eyes. He is never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet,
+when he enters a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step in his
+direction; then they get to cover as speedily as possible,
+grumbling: "Look out! it's only the old bird again." But one of them
+is always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide. He thinks he
+knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross
+and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them.
+He is the embittered dilettante; embittered, because with his
+moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant
+of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month
+in the year. So he rails at the dealers, inveighs against the
+artists, and haunts auction-rooms. He never bids, but is extremely
+solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to
+sit for hours on a small print, until, in despair, the owner leaves.
+Then, with infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving
+matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and
+prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a
+favoured few. He bought it. He selected it. It is a tribute to his
+exquisite taste. And the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence
+by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings and parrot
+ejaculations. Withal, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of
+art. He sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a Dürer; but he puts the
+blame upon his defective eyesight.
+
+
+THE CITY OF BROTHERLY NOISE
+
+Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk
+about any of the narrow streets of this cold-storage abode of
+Brotherly Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the
+venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of
+the abode of brotherly love. Over there the nerve shock is
+ultra-dynamic. As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then,
+will ask the puzzled student of national life, does the venerable
+witticism persist in living? The answer is that in the United
+States a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race
+of humourists. Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets that
+vibrate with the clangour of the loosely jointed machinery, an army
+of carts and the cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling
+people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the
+Schuylkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all
+these and a thousand other things place New York in a more modest
+category; in reality our own city emits few pipes in comparison with
+the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls over the map of
+Pennsylvania. Yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke
+flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is stunned by the
+welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first
+crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of "society" was
+forced to go northward to this Mahomet of operatic music; else
+forego Richard Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden, and Oscar's
+famous head-tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years
+Market Street had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians.
+Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue
+was Cimmerian darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company,
+accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say "Girard
+Avenue" or "Spring Garden" without blushing, because of their
+increased knowledge of municipal topography. Society trooped
+northward. Motor-cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar
+Street. Philadelphia boasts a much superior culture in the
+crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found
+there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom
+Street hangs his banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper
+soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder.
+
+The difference in the handling of the social "hammer" between
+Philadelphia and New York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be thus
+illustrated: At the clubs in Philadelphia they say: "Dabs is going
+fast. Pity he drinks. Did you see the seven cocktails he got away
+with before dinner last night?" In Boston they say: "Dabs is quite
+hopeless. This afternoon he mixed up Botticelli with Botticini. Of
+course, after that--!" Now, in New York, we usually dismiss the case
+in this fashion: "Dabs went smash this morning. The limit! Serves
+the idiot right. He never would take proper tips." Here are certain
+social characteristics of three cities set forth by kindly disposed
+clubmen. As the Chinese say: An image-maker never worships his
+idols. We prefer the Cambodian sage who remarked: "In hell, it's bad
+form to harp on the heat."
+
+
+THE SOCIALIST
+
+The socialist is not always sociable. Nor is there any reason why he
+should be. He usually brings into whatever company he frequents his
+little pailful of theories and dumps them willy-nilly on the carpet
+of conversation. He enacts the eternal farce of equality for all,
+justice for none. The mob, not the individual, is his shibboleth.
+Yet he is the first to resent any tap on his shoulder in the way of
+personal criticism. He has been in existence since the coral atoll
+was constructed by that tiny, busy, gregarious creature, and in the
+final cosmic flare-up he will vanish in company with his fellow man.
+He is nothing if not collective. His books, written in his own
+tongue, are translated into every living language except sound
+English, which is inimical to jargon. If his communal dreams could
+come true he would charge his neighbour with cheating above his
+position; being a reformer, the fire of envy brightly burns in his
+belly--a sinister conflagration akin to that of Ram Dass (see
+Carlyle). In the thick twilight of his reason he vaguely wanders,
+reading every new book about socialism till his confusion grows
+apace and is thrice confounded. From ignorance to arrogance is but a
+step. At the rich table of life, groaning with good things, he turns
+away, preferring to chew the dry cud of self-satisfaction. He would
+commit Barmecide rather than surrender his theory of the "unearned
+increment." He calls Shaw and Wells traitors because they see the
+humorous side of their doctrines and, occasionally, make mock of
+them. The varieties of lady socialists are too numerous to study.
+It may be said of them, without fear of being polite, that females
+rush in where fools fear to tread. But, then, the woman who
+hesitates--usually gets married.
+
+
+THE CRITIC WHO GOSSIPS
+
+He has a soul like a Persian rug. Many-coloured are his ways, his
+speech. He delights in alliteration of colours, and avails himself
+of it when he dips pen into ink. He is fond of confusing the
+technical terms of the Seven Arts, writing that "stuffing the
+ballot-box is no greater crime than constipated harmonics." But what
+he doesn't know is that such expressions as gamut of colours,
+scales, harmonies, tonal values belong to the art of painting, and
+not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote and gossip than of
+history. But what's the use! You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic
+will quote for you, with his gimlet eye of a specialist boring into
+your own, the story which was whispered to Anthony Trollope (in
+1857, please don't forget) if he would be so kind (it was at the
+Uffizi Galleries, Florence) as to show him the way to the Medical
+Venus. This is marvellous humour, and worth a ton of critical
+comment (which, by Apollo! it be). But, as Baudelaire puts it:
+"Nations, like families, produce great men against their will"; and
+our critic is "produced," not made. In the realm of the blind, the
+cock-eyed is king. The critic is said to be the most necessary
+nuisance--after women--in this "movie" world of ours. But all human
+beings are critics, aren't they?
+
+
+THE MOCK PSYCHIATRIST
+
+If for the dog the world is a smell, for the eagle a picture,
+for the politician a Nibelung hoard, then for the psychiatrist
+life is a huge, throbbing nerve. He dislikes, naturally, the
+antivivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection of his fellow
+creatures. It's a mad world for him, my masters! And if your ears
+taper at the top, beware! You have the morals of a faun; or, if your
+arms be lengthy, you are a reversion to a prehistoric type. The only
+things that are never too long, for our friend the "expert" of rare
+phobias, are his bills and the length of his notice in the
+newspapers. If he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and Eve in
+Milton's Paradise behave too much like married people, he quickly
+resents any tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception. He
+maintains that religious feeling is only "a mode of reaction," and
+our conscience but a readjusting apparatus. His trump-card is the
+abnormal case, and if he can catch tripping a musician, a poet, a
+painter, he is professionally happy. Homer nodded. Shakespeare
+plagiarised. Beethoven drank. Mozart liked his wife's sister. Chopin
+coughed. Turner was immoral. Wagner, a little how-come-ye-so!
+Hurray! Cracked souls, and a Donnybrook Fair of the emotions. The
+psychiatrist can diagnose anything from rum-thirst to sudden death.
+Nevertheless, in his endeavour to assume the outward appearance of a
+veritable man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one of the
+hermit-crab as described in E. H. Banfield's Confessions of a Beach
+Comber (p. 132). "The disinterested spectator," remarks Professor
+Banfield, "may smile at the vain, yet frantically anxious efforts of
+the hermit-crab to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a
+flattering misfit; but it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until
+he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic
+contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail in a No. 5
+shell abandoned." The mock psychiatrist is the hermit-crab of
+psychology. And of the living he has never been known to speak a
+word of praise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE
+
+
+I
+
+Dear naughty George Moore--sad, bad, mad--has reformed. He tells us
+why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky
+enough to read; for, the American edition is expurgated, nay,
+fumigated, as was the Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic
+Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail and Farewell, Ave and
+Salve being the titles of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is
+sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell,
+the poet and painter, better known as "Æ." in a more sympathetic
+fashion. When Vale was announced several years ago as on the brink
+of completion I was moved to write: "I suppose when the final book
+appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his
+soul, not to say, his shop. But I have my serious doubts." After
+reading Vale I still had them. Only death will end the streaming
+confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by
+the pen. (This latter sentence is not a quotation from the sacred
+books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave chained to the
+ink-well.)
+
+I said that Vale is expurgated for American consumption. Certainly.
+We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America--thanks to the
+mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters--that a hearty oath
+scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George
+calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank
+malodorous soil with his war-worn agricultural implement. When he
+returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the national
+literary and artistic movement, he found a devoted band of brethren:
+William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Synge,
+Edward Martyn, Russell, and others.
+
+I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the neo-Celtic awakening.
+Yeats was the prime instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally
+discovered Synge, the dramatist--in reality the only strong man of
+the group, the only dramatist of originality--and, with his
+exquisite lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland, a fabulous,
+beautiful Erin, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton,
+Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault.
+
+As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering
+gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town,
+given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the
+smoking-room of the Shelbourne, and a few hours later the clubs
+will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day,
+and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of
+enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of
+novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't
+been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his
+usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults.
+
+But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have
+removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren
+will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like
+chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy
+will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a
+calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now
+old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far
+as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh!
+in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the
+"lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume
+(see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his
+tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these
+lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set
+you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once
+called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen
+and ink. Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for
+physical quarrels.
+
+He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though
+he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats;
+what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as
+possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a
+crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet
+belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been
+thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin
+bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave
+him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to
+exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn,
+very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing
+as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very
+bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned--I
+speak figuratively--and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who
+slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till,
+bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each
+other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception
+to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I
+didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself
+seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight.
+
+He "got even" with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a
+capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all
+over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant
+conversion he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties,
+mental and temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented
+itself and he hurried to the Cathedral for advice. He sent in his
+name to the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed:
+"Moore, Moore, oh, that man again! Well, give him another pair of
+blankets." In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings, were
+added to the apocryphal anecdote--which, by the way, set smiling the
+usually impassive Moore, who can see a joke every now and then.
+
+Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in Vale of
+his riding dangerous mounts; and when challenged at an English
+country house did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to
+hounds the better part of a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take
+the "dare," although when he reached his room he found his boots
+full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Any one reading
+his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart.
+In Vale he describes his father's stable at Castle Moore, County
+Mayo.
+
+Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his
+complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new
+imprudences in black and white, we may expect? He has paid his
+respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all
+camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of
+Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised
+John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered"
+by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I
+only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at
+Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is
+not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as
+diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and
+an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the
+only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the
+same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian
+experiences--it is the best part of the book--and to my way of
+thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris;
+London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas,
+Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of
+1880--what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and
+delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's
+work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London
+was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow
+head of George Moore--that colour so admired by Manet and so
+wonderfully painted by him--in the academic camp. He replied with
+all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on
+tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated
+mediocrities--on the pictorial side, at least--though John Millais
+was a talent--and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of
+Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe
+pinches on the other foot--it is George who is a belated critic of
+the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and
+many are the wordy battles waged at the Café Royal, London, when
+Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of
+Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other
+Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for
+modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some
+impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable
+granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its
+critics.
+
+
+II
+
+In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that
+the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks
+otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the
+synoptic Gospels. The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the
+life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one
+that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth
+his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in
+Salammbô, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style
+that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such
+sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely
+tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped
+forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme
+bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic
+character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless,
+Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama
+in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by
+temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can
+no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did
+Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open
+letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years
+heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey
+d'Aurévilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans,
+Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious
+pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a
+formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the
+Index before it was written. And yet we find in it George Moore
+among the prophets.
+
+Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur
+Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There
+are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life,
+written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by
+Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge,
+ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au
+Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar
+Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The
+Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with
+blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that
+M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea,
+in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied,
+sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator
+who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple
+authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the
+third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided
+by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the
+Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in
+the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature.
+The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses every page of The Brook
+Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something
+perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called
+"blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution
+makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies
+of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and
+Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently
+"blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation
+or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions,
+and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.
+
+Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate The Brook
+Kerith. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics,
+the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps the Scriptural
+Kedron? This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic
+Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or Temple
+worship; furthermore, they practised celibacy till a schism within
+their ranks drove the minority away from the parent body to shift
+for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph,
+a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother--they have other
+sons--is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the
+prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John
+the Baptist, the precursor of the long-foretold Messiah, lead him
+astray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a
+theomaniac--he believes himself to be the son of God, appointed by
+the heavenly father to save mankind; especially his fellow Jews.
+Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor,
+ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the
+only son of a rich merchant of Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel
+are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who,
+inducted into the wisdom of the Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding,
+a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets. The
+dialogues between father and son rather recall Erin, hardly Syria.
+Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal
+day of the crucifixion he beseeches his friend Pilate to let him
+have the body of his Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs,
+then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women Mary and
+Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre.
+
+If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem (heated to
+this murder by the High Priest) the title of the book might have
+been "Joseph of Arimathea." He is easily the most viable figure.
+Jesus is too much of the god from the machine; but he serves the
+author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the
+Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to
+the house of his father, hides him and listens unmoved to the
+fantastic tales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are
+everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second crucifixion, so Joseph
+takes him back to the Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation
+of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back
+health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and
+blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of
+the demon. It seems that in those troubled days the cities and
+countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching
+the speedy destruction of the world. For a period Jesus called
+himself a son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the
+sword.
+
+Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived with his flocks. The
+idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein; sober, as
+befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned an undulating
+prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the
+clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant
+of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great
+landscape-painter.
+
+Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's crook to his successor
+and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling
+events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is
+vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem, with Timothy lost
+somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquent
+pages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus
+Christ. A disputatious man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any
+easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline
+Christianity, differing from the tender message of Jesus; that Jesus
+of whom Havelock Ellis wrote: "Jesus found no successor. Over the
+stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof
+curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics,
+which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were
+unable to melt."
+
+If this be the case then Paul was, if not the founder, the
+foster-father of the new creed. A seer of epileptic visions--Edgar
+Saltus has said of the "sacred disease" that all founders of
+religions have been epileptics--Paul, with the intractable
+temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek
+blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of salvation,
+of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as
+if these things were realities." For Paul and those who followed him
+they were and are realities; from them is spun the web of our modern
+civilisation. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus
+that he it was who, crucified, came back to life may be fancy. The
+sturdy Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing
+from the blinding light on the road to Damascus: "Paul, Paul, why
+persecutest thou me?" naturally enough denounced Jesus as a madman,
+but accepted his services as a guide to Cæsarea, where, in company
+with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad
+tidings, there to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.
+
+On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his
+cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a
+half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original
+Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George
+Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Néant,
+Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the
+light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have
+quoted the mystic Joachim Flora--of the Third Kingdom--who said that
+the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui
+vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a
+man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it
+away. Jesus cast his cross away--his spiritual ambition--believing
+that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then
+to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.
+
+The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they
+love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts
+company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is
+not going, as he had contemplated, to give himself up to Hanan, the
+High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical
+sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in
+Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is
+a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to
+the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the
+mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda:
+"The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the
+"rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book
+is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.
+
+If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir
+of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the
+dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope
+Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating
+phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is
+no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which
+while it must have given its author pains to write--so full of
+Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is
+it--must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The
+poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is
+understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of
+protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt
+that he is, followed his vision. In every man's heart there is a
+lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very
+pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him--though it would
+be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation--what Barbey
+d'Aurévilly once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel
+Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate
+himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his
+genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native
+religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his
+new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in
+Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the
+Christ stand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+PILLOWLAND
+
+
+In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles
+Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick
+man "sways his pillow--tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and
+lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the
+ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes
+_sides_ oftener than a politician." How true this is--even to the
+italicised word--I discovered for myself after a personal encounter
+with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the
+pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it
+literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I
+found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet
+seemingly a land without limit,--who dares circumscribe the
+imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on
+the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow
+is his throne--from it he issues his orders for the day, his
+bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right
+hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of
+officious advisers. But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot
+against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little
+pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled.
+He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as
+his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled
+hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas!
+Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant.
+In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an
+evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical
+weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them."
+And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers.
+Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in
+my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness
+makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most
+annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to
+your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure
+yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast.
+The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever.
+Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden
+variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say--I read their
+meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated--we shall have this
+fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well
+too rapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight
+change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give,
+I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time
+takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue
+for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine
+rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper
+men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor
+was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My
+heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I
+realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red
+lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a
+digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of
+life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative
+sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull
+like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"--as the
+unchristian unscientists say--on the nurse, my nurse.
+
+As an old reporter of things theatrical I had seen many plays with
+the trained nurse as heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even the
+gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret Anglin in a piece
+whose name I've forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus in
+which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How
+mistaken I have been. Now, the trained nurse seems an angel without
+wings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired
+girl of the footlights; she is often mature and stout and a lover of
+potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but
+her severity hath good cause. At first you feebly utter the word
+"nurse." Later she is any Irish royal family name. Follows, "Mary,"
+and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her
+"Marie" he is doomed. Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages
+made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis,
+and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius Hospital staff. Married
+sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental
+bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years hasn't any more
+chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a
+"snowbird in hell"--as Brother Mencken phrases it.
+
+However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are
+wet. You are weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only
+care for your precious carcass but also a surcease from the demands
+of the world. Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work
+if you are a convalescent of the true-blue sort. Hence your tears.
+But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in
+your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo
+about your embattled bed. You begin sudden little arguments with
+your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time
+virility in the technique of household squabbling. You haven't. You
+swell with masculine satisfaction and for at least five minutes you
+are the Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness,
+send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the
+familiar leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what humility of
+accent: "Mamma!" The Eternal Masculine? The Eternal Child! You
+mumble to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on that
+thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to be haughty. But she knows
+you are simply a sick grumpy old person of the male species who
+needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well
+hidden.
+
+The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow
+white, and find in vernal green, is an experience almost worth the
+miseries you have so impatiently endured. A veritable vacation for
+the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of Flatbush
+break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless
+interest the man[oe]uvres of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden
+as he manfully deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries, his
+little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the
+makings of a leader. He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel, and
+Master-politician; but he will always be foremost, else nowhere.
+"You are the audience," he imperiously bids his companions, and
+when rebellion seemed imminent he punched, without a trace of anger,
+a boy much taller. I envied Georgie his abounding vitality.
+Furtively I raised the window. Instantly I was spied by Georgie who
+cried lustily: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!"
+I almost felt gay, "You come up here," I called out with one lung.
+"I haven't a stepladder," he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as
+remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. (Now I'm
+moralising!) Undismayed, Georgie continued to call: "Little boy,
+little boy, come down and play with me!"
+
+The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend
+who meets you and says: "I never saw you look better in your life."
+It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You
+renounce then and there the doctor with all his pomps of healing.
+You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured
+and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd.
+Notwithstanding you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer King
+of Pillowland.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+CROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE
+
+
+I
+
+They order certain things better in France than elsewhere; I mean
+such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of book-making known as
+Inquiries ("Enquête," which is not fair to translate into the
+lugubrious literalism, "Inquest"), Anthologies, and books that
+masquerade as books, as Charles Lamb hath it. Without a trace of
+pedantry or dogmatism, such works appear from time to time in Paris
+and are delightful reminders of the good breeding and suppleness of
+Gallic criticism. To turn to favour and prettiness a dusty
+department of literature is no mean feat.
+
+What precisely is the condition of French letters since Catulle
+Mendès published his magisterial work on The French Poetic Movement
+from 1867 to 1900? (Paris, 1903.) Nothing so exhaustive has appeared
+since, though a half-dozen Inquiries, Anthologies, and Symposiums
+are in existence.
+
+The most comprehensive recently is Florian-Parmentier's Contemporary
+History of French Letters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a poet,
+one of les Jeunes, and an expert swimmer in the multifarious
+cross-currents of the day. His book is a bird's-eye view of the map
+of literary France as far as the beginning of the war. He is quite
+frank in his likes and dislikes, and always has his reasons for his
+major idolatries and minor detestations.
+
+As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds there are several new
+Anthologies at hand which aid us to form our own opinion of the
+younger men's prose and verse. And, finally, there is the
+significant Inquiry of Emile Henriot: "A Quoi Rêvent les Jeunes
+Gens?" (1913); of which more anon.
+
+M. Florian-Parmentier is a native of Valenciennes, a writer whose
+versatility and fecundity are noteworthy in a far from barren
+literary epoch. He has, with the facility of a lettered young
+Frenchman, tried his hand at every form. All themes, so they be
+human, are welcome to him, from art criticism to playwriting. He is
+seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps they may not admit this;
+but the question may be answered in the affirmative: Is he a safe
+critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day French letters?
+
+He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of humour in a critical
+barometer, the tendency of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others
+to form schools, to create cénacles, to begin fighting before they
+have any defined ideal. It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive
+manifestoes, declarations, and challenges, most of them rather in
+the air; though it cannot be denied that these ebullitions of gusty
+temperaments do clear that same air, murky with theories and
+traversed by an occasional flash of genius.
+
+After paying his respects to the daily Parisian press, which he
+belabours as venal, cynical, and impure, our critic evokes a picture
+of the condition of literary men; not a reassuring one. Indeed, we
+wonder how young people can dream of embracing such a profession,
+with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable poverty. Unless
+these aspiring chaps have a private income, how do they contrive to
+live?
+
+The answer is, they don't live, unless they write twaddle for the
+Grand Old Public, which must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You
+say to yourself, after all Paris is not vastly different in this
+respect from benighted New York. Detective stories, melodrama, the
+glorification of the stale triangle in fiction and drama, the
+apotheosis of the Apache--what are all these but slight variants of
+the artistic pabulum furnished by our native merchants in
+mediocrity? Consoled, because your mental and emotional climate is
+not as inartistic as it is painted, you return to Florian-Parmentier
+and his divagations. He has much to say. Some of it is not as tender
+as tripe, but none is salted with absurdity.
+
+Then you make a discovery. There is in France a distinct class, the
+Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior
+claims; a class to which there is no analogy either in England or in
+America. (The French Academy is not particularly referred to just
+now.) Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs, bohemians, and
+professors--all may belong to it if they have the necessary
+credentials: brains, talent, enthusiasm. It is the latter quality
+that floats out on the sea of speculation many adventuring barks.
+Each sports a tiny pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered
+by some dreamer of proud, impossible dreams. But they float, do
+these frail boats, laden with visions and captained by noble
+ambitions.
+
+Or, another image; a long, narrow street, on either side houses of
+manifold styles--fantastic or sensible, castellated or commonplace,
+baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty, these eclectic
+architectures reflect the souls of the dwellers within. The ivory
+tower is not missing, though a half-century ago it was more in
+evidence; the church is there, though sadly dwarfed--France is still
+spiritually crippled and flying on one wing (this means previous to
+1914); and a host of other strange and familiar houses that Jack the
+poet built.
+
+On the doors of each is a legend; it may be Neo-Symbolism,
+Neo-Classicism, Free-Verse, Sincerism, Intenseism, Spiritualists,
+Floralism or the School of Grace, Dramatism and Simultanism,
+Imperialism, Dynamism, Futurism, Regionalism, Pluralism, Sereneism,
+Vivantism, Magism, Totalism, Subsequentism, Argonauts, Wolves,
+Visionarism, and, most discussed of all, Unanimism, headed by that
+fiery propagandist and poet, Jules Romains.
+
+Now, every one of these cults in miniature has its following, its
+programmes, sometimes its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They
+are the numerous progeny of the elder Romantic, Realistic, and
+Symbolistic schools, long dead and gathered to their fathers.
+
+Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet Correspondences the Symbolists
+dated; Baudelaire, the precursor of so much modern, is to-day
+chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical and æsthetic. His
+Little Poems in Prose are a breviary for the youths who are turning
+out an amorphous prose, which they call Free. Paul Verlaine's
+influence is still marked, for he is a maker of Debussy-like music;
+moonlit, vapourish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The very
+quintessence of poetry haunts the vague terrain of his verse; but
+his ideas, his morbidities, these are negligible, indeed, abhorred.
+
+The new schools, whether belonging to the Extreme Right or Extreme
+Left, are idealistic in their aim and practice; that or nothing. The
+brutalities of Zola and the Naturalistic School, the frigid
+perfection and metallic impassibility of the Parnassians are over
+and done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind the eye of the
+ideal. There is a renaissance of sensibility. The universe is become
+pluralistic, sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony has ceased
+to be a potent weapon in the armoury of poets and prosateurs. It is
+replaced by an ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that weeps on
+the shoulder of one's neighbour, by a horror of egoism--whether
+masquerading as a philosophy such as Nietzsche's, or a poesy such as
+the Parnassians. For these poetlings issues are cosmical.
+
+Coeval with this revival of sentiment is a decided leaning toward
+religion; not the "white soul of the Middle Ages," as Huysmans would
+say; not the mediæval curiosities of Hugo, Gautier, Lamartine; but
+the carrying aloft of the banner of belief; the opposition to
+sterile agnosticism by the burning tongues of the holy spirit. No
+dilettante movement this return to Roman Catholicism. The time came
+for many of these neophytes when they had to choose at the
+cross-roads. Either--Or? The Button-Moulder was lying in wait for
+such adolescent Peer Gynts, and, outraged and nauseated by the gross
+license of their day and hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts,
+they turned to the right--some, not all of them. The others no
+longer cry aloud their pagan admiration of the nymph's flesh in the
+brake, of the seven deadly arts and their sister sins.
+
+In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing
+across the housetops of French art and literature. Science is too
+positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is
+without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again; only, the
+youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the Cubists are
+working for formal severity, despite their geometrical fanaticism.
+Youth will have its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring
+colours, and those doors in the narrow street called "Perhaps," do
+but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot
+live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaning to the
+infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish
+with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings also; else his
+chamber of dreams might overflow into reality, and then we should be
+converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers and all.
+
+What were the controlling factors in young French literature up
+to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy
+of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion,
+graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous,
+fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an
+intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barrès is another
+name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical
+and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism,
+replacing  the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words:
+Patriotism, reverence for the dead--a reverence perilously near
+ancestor-worship--the prose-master Barrès went into the political
+arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive
+"modernism," an idealistic reactionary.
+
+He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time
+master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his
+patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot
+be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity--"moral
+earnestness," so called--has never been his. He is no more a sower
+of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he
+is accepted as a vital teacher.
+
+Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal,
+Mallarmé, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud--that stepfather of symbolism
+--Emil Verhaeren--who is truly an elemental and disquieting
+force--Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont--who
+contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making--Francis
+Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de
+Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue--and how many others, to be found in the
+pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study
+dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties.
+
+
+II
+
+When we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the
+intricate polyphony of literary sects and cénacles, the American
+lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the
+whirligig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900
+has jostled from their place the "elders" of a decade previous: you
+read of Paul-Napoléon Roinard, Maurice Beaubourg, Hans Ryner--a
+remarkable writer--André Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul Fort,
+Paul Claudel, André Suarès, Stéphane Servant, André Spire, Philéas
+Lebesgue, Georges Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations
+deserves an English garb), and you recall some of them as potent
+creators of values.
+
+But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men
+through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Symons, Edmund
+Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we
+not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a
+matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who
+"create"--as the jargon goes--that same provincialism is a
+windshield against the draughts of too tempting imitation; but for
+our criticism there is no excuse. A critic will never be a catholic
+critic of his native literature or art if he doesn't know the
+literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical as this may sound.
+We lack æsthetic curiosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism
+America is comparable to a cemetery of clichés.
+
+Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance
+Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long,
+narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its alternations of
+Septentrional mists and the blazing blue sky of the Midi. This
+critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have
+no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been
+called the "Woad" argument; he goes back not to the early Britons,
+but to Celticism. He is a sturdy Kymrist, and believes not in
+literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche,"
+the purveyors of "canned" classics, the chilly rhetoricians who set
+too much store on conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner, and
+the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier. In his
+auscultation of genius, La Physiologie Morale du Poète (1904), may
+be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar
+enough now, as does the flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of
+Renan, in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has had some
+influence. M. Florian-Parmentier does not admire this movement or
+its prophet, Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant magic of the
+word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the
+cockles of the heart of critics.
+
+And then the generation of 1900--Alexander Mercereau, Henri
+Hertz, Sébastien Voirol, Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand
+Divoire, Tancrède Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux, Mandin, Guillaume
+Apollinaire--all workers in the vast inane, dwellers on the
+threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the
+Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing
+extraordinary has come from it. Balzac is still the mighty one in
+fiction. Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul Adam, the
+brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille--a brilliant, versatile man--still
+maintain their primacy.
+
+Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gourmont, Camille Mauclair,
+Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois--now sojourning
+in America and a thinker of verve and originality--and Henry
+Houssaye, hold their own against the younger generation.
+
+In the theatre there are numerous and vexing tendencies:
+Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness to gentle
+Charles van Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has disciples;
+but the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who
+had his day in Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were accepted
+not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men
+of the theatre. There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are
+Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux, and Marie
+Leneru; but the technique of the drama is immutable.
+
+In the domain of philosophy and experimental science we find Emile
+Boutroux, and such collective psychologists as Durckheim, Gustave
+le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names such as Binet, Ribot, Michel
+Savigny, Alfred Fouillée, and the eminent mathematician, Henri
+Poincaré--who finally became sceptical of his favourite logic,
+philosophy, and mathematics. This intellectual volte-face caused
+endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive
+vs. intellectualism--what William James called "vicious
+intellectualism"--is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.
+
+There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of
+metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of
+suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse,
+intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time in Bergson caught the
+fancy of the poets. Naturally enough. Literary dogmatism had
+prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence
+of formal verse that is to be feared. Vers-libre, which began with
+such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud, has run
+the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yawping from the
+terrace of the brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted to ask.
+Voices they have, but not bird-like voices.
+
+That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gourmont--who
+practically introduced him--must not be overlooked, for he had
+genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gaultier, who evolved
+from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme--which,
+succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than
+it is; from the philosopher to the snob, from the priest to the
+actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.
+
+Of the influence of politics upon art and literature--which happily
+are no cloistered virtues in France--we need not speak here. M.
+Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and bulky book, of which
+we have only exposed the high lights.
+
+Since Jules Huret's Enquête sur l'Evolution Littéraire (1890),
+followed by similar works of Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard
+(1913), we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's, mentioned
+above. He put the questions: "Where are we? Where are we going?" in
+_Le Temps_ of Paris, June, 1912, to a number of representative
+thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers their answers in
+1913.
+
+The result is rather confusing, a cloud of contradictory witnesses
+are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies. There are no
+schools! Yes, there are groups! We are going to the devil headlong!
+The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial!
+Better the extravagances of the decayed Romanticists than the
+debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague
+on all your houses! say the Unanimists. One fierce Wolf (Loup)
+admitted that at the banquets of his cénacle he and his fellow poets
+always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was it at the
+Symbolists'? Does it much matter? The gesture counts alone with
+these youthful "Fumistes"--as Leconte de Lisle had christened their
+predecessors.
+
+Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as "Cymbalists"
+the Symbolists, his own followers. Gongs would have been a better
+word. A punster speaks of Theists as those who love "le bon Dieu and
+tea." The new critical school, at its head Charles Maurras, do not
+conceal their contempt for all these "arrivistes" and revolutionary
+groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save Young
+France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces in faded accents the
+ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are
+dead since the war began: Emile Faguet, Jules Lemaître, and Remy de
+Gourmont. They leave no successors worthy of their mettle.
+
+
+III
+
+The three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from
+1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of
+Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch,
+it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Among the
+rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As
+epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this
+poet's testament: "Ce désir d'être tout que j'appelle mon âme!"
+Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson,
+but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the
+poems are more representative.
+
+Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But
+are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are
+celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art
+prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following
+Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it!
+Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The
+watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.
+
+Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing
+lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets--Emile
+Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature,
+and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable
+power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more
+sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse
+of Henri de Régnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the
+exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren?
+
+What thinker and dramatist is known like Maeterlinck, except it be
+the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality--for Verhaeren at
+one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and
+"Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been
+careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poë"; he can
+boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal
+order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one
+irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than
+constructive.
+
+Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same?
+Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique--all
+these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly.
+
+As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow
+wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his
+crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of
+Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound
+of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of
+barbarians."
+
+Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and
+Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Châteaubriand
+was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to
+the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and
+Flaubert. They set it down to the fact that none but a Frenchman
+can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which
+may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala
+was temperamentally distasteful.
+
+Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two
+Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a
+purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a
+distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and
+Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one.
+The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the
+little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both
+Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their
+inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too
+august body as much as the Belgian poets.
+
+As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for
+soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870
+certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul
+had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish
+for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and
+genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger
+the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by
+Catulle Mendès, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our
+contention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+MORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNER
+
+
+Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for
+originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly
+proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern
+critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the
+composer under their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the
+ambitious chap aforesaid.
+
+Never has the music of Wagner been more popular than now; his name
+on the opera billboards is bound to crowd a house. And never,
+paradoxical as it may sound, has there been such a critical hue and
+cry over his works and personality. The publication of his
+autobiography has much to do with this renewal of interest. There is
+some praise, much abuse, to be found in the newly published books on
+the subject. European critics are building up little islands of
+theory, coral-like, some with fantastic lagoons, others founded on
+stern truth, and many doomed to be washed away over-night.
+Nevertheless, the true Richard Wagner is beginning to emerge from
+the haze of Nibelheim behind which he contrived to hide his real
+self.
+
+Wagner the gigantic comedian; Wagner the egotist; Wagner the victim
+of a tragic love, Wagner tone-poet, mock philosopher, and a
+wonderful apparition in the world of art till success overtook him;
+then Wagner become bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted
+by his best friends--whom he had alienated--without the solace of
+the men he had most loved, the men who had helped him over the
+thorny path of his life--Liszt, Nietzsche, Von Bülow, Otto
+Wesendonk, and how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom he had
+treated with characteristic ingratitude! No, Richard Wagner during
+the sterile years, so called, from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented
+man, despite his union with Cosima von Bülow-Liszt and the
+foundation of a home and family at Baireuth.
+
+
+I
+
+However, there are exceptions. One is the book of Otto Bournot
+entitled Ludwig Geyer, the Stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote
+about it in 1913 for the _New York Times_. In this slender volume of
+only seventy-two pages the author sifts all the evidence in the
+Geyer-Wagner question, and he has delved into archives, into the
+newspapers of Geyer's days, and has had access to hitherto untouched
+material. It must be admitted that his conclusions are not to be
+lightly denied. August Böttiger's Necrology has until recently been
+the chief source of facts in the career of Geyer, but Wagner's
+Autobiography--which in spots Bournot corrects--and the life of
+Wagner by Mary Burrell, not to mention other books, have furnished
+Bournot with new weapons.
+
+The Geyers as far back as 1700 were simple pious folk, the first of
+the family being a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a
+trombone-player and organist. Indeed, the chief occupation of many
+Geyers was in some way or other connected with the Evangelical
+Church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer was a portraitist of no mean
+merit, an actor of considerable power--his Franz Moor was a
+favourite rôle with the public--a dramatist of fair ability (he
+wrote a tragedy, among others, named The Slaughter of the
+Innocents), and also a verse-maker. His acquaintance with Weber
+stimulated his interest in music; Weber discovered his voice, and he
+sang in opera. Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature all
+the qualities of Wagner. The latter was too young at the time of
+Geyer's death, September, 1821, to have profited much by the
+precepts of his stepfather, but his example certainly did prove
+stimulating to the imagination of the budding poet and composer.
+Geyer married Johanna Wagner-Bertz (Mary Burrell was the first to
+give the correct spelling of her maiden name), the widow of the
+police functionary Wagner (to whose memory Richard pays such cynical
+homage in his obituary), August 14, 1814. She had about two hundred
+and sixty-one thalern, and eight children. A ninth came later in the
+person of Cäcile, who afterward married a member of the Avenarius
+family. Cäcile, or Cicely, was a prime favourite with Richard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seven years passed, and again Frau Geyer found herself a widow, with
+nine children and little money. How the family all tumbled up in the
+world, owing much to the courage, wit, vivacity, and unshaken
+will-power of their mother, may be found in the autobiography.
+Bournot admits that Geyer and his wife may have carried to the grave
+certain secrets. Richard Wagner until he was nine years old was
+known as Richard Geyer, and on page thirteen of his book our author
+prints the following significant sentence: "The possibility of
+Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in itself nothing detrimental
+to our judgment of the art-work of Baireuth."
+
+
+II
+
+In 1900 a twenty-page pamphlet bearing the title Richard Wagner in
+Zurich was published in Leipsic. It was signed Hans Bélart, and gave
+for the first time to a much mystified world the story of Wagner's
+passion for Mathilde Wesendonk, thus shattering beyond hope of
+repair our cherished belief that Cosima von Bülow-Liszt had been
+the lode-stone of Wagner's desire, that to her influence was due the
+creation of Tristan and Isolde, its composer's high-water mark in
+poetic, dramatic music. Now, Bélart, not content with his
+iconoclastic pamphlet, has just sent forth a fat book which he calls
+Richard Wagner's Love-Tragedy with Mathilde Wesendonk.
+
+We had thought that the last word in the matter had been said when
+Baireuth (Queen Cosima I) allowed the publication of Wagner's
+diaries and love-letters to Mathilde--though her complete
+correspondence is as yet unpublished. But Bélart is one of the
+busiest among the German critical coral builders. He has dug into
+musty newspapers and letters, and gives at the close of his work a
+long list of authorities. Yet nothing startlingly new comes out of
+his researches. We knew that Mathilde Wesendonk (or Wesendonck) was
+the first love of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not his usual
+self-seeking philandering. We also knew that Otto Wesendonk behaved
+like a patient husband and a gentleman--any other man would have put
+a bullet in the body of the thrice impertinent genius; knew, too,
+that Tristan and Isolde was born of this romance. But there is a
+mass of fresh details, petty backstairs gossip, all the
+tittle-tattle beloved of such writers, that in company with Julius
+Kapp's Wagner und die Frauen, makes Bélart's new book a valuable one
+for reference.
+
+Kapp, who has written a life of Franz Liszt, goes Bélart one better
+in hinting that the infatuated couple transformed their idealism
+into realism. Bélart does not believe this; neither does Emil
+Ludwig, the latest critical commentator on Wagner. But neither
+critic gives the profoundest proof that the love of Richard and
+Mathilde was an exalted, platonic one, _i. e._, the proof
+psychologic. I firmly believe that if Mathilde Wesendonk had eloped
+with Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan and Isolde
+might not have been finished; at all events, the third act would not
+have been what it now is. A mighty longing is better for the birth
+of great art than facile happiness. For the first time in his
+selfish unhappy life Wagner realised Goethe's words of wisdom:
+"Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce." It was a bitter sacrifice,
+but out of its bitter sweetness came the honey and moonlight of
+Tristan and Isolde. Wagner suffered, Mathilde suffered, Otto
+Wesendonk suffered, and last, but not least, Minna Wagner, the poor
+pawn in his married game, suffered to distraction. Let us begin with
+a quotation on the last page but three of Bélart's book: "Remarked
+Otto Wesendonk to a friend: 'I have hunted Wagner from my
+threshold....'"
+
+This was in August, 1858. Wagner first met the Wesendonks about
+1852, three years after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because
+of his participation in the uprising of 1849. (Wagner as amateur
+revolutionist!) Thanks to the request of his wife Mathilde, Otto
+Wesendonk furnished a little house on the hill near his splendid
+villa for the Wagners. First christened "Fafner's Repose," Wagner
+changed the title to the "Asyl," and for a time it was truly an
+asylum for this perturbed spirit.
+
+But he must needs fall deeply in love with his charming and
+beautiful neighbour, a woman of intellectual and poetic gifts, and
+to the chagrin of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife. The
+gossip in the neighbourhood was considerable, for the complete
+frankness of the infatuated ones was not the least curious part of
+the affair. Liszt knew of it, so did the Princess Layn-Wittgenstein.
+An immense amount of "snooping" was indulged in by interested lady
+friends of Minna Wagner. She has her apologists, and, judging from
+the letters she wrote at the time and afterward--several printed for
+the first time by Kapp and Bélart--she took a lively hand in the
+general proceedings. Evidently she was tired of her good man's
+behaviour, and when he solemnly assured her that it was the
+master-passion of his life she didn't believe him. Naturally not. He
+had cried "wolf" too often; besides, Minna, like a practical person,
+viewed the possibility of a rupture with Otto Wesendonk as a
+distinct misfortune. Otto had not only advanced much money to
+Richard, but he paid twelve thousand francs for the scores of
+Rheingold and Walküre and for the complete performing rights.
+Afterward he sent both to King Ludwig II as a gift--but I doubt if
+he ever got a penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed the
+expenses of the Wagner concert at Zurich, a little item of nine
+thousand francs. Scandal and calumny invaded his home, the fair fame
+of his wife was threatened. No wonder the finale, long deferred, was
+stormy, even operatic.
+
+The lady was much younger than her husband; she was born at the
+close of 1828, therefore Wagner's junior by fifteen years. She was a
+Luckemeyer, her mother a Stein; a cultured, sweet-natured woman, it
+is more than doubtful if she could have endured Wagner as a husband.
+She did a wise thing in resisting his prayers. Not only was her
+husband a bar to such a proceeding, but her children would have
+always prevented her thinking of a legal separation. All sorts of
+plans were in the air. When, in 1857, the American panic seriously
+threatened the prosperity of Otto Wesendonk, who had heavy business
+interests in New York, gossip averred that Frau Wesendonk would ask
+for a divorce; but the air cleared and matters resumed their old
+aspect. Minna Wagner's health, always poor, became worse. It was a
+case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs. She daily made
+scenes at home and threatened to tell what she knew. That she knew
+much is evident from her correspondence with Frau Wilk. She said
+that Wagner had two hearts, but while he delighted in intellectual
+and emotional friendship with such a superior soul as Mathilde, he
+nevertheless would not forego the domestic comforts provided by
+Minna. Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois. Those
+intolerable dogs, the parrot, the coffee-drinking, the soft beds and
+solicitude about his underclothing, all were truly German;
+human-all-too-human.
+
+In September, 1857, the newly married Von Bülows paid the Wagners a
+visit, and as the guest-chamber of the cottage was occupied they
+took up temporary quarters at an inn, "The Raven" (Wotan's ravens!)
+Cosima, young, impressionable, turned her face to the wall and wept
+when Wagner played and sang for his friends the first and second
+acts of Siegfried. Even then she felt the "pull" of his magnetism,
+of his genius, and doubtless regretted having married the fussy,
+irritable Von Bülow--who had gone down in the social scale in
+wedding a girl of dubious descent. (In Paris Liszt for many years
+was only a strolling gipsy piano-player to whom the Countess
+d'Agoult had "condescended.")
+
+Mathilde Wesendonk entertained the Von Bülows, who went away pleased
+with their reception, above all deeply impressed by the exiled
+Wagner. They so reported to Liszt, and Von Bülow did more; as the
+scion of an old aristocratic family, he made many attempts to
+secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as making propaganda for his
+music. Which favours Wagner, who was the very genius of ingratitude,
+repaid later.
+
+In one point Herr Ludwig is absolutely correct: the composer was
+supported by his friends from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig
+intervened. The starvation talk was a part of the Wagner legend,
+even the Paris days were greatly exaggerated as to their black
+poverty. Wagner was always a spendthrift.
+
+From November, 1857, to May, 1858, Wagner set to music the five
+poems of Mathilde, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in
+September, 1857, the relations between Minna and Mathilde had become
+strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde in a vulgar
+manner; worse remained; he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frau
+Wesendonk and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke the seal, read
+the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes; yet can
+you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's
+genius. For her Rienzi was his only work. Had it not succeeded? So
+had Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, also The Flying Dutchman, but Rienzi
+was her darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of
+the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed to tell us. Otto
+Wesendonk's wife she firmly believed was leading him into a
+quagmire. What theatre could ever produce The Ring? One thing,
+however, Minna did not do, as most writers on the subject say she
+did: she did not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the time, but
+only to Wagner. Later she made its meanings clear to the injured
+husband, which no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted above.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared
+on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an
+uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water
+cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle
+the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age
+of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig
+smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost
+lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima
+Von Bülow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and
+wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no
+individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of
+Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also
+shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who
+banished from her life both von Bülow and her father, Franz Liszt,
+when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed
+after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human
+feeling toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She
+denied herself to him. She became a Brünnhilde frozen into a symbol
+of intolerable grief.
+
+Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth
+Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von
+Bülow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that
+is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on
+Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.
+
+On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on
+the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no
+definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his
+diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by
+Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty
+emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an
+erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a
+moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere
+of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have
+loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.
+
+
+III
+
+The two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book
+by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly
+destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche--and not Nietzsche
+at his best--there has not been written a book so overflowing with
+hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the
+author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a
+noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he
+does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's
+poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies
+remain the best of its kind, because it is written without
+parti-pris.
+
+Ludwig slashes à la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's
+diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic--a
+painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like
+Beethoven--weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan
+and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book
+stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper
+critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls
+Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the
+law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but
+engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was a monster of ingratitude.
+Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the
+futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard
+experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the
+universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich
+rather than face the angry burghers.
+
+He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall
+of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did
+Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things
+about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat
+Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in
+sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a
+performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with
+one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a
+performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the
+completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in
+Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded
+the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of
+Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Bülow-Liszt followed Wagner to
+Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair
+was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima
+married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant.
+Liszt, a religious man (despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the
+luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to
+this defection on the part of a beloved child.
+
+It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward
+mysticism, toward religion: witness the mock-duck mysticism and
+burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach came
+Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual life of Wagner. This was in
+1854. His friend Wille lent him the book. Immediately he started to
+"Schopenhauerise" the Ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of
+situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's
+temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was
+not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master.
+Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian; and Siegfried, a
+pessimist at the close.
+
+Nietzsche was right; Schopenhauer proved a powerful poison for
+Wagner. And Schopenhauer himself laughed at Wagner's music; he
+remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised Wagner, through a
+friend, to stick to the theatre and hang his music on a nail in the
+wall; but when his library was overhauled several marginalia were
+discovered, one which he contemptuously wrote on a verse of
+Wagner's: "Ear! Ear! Where are your ears, musician?"
+
+Wagner, when Liszt adjured him to turn to religion as a consolation,
+replied: "I believe only in mankind." Ludwig compares this
+declaration with some of the latter opinions concerning
+Christianity, of which Wagner has said many evil things. Wagner's
+life was a series of concessions to the inevitable. He modified his
+art theories as he grew older, and with fame and riches his
+character deteriorated.
+
+He couldn't stand success--he, the bravest man of his day; the
+undaunted fighter for an idea crooked the knee to caste, became an
+amateur mystic and announced his intention of returning to absolute
+music, of writing a symphony strict in form--which, for his
+reputation, he luckily did not attempt. He was a colossal actor
+and the best self-advertiser the world has yet known since Nero.
+But I can't understand Herr Ludwig when he asserts that from 1866
+to 1883 the composer did nothing but compose two marches, finish
+Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Rather a large order, considering the
+labours of the man as practical opera conductor, prose writer,
+poet-dramatist, and composer. And then, too, the gigantic scheme of
+Baireuth was realised in 1876.
+
+Comparatively barren would be a fairer phrase. After Tristan and
+Isolde, what could any man compose? A work which its creator
+rightfully said was a miracle he couldn't understand. After the
+anecdotage of Wagner's career is forgotten, after Baireuth has
+become owl-haunted, Tristan and Isolde will be listened to by men
+and women who love or have loved.
+
+It isn't pleasant to read a book like Ludwig's, truthful as it may
+be in parts. Nor should he call our attention to the posthumous
+venom of the composer as expressed in his hateful remarks concerning
+Otto Wesendonk. There Wagner was his own Mime, his own Alberich, not
+the knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish maid till magic
+did melt his will. Richard Wagner was once Tristan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+MY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTURE
+
+
+Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's
+Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz
+Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary director of the
+Austro-Hungarian section. But I could not find him, although I heard
+of him everywhere, of musical fêtes and the usual glittering company
+that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One
+day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an
+October afternoon, when in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with
+bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his
+mouth a long black cigar, which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I
+gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an easy job to keep up
+with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I
+caught up and took a long stare, the object of which composedly
+smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz Liszt.
+You see there were so many different pictures of him; even the warts
+were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein I
+swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did.
+
+Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired, and at the advice of
+Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy,
+I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with a letter of introduction
+to the acting secretary, Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old
+to enter, being a few months past eighteen. I was disappointed and
+voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and
+correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was
+Vice-Consul Robert Hooper and he kindly introduced me to General
+Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination I was given
+a letter in which the United States Government testified to my good
+social standing (I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder from
+justice) and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable document,
+I again besieged the gates of the great French conservatoire--whose
+tuition, it must be remembered, is free. I was successful, inasmuch
+as I was permitted to present myself at the yearly examination, which
+took place November 13 (ominous date). To say that I studied hard and
+shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an
+alley-like street off the Boulevard des Batignolles and lived
+luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day
+(with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning) and practising on a
+wretched little cottage piano as long as my neighbours would stand
+the noise. They chucked boots or any old faggot they could find at
+my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the
+keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to
+keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite, I would lie
+in bed till dinner-time. O Chopin! O consommé and boiled beef! O
+sour blue wine at six cents the litre!
+
+At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists say. It was nasty,
+chilling, foggy autumnal, but my long locks hung negligently and my
+velveteen coat was worn defiantly open to the wind. I reached the
+Conservatoire--then in the old building on the Rue du Faubourg
+Poissonière--at precisely nine o'clock of the morn. I was put in a
+large room with an indiscriminate lot of candidates, some of them so
+young as to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep we
+huddled and as my eyes feverishly rambled I noticed a lad of about
+twelve with curling hair worn artist fashion; a naughty haughty boy
+he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs and audibly inquired: "Is
+grandpa to play with us!" I knew enough French to hate that little
+monster with a nervous hatred. There was a tightened feeling about
+my throat and heart and I waited in an agitated spirit for my
+number. A bearded and shy young man came in from examination and was
+at once mocked by the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes. Another
+unfortunate, with a roll of music! Then the little devil was
+summoned. We sat up. In ten minutes he returned with downcast mien,
+flushed face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of the
+room, but too late. After shaking hands all round we solemnly danced
+in a circle about the now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who
+says youth is ever generous?
+
+"Number thirteen!" sang out a voice, and I was pushed through a
+narrow entry and a minute later was standing on the historic stage
+of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was dim, but I discerned a
+group of persons somewhere in front of me. A man asked me to sit
+down at the grand piano--of course, like most pianos, out of
+tune--and I tremblingly obeyed his polite request. At this juncture
+a woman's voice inquired: "How old are you, monsieur?" I told her. A
+feminine laugh rippled through the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little
+beard, was undeniably gawky, and looked conspicuously older than my
+years. That laugh settled me. Queer, creepy feelings seized my legs,
+my eyes were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace and my
+heart beat like a triphammer. I was not the first man, young or old,
+to be knocked out by a woman's laugh. (Later I met the lady. She was
+Madame Massart, and the wife of the well-known violin master,
+Massart, of the Conservatoire.) Again the demand, "Play something."
+It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't. I began a minuetto
+from a Beethoven Sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and a
+kaleidoscope of comets, then pitched into a presto by the
+unfortunate Beethoven, and was soon stopped. A sheet of manuscript
+was placed before me. I could have sworn that it was upside down, so
+as a sight-reading test it was a failure. I was altogether a
+distinguished failure, and with the audible comment of the examining
+faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled across the stage into welcome
+darkness, and without waiting to thank Secretary Rety for his
+amiability I got away, crossing in a hurry that celebrated courtyard
+in which the hideous noises made by many instruments, including the
+human voice, reminded me of a torture circle in Dante's Inferno.
+
+The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical--or
+unmusical--son that dull day in November, 1878. When I arrived in my
+garret I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the
+xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a
+more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an
+active student you may have influence enough to become an
+"auditeur," a listener; and a listener I became and in the class of
+Professor Georges Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical
+readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master I
+learned many things about the Polish composer; heard from his still
+supple fingers much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and
+discriminating in style, M. Mathias had never developed into a
+brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he produced effects on the
+keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high
+shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors. He also taught
+me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before
+the public, then he or she has not a musical vocation--the case of
+Adolf Henselt to the contrary notwithstanding. But better would it
+be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly
+enough to succeed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+VIOLINISTS NOW AND YESTERYEAR
+
+
+With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of
+the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument
+devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone
+compared it with the locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism of
+the wheeled monster, its type is transitional; steam is already
+supplanted by electricity; while the violin is perfection, as
+perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of
+emotion next to the human voice; indeed it is even more poignant.
+Orchestrally massed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with
+banners. In quartet form it represents the very soul of music; it is
+both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its
+great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism is,
+nevertheless, a monster of music if placed beside the violin, with
+its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music-making. The
+scraping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric
+times, nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its ingenious manner
+of producing sound. But the violin, as we know it to-day, is not
+such an old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth century
+before it made its appearance, with its varnished and modelled back.
+
+Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the violin has had for its
+votaries men of such widely differing temperaments as Paganini and
+Spohr, Wilhelmj and Sarasate, Joachim and Ysaye. Its literature does
+not compare with that of the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven,
+Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms have written their choicest music, yet
+the intimate nature of the violin, its capacity for passionate
+emotion, crowns it--and not the organ, with its mechanical tonal
+effects--as the king of instruments. Nor does the voice make the
+peculiar appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G below the
+treble clef, and its top note a mere squeak; but it seems in a few
+octaves to have imprisoned within its wooden walls a miniature world
+of feeling; even in the hands of a clumsy amateur it has the
+formidable power of giving pain; while in the grasp of a master it
+is capable of arousing the soul.
+
+No other instrument has the ecstatic quality; neither the
+shallow-toned pianoforte, nor the more mellow and sonorous
+violoncello. The angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of the
+violin are without parallel in music or nature. It is as if this box
+with four strings across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous
+system than all other instruments. It is a cry, a shriek, a hymn to
+heaven, a call to arms, an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series
+of multi-coloured visions, a broad song of passion, or mocking
+laughter--what cannot the violin express if the soul that guides it
+be that of an artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is the
+hero, the heroine, the vanguard of every composition. As a solo
+instrument in a concerto, its still small voice is heard above the
+din and thunder of the accompaniment. In a word, this tiny music-box
+is the ruler among instruments.
+
+Times have changed since 1658 in England, when the following
+delightful ordinance was made for the benefit of musical genius, or
+otherwise:
+
+"And be it enacted that if any person or persons, commonly called
+Fiddlers, or minstrels, shall at any time after the said first of
+July be taken playing, fiddling, or making music in any inn,
+alehouse or tavern, or shall be proffering themselves, or desiring,
+or entreating any person or persons to hear them play ... shall be
+adjudged rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars."
+
+Decidedly, England was not then the abode of the muses, for the poor
+actor suffered in company with the musician. You wonder whether this
+same penalty would be imposed upon musical managers ... they
+certainly do "entreat" the public to listen to their "fiddlers." Yet
+in 1690 when Corelli, the father of violin playing, led the band at
+Cardinal Ottoboni's house in Rome, he stopped the music because his
+churchly patron was talking, and he made an epigram that has since
+served for other artists: "Monsignore," remarked this intrepid
+musician, when asked why the band had ceased, "I feared the music
+might interrupt the conversation." How well Liszt knew this anecdote
+may be recalled by his retort to a czar of Russia under similar
+circumstances.
+
+Until a few months ago I had not heard Eugene Ysaye play for years.
+In the old days he had enchanted my ears, and in company with
+Gerardy, the violoncellist and Pugno the pianist had made music fit
+for the gods. Considering the flight of the years, I found the art
+of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like Liszt, like Paderewski,
+Ysaye has his good moments and his indifferent. He is the Paderewski
+of the strings in his magical interpretations. And unlike his
+younger contemporaries, he still carves out the whole block of the
+great classics, sonatas, and concertos. He plays little things
+tenderly, exquisitely, and the man is first the musician, then the
+virtuoso.
+
+I heard neither Paganini nor Spohr. Joachim, Wilhelmj, Wieniawski,
+and Ysaye I have heard and seen. My memory assures me of keener
+satisfactions than any book about these giants of the four strings
+could give me. The first violinist I ever listened to was in the
+early seventies. I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination.
+Yet I remember much. It was at the opera, a matinee in the
+Philadelphia Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I can't recall
+her on that occasion, though it seems only the other day when
+Carlotta Patti sang the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, and
+limped over the stage--possibly the lameness fixed the event in my
+mind more than the music.
+
+A "front" set was dropped between the acts at this particular
+matinee--I do not recollect the name of the opera--and through a
+"practicable" door came an old gentleman with a violin in his hands.
+He was white-haired, he wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to
+my young eyes like a prosperous banker. He played. It was as the
+sound of falling waters on a moonlight night. I asked the name of
+the old gentleman. My father said, "Henri Vieuxtemps," which told me
+nothing then, though it means much to me now. What did he play? I do
+not know. Yet whenever I hear the younger men attack his Fantaisie
+Caprice, his Ballade and Polonaise, his Concertos, I think proudly:
+"I have heard Vieuxtemps!" He was a Belgian, born 1820, died 1881.
+His style was finished, elegant, charming. He was a pupil of De
+Bériot and represented, with his master, perfection in the Belgian
+school.
+
+After an interval of some years, I heard the only pupil of
+Paganini, as he called himself, Camillo Sivori. It was in Paris,
+1879. The precise day I can't say but my letter from Paris which
+appeared in the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_ was dated January
+31, 1879. I still preserve it in a venerable scrap-book. I was in my
+'teens but I wrote with the courage of youthful ignorance as
+follows: (It almost sounds like a musical criticism.) "Although it
+was generally supposed that Sivori, the great violinist, would not
+play this season in Paris, he, nevertheless delighted a large
+audience, last Sunday, at the Concert Populaire, with his lovely
+music. He is no longer a young man, but the vigour and fire of his
+playing are immense. He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment, a
+Berceuse, his own composition, with unapproachable delicacy. It was
+played throughout with the mute. In contrast came a Mouvement
+Perpetuel. Sivori's tone is not like that of Joachim or Wilhelmj,
+but it is sweeter than either. It reminds one of gold drawn to
+cobweb fineness. As an encore he played the too well known Carnival
+of Venice. That it was given in the style of his illustrious master,
+Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing, painful, finally
+tiresome." That same season I heard Anna Bock, Boscovitz, Diémer,
+Planté, Theodore Ritter, the two Jaells, fat Alfred and his thin
+wife.
+
+Sivori (1815-1894), dapper, modest, stood up in the vast spaces of
+the Cirque d'Hiver, which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques
+Pasdeloup and his orchestra. (Jacob Wolfgang was the real name of
+this conductor who braved the wrath of his audiences by putting
+Wagner on his programmes; and one afternoon we had a pitched battle
+over Rimsky-Korsakoff's Symphonic Poem, Sadko.) Sivori played a
+tarantella; every tone was clearly heard in the great, crowded
+auditorium. Pupils of De Bériot and Paganini I have heard, though I
+hardly recall the style of the former and nothing of the latter. But
+there was little of Paganini's fiery attack in Sivori; possibly he
+was too old. Fire and fury I later found in Wieniawski.
+
+I must not omit the name of Ole Bull (1810-1880), for, though I
+heard him as a boy, I best remember him in 1880, when he gave his
+last concerts in America. In the fifties, while on a visit to my
+father's house, he went on his two thumbs around a dining-table,
+lifting his body clear from the ground. His muscular power was
+remarkable. It showed in the dynamics of his robust and sentimental
+playing. Spohr discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of his
+"wonderful playing and sureness of his left hand; unfortunately,
+like Paganini, he sacrifices what is artistic to something that is
+not quite suitable to the noble instrument. His tone, too, is
+bad...." For Spohr any one's tone was, naturally enough, bad, as he
+possessed the most monumental tone that ever came from a violin.
+
+The truth is that Ole Bull was not a classical player; as I remember
+him, he could not play in strict tempo; like Chopin, he indulged in
+the rubato and abused the portamento. But he knew his public.
+America a half-century ago, particularly in the regions he visited,
+was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos. Old Dan Tucker and the
+Arkansaw Traveller were the mode. Bull played them both, played jigs
+and old tunes, roused the echoes with the Star Spangled Banner and
+Irish melodies. He played such things beautifully, and it would have
+been musical snobbery to say that you didn't like them. You couldn't
+help yourself. The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was a handsome
+Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan and a touch of Liszt in his
+tall, willowy figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair. Such
+white hair! It tumbled in masses about his kindly face like one of
+his native Norwegian cataracts. He was the most picturesque old man
+I ever saw except Walt Whitman, at that time a steady attendant of
+the Carl Gaertner String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia. (And what
+Walt didn't know about music he made up in his love for stray dogs;
+he was seldom without canine company.)
+
+Those were the days when Prume's La Mélancolie and Wieniawski's
+Légende were the two favourite, yet remote, peaks of the student's
+répertoire. How we loved them! Then came Wieniawski with Rubinstein
+in 1872-1873, and such violin playing America had never before
+heard--nor has it since, let me hasten to add. This Pole (1835-1880)
+was a brilliant master. His dash and fire and pathos carried you off
+your feet. His tone at times was like molten metal. He had a
+caressing and martial bow. His technique was infallible, his
+temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle, fierce. Wieniawski
+always reminded me of a red-hot coal. How chivalric is his
+Polonaise--that old war-horse! How elegiac his Légende! His
+favourite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg, the greatest violin talent
+that has been thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg had
+everything when a youth--temperament, brains, musical feeling, and
+great technical ability.
+
+After Wieniawski followed Wilhelmj, who did not efface his memory,
+but plunged one into another atmosphere; that of the calm, profound,
+untroubled, and classic. No doubt Spohr's tone was larger, yet this
+is difficult to believe. Wilhelmj drew from his instrument the
+noblest sounds I ever heard; not Joachim, not Ysaye excelled him in
+cantabile. He was the first to play Wagner transcriptions--no wonder
+Wagner made him leader of the strings at Bayreuth in 1876. How he
+read the Beethoven Concerto, the Bach Chaconne. Or the D flat
+Nocturne of Chopin--in D. Or the much abused Mendelssohn E Minor
+Concerto--with Max Vogrich accompanying him at the piano. A giant
+in physique, when he faced his audience there was something of the
+majestic, fair-haired god Wotan in his immobile posture. He never
+appealed to his public as did Wieniawski; there was always something
+of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelmj's play. The last time
+I saw him was at Marienbad, shortly before his death, where, a
+stooped-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he was taking a Kur. He
+walked slowly, his hands clasped behind him, in his eyes the vacant
+look of one busy with memories. He reminded me of Beethoven's
+pictures.
+
+Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I
+heard him in London. He played out of tune--some of his pupils have
+imitated his failing--but whether in a Beethoven quartet, concerto,
+sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that
+Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This
+is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with
+another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke
+such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers.
+Maud Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has asserted that it
+took her three years before she could recover herself in the
+presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as
+not at all assertive. He seemed an "objective" player, _i. e._, you
+thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself
+of their Olympian measures. The grand manner is now out of fashion.
+We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures.
+Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski set my blood
+coursing faster; but in Joachim's presence I felt as if near some
+old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped gods.
+
+Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely, and scratch
+diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose
+and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I
+had an opportunity to study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was
+Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He brought to my father's
+house in the early eighties his favourite instruments, and such a
+wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour,
+everything from Bach to Brahms--and incidentally scolded Brahms for
+"stealing" some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances! (Which is a
+joke, as Brahms only followed the examples of Liszt and Joachim in
+avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did such tricks as
+dashing off in impeccable tune his arrangement of the D Flat Valse
+of Chopin in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will
+understand the feat when I tell them that the key was the original
+one--D flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow
+clangorously in the opening chords of the Rackoczy March. What a
+hero then seemed this stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man with
+the face of an unfrocked priest. How he could talk in a half-dozen
+different languages; he had travelled enough and encountered enough
+celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He
+was a violinist of unquestionable power; that he deteriorated in his
+later years was to have been expected. Liszt understood and
+appreciated Remenyi from the first; he nicknamed him "the Kossuth of
+the Fiddle."
+
+To recall all the celebrities of the violin I have heard since 1870
+would be hardly possible. I've forgotten most of them, though I do
+remember that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont, who ended his life,
+so rich in possibilities, it is said as a billiard marker. He was
+spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad. Another wonder-child kept
+his head, and to-day fascinating Fritz Kreisler is a master of
+masters and a favourite in America without peer. He first appeared
+at Boston and in 1888. In Paris I recall Marsick and his polished
+style; the gallant Sauret, Johannes Wolf, and the brilliant and
+elegant Timothée Adamowski. And in 1880, Marie Tayau and her woman
+quartet, a member of which was Jeanne Franko, the sister of the
+conductors and violinists, Sam Franko and Nahan Franko; Cæsar
+Thomson, the miraculous; C. M. Loeffler--subtle player, subtle
+composer; Sarasate with his sweet tone; Brodsky and his masculine
+manner; Willy Burmester and his pallid pyrotechnics; the learned
+Schradieck, the Bohemian Ondricek, the dashing Ovide Musin, Bernhard
+Listemann, Carl Halir; Gregorowitsch, the languid; brilliant
+Marteau; Alexander Petschinikoff, the Russian; the musicianly Max
+Bendix; the astonishing John Rhodes, the wonder-worker Kubelik and
+his icy perfections; Kocian, Willy Hess, Efrem Zimbalist, Albert
+Spalding, Arthur Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths, Von
+Veczsey, Horszowski--all have crossed the map of my memory. And
+Franz Kneisel and the Kneisel Quartet, dispensers of musical joys
+for decades, but alas! no more. Alas! I would not barter memories of
+their music-making for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must not forget
+Joseph White, the Cuban violinist, who was with Theodore Thomas one
+season. His style was finished and Parisian. He was a mulatto and a
+handsome man. The night I heard him he played the Mendelssohn
+concerto, and at the beginning of the slow movement his chanterelle
+broke. Calmly he took concert master Richard Arnold's proffered
+instrument and triumphantly finished the composition.
+
+Three violinists abide clear in my recollection: Wieniawski,
+Wilhelmj, and Ysaye. The last named is dearer because nearer,
+contrary to the supposed rule that the older the thing the worse it
+is. Ysaye is the magician of the violin. He holds us in a spell with
+that elastic, curving bow of his, with those many coloured tones,
+tender, silky, sardonic, amorous, rich, and ductile. He interprets
+the classics as well as the romantics; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms;
+Vieuxtemps as well as Sibelius. Above all else, his mastery of the
+violin's technical mysteries, looms his musical temperament. He has
+imagination.
+
+I have reserved the women for the last. A goodly, artistic company.
+It is not necessary to go back to the Milanolla sisters. We still
+cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her broad musicianly
+manner; the finished style of Normann-Neruda, Maris Soldat, the
+gifted and unhappy Arma Senkrah, Nettie Carpenter, Teresina Tua--who
+did not become a "Fiddle Fairy" when she visited us in 1887--Leonora
+Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maud Powell. In Europe many
+years ago, I heard Marcella Sembrich, who, after playing the E Flat
+Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked up a violin and dashed off
+the Wieniawski Polonaise; these feats were followed by songs, one
+being Viardot-Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's D Major Mazourka.
+Sembrich is the blue rose among great singers. Gericke, Paur,
+Nikisch were at first violinists; so was Fritz Scheel, late
+conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Franz Kneisel is a
+conductor of great skill; so is Frederick Stock, who followed
+Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
+Theodore Spiering formerly concert-master of the Philharmonic
+orchestra proved himself an excellent conductor. But that a little
+Polish woman could handle with ease two instruments and sing like an
+angel besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine Morgan is an
+admirable violin artiste who plays solo as well as quartet with
+equal authority.
+
+Maud Powell has fulfilled her early promise. She is a mature
+artiste, one who will never be finished because she will always
+study, always improve. A Joachim pupil, she is, nevertheless, a
+pupil of Maud Powell, and her playing reveals breadth, musicianship,
+beauty of tone and phrasing. She is our greatest American violin
+virtuosa.
+
+I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of the many Mischas and
+Jaschas who mew on the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in
+London: "United to an amazing technical precision there is a still
+more amazing emotional temperament, all dominated by a powerful
+musical and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his
+teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither
+as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as Ysaye's? Elman will
+mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His
+tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colours. He
+displays numberless nuances of feeling. The musical in him dominates
+the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth asserts itself, and
+often, self-intoxicated, he intoxicates his audiences with his
+sensuous, compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the
+boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice
+to Slavic despair--Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen
+to him I almost forget Ysaye." Yet when I heard Ysaye play last
+season it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a
+critic, too, may have his moods. And now comes another conqueror,
+the lad Jasha Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer and an
+artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among
+contemporary violinists--is it necessary to mention names?--have
+said of him that his art begins where theirs ends, and that they
+will shut up shop when he plays here. All of which is a flattering
+tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz, however, may be the
+dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+RIDING THE WHIRLWIND
+
+
+Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be
+born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who
+offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a
+sauce?
+
+Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the
+commonplaces of to-day. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors,
+wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of
+course by the man in the street. How stale will seem woman suffrage
+and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art
+conditions are analogous. The cubist nail drove out the
+impressionist, and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is
+sufficiently heavy.
+
+Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make
+a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether
+captive or free; in the case of the former, a trip to the top of the
+Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I
+rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks, or about $25, was
+the tariff) and saw Potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The
+passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate, drank, even smoked. The
+travelling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer
+day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster air-ship left its
+hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked
+the flavour of adventure. And that leads me to a personal
+confession.
+
+I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the
+Darwinian sense am I a "sport," a deviation from the normal history
+of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A
+baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I
+can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the
+frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen
+asleep over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and the biggest
+bore of all was a Sunday afternoon bull-fight in Madrid. It was such
+a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, shell races
+are puerile, football matches smack of obituaries. As for golf--that
+is a prelude to senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's
+establishment.
+
+The swiftness of film pictures has set a new metronomic standard for
+modern sports. I suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard is as
+exciting a game as any; that is, for those who like it. A
+four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It
+beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.
+
+Conceive me as an elderly person of generous waist measurement,
+slightly reckless like most near-sighted humans; this recklessness
+is psychical. Safety first, and I always watch my step; painful
+experience taught me years ago the perils that lurk in ambush for a
+Johnny-look-in-the-air.
+
+Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated me. The fantastic
+stories of H. G. Wells were ever a joy. When the Argonauts of the
+Air appeared, flying was practically assured, although a Paris
+mathematician had demonstrated with ineluctable logic that it was
+impossible; as proved a member of the Institute a century earlier
+that birds couldn't fly. It was an illusion. Well, the Wrights flew,
+even if Langley did not--Langley, the genuine father of the
+aeroplane.
+
+Living so long in France and Belgium, I had grown accustomed to the
+whirring of aerial motors, a sound not unlike that of a motor-boat
+or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became accustomed to this drone above
+the housetops, and since my return to America I have often wondered
+why in the land where the aeroplane first flew, so little public
+interest was manifested. To be sure, there are aero clubs, but they
+never fly where the interest of the greater public can be intrigued.
+Either there is a hectic excitement over some record broken or else
+the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the money devil at the bottom of
+the trouble? Sport for sport's sake, like art for art's sake, is
+rarely encountered. The government has taken up flying, but that is
+for pragmatic purposes. The aeroplane as a weapon of defence, not
+the aeroplane as a new and agreeable pleasure. We are not a
+disinterested nation; even symphony concerts and opera and the
+salvation of souls are commercial propositions. Else would our skies
+be darkened by flying machines instead of smoke, and our churches
+thronged with aviators.
+
+Walking on the famous and fatiguing Boardwalk of Atlantic City I
+suddenly heard a familiar buzzing in the air and looked up. There it
+was, a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragon-fly, speeding from
+the Inlet down to the million-dollar pier. Presently there were two
+of them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilised land. On the
+trolleys were signs: "See the Flying Boats at the Inlet!" I did, the
+very next morning. I had no notion of being a passenger. I was not
+tempted by the thought. But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I
+lounged down the beach to the Kendrick biplane, and stared my full
+at its slender proportions. A young man in a bathing-suit explained
+to me the technique of flying, and insinuated that hundreds and
+hundreds had flown during the season without accident. Afternoon saw
+me again on the sands, an excited witness of a flight; excited
+because I stood behind the motor when it was started for a
+preliminary tryout--"tuning up" is the slang phrase of the
+profession--and the cyclonic gale blew my hat away, loosened my
+collar, and made my teeth chatter.
+
+Such a tornadic roar! I firmly resolved that never would I trust
+myself in such a devil's contrivance. Why, it was actually riding
+the whirlwind--and, perhaps, reaping a watery grave. What else but
+that? On a blast of air you sail aloft and along. When the air
+ceases you drop (less than forty-five miles an hour). And this in a
+flimsy box kite. Never for me! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow
+with a crusty cottage! as we used to say in dear old "Lunnon" years
+ago. Nevertheless, the poison was in my veins; cunningly it began to
+work. I saw a passenger, a fat man, weighing two hundred and four
+pounds--I asked for the figures--trussed up like a calf in the arms
+of a slight, muscular youth, who carried him a limp burden and
+deposited him on a seat in the prow of the boat. I turned my head
+away. I am not easily stirred--having reported musical and
+theatrical happenings for a quarter of a century--but the sight of
+that stout male, a man and a brother (I didn't know him from Adam),
+evoked a chord of pity in my breast. I felt that I would never set
+eyes again on this prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the
+spot and returned to my hotel, determined to say, "Retro me,
+Sathanas!" if that personage should happen to show me his hoofs,
+horns, and hide.
+
+But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast. He had simply set
+jangling the wires of suggestion, and my nerves accomplished the
+rest. One morning, a few days later, I awoke parched with desire. I
+drank much strong tea to steady me and smoked unremittingly. Again,
+during the early afternoon, I found myself up the beach. "My feet
+take hold on hell," I said to myself, but it was only hot sand. I
+teased myself with speculations as to whether the game was worth the
+candle--yes, I had got that far, traversing a vast mental territory
+between the No-Sayer and the Yes-Sayer. I was doomed, and I knew it
+when I began to circle about the machine.
+
+Courteously the bonny youth explained matters. It was a Glenn H.
+Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, furnished with one of the new Curtiss
+engines of ninety horse-power, capable of flying seventy to ninety
+miles an hour, of lifting four hundred pounds, and weighing in all
+about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut, skinny piano wires that
+manipulated the steering-gear and the plane durable? Didn't they
+ever snap? Of course they were durable, and, of course, they
+occasionally snapped. What then? Why, you drop, in spiral
+fashion--volplane--charming vocable! But if the engine?--same thing.
+You would come to earth, rather water, as naturally as a child takes
+the breast. Nothing to fear.
+
+Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic City product--he was a
+professional swimmer and life-guard--and will look after you. The
+price is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars, but
+competition, which is said to be the life of trade, had operated in
+favour of the public. Rather emotionally I bade my man good day,
+promising to return for a flight the next morning, a promise I
+certainly did not mean to keep. This stupendous announcement he
+received coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian banality.
+
+And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it
+an eclipse, or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the
+supposititious spindles spoken of by Langley devouring the light of
+our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full
+of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must
+suffer terribly in the interim.
+
+Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome
+privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and as a
+consoling thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor
+who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely
+drunk, passionately reading to a group of miners from a table his
+lantern-illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel raw
+waste of grain in the making of bread when so many honest men were
+starving for whisky. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my
+hard-earned royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormented
+between the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity I
+retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that
+attacked me in an aeroplane.
+
+I shan't weary you with the further analysis of my soul-states
+during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed
+much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we
+boarded an Inlet car. I had the day previous resorted to a major
+expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering
+resolution, that I was going to fly; an expedient that seldom
+misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk,
+the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel if I failed to keep
+my promise.
+
+"Boaster! Swaggerer!" I muttered to myself en route. "Now are you
+satisfied? Thou tremblest, carcass! Thou wouldst tremble much more
+if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!" I quoted Turenne,
+and I was beginning to babble something about Icarus--or was it
+Phæton, or Simon Magus?--brought to earth in the Colosseum by a
+prayer from the lips of Saint Peter--when we arrived. How I hated
+the corner where we alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister
+in the dazzling sunlight--a red-hot Saturday, September 11, 1915,
+and the hour was 10.30 A. M. A condemned criminal could not have
+noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We
+ploughed through the sand. We reached the scaffold--at least it
+looked like one to me. "Hello, here's a church. Let's go in," I felt
+like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering Dickens and Mr.
+Wemmick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted Holy Scripture
+to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance.
+
+I asked my friend, and my voice sounded steady enough, whether the
+wind and weather seemed propitious for flying. Never better was the
+reply, and my heart went down to my boots. I really think I should
+have escaped if a stout man with a piratical moustache hadn't
+approached me and asked: "Going up to-day?" I marvelled at his
+calmness, and wished for his instant dissolution, but I gave an
+affirmative shake of the head. Cornered at last! Handing my watch,
+hat, and wallet to my friend, I coldly awaited the final
+preparations. I had forgotten my ear protector, but cotton-wool
+would answer the purpose of making me partially deaf to the
+clangorous vibration of the propeller blades--which resemble in a
+magnified shape the innocent air-fans of offices and cafés. I
+essayed one more joke--true gallows humour--before I was led like a
+lamb (a tough one) to the slaughter. I asked an attendant to whom I
+had paid the official fee if my widows would be refunded the money
+in case of accident; but this antique and tasteless witticism was
+indifferently received, as it deserved. Finally the young man gave
+me a raincoat, grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me clasp
+his neck he carried me out into shallow water and sat me beside the
+air-pilot, who looked like a mere lad in his bathing-clothes. My
+hand must have been trembling (ah, that old piano hand), for he
+inquiringly eyed me. The motor was screaming as we flew through the
+water toward the Inlet. I hadn't courage of mind to make a farewell
+signal to my companion. Too late, we're off! I thought, and at once
+my trepidation vanished.
+
+I had for some unknown reason, possibly because of absolute despair,
+suffered a rich sea-change. We churned the waves. I saw tiny sails
+studding the deep blue. Men fished from the shore. As we neared the
+Inlet, where a shambling wooden hotel stands on the sandy point, the
+sound of the motor grew intenser. We began to lift, not all at once,
+but gradually. Suddenly her nose poked skyward, and the boat climbed
+the air with an ease that was astonishing. No shock. No jerkiness.
+We simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native heath--you will
+pardon the Hibernicism--and as if determined to pay a visit to the
+round blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant blue. And with the
+mounting ascent I became unconscious of my corporeal vesture. I had
+become pure spirit. I feared nothing. The legend of angels became a
+certainty. I was on the way to the Fourth Dimensional vista. I
+recalled Poincaré's suggestion that there is no such thing as
+matter; only holes in the ether. Nature embracing a vacuum instead
+of abhorring it. A Swiss cheese universe. Joseph Conrad has said
+"Man on earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close
+investigation." But man in the air? Man is destined to wings. Was I
+not proving it? Flying is the sport of gods, and should be of humans
+now that the motor-car is become slightly "promiscuous."
+
+The Inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were a network of silvery
+ribbons. The heat was terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But I
+no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay-fever problem. The wind
+forced me to clench my teeth. We were hurled along at seventy miles
+an hour, and up several thousand feet, yet below the land seemed
+near enough to touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts I
+wondered that we didn't graze them--so elusive was the crystal
+clearness of the atmosphere, a magic mirror that made the remote
+contiguous. The mast of the sunken schooner hard by the sand-bar
+looked like a lead-pencil one could grasp and write a message to
+Mars.
+
+Hello! I was become lyrical. It is inescapable up in the air. The
+blood seethes. Ecstasy sets in; the kinetic ecstasy of a
+spinning-top. I gazed at the pilot. He twisted his wheel
+nonchalantly as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over the sides
+of the cedar boat and was not giddy, for I had lived years at the
+top of an apartment-house, ten stories high, from which I daily
+viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks; besides, I have
+strong eyes and the stomach of a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no
+nausea. Only exaltation as we swooped down to lower levels. Atlantic
+City, bizarre, yet meaningless, outrageously planned and executed,
+stretched its ugly shape beneath us; the most striking objects were
+the exotic hyphenated hotel, with its Asiatic monoliths and dome,
+and its vast, grandiose neighbour, a mound of concrete, the biggest
+hotel in the world. The piers were salient silhouettes. A
+checker-board seemed the city, which modulated into a tremendous
+arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to stare seaward. The
+absorbent cotton in my ears was transformed into gun-cotton, so
+explosive the insistent drumming of the motor-engine. Otherwise, we
+flew on even keel, only an occasional dip and a sidewise swing
+reminding me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway. The initial
+intoxication began to wear off, but not the sense of freedom, a
+glorious freedom; truly, mankind will not be free till all fly.
+
+Alas! though we become winged we remain mortal. We may shed our
+cumbersome pedestrian habits, but we take up in the air with us our
+petty souls. I found myself indulging in very trite thoughts. What a
+pity that war should be the first to degrade this delightful and
+stimulating sport! Worse followed. Why couldn't I own a machine?
+Base envy, you see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work. No
+use; we shall remain human even in heaven or hell.
+
+I have been asked to describe the sensation of flying. I can't. It
+seems so easy, so natural. If you have ever dreamed of flying, I can
+only say that your dream will be realised in an aeroplane. Dreams do
+come true sometimes. (Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying
+since.) But as there is an end even to the most tedious story, so
+mine must finish.
+
+Suddenly the sound of the engine ceased. The silence was thrilling,
+almost painful. And then in huge circles, as if we were descending
+the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came down, the bow of the
+flying boat pointing at an angle of forty-five degrees. Still no
+dizziness, only a sense of regret that the trip was so soon over. It
+had endured an eternity, but occupied precisely twenty-one minutes.
+
+We reached the water and settled on the foam like a feather. Then we
+churned toward the beach; again I was carried, this time on to solid
+land, where I had ridiculous trouble in getting the cotton from my
+harassed eardrums. Perhaps my hands were unsteady, but if they were,
+my feet were not.
+
+I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew
+the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and
+twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I had enjoyed a new
+pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves!
+And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He
+flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears--a moral as well as a
+physical victory for a timid conservative.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING
+
+(From the editorial page of the New York _Sun_, December 31, 1916)
+
+
+It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they
+may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs
+from the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who
+are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the
+eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital
+paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of
+deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite
+sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining
+appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle
+that we know you for what you are--the profoundest instinct of life:
+its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now,
+all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes
+unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and Space. Nature clothes
+the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears
+overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love
+itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religion is
+first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig
+to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the
+cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation,
+and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to
+speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe
+that the devil deserves the hindmost.
+
+We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of
+apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are
+the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the
+stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by
+compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast
+chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be
+for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too
+comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues.
+Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to
+preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we
+may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness,
+wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the
+body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.
+
+The human soul in health? But there is no spiritual health. The
+mystic, Doctor Tauler, has said: "God does not reside in a vigorous
+body"; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. The dolorous certitude
+that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease
+and death; that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning in
+the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute; that the
+only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep the
+prelude to the profound and eternal silence--why then this gabble
+about soul-states and the peace that passeth all understanding?
+Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are, when
+dynamic, mighty breeders of hope; if the powers and principalities
+of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are
+dominated by the leucocytes. Gods and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman,
+and other phantasms of the sky, may all be put on a microscopic
+slide and their struggles noted. And the evil ones are ever victors
+in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of
+mankind there is a tiny shrine with its burning taper; the idol is
+Self; the propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in vain.
+We succumb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we
+were sure of the River Styx afterward we should pay the ferry-tax
+with joy. Better Hades than the poppy of oblivion. "Ready to be
+anything in the ecstasy of being ever," as Sir Thomas Browne sagely
+remarks.
+
+The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like
+structures of English prose to the greater glory of God and for the
+edification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy
+of prayer in a singularly luminous passage: "Holy prayer procures
+the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of God.
+It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its
+course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon. It rules
+over all God's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of
+rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence
+of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our sufferance
+and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of
+persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But prayer
+that can do this much for us can do nothing at all without holiness,
+for God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God
+and doth His will, him He heareth."
+
+It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps the greatest English
+prose-master save John Milton, was a stickler for good works as well
+as faith. He was considered almost heterodox because of his violence
+of speech when the subject of death-bed repentance became a topic of
+discussion; indeed, his bishop remonstrated with him because of his
+stiff-necked opinions. To joust through life as at a pleasure
+tournament and when the dews of death dampen the forehead to call on
+God in your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine an act of
+slinking cowardice. Far better face the evil one in a defiant spirit
+than knock for admittance at the back door of paradise and try to
+sneak by the winged policeman into a vulgar bliss: unwon, unhoped
+for, undeserved. Therefore the rather startling statement, "God
+heareth not sinners," read in the light of Bishop Taylor's fervent
+conception of man's duty, hath its justification.
+
+But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces and "inspissated
+gloom" should not be long maintained when the coursers of the sun
+are plunging southward in the new year; when the Huntsman is up at
+Oyster Bay and "they are already past their first sleep in Persia."
+What a bold and adventurous piece of nature is man; yet how he
+stares at life as a frowning entertainment. Why must we "act our
+antipodes" when "all Africa and her prodigies are in us"? Ergo, let
+us be cheerful. God is with the world. Let us pray that during the
+ensuing year no rust shall colour our soul into a dingy red. Let us
+pray for the living that they may be loosed from their politics and
+see life steadily and whole.
+
+Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves to feel holier than
+our neighbours. Let us pray that we be not cursed with the itching
+desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the reformer is hard,
+and he always gets what he deserves: the contempt of his fellow men.
+He is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we are not struck by
+religious zeal; religious people are not always good people; good
+people are not envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or
+busybodies, or too much bound up in the prospect of the mote in
+their brother's eye and unmindful of the beam in their own.
+Furthermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the
+faults of women. Have faith. Have hope, and remember that charity is
+as great as chastity.
+
+Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful of Mother Church,
+her wisdom, her consolations, flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant,
+mumbo-jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the sacred name as they
+epileptically leap, shouting glory-kingdom-come and please settle at
+the captain's office.
+
+Though they run on all fours and bark as hyenas, they shall not
+enter the city of the saints, being money-changers in the Temple,
+and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and its burning pitch than
+a wilderness of such apes of God. Some men and women of culture and
+social position indorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their
+paradoxical conduct being any port in a storm; any degrading circus,
+so it be followed by a mock salvation. But salvation for whom? What
+deity cares for such foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion
+is silent and comes from within, and not to the din of brass-bands
+and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make the
+cosmos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our primate
+ancestors, the cave-dwellers? This squirming and panting and brief
+reform "true religion"? On the contrary it is a throwback to
+bestiality, to the vilest instincts. A "soul" that has to be saved
+by such means is a soul not worth the saving. To the discard with
+it, where, flaming in purgatorial fires, it may be refashioned for
+future reincarnation on some other planet.
+
+Abuse of drink is to be deplored, but Prohibition is more enslaving
+than alcohol. Paganism in its most exotic forms is preferable to
+this prize-ring Christianity. One may be zealous without wallowing
+in debasing superstition. Again, let us pray for these imbeciles and
+for the charlatans who are blinding them. Neither arts and sciences
+nor politics and philosophies will save the soul. The azure route
+lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of horn.
+
+Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes, who are still
+suffering from the injustice of Man, now some million of years. Let
+us pray that they be given the ballot to prove to them its utter
+futility as a cure-all. With it they shall be neither happier nor
+different. Once a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be deceived
+by illusive phrases. If they had not been oppressed they would
+to-day be "free"! Alas! free from their sex? Free from the burden of
+family? Free like men to carry on the rude labours of this ruder
+earth? To what purpose? To become second-rate men, when nature has
+endowed them with qualities that men vainly emulate, vainly seek to
+evoke their spirit in the arts and literature! Ages past woman
+should have attained that impossible goal, oppression or no; in
+fact, adversity has made man what he is--and woman, too. Pray, that
+she may not be tempted by the mirage into the desert, there to
+perish of thirst for the promised land. Nearly a century ago George
+Sand was preaching the equality of the sexes, and rightly enough.
+What has come of it? The vote? Political office? Professions,
+business opportunities? Yes, all these things, but not universal
+happiness. Woman's sphere--stale phrase!--is any one she hankers
+after; but let her not deceive herself. Her future will strangely
+resemble her past.
+
+William Dean Howells was not wrong when he wrote: Woman has only her
+choice in self-sacrifice. And sometimes not even the choosing. Why?
+Why are eclipses? Why are some men prohibitionists? Why do hens
+cluck after laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women that their
+politically ambitious leaders may no longer dupe them with
+fallacious promises--surely a "pathetic fallacy." But, then, females
+rush in where fools fear to tread.
+
+And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers, let us heartily pray that
+our imperial democracy (or is it a democratic empire?), our
+plutocratic republic (or should we say republican plutocracy?) may
+be kept from war; avoid "the drums and tramplings of three
+conquests." But by the Eternal Jehovah, God of battles, if we are
+forced to fight, then let us fight like patriotic Americans, and not
+gently coo, like pacifists and other sultry south winds. A billion
+for "preparedness," but not a penny for "pork," say we.
+
+And by the same token let us pray that those thundering humbugs and
+parasites who call themselves labour leaders--the blind leading the
+blind--for ever vanish. Because of their contumacious acts and
+egregious bamboozling of their victims, because of their false
+promises of an earthly paradise and a golden age, they deserve the
+harshest condemnation.
+
+Like certain Oriental discourses, our little Morality which began in
+the mosque has rambled not far from the tavern. Nevertheless, let us
+pray for the living as well as the dead. Oremus!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
+
+
+_What some distinguished writers have said of them_:
+
+Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: "Do you know that
+'Iconoclasts' is the only book of high and universal critical worth
+that we have had for years--to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It
+is at once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and sure."
+
+And of "Ivory Apes and Peacocks" he said, among other things: "I
+have marvelled at the vigilance and clarity with which you follow
+and judge the new literary and artistic movements in all countries.
+I do not know of criticism more pure and sure than yours." (October,
+1915.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of "Visionaries" Remy de Gourmont wrote, June 22, 1906: "I am
+convinced that you have written a very curious, very beautiful book,
+and one of that sort comes to us rarely."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, 1909, of "Egoists": "I have
+browsed through the pages of your book and found that you touch in a
+sympathetic style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the
+case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatment is extremely rare and
+courageous."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Georg Brandes, the versatile and profound Danish critic, wrote:
+"I find your breadth of view and its expression more European than
+American; but the essential thing is that you are an artist to your
+very marrow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Out of the depressing welter of our American writing upon
+     æsthetics, with its incredible thinness and triteness and
+     paltriness, its intellectual sterility, its miraculous dulness, its
+     limitless and appalling vapidity, Mr. James Huneker, and the small
+     and honorable minority of his peers, emerge with a conspicuousness
+     that is both comforting and disgraceful.... Susceptibility,
+     clairvoyance, immediacy of response, are his; he is the friend of
+     any talent that is fine and strange and frank enough to incur the
+     dislike of the mighty army of Bourbons, Puritans, and B[oe]otians.
+     He is innocent of prepossessions. He is infinitely flexible and
+     generous. Yet if, in the twenty years that we have been reading
+     him, he has ever praised a commonplace talent, we have no
+     recollection of it. His critical tact is well-nigh infallible....
+     His position among writers on æsthetics is anomalous and
+     incredible: no merchant traffics in his heart, yet he commands a
+     large, an eager, an affectionate public. Is it because he is both
+     vivid and acute, robust yet fine-fingered, tolerant yet unyielding,
+     astringent yet tender--a mellow pessimist, a kindly cynic? Or is it
+     rather because he is, primarily, a temperament--dynamic,
+     contagious, lovable, inveterately alive--expressing itself through
+     the most transparent of the arts?"
+          --LAWRENCE GILMAN, in _North American Review_ (October, 1915).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+NEW COSMOPOLIS
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a
+     craftsman of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and
+     distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He is
+     intensely 'modern,' well read in recent European writers, and not
+     lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. Ancient serenity
+     has laid no chastening hand on his thought and style, but he has
+     achieved at times a fineness of expression that lifts his work
+     above that of the many eager and artistic souls who strive to be
+     the thinkers of New England to-day. He flings off his impressions
+     at fervent heat; he is not ashamed to be enthusiastic; and he
+     cannot escape that large sentimentality which, to less disciplined
+     transatlantic writers, is known nakedly as 'heart interest.' Out of
+     his chaos of reading and observation he has, however, evolved a
+     criticism of life that makes for intellectual cultivation, although
+     it is of a Bohemian rather than an academic kind. Given a different
+     environment, another training, Mr. Huneker might have emerged as an
+     American Walter Pater."
+                                 --_London Athenæum_ (November 6, 1915).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MELOMANIACS
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase. Never
+     did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts,
+     not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and
+     obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were
+     perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of
+     thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness,
+     but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is
+     genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the
+     wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of
+     thought."
+           --HAROLD E. GORST, in _London Saturday Review_ (Dec. 8,1906).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+VISIONARIES
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy
+     and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly
+     moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his
+     heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in
+     these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering, and unblessed. But
+     Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a
+     tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's
+     stories."
+                                      --_London Academy_ (Feb. 3, 1906).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ICONOCLASTS:
+
+A Book of Dramatists
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in
+     which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every
+     sentence."
+                             --G. K. CHESTERTON, in _London Daily News_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the
+     music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words
+     as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping
+     strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And
+     as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of
+     quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and
+     temperament--a string that vibrates and sings in response to
+     music--we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very
+     valuable contribution to the world's tiny musical literature."
+                          --J. F. RUNCIMAN, in _London Saturday Review_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+FRANZ LISZT
+
+_WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+12mo. $2.00 net
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHOPIN: The Man and His Music
+
+12mo. $2.00 net
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+OVERTONES: A Book of Temperaments
+
+_WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS_
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant
+     of all living writers on matters musical."
+     --_Academy, London_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE
+
+A Book of a Thousand and One Moments
+
+12mo. $2.00 net
+
+     "He talks about Bergson as well as Matisse; he never can keep still
+     about Wagner; he hauls over his French library of modern immortals,
+     and he gives a touch to George Moore, to Arthur Davies, and to many
+     another valiant worker in paint, music, and letters. The book is
+     stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected
+     brilliancy."
+                                                    --_Chicago Tribune_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the
+     technical contributions of Cézanne and Rodin. Here Mr. Huneker is a
+     real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways in
+     art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such
+     appreciations as the Monticelli and Chardin."
+    --FRANK JEWETT MATHER, Jr., in _New York Nation_ and _Evening Post_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+EGOISTS
+
+_WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS_
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as
+     a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very
+     shrewd."
+                           --ROYAL CORTISSOZ, in the _New York Tribune_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the
+exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also
+inconsistently spelled words. The oe ligature is indicated by
+[oe].
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The full list of changes to the text is as following:
+
+
+p. 10
+
+"Lizst" changed to "Liszt"
+
+
+p. 24
+
+"Henri de Regnier" changed to "Henri de Régnier"
+
+
+p. 40
+
+"immediable" changed to "irremediable"
+
+
+p. 66
+
+"Maurice Barres" changed to "Maurice Barrès"
+
+
+p. 77
+
+"idylic" changed to "idyllic"
+
+
+p. 83
+
+"a critic should be ever so. (Consider" changed to
+"a critic should be ever so. Consider"
+
+Explanation: the opening bracket (with no corresponding closing
+bracket) was removed.
+
+
+p. 108
+
+"hippogrifs" changed to "hippogriffs"
+
+
+p. 112
+
+"misanthrophy" changed to "misanthropy"
+
+
+p. 116
+
+"Huysman's" changed to "Huysmans's"
+
+
+p. 117, p. 276
+
+"Barbey d'Aurevilly" changed to "Barbey d'Aurévilly"
+
+
+p. 127
+
+"promegranates" changed to "pomegranates"
+
+
+p. 133
+
+"Musica" changed to "Musical"
+
+
+p. 156
+
+"Cujol" changed to "Cajal"
+
+
+p. 165
+
+"Facino Cano" changed to "Facino Cane"
+
+
+p. 168
+
+"Frederic Chopin" changed to "Frédéric Chopin"
+
+
+p. 244
+
+"I'm a Social-Democrat now." changed to ""I'm a Social-Democrat now."
+
+Explanation: opening double quote added.
+
+
+p. 246
+
+"sich" changed to "such"
+
+
+p. 246
+
+"exclaims Maeterlinck," yet" changed to "exclaims Maeterlinck, "yet"
+
+Explanation: the double quote was moved to the next sentence.
+
+
+p. 327
+
+"De Beriot" changed to "De Bériot"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Please note that the text contains inconsistently spelled words or
+phrases that were not changed. The following is a list of those
+words. The number in brackets denotes the number of occurences of
+each such word or phrase.
+
+  - Café (1), Cafe (1)
+  - Eugene Ysaye (1), Eugène Ysaye (1)
+  - Karl Heymann (1), Carl Heyman (1)
+  - Trocadero (1), Trocadéro (2)
+  - bird-like (1), birdlike (1)
+  - bric-à-brac (1), bric-a-brac (1)
+  - free-will (1), free will (1)
+  - rusé (1), ruse (1)
+  - shadow-land (1), shadow land (1)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Unicorns
+
+Author: James Huneker
+
+Release Date: March 12, 2012 [EBook #39116]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNICORNS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Ewa "czupirek" Jaros and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div id="all">
+
+<div id="tnotes_mini">
+<h2>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES</h2>
+
+
+<p>The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the
+exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also
+inconsistently spelled words. The full list of both changes to the
+text and the inconsistencies in spelling can be found
+<a href="#tnotes_full">at the end of this file</a>. All the corrections
+are marked with a dashed line and the
+original text should appear on <ins class="ins" title="like this">hovering
+the mouse over it</ins>.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</a></span></p>
+<h1>BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER<br />
+
+<span class="subh1"><span class="smcap">Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</span></span></h1>
+
+<div id="books" class="other_books">
+<div><span class="smcap">UNICORNS.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.75</span></div>
+
+<div><span class="smcap">IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">NEW COSMOPOLIS.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $2.00</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">FRANZ LISZT.</span> Illustrated. 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $2.00</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">OVERTONES: A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC.</span> With Portrait. 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $2.00</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">VISIONARIES.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+<div><span class="smcap">MELOMANIACS.</span> 12mo, <span class="price"><i>net</i>, $1.50</span></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</a></span></p>
+<h1 class="paddinghugeB paddinghugeT"><a name="title" id="title"></a>UNICORNS</h1>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[iii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1 class="center paddinMedT">UNICORNS</h1>
+
+
+<h4 class="paddingMedT">BY</h4>
+
+<h3 class="paddingMedB">JAMES HUNEKER</h3>
+
+<p class="quote center block">
+&ldquo;I would write on the lintels<br />
+<span class="i2">of the door-post, &lsquo;Whim.&rsquo;&rdquo;</span><br />
+<span class="indent">&mdash;<i>Emerson</i><span/></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center paddinMedT">NEW YORK</p>
+
+<p class="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</p>
+
+<p class="center paddinMedB">1917</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">
+COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY<br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</p>
+<hr class="m" />
+<p class="center">Published September, 1917</p>
+<hr class="m" />
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1906, by THE NEW YORK HERALD COMPANY</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1907, by THE RIDGEWAY COMPANY</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1909, 1911, 1916, 1917, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING CO.</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, by THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1915, 1916, by PUCK PUBLISHING CO.</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1917, by NORTH AMERICAN</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1917, by THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="pagewidth1">
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
+<div align="center" class="center withpadded" id="ded">THIS BOOK<br />
+<span class="smaller">OF SPLEEN AND GOSSIP IS INSCRIBED</span><br />
+TO MY FRIEND<br />
+<span class="bigger">EDWARD ZIEGLER</span></div>
+
+<div class="motto" id="mainmotto">
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+&ldquo;Come! let us lay a crazy lance in rest<br />
+And tilt at windmills under a wild sky.&rdquo;
+</p></div>
+
+<p style='text-align: right'>
+&mdash;<i>John Galsworthy</i>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&ldquo;He is a fribble, a sonsy faddle, whose
+conceits veer with the breeze like a creaking
+weather-vane. As the sterile moon
+hath her librations, so must he boast of
+his oscillations, thinking them eternal
+verities. A very cockatoo in his perched-up
+vanity and prodigious clatter....&rdquo;</p></div>
+
+<p style='padding-left: 10em;'>
+[<i>From &ldquo;The Velvet Cactus.&rdquo; Anonymous.
+Printed at the Sign of the
+Cat and Cameo, Threadneedle Street,
+London. A.D. 1723. Rare.</i>]
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div id="cont_wrapper">
+    <div id="cont">
+	<div class="r">
+	    <div class="lc">CHAPTER</div>
+	    <div class="mc">&nbsp;</div>
+	    <div class="rc">PAGE</div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="r">
+	    <div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></div>
+	    <div class="mc"><span class="smcap">In Praise of Unicorns</span></div>
+	    <div class="rc"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">An American Composer: The Passing of Edward MacDowell</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_6">6</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Remy de Gourmont: His Ideas. The Colour of His Mind</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Artzibashef</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">A Note on Henry James</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">George Sand</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Great American Novel</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Case of Paul C&eacute;zanne</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Brahmsody</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_106">106</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Opinions of J.-K. Huysmans</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Style and Rhythm in English Prose </span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Queerest Yarn in the World</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_139">139</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">On Rereading Mallock</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Lost Master</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_161">161</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Grand Manner in Pianoforte Playing</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_171">171</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">XVI.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">James Joyce</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Creative Involution</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+
+	<div class="r"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Four Dimensional Vistas</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_203">203</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">XIX.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">O. W.</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">XX.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">A Synthesis of the Seven Arts</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">XXI.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Classic Chopin</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_228">228</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">XXII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Little Mirrors of Sincerity</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">XXIII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">The Reformation of George Moore</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">XXIV.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Pillowland</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">XXV.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Cross-Currents in Modern French Literature</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_283">283</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">XXVI.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">More About Richard Wagner</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">XXVII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">My First Musical Adventure</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_317">317</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">XXVIII.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Violinists Now and Yesteryear</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">XXIX.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Riding the Whirlwind</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+
+	<div class="r">
+		<div class="lc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">XXX.</a></div>
+		<div class="mc"><span class="smcap">Prayers for the Living</span></div>
+		<div class="rc"><a href="#Page_353">353</a></div>
+	</div>
+
+    </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>
+<h1 class="paddinghugeT paddinghugeB"><a name="UNICORNS_beginning" id="UNICORNS_beginning"></a>UNICORNS</h1>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h1  class="paddinghugeT paddingMedB"><a name="UNICORNS" id="UNICORNS"></a>UNICORNS</h1>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h2>IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS</h2>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&quot;The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town.&quot; ...<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In the golden book of wit and wisdom,
+Through the Looking-Glass, the Unicorn rather
+disdainfully remarks that he had believed children
+to be fabulous monsters. Alice smilingly
+retorts: &quot;Do you know, I always thought Unicorns
+were fabulous monsters, too? I never
+saw one alive before!&quot; &quot;Well, now that we
+<i>have</i> seen each other,&quot; said the Unicorn, &quot;if
+you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is
+that a bargain?&quot; &quot;Yes, if you like,&quot; said
+Alice. No such ambiguous bargains are needed
+to demonstrate the existence of Unicorns.
+That is, not for imaginative people. A mythical
+monster, a heraldic animal, he figures in the
+dictionary as the Monoceros, habitat, India;
+and he is the biblical Urus, sporting one horn,
+a goat beard and a lion's tail. He may be all
+these things for practical persons; no man is a
+genius to his wife. But maugre that he is something
+more for dreamers of dreams; though <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+not the Hippogriff, with its liberating wings,
+volplaning through the Fourth Dimension of
+Space; nor yet is he tender Undine, spirit of
+fountains, of whom the Unicorn asked: &quot;By
+the waters of what valley has jealous mankind
+hidden the source of your secrets?&quot; (Cousin
+german to the Centaur of Maurice de Gu&eacute;rin,
+he can speak in like cadence.)</p>
+
+<p>Alice with her &quot;dreaming eyes of wonder&quot;
+was, after the manner of little girls, somewhat
+pragmatic. She believed in Unicorns only
+when she saw one. Yet we must believe without
+such proof. Has not the Book of Job put
+this question: &quot;Canst thou bind the Unicorn
+with his band in the furrow?&quot; As if a harnessed
+Unicorn would be credible. We prefer placing
+the charming monster, with the prancing tiny
+hoofs of ivory (surely Chopin set him to musical
+notation in his capricious second Etude in
+F; Chopin who, if man were soulless, would
+have endowed him with one) in the same category
+as the Chimera of &quot;The Temptation of
+St. Antony,&quot; which thus taunted the Sphinx:
+&quot;I am light and joyous! I offer to the eyes of
+men dazzling perspectives with Paradise in
+the clouds above.... I seek for new perfumes,
+for vaster flowers, for pleasures never
+felt before....&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With Unicorns we feel the nostalgia of the
+infinite, the sorcery of dolls, the salt of sex,
+the vertigo of them that skirt the edge of perilous
+ravines, or straddle the rim of finer issues. He
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+dwells in equivocal twilights; and he can stare
+the sun out of countenance. The enchanting
+Unicorn boasts no favoured zone. He runs
+around the globe. He is of all ages and climes.
+He knows that fantastic land of Gautier, which
+contains all the divine lost landscapes ever
+painted, and whose inhabitants are the lovely
+figures created by art in granite, marble, or
+wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Betimes
+he flashes by the nymph in the brake, and
+dazzled, she sighs with desire. Mallarm&eacute; set
+him to cryptic harmonies, and placed him in
+a dim rich forest (though he called him a faun;
+a faun in retorsion). Like the apocryphal
+Sadhuzag in Flaubert's cosmical drama of
+dreams, which bore seventy-four hollow antlers
+from which issued music of ineffable sweetness,
+our Unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those
+who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets.
+When angered he echoes the Seven Thunders
+of the Apocalypse, and we hear of desperate
+rumours of fire, flood, and disaster. And he
+haunts those ivory gates of sleep whence come
+ineffable dreams to mortals.</p>
+
+<p>He has always fought with the Lion for the
+crown, and he is always defeated, but invariably
+claims the victory. The crown is Art, and the
+Lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by
+its glitter, not the symbol. The Unicorn, an
+idealist, divines the inner meaning of this precious
+fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher's
+stone, and the most brilliant jewel
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+in this much-contested crown. Eternal is the
+conflict of the Real and the Ideal; Aristotle
+and Plato; Alice and the Unicorn; the practical
+and the poetic; butterflies and geese; and
+rare roast-beef versus the impossible blue rose.
+And neither the Lion nor the Unicorn has yet
+fought the battle decisive. Perhaps the day
+may come when, weariness invading their
+very bones, they may realise that they are as
+different sides of the same coveted shield;
+matter and spirit, the multitude and the individual.
+Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish
+the tyrannies of superannuated superstitions,
+and give the people vision, without which they
+perish. The divine rights of humanity, no
+longer of kingly cabbages.</p>
+
+<p>The dusk of the future is washed with the
+silver of hope. The Lion and the Unicorn in
+single yoke. Strength and Beauty should
+represent the fusion of the Ideal and the Real.
+There should be no anarchy, no socialism, no
+Brotherhood or Sisterhood of mankind, just
+the millennium of sense and sentiment. What
+title shall we give that far-away time, that
+longed-for Utopia? With Alice and the Faun
+we forget names, so let us follow her method
+when in doubt, and exclaim: &quot;Here then!
+Here then!&quot; Morose and disillusioned souls
+may cry aloud: &quot;Ah! to see behind us no longer,
+on the Lake of Eternity, the implacable Wake
+of Time!&quot; nevertheless, we must believe in
+the reality of our Unicorn. He is Pan. He is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+Puck. He is Shelley. He is Ariel. He is Whim.
+He is Irony. And he can boast with Emerson:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&quot;I am owner of the sphere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the seven stars and the solar year,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of C&aelig;sar's hand and Plato's brain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h2>AN AMERICAN COMPOSER</h2>
+
+<h2 class="subh2">THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL</h2>
+
+
+<p>Whom the gods love&mdash;&mdash;!</p>
+
+<p>Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata
+Tragica may recall the last movement, in which,
+after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on
+tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief
+of MacDowell that nothing is more sublimely
+awful than &quot;to heighten the darkness
+of tragedy by making it follow closely on the
+heels of triumph.&quot; This he accomplished in his
+first sonata, and fate has ironically transposed
+to the life of its composer the cruel and tragic
+drama of his own music. Despite occasional
+days brightened by a flitting hope, the passing
+of Edward MacDowell has begun. He is no
+longer an earth-dweller. His body is here,
+but his brain elsewhere. Not mad, not melancholy,
+not sunken in the stupor of indifference,
+his mind is translated to a region where serenity,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+even happiness, dwells. It is doubtless the
+temporary arrest of the dread mental malady
+before it plunges its victims into darkness.
+Luckily, with the advent of that last phase, the
+body will also succumb, and the most poetic
+composer of music in America be for us but a
+fragrant memory.</p>
+
+<p>Irony is a much-abused word, yet does it
+not seem the very summit of pitiless irony for
+a man of MacDowell's musical and intellectual
+equipment and physical health to be stricken
+down at the moment when, after the hard
+study of twenty-five years, he has, as the expression
+goes, found himself? And the gods
+were good to him&mdash;too good.</p>
+
+<p>At his cradle poetry and music presided.
+He was a born tone-poet. He had also the
+painter's eye and the interior vision of the
+seer. A mystic and a realist. The practical
+side of his nature was shown by his easy grasp
+of the technics of pianoforte-playing. He had
+a large, muscular hand, with a formidable grip
+on the keyboard. Much has been said of the
+idealist MacDowell, but this young man, who
+had in his veins Scotch, Irish, and English
+blood, loved athletic sports; loved, like Hazlitt,
+a fast and furious boxing-match. The call of
+his soul won him for music and poetry. Otherwise
+he could have been a sea-captain, a soldier,
+or an explorer in far-away countries. He
+had the physique; he had the big, manly
+spirit. We are grateful, selfishly grateful, considering
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+his life's tragedy, that he became a
+composer.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, in all this abounding vitality,
+the irony of the skies is manifest. Never a
+dissipated man, without a touch of the improvidence
+we ascribe to genius, a practical
+moralist&mdash;rare in any social condition&mdash;moderate
+in his tastes, though not a Puritan, he nevertheless
+has been mowed down by the ruthless
+reaper of souls as if his were negligible clay.
+But he was reckless of the most precious part
+of him, his brain. He killed that organ by
+overwork. Not for gain&mdash;the money-getting
+ideal and this man were widely asunder&mdash;but
+for the love of teaching, for the love of sharing
+with others the treasures in his overflowing
+storehouse, and primarily for the love of music.
+He, American as he was&mdash;it is sad to speak
+of him in the past tense&mdash;and in these piping
+days of the pursuit of the gold piece, held steadfast
+to his art. He attempted to do what others
+have failed in, he attempted to lead, here in
+our huge, noisy city, antipathetic to &aelig;sthetic
+creation, the double existence of a composer
+and a pedagogue. He burned away the delicate
+neurons of the cortical cells, and to-day he
+cannot say &quot;pianoforte&quot; without a trial. He
+suffers from aphasia, and locomotor ataxia has
+begun to manifest itself. It would be tragedy
+in the household of any man; it is doubly so
+in the case of Edward MacDowell.</p>
+
+<p>He has just passed forty-five years and there
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+are to his credit some sixty works, about one
+hundred and thirty-two compositions in all.
+These include essays in every form, except
+music-drama&mdash;symphonic and lyric, concertos
+and sonatas for piano, little piano pieces of delicate
+workmanship, charged with poetic meanings,
+suites for orchestra and a romance for
+violoncello, with orchestral accompaniment. As
+a boy of fifteen MacDowell went to the Paris
+Conservatoire, there entering the piano classes
+of Marmontel. It was in 1876. Two years
+later I saw him at the same institution and
+later in comparing notes we discovered that we
+had both attended a concert at the Trocadero,
+wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant
+brother of Anton, played the B flat minor concerto
+of a youthful and unknown composer,
+Peter Illyitch Tschaikovsky by name. This
+same concerto had been introduced to America
+in 1876 by Hans von B&uuml;low, to whom it is
+dedicated. Rubinstein's playing took hold of
+young MacDowell's imagination. He saw there
+was no chance of mastering such a torrential
+style in Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany.
+He had enjoyed lessons from Teresa Carre&ntilde;o,
+but the beautiful Venezuelan was not then the
+virtuosa of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>So MacDowell, who was accompanied by
+his mother, a sage woman and deeply in sympathy
+with her son's aims, went to Frankfort,
+where he had the benefit of Karl Heymann's
+tuition. He was the only pianist I ever heard
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+who could be compared to our Rafael Joseffy.
+But his influences, while marked in the development
+of his American pupil, did not weaken
+MacDowell's individuality. Studies in composition
+under Joachim Raff followed, and then
+he journeyed to Weimar for his baptism of
+fire at the hands of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Lizst" id="tnote1">Liszt</ins>. That genial Prospero
+had broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted
+himself to the culture of youthful genius and
+his own compositions. He was pleased by the
+force, the surety, the brilliancy and the poetic
+qualities of MacDowell's playing, and he laughingly
+warned Eugen d'Albert to look to his
+laurels. But music was in the very bones of
+MacDowell, and a purely virtuoso career had
+no attraction for him. He married in 1884
+Marian Nevins, of New York, herself a pianist
+and a devoted propagandist of his music. The
+pair settled in Wiesbaden, and it was the happiest
+period of MacDowell's career. He taught;
+he played as &quot;guest&quot; in various German cities;
+above all, he composed. His entire evolution
+is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic
+monograph. It was in Wiesbaden that
+he laid the foundation of his solid technique as
+a composer.</p>
+
+<p>I once asked him during one of our meetings
+how he had summoned the courage to leave
+such congenial surroundings. In that half-smiling,
+half-shy way of his, so full of charm
+and na&iuml;vet&eacute;, he told me his house had burned
+down and he had resolved to return home and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+make enough money to build another. He
+came to America in 1888 and found himself,
+if not famous, at least well known. To Frank
+van der Stucken belongs the glory of having
+launched the young composer, and so long ago
+as 1886 in the old Chickering Hall. Some would
+like to point to the fact that America was MacDowell's
+artistic undoing, but the truth is
+against them. As a matter of musical history
+he accomplished his best work in the United
+States, principally on his farm at Peterboro,
+N. H.&mdash;hardly, one would imagine, artistic
+soil for such a dreamer in tones. But life has
+a way of contradicting our theories. Teaching,
+I have learned, was not pursued to excess by
+MacDowell, who had settled in Boston. Yet
+I wish there were sumptuary legislation for
+such cases. Why should an artist like MacDowell
+have been forced into the shafts of dull
+routine? It is the larger selfishness, all this,
+but I cling to it. MacDowell belonged to the
+public. Joseffy belongs to the public. They
+doubtless did and do much good as teachers,
+but the public is the loser. Besides, if MacDowell,
+who was a virtuoso had confined himself
+to recitals he might not&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Alas! all this is bootless imagining. He
+launched himself with his usual unselfishness
+into the advancement of his scholars, and when
+in 1896 he was called to the chair of music at
+Columbia the remaining seven years of his
+incumbency he gave up absolutely to his classes.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+A sabbatical year intervened. He went to
+Switzerland for a rest. Then he made a tour
+of the West, a triumphal tour; and later followed
+the regrettable difference with Columbia.
+He resigned in 1904, and I doubt if he had had
+a happy day since&mdash;that is, until the wave
+of forgetfulness came over him and blotted
+out all recollections.</p>
+
+<p>As a pianist I may only quote what Rafael
+Joseffy once said to me after a performance of
+the MacDowell D minor concerto by its composer:
+&quot;What's the use of a poor pianist trying
+to compete with a fellow who writes his
+own music and then plays it the way MacDowell
+does?&quot; It was said jestingly, but, as
+usual, when Joseffy opens his mouth there is
+a grain of wisdom in the speech. MacDowell's
+French training showed in his &quot;pianism&quot; in
+the velocity, clarity, and pearly quality of his
+scales and trills. He had the elegance of the
+salon player; he knew the traditions. But he
+was modern, German and Slavic in his combined
+musical interpretation and fiery attack.
+His tone was large; at times it was brutal.
+This pianist did not shine in a small hall. He
+needed space, as do his later compositions.
+There was something both noble and elemental
+in the performance of his own sonatas. At his
+instrument his air of preoccupation, his fine
+poetic head, the lines of which were admirably
+salient on the concert stage, and his passion
+in execution were notable details in the harmonious
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+picture. Like Liszt, MacDowell and
+his Steinway were as the rider and his steed.
+They seemed inseparable. Under the batons
+of Nikisch, Gericke, Paur, and Seidl we heard
+him, and for once at least the critics were unanimous.</p>
+
+<p>When I first studied the MacDowell music
+I called the composer &quot;a belated Romantic.&quot;
+A Romantic he is by temperament, while his
+training under Raff further accentuated that
+tendency. It is a dangerous matter to make
+predictions of a contemporary composer, yet
+a danger critically courted in these times of
+rapid-fire judgments. I have been a sinner
+myself, and am still unregenerate, for if it be
+sinful to judge hastily in the affirmative, by
+the same token it is quite as grave an error to
+judge hastily in the negative. So I shall dare
+the possible contempt of the succeeding critical
+generation, which I expect&mdash;and hope&mdash;will
+not calmly reverse our dearest predictions, and
+range myself on the side of MacDowell. And
+with this reservation; I called him the most
+poetic composer of America. He would be a
+poetic composer in any land; yet it seems to me
+that his greatest, because his most individual,
+work is to be found in his four piano sonatas.
+I am always subdued by the charm of his songs;
+but he did not find his fullest expression in his
+lyrics.</p>
+
+<p>The words seemed to hamper the bold wing
+strokes of his inspiration. He did not go far
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+enough in his orchestral work to warrant our
+saying: &quot;Here is something new!&quot; He shows
+the influence of Wagner slightly, of Grieg, of
+Raff, of Liszt, in his first Orchestral Suite, his
+Hamlet and Ophelia, Launcelot and Elaine;
+The Saracens and Lovely Alda, the Indian
+Suite, and in the two concertos. The form is
+still struggling to emerge from the bonds of
+the Romantics&mdash;of classic influence there is
+little trace. But the general effect is fragmentary.
+It is not the real MacDowell, notwithstanding
+the mastery of technical material, the
+genuine feeling for orchestral colour, which is
+natural, not studied. There are poetic moods&mdash;MacDowell
+is always a poet&mdash;yet no path-breaker.
+Indeed, he seemed as if hesitating.
+I remember how we discussed Brahms, Tschaikovsky,
+and Richard Strauss. The former he
+admired as a master builder; the latter piqued
+his curiosity tremendously, particularly Also
+Sprach Zarathustra. I think that Tschaikovsky
+made the deepest appeal, though he said that
+the Russian's music sounded better than it
+was. Grieg he admired, but Grieg could never
+have drawn the long musical line we find in
+the MacDowell sonatas.</p>
+
+<p>The fate of intermediate types is inevitable.
+Music is an art of specialisation: the Wagner
+music-drama, Chopin piano music, Schubert
+songs, Beethoven symphony, Liszt symphonic
+poems, and Richard Strauss tone-poems, all
+these are unique. MacDowell has invented
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+many lovely melodies. That the Indian duet
+for orchestra, the Woodland Sketches, New
+England Idyls, the Sea Pieces&mdash;To the Sea
+is a wonderful transcription of the mystery,
+and the salt and savour of the ocean&mdash;will
+have a long life, but not as long as the piano
+sonatas. By them he will stand or fall. MacDowell
+never goes chromatically mad on his
+harmonic tripod, nor does he tear passion to
+tatters in his search of the dramatic. If he
+recalls any English poet it is Keats, and like
+Keats he is simple and sensuous in his imagery,
+and a lover of true romance; not the sham
+ecstasies of mock medi&aelig;val romance, but that
+deep and tender sentiment which we encounter
+in the poetry of Keats&mdash;in the magic of a
+moon half veiled by flying clouds; in the mystery
+and scent of old and tangled gardens. I
+should call MacDowell a landscape-painter had
+I not heard his sonata music. Those sonatas,
+the Tragica, Eroica, Norse, and Keltic, with
+their broad, coloured narrative, ballad-like
+tone, their heroic and chivalric accents, epic
+passion, and feminine tenderness. The psychology
+is simple if you set this music against that
+of Strauss, of Loeffler, or of Debussy.</p>
+
+<p>But it is noble, noble as the soul of the man
+who conceived it. Elastic in form, orchestral
+in idea, these sonatas&mdash;which are looser spun
+in the web than Liszt's&mdash;will keep alive the
+name of MacDowell. This statement must
+not be considered as evidence that I fail to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+enjoy his other work. I do enjoy much of it,
+especially the Indian Orchestral Suite; but the
+sonatas stir the blood, above all the imagination.
+When the Tragica appeared I did not
+dream of three such successors. Now I like
+best the Keltic, with its dark magic and its
+tales of Deirdr&eacute; and the &quot;great Cuchullin.&quot;
+This fourth sonata is as Keltic as the combined
+poetic forces of the neo-Celtic renascence in
+Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>I believe MacDowell, when so sorely stricken,
+was at the parting of the ways. He spoke
+vaguely to me of studies for new symphonic
+works, presumably in the symphonic-poem form
+of Liszt. He would have always remained the
+poet, and perhaps have pushed to newer scenes,
+but, like Schumann, Donizetti, Smetana and
+Hugo Wolf, his brain gave way under the strain
+of intense study. The composition of music involves
+and taxes all the higher cerebral centres.</p>
+
+<p>The privilege was accorded me of visiting
+the sick man at his hotel several weeks ago,
+and I am glad I saw him, for his appearance
+dissipated the painful impression I had conjured
+up. Our interview, brief as it was, became
+the reverse of morbid or unpleasant before
+it terminated. With his mental disintegration
+sunny youth has returned to the composer. In
+snowy white, he looks not more than twenty-five
+years old, until you note the grey in his
+thick, rebellious locks. There is still gold in
+his moustache and his eyes are luminously
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+blue. His expression suggests a spirit purged
+of all grossness waiting for the summons. He
+smiles, but not as a madman; he talks hesitatingly,
+but never babbles. There is continuity
+in his ideas for minutes. Sometimes the word
+fits the idea; oftener he uses one foreign to his
+meaning. His wife, of whose devotion, almost
+poignant in its earnestness, it would be too sad
+to dwell upon, is his faithful interpreter. He
+moves with difficulty. He plays dominoes,
+but seldom goes to the keyboard. He reads
+slowly and, like the unfortunate Friedrich
+Nietzsche, he rereads one page many times.
+I could not help recalling what Mrs. Elizabeth
+Foerster-Nietzsche told me in Weimar of her
+brother. One day, noticing that she silently
+wept, the poet-philosopher exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But why do you weep, little sister? Are
+we not very happy?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>MacDowell is very happy and his wife is
+braver than Nietzsche's sister. One fragment
+of his conversation I recall. With glowing
+countenance he spoke of the thunderbolt in his
+wonderfully realistic piano poem, The Eagle.
+There had been a lightning-storm during the
+afternoon. Then he told me how he had found
+water by means of the hazel wand on his New
+Hampshire farm&mdash;a real happening. As I
+went away I could not help remembering that
+the final words I should ever hear uttered by
+this friend were of bright fire and running water
+and dream-music.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>[The above appeared in the New York <i>Herald</i>, June 24,
+1906, and is reprinted by request. Edward MacDowell died
+January 23, 1908.]</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h2>REMY DE GOURMONT</h2>
+
+<h2 class="subh2">HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS
+MIND</h2>
+
+<p class="quote center" align="center">&quot;Je dis ce que je pense&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">R. de G.</span></p>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Those were days marked by a white stone
+when arrived in the familiar yellow cover a
+new book, with card enclosed from &quot;Remy de
+Gourmont, 71, rue des Saints-P&egrave;res, Paris.&quot;
+Sometimes I received as many as two in a
+year. But they always found me eager and
+grateful, did those precious little volumes bearing
+the imprint of the <i>Mercure de France</i>,
+with whose history the name of De Gourmont
+is so happily linked. And there were post-cards
+too in his delicate handwriting on which were
+traced sense and sentiment; yes, this man of
+genius possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality.
+His personal charm transpired in
+a friendly salutation hastily pencilled. He
+played exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument,
+and knew the value of time and space.
+So his post-cards are souvenirs of his courtesy,
+and it was through one, which unexpectedly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+fell from the sky in 1897, I began my friendship
+with this distinguished French critic. His
+sudden death in 1915 at Paris (he was born
+1858), caused by apoplexy, was the heroic ending
+of a man of letters. Like Flaubert he was
+stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no
+more fitting end for a valiant soldier of literature.
+He was a moral hero and the victim of
+his prolonged technical heroism.</p>
+
+<p>De Gourmont was incomparable. Thought,
+not action, was his chosen sphere, but ranging
+up and down the vague and vast territory of
+ideas he encountered countless cerebral adventures;
+the most dangerous of all. An aristocrat
+born, he was, nevertheless, a convinced
+democrat. The latch was always lifted on the
+front door of his ivory tower. He did live in
+a certain sense a cloistered existence, a Benedictine
+of arts and letters; but he was not, as
+has been said, a sour hermit nursing morose
+fancies in solitude. De Gourmont, true pagan,
+enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had,
+despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean
+soul. But of a complexity. He never sympathised
+with the disproportionate fuss raised by
+the metaphysicians about Instinct and Intelligence,
+yet his own magnificent cerebral apparatus
+was a battle-field over which swept the
+opposing hosts of Instinct and Intelligence, and
+in a half-hundred volumes the history of this
+conflict is faithfully set down. As personal as
+Maurice Barr&egrave;s, without his egoism, as subtle
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+as Anatole France, De Gourmont saw life
+steadier and broader than either of these two
+contemporaries. He was one who said &quot;vast
+things simply.&quot; He was the profoundest philosopher
+of the three, and never, after his beginnings,
+exhibited a trace of the dilettante.
+Life soon became something more than a mere
+spectacle for him. He was a meliorist in theory
+and practice, though he asserted that Christianity,
+an Oriental-born religion, has not become
+spiritually acclimated among Occidental peoples.
+But he missed its consoling function; religion,
+the poetry of the poor, never had for him the
+prime significance that it had for William
+James; a legend, vague, vast, and delicious.</p>
+
+<p>Old frontiers have disappeared in science and
+art and literature. We have Maeterlinck, a
+poet writing of bees, Poincar&eacute;, a mathematician
+opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space;
+solid matters resolved into mist, and the law
+of gravitation questioned. The new horizons
+beckon ardent youth bent on conquering the
+secrets of life. And there are more false beacon-lights
+than true. But if this is an age of specialists
+a man occasionally emerges who contradicts
+the formula. De Gourmont was at base
+a poet; also a dramatist, novelist, raconteur,
+man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and,
+lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering
+were his accomplishments. He is a
+poet in his Hieroglyphes, Oraisons mauvaises,
+Le Livre des Litanies, Les Saintes du Paradis,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+Simone, Divertissements&mdash;his last appearance
+in singing robes (1914); he is a raconteur&mdash;and
+such tales&mdash;in Histoires magiques, Prose
+moroses, Le P&egrave;lerin du silence, D'un Pays lointain,
+Couleurs; a novelist in Merlette&mdash;his
+first book&mdash;Sixtine, Le Fant&ocirc;me, les Chevaux
+de Diom&egrave;de, Le Songe d'une Femme, Une Nuit
+au Luxembourg, Un C&#339;ur virginal; dramatist
+in Th&eacute;odat, Ph&eacute;nissa, Le vieux Roi, Lilith; as
+master critic of the &aelig;sthetics of the French
+language his supremacy is indisputable; it is
+hardly necessary to refer here to Le Livre des
+Masques, in two volumes, the five volumes of
+Promenades litt&eacute;raires, the three of Promenades
+philosophiques; as moralist he has signed such
+works as l'Idealisme, La Culture des Id&eacute;es, Le
+Chemin de Velours; historian and humanist,
+he has given us Le Latin mystique; grammarian
+and philologist, he displays his learning in Le
+Probl&egrave;me du Style, and Esth&eacute;tique de la Langue
+fran&ccedil;aise, and incidentally flays an unhappy
+pedagogue who proposed to impart the secret
+of style in twenty lessons. He edited many
+classics of French literature.</p>
+
+<p>His chief contribution to science, apart from
+his botanical and entomological researches, is
+Physique de l'Amour, in which he reveals himself
+as a patient, thorough observer in an almost
+new country. And what shall we say to
+his incursions into the actual, into the field
+of politics, sociology and hourly happenings
+of Paris life; his Epilogues (three volumes),
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+Dialogues des Amateurs, the collected pages
+from his monthly contributions to <i>Mercure
+de France</i>? Nothing human was alien to him,
+nor inhuman, for he rejected as quite meaningless
+the latter vocable, as he rejected such clich&eacute;s
+as &quot;organic and inorganic.&quot; Years before we
+heard of a pluralistic universe De Gourmont
+was a pragmatist, though an idealist in his
+conception of the world as a personal picture.
+Intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words,
+he might have fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that
+some one would write a History of Ideas. At
+the time of his death the French thinker was
+composing a work entitled La Physique des
+M&#339;urs, in which he contemplated a demonstration
+of his law of intellectual constancy.</p>
+
+<p>A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was like most
+Frenchmen an ardent patriot. The little
+squabble in the early eighties over a skit of his,
+Le Jou-jou&mdash;patriotisme (1883), cost him his
+post at the National Library in Paris. As a
+philosopher he deprecated war; as a man, though
+too old to fight, he urged his countrymen to
+victory, as may be noted in his last book, Pendant
+l'Orage (1916). But the philosopher
+persists in such a sorrowful sentence as: &quot;In
+the tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte.&quot;
+To show his mental balance at a time when
+literary men, artists, and even philosophers,
+indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Jugements
+his calm admission that the war has
+not destroyed for him the intellectual values
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+of Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He
+owes much to their thought as they owed much
+to French thought; Goethe has said as much;
+and of Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer
+was a disciple. Without being a practical musician,
+De Gourmont was a lover of Beethoven
+and Wagner. He paid his compliments to
+Romain Rolland, whose style, both chalky
+and mucilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated
+and spun-out series Jean-Christophe. Another
+little volume, La Belgique litt&eacute;raire, was published
+in 1915, which, while it contains nothing
+particularly new about Georges Rodenbach,
+Emile Verhaeren, Van Lerberghe, Camille
+Lemonnier, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is excellent
+reading. The French critic was also
+editor of the <i>Revue des Id&eacute;es</i>, and judging from
+the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Querlon
+as long ago as 1903, he was a collaborator of
+numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson,
+English humour, or Thomas &agrave; Kempis with
+the same facility as he dissected the mystic
+Latin writers of the early centuries after Christ.
+Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by
+the plodding crowd of college professors, his
+general adversaries. But his erudition could
+not be challenged; only two other men matched
+his scholarship, Anatole France and the late
+Marcel Schwob. And we have only skimmed
+the surface of his accomplishments. Remy de
+Gourmont is the Admirable Crichton of French
+letters.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably
+expected from this diversity of interests, yet
+the result is quite the reverse. The artist
+in this complicated man banished confusion.
+He has told us that because of the diversity
+of his aptitudes man is distinguished from his
+fellow animals, and the variety in his labours is
+a proof positive of his superiority to such fellow
+critics as the mentally constipated Bruneti&egrave;re,
+the impressionistic Anatole France, the agile
+and graceful Lema&icirc;tre, and the pedantic philistine
+Faguet. But if De Gourmont always attains
+clarity with no loss of depth, he sometimes
+mixes his genres; that is, the poet peeps out
+in his reports of the psychic life of insects, as
+the philosopher lords it over the pages of his
+fiction. A mystic betimes, he is a crystal-clear
+thinker. And consider the catholicity evinced
+in Le Livre des Masques. He wrote of such
+widely diverging talents as Maeterlinck, Mallarm&eacute;,
+Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Paul Adam;
+of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Henri de Regnier" id="tnote2">Henri de R&eacute;gnier</ins> and Jules Renard; of
+Huysmans and Jules Laforgue; the mysticism
+of Francis Poictevin's style and the imagery of
+Saint-Pol-Roux he defined, and he displays an
+understanding of the first symbolist poet, Arthur
+Rimbaud, while disliking the personality of that
+abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of
+new talent literally made visible and vocal by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+our critic? It is a pleasure to record the fact
+that most of his swans remained swans and
+did not degenerate into tame geese. In this
+book he shows himself a profound psychologist.</p>
+
+<p>Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive
+his chimeras in double harness and safely. His
+best fiction is Sixtine and Une Nuit au Luxembourg,
+if fiction they may be called. Never
+will their author be registered among best-sellers.
+Sixtine deals with the adventures of
+a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In
+Un C&#339;ur virginal we touch earth, fleshly and
+spiritually. This story shocked its readers. It
+may be considered as a sequel to Physique de
+l'Amour. It shows mankind as a gigantic
+insect indulging in the same apparently blind
+pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also
+shows us the &quot;female of our species&quot; endowed
+with less capacity for modesty than the lady
+mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting,
+too, is the psychology of the heroine's
+virginal soul, not, however, cynical; cynicism is
+the irony of vice, and De Gourmont is never
+cynical. But a master of irony.</p>
+
+<p>Une Nuit au Luxembourg has been done
+into English. It handles with delicacy and
+frankness themes that in the hands of a lesser
+artist would be banished as brutal and blasphemous.
+The author knows that all our felicity
+is founded on a compromise between the dream
+and reality, and for that reason while he signals
+the illusion he never mocks it; he is too much an
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+idealist. In the elaborately carved cups of his
+tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and
+nectar, there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He
+could never have said with Proudhon that
+woman is the desolation of the just; for him
+woman is often an obsession. Yet, captain of
+his instincts, he sees her justly; he is not subdued
+by sex. With a gesture he destroys the
+sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist and
+marches on to new intellectual conquests.</p>
+
+<p>In Lilith, an Adamitic Morality, he reveals
+his Talmudic lore. The first wife of our common
+ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the accomplice
+of Satan in the corruption of the human race.
+Thus medi&aelig;val play is epical in its Rabelaisian
+plainness of speech. Perhaps the Manichean in
+De Gourmont fabricated its revolting images.
+He had traversed the Baudelairian steppes of
+blasphemy and black pessimism; Baudelaire,
+a poet who was a great critic. Odi profanum
+vulgus! was De Gourmont's motto, but his soul
+was responsive to so many contacts that he
+emerged, as Barr&egrave;s emerged, a citizen of the
+world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did
+not long content him, although he never relinquished
+his detached attitude of proud individualism.
+He saw through the sentimental
+equality of J.J. Rousseau. Rousseau it was
+who said that thinking man was a depraved
+animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth.
+Man is an affective animal more interested in
+the immediate testimony of his senses than in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+his intellectual processes. His metaphysic may
+be but the reverberation of his sensations on
+the shore of his subliminal self, the echo of the
+sounding shell he calls his soul. And our critic
+had his scientific studies to console him for the
+inevitable sterility of soul that follows egoism
+and a barren debauch of the sensations. He
+did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His
+artistic sensibility was his saviour.</p>
+
+<p>Without being a dogmatist, De Gourmont
+was an antagonist of absolutism. A determinist,
+(which may be dogmatism &agrave; rebours), a relativist,
+he holds that mankind is not a specially
+favoured species of the animal scale; thought
+is only an accident, possibly the result of rich
+nutrition. An automaton, man has no free
+will, but it is better for him to imagine that he
+has; it is a sounder working hypothesis for the
+average human. The universe had no beginning,
+it will have no end. There is no first link
+or last in the chain of causality. Everything
+must submit to the law of causality; to explain
+a blade of grass we must dismount the stars.
+Nevertheless, De Gourmont no more than
+Renan, had the mania of certitude. Humbly
+he interrogates the sphinx. There are no isolated
+phenomena in time or space. The mass
+of matter is eternal. Man is an animal submitting
+to the same laws that govern crystals
+or brutes. He is the expression of matter in
+physique and chemistry. Repetition is the
+law of life. Thought is a physiological product;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+intelligence the secretion of matter and is amenable
+to the law of causality. (This sounds like
+Taine's famous definition of virtue and vice.)
+And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical
+laboratories? It is not the rigid old-fashioned
+materialism, but a return to the more
+plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism
+of the Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries.
+For De Gourmont the Darwinian notion that
+man is at the topmost notch of creation is as
+antique and absurd as most cosmogonies; indeed,
+it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of creation.
+Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian
+symbols. Voil&agrave; l'ennemi! said De Gourmont
+and put on his controversial armour. What
+blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his!</p>
+
+<p>Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction
+of many scientists that bird life came later on
+our globe than the primates from whom we stem.
+The law of thermal constancy proves it by the
+interior temperature of birds. Man preceded
+the carnivorous and ruminating animals, of
+whom the bodily temperature is lower than
+that of birds. The ants and bees and beavers
+are not a whit more automatic than mankind.
+Automatism, says Ribot, is the rule. Thought
+is not free, wrote William James, when to it
+an affirmation is added; then it is but the
+affirmation of a preference. &quot;L'homme,&quot; asserts
+De Gourmont, &quot;varie &agrave; l'infini sa mimique.
+Sa sup&eacute;riorit&eacute;, c'est la diversit&eacute; immense de ses
+aptitudes.&quot; He welcomed Jules de Gaultier
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+and his theory of Bovaryisme; of the vital lie,
+because of which we pretend to be what we are
+not. That way spells security, if not progress.
+The idea of progress is another necessary illusion,
+for it provokes a multiplicity of activities. Our
+so-called free will is naught but the faculty of
+making a decision determined by a great and
+varied number of motives. As for morality,
+it is the outcome of tribal taboos; the insect
+and animal world shows deepest-dyed immorality,
+revolting cruelty, and sex perversity.
+Rabbits and earthworms through no fault of
+their own suffer from horrible maladies. From
+all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual
+constancy. The human brain since
+prehistoric times has been neither diminished
+nor augmented; it has remained like a sponge,
+which can be dry or saturated, but still remains
+itself. It is a constant. In a favourable environment
+it is enriched. The greatest moment
+in the history of the human family was the discovery
+of fire by an anthropoid of genius.
+Prometheus then should be our god. Without
+him we should have remained more or less
+simian, and probably of arboreal habits.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>A synthetic brain is De Gourmont's, a sower
+of doubts, though not a No-Sayer to the universe.
+He delights in challenging accepted
+&quot;truths.&quot; Of all modern thinkers a master of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+Vues d'ensembles, he smiles at the pretensions,
+usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of so-called
+&quot;general ideas.&quot; He dissociates such conventional
+grouping of ideas as Glory, Justice,
+Decadence. The shining ribs of disillusion
+shine through his psychology; a psychology of
+nuance and finesse. Disillusioning reflections,
+these. Not to be put in any philosophical
+pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the
+eclecticism of Victor Cousin as from the verbal
+jugglery and metaphysical murmurings of Henri
+Bergson. The world is his dream; but it is a
+tangible dream, charged with meaning, order,
+logic. The truest reality is thought. Action
+spoils. (Goethe said: &quot;Thought expands, action
+narrows.&quot;) Our abstract ideas are metaphysical
+idols, says Jules de Gaultier. The
+image of the concrete is De Gourmont's touchstone.
+Th&eacute;ophile Gautier declared that he was
+a man for whom the visible world existed. He
+misjudged his capacity for apprehending reality.
+The human brain, excellent instrument in a
+priori combinations is inept at perceiving realities.
+The &quot;Sultan of the Epithet,&quot; as De
+Goncourt nicknamed &quot;le bon Th&eacute;o,&quot; was not
+the &quot;Emperor of Thought,&quot; according to Henry
+James, and for him it was a romantic fiction
+spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster,
+greyer world is adumbrated in the books of De
+Gourmont. He never allowed symbolism to
+deform his representation of sober, every-day
+life. He pictured the future domain of art and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+ideas as a fair and shining landscape no longer
+a series of little gardens with high walls. A
+hater of formulas, sects, schools, he teaches
+that the capital crime of the artist, the writer,
+the thinker, is conformity. (Yet how serenely
+this critic swims in classic currents!) The artist's
+work should reflect his personality, a
+magnified reflection. He must create his own
+&aelig;sthetic. There are no schools, only individuals.
+And of consistency he might have said
+that it is oftener a mule than a jewel.</p>
+
+<p>Sceptical in all matters, though never the
+fascinating sophist that is Anatole France, De
+Gourmont criticised the thirty-six dramatic
+situations, reducing the number to four. Man
+as centre in relation to himself; in relation to
+other men; in relation to the other sex; in
+relation to God, or Nature. His ecclesiastical
+<i>fond</i> may be recognised in Le Chemin de
+Velours with its sympathetic exposition of
+Jesuit doctrine, and the acuity of its judgments
+on Pascal and the Jansenists. The latter section
+is as an illuminating foot-note to the history
+of Port-Royal by Sainte-Beuve. The younger
+critic has the supple intellect of the supplest-minded
+Jesuit. His bias toward the order is
+unmistakable. There are few books I reread
+with more pleasure than this Path of Velvet.
+Certain passages in it are as silky and sonorous
+as the sound of Eug&egrave;ne Ysaye's violin.</p>
+
+<p>The colour of De Gourmont's mind is stained
+by his artistic sensibility. A maker of images,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+his vocabulary astounding as befits both a poet
+and philologist, one avid of beautiful words,
+has variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant,
+a quality that has informed the finer intellects
+of France since Montaigne. His literary equipment
+is unusual. A style as brilliant, sinuous,
+and personal as his thought; flexible or massive,
+continent or coloured, he discourses at ease in
+all the gamuts and modes major, minor, and
+mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a
+Latinist; a classic, not a romantic style. His
+formal sense is admirable. The tenderness of
+Anatole France is absent, except in his verse,
+which is less spontaneous than volitional. A
+pioneer in new &aelig;sthetic pastures, De Gourmont
+is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though
+the gift of tears nature&mdash;possibly jealous because
+of her prodigality&mdash;has denied him.
+But in the curves of his overarching intellect
+there may be found wit, gaiety, humour, the
+Gallic attributes, allied with poetic fancy, profundity
+of thought, and a many-sided comprehension
+of life, art, and letters. He is in the
+best tradition of French criticism only more
+versatile than either Sainte-Beuve or Taine;
+as versatile as Doctor Brandes or Arthur Symons,
+and that is saying much. With Anatole France
+he could have exclaimed: &quot;The longer I contemplate
+human life, the more I believe that
+we must give it, for witnesses and judges, Irony
+and Pity....&quot;</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h2>ARTZIBASHEF</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck
+wrote: &quot;Whereas, it is far away from bloodshed,
+battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the
+lives of most of us flow on, and the tears of
+men are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost
+spiritual....&quot; This is a plea for his
+own spiritualised art, in which sensations are
+attenuated, and emotions within emotions, the
+shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into
+crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to
+follow the example of the Belgian dreamer,
+and since the advent of the new century there
+has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic
+violence, that must be disconcerting
+to Maeterlinck.</p>
+
+<p>It is particularly the case with Russian
+poetry, drama, and fiction. That vast land of
+promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out
+place for the theories and speculations
+of western Europe; no other nation responds
+so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit,
+no other literature reflects with such
+clearness the fluctuations of contemporary
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most
+emotional among living peoples.</p>
+
+<p>Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is
+the key-note of much Russian literature; but
+it was the clash of events; the march of ideas
+which precipitated young Russia into the expression
+of revolt, pessimism, and its usual
+concomitant, materialism. There were bloodshed,
+battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears,
+tangible, not invisible, in the uprising of ten
+years ago. The four great masters, Gogol,
+Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled
+the minds of the intellectuals, but a younger
+element was the yeast in the new fermentation.</p>
+
+<p>Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales
+of mean, colourless lives, Gorky and his disinherited
+barefoot brigade, the dramatic Andreiev,
+the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin,
+Ivanov, Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch
+(I select a few of the romancers)&mdash;not
+to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and
+Ivanov&mdash;are the men who are fighting under
+various banners but always for complete freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Little more than a decade has passed since
+the appearance of a young man named Michael
+Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring
+of trumpets, has taken the centre of the
+stage and still holds it. He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky,
+more pessimistic than Tolstoy, though
+not the supreme artist that was Turgenev.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+Of Gogol's overwhelming humour he has not
+a trace; instead, a corroding irony which eats
+into the very vitals of faith in all things human.
+Gorky, despite his &quot;bitter&quot; nickname, is an
+incorrigible optimist compared with Artzibashef.
+One sports with Nietzsche, the other not
+only swears by Max Stirner, but some of his
+characters are Stirnerism incarnate. His chosen
+field in society is the portrayal of the middle-class
+and proletarian.</p>
+
+<p>To Andr&eacute; Villard, his friend and one of his
+translators, the new Russian novelist told
+something of his life, a life colourless, dreary,
+bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town
+in southern Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef
+is of Tatar, French, Georgian, and Polish blood.
+His great-grandfather on the maternal side was
+the Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a
+retired officer, was a small landowner. In the
+lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis.
+His youth was a wretched one. At school he
+was unhappy because of its horrors&mdash;he has
+written of them in his first story, Pasha Tumanow&mdash;and
+he drifted from one thing to another
+till he wrote for a literary weekly in the provinces
+founded by a certain Miroliuboff, to whom he
+ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors
+at the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev,
+Kuprin, and other young men who,
+like Artzibashef, have since &quot;arrived.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It
+brought him recognition. This was in 1904.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+But the year before he had finished Sanine, his
+masterpiece, though it did not see publication
+till 1908. This was three years after the revolution
+of 1905, so that those critics were astray
+who spoke of the book as a naturally pessimistic
+reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism
+was born in the bones of the author and he
+needed no external stimulus to provoke such
+a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is
+happier, healthier, whether he has married and
+raised a family, we know not. Personal as his
+stories are said to be, their art renders them
+objective.</p>
+
+<p>The world over Sanine has been translated.
+It is a significant book, and incorporates the
+aspirations of many young men and women in
+the Russian Empire. It was not printed at
+first because of the censorship, and in Germany
+it had to battle for its life.</p>
+
+<p>It is not only written from the standpoint of
+a professed immoralist, but the Russian censor
+declared it pernicious because of its &quot;defamation
+of youth,&quot; its suicidal doctrine, its depressing
+atmosphere. The sex element, too,
+has aroused indignant protests from the clergy,
+from the press, from society itself.</p>
+
+<p>In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied
+libelling the younger generation. &quot;Sanine,&quot; he
+says, &quot;is the apology for individualism: the
+hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form
+this type is still new and rare, but its spirit is
+in every frank, bold, and strong representative
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+of the new Russia.&quot; And then he adds his own
+protest against the imitators of Sanine, who
+&quot;flooded the literary world with pornographic
+writings.&quot; Now, whatever else it may be,
+Sanine is not pornographic, though I shall not
+pretend to say that its influence has been harmless.
+We should not forget Werther and the
+trail of sentimental suicides that followed its
+publication. But Sanine is fashioned of sterner
+stuff than Goethe's romance, and if it be &quot;dangerous,&quot;
+then all the better.</p>
+
+<p>Test all things, and remember that living
+itself is a dangerous affair. Never has the
+world needed precepts of daring, courage, individualism
+more than in this age of cowardly
+self-seeking, and the sleek promises of altruism
+and its soulless well-being. Sanine is a call to
+arms for individualists. And recall the Russian
+saying: Self-conceit is the salt of life.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>That Artzibashef denies the influence of
+Nietzsche while admitting his indebtedness to
+Nietzsche's forerunner, Max Stirner, need not
+particularly concern us. There are evidences
+scattered throughout the pages of Sanine that
+prove a close study of Nietzsche and his idealistic
+superman. Artist as is Artzibashef, he has
+densely spun into the fabric of his work the
+ideas that control his characters, and whether
+these ideas are called moral or immoral does
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+not matter. The chief thing is whether they
+are propulsive forces in the destiny of his
+puppets.</p>
+
+<p>That he paints directly from life is evident:
+he tells us that in him is the d&eacute;bris of a
+painter compelled by poverty to relinquish his
+ambitions because he had not money enough
+to buy paper, pencil, colour. Such a realistic
+brush has seldom been wielded as the brush
+of Artzibashef. I may make one exception,
+that of J.-K. Huysmans. The Frenchman is
+the greater artist, the greater master of his
+material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the
+master of &quot;the intensest vision of the modern
+world&quot;; but Huysmans lacks the all-embracing
+sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of
+suffering mankind that distinguishes the young
+Russian novelist, a love that is blended with
+an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both
+men prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the
+vilest aspects of life.</p>
+
+<p>The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and
+profound. The leading motive of his symphony
+is as old as Ecclesiastes: &quot;The thing that hath
+been, it is that which shall be.&quot; It is not original,
+this theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity;
+but it has been orchestrated anew by
+Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen,
+Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to
+reveal to us, if no hidden angles of the truth,
+at least its illusion in terms of terror, anguish,
+and deadly nausea produced by mere existence.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+With such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of
+life must soon be blasted. His intellectual indifferentism
+to all that constitutes the solace
+and bravery of our daily experience is almost
+pathological. The aura of sadism hovers about
+some of his men. After reading Artzibashef
+you wonder that the question, &quot;Is life worth
+living?&quot; will ever be answered in the affirmative
+among these humans, who, as old Homer says,
+hasten hellward from their birth.</p>
+
+<p>The corollary to this leading motive is the
+absolute futility of action. A paralysis of the
+will overtakes his characters, the penalty of
+their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev,
+in an essay on Hamlet, who declared that the
+Russian character is composed of Hamlet-like
+traits. Man is the only animal that cannot
+live in the present; a Norwegian philosopher,
+S&ouml;ren Kierkegaard, has said that he lives forward,
+thinks backward; he aspires to the
+future. An idealist, even when close to the
+gorilla, is doomed to disillusionment. He discounts
+to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Russian youth has not always the courage
+of its chimera, though it fraternises with the
+phantasmagoria of its soul. Its Golden Street
+soon becomes choked with fog. The political
+and social conditions of the country must stifle
+individualism, else why should Artzibashef
+write with such savage intensity? His pen is
+the pendulum that has swung away from the
+sentimental brotherhood of man as exemplified
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+in Dostoievsky, and from the religious mania
+of Tolstoy to the opposite extreme, individual
+anarchy. Where there is repression there is
+rebellion. Max Stirner represents the individualism
+which found its vent in the Prussia of
+1848; Nietzsche the reaction from the Prussia
+of 1870; Artzibashef forestalled the result of
+the 1905 insurrection in Russia.</p>
+
+<p>His prophetic soul needed no proof; he knew
+that his people, the students and intellectuals,
+would be crushed. The desire of the clod for
+the cloud was extinguished. Happiness is an
+eternal hoax. Only children believe in life.
+The last call of the devil's dinner-bell has
+sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is
+only mirage. The moonlit air is a ruse of that
+wily old serpent, nature, to arouse romance in
+the breast of youth and urge a repetition of
+the life processes. We graze Schopenhauer,
+overhear Leopardi, but the Preacher has the
+mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says
+none of these things outright. The phrases
+are mine, but he points the moral in a way that
+is all his own.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the remedy for the ills of this
+life? Is its misery <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: immediable" id="tnote3">irremediable</ins>? Why must
+mankind go on living if the burden is so great?
+Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and
+no matter how brilliant we may live, we must
+all die alone. Pascal said this better. In several
+of his death-bed scenes the dying men of Artzibashef
+curse their parents, mock at religion,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+and&mdash;here is a novel nuance&mdash;abuse their
+intellectual leaders. Semenow the student,
+who appears in several of the stories, abuses
+Marx and Nietzsche. Of what use are these
+thinkers to a man about to depart from the
+world? It is the revolt of stark humanity
+from the illusions of brotherly love, from the
+chiefest illusion&mdash;self.</p>
+
+<p>Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion
+to his sufferers. With a vivid style that recalls
+the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch he
+shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer,
+their souls emptied of all earthly hopes
+save one. Shall I live? Not God's will be done,
+not the roseate dream of a future life, only&mdash;why
+must I die? though the poor devil is submerged
+in the very swamp of life. But life,
+life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather
+than annihilation! In the portrayal of these
+damned creatures Artzibashef is elemental. He
+recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.</p>
+
+<p>He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy
+(also to Goethe, Hugo, Dostoievsky, and much
+to Tchekov), but his characters are usually failures
+when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the
+great moralist and expounder of &quot;non-resistance.&quot;
+He simply explodes the torpedo of truth
+under the ark of socialism. This may be noted
+in Ivan Lande&mdash;now in the English volume entitled
+The Millionaire&mdash;where we see step by
+step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed
+by the love of his fellows.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral
+is startling. Not thus can you save your soul.
+Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your
+other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite
+the smiter, and heartily. However, naught
+avails, you must die, and die like a dog, a star,
+or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success
+comes only to the unfortunate. And so we
+swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who, in
+his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the
+same thing. (A ferocious advocate of pessimism
+and a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer, by name
+Mainlander, preached world destruction through
+race suicide.)</p>
+
+<p>But all these pessimists seem well fed and
+happy when compared to the nihilists of Artzibashef.
+He portrays every stage of disillusionment
+with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation
+is worth the trouble of a despairing
+gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist or royalist&mdash;your
+career is, if you but dare break the
+conspiracy of silence&mdash;a burden or a sorrow.
+Happiness is only a word. Love a brief sensation.
+Death a certainty. For such nihilism we
+must go to the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong
+silence, some fanatic fatidically stares at
+his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead,
+there is the world of the five senses, and
+a glorious world it may prove if you have only
+the health, courage, and contempt for the
+Chinese wall with which man has surrounded
+his instincts. There are no laws, except to be
+broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered.
+There is the blue sky, brother, and the air on
+the heath, brother! Drop the impedimenta
+and lead a free, roving life. How the world
+would wag without work no one tells us. Not
+didactic, the novelist disdains to draw a moral.</p>
+
+<p>There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in
+Sanine, who is a handsome young chap, a giant,
+and a &quot;blond barbarian.&quot; It is the story of
+the return of the native to his home in a small
+town. He finds his mother as he left her, older,
+but as narrow as ever, and his sister Lydia, one
+of the most charming girls in Russian fiction.
+Sanine is surprised to note her development.
+He admires her&mdash;too much so for our Western
+taste. However, there is something monstrous
+in the moral and mental make-up of this hero,
+who is no hero. He may be a type, but I don't
+believe in types; there are only humans. His
+motto might be: What's the difference? He
+is passive, not with the fatalism of Oblomov,
+Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of
+Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of Frederic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+Moreau; he displays an indifference to
+the trivial things of life that makes him seem
+an idler on the scene.</p>
+
+<p>When the time arrives for action he is no
+skulker. His sister has been ruined by a frivolous
+officer in garrison, and she attempts suicide.
+Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but
+philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing
+in words. Ruined! Very well, marry
+and forget! However, he drives the officer
+to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses
+a duel, punches his head, and the silly
+soldier with his silly code of honour blows out
+his brains. A passive r&ocirc;le is Sanine's in the
+composition of this elaborate canvas, the surface
+simplicity of which deceives us as to its
+polyphonic complexity. He remains in the
+background while about him play the little
+destinies of little souls. Yet he is always the
+fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made
+up my mind whether Sanine is a great man or
+a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.</p>
+
+<p>A temperamental and imaginative writer is
+Artzibashef. I first read him (1911) in French,
+the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his
+style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly
+because of the language. In the German
+translation he is not so appealing; again perhaps
+of the difference in the tongues. As I
+can't read Russian, I am forced to fall back on
+translations, and they seldom give an idea of
+personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+into Russian the Three Tales of his friend
+Flaubert.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign
+speech the genius of Artzibashef shines like a
+crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss the
+caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the
+organ-toned Russian language: The English
+versions are excellent, though, naturally enough,
+occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I
+must protest here against the omission of a
+chapter in Breaking Point which is a key to
+the ending of the book. I mean the chapter
+in which is related the reason why the wealthy
+drunkard goes to the monastery, there to end
+his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we
+could never write of America as Dostoievsky
+did of Russia, and it was true enough at the
+time; nor, would we ever tolerate the nudities
+of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and
+I am fain to believe that the tragic issues of
+American life should be given fuller expression,
+and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's,
+whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity
+is a form of his genius.</p>
+
+<p>The very air of America makes for optimism;
+our land of milk and honey may never produce
+such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef, unless
+conditions change. But the lesson for our
+novelists is the courageous manner&mdash;and artistic,
+too&mdash;with which the Russian pursues
+the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He
+notes, being a psychologist as well as a painter,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+the exquisite recoil of the cerebral cells upon
+themselves which we call consciousness. Profoundly
+human in his sympathies, without being,
+in the least sentimental, he paints full-length
+portraits of men and women with a flowing
+brush and a fine sense of character values. But
+he will never bend the bow of Balzac.</p>
+
+<p>Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful
+portrait. In the book there are several persons:
+the disgraced student Yourii, who is self-complacent
+to the point of morbidity; his lovely
+sister, and her betrothed. The officers are
+excellently delineated and differentiated, while
+the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the
+teacher, are extremely attractive.</p>
+
+<p>Karsavina is a veracious personality. The
+poor little homeless Hebrew who desires light
+on the mystery of life could not be bettered by
+Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is
+partially indebted to Dostoievsky for certain
+traits of Ivan Lande&mdash;who is evidently patterned
+from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.
+Wherever Sanine passes, trouble follows. He
+is looked on as possessing the evil eye, yet he
+does little but lounge about, drink hard, and
+make love to pretty girls. But as he goes he
+snuffs out ideals like candles.</p>
+
+<p>As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must
+not be supposed that the book is unrelieved in
+its gloom. There are plenty of gay episodes,
+sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party,
+and pastorals done in a way which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+would have extorted the admiration of Turgenev.
+Thomas Hardy has done no better in
+his peasant life. There are various gatherings,
+chiefly convivial, a meeting of would-be intellectuals
+for self-improvement&mdash;related with
+blasting irony&mdash;and drinking festivals which
+are masterly in their sense of reality; add to
+these pages of nature descriptions, landscapes,
+pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises,
+revealing a passionate love of the soil which
+is truly Russian. You fairly smell the frosty
+air of his Winter days.</p>
+
+<p>Little cause for astonishment that Sanine
+at its appearance provoked as much controversy,
+as much admiration and hatred as did
+Fathers and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir
+Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov the anarchist,
+but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the
+new order, neither a propagandist by the act,
+but a philosophical anarch who lazily mutters:
+&quot;Let the world wag; I don't care so that it
+minds its own business and lets me alone.&quot; With
+few exceptions most latter-day fiction is thin,
+papery, artificial, compared with Artzibashef's
+rich, red-blooded genius.</p>
+
+<p>I have devoted so much attention to Sanine
+that little space is left for the other books,
+though they are all significant. Revolutionary
+Tales contains a strong companion picture to
+Sanine, the portrait of the metal-worker Schevyrjoy,
+who is a revolutionist in the literal sense.
+His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+The end is almost operatic. A captivating
+little working girl figures in one episode.
+It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef
+does not paint for our delectation the dear dead
+drabs of yesteryear, nor yet the girl of the street
+who heroically brings bread to her starving
+family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment).
+Few outcasts of this sort are to be
+found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly
+etched, as, for example, the ladies in
+The Millionaire.</p>
+
+<p>This story, which is affiliated in ideas with
+Sanine, is Tolstoyian in the main issue, yet
+disconcertingly different in its interpretation.
+Wealth, too, may become an incitement to
+self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story
+of Pasha Tumanow is autobiographical, and
+registers his hatred of the Russian grammar
+schools where suicides among the scholars are
+anything but infrequent. Morning Shadows
+relates the adventures of several young people
+who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with
+tragic conclusions. The two girl students end
+badly, one a suicide, the other a prisoner of the
+police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A
+stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and
+sympathetic handling. The doctor gives us a
+picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province
+town. You simply shudder at the details of
+the wretched Jews shot down, ripped open,
+maltreated, and driven into the wilderness.
+It is a time for tears; though I cannot quite
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+believe in this doctor, who, while not a Jew,
+so sympathises with them that he lets die the
+Chief of Police that ordered the massacre.
+Another story of similar intensity, called Nina
+in the English translation, fills us with wonder
+that such outrages can go unpunished. But
+I am only interested in the art of the novelist,
+not in political conditions or their causes.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary
+Tales is The Blood Stain, confessedly
+beloved by its author. Again we are confronted
+by the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice.
+Might is right, ever was, ever will be.
+Again the victims of lying propagandists and
+the cruel law lie &quot;on stretchers, with white
+eyes staring upward. In these eyes there was
+a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and
+despair.&quot; Always despair, in life or death, is
+the portion of these poor. [This was written in
+1915, before the New Russia was born. Since
+the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served
+in the field and hospitals. He has written
+several plays, one of which, War, has been
+translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war.
+His latest story, The Woman Standing in the
+Midst, has not yet appeared here.]</p>
+
+<p>Without suggesting a rigid schematology,
+there is a composition plan in his larger work
+that may be detected if the reader is not confused
+by the elliptical patterns and the massive
+mounds of minor details in his novel Breaking
+Point. The canvas is large and crowded, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+motivation subtly managed. As is the case
+with his novels, the drama plays in a provincial
+town, this time on the steppes, where the inhabitants
+would certainly commit suicide if
+the place were half as dreary as depicted. Some
+of them do so, and you are reminded of that
+curious, nervous disease, indigenous to Siberia,
+named by psychiatrists &quot;myriachit,&quot; or the
+epidemic of imitation. A man, a sinister rascal,
+Naumow, preaches the greyness and folly of
+living, and this &quot;Naumowism&quot; sets by the ears
+three or four impressionable young men who
+make their exit with a bare bodkin or its equivalent.
+Naumow recalls a character in The
+Possessed, also the sinister hero of The Synagogue
+of Satan by the dramatic Polish writer
+Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central
+point the &quot;chorus&quot; of the novel is a little student
+who resembles a goldfinch, and has a birdlike
+way of piping about matters philosophical.</p>
+
+<p>There are oceans of talk throughout the
+novels, talks about death. Really, you wonder
+how the Russians contrive to live at all till you
+meet them and discover what normal people
+they are. (It should not be forgotten that art
+must contain as an element of success a slight
+deformation of facts.) The student watches
+the comedy and tragedy of the town, his brain
+flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of
+mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect
+on the uselessness of suffering from self-privation
+so that some proletarian family may eat
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+roast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually
+he succumbs to the contagion of resemblance,
+takes to drink, and hangs himself to a nail in
+the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his
+feet, faithful to the last&mdash;they, Dickens-like,
+are shown from the start.</p>
+
+<p>There is a nihilistic doctor&mdash;the most viable
+character of all about whose head hovers the
+aura of apoplexy&mdash;a particularly fascinating actress,
+an interesting consumptive, two wretched
+girls betrayed by a young painter (a Sanine
+type, <i>i. e.</i>, Max Stirnerism in action), while
+the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly
+pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with
+the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin in Dostoievsky's
+The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily
+vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder,
+drunkenness, and boredom permeate
+nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most
+poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It
+is the prose complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called
+Suicide Symphony. Browning is reversed.
+Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the
+world! Yet it compels reflection and rereading.
+Why?</p>
+
+<p>Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable,
+and granting the exaggeration inherent in
+the nature of the subject, it is lifelike, though
+its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The
+little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the
+Seven Sorrows. However, in it, as in Sanine,
+there is many an oasis of consolation where sanity
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+and cheerfulness and normal humans may
+be enjoyed. But I am loath to believe that
+young Russia, Holy Russia, as the mystagogues
+call her, has lost her central grip on the things
+that most count; above all, on religious faith.
+Then needs must she pray as prayed Des Esseintes
+in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: &quot;Take
+pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on
+the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict
+of life who embarks alone, in the night,
+beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling
+beacons of ancient faith.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h2>A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>In company with other distinguished men
+who have passed away during the progress of
+the war, the loss of Henry James was passably
+chronicled. News from the various battle-fields
+took precedence over the death of a mere man
+of literary genius. This was to be expected.
+Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession
+from American citizenship may have increased
+the coolness which prevailed, still prevails, when
+the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print.
+More English than the English, he only practised
+what he preached, though tardily in the
+matter of his British naturalisation. That he
+did not find all the perfections in his native
+land is a personal matter; but that he should
+be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply
+the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion
+to art. There is no need of indignation in the
+matter. Time rights such critical wrongs.
+Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of
+Henry James is for the future.</p>
+
+<p>James seceded years ago from the English
+traditions, from Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The
+Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions
+that will influence future novelists. In our own
+days we see what a power James has been; a
+subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul
+Bourget, Edith Wharton, even Joseph Conrad,
+and many minor English novelists. His later
+work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse,
+is the prose equivalent of the seven arts in a
+revolutionary ferment. A marked tendency
+in the new movements is to throw overboard
+superfluous technical baggage. The James
+novel is one of grand simplifications.</p>
+
+<p>As the symphony was modified by Liszt into
+the symphonic poem and later emerged in the
+shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so
+the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's
+Sentimental Education, which, despite its
+&quot;heavenly length,&quot; contains in solution all that
+the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned
+after it in the prodigious Rougon-Macquart
+series; Daudet found therein the
+impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant
+and Huysmans delved patiently and
+practised characteristic variations. Flaubert is
+the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism.
+His excessive preoccupation with style
+and his attaching esoteric significance to words
+sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry
+James disliked Sentimental Education&mdash;like
+other great critics he had his blind side&mdash;yet
+he did not fail to benefit by the radical formal
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+changes introduced by Flaubert, changes as
+revolutionary as those of Wagner in the music-drama.
+I call the later James novel a simplification.
+All the conventional chapter endings are
+dispensed with; many are suspended cadences.
+The accustomed and thrice-barren modulations
+from event to event are swept away; unprepared
+dissonances are of continual occurrence.
+There is no descriptive padding&mdash;that bane of
+second-class writers; nor are we informed at
+every speech of the name of a character. This
+elliptical method James absorbed from Flaubert,
+while his sometime oblique psychology is partly
+derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal
+both Meredith and James would have been
+sadly shorn of their psychological splendour.
+Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not to
+mention that of Jane Austen.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly the famous &quot;third manner&quot; of
+James was the result of his resorting to dictation;
+the pen inhibits where speech does not.
+These things make difficult reading for a public
+accustomed to the hypnotic passes of successful
+fiction-mongers. In James nothing is forestalled,
+nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning
+the curve of the unexpected. The actual
+story may be discouraging in its bareness, yet
+the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn
+of the Screw is an exception.) You rub your
+eyes as you finish; for with all your credulity,
+painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a
+pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+reveal magic in their misty attenuations.
+And there is ever the triumph of poetic feeling
+over banal sentiment. The portraiture in
+Milly Theale and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant.
+Milly's life is a miracle, her ending, art superlative.
+The Wings of a Dove is filled with the
+faintly audible tread of destiny behind the
+arras of life. The reverberations are almost
+microphonic with here and there a crescendo
+or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry
+James is more thrilling to the educated ear
+than the sound of the big drum and the blaring
+of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the
+novelist concerning causes that do not seem
+final has been amply dealt with by Mr. Brownell.
+The question whether his story is worth the
+telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered;
+what most concerns us now in the James
+case is his manner, not his matter. All the
+rest is life.</p>
+
+<p>As far as his middle period his manner is
+limpidity itself; the later style is a jungle of
+inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions,
+echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms,
+in which the heads of young adjectives
+despairingly gaze from afar at the verbs which
+come thundering at the close of sentences leagues
+long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering
+is this peculiarly individual style when draughted
+into smooth journalistic prose. Nothing
+remains. Henry James has not spoken. His
+dissonances cannot be resolved except in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+terms of his own matchless art. His meanings
+evaporate when phrased in our vernacular.
+This may prove a lot of negating things, or it
+may not. Why prose should lag behind its
+sister arts I can't say; possibly because every
+pothouse politician is supposed to speak it.
+For that matter any one who has dipped into
+the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century
+literature, must realise that nowadays we
+write a parlous prose. However, it is not a
+stately prose that James essayed. The son of
+a metaphysician and moralist&mdash;the writings of
+Henry James, the elder, are far from negligible&mdash;the
+brother of the greatest American psychologist,
+the late William James of brilliant
+memory, it need hardly be added that character
+problems are of more interest to this
+novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical
+sonority, or the fascination of glowing surfaces.
+You can no more read aloud a page of James
+than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For
+Flaubert, who modelled his magnificent prose
+harmonies on the Old Testament, Shakespeare,
+Bossuet, and Ch&acirc;teaubriand, the final test of
+noble prose is the audible reading thereof.
+Flaubert called it &quot;spouting.&quot; The James prose
+appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and
+overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical
+variety. Henry James is a law unto himself.
+His novels may be a precursor of the books our
+grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly
+of noisy adventure, cheap historical vapidities,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>
+and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall
+have vanished. (But, like the poor, the stupid
+reader we shall always have with us.) In the
+fiction of the future a more complete synthesis
+will be attained. An illuminating essay by
+Arthur Symons places George Meredith among
+the decadents, the murderers of their mother
+tongue, the men who shatter syntax to serve
+their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to
+this group for a longer time than the majority
+of his critics suspected. In his ruthless disregard
+of the niceties and conventionalities of
+sentence-structure I see the outcome of his
+dictation. Yet no matter how crabbed and involved
+is his page, a character always emerges
+from the smoke of his muttered enchantments.
+The chief fault is not his obscurity (his prose,
+like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is packed
+with too many meanings), but that his character
+always speaks in purest Jacobean. So
+do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric
+world. So the men and women of Dickens
+and Meredith. It is the fault&mdash;or virtue&mdash;of
+all subjective genius; however, not a fault
+or virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy.
+All in all, Henry James is a distinctly American
+novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary power
+and divination. He has pinned to paper the
+soul of the cosmopolitan. The obsession of the
+moral problem that we feel in Hawthorne is
+not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic,
+his deep-veined humanity may be felt by those
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+who read him aright. His Americans abroad
+suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of
+achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from
+Maggie Verver. Henry James is a faithful
+Secretary to Society&mdash;the phrase is Balzac's&mdash;to
+the American afloat from his native mooring
+as well as at home. And his exquisite notations
+are the glory of English fiction.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Before me lies an autograph letter from
+Henry James to his friend Doctor Rice. It is
+dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21
+East Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: &quot;I
+am not one of 'The Bostonians,' but was born in
+this city April 15, 1843. Believe me, truly yours,
+Henry James.&quot; Although he died a naturalised
+Englishman, there seems to be some confusion
+as to his birthplace in the minds of his English
+critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical study,
+Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life
+of James &quot;began in New England in 1843.&quot; He
+was born in America in 1843, then a land where
+culture was rare! That delightful condescension
+in foreigners is still extant. Now this isn't such
+a serious matter, for Henry James was a citizen
+of the world; but the imputation of a New England
+birthplace does matter, because it allows
+the English critic&mdash;and how many others?&mdash;to
+perform variations on the theme of Puritanism,
+the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamental
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+Puritan&mdash;one is forced to capitalise
+the unhappy word! Apart from the fact that
+there is less Puritanism in New England than
+in the Middle West, James is not a Puritan.
+He does not possess the famous New England
+conscience. He would have been the first to
+repudiate the notion. For him the Puritan
+temperament has a &quot;faintly acrid perfume.&quot;
+To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues
+and refinement, sensibility, intellectuality,
+is a common enough mistake. James never
+made that mistake. He knew that all the good
+things of life are not in the exclusive possession
+of the Puritans. He must not be identified
+with the case he studies. Strictly speaking,
+while he was on the side of the angels, like all
+great artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he
+is our first great &quot;immoralist,&quot; a term that has
+supplanted the old-fashioned amoralist. And
+he wrote the most unmoral short story in the
+English language, one that also sets the spine
+trilling because of its supernatural element as
+never did Poe, or De Maupassant.</p>
+
+<p>Another venerable witticism, which has
+achieved the pathos of distance, was made a
+quarter of a century ago by George Moore.
+Mr. Moore said: &quot;Henry James went to France
+and read Turgenev. W. D. Howells stayed at
+home and read Henry James.&quot; To lend poignancy
+to this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes
+it, substituting the name of De Maupassant
+for Turgenev's. A rather uncanny
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+combination&mdash;Henry and Guy. A still more
+aged &quot;wheeze&quot; bobs up in the pages of Mr.
+Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient
+saw about William James, the fictionist,
+and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None
+of these things is in the least true. With the
+prudishness and peanut piety of puritanism
+Henry James has nothing in common. He did
+not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote
+of him with more sympathy and understanding
+than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire; and Mr.
+Howells never wrote a page that resembled
+either the Russian's or the American's fiction.
+Furthermore, James is a masterly psychologist
+and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest
+English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman
+in many literary fields, he writes with authority,
+though too often in a superlative key. But
+how James would have winced when he read
+in Mr. Hueffer's book that he is or was &quot;the
+greatest of living men.&quot; This surely is a planet-struck
+phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed
+with startling things. He bangs Balzac over
+the head. He tells the truth about Flaubert,
+whose Sentimental Education is an entire
+Human Comedy. He thinks ill of &quot;big business,&quot;
+that &quot;business and whatever takes
+place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not
+worth the attention of any intelligent being.
+It is a manner of dirty little affairs incompetently
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+handled by men of the lowest class of
+intelligence.&quot; But all this in a volume about
+the most serene and luminous intelligence of
+our times. Mr. Hueffer also &quot;goes for&quot; James
+as critic. He once dared to couple the name
+of the &quot;odious&quot; George Eliot with Flaubert's.
+It does rather take the breath away, but, after
+all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who
+was Henry James say that no one is constrained
+to like any particular kind of writing? As to
+the &quot;cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats&mdash;all
+human life is there,&quot; of The Madonna of
+the Future, we need not take the words as a
+final message; nor are the other phrases quoted:
+&quot;The soul is immortal certainly&mdash;if you've
+got one, but most people haven't! Pleasure
+would be right if it were pleasure right through,
+but it never is.&quot; Mr. Hueffer says that James
+&quot;found English people who were just people
+singularly nasty,&quot; and who can say him nay
+after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends
+on the right note: &quot;And for a man to have
+attained to international rank with phrases
+intimately national is the supreme achievement
+of writers&mdash;a glory that is reserved only for
+the Dantes, the Goethes, and the Shakespeares,
+who none the less remain supremely national.&quot;
+Neither Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt
+as to the essential Americanism of Henry James.
+He is almost as American as Howells, who is
+our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision.
+And Trollope, by the way, will loom larger in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+the future despite his impersonality and microscopic
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence.
+To alter his own words, he plays his
+intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a
+portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His
+soul is not a solitary pool in a midnight forest,
+but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or cloud-shadowed;
+yet in whose depths there is a moving
+mass of exquisite living things. His pages
+reverberate with the under hum of humanity.
+We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said
+of Walter Scott: &quot;His works, taken altogether,
+are almost like a new edition of human nature.&quot;
+But we can follow with the coda of that same
+dictum: &quot;This is indeed to be an author.&quot;
+Many more than the dozen superior persons
+mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James
+novels. His swans are not always immaculate,
+but they are not &quot;swans of the cesspool,&quot; to
+quote Landor. There is never an odour of
+leaking gas in his premises, as he once remarked
+of the D'Annunzio fiction. He has the cosmopolitan
+soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual
+gait. Like Renan, he abhorred the &quot;horrible
+mania of certitude&quot; to be found in the writing
+of his realistic contemporaries. He does not
+always dot the &quot;i's&quot; of his irony, a subrisive
+irony. But the spiritual antenn&aelig; which he
+puts forth so tentatively always touch real
+things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense
+he boasts. He peeps into the glowing core of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+emotion, but seldom describes it. His ears are
+for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the
+obvious, of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what
+novelist has kept his ear so close to quotidian
+happenings, and with what dignity and charm
+in his crumbling cadences? Not even that
+virtuoso of the ugly, Huysmans, than whom
+no writer of the past century ever &quot;rendered&quot;
+surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such
+implacable ferocity, is as clairvoyant as James.</p>
+
+<p>Fustian and thunder form no part of the
+James stories, which are like a vast whispering
+gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill the
+listening ear. He is an &quot;auditive&quot; as well as a
+&quot;visualist,&quot; to employ the precious classification
+of the psychiatrists. His astute senses
+tell him of a world which we are only beginning
+to comprehend. He is never obscure, never
+recondite; but, like Browning, he sends a
+veritable multiplex of ideas along a single wire.
+Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is
+not well to pursue the meanings of an author
+to the very heart of darkness. However, readers
+as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny
+plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin
+in one key and end in another. If it's to
+be pork and molasses or &quot;hog and hominy&quot;
+(George Meredith's words), then let it be these
+delectable dishes through every course. But
+James is ever in modulation. He tosses his
+theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals
+spin and bathe in the blue he weaves a web of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+gold and lace, and it is marvellously spun. He
+is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is
+shown from a variety of angles, but the result
+is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther Cary has pointed
+out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He
+does not take the mechanism of his marionette
+apart, but lets us examine it in completeness.
+As a psychologist he stands midway between
+Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling,
+rather than fact.</p>
+
+<p>Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his
+rhythmic moments of libration; he then reveals
+his other side, a profoundly human, emotional
+one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he
+holds in horror the facile expression of the sentiments.
+It's only too easy to write for those avid
+of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas
+Huxley calls &quot;sensualistic caterwauling.&quot; In
+the large, generous curve of his temperament
+there is room for all life, but not for a lean or
+lush statement of life. You may read him in
+a state of mellow exasperation, but you cannot
+deny his ultimate sincerity. There is no lack
+of substance in his densely woven patterns, for
+patterns there are, though the figure be difficult
+to piece out. His route of emerald is elliptical;
+follow him who dare! A &quot;wingy mystery.&quot;
+He is all vision. He does not always avoid
+naked issues. His thousand and one characters
+are significantly vital. His is not &quot;the
+shadow land of American fiction&quot;; simply his
+supreme tact of omission has dispensed with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+the entire banal apparatus of fiction as commonly
+practised. To use a musical example:
+his prose is like the complicated score of some
+latter-day composer, and his art, like music,
+is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions,
+antique melodramatics, set developments
+and d&eacute;nouements, mastodonic structures.
+The sharp savour of character is omnipresent.
+His very pauses are eloquent. He evokes.
+His harmonic tissue melts into remoter harmonic
+perspectives. He composes in every
+tonality. Continuity of impression is unfailing.
+When reading him sympathetically one
+recalls the saying of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Maurice Barres" id="tnote4">Maurice Barr&egrave;s</ins>: &quot;For an
+accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue,
+that between our two egos&mdash;the momentary
+ego that we are and the ideal one toward
+which we strive.&quot; For Jacobeans this interior
+dialogue, with its &quot;secondary intention&quot;
+marches like muted music through the pages
+of the latter period. Henry James will always
+be a touchstone for the tasteless.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h2>GEORGE SAND</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="motto">
+Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called George Sand!</p>
+<p class="motto right smcap">&mdash;Mrs. Browning.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Who reads George Sand nowadays? was
+asked at the time of her centenary (she was
+born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in
+gallant phrases. She was declared one of the
+glories of French literature. Nevertheless, we
+are more interested in the woman, in her psychology,
+than in her interminable novels. The
+reason is simple; her books were built for her
+day, not to endure. She never created a vital
+character. Her men and women are bundles
+of attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good
+red melodrama. She was a wonderful journalist,
+one is tempted to say the first of her
+sex, and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft
+Godwin was a shriller propagandist, yet
+she accomplished no more for the cause than
+her French neighbour, not alone because she
+didn't smoke big cigars or wear trousers, but
+on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin
+didn't exactly practise what she preached and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+George Sand did. For her there was no talk
+of getting the vote; her feminism was a romantic
+revolt, not economic or political rebellion.
+George Sand should be enshrined as the patron
+saint of female suffragism. By no means a deep
+thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the
+ideas of the intellectual men she met, she had
+an enormous vogue. Her reputation was worldwide.</p>
+
+<p>We know more about her now, thanks to
+the three volumes recently published by Vladimir
+Kar&eacute;nine (the pen-name of a Russian lady,
+Mme. Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow).
+This writer has brought her imposing
+work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848,
+and, as much happened in the life of her heroine
+after that, we may expect at least two more
+fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable.
+She has read all the historical and critical literature
+dealing with Sand. She has at first-hand
+from friends and relatives facts hitherto unpublished,
+and she is armed with a library of
+documents. More, she has read and digested
+the hundred-odd stories of the fecund writer,
+and actually analyses their plots, writes at length
+of the characters, and incidentally throws light
+on her own intellectual processes.</p>
+
+<p>Mme. Kar&eacute;nine is not a broad critic. She
+is a painstaking historian. While some tales
+of Sand are worth reading&mdash;The Devil's Pool,
+Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all,
+her autobiography&mdash;the rest is a burden to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+the spirit. Her facility astounds, and also
+discourages. She confesses that with her writing
+was like the turning on of a water-tap, the
+stream always flowed, a literary hydrant.
+Awaken her in the night and she could resume
+her task. She was of the centrifugal temperament,
+hence the resultant shallowness of her
+work. She had charm. She had style, serene,
+flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested
+by Charles Baudelaire, and admired by
+Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais. Baudelaire
+remarked of this &quot;best seller&quot; that she
+wrote her chefs d'&#339;uvre as if they were letters,
+and posted them. The &quot;style coulant,&quot; praised
+by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked
+accent, relief, individuality. &quot;She is the Prudhomme
+of immorality,&quot; he said&mdash;not a bad
+definition&mdash;and &quot;she is stupid, heavy, and a
+chatterer.&quot; She loves the proletarian, and her
+sentiment is adapted to the intelligent wife of
+the concierge and the sentimental harlot. Which
+shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire
+had his prejudices. The sweetness and
+nobility of her nature were recognised by all
+her associates.</p>
+
+<p>Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives
+from Rousseau&mdash;he might have added Byron,
+also&mdash;she is false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated;
+... her style is of a variegated wall-paper
+pattern. She betrays her vulgarity in
+her ambition to expose her generous feelings.
+She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferable
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+artist. She wound herself up like a timepiece
+and&mdash;wrote. Nietzsche, like his great master,
+Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the
+irresponsible sex. And her immorality? P&egrave;re
+Didon said that her books are more immoral
+than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted as
+they are with false ideas and sentiments. George
+Sand immoral? What bathos! How futile
+her fist-shakings at conventional morality. As
+well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral.
+This literature of gush and gabble is as dangerous
+to the morals of our time as the Ibsen
+plays or &AElig;sop's fables.</p>
+
+<p>Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of
+the downtrodden shop girl are the stigmata
+of the Sand school. She has written many
+memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such
+masters as Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Delacroix,
+Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and
+Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories
+are of an indubitable charm. But her immorality,
+like her style, is old-fashioned&mdash;there is
+a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as
+Ibsen maintained, all truths stale and die after
+two decades, how much less life may be allowed
+a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as
+evanescent as last year's mist.</p>
+
+<p>Mme. Kar&eacute;nine does not belong to the School
+of Moral Rehabilitation, so prevalent here and
+in England. She does not spare her subject;
+indeed, makes out a worse case than we had
+supposed. She is not a prude and, if critically
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+she is given to discovering a masterpiece under
+every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener,
+George Sand, she is quite aware of
+George's flagrant behaviour. The list of lovers
+is a longer one than given by earlier biographers.
+Dumas fils, a close observer of the novelist,
+asserts that she had no temperament at all,
+thus corroborating the earlier testimony of
+Heine. This further complicates the problem.
+She was not, then, a perverse pursuer of young
+genius, going about seeking whom she could
+devour, and indulging in what Mother Church
+calls morose delectation! A &quot;cold devil&quot;&mdash;&agrave;
+la F&eacute;licien Rops. I doubt this. Maternal she
+was. I once described her as a maternal
+nymphomaniac, a metaphysical Messalina. She
+presided at numerous artistic accouchements;
+she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to
+many poets, pianists, painters, composers, and
+thinkers. If she made some of them unhappy,
+she brought into the life of others much happiness.
+Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did
+the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert; George
+Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the
+same kind of a moral galley, but with heavier
+oars and through the Sargossian seas of British
+prudery.</p>
+
+<p>In contact with the finest minds of her times,
+George Sand was neither a moral monster nor
+yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has fashioned
+of her. She was a fond mother, and a
+delightful grandmother. She had the featherbed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+temperament, and soothed masculine nerves
+exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art.
+Jules Laforgue would have said of her: Stability,
+thy name is Woman! She died in the odour
+of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends,
+and the idol of the literary world.</p>
+
+<p>How account for her uprightness of character,
+her abundant virtues&mdash;save one? She
+was as true as the compass to her friends, to
+her family. Either she has been slandered or
+else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In
+either case we need a new transvaluation of
+morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans,
+she refused to go to the devil. Like Aspasia,
+she was an immoralist. As an artist
+she could have had social position. But she
+didn't crave it; she didn't crave notoriety;
+paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was
+thrust upon her. At Nohant, her ch&acirc;teau
+in Berri, there was usually a conglomeration
+of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy
+dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working
+men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew
+Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous
+&quot;What a set!&quot; which he despairingly uttered
+about the Shelley-Godwin gatherings.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>George Sand was a normal woman. She
+preferred the society of men; with women she
+was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+one eye open. Her friendship with Mme.
+D'Agoult, the elective affinity of Liszt, soon
+ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic
+seas, nor hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories.
+She never did approvingly quote the
+verse of Baudelaire beginning: &quot;Lo! the Lesbians
+their sterile sex advancing.&quot; She was a
+woman from top to toe. Nor did she indulge
+often in casual gallant adventures. Her affairs
+were romantic. With the author of Carmen
+her spiritual thermometer registered at its
+lowest. She endured him just eight days, and
+M&eacute;rim&eacute;e is responsible for the tasteless anecdote
+which he tells as his reason for leaving her. He
+saw her of a cold morning making the fire, her
+head in curl-papers, and attired in an old dressing-gown.
+No passion could survive that
+shock, and selfish Prosper at once grew frigid.</p>
+
+<p>A French expression may suit George: She
+always had her heart &quot;en compote.&quot; And she
+was incorrigibly na&iuml;ve&mdash;they called it &quot;Idealism&quot;
+in those days&mdash;witness her affair with
+Doctor Pagello in Venice. The first handsome
+Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed
+poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris
+alone, although she had promised his mother
+to guard him carefully. He was suffering from
+an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He
+had said of himself: &quot;I am not tender, I am
+excessive.&quot; He was. His name, unlike Keats's,
+is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless,
+you can reread him.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>But the separation didn't kill him. He was
+twenty-two, George six years older. Their
+affair struggled along about six months. Alfred
+consoled himself with Rachel and many
+others. He was more poet than artist, more
+artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen
+of a man. He wrote the history of his love
+for George. She followed suit. This sphinx
+of the ink-well was a journalist born. She
+used her lovers for &quot;copy&quot;; and for that matter
+Byron and Goethe did the same. George
+always discoursed of her thirst for the &quot;infinite.&quot;
+It was only a species of moral indigestion.
+Every romance ended in disillusionment.
+The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly
+ten years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not
+in 1837, as the Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced
+them. Later Chopin quarrelled with
+Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at
+first; blue stockings were not to the taste of
+this conventional man of the world. Yet he
+succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather
+than from the separation in 1847. Sand divined
+the genius of Chopin before many of his critical
+contemporaries. She had the courage&mdash;and
+the wisdom&mdash;to write that one of his Tiny
+Preludes contained more genuine music than
+much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings.
+And Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when
+she said this.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate cause of this separation I
+hinted at in my early study of Chopin. Solange
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+Sand, the daughter of George, was a
+thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted
+with Chopin, seeking to lure him from her
+mother&mdash;truly a Gallic triangle&mdash;but she so
+contrived matters that her mother was forced
+to allow the intriguing girl to marry her lover,
+Cl&eacute;singer, the sculptor. The knowledge of this
+Mme. Sand kept from Chopin for a while because
+she feared that he would side with Solange.
+He promptly did so, being furious at
+the deception. He it was who broke with
+George, possibly aided thereto by her nagging.
+He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped
+her young and unhappy household. He announced
+by letter to George the news that she
+was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.</p>
+
+<p>Cl&eacute;singer did not get on with his mother-in-law.
+She once boxed his ears. He drank,
+gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George
+Sand suffered the agony of seeing in her
+daughter's life a duplicate of her own. Her
+husband, Fran&ccedil;ois-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched
+country squire, drank, was unfaithful,
+and beat her betimes. He treated his dogs
+better. No wonder she ran away to Paris,
+there to live with Jules Sandeau. (She had
+married in 1822, and brought her husband
+five hundred thousand francs.)</p>
+
+<p>But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did
+her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist
+and wrote by the sweat of her copious
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+soul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still,
+as metaphysicians would say. She
+thought with her nerves and felt with her brain.
+She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised.
+She was a subtle mixer of praise
+and poison, and her autobiography is stuffed
+with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying
+facts, for she was an incurable sentimentalist.
+Heine has cruelly said that women writers
+write with one eye on the paper, the other on
+some man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn,
+who had one eye. George Sand wrote with
+both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity
+should cover a multitude of her missteps. In
+her case we don't know all. We know too much.
+Still, I believe she was more sinned against
+than sinning.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors
+left the Garden of Eden, when Adam
+digged and Eve span, there have been a million
+things that women were told they shouldn't
+attempt, that is, not without the penalty of
+losing their &quot;womanliness,&quot; or interfering with
+their family duties. But they continued, did
+these same refractory females, to overcome
+obstacles, leap social hurdles, make mock of
+antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves
+as if they were free individuals, and not
+petticoated with absurd prejudices. They
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+loved. They married. They became mothers.
+George Sand was in the vanguard of this small
+army of protestants against the prevailing
+moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy
+marriage was a blazing bonfire of revolt. The
+misunderstood woman at last had her innings.
+Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful
+in the eyes of law and order. Yet, compared
+with the feminine fiction of our days, Sand's
+is positively <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: idylic" id="tnote5">idyllic</ins>. She is one parent of the
+Woman movement, unpalatable as her morals
+may prove to churchgoers. She acted in life
+what so many of our belligerent ladies urge
+others to do&mdash;and never attempt on their own
+account. George was brave. And George was
+polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament,
+she had the courage to throw her bonnet over
+the windmill when she saw the man she liked,
+and if she suffered later, she, being an artist,
+made a literary asset of these sufferings. She
+is the true ancestor of the New Woman. Her
+books were considered so immoral by her generation
+that to be seen reading them was enough
+to damn a man. Other males, other tales.</p>
+
+<p>She dared &quot;to live her own life,&quot; as the Ibsenites
+say, and she was the original Ibsen
+girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the
+slightest doubt that to-day she would speak
+to street crowds, urging the vote for woman.
+Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be
+supposed to argue. There will be less dyspepsia
+in America when women desert the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce,
+are better cooks. So, by all means,
+let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test
+applied to our alleged democratic institutions?
+George Sand believed herself to be a social-democrat.
+She trusted in Pierre Leroux's
+mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier,
+in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the latter especially
+because of her intimacy with Franz Liszt;
+nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation
+of ideas in our century, and, as she had
+a sensitive soul, modern democracy might prove
+for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was
+always &aelig;sthetic. She could portray with a
+tender pen the stammering litany of young
+caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her
+fiction. Her Indianas, L&eacute;lias, and the other
+romantic insurgents against society are Byronic,
+Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and rage,
+they are as rare in life as black lightning on a
+blue sky. Her stories are as sad and as ridiculous
+as a nightcap.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>George Sand was not beautiful. Edouard
+Grenier declares that she was short and stout.
+&quot;Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close
+together.&quot; Do you recall Heine's phrase,
+&quot;Femme avec l'&#339;il sombre&quot;? Black they were,
+those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at
+once of unpolished marble and velvet. &quot;Her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+nose was thick and not overshapely. She spoke
+with great simplicity and her manner was very
+quiet.&quot; With these rather negative physical
+attractions she conquered men like Napoleon.
+Even prim President Thiers tried to kiss her
+and her indignation was epical. He is said
+to have giggled in a silly way when reproved.
+It seems incredible. (Did you ever see the
+Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?)
+Liszt never wholly yielded to her. M&eacute;rim&eacute;e
+despised her in his chilly fashion. Michel de
+Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de
+Musset&mdash;who, when he was short of money,
+would dine in an obscure tavern, and, with a
+toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the
+entrance of some fashionable boulevard caf&eacute;&mdash;seems
+to have loved her romantically, the
+sort of love she craved. What was her attraction?
+She had brains and magnetism, but
+that she could have loved all the lovers she is
+credited with is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules
+Sandeau, who was followed by De Musset;
+after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello&mdash;who
+was jilted when he followed her to Paris; Michel
+de Bourges, Pierre Leroux, F&eacute;licien Mallefille,
+Chopin, M&eacute;rim&eacute;e, Manceau, and the platonic
+friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest
+friendship; the correspondence proves it. She
+went to the Magny dinners with Flaubert,
+Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet.
+Her influence on the grumbling giant of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+Croisset was tonic. It was she who should
+have written Sentimental Education. But
+where is that sly old voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve,
+or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many tales),
+or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period,
+notwithstanding Mme. Kar&eacute;nine's denial? She
+denies the Leroux affair, too. Are these all?
+Who dare say?</p>
+
+<p>Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's
+letters from Warsaw and Sand buried them at
+Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks,
+has been corroborated since by Mme. Kar&eacute;nine.
+What a loss for inquisitive critics! George
+was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she was
+descended from a choice chain of rowdy and
+remotely royal ancestors. In her mature years
+she became optimistic, proper, matronly. She
+was a cheerful milch cow for her two children.
+It is delicious comedy to read the warnings to
+her son Maurice against actresses. Solange
+she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for
+the sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted
+and evil art-for-art.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange
+are to be found in Samuel Rocheblave's
+George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left
+Cl&eacute;singer she formed a literary partnership
+with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew of the great
+Italian poet. &quot;Soli&quot; opened a salon in Paris,
+to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet,
+Taine, Herv&eacute;, Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+critic who describes her as having the &quot;curved
+Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black.&quot;
+She, too, must write novels. She died at Nohant,
+her mother's old home, in 1899. Maurice
+Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.</p>
+
+<p>Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about
+Sand. In 1870, when she was old and full of
+honours, she went one day to visit the Minister
+of Instruction. There, being detained in the
+antechamber, she fell into a pleasant conversation
+with a well-groomed, decorated old gentleman.
+After ten minutes' chat the unknown
+consulted his watch, arose, and bowed to Mme.
+Sand. &quot;If I could always find such a charming
+companion I would visit the Ministry often,&quot;
+he gallantly said, and went away. The novelist
+called an attendant. &quot;Who is that amiable
+gentleman?&quot; she asked. &quot;Ah, that is M. Jules
+Sandeau of the French Academy.&quot; And he,
+her first flame in Paris, inquired the name of
+the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and
+moralising must have ensued! The story is
+pretty enough to have been written in the candied
+thunder of Sand herself.</p>
+
+<p>De Lenz, author of several rather neglected
+volumes about musicians, did not like Sand
+because she was rude to him when introduced
+by Chopin. He asked her concierge, &quot;What
+is Madame properly called&mdash;Dudevant?&quot;
+&quot;Ah, Monsieur, she has many names,&quot; was the
+reply. But it is her various names, and not
+her novels, that interest us, and will intrigue the
+attention of posterity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p></p>
+<p>When the supreme master of the historical
+novel modestly confessed that he could do the
+&quot;big bow-wow strain,&quot; but to Jane Austen
+must be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsmanship,
+there was then no question upon the
+critical map of the so-called &quot;great American
+novel.&quot; Sir Walter Scott&mdash;to whom such
+authors of historical novels as Ch&acirc;teaubriand
+and his Martyrs, the Salammb&ocirc; of Flaubert,
+and that well-nigh perfect fiction, The History
+of Henry Esmond, by Thackeray, yield precedence&mdash;might
+have achieved the impossible:
+the writing of a library, epitomising the social
+history of &quot;These States&quot;&mdash;as Walt Whitman
+would say. After Scott no name but Balzac's
+occurs to the memory; Balzac, who laid all
+France under his microscope (and France is
+all of a piece, not the checker-board of nationalities
+we call America). Even the mighty Tolstoy
+would have balked the job. And if these giants
+would have failed, what may be said of their
+successors? The idea of a great American
+novel is an &quot;absolute,&quot; and nature abhors an
+absolute, despite the belief of some metaphysicians
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+to the contrary. Yet the notion still
+obtains and inquests are held from time to
+time, and the opinions of contemporary novelists
+are taken toll of; as if each man and woman
+could give aught else but their own side of
+the matter, that side which is rightfully enough
+personal and provincial. The question is, after
+all, an affair for critics, and the great American
+novel will be in the plural; thousands perhaps.
+America is a chord of many nations, and to
+find the key-note we must play much and varied
+music.</p>
+
+<p>While a novelist may be cosmopolitan at his
+own risk, a critic should be ever so. <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: (Consider" id="tnote6">Consider</ins>
+the names of such widely contrasted critical
+temperaments as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, De Gourmont,
+Matthew Arnold, Brandes, Swinburne,
+Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, Henry James,
+Gosse, and W. C. Brownell; all cosmopolitan
+as well as national. The sublime tenuities of
+Henry James, like the black music of Michael
+Artzibashef, are questions largely temperamental.
+But the Russian is all Slavic, and
+no one would maintain that Mr. James shows
+a like ingrained nationalism. Nevertheless, he
+is American, though dealing only with a certain
+side of American life, the cosmopolitan
+phase. At his peril an American novelist sails
+eastward to describe the history of his countrymen
+abroad. With the critic we come upon a
+different territory. He may go gadding after
+new mud-gods (the newest god invented by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+man is always the greatest), for the time being,
+and return to his native heath mentally refreshed
+and broadened by his foreign outing.
+Not so the maker of fiction. Once he cuts
+loose his balloon he is in danger of not getting
+home again.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. James is a splendid case for us; he began
+in America and landed in England, there to
+stay. Our other felicitous example of cosmopolitanism
+is Henry Blake Fuller, the author
+of The Chevalier Pensieri Vani and The Ch&acirc;telaine
+de la Trinit&eacute;, who was so widely read in
+the nineties. After those charming excursions
+into a rapidly vanishing Europe Mr. Fuller
+reversed the proceeding of James; he returned
+to America and composed two novels of high
+artistic significance, The Cliff Dwellers and
+With the Procession, which, while they continued
+the realistic tradition of William Dean
+Howells, were also the forerunners of a new
+movement in America. It is not necessary to
+dwell now on The Last Refuge, or on that
+masterly book of spiritual parodies, The Puppet-Booth.
+But Mr. Fuller did not write the great
+American novel. Neither did Mr. Howells,
+nor Mr. James. Who has? No one. Is there
+such a thing? Without existing it might be
+described in Celtic fashion, this mythical work,
+as pure fiction. Let us admit for the sake of
+argument that if it were written by some unknown
+monster of genius, it would, like Lewis
+Carroll's Snark, turn into a Boojum.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Henry James has said that no one is compelled
+to admire any particular sort of writing;
+that the province of fiction is all life, and he
+has also wisely remarked that &quot;when you have
+no taste you have no discretion, which is the
+conscience of taste,&quot; and may we add, when
+you have no discretion you perpetrate the shocking
+fiction with which America is deluged at
+this hour. We are told that the new writers
+have altered the old canons of bad taste, but
+&quot;plus &ccedil;a change, plus c'est la m&ecirc;me chose.&quot;
+A liquorish sentimentality is the ever-threatening
+rock upon which the bark of young American
+novelists goes to pieces. (Pardon the
+mixed metaphor.) Be sentimental and you
+will succeed! We agree with Dostoievsky that
+in fiction, as well as in life, there are no general
+principles, only special cases. But these cases,
+could they not be typical? even if there are
+not types, only individuals. And are men and
+women so inthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism
+in life? Have the motion-pictures
+hopelessly deranged our critical values? I
+know that in America charity covers a multitude
+of mediocrities, nevertheless, I am loath
+to believe that all one reads in praise of wretched
+contemporary fiction is meant in earnest.</p>
+
+<p>Well, chacun &agrave; ses d&eacute;go&ucirc;ts! The &quot;thrilling&quot;
+detective story, the romantic sonorities of the
+ice cream-soda woman novelist?&mdash;with a triple-barrelled
+name, as Rudyard Kipling put it
+once upon a time&mdash;or that church of Heavenly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+Ennui, the historical novel&mdash;what a cemetery
+of ideas, all of them! An outsider must be
+puzzle-pated by this tumult of tasteless writing
+and worse observation. However, history in
+fiction may be a cavalcade of shining shadows,
+brilliant, lugubrious, dull, or joyful happenings;
+but where Thackeray succeeded multitudes
+have failed. Who shall bend the bow of that
+Ulysses? Native talent, subtle and robust,
+we possess in abundance; thus far it has cultivated
+with success its own parochial garden&mdash;which
+is as it should be. The United States
+of Fiction. America is Cosmopolis.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>As to the Puritanism of our present novels
+one may dare to say in the teeth of youthful
+protestants that it is non-existent. The pendulum
+has swung too far the other way. And as
+literary artists are rare, the result has not been
+reassuring. Zola seems prudish after some
+experiments of the younger crowd. How badly
+they pull off the trick. How coarse and hard
+and heavy their touch. Most of these productions
+read like stupid translations from a dull
+French original. They are not immoral, only
+vulgar. As old Flaubert used to say: such
+books are false, nature is not like that. How
+keenly he saw through the humbug of &quot;free
+love&quot;&mdash;a romantic tradition of George Sand's
+epoch&mdash;may be noted in his comment that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+Emma Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes
+of marriage. Ah! that much-despised,
+stupid, venerable institution, marriage! How
+it has been flouted since the days of Rousseau&mdash;the
+father of false romanticism and that stupefying
+legend, the &quot;equality&quot; of mankind.
+(O! the beautiful word, &quot;equality,&quot; invented
+for the delectation of rudimentary minds.) A
+century and more fiction has played with the
+theme of concubinage. If the Nacquet divorce
+bill had been introduced a decade or so before
+it was in France, what would have become of
+the theatre of Dumas fils, or later, of the misunderstood
+woman in Ibsen's plays? All such
+tribal taboos make or unmake literature.</p>
+
+<p>So, merely as a suggestion to ambitious
+youngsters, let the novelist of the future in
+search of a novelty describe a happy marriage,
+children, a husband who doesn't drink or gamble,
+a wife who votes, yet loves her home, her family,
+and knows how to cook. What a realistic bombshell
+he would hurl into the camp of sentimental
+socialists and them that believe a wedding
+certificate is like Balzac's La Peau de
+Chagrin&mdash;a document daily shrinking in happiness.
+Absurdities make martyrs, but of all
+the absurd and ineffectual martyrdoms that of
+running off with another's wife is usually the
+crowning one. &quot;I don't call this very popular
+pie,&quot; said the little boy in Richard Grant White's
+story; and the man in the case is usually the
+first to complain of his bargain in pastry.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>However, categories are virtually an avowal
+of mental impuissance, and all marriages are
+not made in heaven. In the kingdom of morality
+there are many mansions. When too late
+you may sport with the shade&mdash;not in the
+shade&mdash;of Amaryllis, and perhaps elbow epigrams
+as a lean consolation. That is your own
+affair. Paul Verlaine has told us that &quot;j'ai
+v&eacute;cu &eacute;norm&eacute;ment,&quot; though his living enormously
+did not prove that he was happy. Far
+from it. But he had at least the courage to relate
+his terrors. American novelists may agree
+with Dostoievsky that &quot;everything in the world
+always ends in meanness&quot;; or with Doctor Pangloss
+that all is for the best in the best of possible
+worlds. An affair of temperament. But
+don't mix the values. Don't confuse intellectual
+substances. Don't smear a fact with
+treacle and call it truth. Above all, don't
+preach. Impiety is an indiscretion, yet, don't
+be afraid to tell the truth. From Jane Austen
+and Walter Scott, the parents of the modern
+English novel, to many modern instances, fiction
+has thrived best on naked truth. All
+the rest is sawdust, tripe-selling, and sentimentalism.
+Didn't Mr. Roundabout declare
+in one of his famous papers that &quot;Figs are
+sweet, but fictions are sweeter&quot;? In our land
+we can't get the latter sweet enough. Altruism,
+Brotherhood of Man Uplifting. These are the
+shibboleths of the &quot;nouvelles couches sociales.&quot;
+Prodigious!</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>J.-K. Huysmans declared that in the land
+of books there are no schools; no idealism,
+realism, symbolism; only good writers and
+bad. Whistler said the same about painting
+and painters. Setting aside the technical viewpoint
+of such dicta, we fancy that our &quot;best
+sellers&quot; do not preoccupy themselves with the
+&quot;mere writing&quot; of their fictions, but they have
+developed a formidable faculty of preaching.
+Old-fashioned fiction that discloses personal
+charm, that delineates manners, or stirs the
+pulse of tragedy&mdash;not melodrama, is vanishing
+from publishers' lists. Are there not as many
+charming men and women perambulating the
+rind of the planet as there were in the days
+when Jane Austen, or Howells, or Turgenev
+wrote? We refuse to believe there are not;
+but there is little opportunity, in a word, no
+market, for the display of these qualities. The
+novel with a purpose, generally an unpleasant
+purpose, has usurped the rule of the novel of
+character and manners. Boanerges, not Balzac,
+now occupies the pasteboard pulpit of
+fiction.</p>
+
+<p>I quoted Henry James to the effect that all
+life is the province of the novelist. Nevertheless,
+the still small garden wherein is reared
+the tender solitary flower does but ill represent
+the vaster, complicated forest of common humanity.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+The ivory tower of the cultivated
+egoist is not to be unduly admired; rather
+Zola's La Terre with its foul facts than a palace
+of morbid art. Withal, the didactic side of
+our fiction is overdone. I set it down to the
+humbug about the &quot;masses&quot; being opposed
+to the &quot;classes.&quot; Truly a false antithesis. As
+if the French bourgeois were not a product of the
+revolution (poor bourgeois, always abused by
+the novelist). As if a poor man suddenly
+enriched didn't prove, as a rule, the hardest
+taskmaster to his own class. Consider the
+new-rich. What a study they afford the students
+of manners. A new generation has arisen. Its
+taste, intelligence, and culture; its canned
+manners, canned music&mdash;preferably pseudo-African&mdash;canned
+art, canned food, canned
+literature; its devotion to the mediocre&mdash;what
+a field for our aspiring young &quot;secretaries to
+society.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cheap prophylactics, political and religious&mdash;for
+religion is fast being butchered to make
+the sensational evangelists' holiday&mdash;are in
+vogue. They affect our fiction-mongers, who
+burn to avenge wrongs, write novels about
+the &quot;downtrodden masses,&quot; and sermons on
+social evils&mdash;evils that have always existed,
+always will exist. Like the knife-grinder, story
+they have none to tell. Why write fiction, or
+what they are pleased to call fiction? Why
+not join the brave brigade of agitators and
+pamphleteers? The lay preachers are carrying
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+off the sweepstakes. For them Mr. Howells is
+a superannuated writer. Would there were
+more like him in continence of speech, wholesomeness
+of judgment, nobility of ideals, and
+in the shrewd perception of character.</p>
+
+<p>Fiction, too, is a fine art, though this patent
+fact has escaped the juvenile Paul Prys, who
+are mainly endeavouring to arouse class against
+mass. It's an old dodge, this equality theory,
+as old as Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. When all
+fruit fails, welcome envy and malicious slandering.
+When you have nothing else to write
+about, attack your neighbour, especially if he
+hath a much-coveted vineyard. Max Stirner,
+least understood of social philosophers, wrote,
+&quot;Mind your own business,&quot; and he forged on
+the anvil of experience a mighty leading motive
+for the conduct of life. But our busy little
+penmen don't see in this golden motto a sufficient
+sentimental appeal. It doesn't flatter
+the &quot;masses.&quot; Mr. Bryan a few years ago
+told us that we were all middle class. What is
+middle class? In Carlyle's day it was a &quot;gig-man&quot;;
+in ours is it the owner of a &quot;flivver&quot;?
+But in the case of Snob vs. Mob, Snob always
+wins.</p>
+
+<p>This twaddle about &quot;democratic art&quot; is the
+bane of our literature. There is only good art.
+Whether it deals with such &quot;democratic&quot; subjects
+as L'Assommoir or Germinie Lacerteux, or
+such &quot;aristocratic&quot; themes as those of D'Annunzio
+and Paul Bourget, it is the art thereof
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+that determines the product. I hold no brief
+for the sterile fiction that is enrolled under
+the banner of &quot;Art for Art.&quot; I go so far as to
+believe that a novelist with a beautiful style
+often allows that style to get in the way of
+human nature. Stained-glass windows have
+their use, but they falsify the daylight. A
+decorative style may suit pseudo-medi&aelig;val
+romances, but for twentieth-century realism
+it is sadly amiss. Nor is the arterio-sclerotic
+school of psychological analysis to be altogether
+commended. It has been well-nigh done to
+death by Stendhal, Meredith, James, and
+Bourget; and it is as cold as a star. Flaubert
+urged as an objection to writing a novel, proving
+something that the other fellow can prove
+precisely the opposite. In either case selection
+plays the r&ocirc;le.</p>
+
+<p>The chief argument against the novel &quot;with
+a purpose&quot;&mdash;as the jargon goes&mdash;is its lack
+of validity either as a document or as art. A
+novel may be anything, but it must not be
+polemical. Zola has been, still is, the evil
+genius of many talented chaps who &quot;sling
+ink,&quot; not to make a genuine book, but to create
+a sensation. Such writers lack patience, art,
+and direction. They always keep one eye on
+the box-office. Indeed, the young men and
+women of the day, who are squandering upon
+paper their golden genius, painfully resemble
+in their productions the dime novels once published
+by the lamented Beadle or the lucubrations
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+in the Saturday weeklies of long ago.
+But in those publications there was more virility.
+The heroes then were not well-dressed
+namby-pambies; the villains were villainous;
+the detectives detected real crimes, and were
+not weavers of metaphysical abstractions like
+your latter-day miracle-workers of an impossible
+Scotland Yard; and the girls were girls,
+neither neurasthenic, nor did they outgolf all
+creation. The &quot;new&quot; novelists still deal with
+the same raw material of melodrama. Their
+handling of love-episodes has much of the blaring-brass
+quality of old-fashioned Italian opera.
+They loudly twang the strings of sloppy sentiment,
+which evoke not music, but mush and
+moonshine. And these are our &quot;motion-masters&quot;
+to-day.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>There can be no objection to literature and
+life coming to grips. Letters should touch
+reality. Many a sturdy blow has been struck
+at abuses by penmen masquerading behind
+fiction. No need to summon examples. As
+for realism&mdash;I deny there are commonplace
+people. Only those writers are commonplace
+that believe in the phrase. It is one of the paradoxes
+of art that the commonplace folk of
+Thackeray, Flaubert, or Anthony Trollope who
+delight us between covers would in life greatly
+bore us. The ennui is artistically suggested,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+though not experienced by the reader. It is
+the magic of the novelist, his style and philosophy,
+that make his creations vital.</p>
+
+<p>Dostoievsky says there are no old women&mdash;to
+be sure he puts the expression in the mouth
+of the sensualist Karamazov&mdash;and as a corollary
+I maintain that nothing is uninteresting
+if painted by a master hand, from carrots to
+Chopin. As for the historical novel, there is
+Sentimental Education as a model, if you desire
+something epical in scale and charged with the
+modern ironic spirit. A Flaubertian masterpiece,
+this book, with its daylight atmosphere;
+the inimitable sound, shape, gait, and varied
+prose rhythms of its sentences, its marvellous
+gallery of portraits executed in the Dutch
+manner of Hals and Vermeer, its nearness to
+its environment, and its fidelity to the pattern
+of life. It is a true &quot;historical&quot; novel, for it is
+real&mdash;to employ the admirable simile of Mr.
+Howells.</p>
+
+<p>No need to transpose the tragic gloom of
+Artzibashef to America; we are an optimistic
+people, thanks to our air and sky, political
+conditions, and the immigration of sturdy
+peasant folk. Yet we, too, have our own peculiar
+gloom and misery and social problems
+to solve. We are far from being the &quot;shadow-land&quot;
+of fiction, as a certain English critic
+said. When I praise the dissonantal art of
+Michael Artzibashef it is not with the idea
+that either his style or his pessimism should
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+be aped. That way unoriginality lies. But I
+do contend that in the practice of his art, its
+sincerity, its profundity, he might be profitably
+patterned after by the younger generation.
+Art should elevate as well as amuse. Must
+fiction always be silly and shallow? It need
+be neither sordid nor didactic.</p>
+
+<p>William James put the matter in a nutshell
+when he wrote that &quot;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 flavours.&quot; And on this
+fundamentally sound note I must end my little
+sermon&mdash;for I find that I have been practising
+the very preaching against which I warned
+embryo novelists. But, then, isn't every critic
+a lay preacher?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE CASE OF PAUL C&Eacute;ZANNE</h2>
+
+
+<p>The case of painter Paul C&eacute;zanne. Is he
+a stupendous nobody or a surpassing genius?
+The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen
+for the reputation of the man from Provence.
+We do not discuss a corpse, and though C&eacute;zanne
+died in 1906 he is still a living issue among
+artists and writers. Every exhibition calls
+forth comment: fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom
+just. Yet the C&eacute;zanne question, is it so
+difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman
+is often misrepresented; Brahms, known
+now as a Romantic writing within the walls of
+accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist;
+C&eacute;zanne, not a revolutionist, not an
+innovator, vastly interested in certain problems,
+has been made &quot;chef d'&eacute;cole&quot; and fathered
+with a lot of theories which would send him
+into one of his famous rages if he could hear
+them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist!
+cried Paul Gauguin&mdash;whose work was heartily
+detested by C&eacute;zanne; but truth is ever mediocre,
+whether it resides at the bottom of a well
+or swings on the cusps of the new moon. What
+is the truth about C&eacute;zanne? The question
+bobs up every season. His so-called followers
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+raise a clamour over the banality of &quot;representation&quot;
+in art, and their master is the one man
+in the history of art who squandered on canvas
+startling evocations of actuality, whose nose
+was closest to the soil. Huysmans was called
+an &quot;eye&quot; by Remy de Gourmont. Paul C&eacute;zanne
+is also an eye.</p>
+
+<p>In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon
+a picture by Maurice Denis entitled Hommage
+&agrave; C&eacute;zanne, the idea of which was manifestly
+inspired by Manet's Hommage &agrave; Fantin-Latour.
+The canvas depicted a still life by C&eacute;zanne
+on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard,
+Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard,
+Mellerio, and Vollard. Himself (as they say
+in Irish) is shown standing and apparently unhappy,
+embarrassed. Then came the brusque
+apotheosis of 1904 at the Autumn Salon, the
+most revelatory of his unique gift thus far
+made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special
+Salle, so had Eug&egrave;ne Carri&egrave;re; C&eacute;zanne held
+the place of honour. The critical press was
+hostile or half-hearted. Poor C&eacute;zanne, with
+his na&iuml;ve vanity, seemed dazzled by the uproarious
+championship of &quot;les jeunes,&quot; and,
+to give him credit for a peasant-like astuteness,
+he was rather suspicious and always on his
+guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage
+of the youngsters, looking all the while
+like a bourgeois Buddha. In The Sun of 1901,
+1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death)
+appeared my articles on C&eacute;zanne, among the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+first, if not the first, that were printed in this
+country. Since then he has been hoisted to
+the stars by his admirers, and with him have
+mounted his prices. Why not? When juxtaposed
+with most painters his pictures make
+the others look like linoleum or papier-m&acirc;ch&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>He did not occupy himself, as did Manet,
+with the manners, ideas, and aspects of his
+generation. In the classic retort of Manet he
+could have replied to those who taunted him
+with not &quot;finishing&quot; his pictures: &quot;Sir, I am
+not a historical painter.&quot; Nor need we be disconcerted,
+in any estimate of him, by the depressing
+snobbery of collectors who don't know
+B from a bull's foot, but who go off at half-trigger
+when a hint is dropped about the possibilities
+of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary
+sense. C&eacute;zanne is the painting idol of the
+hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago.
+These fluctuations must not distract us, because
+Cabanel, Bouguereau and Henner, too,
+were idolised once upon a time, and served to
+make a millionaire's holiday by hanging in
+his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable
+truth that C&eacute;zanne has become a tower of
+strength in the eyes of the younger generation
+of artists which intrigues critical fancy. Sincerity
+is strength; C&eacute;zanne is sincere to the
+core; but even stark sincerity does not necessarily
+imply the putting forth of masterpieces.
+Before he attained his original, synthetic power
+he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+several others. He achieved at times the foundational
+structure of Courbet, but his pictures,
+so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans
+linear pattern, sans personal charm. But &quot;Popularity
+is for dolls,&quot; cried Emerson.</p>
+
+<p>C&eacute;zanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless
+one. His early modelling in paint
+was quasi-structural. Always the architectural
+sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at
+times and he betrays a predilection for the
+asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has
+given to an art in two dimensions the illusion
+of a third; tactile values are here raised to the
+<i>n</i>th degree. His colour is personal and rhythmic.
+Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century
+ago, he spoke of C&eacute;zanne's work as
+containing the prodromes of a new art. He
+was absorbed in the handling of his material,
+not in the lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical
+elements. His portraits are vital and
+charged with character. And he often thinks
+profoundly on unimportant matters.</p>
+
+<p>When you are young your foreground is huddled:
+it is the desire for more space that begets
+revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing
+his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all
+these sporadic outbursts; and while a creative
+talent may remain provincial, even parochial,
+as was the case with C&eacute;zanne, a critic must be
+cosmopolitan or nothing. An artist may stay
+rooted in his own bailiwick his life long, yet
+paint like an angel; but a provincial critic is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+a contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a
+razor so dull that it can't cut butter. Let us
+therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even
+Cabanel has his good points.</p>
+
+<p>The tang of the town is not in C&eacute;zanne's
+portraits of places. His leaden landscapes do
+not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded
+retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet.
+As for the groups of bathing women, how they
+must wound the sensibility of George Moore,
+Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica.
+There is no sex appeal. Merely women
+in their natural pelt. It is related of the Empress
+Eug&eacute;nie that in front of Courbet's Les
+Baigneuses (Salon, 1853) she asked: &quot;Est-ce
+aussi une percheronne?&quot; Of the heavy-flanked
+Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the
+canvases of C&eacute;zanne. The remark of the Empress
+appealed to the truculent vanity of Courbet.
+It might not have pleased C&eacute;zanne. With
+beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic.
+If you don't care for his graceless nudes you
+may console yourself that there is no disputing
+tastes&mdash;with the tasteless. They are uglier
+than the females of Degas, and twice as truthful.</p>
+
+<p>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 slightly
+stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an
+oboe in a score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle
+sonorities, what colour chords are in his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+best work. I once wrote in the Promenades of
+an Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables
+savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life
+with realistic beauty; when he painted an
+onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would
+have dramatised it. When C&eacute;zanne painted
+one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be
+sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board
+of my sensibility.</p>
+
+<p>The supreme technical qualities in C&eacute;zanne
+are volume, ponderability, and an entrancing
+colour scheme. What's the use of asking whether
+he is a &quot;sound&quot; draughtsman? He is a master
+of edges and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans
+spoke of his defective eyesight; but disease
+boasts its discoveries, as well as health.
+The abnormal vision of C&eacute;zanne gave him
+glimpses of a &quot;reality&quot; denied to other painters.
+He advised Emile Bernard to look for the contrasts
+and correspondences of tones. He practised
+what he preached. No painter was so
+little affected by personal moods, by those
+variations of temperament dear to the artist.
+Had C&eacute;zanne the &quot;temperament&quot; that he was
+always talking about? If so it was not decorative
+in the accepted sense. An unwearying
+experimenter, he seldom &quot;finished&quot; a picture.
+His morose landscapes were usually painted
+from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited
+the spot. The pictures do not resemble it;
+which simply means that C&eacute;zanne had the
+vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+variations filled his simple life. Art
+submerged by the apparatus. And he had the
+centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament.</p>
+
+<p>In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no
+room for climate, personal charm, not even for
+sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky and
+sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot
+of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet,
+and search for this mellow richness and misty
+golden air in the pictures of our master. You
+won't find them, though a mystic light permeates
+the entire series. The sallow-sublime.
+He did not paint portraits of Provence, as did
+Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arl&eacute;sienne.
+He sought for profounder meanings.
+The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the
+brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an
+&quot;abstract&quot; painter&mdash;as the jargon goes. He
+was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate
+trompe-l'&#339;il on the optic nerve. His is not a
+pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow,
+patient delineation by a geologist of art of a
+certain hill on old Mother Earth, shamelessly
+exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and
+gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped.
+As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, and
+as austere in linear economy; and as analytical
+as Stendhal or Ibsen, C&eacute;zanne never becomes
+truly lyrical except in his still-life. Upon an
+apple he lavishes his palette of smothered
+jewels. And, as all things are relative, an
+onion for him is as beautiful as a naked woman.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+And he possesses a positive genius for the tasteless.</p>
+
+<p>The chiefest misconception of C&eacute;zanne is
+that of the theoretical fanatics who not only
+proclaim him their chief of school, which may
+be true, but also declare him to be the greatest
+painter that ever wielded a brush since the
+Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I
+saw at Paris would have been astounded at
+some of the things printed since his death;
+while he yearned for the publicity of the official
+Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy)
+he disliked notoriety. He loved work; above
+all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch
+of canvases every morning and trudged to his
+pet landscapes, the Motive he called it, and
+it was there that he slaved away with technical
+heroism, though he didn't kill himself
+with his labours as some of his fervent disciples
+have asserted. He died of unromantic diabetes.
+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,
+A rare impersonality, I should say.</p>
+
+<p>There is a lot of inutile talk about &quot;significant
+form&quot; by propagandists of the New
+&AElig;sthetic. As if form had not always been
+significant. No one can deny C&eacute;zanne's preoccupation
+with form; nor Courbet's either.
+Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their
+sombre flux of forest, by the crassest realist
+among French painters (he seems hopelessly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+romantic to our sharper and more petulant
+modern mode of envisaging the world); there
+is &quot;significant form,&quot; and a solid structural
+sense. But C&eacute;zanne quite o'ercrows Courbet
+in his feeling for the massive. Sometimes you
+can't see the ribs because of the skeleton.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe has told us that because of his limitations
+we may recognise a master. The
+limitations of Paul C&eacute;zanne are patent to all.
+He is a profound investigator, and if he did not
+deem it wise to stray far from the territory he
+called his own then we should not complain,
+for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed.
+His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine
+reversing musical history and finding Johann
+Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss!
+The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively
+speaking, constitutes the case of C&eacute;zanne.
+He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic,
+symbolic schools. He is a primitive,
+not made, like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed
+simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes
+recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe.
+Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained
+radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music
+flows as if from a secret spring.</p>
+
+<p>What poet asked: &quot;When we drive out from
+the cloud of steam majestical white horses, are
+we greater than the first men, who led black
+ones by the mane?&quot; Why can't we be truly
+catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains
+many mansions, and the rainbow more
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+colours than one. Paul C&eacute;zanne will be remembered
+as a painter who respected his material,
+and as a painter, pure and complex. No
+man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring
+epitaph.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<p></p>
+<h2>BRAHMSODY</h2>
+
+
+<p>After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes
+Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama;
+a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms,
+a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold
+of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever
+a poet. &quot;Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,&quot;
+cried Von B&uuml;low; but he forgot Schumann.
+The molten tide of passion and extravagance
+that swept over intellectual Europe threescore
+years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert
+Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince
+of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who
+dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered
+and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled,
+rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms
+wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery,
+and the leaves rustle rhythms to the
+heart-beats of lovers. All German romance,
+fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann
+of the Papillons and the Carneval.
+Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades.
+Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade
+him glance aloft at the stars. And Brahms
+had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful
+harmonies. In his music the formulist
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+finds perfect things. Structurally he is as great
+as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic
+is superb. His melodic content is his own
+as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued
+Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning.
+Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.</p>
+
+<p>The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual
+an&aelig;mia, leaving the world as a legacy one
+of the most marvellous groupings of genius
+since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to
+Pericles. Then came the revolution of 1848,
+and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the
+mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past,
+his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at
+Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois.
+Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools,
+and the world grew aweary of the malodor.
+Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers
+of romanticism, were put in albums where
+their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are
+pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even
+Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the
+scores of Wagner and Liszt; even mad Hector,
+with the flaming locks, sounded garishly empty,
+brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived.
+A short, stocky youth played his sonata
+in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the Magyar of
+Weimar returned the compliment by singing
+in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B
+minor, which he fondly and futilely believed
+a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was
+enraged. But how symbolical of Brahms to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+fall asleep at the very onset of his career, fall
+asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new
+wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the
+garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful.
+Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned
+philosopher, the philosopher turned musician.
+If he were not a great composer he would be a
+great biologist, a great metaphysician. There
+are passages in his music in which I detect the
+philosopher in omphalic meditation.</p>
+
+<p>Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that
+scale the Infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods
+his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings&mdash;wings
+of great, terrifying monsters; <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: hippogrifs" id="tnote7">hippogriffs</ins>
+of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces
+with stony stare, menace your imagination.
+He can bring down within the compass of the
+octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals.
+He is a magician, spectral at times, yet
+his songs have the homely lyric fervour and
+concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the
+untoward, shudders at certain bars in his F
+sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit
+tranquillity in the slow movement of the F
+minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated,
+obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift
+of lovely music wells out of the mist; you are
+enchanted and cry: &quot;Brahms, master, anoint
+again with thy precious melodic chrism our
+thirsty eyelids!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His
+four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+choral works and chamber music&mdash;are they
+not all living testimony to his admirable management
+of masses? He is not a great colourist.
+For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and
+Th&eacute;ophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis
+de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat
+tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon
+rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of
+thought. Ideas, noble, profundity-embracing
+ideas he has. He says great things in a great
+manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic,
+scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He
+disdains racial allusions. He is German, but
+a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the
+geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg
+to the map of Norway. Brahms's melodies are
+world-typical, not cabined and confined to
+his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance,
+lack of polish, and a disregard for the
+politesse of his art do not endear him to the
+unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist
+he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi.
+There he catches the tender sigh of childhood
+or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred
+by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer;
+and virile as are few men. The sinister
+fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first
+rhapsodies&mdash;true soul-tragedies&mdash;how they
+unearthed the core of pessimism in our age.
+Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer
+in himself, thus a believer in men and women.</p>
+
+<p>He reminds me more of Browning than does
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the
+dramatic&mdash;yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric&mdash;modes
+of analysis, the flow, glow, and
+relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of
+motives is Browning; but the composer never
+loses his grip on the actualities of structure.
+After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling,
+deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood,
+the sweet, exasperated poison of the
+Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and
+it sings about the base of that mighty mount
+we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane
+depths; Beethoven is for the heights.
+Strong lungs are needed for the company of
+both giants.</p>
+
+<p>Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces
+the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and
+healer. Beethoven and Brahms.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h2>THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS</h2>
+
+
+<p>A monument should be erected to the memory
+of the inventor of playing-cards because
+he did something toward suppressing the free
+exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman
+Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment,
+was not necessarily companionable. He
+was the most unpleasant among the world's
+great writers; for as a great master of prose
+he ranks high in the literature of his country.
+His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting
+fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic,
+his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition,
+Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the
+ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why
+precisely such subjects appealed to him must
+be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration.
+Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed
+scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not.
+Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De
+Goncourts have told us in their copious confidences
+the agony they endured when digging
+for documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful
+travail, not alone because of the tortuous
+style it demanded, but also because of the
+author's natural repugnance to such vulgar
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+material. They were aristocrats. Huysmans
+came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on
+the paternal side, his father hailed from Breda,
+and Parisian on the distaff. Therefore he might
+have described his modest surroundings with
+less acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts.
+Such was not the case. He loathed his themes.
+He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps
+the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be
+a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the
+task. But the fact remains that, art and religion
+aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed
+from life to his marvellously written
+pages. His was a veritable &AElig;sthetic of the
+Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature
+sensitive to the pathological point. And, like
+Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility
+with a repelling <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: misanthrophy" id="tnote8">misanthropy</ins>.</p>
+
+<p>In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave
+Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an
+etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown
+some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never
+beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed
+his opinions concerning contemporaries;
+indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have
+been his, &quot;Je vomis mes contemporains.&quot; He
+has been called an &quot;exasperated Goncourt,&quot;
+which is putting it mildly. However, it must
+not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist,
+hitting out blindly. He seems, according to
+the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont,
+to have been an unassuming and industrious
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+functionary in the Ministry of the Interior,
+and even when aroused not so truculent
+as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to
+his temperament endowed him with considerable
+phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked
+effusiveness in life and literature, and only
+in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness
+of his prejudices. He had many. Yet,
+fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and
+disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues
+of thirty-two years of office work, and, a
+model clerk, he was decorated when he left his
+bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for
+his zeal and punctuality, not for his books.
+Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion
+of Honour, yet none contain such subacid
+irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible
+among decorated philistines!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some
+one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he
+speaks the book looms up before one, becomes
+monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a
+miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little
+woman grows into a slow horror before your
+eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of
+things that he seizes, but the intensity of his
+revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch
+of the sublime into the very expression of his
+disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and
+every epigram slaughters a reputation or an
+idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained
+surprise, and amused look of contempt, so profound
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+that it becomes almost pity, for human
+imbecility.&quot; This tiny etched portrait is by
+Mr. Arthur Symons, who practically introduced
+Huysmans to English-speaking letters.</p>
+
+<p>Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to
+others. Yet Coquiot found him entertaining
+betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his tales
+of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate
+heartily in the very restaurants he so viciously
+abuses throughout that Iliad of indigestion, A
+Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic
+hero; as he was the unpatriotic hero of
+The Knapsack&mdash;published in Zola's collection,
+Les Soir&eacute;es de Medan. In all his books he figures.
+Jules Lema&icirc;tre describes them collectively
+as: a young man with the dysentery; a young
+man who disliked single blessedness&mdash;the critic
+used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't
+get a beefsteak in Paris cooked as he wanted it,
+and a man who liked to read the chaste chronicle
+of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the
+sadistic Bluebeard&mdash;these comprise the characters
+of Huysmans. After his conversion he made
+amends, though he was always the atrabilious
+faultfinder.</p>
+
+<p>No matter. One of the most notable of art
+critics in a city abundantly supplied with criticism
+was this same Huysmans. His critical
+achievement may outlive his fiction and his
+religious confessions. He preferred Certains
+to his other books. It is written in his most
+astounding and captivating style. The portraits
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+of certain artists in this unique volume
+recite the history of the critic's acuity and
+clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas
+as the &quot;greatest artist we possess to-day in
+France.&quot; He discovered Odilon Redon, Raffaelli,
+Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau
+in enamelled prose. Whistler, Ch&eacute;ret, Pissarro,
+Gauguin were praised by him before they had
+attracted the pontifical disdain of academic
+criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary
+pages, for Huysmans was a verbal
+virtuoso superior to any of the artists he praised
+and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot
+that he didn't highly estimate the Belgian
+etcher, but found in him excellent pasture for
+his own picture-making pen. In a word, the
+erotic Rops attracted him more than Rops
+the every-day craftsman, and rightly enough.
+With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is
+only for the connoisseur.</p>
+
+<p>Huysmans said some just things of Whistler,
+and he was the first critic to salute the rising
+star of Paul C&eacute;zanne, who, he asserts, contributed
+more to the impressionist movement
+than Manet; and one who also discovered the
+prodromes of a new art. (This was as early
+as 1877.) He found the C&eacute;zanne still-life brutally
+real; above all, a preoccupation with
+forms and &quot;edges,&quot; that betrayed this painter's
+tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according
+to Coquiot, Huysmans saw through
+the hole in the C&eacute;zanne millstone. The Proven&ccedil;al
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+was a rus&eacute;, an intrigant, and a money-grubber
+in his old age, and proved his plebeian
+ancestry. His father began barber, ended
+banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his
+client&egrave;le in both professions.</p>
+
+<p>American collectors of art Huysmans treated
+as brigands. In the matter of the classical
+painters and sculptors he manifested himself
+intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives,
+the School of Cologne and a few of the
+Italian primitives, but with the exception of
+Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous.
+(He employed a more pungent
+term.) In the Low Countries are the true
+primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism
+is that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa.
+Matthias Gr&uuml;newald's Crucifixion is his idol.
+<ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Huysman's" id="tnote9">Huysmans's</ins> opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in
+Certains is stimulating though inconclusive.
+For him Puvis tries to dance a rigaudon at a
+Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis
+Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an
+abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a
+veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont
+called him an &quot;eye.&quot; His prose is addressed
+to the eye, rather than to the ear. Sumptuous
+in colouring, its rhythmic movement is
+pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated
+it that it was a perfect medium to depict
+the Paris of his time.</p>
+
+<p>Huysmans did not think too highly of his
+brothers under the same literary yoke. His
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them.
+Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic
+group, Huysmans soon tired of his chief,
+tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and
+life. He definitely broke away from him in his
+famous preface to L&agrave; Bas. And it should not be
+forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in
+fiction, if celebration it may be called, the
+prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared
+a year earlier than either Nana or La Fille
+Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But
+he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive
+deeper in the medi&aelig;val vileness of L&agrave; Bas.
+He met Goncourt through the offices of L&eacute;on
+Cladel, a writer little known to our generation.
+Huysmans was a friend in need to Villiers de
+l'Isle Adam, and frequented the eccentric company
+of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Barbey d'Aurevilly" id="tnote10">Barbey d'Aur&eacute;villy</ins>, in whose apartment
+he said that Paul Bourget was apt to
+pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care
+for that &quot;Cherubin of the Duchesses of the
+Faubourg Saint-Antoine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Of Corneille, Racine, Moli&egrave;re, Dante, Schiller,
+and Goethe he spoke with ill-concealed contempt.
+Raseurs, all these &quot;solemn pontiffs.&quot;
+His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac,
+the prodigious novelist, left him unstirred.
+&quot;Not an artistic epithet&quot; in his edition, fifty
+volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread.
+Th&eacute;ophile Gautier did not attract him;
+he found the impeccable master cold and diluted;
+so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+believed in &quot;saying something,&quot; and for
+him it usually meant something disagreeable,
+or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated
+the theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier,
+Dumas fils, Sardou, Feuillet, and of the &quot;old
+pedant&quot; Sarcey, are savage. He had no feeling
+for the footlights, and not possessing much
+imagination and deficient in what are called
+&quot;general ideas&quot; (that is, the stereotyped
+commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate
+&quot;thinkers&quot;), he revolted at the lean or hysterical
+stuff manufactured by dramatists; plays
+that are neither life nor literature, nor even
+theatrical.</p>
+
+<p>Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers
+in the poetical Parnassus of that period,
+appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as well
+he might, Flaubert, but found his company
+intolerable. That giant from Normandy was
+too healthy for the slender overwrought Parisian.
+He had, so said Huysmans, the manners
+of a traveling salesman&mdash;Balzac's Gaudissart&mdash;and
+would play his own Homais, being addicted
+to punning and disconcerting joking.
+Poor Flaubert! Poorer Huysmans! Such sensibility
+as his must have been a daily torture.
+Victor Hugo was &quot;an incomparable trumpet,
+an epic of the garde nationale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending
+airs of &quot;un vieux ma&icirc;tre,&quot; he escaped
+by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great
+men, was a tedious Russian, &quot;a spigot of tepid
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+water always flowing.&quot; If Verlaine had been
+penned up in hospital or prison it would have
+been for the greater glory of French poetry.
+Jules Laforgue, &quot;Quelle joie!&quot; Remy de Gourmont:
+&quot;I wrote a preface to one of his books&quot;
+(Le Latin mystique). &quot;That says enough.&quot;
+Marcel Provost: &quot;Le jeune premier des romans
+de Georges Ohnet,&quot; which isn't bad. He rather
+evades a definite judgment of Anatole France:
+&quot;Il s'y conna&icirc;t, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se
+d&eacute;file!&quot; The style and thought of these two
+remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls
+Maurice Barr&egrave;s &quot;Lord Beaconsfield,&quot; a high
+compliment to that exquisite writer's political
+attainments. He sums up Ferdinand Bruneti&egrave;re
+as &quot;constip&eacute;,&quot; a sound definition of a shrewd,
+unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers,
+&quot;little geese,&quot; are not spared by this waspish
+misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed
+ideas as well as objects.</p>
+
+<p>In A Rebours there is the account of a trip
+to London by the an&aelig;mic hero, Des Esseintes.
+He gets no further than one of the English
+taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It
+is risible, this episode; Huysmans could display
+verve and a sort of grim humour when he
+wished. Bruneti&egrave;re, who was serious to solemnity,
+and lacked a funny bone, declared
+that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a
+popular vaudeville, Le Voyage &agrave; Dieppe, by
+Fulgence and Wafflard. He need not have
+gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+by the Cr&eacute;pets (Eug&egrave;ne and Jacques) there is
+the genesis of the story. To become better
+acquainted with English speech and manners,
+Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in
+the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank whisky,
+read <i>Punch</i>, and also sought the company of
+English grooms in the Faubourg Saint-Honor&eacute;.
+Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as Bruneti&egrave;re
+detested him. There is no doubt he knew
+this thoroughly Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse
+comet in the firmament of French literature,
+Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more
+admired than loved.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h2>STYLE AND RHYTHM IN
+ENGLISH PROSE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Stylists in prose are privileged persons.
+They may write nonsense and escape the castigation
+of prudish pedants; or, dealing with
+cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of
+the unthinking; witness, in the brain-carpentry
+of metaphysics, say, the verbal man&#339;uvres of
+three such lucid though disparate thinkers as
+Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James.
+The names of these three writers are adduced
+as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy
+of style even when dealing with abstract ideas.
+And Germany has long been the Nibelheim of
+philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose
+commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded?
+Style in literature is an antiseptic.
+It may embalm foolish flies in its amber,
+and it is a brevet of immortality&mdash;that is, as
+immortality goes; a brief thing, but a man's
+boast. When the shoeblack part of the affair
+is over and done with, the grammar, which was
+made for schoolmarms in male garb, and the
+shining rhetoric, what remains? The answer
+is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good
+style is direct, plain, and simple. The writer's
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>
+keyboard is that humble camel the dictionary.
+Style, being concerned with the process of
+movement, has nothing to do with results, says
+one authority. And an impertinent collusion
+on the part of the writer with his own individuality
+does not always constitute style;
+for individual opinion is virtually private
+opinion, notwithstanding its appearance in
+editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve
+and De Quincey here occur to the memory.
+Men change; mankind never.</p>
+
+<p>Too close imitation of the masters has its
+dangers for the novice. Apes and peacocks
+beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is
+highly synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's
+manner. He has no esoteric message beyond
+the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical personality,
+and this expression is, in the main,
+consummate. The lion in his pathway is the
+thinness of his intellectual processes; as in
+De Quincey's case, a master of the English
+language beyond compare, who in the region
+of pure speculation often goes sadly limping;
+his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker
+in our written speech, Robert Louis
+Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird in
+English literature. He overplayed the sedulous
+imitator. John Jay Chapman in a brilliant
+essay has traced the progress of this prose
+pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional
+invalid. The American critic registers
+the variations in style and sensibility of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+Scotsman, who did not always demonstrate in
+his writing the fundamental idea that the sole
+exponent of sensibility is analytic power. He
+drew freely on all his predecessors, and his
+personal charm exhibits the &quot;glue of unanimity,&quot;
+as old Bo&euml;thius would say. Mr. Chapman
+quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas
+Browne, beginning, &quot;Time sadly overcometh
+all things,&quot; which is not to be found in his
+collected writings. Yet it is apropos because,
+like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible
+of an alchemist, though at the time Mr. Chapman
+quoted it was not known to be a clever
+Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable
+controversy, the paragraph in question
+has been shown as the fabrication of a Liverpool
+man of letters, whose name we have forgotten.
+But it suggests, does this false Browne,
+that good prose may be successfully simulated,
+though essentials be missing.</p>
+
+<p>If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is
+the next best thing to do, after a close study
+of the masters? We should say, go in a chastened
+mood to the nearest newspaper office
+and apply for a humble position on its staff.
+Then one will come to grips with life, the pacemaker
+of style. There is a lot of pompous
+advice emitted by the college professor&mdash;the
+Eternal Sophomore&mdash;about fleeing &quot;journalese&quot;;
+whereas it is in the daily press, whether
+New York, Paris, Vienna, or London, that one
+may find the soundest, most succinct prose,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose
+bare to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not
+elevated prose, &quot;numerous&quot; prose, as Quintilian
+hath it. For the supreme harmony of
+English prose we must go to the Bible (the
+Authorised, not the Revised, the latter manufactured
+by &quot;the persons called revisers,&quot; as
+George Saintsbury bluntly describes them);
+to Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas
+Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey,
+Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater,
+and Arthur Symons. And not forgetting the
+sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm
+of Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and
+imaginative prose of W. H. Hudson, whose
+Green Mansions recalls the Ch&acirc;teaubriand of
+Atala, without its hateful note of morbid egotism.</p>
+
+<p>Nor are the exponents of the grand manner,
+of an ornate style, to be patterned after. If
+elevation of theme is not present, then the peril
+of &quot;fine writing&quot; is scarcely to be avoided.
+Better follow such writers as Bacon, Bunyan,
+Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the Augustan
+group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple.
+But Doctor Johnson, Burke and Gibbon
+are not models for the beginner, any more than
+the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical
+utterance of Ch&acirc;teaubriand, or the dramatic
+prose of Hugo are safe models for French students.
+The rich continence of Flaubert, the
+stippled concision of M&eacute;rim&eacute;e or the dry-sherry
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+wit of Voltaire are surer guides. And the
+urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray
+are preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms
+of Carlyle the Boanerges.</p>
+
+<p>Yet what sweet temptations are to be found
+in the golden age of English prose, beginning
+with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh, &quot;O
+eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none
+could advise, thou hast persuaded&quot;; surely
+not far beneath the magnificent prose of the
+sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised,
+&quot;Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the
+glory of the Lord is risen unto thee,&quot; which
+is so mighty in rhythm that even those &quot;dolefullest
+of creatures ... utterly ignorant of
+English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85,
+hardly dared to touch at all,&quot; blandly remarks
+Professor Saintsbury. And to balance the
+famous &quot;Now since these dead bones&quot; of Sir
+Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William
+Temple's Use of Poetry and Music, &quot;When
+all is done, human life is at the greatest and
+best.&quot; Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming
+with melody and cadences, like the humming
+of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling
+on sullen strands, composed by the masters
+of that &quot;other harmony of prose,&quot; are not mere
+&quot;purple panels&quot; but music made by immortals.
+(And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were
+alive and condemned to read this last sentence
+of mine, with its monotonous &quot;run&quot; of M's,
+he would condemn it.) Consider Milton and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+his majestic evocation: &quot;Methinks I see in
+my mind a noble and puissant nation arousing
+herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty
+youth ...&quot; and then fall down and worship,
+for we are in the holy of holies. Stevenson
+preferred the passage, &quot;I cannot praise a fugitive
+and cloistered virtue,&quot; and who shall gainsay
+him? And Stevenson has written a most
+inspiring study of the Technical Elements of
+Style in Literature, to be found in the Biographical
+Edition. In it he calls the Macaulay
+&quot;an incomparable dauber&quot; for running the
+letter &quot;k&quot; through a paragraph, and in it he
+sets forth in his chastened and classic style the
+ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty
+word) perils of prose. Also its fascinations.
+&quot;The prose writer,&quot; he says, &quot;must keep his
+phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without
+letting them fall into the strictly metrical;
+harmonious in diversity, musical in the mouth,
+in texture woven into committed phrases and
+rounded periods.&quot; The stylist may vault airily
+into the saddle of logic, or in the delicate reticulation
+of his silver-fire paragraphs he may
+take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.</p>
+
+<p>Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way
+lies madness for all save a few valiant spirits.
+Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor Raleigh,
+has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an
+essay of moment because in the writing thereof
+he preaches what he practises. He confesses
+that &quot;inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>
+tradition,&quot; and that &quot;words must change to
+live, and a word once fixed becomes useless....
+This is the error of the classical creed,
+to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the
+quickest eye can never see the same thing
+twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated,
+language alone should be capable of
+fixity and finality.&quot; The Flaubertian crux.
+Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in
+a fluid, impressionistic way: &quot;A style ...
+which will be as rhythmic as verse, as precise
+as the language of science, which will have
+undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello,
+flashes of fire. A style which would enter
+into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto, ...
+all the combinations of prosody have been
+made, those of prose are still to make.&quot; Flaubert
+was not obsessed by the &quot;unique word,&quot;
+but by a style which is merged in the idea; as
+the melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard
+Wagner were born simultaneously and clothed
+in the appropriate orchestral colours. Perhaps
+the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple
+resonance and languorous rhythms, may be
+a sort of sublimated chess-game, as Saintsbury
+more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his
+carved ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent
+periods are like the solemn sound of
+organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony
+of flutes, peacocks, and <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: promegranates" id="tnote11">pomegranates</ins>.</p>
+
+<p>No wonder Stevenson pronounces French
+prose a finer art than English, though admitting
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+that in the richer, denser harmonies of English
+its native writers find at first hand the very
+quality so eagerly sought for by Flaubert.
+French is a logical language, one of distinction
+and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes,
+but it lacks the overtones of our mother
+speech. The English shares in common with
+the Russian the art of awakening feelings and
+thoughts by the resonance of words, which
+seem to be written not in length but in depth,
+and then are lost in faint reverberations.</p>
+
+<p>But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible
+quantity nowadays. It was all very
+well in the more spacious times of linkboys,
+sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist
+cutting one's phrases into angular fragments,
+with the soil at our heels saturated in slang,
+what hope is there for assonance, variety in
+rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose?
+Write &quot;naturally,&quot; we are told. Properly
+speaking, there is no such thing as a &quot;natural
+style.&quot; Even Newman, master of the pellucid,
+effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of
+correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost
+and with no thought of style, so-called.
+Abraham Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on
+the Bible and Bunyan. He is a writer of simple
+yet elevated prose, without parallel in our
+native literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne
+and Poe wrote in the key of classic
+prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is
+the ultimate deliquescence of prose form. For
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+practical every-day needs the eighteenth-century
+prose men are the best to follow. But the
+Bible is the Golden Book of English prose.</p>
+
+<p>Quintilian wrote: &quot;We cannot even speak
+except in longs and shorts, and longs and
+shorts are the material of feet.&quot; All personal
+prose should go to a tune of its own. The
+curious are recommended to the monumental
+work of George Saintsbury, A History of English
+Prose Rhythm. Prose may be anything
+else, but it must not be bad blank verse.
+&quot;Numerous&quot; as to rhythms, but with no hint
+of balance, in the metrical sense; without
+rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver
+Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity
+in his English Prose Numbers. He also analyses
+a page from The Golden Bowl of Henry James,
+discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle
+cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor
+Saintsbury's study is the authoritative one
+among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on
+Style is honeycombed with involutions and
+preciosity. When On the Art of Writing, by
+Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed
+Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English
+Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell,
+and with more pleasure and profit than followed
+the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.</p>
+
+<p>He warns against jargon. But the seven
+arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion,
+have each their jargon. Not music-criticism,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+not baseball, are so painfully &quot;jargonised&quot;
+as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in
+the ointment of every critic. Even the worthy
+fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself,
+does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of
+his Inaugural Address he speaks of &quot;loose,
+discinct talk.&quot; &quot;Discinct&quot; is good, but &quot;ungirded&quot;
+is better because it is not obsolete,
+and it is more sonorous and Saxon. On page
+42 we stumble against &quot;suppeditate&quot; and
+gnash our teeth. After finishing the book the
+timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering
+unction to his soul that he is a born stylist,
+like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke
+prose so many years without knowing it.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle
+years, standing before a music-desk, humming
+and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is
+in disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light,
+gleam with excitement. The colour of his
+face is reddish, the blood mounts easily to his
+head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy.
+It is Gustave Flaubert in his study at
+Croisset, a few miles down the Seine below
+Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed
+piece of prose, marking time as if he were conducting
+a music-drama. &quot;What are you doing
+there?&quot; asked his friend. &quot;Scanning these
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+words, because they don't sound well,&quot; he replied.
+Flaubert would spend a day over a
+sentence and practically tested it by declaiming&mdash;spouting,
+he called it&mdash;for as he wisely
+remarked: &quot;A well-constructed phrase adapts
+itself to the rhythm of respiration.&quot; His delight
+in prose assonance and cadence manifested
+itself in his predilection for such a phrase
+as Ch&acirc;teaubriand's in Atala: &quot;Elle r&eacute;pand
+dans le bois ce grand secret de m&eacute;lancholie
+qu'elle aime &agrave; raconter aux vieux ch&ecirc;nes et
+aux rivages antiques des mers.&quot; There's a
+&quot;mouther&quot; for you! as George Saintsbury
+would say. But in this age of uninflected speech
+the louder the click of the type-machine the
+better the style.</p>
+
+<p>If modern prose were written for the ear as
+well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it might
+prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it
+does, and more artistic. Curiously enough,
+Professor Saintsbury in his magisterial work
+writes: &quot;I rather doubt myself whether the
+very finest and most elaborate prose is not
+better read than heard.&quot; That is, it must be
+overheard by the inner ear, which statement
+rather puts a damper on Flaubert's contention.
+What saith the worthy Aristotle? &quot;All things
+are determined by number.&quot; Prose should
+have rhythm but should not be metrical (&quot;Rhetoric&quot;);
+which Robert Louis Stevenson thus
+paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style
+in Literature: &quot;The rule of scansion in verse
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+is to suggest no measure but the one in hand;
+in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose
+must be rhythmical, and it may be as much
+so as you will; but it must not be metrical.
+It may be anything, but it must not be verse.&quot;
+(Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff
+by courtesy named &quot;vers libre&quot; Stevenson
+would have written a stronger word than &quot;anything.&quot;)
+Or, again, Saintsbury: &quot;The Rhythm
+of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in English
+as well as the classical languages, be best
+expressed by the foot system, or system of
+mathematical combinations of 'long' and 'short'
+syllables.&quot; A fig for your &quot;ancient trumpery
+of skeleton scanning,&quot; cries Professor William
+Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose:
+&quot;Amphibrachs, bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts,
+molossi, dochmiacs, and proceleusmatics, which
+heretofore have been brandished before our
+eyes, as if they were anything more than, as
+stress-patterns, merely half the story.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Columbia University professor would
+be far more likely to indorse the axiom of Remy
+de Gourmont that style is physiological, which
+Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed
+my heaviest artillery of quotation, let
+me begin by saying that Professor Patterson's
+study is a remarkable contribution to the
+critical literature of a much-debated theme,
+Prose Rhythms, and this without minifying the
+admirable labours of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver
+Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the New
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+York University. One of the reasons that interest
+the present writer in the monograph is
+its strong musical bias. Professor Patterson
+is evidently the possessor of a highly organised
+musical ear, even if he be not a practical musician.
+He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum
+that the key to literature is music; <i>i. e.</i>,
+number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss Dabney's
+study, The <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Musica" id="tnote13">Musical</ins> Basis of Verse, dealing
+as it does with a certain side of the
+subject. But the Patterson procedure is different.
+It is less &quot;literary&quot; than psychological,
+less psychological than physiological. He experiments
+with the Remy de Gourmont idea,
+though he probably never saw it in print.
+&quot;Rhythm,&quot; he writes in his preface, &quot;is thus
+regarded as first of all an experience, established,
+as a rule, by motor performance of
+however rudimentary a nature.&quot; Here is the
+man of science at work.</p>
+
+<p>He speaks of the &quot;lost art of rhythm,&quot; adduces
+syncopation so easily mastered by those
+born &quot;timers,&quot; the Indians and Negroes, pertinently
+remarks that &quot;no two individuals
+ever react exactly alike. The term 'type' is
+in many ways a highly misleading fiction.&quot;
+Prose Rhythm, he continues, &quot;must be classed
+as subjective organisation of irregular, virtually
+haphazard arrangement of sounds.... The
+ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however,
+is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest
+upon a series of definite temporal units.&quot;</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+Professor Patterson experimented in two
+rooms: &quot;one the regular sound-room belonging
+to the department of psychology at Columbia;
+the other an expressly constructed, fairly
+sound-proof cabinet built into one end of an
+underground room belonging to the department
+of physics.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it
+not? Padded cells and aural finger-prints!&mdash;to
+make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called
+John Ruskin a Torquemada of &AElig;sthetics.
+Professor Patterson might be styled a Tonal
+Torturer. But the experimentings were painless.
+&quot;The first object,&quot; he informs us, &quot;was to
+find out, as far as possible, how a group of
+twelve people, ten men and two women, differed
+with respect to the complex of mental
+processes usually designated roughly as the
+'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked
+according to the nature of their reactions and
+achievements in various tests, one of the group,
+who had evinced a measure of ease in rapid
+tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records
+on a phonograph. A sentence from Walter
+Pater, a sentence from Henry James, a passage
+of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement
+of words and a haphazard arrangement
+of musical notes, were tapped upon a
+small metal drum and the beats recorded by the
+phonograph. The words were tapped according
+to the syllables as felt, a tap for each syllable.
+'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+The notes were tapped according to their
+designated time-values. Observer No. 1, having
+had long training as a musician, found no
+technical difficulty in the task. The remaining
+eleven observers, without being told the source
+of the records, heard the five series of drumbeats
+and passed judgment upon them. The
+most significant judgment made was that of
+Observer No. 7, who declared that all five
+records gave him the impression of regular
+musical themes. A large number of the observers,
+especially on the first hearing, found
+all of the records, including even the passage
+from Chopin, elusive and more or less irregular.
+An attempt was then made, by means of accompanying
+schedules, to find out how much
+or how little organisation each observer could
+be brought to feel in the beats corresponding
+to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage
+of haphazard musical notes.&quot; All the data
+are carefully set down in the Appendices.</p>
+
+<p>The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen
+from his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in The
+Renaissance. &quot;It is the landscape, not of
+dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn,
+and hours selected from a thousand with a
+miracle of finesse&quot;; subtly rhythmic, too much
+so for any but trained ears. Some simpler
+excerpt from Sir Thomas Browne or John
+Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in
+the former case, the coda from the Urn Burial,
+or even that chest-expanding phrase, &quot;To subsist
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+in bones, and to be pyramidally extant
+is a fallacy in duration.&quot; Or, best of all, because
+of its tremendous intensity, the passage
+from Saint Paul: &quot;For I am persuaded, that
+neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
+nor powers, nor things present, nor
+things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any
+other creature, shall be able to separate us from
+the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
+Lord.&quot; The drum-beat is felt throughout, but
+the pulsation is not marked as in the pages of
+Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in
+Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of
+common or four-four time, and also the coincidence
+of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a
+coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and
+all latter-day composers flee as dulness-breeding.
+The base-rhythm of English prose is, so Professor
+Saintsbury writes, &quot;the p&aelig;on, or four-syllabled
+foot,&quot; and, he could have added, provocative
+of ennui for delicate ears. Variety in
+rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely
+quotes from Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: &quot;A
+picture composed in substitutional symmetry is
+more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse,
+and thus more beautiful, than an example of
+geometrical symmetry.&quot; And this applies to
+prose and music as well as to pictures. It is
+the very kernel of the art of Paul C&eacute;zanne;
+rhythmic irregularity, syncopation, asymmetry.</p>
+
+<p>De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a
+sentence from Cardinal Newman's Grammar
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+of Assent were included among the tests. Also
+one from Henry James; in the preface to The
+Golden Bowl: &quot;For I have nowhere found
+vindicated the queer thesis that the right values
+of interesting prose depend all on withheld
+tests.&quot; If, according to lovers of the old rhetoric,
+of the resounding &quot;purple panels&quot; of Bossuet,
+Ch&acirc;teaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and
+Ruskin, the cooler prose of Mr. James cannot
+be &quot;spouted&quot;; nevertheless, the interior
+rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The
+Chopin nocturne played was the familiar one
+in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1, simple in rhythmic
+structure though less interesting than its sister
+nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in
+common, the second in six-eighths time). Professor
+Patterson knows Riemann and his &quot;agogic
+accent,&quot; which, according to that editor of
+the Chopin Etudes, is a slight expansion in
+the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.</p>
+
+<p>In his treatment of vers libre our author
+is not too sympathetic. He thinks that &quot;in
+their productions&quot;&mdash;free-verse poets&mdash;&quot;the
+disquieting experience of attempting to dance
+up the side of a mountain&quot; is suggested. &quot;For
+those who find this task exhilarating vers libre,
+as a form, is without rival. With regard to
+subtle cadence, however, which has been claimed
+as the chief distinction of the new poets, it is
+still a question as to how far they have surpassed
+the refinement of balance that quickens
+the prose of Walter Pater.&quot; They have not,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+despite the verbal ingenuity, banished the impression
+of dislocation, of the epileptic. In
+French, in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine,
+Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, R&eacute;gnier, Stuart
+Merrill, Viel&eacute; Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the
+rhythms are supple, the assonances grateful
+to the ear, the irregular patterns not offensive
+to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation
+from form, more happily adapted to the genius
+of the French or Italian language than to the
+English. Most of our native vers libre sounds
+like a ton of coal falling through too small an
+aperture in the sidewalk. However, &quot;it's not
+the gilt that makes a god, but the worshipper.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For musicians and writers the interesting
+if abstruse study of Professor Patterson will
+prove valuable. After reading of the results
+in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we
+have been, all of us, talking rhythmic prose
+our life long.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLD</h2>
+
+
+<p>The way the story leaked out was this: A
+young Irishman from Sligo, as he blushingly
+admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty
+stamped by nature herself, had served two
+customers over the bar of the old chop-house
+across the street from the opera-house. To
+him they were just two throats athirst; nothing
+more. They ordered drinks, and this first attracted
+his attention, for they agreed on cognac.
+Now, brandy after dinner is not an unusual
+drink, but this pair had asked for a large glass.
+Old brandy was given them, and such huge
+swallows followed that the bartender was compelled
+by his conscience to ring up one dollar
+for the two drinks. It was paid, and another
+round commanded, as if the two men were
+hurried, as indeed they were, for it was during
+an entr'acte at the opera that they had slipped
+out for liquid refreshments. Against the bar
+of the establishment a dozen or more humans
+were ranged, and the noise was deafening, but
+not so great as to prevent the Irishman from
+catching scraps of the conversation dropped
+by the brandy-drinkers. Their talk went something
+like this, and, although Michael had little
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+schooling, his memory was excellent, and, being
+a decent chap, there is no need to impeach
+the veracity of his report.</p>
+
+<p>The taller man, neither young, neither old,
+and, like his friend, without a grey hair, burst
+out laughing after the disappearance of the
+second cognac. &quot;I say, old pal, who was it
+wrote that brandy was for heroes? Kipling?
+What?&quot; The other man, stockily built, foreign-looking,
+answered in a contemptuous tone
+(&quot;sneering-like,&quot; as my informant put it):</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Where's your memory? Gone to rack and
+ruin like your ideals, I suppose! Kipling!
+What do such youngsters know? Doctor
+Johnson or Walter Savage Landor was the
+originator of the lying epigram; after them
+Byron gobbled it up, as he gobbled up most
+of the good things of his generation, and after
+him, the deluge of this mediocre century. When
+I told Byron this, at Milan, I think it was, he
+vowed me an ass. Now, it was Doctor Johnson.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Cheer up, it's not so bad. I remember
+once at Paris, or was it Vienna, you said the
+same thing about&mdash;&mdash;&quot; and here followed a
+strange name.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And, anyhow, you are mixing dates; Landor
+followed Byron, please, but I suppose he said
+it first. I told Metternich of your bon-mot,
+and, egad! he laughed, did that old parchment
+face. As for Bonaparte, upstart and charlatan,
+he was too selfish to smile at anybody's wit
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+but his own, and little he had. Do you remember
+the Congress of Vienna?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Do I&mdash;1815?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Some such year. Or was it in 1750 when
+we saw Casanova at Venice? Well&mdash;&quot; At
+this point the alarm-signal went off, and the
+mob went over to the opera. The young bartender's
+heart was beating so fast that it &quot;leapt
+up in his bosom,&quot; as he described it. Two
+middle-aged men talking of a century ago as
+calmly as if they had spoken of yesterday flustered
+him a bit. He heard the dates. He
+noticed the perfectly natural manner in which
+events were mentioned. There was no mystification.
+For the first time in his life Michael
+was sorry the between-act pause was so short,
+and he longed for the next one, though fatigued
+from the labours of the last. Would these
+gentlemen return for more cognac? In an
+hour they came back with the crowd, again
+drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about
+a lot of incomprehensible things that had evidently
+taken place in the sixteenth or seventeenth
+century; at least, Michael overheard
+them disputing dates, and one of them bet
+the other that the big fire in London occurred
+in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Peppers,
+or Peps&mdash;some such name.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ah, poor old Pepys,&quot; sighed the dark man;
+&quot;if he had only taken better care of himself
+he might have been with us to-day instead of
+mouldering in his grave.&quot;</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
+&quot;Oh, well! you can't expect every one to
+believe in your Struldbrug cure,&quot; replied his
+friend dreamily. &quot;Even Her Majesty, Queen
+Anne, would not take your advice, though Mrs.
+Masham and Mr. Harley begged her to.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, about the only thing they ever agreed
+upon in their life. Where is Harley to-day?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, I suppose in London,&quot; carelessly replied
+the other. &quot;For a young bird of several
+centuries he's looking as fit as a fiddle; but
+see here, Swift, old boy, your bogy-tales are
+worrying our young friend,&quot; and with that
+Michael says they pointed to him, heartily
+laughed, and went away.</p>
+
+<p>He crossed himself, and for a moment the
+electric lights burned dim, so it seemed to the
+superstitious laddie-buck. But he had had a
+good chance to study the odd pair. They were
+not, as he repeated, old men, neither were they
+youthful. Say thirty-five or forty years, and
+he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions,
+the brilliancy of their eyes. They
+were just gentlemen in evening clothes and
+had run across Broadway without overcoats,
+a reprehensible act even for a young man.
+But they were healthy, self-contained, and
+hard-headed&mdash;they took, according to the
+statistician behind the bar, about a quart of
+brandy between them, and were as fresh as
+daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they?
+&quot;Blagueurs,&quot; said I, after I had carefully deciphered
+the runic inscriptions in Michael's mind.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+(This was a week later.) Two fellows out on a
+lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy. But
+what was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternich,
+or Mr. Harley to him? Just words. Bonaparte
+he might be expected to remember. It was
+curious all the same that he could reel off the
+unusual names of Mrs. Masham and Casanova.
+The deuce! was there something in the horrid
+tale? Two immortals stalking the globe when
+their very bones should have been dissolved
+into everlasting dust! Two wraiths revisiting
+the glimpses of the moon&mdash;hold on! Struldbrug!
+Who was Struldbrug? What his cure?
+I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the
+worthies of the eighteenth century. Struldbrug.
+Swift. Struldbrug. Sir William Temple.
+Struldbrug&mdash;ah! by the great horn spoon!
+The Struldbrugs of the Island of Laputa! Gulliver's
+hideous immortals&mdash;and then the horror
+of the story enveloped me, but, despite my
+aversion to meeting the dead, I determined to
+live in the chop-house till I saw face to face
+these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity
+was soon gratified, as the sequel will show.</p>
+
+<p>Just one week after the appearance of this
+pair I stood talking to the Irish barman, when
+I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here
+are my men. I was not mistaken. Two well-built
+and well-groomed gentlemen asked for
+brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were
+polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare.
+No wonder I stared. They recalled familiar
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+faces, yet I couldn't at once place the owners.
+Presently they went over to a table and seated
+themselves. Loudly calling for a mug of musty
+ale, I boldly put myself at an adjacent spot,
+and continued my spying tactics. The friends
+were soon in hot dispute. It concerned the
+literary reputation of Balzac. I sat with my
+mouth wide open.</p>
+
+<p>The elder of the pair, the one called Swift,
+snapped at his friend: &quot;Zounds, sir! you and
+your Balzac. Hogwash and roosters in rut&mdash;that's
+about his capacity. Of course, when
+your own dull stuff appeared he praised you
+for the sake of the paradox. You moderns!
+Balzac the father of French fiction! You the
+father, or is it grandfather, of psychology&mdash;a
+nice crew! That boy Maupassant had more
+stuff in him than a wilderness of Zolas, Goncourts,
+and the rest. He is almost as amusing
+as Paul de Kock&mdash;&quot; The other, the little
+man, bristled with rage.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Because you wrote a popular boy's book,
+full of filth and pessimism, you think you know
+all literature. And didn't you copy Cyrano de
+Bergerac's Voyagers, and Defoe? You satirise
+every one except God, whom you spare because
+you don't know him. I don't care much
+for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did
+treat me handsomely in praising my Chartreuse&mdash;&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Good God!&quot; I groaned, &quot;it's Stendhal, otherwise
+Henry Beyle, laying down the law to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+tremendous author of Gulliver's Travels.&quot; And
+yet neither man looked the accepted portrait
+of himself. Above all, no Struldbrug moles
+were in view. I forgot my former fear, being
+interested in the dispute of these two giant
+writers who are more akin artistically than
+ever taken cognisance of by criticism. Dead?
+What did I care! They were surely alive now,
+and I was not dreaming. I didn't need to
+pinch myself, for my eyes and ears reported
+the occurrence. A miracle? Why not. Miracles
+are daily, if we but knew it. Living is the
+most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion
+proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he
+wrote:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Enough, friend Beyle. You are a charlatan.
+Your knowledge of the human heart
+is on a par with your taste in literature. You
+abominate Flaubert because his prose is more
+rhythmic than yours.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I vow I protest,&quot; interrupted Stendhal.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No matter. I'm right. M&eacute;rim&eacute;e, your
+pupil, is your master at every point.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I could no longer contain myself, and, bursting
+with curiosity, I cried:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting
+such a luminous altercation, but, notwithstanding
+the queerness of the situation, may I
+not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift
+and Henry Beyle-Stendhal?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Discovered, by the eternal Jehovah!&quot;
+roared Swift, adding an obscene phrase, which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+I discreetly omit. Stendhal took the incident
+coolly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As I am rediscovered about every decade
+by ambitious young critics anxious to achieve
+reputations, I am not disturbed by our young
+friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted.
+Pray, join us in a fresh drink and conversation.&quot;
+But I was only thirsty for more
+talk, oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendhal,
+who regarded me with cynical eyes, all
+the while fingering his little whisker: &quot;Did
+you ever hear Chopin play?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who,&quot; he solemnly asked in turn, &quot;is
+Chopin?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was at his best in the forties, and as
+you didn't die till&mdash;&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pardon me, monsieur. I never died. Your
+Chopin may have died, but I am immortal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You venerable Struldbrug,&quot; giggled Swift.
+I was disagreeably impressed, yet held my
+ground:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You must have met him. He was a friend
+of Balzac&mdash;his music was then in vogue at
+Paris&mdash;&quot; I stumbled in my speech.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He probably means that little Polish piano-player
+who dangled at the petticoats of George
+Sand,&quot; interpolated Swift.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I knew Cimarosa, Rossini I saw, but I
+never heard of Chopin. As for the Sand woman,
+that cow who chewed and rechewed her literary
+cud&mdash;don't mention her name to me,
+please. She is the village pump of fiction;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+water, wet water. Balzac was bad enough.&quot;
+My heart sank. Chopin not even remembered
+by a contemporary! This then is fame. But
+the immortality of Stendhal, of Swift&mdash;what
+of that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps
+Balzac, Sand, Flaubert were still alive.
+I propounded the question. Swift answered
+it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, they are alive. My Struldbrugs are
+meant to symbolise the immortality of genius.
+Only stupid people die. Sand is a barmaid
+in London. Balzac is on the road selling knit-goods,
+and a mighty good drummer he is sure
+to be; but poor Flaubert has had hard luck.
+He was the reader to a publishing house, and
+forced to pass judgment on the novels of the
+day&mdash;favourable judgment, mind you, on the
+popular stuff. He nearly burst a blood-vessel
+when they gave him a Marie Corelli manuscript
+to correct&mdash;to correct the style, mind
+you, he, Flaubert! The gods are certainly
+capricious. Now the old chap&mdash;he has aged
+since 1880&mdash;is in New York reading proof at
+a daily newspaper office. He sits at the same
+desk with Ben de Casseres, and every time he
+mutters over the rhythm of a sentence Ben
+raps him on the knuckles, and says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop
+Flaubert! Some night I'll take you over to
+Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to
+teach you what brilliance and Bovarysme
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+really mean.'&quot; I was shocked at this blasphemy,
+and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to
+keep my temper.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But isn't Mr. Swift joking?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Swift is always joking,&quot; was the far
+from reassuring reply. To fill in the interval
+I called for the waiter. The ghosts again demanded
+cognac. Stendhal looked like the
+caricature by F&eacute;licien Rops, in which his little
+pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose, and
+protuberant eyes are shown dominating some
+strange Cosmopolis of 1932. In life&mdash;or
+death&mdash;he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He
+glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in
+the sad existence of the mighty prose master,
+but he smiled superciliously when I reproached
+him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic
+fantasy of the gods of Greece, alive, and still
+in hiding, was not precisely convincing in the
+present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion
+ensued, and finally I arose and said good night
+to my very new and very old friends. Swift's
+picture of the Struldbrugs was realised, and it
+was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should
+never be seen; in their works alone they live.
+Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated humour;
+Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance
+and superiority, did not win my sympathy.
+They evidently noted my dismay.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You're disappointed. So sorry!&quot; said Swift
+ironically. &quot;At first I was vastly intrigued at
+the opportunity of talking with one of you
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+modern persons, but I see I'm mistaken&mdash;ha!
+Beyle, what d'ye say?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Stendhal pondered. &quot;Cimarosa, Rossini, and
+Haydn I knew. Correggio I admire, but who
+was Chopin?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Stung to anger, I retorted: &quot;Yours is the
+loss, not Chopin's.&quot; Whereat Michael, the
+bartender, merrily laughed, and the company
+joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My
+head was on the chopping-block, and Stendhal
+was the executioner. Forgetting the respect
+due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger
+under Stendhal's upturned nostrils: &quot;You
+may be a couple of impostors for all I know,
+but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how
+heartily I dislike your petty carping criticisms.
+Better oblivion than immortality for your
+lean and sinister souls.&quot; Again hysterical
+laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful
+accents, as if his vanity had been
+wounded:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This saucy Yahoo reads our books and
+believes in them, but when we talk he doubts
+us. As Sam Johnson used to say, 'The reciprocal
+civility of authors is one of the most
+risible scenes in the farce of life.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Stendhal boomed out: &quot;He is dead himself
+but doesn't know it yet. All critics are stillborn.
+But <i>we</i> live on for ever. Gar&ccedil;on! some
+more brandy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Out on crowded, expressive Broadway I
+stood, dazed and irritated. After all the palaver
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>
+of authors, it is the critic who has the
+last word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the
+originality of the idea, I went my wooden
+way.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h2>ON REREADING MALLOCK</h2>
+
+
+<p>It seems the &quot;dark backward and abysm
+of time&quot; when writing the name of William
+Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he
+was the most discussed author of his day. The
+old conundrum, Is Life Worth Living? he
+revived, and newly orchestrated with particular
+reference to the spiritual needs of the
+hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth Century
+was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle
+de Maupin. Gautier was read then and Swinburne's
+lilting paganism quite filled the lyric
+sky. Mr. Mallock's r&ocirc;le was that of a philosophical
+novelist and essayist who reproved
+the golden materialism of his age, not with
+fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with
+melodious indignation, like Ruskin, but with a
+more subtle instrument of castigation, irony.
+He laughed at the gods of the new scientific
+dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall,
+Clifford, and he put them in the pages of
+his New Republic for the delectation of the
+world, and most appealing foolery it was; this
+and the sheer burlesque of The New Paul and
+Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an individualist.
+The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet
+waned in the seventies&mdash;he occupied then a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+place midway between Bentham and Spencer.
+His birth, breeding, and temperament made
+Mallock a foe to socialism, to the promiscuous
+in politics, religion, society, therefore an apostle
+of culture, not missing its precious side; witness
+Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one
+who abhorred the crass and the irreverent in
+the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His
+ideas were boldly seized and transformed by
+the men of the nineties, yet to-day it is difficult
+to get a book of his. They are mostly out of
+print&mdash;which is equivalent to saying, out of
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>With what personal charm he invested his
+romances! He is the literary progenitor of a
+long line of young men, artistic in taste, a trifle
+sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly,
+widely cultured, and aristocratic. The staler
+art of Oscar Wilde gives the individual of Mallock
+petrified into a rather unpleasant type.
+Walter Pater's fear that the word &quot;hedonist&quot;
+would be suspected as immoral came true in
+Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of
+the Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and
+The New Republic have a strong family resemblance.
+They were supermen before Nietzsche
+was discovered. They are prepossessed by
+theological problems, they love the seven arts,
+and are a trifle decadent; though when action is
+demanded they do not fail to respond. As
+stories go, A Romance is the best of Mallock's;
+the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the intrigue
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+less intense, and the characterisation more
+human. The unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters,
+who so shocked our mothers, is not duplicated
+in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to
+the second edition of A Romance, a superfluous
+one, for the book needs no apology. It never
+did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though
+not as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered
+convention in French fiction, but the naturalistic
+photographs in A Romance are not
+agreeable, and Cynthia's epitaph, &quot;Blessed are
+the pure in heart, for they shall see God,&quot;
+leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the
+mode ironical almost projected to the key of
+cynicism. No doubt the leisurely gait of these
+fictions would be old-fashioned to the present
+generation, with its preference for staccato
+English, morbid sensationalism, and lack of
+grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a scholar
+and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction,
+and he is also a thinker, reactionary, to
+be sure, but a tilter at sham philosophies and
+sham religions. Last, but not least, he has
+abundant humour and a most engaging wit.
+Possibly all these qualities would make him
+unpopular in our present century.</p>
+
+<p>What a gathering of choice spirits in The
+New Republic: Matthew Arnold, Professor
+Jowett&mdash;a fine character etching&mdash;Huxley,
+Tyndall, Carlyle, Pater&mdash;rather cruelly treated&mdash;Ruskin,
+Doctor Pusey, Mrs. Mark Pattison,
+W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane&mdash;how the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+author juggles with their personalities, with
+their ideas. It's the cleverest parody of its
+kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are
+closely related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon,
+Alie Campbell, and the priest Stanley of A
+Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier
+Lord Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded
+dandy, poet, and man about town, Lord Surbiton,
+of A Romance, are difficult to match
+outside of Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes.
+The d&eacute;cor is always gorgeous&mdash;Monte
+Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing
+with milk and honey, marble ruins, the
+ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces there are,
+and inhabited by languid, fascinating young
+men who anxiously examine in the glass their
+expressive countenances, asking the Lord
+whether He is pleased with them. And lovely
+girls, charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case
+a lily with a cankered calyx. Then there are
+the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs.
+Norham, &quot;celebrated authoress and upholder
+of the people.&quot; One of the notable blackguards
+in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the Poodle
+and the new-rich Helbecksteins&mdash;a complete
+picture-gallery may be found in these interesting
+novels. Romance rules; poetry, tenderness
+in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and
+a pity for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters,
+the &quot;dear, dead woman,&quot; lingers in the memory,
+as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a
+daguerreotype.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr.
+Mallock as an antagonist is most vigorous.
+He went at the scientific men with all the weapons
+in his armoury. To-day there no longer
+exists the need of such polemics. In the moral
+world there are analogies to the physical, and
+particularly in geology, with its prehistoric
+stratifications, its vast herbarium, its quarries
+and petrifications, its ossuaries, the bones of
+vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of
+a leaf to the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl&mdash;now
+reduced to the exquisite and
+iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth
+to the tiny forerunner of the horse.
+Philosophy and Religion, too, have their mighty
+dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose
+the bones of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete
+systems. And on the sands of time lie
+the arch-images of antique thought awaiting
+the condign catastrophe. There are Kant and
+his followers, and near the idealists are the
+materialists; next to Hegel is B&uuml;chner, and at
+the base of the vast structure so patiently
+reared by Herbert Spencer the mists are already
+dense, though not as obscuring as the
+clouds about the mausoleum of Comte. That
+great charmless woman, George Eliot, smiles
+a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer
+tomb, and the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel
+is heard whispering: Where is your Positivism?
+Where is your Rationalism? What has become
+of your gaseous invertebrate god? Surely
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+there is sadly required in the cynical universities
+of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle
+Edgar Saltus as its first incumbent.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and
+philosophy may travel on parallel lines, therefore
+never collide. He took the catch-word &quot;the
+bankruptcy of science&quot; too seriously. Notwithstanding
+the persuasive rhetoric of that
+silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary
+metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend
+of latter-day thought is toward the veritable
+victories of science. A new world has come into
+being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis,
+the modes of force, matter displaced by energy,
+the relations of atoms in molecules&mdash;a renewed
+geology, astronomy, pal&aelig;ontology, biology,
+embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest
+of the air, and, last but not least, the
+discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn
+evolution theory is now confronted by the
+Transformism of Hugo de Vries, who has
+shown in a most original manner that nature
+also proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in
+slow, orderly progress. And the brain, that
+telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is
+become another organ. Ramon y <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Cujol" id="tnote14">Cajal</ins>, the
+Spanish biologist, with his neurons&mdash;little
+erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred
+to motor impulses when a message is sent them
+from the sensory nerves&mdash;has done more for
+positive knowledge than a wilderness of metaphysicians.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+That famous interrogation, &quot;Is life worth
+living?&quot; may be viewed to-day from a different
+angle. Mr. Mallock acknowledged that the
+question must be answered in the terms of the
+individual only. Here we encounter a new
+crux. What is the individual? The family
+is the unit of society, not the individual. And
+the autonomous &quot;I&quot; exists no longer, except
+as a unit in the colony of cells which are &quot;We.&quot;
+Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations.
+Society demands the co-operation of its component
+cells, else relegates to solitude the individual
+who cannot adapt himself to play a
+humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That
+protean theory Socialism has changed its chameleonic
+hues many times since Mr. Mallock
+wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is
+worked out with great clearness in the apprehension
+of details, but with little feeling for
+their relations to each other. Sadly considered,
+we may take it for granted that life has a definite
+aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts
+it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable
+nature under the universal law of causality;
+this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but
+a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing
+diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities.
+Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no
+existence. There never was, there never will
+be an earthly paradise, no matter what the
+socialists say. Content is the summum bonum
+of mankind; the content that comes with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+sound health and a clear conscience. The
+wrangling over Free Will is now considered a
+sign of ghost-worship.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live
+are both rather amusing survivals of antique
+animism. The problem is not whether we can
+do what we want to do, but whether we can
+will what we want to will. But the illusion
+of individual freedom of will is the last illusion
+to be dissipated in this most deterministic
+of worlds and most pluralistic of universes.
+It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't
+work both ways. As there will be no end
+to things, there never was a beginning.
+Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott
+wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that
+&quot;the feeling we have of a necessity for such an
+explanation [the attempt to explain the universe]
+arises from the conformation of our
+brains, which think by associating disjoined
+ideas; ... no last explanation is possible or
+perhaps even exists,&quot; which will please the
+relativists and pain the absolutists. But deprive
+mankind of its dreams and it is like the
+naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's
+fable. A fairy punished this child by giving
+him dreamless slumber. Without vision, old
+as well as young limp through life.</p>
+
+<p>Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been
+pointed out, is the last superstition of primordial
+times. It is a form of egomania. From
+Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+from Werther to Sanine it has ruled fiction. It
+is less a philosophy than a matter of temperament.
+It was the mode during the last century,
+and as an issue is as dead as the humanitarianism
+that followed. Is life worth living? was properly,
+if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends
+on the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic
+fallacy reduced to medicinal formula. It is
+now merely in our stock of mental attitudes,
+usually a pose; when it is not, it's bound to
+be pathological. Yet Bossuet has spoken of
+&quot;the inexorable ennui which forms the basis
+of life.&quot; Mr. Mallock was once accused of
+dilettanteism, &aelig;sthetic and ethical; nevertheless,
+there is no mistaking his moral earnestness
+at the close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore,
+he foresaw the muddle the world is
+making to-day in the conduct of life. All the
+self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation
+during the Buddhist upheaval some decades
+ago has been translated into a veritable annihilation.
+The holy name of Altruism&mdash;social
+emotion made functional&mdash;has vanished
+into the intense inane. The higher forms of
+discontent have modulated into the debasing
+superstition of universal slaughter. With Bergson
+the divinity of diving into the subconscious&mdash;what
+else is his intuition?&mdash;is set before
+the lovers of the mystic to worship. Years
+ago the Sufi doctrine declared that the judging
+faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive.
+Don't reason! Just dream! The poet Rogers
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+replied to a lady who asked his religion that
+his was the religion of all sensible men. &quot;And
+what is that?&quot; she persisted. &quot;That no sensible
+men ever tell.&quot; But Mr. Mallock has told,
+and four decades after his confession he is still
+worth rereading.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h2>THE LOST MASTER</h2>
+
+
+<p>&quot;What's become of Waring since he gave
+us all the slip?&quot; was quoted by a man at the
+Painters' Club the other night. What made
+him think of Browning, he blandly explained
+to the two or three chaps sitting at his table
+on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but
+the line swam across his memory when he recalled
+the name of Albertus Magnus as a green
+meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops
+into the watery void. &quot;Who, in the name of
+Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?&quot; was asked. The
+painter sat up. &quot;There you are, you fellows!&quot;
+he roared. &quot;You all paint or write or spoil
+marble, but for the history of your art you
+don't care a rap.&quot; &quot;Yes, but what has your
+Albertus Thingamajig to do with Browning's
+Waring?&quot; &quot;Only this,&quot; was the grumbling
+reply; &quot;it is a similar case.&quot; &quot;A story, a
+story!&quot; we all cried, and settled down for a
+yarn; but no yarn was spun. The painter relapsed
+into silence, and the group gradually dissolved.
+We sat still, hoping against hope.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;See here,&quot; we expostulated, &quot;really you
+should not arouse expectations, and then evade
+the logical conclusions. It's not fair.&quot; &quot;I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+didn't care to explain to those other fellows,&quot;
+was the reply. &quot;They are too cynical for my
+taste. They go to the holy of holies of art to
+pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism,
+rather realism, as you call it, is the canker of
+modern art. Suppose I told you that here,
+now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there
+lives a man of genius, who paints like a belated
+painter of the Renaissance? Suppose I said
+that I could show you his work, would you
+think I was crazy?&quot; He paused. &quot;A young
+genius, poor, unknown? Oh, lead us to him,
+Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!&quot; &quot;He
+is not young, and, while the great public and
+the little dealers have not heard of him, he has
+a band of admirers, rich men leagued in a conspiracy
+of silence, who buy his pictures, though
+they don't show them to the critics.&quot; We
+reiterated our request: &quot;Lead us to him!&quot;
+Without noticing our importunities, he continued:
+&quot;He paints for the sake of beautiful
+paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting,
+or like Frenhofer, the
+hero in Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece!
+He is more like Balzac's Frenhofer&mdash;is
+that the chap's name?&mdash;than Browning's
+Waring. He is the lost master, a Frenhofer
+who has conquered, for he has a hundred masterpieces
+stored away in his studio.&quot; &quot;Lost
+master?&quot; we stuttered; &quot;a hundred masterpieces
+that have never been shown to critic or
+public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but it
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+rose afar.'&quot; &quot;Yes, and he quotes Browning
+by the yard, for he was a close friend of the
+poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the
+animal painter, now dead.&quot; &quot;Won't you tell
+his story connectedly, and put us out of our
+agony?&quot; we pleaded. &quot;No,&quot; he answered;
+&quot;I'll do better. I'll take you to his studio.&quot;
+The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon following we found ourselves
+in Greenwich Village, in front of a row of old-fashioned
+cottages covered with honeysuckle.
+You may recall the avenue and this particular
+block that has thus far resisted the temptation
+to become either lofty apartment or business
+palace. But the painter met us here, and
+conducted us westward until we reached a
+warehouse&mdash;gloomy, in need of repair, yet
+solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered
+the wagonway, traversed a dirty court, mounted
+a dark staircase, and paused before a low door.
+&quot;Do you knock,&quot; we were admonished, and
+at once did so. Approaching footsteps. A
+rattling and grating of rusty bolts and keys.
+The door was slowly opened. A big hairy
+head appeared. The eyes set in this halo of
+white hair were positively the most magnificent
+I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human
+countenance. If a lion were capable of being
+at once poet and prophet and exalted animal,
+his eyes would have possessed something of the
+glance of this stranger. We turned anxiously to
+to our friend. He had disappeared. What a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+trick to play at such a moment. &quot;Who do you
+wish?&quot; rumbled a mellow voice. &quot;Albertus
+Magnus?&quot; we timidly inquired, expecting to
+be pitched down the stairs the next minute.
+&quot;Ah!&quot; was the reply. Silence. Then, &quot;Come
+in, please; don't stumble over the canvases.&quot;
+We followed the old man, whose stature was
+not as heroic as his head; and we did not fail
+to stumble, for the way was obscure, and paved
+with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of
+bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets,
+wretched furniture, and all the other flotsam
+and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were
+not sorry when we came into open space and
+light. We were in the room that doubtless
+concealed the lost masterpieces, and there,
+blithely smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the
+painter. He had entered by another door, he
+explained; and, without noticing our discontented
+air, he introduced us to the man of the
+house. In sheer daylight he looked younger,
+though his years must have bordered upon the
+biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the
+brain that came out of his wonderful eyes, were
+as young as to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Isn't he a corker?&quot; irreverently demanded
+our friend. &quot;He is not even as old as he looks.
+He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he
+drinks anything he can get, and smokes day
+and night. And yet he calls himself an idealist.&quot;
+The old painter smiled. &quot;I suppose I have
+been described as Waring to you, because I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+knew Robert Browning. I did vanish from the
+sight of my friends for years, but only in the
+attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money
+or kingship, like the original Alfred Domett,
+called Waring in the poem. But when I returned
+from Italy I was a stranger in a strange
+land. No one remembered me. I had last
+seen Elihu Vedder at Capri. Worst of all, I
+had forgotten that with time fashions change
+in art as in dress, and nowadays no one understands
+me, and, with the exception of Arthur
+Davies, I understand no one. I come from the
+Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines;
+his line is as beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love
+gold more than did <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Facino Cano" id="tnote15">Facino Cane</ins> of Balzac.
+Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the
+masters. Tell me, do you love Titian?&quot; We
+swore allegiance to the memory of Titian. The
+artist seemed pleased. &quot;You younger men are
+devoted to Velasquez and Hals&mdash;too much so.
+Great as painters, possibly greatest among
+painters, their souls never broke away from the
+soil like runaway balloons. They miss height
+and depth. Their colour never sings like
+Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of
+their sitters, but never the secret surprised by
+the Italian. I sat at his feet, before his canvases,
+fifty years, and I'm further away than
+ever&mdash;&quot; Our friend interrupted this rhapsody.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Look here, Albertus, you man with a name
+out of Thomas Aquinas, don't you think you
+are playing on your visitors' nerves, just to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+set them on edge with expectancy? I've heard
+this choral service for the glorification of Titian
+more than once, and I've inevitably noticed
+that you had a trump of your own up your
+sleeve. You love Titian. Well, admit it. You
+don't paint like him, your colour scheme is
+something else, and what you are after you
+only know yourself. Come! trot out your
+Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or,
+better still, that landscape with a river-bank
+and shepherds.&quot; The old man gravely bowed.
+Then he manipulated the light, placed a big
+easel in proper position, fumbled among the
+canvases that made the room smaller, secured
+one and placed it before us. We drew a long
+breath. &quot;Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt,
+was the inspiration,&quot; murmured the
+master.</p>
+
+<p>The tormented vessel stormed down the
+picture, every inch of sail bellying out in a
+wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays,
+so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon.
+The water was massive and rhythmic. In the
+first plane a smaller ship does not even attempt
+to tack. You anticipate the speedy
+crackling and smashing when the Flying Dutchman
+rides over her; but it never happens.
+Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may
+melt into air-bubbles before it reaches the
+other boat. No figures are shown. Nevertheless,
+as we studied the picture we fancied
+that we discerned the restless soul of Vanderdecken
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+pacing his quarter-deck, cursing the
+elements, or longing for some far-away Senta.
+A poetic composition handled with masterly
+evasiveness, the colour was the strangest part
+of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret
+of that flowing gold, potable gold; gold that
+threateningly blazed in the storm wrack, gold
+as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such
+sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected
+illusion. My friend, the painter, laughed:
+&quot;Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it
+only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here
+has a few tricks. Know then, credulous one,
+that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek
+the reason for that suffused back sky, realise
+that the solar photosphere in a mist is precisely
+the breeder of all this magic gold you so envy.&quot;
+&quot;Yes,&quot; we exclaimed, &quot;but the motion of it
+all, the grip! Only Turner&mdash;&quot; We were
+interrupted by a friendly slap on the back.
+&quot;Now, you are talking sense,&quot; said our friend.
+&quot;Turner, a new Turner, who has heard the
+music of Wagner and read the magic prose of
+Joseph Conrad.&quot; What followed we shall not
+pretend to describe. Landscapes of old ivory
+and pearly greys; portraits, in which varnish
+modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity
+that set tingling the eyeballs, and played a
+series of tonal variations in the thick of which
+the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged triumphantly,
+and at the end vanished in the glorious
+arabesque; then followed apocalyptic visions,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+in which the solid earth staggered through the
+empyrean after a black sun&mdash;a magnetic disk
+doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud:
+&quot;It is accomplished.&quot; Pastorals as ravishing
+as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold undreamed
+of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt,
+faced us. Our very souls centred in
+our eyes; but, uncritical as was our mood in
+the presence of all this imaginative art, we
+could not help noting that it was without a
+single trait of the modern. Both in theme and
+treatment these pictures might have been
+painted at the time of the Renaissance. The
+varnish was as wonderful as that on the belly
+of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a
+celestial quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer;
+the resonant browns, the whites&mdash;ah!
+such exquisite whites, &quot;plus blanche que la
+plus blanche hermine&quot;&mdash;the rich blacks, sonorous
+reds and yellows&mdash;what were all these
+but secrets recovered from the old masters.
+The subjects were mainly legendary or mythological;
+no discordant note of &quot;modernity&quot;
+obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence
+of something as rare as a lyric by Shelley or the
+playing of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Frederic Chopin" id="tnote16">Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric Chopin</ins>.</p>
+
+<p>What! Why! How! we felt like asking all
+at once, but Albertus Magnus only smiled,
+and we choked our emotion. Why had he
+never exhibited at the Academy or at a special
+show? Our friend saw our embarrassment, and
+shielded us by blurting out: &quot;No! he never
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+exhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never
+will. He makes more money than he needs,
+and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is
+a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest
+him. You won't find one female head in all
+this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old
+Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only
+love is his paint. His one weakness is a selfish,
+a miserly desire to keep all this beautiful paint
+for himself. Balzac would have delighted to
+analyse such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability
+itself compared with this curmudgeon of
+genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus&mdash;&quot;
+&quot;But I must,&quot; expostulated the painter. &quot;I
+am always glad to receive visitors here if they
+are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or
+those who think the moderns can paint. Yet
+no one comes to see me. My chattering friend
+here occasionally asks them, and he is a
+hoaxer. While I go nowhere&mdash;I haven't been
+east of Ninth Avenue for years. What shall I
+do?&quot; &quot;Paint!&quot; was the curt answer of our
+friend, as we took our leave. In New York,
+now, a painter of genius who is known to
+few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus
+Magnus, or is that only Latin for Albert
+Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders and
+smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. &quot;Be
+frank!&quot; we adjured him. He hummed: &quot;In
+Vishnu land what avatar?&quot; &quot;More Browning!&quot;
+we sneered.</p>
+
+<p>Then we crossed over to the club and talked
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+art far into the night. Also wet our clay. And
+Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his
+paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces?
+Perhaps. Who knows? As the Russians
+say&mdash;<i>Avos!</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h2>THE GRAND MANNER IN
+PIANOFORTE PLAYING</h2>
+<p></p>
+
+<p>Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory!
+might be the epigraph of every great pianist's
+life, and the ivory is about as perdurable stuff
+as the water in which is written the epitaph
+of John Keats. Despite cunning reproductive
+contrivances the executive musician has no
+more chance of lasting fame than the actor.
+The career of both is brief, but brilliant. Glory,
+then, is largely a question of memory, and when
+the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away
+then he has no existence except in the biographical
+dictionaries. Creative, not interpretative,
+art endures. Better be &quot;immortal&quot;
+while you are alive, which wish may account
+for the number of young men who write
+their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal
+of beards, while the pianist or violinist
+plays his autobiography, and this may be some
+compensation for the eternal injustice manifested
+in matters mundane.</p>
+
+<p>Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws
+of Anton Rubinstein caress the keyboard shall
+never forget the music. He is the greatest
+pianist in my long and varied list. Think of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+his delivery of the theme at the opening of
+Beethoven's G major concerto; or in that last
+page of Chopin's Barcarolle. It was no longer
+the piano tone, but the sound of distant waters
+and horns from elf-land. A mountain of fire
+blown skyward, when the elemental in his
+profoundly passionate temperament broke loose,
+he could roar betimes as gently as a dove. Yet,
+when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining
+pupils of Chopin declared that he was
+brutal in his treatment of their master. He
+played Rubinstein, not Chopin, said Georges
+Mathias to me. Mathias knew, for he had
+heard the divine Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric play. Nevertheless,
+Rubinstein played Chopin, the greater and
+the miniature, as no one before or since.</p>
+
+<p>To each generation its music-making. The
+&quot;grand manner&quot; in piano-playing has almost
+vanished. A few artists still live who illustrate
+this manner; you may count them on the fingers
+of one hand. Rosenthal, D'Albert, Carre&ntilde;o,
+Friedheim&mdash;Reisenaur had the gift, too&mdash;how
+many others? Paderewski I heard play in
+Leipsic in 1912 at a Gewandhaus concert under
+the baton of the greatest living conductor,
+Arthur Nikisch, and I can vouch for the plangent
+tone quality and the poetic reading he displayed
+in his performance of that old war-horse,
+the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore,
+my admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer
+was considerably increased after hearing
+his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikisch.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+How far away we were from Manru. Joseffy,
+who looked upon Paderewski, as a rare personality,
+told me that the Polish Fantasy for
+piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its
+seeming simplicity in figuration. &quot;Only the
+composer,&quot; enthusiastically exclaimed Joseffy,
+&quot;could have made it so wonderful.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But the grand manner, has it become too
+artificial, too rhetorical? It has gone out of
+fashion with the eloquence of the old histrions,
+probably because of the rarity of its exponents;
+also because it no longer appeals to a matter-of-fact
+public. Liszt was the first. He was dithyrambic.
+He was a volcano; Thalberg&mdash;his
+one-time rival&mdash;possessed all the smooth and
+icy perfections of Nesselrode pudding. Liszt
+in reality never had but two rivals close to his
+throne; Karl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton
+Rubinstein, the Russian. Von B&uuml;low was all
+intellect; his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and
+Brahms were cerebral, not emotional. He had
+the temperament of the pedant. I first heard
+him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of
+Music. He introduced the Tschaikovsky B
+flat minor concerto, with B. J. Lang directing
+the orchestra, a quite superfluous proceeding,
+as Von B&uuml;low gave the cues from the keyboard
+and distinctly cursed the conductor, the band,
+the composition, and his own existence, as befitted
+a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh! he could
+be fiery enough, though in his playing of the
+Romantics the fervent note was absent; but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+his rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible.
+You need only recall the pungency of his reading
+of Beethoven's Scherzo in the Sonata Opus
+31, No. 3. It was staccato as a hail-storm.
+Two years later, in Paris, I heard the same
+concerto played by Nicholas Rubinstein at the
+Trocad&eacute;ro (Exposition, 1878), the very man
+who had first flouted the work so rudely that
+Tschaikovsky, deeply offended, changed the
+dedication to Von B&uuml;low.</p>
+
+<p>Anton Rubinstein displayed the grand
+manner. His style was a compound of tiger's
+blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip
+about his &quot;false notes&quot; (he wrote a Study on
+False Notes, as if in derision), he was, with
+Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was
+not always in practice and most of the music
+he wrote for his numerous tours was composed
+in haste and repented of at leisure. It is now
+almost negligible. The D minor concerto reminds
+one of a much-traversed railroad-station.
+But Rubinstein the virtuoso! It was in 1873
+I heard him, but I was too young to understand
+him. Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he
+gave his Seven Historical Recitals in Paris and
+I attended the series, not once, but twice. He
+played many composers, but for me he seemed
+to be playing the Book of Job, the Apocalypse,
+and the Scarlet Sarafan. He had a ductile tone
+like a golden French horn&mdash;Joseffy's comparison&mdash;and
+the power and passion of the man
+have never been equalled. Neither Tausig nor
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+Liszt did I hear, worse luck, but there were
+plenty of witnesses to tell me of the differences.
+Liszt, it seems, when at his best, was both
+Rubinstein and Tausig combined, with Von
+B&uuml;low thrown in. Anton Rubinstein played
+every school with consummate skill, from the
+iron certitudes of Bach's polyphony to the
+magic murmurs of Chopin and the romantic
+rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann.
+Beethoven, too, he interpreted with intellectual
+and emotional vigour. Yet this magnificent
+Calmuck&mdash;he wasn't of course, though
+he had Asiatic features&mdash;grew weary of his
+instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the stars
+in their courses by composing. But his name
+is writ in ivory, and not in enduring music.</p>
+
+<p>Scudo said that when Sigismund Thalberg
+played, his scales were like perfectly strung
+pearls falling on scarlet velvet; with Liszt
+the pearls had become red hot. This extravagant
+image is of value. We have gone back
+to the Thalbergian pearls, for too much passion
+in piano-playing is voted bad taste to-day.
+Nuance, then colour, and ripe conception.
+Technique for technique's sake is no
+longer a desideratum; furthermore, as Felix
+Leifels wittily remarked: &quot;No one plays the
+piano badly&quot;; just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably.
+Mr. Leifels, as a veteran contrabassist
+and at present manager of the Philharmonic
+Society, ought to be an authority on the
+subject; the old Philharmonic has had all the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+pianists, from H. C. Timm, in 1844&mdash;a Hummel
+concerto&mdash;to Thalberg and Rubinstein,
+Joseffy, Paderewski, and Josef Hofmann. Truly
+the standard of virtuosity is higher than it was
+a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals
+with programmes that are staggering. The
+Chopin concertos now occupy the position, technically
+speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn
+concertos. Every one plays Chopin as a
+matter of course, and, with a few exceptions
+horribly. Yes, Mr. Leifels is right; no one
+plays the piano badly, yet new Rubinsteins do
+not materialise.</p>
+
+<p>The year of the Centennial Exposition in
+Philadelphia, 1876, was a memorable one for
+visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von
+B&uuml;low, but also two beautiful women, one at
+the apex of her artistic career, Annette Essipoff
+(or Essipowa) and Teresa Carre&ntilde;o, just
+starting on her triumphal road to fame. Essipowa
+was later the wife of Leschetizky&mdash;maybe
+she was married then&mdash;and she was
+the most poetic of all women pianists that I
+have heard. Clara Schumann was as musical,
+but she was aged when I listened to her. Essipowa
+played Chopin as only a Russian can.
+They are all Slavs, these Poles and Russians,
+and no other nation, except the Hungarian,
+interpret Chopin. Probably the greatest German
+virtuoso was Adolf Henselt, Bavarian-born,
+though a resident of Petrograd. He had
+a Chopin-like temperament and played that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+master's music so well that Schumann called
+him the &quot;German Chopin.&quot; Essipowa, I need
+hardly tell you, communicated no little of her
+gracious charm to Paderewski. He learned
+more from her plastic style than from all the
+precepts of Leschetizky.</p>
+
+<p>On a hot night in 1876, and in old Association
+Hall, I first saw and heard Teresa (then
+Teresita) Carre&ntilde;o. I say &quot;saw&quot; advisedly, for
+she was a blooming girl, and at the time shared
+the distinction with Adelaide Neilson and Mrs.
+Scott-Siddons of being one of the three most
+beautiful women on the stage. Carre&ntilde;o, still
+vital, still handsome, and still the conquering
+artist, till her death last spring, was in that
+far-away day fresh from Venezuela, a pupil of
+Gottschalk and Anton Rubinstein. She wore a
+scarlet gown, as fiery as her playing, and when
+I wish to recall her I close my eyes and
+straightway as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear
+her; for her playing has always been scarlet to
+me, as Rubinstein's is golden, and Joseffy's silvery.</p>
+
+<p>The French group I have heard, beginning
+with Theodore Ritter, who came to New York
+in company with Carlotta Patti; Plant&eacute;&mdash;still
+living and over eighty, so I have been told
+by M. Phillipp; Saint-Sa&euml;ns, whom I first saw
+and heard at the Trocad&eacute;ro, Paris, with his
+pupil, Montigny-Remaury; Clotilde Kleeberg,
+Di&eacute;mer, Risler; the venerable Georges Mathias,
+a pupil of Chopin; Raoul Pugno, who was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+veritably a pugnacious pianist, C&eacute;cile Chaminade,
+Marie Jaell, and her corpulent husband,
+Alfred Jaell.</p>
+
+<p>Eugen d'Albert, surely the greatest of Scotch
+pianists&mdash;he was born at Glasgow, though
+musically educated in London&mdash;is another
+heaven-stormer. I heard him at Berlin some
+years ago, in Philharmonic Hall, and people
+stood up in their excitement&mdash;Liszt redivivus!</p>
+<p></p>
+<p>It was the grand manner in its most chaotic
+form. A musical volcano belching up lava,
+scori&aelig;, rocks, hunks of Beethoven&mdash;the Appassionata
+Sonata it happened to be&mdash;while
+the infuriated little Vulcan threw emotional
+fuel into his furnace. The unfortunate instrument
+must have been a mass of splintered
+steel, wood, and wire after the musical giant had
+finished. It was a magnificent spectacle, and
+the music glorious. Eugen d'Albert, whether he
+is or isn't the son of Karl Tausig&mdash;as Weimar
+gossip had it; Weimar, when in the palmy
+days every other pianist you met was a natural
+son of Liszt&mdash;or else pretended to be one&mdash;has
+more than a moiety of that virtuoso's
+genius. He is a great artist, and occasionally
+the magic fire flares and lights up the firmament
+of music.</p>
+
+<p>I think it was in 1879 that Rafael Joseffy
+visited us for the first time; but I didn't hear
+him till 1880. The reason I remember the
+date is that this greatly beloved Hungarian
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+made his d&eacute;but at old Chickering Hall (then
+at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street); but
+I saw him in Steinway Hall. Another magician
+with a peculiarly personal style. In the beginning
+you thought of the aurora borealis,
+shooting-stars, and exquisite meteors; a beautiful
+style, though not a classic interpreter
+then. With the years Joseffy deepened and
+broadened. The iridescent shimmer was never
+absent. No one played the E minor Concerto
+of Chopin as did Joseffy. He had the tradition
+from his beloved master, Tausig, as Tausig
+had it from Chopin by way of Liszt. (Tausig
+always regretted that he had never heard Chopin
+play.) Joseffy, in turn, transmitted the
+tradition to his early pupil, Moriz Rosenthal,
+in whose r&eacute;pertoire it is the most Chopinesque
+of all his performances.</p>
+
+<p>And do you remember the Chevalier de
+Kontski, Carl Baermann, Franz Rummel, S.
+B. Mills&mdash;who introduced here so many
+modern concertos&mdash;the huge Norwegian Edmund
+Neupert, who lived at the Hotel Liszt,
+next door to Steinway Hall, Constantin von
+Sternberg, and Max Vogrich, the Hungarian
+with the Chopin-like profile?</p>
+
+<p>In the same school as Joseffy is the capricious
+De Pachmann; with Joseffy I sat at the first
+recital of this extraordinary Russian in Chickering
+Hall (1890). Joseffy, with his accustomed
+generosity of spirit&mdash;he was the most sympathetic
+and human of great virtuosi&mdash;at once
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+recognised the artistic worth of Vladimir de
+Pachmann. This last representative of a school
+that included the names of Hummel, Cramer,
+Field, Thalberg, Chopin, the little De Pachmann
+(he was then bearded like a pirate) captivated
+us. It was all miniature, without
+passion or pathos or the grand manner, but in
+its genre his playing was perfection; the polished
+perfection of an intricately carved ivory ornament.
+De Pachmann played certain sides of
+Chopin incomparably; capriciously, even perversely.
+In a small hall, sitting on a chair
+that precisely suited his fidgety spirit, then,
+if in the mood, a recital by him was something
+unforgettable.</p>
+
+<p>After De Pachmann&mdash;Paderewski. Paderewski,
+the master-colourist, the grand visionary,
+whose art is often strained, morbid,
+fantastic. And after Paderewski? Why, Leopold
+Godowsky, of course. He belongs to the
+Joseffy-De Pachmann, not to the Rubinstein-Josef
+Hofmann, group. I once called him the
+superman of piano-playing. Nothing like him,
+as far as I know, is to be found in the history
+of piano-playing since Chopin. He is an apparition.
+A Chopin doubled by a contrapuntalist.
+Bach and Chopin. The spirit of the
+German cantor and the Polish tone-poet in
+curious conjunction. His playing is transcendental;
+his piano compositions the transcendentalism
+of the future. That way, else
+retrogression! All has been accomplished in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+ideas and figuration. A new synthesis&mdash;the
+combination of seemingly disparate elements
+and styles&mdash;with innumerable permutations,
+he has accomplished. He is a miracle-worker.
+The Violet Ray. Dramatic passion, flame, and
+fury are not present; they would be intruders
+on his map of music. The piano tone is always
+legitimate, never forced. But every other
+attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten independent
+voices recreating the ancient polyphonic
+art of the Flemings. He is like a Brahma
+at the piano. Before his serene and
+all-embracing vision every school appears and
+disappears in the void. The beauty of his
+touch and tone are only matched by the delicate
+adjustment of his phrasing to the larger
+curve of the composition. Nothing musical is
+foreign to him. He is a pianist for pianists, and
+I am glad to say that the majority of them
+gladly recognise this fact.</p>
+
+<p>One evening Godowsky was playing his
+piano sonata with its subtle intimations of
+Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and its altogether
+Godowskian colour and rhythmic life&mdash;he
+is the greatest creator of rhythmic values since
+Liszt, and that is a &quot;large order&quot;&mdash;when he
+was interrupted by the entrance of Josef Hofmann.
+Godowsky and Hofmann are as inseparable
+as were Chopin and Liszt. Heine
+called the latter pair the Dioscurii of music.
+In the Godowsky apartment stood several
+concert grands. Hofmann nonchalantly removed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+his coat and, making an apology for
+disturbing us, he went into another room and
+soon we heard him slowly practising. What
+do you suppose? Some new concerto with
+new-fangled bedevilments? O Sancta Simplicitas!
+This giant, if ever there was one,
+played at a funereal tempo the octave passages
+in the left hand of the Heroic Polonaise
+of Chopin (Opus 53). Every schoolgirl rattles
+them off as &quot;easy,&quot; but, with the humility of a
+great artist, Hofmann practised the section as
+if it were still a stumbling-block. De Lenz records
+that Tausig did the same.</p>
+
+<p>Later, Conductor Artur Bodanzky of the
+Metropolitan Opera dropped in, and several
+pianists and critics followed, and soon the
+Polish pianist was playing for us all some well-known
+compositions by a certain Dvorsky;
+also an extremely brilliant and effective concert
+study in C minor by Constantin von Sternberg.
+From 1888, when he was a wonder-child here,
+Jozio Hofmann's artistic development has been
+logical and continuous. His mellow muscularity
+evokes Rubinstein. No one plays Rubinstein
+as does this Harmonious Blacksmith&mdash;and
+with the piety of Rubinstein's pet pupil. I
+once compared him to a steam-hammer, whose
+marvellous sensitivity enables it to crack an
+egg-shell or crush iron. Hofmann's range of
+tonal dynamics is unequalled, even in this
+age of perfected piano technique. He is at home
+in all schools, and his knowledge is enormous.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+At moments his touch is as rich as a Kneisel
+Quartet accord.</p>
+
+<p>At the famous Rudolph Schirmer dinner,
+given in 1915, among other distinguished guests
+there were nearly a score of piano virtuosi.
+The newspapers humorously commented upon
+the fact that there was not a squabble, though
+with so many nationalities one row, at least,
+might have been expected. As a matter of
+fact, if any discussion had arisen it would not
+have been over politics, but about the fingering
+of the Double-Note Study in G sharp minor
+of Chopin, so difficult to play slowly&mdash;the
+most formidable of argument-breeding questions
+among pianists. A parterre of pianists,
+indeed, some in New York because of the war,
+while Paderewski and Rosenthal were conspicuous
+by their absence. Think of a few names:
+Joseffy&mdash;he died several months later, Gabrilowitsch,
+Hofmann, Godowsky, Carl Friedberg,
+Mark Hambourg&mdash;a heaven-stormer in
+the Rubinstein-Hercules manner&mdash;Leonard Borwick,
+Alexander Lambert, Ernest Schelling,
+Stojowski, Percy Grainger&mdash;the young Siegfried
+of the Antipodes&mdash;August Fraemcke, Cornelius
+Ruebner, and&mdash;another apparition in the
+world of piano-playing&mdash;Ferruccio Busoni.</p>
+
+<p>This Italian, the greatest of Italian piano
+virtuosi&mdash;the history of which can claim such
+names as Domenico Scarlatti, Clementi, Fumigalli,
+Martucci, Sgambati&mdash;is also a composer
+who has set agog conservative critics by the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+boldness of his imagination. As an artist he
+may be said to embody the intellectuality of
+Von B&uuml;low, the technical brilliancy of the Liszt
+group. Busoni is eminently a musical thinker.</p>
+
+<p>America probably will never again harbour
+such a constellation of piano talent. I sometimes
+wonder if the vanished generation of
+piano artists played much better than those
+men. Godowsky, Hofmann, the lyric and most
+musical Harold Bauer; the many-sided, richly
+endowed, and charming Ossip Gabrilowitsch,
+Hambourg, Busoni, and Paderewski are not
+often matched. Heine called Thalberg a king,
+Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate,
+Kalkbrenner a minstrel (not a negro
+minstrel, for a chalk-burner is necessarily
+white), Mme. Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler&mdash;a
+pianist! The contemporary piano hierarchy
+might be thus classed: Josef Hofmann, a king;
+Paderewski, a poet; Godowsky, a prophet;
+Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, a sibyl; D'Albert, a
+titan; Busoni, a philosopher; Rosenthal, a hero,
+and Alexander Lambert&mdash;a pianist. Well, Mr.
+Lambert may be congratulated on such an
+ascription; Doehler was a great technician in his
+day, and when the &quot;friend of pianists&quot; (Lambert
+could pattern after Schindler, whose visiting-card
+read: &quot;l'Ami de Beethoven&quot;) masters
+his modesty an admirable piano virtuoso is revealed.
+So let him be satisfied with the honourable
+appellation of &quot;pianist.&quot; He is in good
+company.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+And the ladies! I am sorry I can't say,
+&quot;place aux dames!&quot; Space forbids. I've
+heard them all, from Arabella Goddard to Mme.
+Montigny-Remaury (in Paris, 1878, with her
+master, Camille Saint-Sa&euml;ns); from Alide Topp,
+Marie Krebs, Anna Mehlig, Pauline Fichtner,
+Vera Timinoff, Ingeborg Bronsart, Madeline
+Schiller, to Julia Riv&eacute;-King; from Cecilia Gaul
+and Svarvady-Clauss to Anna Bock; from the
+Amazon, Sofie Menter, the most masculine of
+Liszt players, to Ad&egrave;le Margulies, Yoland Maero,
+and Antoinette Szumowska-Adamowska; from
+Ilonka von Ravacsz to Ethel Leginska&mdash;who
+plays like a house afire; from Helen Hopekirk to
+Katharine Goodson; from Clara Schumann to
+Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Olga Samaroff, and
+the newly come Brazilian Guiomar Novaes&mdash;the
+list might be unduly prolonged.</p>
+
+<p>I heard Paderewski play last spring. Surely he
+has now the &quot;grand manner&quot; in all its dramatic
+splendour, and without its old-fashioned pretentious
+rhetoric. Nor has he lost the lusciousness
+of his touch&mdash;a Caruso voice on the keyboard&mdash;or
+the poetic intensity of his Chopin
+and Schumann interpretations. He is still
+Prince Charming.</p>
+
+<p>Not only do I fear prolixity, but the confusing
+of critical values, for I write from memory,
+and I admit that I've had more pleasure
+from the &quot;intimate&quot; pianists than from the
+forgers of tonal thunderbolts; that is&mdash;Rubinstein
+excepted&mdash;from such masters in miniature
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+as Joseffy, Godowsky, Carl Heyman, De
+Pachmann, and Paderewski. I find in the
+fresh, sparkling playing of Mischa Levitski,
+Benno Moiseivich, and Guiomar Novaes high
+promise for their future. The latter came here
+unheralded and as the pupil of that sterling
+virtuoso and pedagogue, Isidor Phillipp of the
+Paris Conservatory.</p>
+
+<p>It is noteworthy that only Chopin, Liszt, and
+Von B&uuml;low were Christian born among the supreme
+masters of the keyboard; the rest (with
+a few exceptions) were and are members of that
+race whose religious tenets specifically incline
+them to the love and practice of music.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h2>JAMES JOYCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Who is James Joyce? is a question that was
+answered by John Quinn, who told us that the
+new writer was from Dublin and at present
+residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good
+health&mdash;his eyes trouble him&mdash;and that he was
+once a student in theology, but soon gave up the
+idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a
+member of the new group of young Irish writers
+who see their country and countrymen in anything
+but a flattering light. Ireland, surely
+the most beautiful and most melancholy island
+on the globe, is not the Isle of Saints for those
+iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who happens
+to write English, though he often thinks
+in French; Bernard Shaw, notwithstanding his
+native wit, is of London and the Londoners;
+while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic,
+and both poets. Yes, and there is the delightful
+James Stephen, who mingles angels' pin-feathers
+with rainbow gold; a magic decoction
+of which we never weary. But James Joyce,
+potentially a poet, and a realist of the De Maupassant
+breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners
+with a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as
+truthful as Tchekov, and as grey&mdash;that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+Tchekov compared with whose the &quot;realism&quot;
+of De Maupassant is romantic bric-&agrave;-brac,
+gilded with a fine style. Joyce is as implacably
+naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the
+sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of
+middle-class life, and he sometimes suggests
+the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical
+methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson, after his experiences in Europe,
+became an armchair traveller. He positively
+despised the idea of voyaging across the water
+to see what is just as good at home. He calls
+Europe a tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen.
+&quot;The stuff of all countries is just
+the same.&quot; So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair
+and enjoyed thinking about Europe, thus evading
+the worries of going there too often. It
+has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly
+for souls easily disillusioned. To anticipate
+too much of a foreign city may result in disappointment.
+We have all had this experience.
+Paris resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second
+Philadelphia at times; it depends on the colour
+of your mood. Few countries have been so
+persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is
+lauded to the eleventh heaven of the Burmese
+or it is a place full of fighting devils in a hell
+of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor
+is it the land of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy
+and Harry Lorrequer are there, but you never
+encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got
+nearer to the heart of the peasantry, and Yeats
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+and Lady Gregory brought back from the hidden
+spaces fairies and heroes.</p>
+
+<p>Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a
+veracious picture of Irish priesthood and college
+life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce representative
+of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud
+of contradictory witnesses passes across the sky.
+What is the Celtic character? Dion Boucicault's
+The Shaughraun? Or isn't the pessimistic
+dreamer with the soul of a &quot;wild goose,&quot;
+depicted in George Moore's story, the real
+man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew Arnold.
+He should have said, Irish magic, for while
+the Irishman is a Celt, he is unlike his brethren
+across the Channel. Perhaps he is nearer to
+the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland
+and Poland! The Irish and the Polish!
+Dissatisfied no matter under which king! Not
+Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs
+to their unhappy temperaments.</p>
+
+<p>The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another
+variation of this always interesting theme.
+It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the
+daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel
+is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
+Man, a title quite original and expressive of
+what follows; also a title that seems to have
+emerged from the catalogue of an art-collector.
+It is a veritable portrait of the artist as a boy,
+a youth and a young man. From school to college,
+from the brothel to the confessional, from
+his mother's apron-strings to coarse revelry, the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+hero is put to the torture by art and relates the
+story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do
+not recall a book like this since the autobiography
+En Route of J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian
+of Dutch extraction is in the company of
+James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way
+house of reticence. It's the House of Flesh
+in its most sordid aspects, and the human soul
+is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the
+grace of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian
+speech is marked. This, if you please, is a
+Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so joyed
+in &quot;green&quot; words, as the French say, as do some
+Irish. Of richest hue are his curses, and the
+Prince of Obliquity himself must chuckle when
+he overhears one Irishman consign another to
+everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.</p>
+
+<p>Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist
+as a Young Man, tells his student friend about
+his father. These were his attributes: &quot;A
+medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur
+actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord,
+a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow,
+a story-teller, somebody's secretary, something
+in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at
+present a praiser of his own past.&quot; He could
+talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a turkey&mdash;as
+they say up Cork way. The portrait
+is well-nigh perfect. The wild goose over
+again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became
+violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits.
+From the extreme of riotous living he was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+transformed into a militant Catholic. The
+reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was
+an excellent Latinist, but his mind was too
+speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing.
+To analyse the sensibility of a soul
+mounting on flaming pinions to God is easier
+than to describe the modulations of a moral
+recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith,
+though he did not again sink into the slough of
+Dublin low life. Cranly, the student, saw
+through the hole in his sceptical millstone.
+&quot;It is a curious thing, do you know,&quot; Cranly
+said dispassionately, &quot;how your mind is supersaturated
+with the religion in which you say
+you disbelieve.&quot; A profound remark. Once
+a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic,
+particularly if you are born in Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He
+neither abuses nor praises. He is evidently
+out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of
+the Jesuits with affection and admiration. The
+sermons preached by them during the retreat
+are models. They are printed in full&mdash;strange
+material for a novel. And he can show us the
+black hatred caused by the clash of political
+and religious opinions. There is a scene of
+this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that
+simply blazes with verity. At a Christmas
+dinner the argument between Dante (a certain
+Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair.
+Stephen's father carves the turkey and
+tries to stop the mouths of the angry man and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+woman with food. The mother implores.
+Stephen stolidly gobbles, watching the row,
+which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his
+temper&mdash;he has had several tumblers of mountain
+dew and is a little &quot;how come you so?&quot;
+He bursts forth: &quot;No God in Ireland! We
+have had too much God in Ireland! Away
+with God!&quot; &quot;Blasphemer! Devil!&quot; screamed
+Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting
+in his face. &quot;Devil out of hell! We won!
+We crushed him to death! Fiend!&quot; The door
+slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly
+bowed his head on his hands with a sob of
+pain. &quot;Poor Parnell!&quot; he cried loudly. &quot;My
+dead King.&quot; Naturally the dinner was not a
+success. Stephen noted that there were tears in
+his father's eyes at the mention of Parnell, but
+that he seemed debonair enough when the old
+woman unpacked her heart of vile words like a
+drab.</p>
+
+<p>There is no denying that the novel is as a
+whole hardly cheerful. Its grip on life, its
+intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching
+acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable
+to the average reader. There is relief
+in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a
+saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr.
+Joyce. There is no ironist like an Irishman.
+The book is undoubtedly written from a full
+heart, but the author must have sighed with
+relief when he wrote the last line. No one
+may tell the truth with impunity, and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+portrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity&mdash;as
+an artistic performance&mdash;and its passionate
+personal note, is bound to give offence in every
+quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish;
+not an infrequent paradox. The volume of
+tales entitled Dubliners reveals a wider range,
+a practised technical hand, and a gift for etching
+character that may be compared with De
+Maupassant's. A big comparison, but read
+such masterpieces in pity and irony as The
+Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or
+Two Gallants, and be convinced that we do
+not exaggerate.</p>
+
+<p>Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge
+whispering gallery. Scandal of the most insignificant
+order never lacks multiple echoes.
+From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to
+Dalkey or Drumcondra; from the Monument to
+Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip is
+unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with
+Dublinesque anecdotes. It is charged with
+the sights and scents and gestures of the town.
+The slackers who pester servant-girls for their
+shillings to spend on whisky; the young man
+in the boarding-house who succumbs to the
+&quot;planted&quot; charms of the landlady's daughter
+to fall into the matrimonial trap&mdash;only De
+Maupassant could better the telling of this
+too commonplace story; the middle-aged man,
+parsimonious as to his emotions and the tragic
+ending of a love-affair that had hardly begun;
+and the wonderfully etched plate called The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+Dead with its hundred fine touches of comedy
+and satire&mdash;these but prove the claim of
+James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer
+signally gifted. A malevolent fairy seemingly
+made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he
+could say&mdash;oh, terrifying irony!&mdash;that &quot;mankind
+is not necessary&quot; in the eternal scheme.
+We hope that with the years he may become
+mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation
+of &quot;life's more bitter flavours.&quot; Insipid
+novelists are legion. He is Huysmans's
+little brother in his flair for disintegrating character.
+But yet an Irishman, who sees the
+shining vision in the sky, a vision that too
+often vanishes before he can pin its beauty
+on canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of
+the murderous humour of such a story as Ivy
+Day in the Committee-Room, which would
+bring to a Tammany heeler what Henry James
+called &quot;the emotion of recognition.&quot; Ah! the
+wild goose. The flying dream.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h2>CREATIVE INVOLUTION</h2>
+
+
+<p>Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed
+once upon a time to the <i>Strand Magazine</i>
+and later reunited in a book bearing the happy
+title Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers
+as being significant chiefly in their self-revelation.
+What they tell of themselves is of more
+value than what they write about. Whether
+Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little
+in the discussion of an unusual book by a woman.
+Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes widely
+after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L.
+Williams, M. S., with an apposite introduction
+by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams deals
+with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension
+of Space (what we do not know we
+fear, and fear is always capitalised). Speculative
+as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter,
+a Christian Scientist, or a member of any of
+the other queer rag-tag and bobtail beliefs and
+superstitions&mdash;fortune-telling, astrology, selling
+&quot;futures&quot; in the next life, table-rapping, and
+such like. Cora Lenore Williams is an authority
+in mathematics, as was the brilliant, unhappy
+Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then,
+are not verbal wind-pudding, but have a basis
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+of mathematics and the investigations of the
+laboratory, where &quot;chemists and physicists are
+finding that the conduct of certain molecules
+and crystals is best explained as a fourth-dimensional
+activity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We have always enjoyed the idea of the
+Fourth Spatial Dimension. The fact that it
+is an <i>x</i> in the plotting of mathematicians in
+general does not hinder it from being a fascinating
+theme. J. K. F. Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved
+to his own satisfaction the existence of a Fourth
+Dimension when he turned an india-rubber
+ball inside out without tearing it. Later he
+became a victim to incurable melancholy.
+No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's
+Flatland, or the ingenious speculations
+of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford, you
+will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual
+motion, squaring the circle, are only
+variants of the alchemical pursuit of the philosopher's
+stone, the transmutation of the baser
+metals, the cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest
+of the absolute. Man can't live on machinery
+alone, and the underfed soul of the past period
+of positivism craves more spiritual nourishment
+to-day. Hasn't the remarkable mathematician
+Henri Poincar&eacute; (author of Science and Hypothesis,
+The Value of Science, Science and
+Method) declared that between the construction
+of the spirit and the absolute of truth there
+is an abysm caused by free choice and the
+voluntary elimination which have necessitated
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+such inferences? Note the word &quot;free&quot;; free-will
+is restored to its old and honourable estate
+in the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron
+determinism of the seventies and eighties has
+gone to join the materialistic ideas of B&uuml;chner
+and Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and
+lordly Intuition&mdash;a dangerous vocable&mdash;rules
+over mere mental processes. (There is, as George
+Henry Lewes asserted, profound truth in the
+Cullen paradox: <i>i. e.</i>, there are more false facts
+than false theories current.) Science only attains
+the knowledge of the correspondence and
+relativity of things&mdash;no mean intellectual
+feat, by the way&mdash;but not of the things themselves;
+one must join, adds Poincar&eacute;, to the
+faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy.
+In a word, Intuition. Even mathematics
+as an exact science is not immutable,
+and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann
+are as legitimate as Euclid's. And at
+this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble
+and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the
+age of miracles now?</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension.
+Time may be in two dimensions. Heraclitus
+before Bergson compared Time to a river always
+flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged
+from this stream at a certain moment and entered
+it an hour later, would it not signify that Time
+has two dimensions. And where does music
+stand in the eternal scheme of things? Are not
+harmony with its vertical structure and melody
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+with its horizontal flow proof that music is another
+dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion
+of the Fourth Spatial Dimension is a spiritual
+one. Creative Involution is to supersede the
+Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution
+described for our salvation in the epistles
+of the Apostle Paul. All roads lead to religion.
+Expel religion forcibly and it returns under
+strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions.
+Yet religion without dogma is like
+a body without a skeleton&mdash;it can't be made
+to stand upright.</p>
+
+<p>Mathematicians are poets, and religion is
+the poetry of the poor, just as philosophy is
+the diversion of professors. Modern science,
+said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's
+stage when it denied religion. But matter, in
+the light of recent experiment, is become spirit,
+energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall
+might have to revise the conclusions of his
+once famous Belfast address in the presence of
+radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the
+essential thing is to search the eternal in the
+diverse and fleeting movements of form. From
+a macrocosmic monster our gods are become
+microcosmic; god may be a molecule, a cell.
+A god to put in a phial; thus far has the zigzag
+caprice of theory attained. And religion is
+&quot;a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise
+of our faculties,&quot; says Salomon Reinach
+in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations
+in vain. All is vanity, even doctrinal
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+fluctuations. Goethe has warned us that &quot;Man
+is not born to solve the mystery of Existence;
+but he must nevertheless attempt it, in order
+that he may learn how to keep within the limits
+of the Knowable.&quot; Goethe detested all &quot;thinking
+about thought.&quot; Spinoza was his only philosophical
+recreation.</p>
+
+<p>Man must no longer be egocentric. The
+collective soul is born. The psychology of the
+mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different
+from the psychology of the individual.
+We know this from the mental workings of a
+jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put
+in a jury-box contaminate each other's will
+so that their united judgment is, as a rule, that
+of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted
+this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant
+humour) fashion, adding that trial by jury was
+all very well in the time of Alfred the Great,
+candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss
+Williams, who sees salvation for the single
+soul in the collective soul&mdash;not necessarily socialistic&mdash;nevertheless
+warns parents against
+the dangers in our public-school system, where
+the individuality of the child is so often disturbed,
+if not destroyed, by class teaching.
+Mob psychology is always false psychology.
+The crowd obliterates the ego. Yet to collective
+consciousness may belong the future. It is
+all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification,
+the result, and the prop of limited class
+interests. (This was years ago.) Stately,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+sedate, stable is the class that won't tolerate
+war; a class of moral lollipops. War we must
+have; it is one of the prime conditions of struggling
+existence. As belief in some totem, fetich,
+taboo is the basis of all superstitions, so the
+superstition of yesterday builds the cathedrals
+of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's Golden Bough&mdash;James
+Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social
+Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations,
+as a wine needs a glass to hold it; and if patriotism
+is a crime of l&egrave;se-majesty against mankind,
+then be it so. But like the poor, war
+and patriotism are precious essences in the
+scheme of life, and we shall always have them
+with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams
+is a timely one. At school our children's
+souls are clogged with bricks and mortar, instead
+of being buoyant and individual.</p>
+
+<p>She quotes&mdash;and her little volume contains
+a mosaic of apt quotations&mdash;with evident approbation
+from Some Neglected Factors in
+Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English
+thinker: &quot;Organic life is thus seen advancing
+out of the dim past upon a series of
+waves, each of which can be scanned in detail
+until we come to that one on which we ourselves,
+the organisms of to-day, and the human
+societies to which we belong, are swept onward.
+Here we must necessarily pause, but
+can we doubt that the great organic rhythm
+which has brought life so far will carry it on
+to still greater heights in the unknown future?&quot;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+Rhythm, measured flow, is the shibboleth.
+Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and
+hybrid of plant and ghost. &quot;I teach you Beyond-Man
+(superman); Man is something that
+will be surpassed ... once man was ape, and
+is ape in a higher degree than any ape....
+Man is a rope connecting animal and Beyond-Man.&quot;
+&quot;Believe that which thou seest not,&quot;
+cries Flaubert in his marvellous masque of
+mythologies ancient and modern, The Temptation
+of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same
+centuries before the Frenchman: Believe what
+is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is the
+price we pay for cognition.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though
+she appreciates his plastic theories. She has
+a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a mystagogue,
+and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs.
+He has yet to answer Professor Hugh S. R.
+Elliott's three questions: &quot;1. Bergson says,
+'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.'
+Where is the specimen on which this allegation
+is founded? 2. Consciousness is to some extent
+independent of cerebral structure. Professor
+Bergson thinks he is disproving a crude theory
+of localisation of mental qualities. Will he
+furnish evidence of its existence apart from
+local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension
+of life that intellect can never give.
+Will Professor Bergson furnish instances of
+the successes of instinct in biological inquiries
+where intellect has failed?&quot; (From Modern
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson,
+1912.) These &quot;metaphysical curiosities,&quot;
+as they are rather contemptuously called by
+Sir Ray Lankester in his preface to this solidly
+reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of
+numerous persons, dilettantes, with a craving
+for an embellished theory of the Grand Perhaps.
+Miss Williams is not the dupe of such
+silken sophistries, and while her divagations
+are sometimes in the air&mdash;which, like the earth,
+hath bubbles, as was observed by the greatest
+of poets&mdash;she plants her feet on tangible affirmations.
+And to have faith we must admit
+the Illative sense of John Henry Newman.
+Thus &quot;the wheel is come full circle.&quot; Creative
+Involution will please mystics and mathematicians
+alike. The author somersaults in
+the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother
+earth.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h2>FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark,
+warned his friend that there were more things
+in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his
+philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio
+had absorbed the contemporary wisdom of
+Wittenberg. And let it be said in passing
+that their knowledge did not lag behind ours,
+metaphysically speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet,
+if he had lived longer, might have said
+that no philosophy would ever solve the
+riddle of the sphinx; that we never know, only
+name, things. Noah is the supreme symbol
+of science, he the first namer of the animals
+in the ark. The world of sensation is our ark
+and we are one branch of the animal family.
+We come whence we know not and go where
+we shall never guess. Standing on this tiny
+Isle of Error we call the present, we think backward
+and live forward. Hamlet the sceptical
+would now demand something more tangible
+than the Grand Perhaps. My kingdom for a
+fulcrum! he might cry to Horatio&mdash;on which
+I may rest my lever and pry this too too solid
+earth up to the starry skies! What the implement?
+Religion? Remember Hamlet was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+a Catholic, too sensitive to send unshrived to
+hell's fire the soul of his uncle. Philosophy?
+Read Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and realise that
+if he were alive to-day the melancholy Prince
+might be a delicate scoffer at all fables. A
+Hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What
+then the escape? We all need more elbow-room
+in the infinite. The answer is&mdash;the Fourth
+Dimension in Higher Space. Eureka!</p>
+
+<p>After studying Saint Teresa, John of the Cross,
+Saint Ignatius, or the selections in Vaughan's
+Hours with the Mystics, even the doubting
+Thomas is forced to admit that here is no trace
+of rambling discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stammered
+enigmas; on the contrary, the true
+mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces
+with crystalline clearness the veil of the visible
+world. As literary style we find sharp contours
+and affirmations. Mysticism is not all
+cobweb lace and opal fire. Remember that we
+are not stressing the validity of either the vision
+or its consequent judgments; we only wish to
+emphasise the absence of muddy thinking in
+these writings. This quality of precision,
+allied to an eloquent, persuasive style, we encounter
+in Claude Bragdon's Four Dimensional
+Vistas. The author is an architect and
+has written much of his art and of projective
+ornament. (He was a Scammon lecturer at
+the Chicago Art Institute in 1915.) He is a
+mystic. He is also eminently practical. His
+contribution to &aelig;sthetics in The Beautiful
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+Necessity is suggestive, and on the purely
+technical side valuable. But Mr. Bragdon,
+being both a mathematician and a poet, does
+not stop at three-dimensional existence. Like
+the profound English mystic William Blake,
+he could ask: &quot;How do you know but every
+bird that cuts the airy way is an immense
+world of delight, closed by your senses five?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>What is the Fourth Dimension? A subtle
+transposition of precious essences from the
+earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in
+a world of three dimensions, the symbols of
+which are length, breadth, thickness. A species
+of triangular world, a prison for certain
+souls who see in the category of Time an escape
+from that other imperative, Space (however,
+not the Categorical Imperative of Kant
+and its acid moral convention). Helmholtz
+and many mathematicians employed the &quot;n&quot;
+dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful
+in some analytical problems, but it is not
+apprehended by the grosser senses. Pascal,
+great thinker and mathematician, had his
+&quot;Abyss&quot;; it was his Fourth Dimension, and
+he never walked abroad without the consciousness
+of it at his side. This illusion or obsession
+was the result of a severe mental shock early
+in his life. Many of us are like the French
+philosopher. We have our &quot;abyss,&quot; mystic
+or real. Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician
+Bolyai, who in 1823 &quot;declared with
+regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+'I will draw two lines through a given point
+both of which will be parallel to a given line.'&quot;
+Space, then, may be curved in another dimension.
+Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though
+he does not attempt to prove it, as that would
+be impossible; but he gives his readers the
+chief points in the hypothesis. The &quot;n&quot; dimension
+may be employed as a lever to the
+imagination. Even revealed religion demands
+our faith, and imagination is the prime agent
+in the interpretation of the universe, according
+to the gospel of mystic mathematics.</p>
+
+<p>Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is
+interesting to note the imagery of transcendentalism
+through the ages. It is invariably
+geometrical. Spheres, planes, cones, circles,
+spirals, tetragrams, pentagrams, ellipses, and
+what-not. A cubistic universe. Xenophanes
+said that God is a sphere. And then there
+are the geometrical patterns made by birds on
+the wing. Heaven in any religion is another
+sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes,
+many mansions for the soul at its various stages
+of existence. The Bible, the mystical teachings
+of Mother Church&mdash;why evoke familiar
+witnesses? We are hemmed in by riddles,
+and the magnificent and mysterious tumult
+of life asks for the eye of imagination, which
+is also the eye of faith. The cold fire and dark
+light of the mystics must not repel us by their
+strangeness. Not knowledge but perception
+is power, and the psychic is the sign-post of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+the future. What do all these words mean:
+matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules, electrons,
+but the same old thing? I am a colony of cells,
+yet that fact does not get me closer to the core
+of the soul. What will? A fourth spatial
+dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a
+poetic concept.</p>
+
+<p>He calls man a space-eater. Human ambition
+is to annihilate space. Wars are fought
+for space, and every step in knowledge is based
+upon its mastery. What miracles are wireless
+telegraphy, flying-machines, the Roentgen ray!
+Astronomy&mdash;what ghastly gulfs it shows us
+in space! Time and space were abolished as
+sense illusions by the worthy Bishop of Cloyne,
+George Berkeley; but as we are up to our eyes
+in quotidian life, which grows over and about
+us like grass, we cannot shake off the oppression.
+First thought, and then realised, these
+marvels are now accepted as matter of fact
+because mankind has been told the technique
+of them; as if any explanation can be more
+than nominal. We shall never know the real
+nature of the phenomena that crowd in on us
+from lust to dust. Not even that synthesis
+of the five senses, the sixth, or sex sense, with
+its evanescent ecstasy, cuts deeply into the
+darkness. There may be a seventh sense, a
+new dimension, intimations of which are setting
+advanced thinkers on fresh trails. But there
+is as yet no tangible proof. Philosophers, who,
+like some singers, bray their brainless convictions
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+to a gaping auditory, ask of us much more
+credence, and little or no imagination. As
+that &quot;old mole,&quot; working in the ground, gravitation,
+is defied by aeroplanes, then we should
+not despair of any hypothesis which permits
+us a peep through the partly opened door.
+Plato's cavern and the shadows. Who knows
+but in this universe there may be a crevice
+through which filters the light of another life?
+Emerson, who shed systems yet never organised
+one, hints at aerial perspectives. A
+flight through the sky with the sun bathing
+in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid
+finite world. In such perilous altitudes I have
+enjoyed this experience and felt a liberation
+of the spirit which has no parallel; not even
+when listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin.
+Music, indeed, is the nearest approach to
+psychic freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Goethe's
+expression &quot;frozen music,&quot; applied to Gothic
+architecture. (Stendhal appropriated this
+phrase.) For us the flying buttress is aspiring,
+and the pointed arch is a fugue. Our author
+is rich in his analogies, and like Sir Thomas
+Browne sees &quot;quincunxes&quot; in everything; his
+particular &quot;quincunx&quot; being Higher Space.
+The precise patterns in our brain, like those
+of the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us
+to perceive and build the universe (otherwise
+called innate ideas) are geometrical. Space
+is the first and final illusion. Time&mdash;which
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+is not &quot;a stuff both resistant and substantial,&quot;
+as Henri Bergson declares&mdash;is perhaps the
+Fourth Dimension in the guise of a sequence
+of states, and not grasped simultaneously, as
+is the idea of Space. That Time can shrink
+and expand, opium-eaters, who are not always
+totally drugged by their dreams, assure us. A
+second becomes an &aelig;on. And space curvature?
+Is it any wonder that &quot;Lewis Carroll,&quot; who
+wrote those extraordinary parables for little
+folk, Through the Looking-Glass and Alice
+in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A
+topsy-turvy world; it is even upside down as
+an optical image. The other side of good and
+evil may be around the corner. Eternity can
+lurk in a molecule too tiny to harbour Queen
+Mab. And we may all live to see the back of
+our own heads without peering in mirrors.
+That &quot;astral trunk&quot; once so fervently believed
+in may prove a reality; it is situated behind
+the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the
+planet Saturn, and by its aid we should be enabled
+to converse with spirits! The pineal
+gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence
+us in at every step. We fill our belly with
+the east wind of vain desires. We eat the air
+promise-crammed. This world is but a point
+in the universe, and our universe only one of
+an infinite series. There was no beginning,
+there is no end. Eternity is now; though
+death and the tax-gatherer never cease their
+importunings.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+All this Mr. Bragdon does not say, though
+he leans heavily on the arcana of the ancient
+wisdom. The truth is that the majority of
+humans are mentally considered vegetables, living
+in two dimensions. To keep us responsive
+to spiritual issues, as people were awaked
+in Swift's Laputa by flappers, is the service
+performed by such transcendentalists as C.
+Howard Hinton, author of The Fourth Dimension;
+Claude Bragdon and Cora Lenore Williams.
+Their thought is not new; it was hoary
+with age when the Greeks went to old Egypt
+for fresh learning; Noah conversed with his
+wives in the same terminology. But its application
+is novel, as are the personal nuances.
+The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may
+be likened to a fresh lens in the telescope or
+microscope of speculation. For the present
+writer the hypothesis is just one more incursion
+into the fairyland of metaphysics. Without
+fairies the heart grows old and dusty.</p>
+
+<p>The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating
+shapes. As for the paradise problem, it is
+horribly sublime for me, this idea of an eternity
+to be spent in a place which, with its silver,
+gold, plush, and diamonds, seems like the
+dream of a retired pawnbroker. The Eternal
+Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse
+for life is its brevity. Why, then, do we
+yearn for that unending corridor through which
+in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders
+bowed by the burden of our chimera&mdash;our
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+ego? I confess that I prefer to watch on the
+edge of some vast promontory the swift approach
+of a dark sun rushing out from the
+primordial depths of interstellar spaces to the
+celestial assignation made at the beginning of
+Time for our little solar system, whose provinciality,
+remote from the populous path of
+the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding
+with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that
+apocalyptic flare-up&mdash;surely a more cosmical
+and heroic death than stewing in greasy bliss&mdash;Higher
+Space may be manifested and Time
+and Tri-Dimensional Space be no more. The
+rest is silence.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h2>O. W.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is an enormous advertisement nowadays
+to win a reputation as a martyr&mdash;whether to
+an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have
+a label by which a careless public is able to
+identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser.
+From the sunflower days to Holloway
+Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of
+Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye.
+Since his death the number of volumes dealing
+with his glittering personality, negligible verse
+and more or less insincere prose, have been
+steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss to
+understand. If he was a victim to British
+&quot;middle-class morality,&quot; then have done with
+it, while regretting the affair. If he was not,
+all the more reason to maintain silence. But
+no, the clamour increases, with the result that
+there are many young people who believe that
+Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in
+reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas
+slamming the memory of his old chum in a not
+particularly edifying manner, though he tells
+some truths, wholesome and unwholesome.
+Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead
+friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the note
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation
+was the object. However, there are
+many to whom the truth will be more welcome
+than the spectacle of broken friendship.
+Another, and far more welcome book, is
+that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender
+volume of &quot;fragments and memories.&quot; His
+Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to
+New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and
+facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana&mdash;or
+Oscariana&mdash;which is it? Pictures,
+too. I confess that his early portraits flatter
+the Irish writer. &quot;He looked like an old maid
+in a boarding-house&quot; said a well-known Philadelphia
+portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a
+&quot;beautiful Greek god,&quot; as his fervent admirers
+think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his
+eyes dull and &quot;draggy,&quot; his forehead narrow,
+the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and
+&quot;horsy,&quot; his head and face was pear-shaped.
+He was a big fellow, as was his brother Willie
+Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he gave
+no impression of muscular strength or manliness;
+on the other hand, he was not a &quot;Sissy,&quot;
+as so many have said. Indeed, to know him
+was to like him; he was the &quot;real stuff,&quot; as
+the slang goes, and if he had only kept away
+from a pestilential group of flatterers and
+spongers, his end might have been different.</p>
+
+<p>I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time,
+best of them all was Barbey d'Aur&eacute;villy, of
+Paris, after whom Oscar palpably modelled&mdash;lace
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations.
+But when Oscar was in the vein,
+which was usually once every twenty-four
+hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will
+bear me out in this. For copiousness, sustained
+wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few
+equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I
+met him when he came here, and once again
+much later. Possibly that is why I care so
+little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne&mdash;(in
+the wholly admirable biography of this
+poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O.
+W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: &quot;I
+thought he seemed a harmless young nobody....
+I should think you in America must be
+as tired of his name as we are in London of
+Mr. Barnum's and his Jumbos&quot;)&mdash;Milton,
+Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter
+Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart
+from the inversion element, is poor Huysmans's&mdash;just
+look into that masterpiece, A Rebours;
+not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval
+Portrait; while Salom&eacute; is Flaubert in operetta
+form&mdash;his gorgeous Herodias watered down
+for uncritical public consumption. It is safe
+to say the piece&mdash;which limps dramatically&mdash;would
+never have been seriously considered
+if not for the Richard Strauss musical setting.
+As for the vaunted essay on Socialism, I may
+only call attention to one fact, <i>i. e.</i>, it does not
+deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical
+anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+any particular. His Intentions is his best,
+because his most &quot;spoken&quot; prose. The fairy-tales
+are graceful exercises by a versatile writer,
+with an excellent memory, but if I had children
+I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books,
+through which sweeps a bracing air, and not
+the hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays
+are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote
+from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error,
+yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti,
+Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations,
+strained as they are through his very gay
+fancy.</p>
+
+<p>He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed
+&agrave; la Byron and Baudelaire; but to hear his
+jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the
+morbid or the sinister. He was materialistic,
+he loved good cookery, old wines, and strong
+tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever
+inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert
+Hichens, which book gossip avers set the ball
+rolling that fetched up behind prison-bars. In
+every-day life he was a charming, companionable,
+and very human chap, and, as Frederick
+James Gregg says, dropped more witty epigrams
+in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best
+thing Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming
+in advance as his own anything Oscar might
+utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing
+an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed
+from the same source and amplified the idea
+that nature is monotonous, nature is a plagiarist
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical
+chatter and inconsequent humour. Both
+Whistler and Wilde have been taken too seriously&mdash;I
+mean on this side. Whistler was a great
+artist. Wilde was not. Whistler discoursed
+wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't knee-high to
+a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde.
+As for the tragic d&eacute;nouement that has been
+thrashed to death by those who know, suffice
+to add that William Butler Yeats told me that
+he called at the Wilde home after the scandal
+had broken, and saw Willie Wilde, who roundly
+denounced his brother for his truly brave attitude&mdash;always
+attitudes with Oscar. He
+would not be persuaded to leave London, and
+perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though
+neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De
+Profundis carry conviction. Need I say that
+my judgment is personal? I have read in cold
+type that Pater was a &quot;forerunner&quot; of Wilde;
+that Wilde is a second Jesus Christ&mdash;which
+latter statement stuns one. (The Whitmaniacs
+are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who
+is not unlike that silly and sinister monster
+described by Rabelais as quite overshadowing
+the earth with its gigantic wings, and after
+dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on
+the embattled hosts below flew away yawping:
+&quot;Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!&quot;) For me,
+he simply turned into superior &quot;journalism&quot;
+the ideas of Swinburne, Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans,
+De Quincey, and others. If his readers
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+would only take the trouble to study the originals
+there might be less talk of his &quot;originality.&quot;
+I say all this without any disparagements
+of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper
+man. Henry James calls attention to the fact
+that the so-called &aelig;sthetic movement in England
+never flowered into anything so artistically
+perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio.
+Which is true; but he could have joined to
+the name of the Italian poet and playwright
+that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one &quot;genius&quot;
+of the &quot;Eighteen-Nineties.&quot; Beardsley gave
+us something distinctly individual. Wilde, a
+veritable cabotin, did not&mdash;nothing but his
+astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a
+fast fading memory.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<h2>A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion
+of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries.
+Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed
+success, though the &aelig;sthetic principle at the
+base of his theory is eminently unsound. Pictures,
+sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the
+rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama;
+but the very titles are significant&mdash;a
+hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is
+the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so
+important, though his scenic sense is unfailing.
+Every one of his works delights the eye;
+truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the
+young man of Urbino had opened to music,
+they would have sung the melodies of the young
+man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann,
+the Japanese poet from Hamburg, made
+a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other
+ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The
+affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were
+wafted on the wings of song and smell to Japan&mdash;only
+I detected the familiar odour of old shoes
+and the scent of armpits&mdash;of the latter Walt
+Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New York
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a
+Japanese crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us.
+In the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre d'art, Paris, and in the last decade
+of the last century, experiments were made
+with all the arts&mdash;except the art of the palate.
+Recently, Mary Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist,
+has invented a mixture of music, lights, and
+costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy
+piece, the stage assumes a deep violet hue,
+which glides into a light purple. The Turkish
+March of Mozart is depicted in deep &quot;reds,
+yellows, and greens.&quot; Philip Hale, the Boston
+music-critic, has written learnedly on the relation
+of tones and colours, and that astonishing
+poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du
+Verbe, tells us: &quot;I believe in all the enchantments.
+I invented the colour of the vowels:
+A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green.&quot;
+This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet,
+Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch
+the ears of credulous ones. Ren&eacute; de Ghil invented
+an entirely new system of prosody, which
+no one understood; least of all, the poet. I wrote
+a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs),
+to prove that music and the violet rays combined
+might prove deadly in the hands of an
+anarch composer like Illowski&mdash;or Richard
+Strauss. And now New York has enjoyed its
+first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine.
+It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra
+under the suave conductorship of Modeste
+Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+his brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at
+the keyboard and pressed down the keys which
+regulated the various tintings on a screen; a
+wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours
+did not mollify the truculence of the score;
+indeed, were quite meaningless, though not
+optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian,
+Scriabine, ever since I heard Josef Hofmann
+play a piano of his &eacute;tude in D sharp minor.
+Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality
+was also shown in it. I've heard few of his
+larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did not
+find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as
+either Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely
+on the scheme set by its composer, I confess
+I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate
+twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was
+best when it recalled Wagner and Chopin (a
+piano part occasionally sounded bilious premonitions
+of Chopin). But, for such a mighty
+theme as Prometheus, the Light-Bringer (a
+prehistoric Ben Franklin without his electrified
+kite), the leading motives of this new music
+were often undersized. The dissociation of
+conventional keys was rigorously practised,
+and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs
+of cacophony. But the scoring evoked many
+novel effects; principally, Berlioz and vodka.
+I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer,
+if not much addicted to the languishing Lydian
+mode. But his Light Symphony proved to
+be only a partial solution of the problem. In
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+Paris the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein
+invented puppet-shows with perfume
+symphonies.</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of a century ago I visited the
+Th&eacute;&acirc;tre d'art, in Paris; that is, my astral
+soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed
+theosophist. The day had been a stupid one
+in Gotham, and I hadn't enough temperament
+to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the
+nombril button, took my Rig-Veda&mdash;a sacred
+buggy&mdash;projected my astral being, and sailed
+through space to the French capital, there to
+enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of
+the seven arts, eating included. As it was a
+first performance, even the police were deprived
+of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery
+was maintained by the experimenters. I found
+the theatre, soon after my arrival, plunged
+into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls
+of violet light, which daintily and intermittently
+blinked. The dominant odour of the atmosphere
+was Cologne-water, with a florid
+counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a
+m&eacute;lange that appealed to my nostrils; and,
+though at first it seems hardly possible that
+the two dissimilar odours could even be made
+to modulate and merge, yet I had not been
+indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the
+duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell,
+and, like a freshly cut lemon, it causes a premonitory
+tickling of the palate and little rills
+of hunger in one's stomach. &quot;Aha!&quot; I cried
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+(astrally, of course), &quot;this is a concatenation
+of the senses never dreamed of by Plato when
+he conceived the plan of his Republic.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the
+theatre drifted into little sighs, and then a
+low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor,
+scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani,
+and piccolo, sounded. Immediately a
+chorus of male soprani blended with this chord,
+though they sang the common chord of A major.
+The effect was one of vividity (we say &quot;avidity,&quot;
+why can't we say &quot;vividity&quot;?); it was a dissonance,
+pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in
+a way that made their drums warble. Then
+a low burbling sound ascended. &quot;The bacon
+frying,&quot; I cried, but I was mistaken. It was
+caused by the hissing of a sheet of carmilion
+(that is carmine and vermilion) smoke which
+slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away
+the lights in the auditorium turned green and
+topaz, and an odour of jasmine and stewed
+tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours
+seemed to be swooning; they were nearly
+prostrate, with their lips glued to the rod that
+ran around the seats. I grasped it, and received
+a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in
+origin, though it was velvety pleasure merely
+to touch it, and the palms of my hands exquisitely
+ached. &quot;The tactile motive,&quot; I said.
+As I touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece,
+and thinking I might hear something, I
+applied my ear; it instantly became wet. So
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+evidently it was not the use to which it should
+be put. Again inspecting this mouthpiece, I
+put my finger to it and cautiously raised the
+moist end to my lips. &quot;Heavenly!&quot; I murmured.
+What sort of an earthly paradise was
+I in? And then losing no time, I placed my
+astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull.
+Gorgeous was the result. Gumbo soup, as sure
+as I ever ate it, not your pusillanimous New
+York variety, but the genuine okra soup that
+one can't find outside of Louisiana, where old
+negro mammies used to make it to perfection.
+&quot;The soup motive,&quot; I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down
+my thirsty throat, a shrill burst of brazen
+clangour (this is not tautological) in the orchestra
+roused me from my dream, and I gazed
+on the stage. The steam had cleared away,
+and now showed a rocky and wooded scene,
+the trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green.
+The band was playing something that sounded
+like a strabismic version of the prelude to
+Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed
+my enjoyment of the music, for so subtly
+allied were the senses in this new temple of
+art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision,
+or sound jarred the ensemble. This uncanny
+interfusion of the arts took my breath away,
+but, full of gumbo soup as I was&mdash;and you
+have no idea how soup discommodes the astral
+stomach&mdash;I was anchored to my seat, and
+bravely determined not to leave till I had some
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+clew to the riddle of the new evangel of the
+seven&mdash;or seventeen&mdash;arts. The stage remained
+bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery
+changed their hues about every twenty
+seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my
+tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted
+to decayed fish, dried grapefruit, and new-mown
+hay, I could stand it no longer, and,
+turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the
+shoulder, and politely asked: &quot;Monsieur, will
+you please tell me the title of this play, piece,
+drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture,
+symphony, cooking-comedy, or whatever
+they call it?&quot; The young man to whom
+I had appealed looked fearfully about him&mdash;I
+had foolishly forgotten that I was invisible
+in my astral shape&mdash;then clutched at his windpipe,
+beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud:
+&quot;Mon Dieu! still another kind of aural
+pleasure,&quot; and was carried out in a superbly
+vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad.
+The spectators were too absorbed, or drugged,
+to pay attention to the incident. Followed a
+slow, putrid silence.</p>
+
+<p>Realising the folly of addressing humans in
+my astral garb, I sat down in my corner and
+again watched the stage. Still no trace of
+actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish
+dun hue, while the orchestra played a Bach
+fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E
+flat and two policemen) accordions in F and
+stopped-strumpets. Suddenly the lights went
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+out, and we were plunged into a blackness that
+actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and
+dead was it. A smell of garlic made us cough,
+and by a sweep of some current we were saturated
+with the odours of white violets, the
+lights were tuned in three keys: yellow of
+eggs, marron glac&eacute;, and orchids, and the soup
+supply shifted to whisky-sours. &quot;How delicate
+these contrasts!&quot; hiccoughed my neighbour,
+and I astrally acquiesced. Then, at last,
+the stage became peopled by one person, a
+very tall old man with three eyes, high heels,
+and a deep voice. Brandishing aloft his whiskers,
+he curiously muttered: &quot;And hast thou slain
+the Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish
+boy.&quot; Alice in Wonderland, was the mystery-play,
+and I had arrived too late to witness the
+slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned
+waistcoat. How gallantly the &quot;beamish boy&quot;
+must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer
+brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried
+and the Dragon motives, and the air all the
+while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't
+help wondering what the particular potage
+was at this crucial moment. My cogitation
+was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing
+young knight in luminous armour,
+who dragged after him a huge carcass, half-dragon
+and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds
+must have been suffering from stage
+fright). The orchestra proclaimed the Abattoir
+motive, and instantly rose-odours penetrated
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+the air, the electric shocks ceased, and subtle
+little kicks were administered to the audience,
+which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning
+with these composite pleasures. The scenery
+had begun to dance gravely to an odd Russian
+rhythm, and the young hero monotonously
+intoned a verse, making the vowel sounds
+sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing
+the consonants: &quot;And as in uffish thought he
+stood, the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
+came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and
+burbled as it came.&quot; &quot;This beats Gertrude
+Stein,&quot; I thought, as the orchestra played the
+Galumphing motive from The Ride of the
+Valkyrs, and the lights were transposed to a
+shivering purple. Then lilac steam ascended,
+the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for
+corno di bassetto and three yelping poodles),
+a smell of cigarettes and coffee permeated the
+atmosphere, and I knew that this magical banquet
+of the senses was concluded. I was not
+sorry, as every nerve was sore from the strain
+imposed. Talk about faculty of attention!
+When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch,
+and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for
+a less alembicated art. Synthesis of the arts?
+Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not
+too much time at that. I pressed my astral
+button, and flew homeward, wearily, slowly;
+I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and
+nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+landed at the Battery it was exactly five o'clock.
+It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was
+preparing to bathe for the night in the wet
+of the western sky. New Jersey was etched
+against a cold hard background, and as an old
+hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way
+to Retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and
+joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of
+ragged children who danced around the venerable
+organist with jeers and shouting. After
+all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<h2>THE CLASSIC CHOPIN</h2>
+
+
+<p>That Chopin is a classic need not be unduly
+insisted upon; he is classic in the sense
+of representing the best in musical literature;
+but that he is of a classical complexion as a
+composer from the beginning of his career
+may seem in the nature of a paradox. Nevertheless,
+it is a thesis that can be successfully
+maintained now, since old party lines have
+been effaced. To battle seriously for such
+words as Classic or Romantic or Realism is
+no longer possible. Cultured Europe did so
+for a century, as it once wrangled over doctrinal
+points; as if the salvation of mankind
+depended upon the respective verbal merits
+of transubstantiation or consubstantiation.
+Only yesterday that ugly word &quot;degeneracy,&quot;
+thanks to quack critics and charlatan &quot;psychiatrists,&quot;
+figured as a means of estimating
+genius. This method has quite vanished among
+reputable thinkers, though it has left behind
+it another misunderstood vocable&mdash;decadence.
+Wagner is called decadent. So is Chopin.
+While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime
+exponent of musical decadence. What precisely
+is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Technically, a decadent style is only such
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+in relation to a classic style. It is simply a
+further development of a classic style, a further
+specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian
+phraseology, having become heterogeneous.
+The first is beautiful because the parts are
+subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful
+because the whole is subordinated to the
+parts.... Swift's prose is classic, Pater's decadent....
+Roman architecture is classic,
+to become in its Byzantine developments completely
+decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected
+type of decadence in art; pure early
+Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest
+degree because it shows an absolute subordination
+of detail to the bold harmonies of structure,
+while the later Gothic ... is decadent....
+All art is the rising and falling of the
+slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two
+classic and decadent extremes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth
+a profound but not widely appreciated fact.
+In art, as in life, there is no absolute. Perhaps
+the most illuminating statement concerning the
+romantic style was uttered by Th&eacute;ophile Gautier.
+Of it he wrote (in his essay on Baudelaire):
+&quot;Unlike the classic style it admits
+shadow.&quot; We need not bother ourselves about
+the spirit of romanticism; that has been done
+to the death by hundreds of critics. And it
+is a sign of the times that the old-fashioned
+Chopin is fading, while we are now vitally interested
+in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopin
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+the romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous,
+morbid, and Chopin the pianist, need not enter
+into our present scheme. He has appeared to
+popular fancy as everything from Thaddeus
+of Warsaw to an exotic drawing-room hero;
+from the sentimental consumptive consoled
+by countesses to the accredited slave of George
+Sand. All this is truly the romantic Chopin.
+It is the obverse of the medal that piques curiosity.
+Why the classic quality of his compositions,
+their clarity, concision, purity, structural
+balance, were largely missed by so many of
+his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of
+his obviously romantic melodies he was definitely
+ranged with the most extravagant of
+the romantics, with Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt;
+but, as a matter of fact, he is formally closer
+to Mendelssohn. His original manner of distributing
+his thematic material deceived the
+critics. He refused to join the revolutionists;
+later in the case of Flaubert we come upon an
+analogous condition. Hailed as chief of the
+realists, the author of Madame Bovary took an
+ironic delight in publishing Salammb&ocirc;, which
+was romantic enough to please that prince of
+romanticists, Victor Hugo. Chopin has been
+reproached for his tepid attitude toward romanticism,
+and also because of his rather caustic
+criticisms of certain leaders. He, a musical
+aristocrat <i>pur sang</i>, held aloof, though he permitted
+himself to make some sharp commentaries
+on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+Decidedly not a romantic despite his romantic
+externalism. Decidedly a classic despite his
+romantic &quot;content.&quot; Of him Stendhal might
+have written: a classic is a dead romantic.
+(Heine left no epic, yet he is an indubitable
+classic.) Wise Goethe said: &quot;The point is for
+a work to be thoroughly good and then it is
+sure to be classical.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But it is not because of the classicism
+achieved by the pathos of distance that Chopin's
+special case makes an appeal. It is Chopin
+as a consummate master of music that interests
+us. In his admirable Chopin the Composer,
+Edgar Stillman Kelley considers Chopin and
+puts out of court the familiar &quot;gifted amateur,&quot;
+&quot;improvisatore of genius,&quot; and the rest
+of the theatrical stock description by proving
+beyond peradventure of a doubt that Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric
+Fran&ccedil;ois Chopin was not only a creator of new
+harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but
+also a musician skilled in the handling of formal
+problems, one grounded in the schools of Bach,
+Mozart, and Beethoven; furthermore, that if he
+did not employ the sonata form in its severest
+sense, he literally built on it as a foundation.
+He managed the rondo with ease and grace,
+and if he did not write fugues it was because
+the fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps
+the divination of his own limitations is a further
+manifestation of his extraordinary genius. This
+does not imply that Chopin had any particular
+genius in counterpoint, but to deny his mastery
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+of polyphony is a grave error. And it is still
+denied with the very evidence staring his critics
+in the face. Beethoven in his sonatas demonstrated
+his individuality, though coming after
+Mozart's perfect specimens in that form.
+Chopin did not try to bend the bow of Ulysses,
+though more than a word might be said of his
+two last Sonatas&mdash;the first is boyishly pedantic,
+and monotonous in key-contrast, while the
+'cello and piano sonata hardly can be ranked
+as an exemplar of classic form.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Etudes Kelley says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In this group of masterpieces we find the
+more desirable features of the classical school&mdash;diatonic
+melodies, well-balanced phrase and
+period-building&mdash;together with the richness afforded
+by chromatic harmonies and modulatory
+devices heretofore unknown.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, a new system of music that changed
+the entire current of the art. It was not without
+cause that I once called Chopin the &quot;open
+door&quot;; through his door the East entered and
+whether for good or for ill certainly revolutionised
+Western music. Mr. Hadow is right
+in declaring that &quot;Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
+are not as far from each other as the music of
+1880 from that of 1914.&quot; And Chopin was
+the most potent influence, in company with
+Beethoven and Wagner, in bringing about that
+change. I say in company with Beethoven and
+Wagner, for I heartily agree with Frederick
+Niecks in his recent judgment:</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+&quot;I consider Chopin to be one of the three
+most powerful factors in the development of
+nineteenth-century music, the other two being,
+of course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute
+originality of Chopin's personality, and
+that of its expression through novel harmony,
+chromaticism, figuration justifies the assertion.
+And none will deny the fact who takes
+the trouble to trace the Polish master's influence
+on his contemporaries and successors. The
+greatest and most powerful composers came
+under this influence, to a large extent, by the
+process of infiltration.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Kelley gives us chapter and verse in the
+particular case of Wagner and his absorption
+of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the
+late Anton Seidl many times for my particular
+benefit.</p>
+
+<p>However, this only brings us to Chopin the
+innovator, whereas it is the aspect of the classic
+Chopin which has been neglected. &quot;As far
+back as 1840 Chopin was employing half-tones
+with a freedom that brought upon him the
+wrath of conservative critics,&quot; writes Hadow,
+who admires the Pole with reservations, not
+placing him in such august company as has
+Kelley and Niecks. True, Chopin was a pioneer
+in several departments of his art, yet how few
+recognised or recognise to-day that Schumann is
+the more romantic composer of the pair; his
+music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness;
+his Carneval the epitome of romantic musical
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+portraiture&mdash;with its &quot;Chopin&quot; more Chopin
+than the original. Contrast the noble Fantasy in
+C, Opus 17 of Schumann, with the equally noble
+Fantasy in F minor, Opus 49 of Chopin, and ask
+which is the more romantic in spirit, structure,
+and technique. Unquestionably to Schumann
+would be awarded the quality of romanticism.
+He is more fantastic, though his fantasy is
+less decorative; he strays into the most delightful
+and umbrageous paths and never falters
+in the preservation of romantic atmosphere.
+Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin,
+who, no matter his potentialities, never experimented
+in the larger symphonic mould, and as
+fully imbued with the poetic spirit as Schumann;
+nevertheless a master of his patterns,
+whether in figuration or general structure. His
+Mazourkas are sonnets, and this Fantasy in
+F minor is, as Kelley points out, a highly complex
+rondo; as are the Ballades and Scherzos.
+Beethoven, doubtless, would have developed
+the eloquent main theme more significantly;
+strictly speaking, Chopin introduces so much
+new melodic material that the rondo form is
+greatly modified, yet never quite banished.
+The architectonics of the composition are more
+magnificent than in Schumann, although I do
+not propose to make invidious comparisons.
+Both works are classics in the accepted sense
+of the term. But Chopin's Fantasy is more
+classic in structure and sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>The Sonatas in B flat minor and B minor are
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+&quot;awful examples&quot; for academic theorists. They
+are not faultless as to form and do sadly lack
+organic unity. Schumann particularly criticises
+the Sonata Opus 35 because of the inclusion
+of the Funeral March and the homophonic,
+&quot;invertebrate&quot; finale. But the two
+first movements are distinct contributions to
+Sonata literature, even if in the first movement
+the opening theme is not recapitulated.
+I confess that I am glad it is not, though the
+solemn title &quot;Sonata&quot; becomes thereby a mockery.
+The composer adequately treats this first
+motive in the development section so that its
+absence later is not annoyingly felt. There
+are, I agree with Mr. Kelley, some bars that
+are surprisingly like a certain page of Die
+G&ouml;tterd&auml;mmerung, as the Feuerzauber music
+may be noted in the flickering chromaticism of
+the E minor Concerto; or as the first phrase
+of the C minor Etude, Opus 10, No. 12, is to
+be found in Tristan and Isolde&mdash;Isolde's
+opening measure, &quot;Wer wagt mich zu h&ouml;hnen.&quot;
+(The orchestra plays the identical Chopin
+phrase.) This first movement of the B flat
+minor Sonata&mdash;with four bars of introduction,
+evidently suggested by the sublime opening
+of Beethoven's C minor Sonata, Opus 111, does
+not furnish us with as concrete an example as the
+succeeding Scherzo in E flat minor, (for me)
+one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's
+exquisite formal sense. While it is not as long-breathed
+as the C sharp minor Scherzo, its
+concision makes it more tempting to the student.
+In character stormier than the Scherzo, Opus
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+39, its thematic economy and development&mdash;by
+close parallelism of phraseology, as Hadow
+points out&mdash;reveal not only a powerful creative
+impulse, but erudition of the highest order.
+No doubt Chopin did improvise freely, did
+come easily by his melodies, but the travail
+of a giant in patience&mdash;again you think of
+Flaubert&mdash;is shown in the polishing of his
+periods. He is a poet who wrote perfect pages.</p>
+
+<p>The third Scherzo, less popular but of deeper
+import than the one in B flat minor, is in spirit
+splenetic, ironical, and passionate, yet with what
+antithetic precision and balance the various and
+antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed.
+And every measure is logically accounted for.
+The automatism inherent in all passage work
+he almost eliminated, and he spiritualised
+ornament and arabesque. It is the triumph
+of art over temperament. No one has ever
+accused Chopin of lacking warmth; indeed,
+thanks to a total misconception of his music,
+he is tortured into a roaring tornado by sentimentalists
+and virtuosi. But if he is carefully
+studied it will be seen that he is greatly
+preoccupied with form&mdash;his own form, be it
+understood&mdash;and that the linear in nearly
+all of his compositions takes precedence over
+colour. I know this sounds heretical. But
+while I do not yield an iota in my belief that
+Chopin is the most poetic among composers
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+(as Shelley is among poets, and Vermeer is
+the painter's painter) it is high time that he
+be viewed from a different angle. The versatility
+of the man, his genius as composer and
+pianist, the novelty of his figuration and form
+dazzled his contemporaries or else blinded them
+to his true import. Individual as are the
+six Scherzos&mdash;two of them are in the Sonatas&mdash;they
+nevertheless stem from classic soil;
+the scherzo is not new with him, nor are its
+rhythms. But the Ballades are Chopinesque
+to the last degree, with their embellished thematic
+cadenzas, modulatory motives, richly
+decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable
+&quot;content&quot;; above all, in their amplification
+of the coda, a striking extension of the
+postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning
+as the main themes. The lordly flowing narration
+of the G minor Ballade; the fantastic
+wavering outlines of the second Ballade&mdash;which
+on close examination exhibits the firm
+burin of a masterful etcher; the beloved third
+Ballade, a formal masterpiece; and the F
+minor Ballade, most elaborate and decorative
+of the set&mdash;are there, I ask, in all piano literature
+such original compositions? The four
+Impromptus are mood pictures, highly finished,
+not lacking boldness of design, and in the second,
+F sharp major, there are fertile figurative devices
+and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic
+organ-point is original. Polyphonic complexity
+is to be found in some of the Mazourkas. Ehlert
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+mentions a &quot;perfect canon in the octave&quot; in
+one of them (C sharp minor, Opus 63).</p>
+
+<p>Of the Concertos there is less to be said, for
+the conventional form was imposed by the title.
+Here Chopin is not the Greater Chopin, notwithstanding
+the beautiful music for the solo
+instrument. The sonata form is not desperately
+evaded, and in the rondo of the E minor Concerto
+he overtops Hummel on his native heath.
+As to the instrumentation I do not believe
+Chopin had much to do with it; it is the average
+colourless scoring of his day. Nor do I believe
+with some of his admirers that he will bear
+transposition to the orchestra, or even to the
+violin. It does not attenuate the power and
+originality of his themes that they are essentially
+of the piano. A song is for the voice
+and is not bettered by orchestral arrangement.
+The same may be said of the classic concertos
+for violin. With all due respect for those who
+talk about the Beethoven Sonatas being &quot;orchestral,&quot;
+I only ask, Why is it they sound so
+&quot;unorchestral&quot; when scored for the full battery
+of instruments? The Sonata Path&eacute;tique loses
+its character thus treated. So does the A flat
+Polonaise of Chopin, heroic as are its themes.
+Render unto the keyboard that which is composed
+for it. The Appassionata Sonata in its
+proper medium is as thrilling as the Eroica
+Symphony. The so-called &quot;orchestral test&quot;
+is no test at all; only a confusion of terms and
+of artistic substances. Chopin thought for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+the piano; he is the greatest composer for the
+piano; by the piano he stands or falls. The
+theme of the grandiose A minor Etude (Opus
+25, No. 11) is a perfect specimen of his invention;
+yet it sounds elegiac and feminine when
+compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's
+C minor Symphony.</p>
+
+<p>The Allegro de Concert, Opus 46, is not his
+most distinguished work, truncated concerto
+as it is, but it proves that he could fill a larger
+canvas than the Valse. In the Mazourkas
+and Etudes he is closer to Bach than elsewhere.
+His early training under Elsner was sound and
+classical. But he is the real Chopin when he
+goes his own way, a fiery poet, a bold musician,
+but also a refined, tactful temperament, despising
+the facile, the exaggerated, and bent
+upon achieving a harmonious synthesis. Truly
+a classic composer in his solicitude for contour,
+and chastity of style. The Slav was tempered
+by the Gallic strain. Insatiable in his dreams,
+he fashioned them into shapes of enduring
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>You would take from us the old Chopin, the
+greater Chopin, the dramatic, impassioned
+poet-improvisatore, I hear some cry! Not in
+the least. Chopin is Chopin. He sings, even
+under the fingers of pedants, and to-day is
+butchered in the classroom to make a holiday
+for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique.
+Sometimes the whole in his work is subordinated
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+to the parts, sometimes the parts are subordinated
+to the whole. The romantic &quot;shadow&quot; is
+there, also the classic structure. Again let me
+call your attention to the fact that if he had not
+juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanct tonic
+and dominant, had not distributed his thematic
+material in a different manner from the prescribed
+methods of the schools, he would have
+been cheerfully, even enthusiastically, saluted
+by his generation. But, then, we should have
+lost the real Chopin.</p>
+
+<p></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<h2>LITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITY</h2>
+
+
+<h3>BARNEY IN THE BOX-OFFICE</h3>
+
+<p><i>First Scene.</i> It is snowing on the Strand.
+Not an American actor is in sight, though
+voices are wafted occasionally from the bar
+of the Savoy (remember this is a play, and the
+unusual is bound to happen). In front of the
+newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science,
+two figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly
+lighted fa&ccedil;ade. The doors are wide open, a
+thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking
+to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are
+as sandy as his wit. The pair outside regard
+him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one
+clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately
+arranged hair on his face. They are the two
+Maxes&mdash;Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?&quot;
+&quot;By jove, it is, let's go in.&quot; &quot;Hasn't he a new
+play on?&quot; &quot;I can't say. I'm only a critic of
+the drayma.&quot; &quot;No cynicism, Maxixe,&quot; urges
+Nordau. They approach. In unanimous flakes
+the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard
+on recognising them:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+I'm giving my annual feast in the
+Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one
+scene. No one may enter, least of all you,
+Nordau, or you, Sir Critic.&quot; &quot;Why, what's
+up, George?&quot; asks in a pleading mid-Victorian
+timbre the little Maxixe. &quot;Back to the woods,
+both of you!&quot; commands George, who has
+read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford.
+&quot;Besides,&quot; he confidentially adds, &quot;you surely
+don't wish to go to a play in which your old
+friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view.&quot;
+&quot;On view!&quot; quoth the author of Degeneration.
+&quot;Yes, visible on a short furlough from Sheol,
+for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies
+and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest
+show on earth. I'm in it. Lively, please!&quot;
+A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the
+snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious
+glitter. &quot;I'm no Maxixe,&quot; he murmurs, &quot;if
+I can't get into a theatre without paying.&quot;
+Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The
+night closes in, and only the musical rattle of
+bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.</p>
+
+<p><i>Second Scene.</i> On the stage of the theatre
+there are two long tables. The scene is set as
+if for a banquet. The curtain is down. Some
+men walk about conversing&mdash;some calmly,
+some feverishly. Several are sitting. The
+lighting is feeble. However, may be discerned
+familiar figures; Victor Hugo solemnly speaking
+to Charles Baudelaire&mdash;who shivers (un
+nouveau frisson); Flaubert in a corner roaring
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+at Sainte-Beuve&mdash;the old row over Salammb&ocirc;
+is on again. Richard Strauss is pulling at the
+velvet coat-tails of Richard Wagner, without
+attracting his attention. The Master, in company
+with nearly all the others, is staring at
+a large clock against the back drop. &quot;Listen
+for the Parsifal chimes,&quot; he says, delight playing
+over his rugged features. &quot;Ape of the
+ideal,&quot; booms a deep voice hard by. It is that
+of Nietzsche, whose moustaches droop in Polish
+cavalier style.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Batiushka! If those two Dutchmen quarrel
+over the virility of Parsifal I'm going away.&quot;
+The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his newest
+Moujik costume, top-boots and all. In his
+left hand he holds a spade. &quot;To table, gentlemen!&quot;
+It is the jolly voice of the Irish Ibsen,
+G. B. S. Lights flare up. Without is heard
+the brumming of the audience, an orchestra
+softly plays motives from Pell&eacute;as et M&eacute;lisande.
+Wagner wipes his spectacles, and Maurice
+Maeterlinck crushes a block of Belgian oaths
+between his powerful teeth. But Debussy
+doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly
+strikes his soup-spoon on a silver salt-cellar
+and immediately jots down musical
+notation. &quot;The correspondences of nuances,&quot;
+he sings to his neighbour, who happens to be
+Whistler. &quot;The correspondence of fudge,&quot;
+retorts James. &quot;D'ye think I'm interested in
+wall-paper music? Oh, Lil'libulero!&quot; All are
+now seated. With his accustomed lingual dexterity
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+Mr. Shaw says grace, calling down a
+blessing upon the papier-m&acirc;ch&eacute; fowls and the
+pink stage-tea, from what he describes as a
+gaseous invertebrate god&mdash;he has read Haeckel&mdash;and
+winds up with a few brilliant heartless
+remarks:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods,
+and demigods, alive or dead, to remember
+that you are assembled here this evening to
+honour me. Without me, and my books and
+plays, you would, all of you, be dead in earnest&mdash;dead
+literature as well as dead bones. As
+for the living, I'll have a shy at you some day.
+I'm not fond of Maeterlinck. [&quot;Hear, hear!&quot;
+comes from Debussy's mystic beard.] As for
+you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at
+bettering Shakespeare, and, for Richard Strauss&mdash;well,
+I've never tried orchestration, but I'm
+sure I'd succeed as well as you&mdash;&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, please, won't some one give me a roast-beef
+sandwich? In Russia I daren't eat meat
+on account of my disciples there and in England&mdash;&quot;
+It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes
+him with an indignant look, he, the prince of
+vegetarians: &quot;Give him some salt, he needs
+salting.&quot; In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading
+of the confessions of Huysmans. The band,
+on the other side of the curtain, swings into the
+Kaisermarch. &quot;Stop them! Stop it!&quot; screams
+Wagner. <ins class="mycorr" title="opening double quote added" id="tnote18">&quot;I'm a Social-Democrat now.</ins> I wrote
+that march when I was a Monarchist.&quot; This
+was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+tall, lanky figure, he began: &quot;You mean, Herr
+Geyer&mdash;to give you your real name&mdash;you
+wrote it for money. You mean, Richard Geyer,
+that you cut your musical coat to suit your
+snobbish cloth. You mean, the Wagner you
+never were, that you wrote your various operas&mdash;which
+you call music-dramas&mdash;to flatter
+your various patrons. Parsifal for the decadent
+King Ludwig&mdash;&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Pardieu! this is too much.&quot; Manet's blond
+beard wagged with rage. &quot;Have we assembled
+this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or
+are we met to do honour to the only man in
+England, and an Irishman at that, who, in his
+plays, has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen,
+Nietzsche, Wagner? As for me, I don't need
+such booming. I'm a modest man. I'm a
+painter.&quot; &quot;Hein! You a painter!&quot; Sitting
+alone, G&eacute;r&ocirc;me discloses spiteful intonations
+in his voice. &quot;Yes, a painter,&quot; hotly replies
+Manet. &quot;And I'm in the Louvre, my Olympe&mdash;&quot;
+&quot;All the worse for the Louvre,&quot; sneers
+G&eacute;r&ocirc;me. The two men would have been at
+each other's throats if some one from the Land
+of the Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened.
+It was Henrik Ibsen.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Children,&quot; he remarks, in a strong Norwegian
+brogue, &quot;please to remember my dignity
+if not your own. Long before Max Stirner&mdash;&quot;
+Nietzsche interrupted: &quot;There never was
+such a person.&quot; Ibsen calmly continued, &quot;I
+wrote that 'my truth is the truth.' And when
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+I see such so-called great men acting like children,
+I regret having left my cool tomb in Norway.
+But where are the English dramatists,
+our confr&egrave;res? Ask the master of the revels.&quot;
+Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops in his head at a
+practicable door.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Who calls?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We wish to know why our brethren, the
+English playwrights, are not bidden to meet
+us?&quot; said Maeterlinck, after gravely bowing
+to Ibsen. Smiling beatifically, Saint Bernard
+replied:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Because there ain't no <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: sich" id="tnote17">such</ins> thing as an
+English dramatist. The only English dramatist
+is Irish.&quot; He disappears. Ensues a lively
+argument. &quot;He may be right,&quot;
+<ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: exclaims Maeterlinck,&quot; yet" id="tnote19">exclaims Maeterlinck, &quot;yet</ins>
+I seem to have heard of Pinero,
+Henry Arthur Jones, Barrie&mdash;well, I'll have
+to ask the trusty A. B. C. Z. Walkley.&quot; &quot;And
+the Americans?&quot; cries Ibsen, who is annoyed
+because Richard Strauss persists in asking for
+a symphonic scenario of Peer Gynt. &quot;I'm
+sure,&quot; the composer complains, &quot;Grieg will
+be forgotten if I write new incidental music
+for you.&quot; Ibsen looks at him sourly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;American dramatists, or do you mean American
+millionaires?&quot; Manet interpolated. &quot;No,
+I fancy he means the American painters who
+imitate my pictures, making them better than
+the originals, and also getting better prices
+than I did.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What envy! what slandering! what envious
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+feelings!&quot; sighs Nietzsche. &quot;If my doctrine
+of the Eternal Recurrence of all things sublunary
+is a reality, then I shall be sitting with
+these venomous spiders, shall be in this identical
+spot a trillion of years hence. Oh, horrors!
+Why was I born?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Divided tones,&quot; argues Manet, clutching
+Whistler by his carmilion necktie, &quot;are the
+only&mdash;&quot; Suddenly Shaw leaps on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Gentlemen, gods, ghosts, idols, I've bad news
+for you. Max Nordau is in the audience.&quot;
+&quot;Nordau!&quot; wails every one. Before the lights
+could be extinguished the guests were under
+the table. &quot;No taking chances,&quot; whispers
+Nietzsche. &quot;Quoi donc! who is this Nordau&mdash;a
+spy of Napoleon's?&quot; demands Hugo, in bewildered
+accents. For answer, Baudelaire
+shivers and intones: &quot;O Poe, Poe! O Edgar
+Poe.&quot; Silence so profound that one hears the
+perspiration drop from Wagner's massive brow.</p>
+
+<p><i>Third Scene.</i> It still snows without. Max,
+the only Nordau, stands in silent pride. He
+is alone. The erstwhile illuminated theatre
+is as dark as the Hall of Eblis. &quot;Gone the
+idols! All. I need but crack that old whip of
+Decadence and they crumble. So much for a
+mere word. And now to work. I'll write the
+unique tale of Shaw's Cave of Idols, for I alone
+witnessed the d&eacute;nouement.&quot; He spoke aloud.
+Judge his chagrin when he heard the other Max
+give him this cheery leading motive: &quot;I saw
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+it all&mdash;what a story for my weekly review.&quot;
+&quot;How like a yellow pear-tree!&quot; exclaims the
+disgusted theorist of mad genius. Nordau
+speeds his way, as from the box-office comes
+the chink of silver. It is G. B. S. counting the
+cash. Who says a poet can't be a pragmatist?
+The little Maxixe calls out: &quot;Me, too, Blarney!
+Remember I'm the only living replica of
+Charles Lamb.&quot; &quot;You mean dead mutton,&quot;
+tartly replied Bernard. The other giggled.
+&quot;The same dear old whimsical cactus,&quot; he
+cries; &quot;but with all your faults we love you
+still&mdash;I said still, if that's possible for your
+tongue, George, quite still!&quot; Curtain.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE WOMAN WHO BUYS</h3>
+
+<p>She (entering art gallery): &quot;I wish to buy
+a Titian for my bridge-whist this evening. Is
+it possible for you to send me one to the hotel
+in time?&quot; He (nervously elated): &quot;Impossible.
+I sent the last Titian we had in stock to
+Mrs. Groats's D&eacute;jeuner F&eacute;roce.&quot; She (making
+a face): &quot;That woman again. Oh, dear, how
+tiresome!&quot; He (eagerly): &quot;But I can give
+you a Raphael.&quot; She (dubiously): &quot;Raphael&mdash;who?&quot;
+He (magisterially): &quot;There are
+three Raphaels, Madame&mdash;the archangel of
+that name, Raphael Sanzio, the painter, and
+Raphael Joseffy. It is to the second one I
+allude. Perhaps you would like to see&mdash;&quot;
+She (hurriedly): &quot;Oh! not at all. I fancy it's
+all right. Send it up this afternoon, or hadn't
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+I better take it along in my car?&quot; (A shrill
+hurry-up booing is heard without. It is the
+voice of the siren on a new one hundred horse-power
+Cubist machine, 1918 pattern.) She
+(guiltily): &quot;Tiens! That is my chauffeur,
+Constant. The poor fellow. He is always so
+hungry about this time. By the way, Mr.
+Frame, how much do you ask for that Raphael?
+My husband is so&mdash;yes, really, stingy this
+winter. He says I buy too much, forgetting
+we are all beggars, anyhow. And what is the
+subject? I want something cheerful for the
+game, you know. It consoles the kickers who
+lose to look at a pretty picture.&quot; He (joyfully):
+&quot;Oh, the price! The subject! A half-million
+is the price&mdash;surely not too much.
+The picture is called The Wooing of Eve. It
+has been engraved by Bartolozzi. Oh, oh,
+it is a genuine Raphael. There are no more
+imitation old masters, only modern art is forged
+nowadays.&quot; She (interrupting, proudly): &quot;Bartolozzi,
+the man who paints skinny women in
+Florence, something like Boldini, only in old-fashioned
+costumes?&quot; He (resignedly): &quot;No,
+Madame. Possibly you allude to Botticelli.
+The Bartolozzi I mention was a school friend
+of Raphael or a cousin to Michael Angelo&mdash;I've
+forgotten which. That's why he engraved
+Raphael's paintings.&quot; (He colours as he recalls
+conflicting dates.) She (in a hurry): &quot;It
+doesn't much matter, Mr. Frame, I hate all
+this affectation over a lot of musty, fusty pictures.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+Send it up with the bill. I ought to
+win at least half the money from Mrs. Stonerich.&quot;
+(She rushes away. An odour of violets
+and stale cigarette smoke floats through the
+hallway. The siren screams, and a rumbling
+is heard in the middle distance.) He (waking,
+as if from a sweet dream, vigorously shouts):
+&quot;George, George, fetch down that canvas
+Schmiere painted for us last summer, and
+stencil it Raphael Sanzio. Yes&mdash;S-a-n-z-i-o&mdash;got
+it? Hurry up! I'm off for the day. If
+any one 'phones, I'm over at Sherry's, in the
+Cafe.&quot; (Saunters out, swinging his stick,
+and repeating the old Russian proverb, &quot;A
+dark forest is the heart of a woman.&quot;)</p>
+
+
+<h3>SCHOOLS IN ART</h3>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes,&quot; said the venerable auctioneer, as he
+shook his white head, &quot;yes, I watch them coming
+and going, coming and going. One year
+it's light pictures, another it's dark. The public
+is a woman. What fashion dictates to a woman
+she scrupulously follows. She sports bonnets
+one decade, big picture hats the next. So, the
+public that loves art&mdash;or thinks it loves art.
+It used to be the Hudson River school. And
+then Chase and those landscape fellows came
+over from Europe, where they got a lot of new-fangled
+notions. Do you remember Eastman
+Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you
+remember the Fortuny craze? His Gamblers,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+some figures sitting on the grass? Well, sir,
+seventeen thousand dollars that canvas fetched.
+Big price for forty-odd years ago. Bang up? Of
+course. Meissonier, Bouguereau, and Detaille
+came in. We couldn't sell them fast enough.
+I guess the picture counterfeiters' factories up
+on Montmartre were kept busy those times.
+It was after our Civil War. There were a lot
+of mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a
+chromo from a G&eacute;r&ocirc;me. Those were the chaps
+we liked. I often began with: 'Ten thousand
+dollars&mdash;who offers me ten thousand
+dollars for this magnificent Munkaczy?' Nowadays
+I couldn't give away Munkaczy as a present.
+He is too black. Our people ask for flashing
+colours. Rainbows. Fireworks. The new
+school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon
+men have had their day. Mind you,
+I don't claim they are falling off. A few seasons
+ago a Troyon held its own against any Manet
+you put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer
+in the market, and the picture cranks are beginning
+to tire of the dull greys, soft blues, and
+sober skies. The Barbizons drove out Meissonier
+and his crowd. Then Monet and the
+Impressionists sent the Barbizons to the wall.
+I tell you the public is a woman. It craves
+novelty. What's that? Interested in the
+greater truth of Post-Impressionism? Excuse
+me, my dear sir, but that's pure rot. The
+public doesn't give a hang for technique. It
+wants a change. Indeed? Really? They have
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+made a success, those young whippersnappers,
+the Cubists. Such cubs! Well, I'm not surprised.
+Perhaps our public is tiring of the
+Academy. Perhaps young American painters
+may get their dues&mdash;some day. We may
+even export them. I've been an art auctioneer
+man and boy over fifty years, and I tell you
+again the public is a woman. One year it's
+dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or
+hats. Silks or satins. Lean or stout. All right.
+Coming&mdash;coming!&quot; Clearing his throat, the
+old auctioneer slowly moves away.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE JOY OF STARING</h3>
+
+<p>Watch the mob. Watch it staring. Like
+cattle behind the rails which bar a fat green
+field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its
+equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece
+after masterpiece, only to let their gaze joyfully
+light upon some silly canvas depicting a thrice-stupid
+anecdote. The socialists assure us that
+the herd is the ideal of the future. We must
+think, see, feel with the People. Our brethren!
+Mighty idea&mdash;but a stale one before Noah
+entered the ark. &quot;Let us go to the people,&quot;
+cried Tolstoy. But we are the people. How
+can we go to a place when we are already there?
+And the people surge before a picture which
+represents an old woman kissing her cow. Or,
+standing with eyeballs agog, they count the
+metal buttons on the coat of the Meissonier
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+Cuirassier. It is great art. Let the public be
+educated. Down with the new realism&mdash;which
+only recalls to us the bitterness and meanness
+of our mediocre existence. (Are we not all
+middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic?
+Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph&mdash;pictures
+that act. Squeaking records.
+Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness
+of Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical
+machines. Or chromos. Therefore, let us joyfully
+stare. Instead of your &quot;step,&quot; watch
+the mob.</p>
+
+
+<h3>A DILETTANTE</h3>
+
+<p>He is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze
+over the pupils of his eyes. He is never dressed
+in the height of the fashion, yet, when he enters
+a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step
+in his direction; then they get to cover as
+speedily as possible, grumbling: &quot;Look out! it's
+only the old bird again.&quot; But one of them is
+always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide.
+He thinks he knows more about etchings
+than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross
+and Macbeth tell him of American art,
+he violently contradicts them. He is the embittered
+dilettante; embittered, because with
+his moderate means he can never hope to own
+even the most insignificant of the treasures
+exposed under his eyes every day, week, and
+month in the year. So he rails at the dealers,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+inveighs against the artists, and haunts auction-rooms.
+He never bids, but is extremely solicitous
+about the purchases of other people. He
+has been known to sit for hours on a small print,
+until, in despair, the owner leaves. Then, with
+infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving
+matters that his hard-won victory is
+not discovered by profane and prying eyes.
+Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing
+it to a favoured few. He bought it. He selected
+it. It is a tribute to his exquisite taste. And
+the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence
+by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings
+and parrot ejaculations. Withal, he is
+not a criminal, only a monomaniac of art. He
+sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a D&uuml;rer;
+but he puts the blame upon his defective eyesight.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE CITY OF BROTHERLY NOISE</h3>
+
+<p>Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North
+America. If you walk about any of the narrow
+streets of this cold-storage abode of Brotherly
+Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the
+venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like
+stillness of the abode of brotherly
+love. Over there the nerve shock is ultra-dynamic.
+As for sleep, it is out of the question.
+Why, then, will ask the puzzled student
+of national life, does the venerable witticism
+persist in living? The answer is that in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+United States a truth promulgated a century
+ago never dies. We are a race of humourists.
+Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets
+that vibrate with the clangour of the loosely
+jointed machinery, an army of carts and the
+cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling
+people making for the ferries on the Delaware
+or the bridges on the Schuylkill rivers,
+together with the hum of vast manufactories,
+all these and a thousand other things place
+New York in a more modest category; in reality
+our own city emits few pipes in comparison
+with the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls
+over the map of Pennsylvania. Yet it is called
+dead and moss-grown. The antique joke
+flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is
+stunned by the welter and crush of life and
+politics. Oscar Hammerstein first crossed the
+Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of
+&quot;society&quot; was forced to go northward to this
+Mahomet of operatic music; else forego Richard
+Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden,
+and Oscar's famous head-tile. What a feat to
+boast of! For hundreds of years Market Street
+had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians.
+Above the delectable region north
+of the City Hall and Penn's statue was Cimmerian
+darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera
+company, accomplished the miracle. Perfectly
+proper persons now say &quot;Girard Avenue&quot; or
+&quot;Spring Garden&quot; without blushing, because
+of their increased knowledge of municipal
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+topography. Society trooped northward. Motor-cars
+from Rittenhouse Square were seen
+near Poplar Street. Philadelphia boasts a
+much superior culture in the crustacean line.
+The best fried oysters in the world are to be
+found there. Terrapin is the local god. And
+Dennis McGowan of Sansom Street hangs his
+banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper
+soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow
+fonder.</p>
+
+<p>The difference in the handling of the social
+&quot;hammer&quot; between Philadelphia and New
+York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be
+thus illustrated: At the clubs in Philadelphia
+they say: &quot;Dabs is going fast. Pity he drinks.
+Did you see the seven cocktails he got away
+with before dinner last night?&quot; In Boston they
+say: &quot;Dabs is quite hopeless. This afternoon
+he mixed up Botticelli with Botticini. Of
+course, after that&mdash;!&quot; Now, in New York, we
+usually dismiss the case in this fashion: &quot;Dabs
+went smash this morning. The limit! Serves
+the idiot right. He never would take proper
+tips.&quot; Here are certain social characteristics of
+three cities set forth by kindly disposed clubmen.
+As the Chinese say: An image-maker
+never worships his idols. We prefer the Cambodian
+sage who remarked: &quot;In hell, it's bad
+form to harp on the heat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE SOCIALIST</h3>
+
+<p>The socialist is not always sociable. Nor is
+there any reason why he should be. He usually
+brings into whatever company he frequents
+his little pailful of theories and dumps them
+willy-nilly on the carpet of conversation. He
+enacts the eternal farce of equality for all,
+justice for none. The mob, not the individual,
+is his shibboleth. Yet he is the first to resent
+any tap on his shoulder in the way of personal
+criticism. He has been in existence since the
+coral atoll was constructed by that tiny, busy,
+gregarious creature, and in the final cosmic
+flare-up he will vanish in company with his
+fellow man. He is nothing if not collective.
+His books, written in his own tongue, are translated
+into every living language except sound
+English, which is inimical to jargon. If his
+communal dreams could come true he would
+charge his neighbour with cheating above his
+position; being a reformer, the fire of envy
+brightly burns in his belly&mdash;a sinister conflagration
+akin to that of Ram Dass (see Carlyle).
+In the thick twilight of his reason he vaguely
+wanders, reading every new book about socialism
+till his confusion grows apace and is
+thrice confounded. From ignorance to arrogance
+is but a step. At the rich table of life,
+groaning with good things, he turns away, preferring
+to chew the dry cud of self-satisfaction.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+He would commit Barmecide rather than surrender
+his theory of the &quot;unearned increment.&quot;
+He calls Shaw and Wells traitors because they
+see the humorous side of their doctrines and,
+occasionally, make mock of them. The varieties
+of lady socialists are too numerous to study.
+It may be said of them, without fear of being
+polite, that females rush in where fools fear to
+tread. But, then, the woman who hesitates&mdash;usually
+gets married.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE CRITIC WHO GOSSIPS</h3>
+
+<p>He has a soul like a Persian rug. Many-coloured
+are his ways, his speech. He delights
+in alliteration of colours, and avails himself of
+it when he dips pen into ink. He is fond of
+confusing the technical terms of the Seven
+Arts, writing that &quot;stuffing the ballot-box is
+no greater crime than constipated harmonics.&quot;
+But what he doesn't know is that such expressions
+as gamut of colours, scales, harmonies,
+tonal values belong to the art of painting, and
+not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote
+and gossip than of history. But what's the use!
+You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic will
+quote for you, with his gimlet eye of a specialist
+boring into your own, the story which was whispered
+to Anthony Trollope (in 1857, please
+don't forget) if he would be so kind (it was at
+the Uffizi Galleries, Florence) as to show him
+the way to the Medical Venus. This is marvellous
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+humour, and worth a ton of critical
+comment (which, by Apollo! it be). But, as
+Baudelaire puts it: &quot;Nations, like families,
+produce great men against their will&quot;; and our
+critic is &quot;produced,&quot; not made. In the realm
+of the blind, the cock-eyed is king. The critic
+is said to be the most necessary nuisance&mdash;after
+women&mdash;in this &quot;movie&quot; world of ours.
+But all human beings are critics, aren't they?</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE MOCK PSYCHIATRIST</h3>
+
+<p>If for the dog the world is a smell, for the
+eagle a picture, for the politician a Nibelung
+hoard, then for the psychiatrist life is a huge,
+throbbing nerve. He dislikes, naturally, the
+antivivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection
+of his fellow creatures. It's a mad
+world for him, my masters! And if your ears
+taper at the top, beware! You have the morals
+of a faun; or, if your arms be lengthy, you are
+a reversion to a prehistoric type. The only
+things that are never too long, for our friend
+the &quot;expert&quot; of rare phobias, are his bills and
+the length of his notice in the newspapers. If
+he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and
+Eve in Milton's Paradise behave too much
+like married people, he quickly resents any
+tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception.
+He maintains that religious feeling is
+only &quot;a mode of reaction,&quot; and our conscience
+but a readjusting apparatus. His trump-card
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+is the abnormal case, and if he can catch tripping
+a musician, a poet, a painter, he is
+professionally happy. Homer nodded. Shakespeare
+plagiarised. Beethoven drank. Mozart
+liked his wife's sister. Chopin coughed. Turner
+was immoral. Wagner, a little how-come-ye-so!
+Hurray! Cracked souls, and a Donnybrook
+Fair of the emotions. The psychiatrist
+can diagnose anything from rum-thirst to sudden
+death. Nevertheless, in his endeavour to assume
+the outward appearance of a veritable
+man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one
+of the hermit-crab as described in E. H. Banfield's
+Confessions of a Beach Comber (p. 132).
+&quot;The disinterested spectator,&quot; remarks Professor
+Banfield, &quot;may smile at the vain, yet
+frantically anxious efforts of the hermit-crab
+to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a
+flattering misfit; but it is not a smiling matter
+to him. Not until he has exhausted a programme
+of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions
+is the attempt to stow away a No. 8
+tail in a No. 5 shell abandoned.&quot; The mock
+psychiatrist is the hermit-crab of psychology.
+And of the living he has never been known to
+speak a word of praise.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Dear naughty George Moore&mdash;sad, bad,
+mad&mdash;has reformed. He tells us why in his
+book, Vale, the English edition of which I was
+lucky enough to read; for, the American edition
+is expurgated, nay, fumigated, as was the
+Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic
+Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail
+and Farewell, Ave and Salve being the titles
+of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is
+sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves
+up George Russell, the poet and painter, better
+known as &quot;&AElig;.&quot; in a more sympathetic fashion.
+When Vale was announced several years ago
+as on the brink of completion I was moved to
+write: &quot;I suppose when the final book appears
+it means that George Moore has put up the
+shutters of his soul, not to say, his shop. But
+I have my serious doubts.&quot; After reading
+Vale I still had them. Only death will end the
+streaming confessions of this writer. He who
+lives by the pen shall perish by the pen. (This
+latter sentence is not a quotation from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+sacred books of any creed, merely the conviction
+of a slave chained to the ink-well.)</p>
+
+<p>I said that Vale is expurgated for American
+consumption. Certainly. We are so averse
+to racy, forcible English in America&mdash;thanks
+to the mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters&mdash;that
+a hearty oath scares us into the Brooklyn
+backyard of our timid conscience. George
+calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring
+up rank malodorous soil with his war-worn
+agricultural implement. When he returned
+some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the
+national literary and artistic movement, he
+found a devoted band of brethren: William
+Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde,
+John M. Synge, Edward Martyn, Russell, and
+others.</p>
+
+<p>I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the
+neo-Celtic awakening. Yeats was the prime
+instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally
+discovered Synge, the dramatist&mdash;in reality
+the only strong man of the group, the only
+dramatist of originality&mdash;and, with his exquisite
+lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland,
+a fabulous, beautiful Erin, unsuspected
+by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton,
+Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault.</p>
+
+<p>As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is
+a vast whispering gallery. Delightful, hospitable
+Dublin is also a provincial town, given
+to gossip and backbiting. Say something about
+somebody in the smoking-room of the Shelbourne,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+and a few hours later the clubs will
+be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every
+hour in the day, and in less than six days he
+had sown for himself a fine crop of enemies.
+To &quot;get even&quot; he conceived the idea of writing
+a series of novels, with real people bearing
+their own names. That he hasn't been shot
+at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is
+just his usual good luck. Vale is largely a book
+of capricious insults.</p>
+
+<p>But then the facts it sets down in cruel type!
+When the years have removed the actors therein
+from the earthly scene, our grandchildren
+will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour
+and Pepys-like chronicling of small-beer. For
+the social historian this trilogy will prove a
+mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws
+a calcium glare on the soul of the author,
+who, self-confessed, is now old, and no longer
+a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was,
+as far as I can make out, not particularly
+a monster of iniquity; but, oh! in his Confessions
+and Memoirs what a rake was he.
+How the &quot;lascivious lute&quot; did sound. Some
+of the pages of the new volume (see pp. 274-278,
+English edition), in which he describes his
+tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache
+in these lonesome latter years, though he
+was only born in 1857), is to set you wondering
+over the frankness of the man. Walter
+Pater once called him &quot;audacious George
+Moore,&quot; and audacious he is with pen and ink.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking
+for physical quarrels.</p>
+
+<p>He once spoke of Shaw as &quot;the funny man in
+a boarding-house,&quot; though he never mentions
+his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like
+Yeats; what's more, he prints the news as
+often and as elaborately as possible. In the
+present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats
+to a crane or a pelican, but he calls attention
+to the fact that the poet belonged to the &quot;lower
+middle-class.&quot; It seems that Yeats had been
+thundering away at the artistic indifference
+of the Dublin bourgeoisie. Now, looking at
+Yeats the night when John Quinn gave him a
+dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note
+any resemblance to exotic birds, though he
+might recall a penguin. He was very solemn,
+very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken
+from fatigue. Posing as a tame parlour poet
+for six weeks had tired the man to his very
+bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat
+unbuttoned&mdash;I speak figuratively&mdash;and
+you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who slowly
+distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote,
+till, bursting with glee, you cry: &quot;How these
+literary men do love each other! How one
+Irishman dotes on another!&quot; Yeats may be
+an exception to the rule that a poet is as vain
+and as irritable as a tenor. I didn't notice the
+irritability, finding him taking himself seriously,
+as should all apostles of culture and Celtic
+twilight.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>
+He &quot;got even&quot; with George Moore's virulent
+attacks by telling a capital story, which he
+confessed was invented, one that went all over
+Dublin and London. When George felt the
+call of a Protestant conversion he was in Dublin.
+He has told us of his difficulties, mental and
+temperamental. One day some question of
+dogma presented itself and he hurried to the
+Cathedral for advice. He sent in his name to
+the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary
+exclaimed: &quot;Moore, Moore, oh, that man
+again! Well, give him another pair of blankets.&quot;
+In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings,
+were added to the apocryphal anecdote&mdash;which,
+by the way, set smiling the usually impassive
+Moore, who can see a joke every now
+and then.</p>
+
+<p>Better still is the true tale of George, who
+boasts much in Vale of his riding dangerous
+mounts; and when challenged at an English
+country house did get on the back of a vicious
+animal and ride to hounds the better part of
+a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take the
+&quot;dare,&quot; although when he reached his room he
+found his boots full of blood. So there is sporting
+temper in him. Any one reading his Esther
+Waters may note that he knows the racing stable
+by heart. In Vale he describes his father's
+stable at Castle Moore, County Mayo.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, this is not the time to attempt an
+estimate of his complete work, for who may
+say what fresh outbursts, what new imprudences
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+in black and white, we may expect?
+He has paid his respects to his fellow countrymen,
+and is heartily despised by all camps,
+political, religious, artistic. He has belittled
+the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin
+Martyn, and has rather patronised John M.
+Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge
+was &quot;discovered&quot; by Yeats, not Moore. Yet
+do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I
+only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise
+in 1901, at Bayreuth. He looked more
+like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is not
+so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird,
+with a chin as diffident as a poached egg, and
+with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and an undecided
+gait. He talked of the Irish language as
+if it were the only redemption for poor unhappy
+Ireland. In Vale there is not the same
+enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on
+his early Parisian experiences&mdash;it is the best
+part of the book&mdash;and to my way of thinking
+the essential George Moore is to be found only
+in Paris; London is an afterthought. The
+Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Huysmans,
+Zola, Verlaine, and all the &quot;new&quot; men
+of 1880&mdash;what an unexplored vein he did
+work for the profit and delectation of the English-speaking
+world. True critical yeoman's
+work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five
+years ago in London was to court a rumpus.
+What hard names were rained upon the yellow
+head of George Moore&mdash;that colour so admired
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+by Manet and so wonderfully painted
+by him&mdash;in the academic camp. He replied
+with all the vivacity of vocabulary which your
+true Celt usually has on tap. He even &quot;went
+for&quot; the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated
+mediocrities&mdash;on the pictorial side, at least&mdash;though
+John Millais was a talent&mdash;and for
+years was as a solitary prophet in a city of
+Philistines. The world caught up with Moore,
+and to-day the shoe pinches on the other foot&mdash;it
+is George who is a belated critic of the
+&quot;New Art&quot; (most of it as stale as the Medes
+and Persians), and many are the wordy battles
+waged at the Caf&eacute; Royal, London, when
+Augustus John happens in of an evening and
+finds the author of Modern Painting denouncing
+Debussy in company with Matisse and other
+Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is &quot;old
+hat&quot; (vieux chapeau) for modern youth. It's
+well to go to bed not too late in life, else some
+impertinent youngster may cry aloud: &quot;What's
+that venerable granddaddy doing up at this
+time of night?&quot; To each generation its critics.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>In one of his fulminations against Christianity
+Nietzsche said that the first and only
+Christian died on the cross. George Moore
+thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version
+of the narrative in the synoptic Gospels.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the
+life of Christ. It is a book that will offend
+the faithful, and one that will not convince the
+heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth his
+ideas concerning the Christ &quot;myth,&quot; evoking,
+as does Flaubert in Salammb&ocirc;, a vanished land,
+a vanished civilisation, and in a style that is
+artistically beautiful. Never has he written
+with such sustained power, intensity and nobility
+of phrasing, such finely tempered, modulated
+prose. It is a rhythmed prose which
+first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's
+Evelyn Innes when the theme bordered on the
+mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic
+character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem
+bedfellows. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been
+haunted from his first elaborate novel, A
+Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological
+questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul
+is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can
+no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith
+and salvation than did Huysmans. (He has
+taken exception to this statement in an open
+letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has
+leaned of late years heavily on the side of the
+spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aur&eacute;villy,
+Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine,
+and Huysmans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons
+of Mother Church who give anxious pause to
+his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith
+will prove a formidable rock of offence, and it
+may be said that it was on the Index before
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>
+it was written. And yet we find in it George
+Moore among the prophets.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical
+work of Professor Arthur Drews, The Christ
+Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction.
+There are many books in which Jesus Christ
+figures. Ernest Renan's Life, written in his
+silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired
+by Christians than the cruder study by
+Strauss. After these the deluge, ending with
+the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont,
+Une Nuit au Luxembourg. And there is the
+brilliant and poetic study of Edgar Saltus,
+his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has
+distilled into his The Revolt of the Angels
+some of his acid hatred of all religions, with
+blasphemous and obscene notes not missing.
+It may be remembered that M. France also
+wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of
+Judea, in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his
+old age, rich, ennuied, sick. He has quite forgotten,
+when asked, about the Jewish agitator
+who fancied himself the son of God and was
+given over to the Temple authorities in Jerusalem
+and crucified. Rising from the tomb on
+the third day he became the Christ of the Christian
+dispensation, aided by the religious genius
+of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the Tent-maker
+of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a
+larger mould and in the grand manner what
+Anatole France accomplished in his miniature.
+The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>
+every page of The Brook Kerith, and the story
+of the four Gospels is twisted into something
+perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking.
+It will be called &quot;blasphemous,&quot; but we
+must remember that our national Constitution
+makes no allowance for so-called &quot;blasphemers&quot;;
+that the mythologies of the Greeks
+and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans
+and Mormons may be criticised, yet the
+criticism is not inherently &quot;blasphemous.&quot;
+America is no more a Christian than a Jewish
+nation or a nation of freethinkers. It is free
+to all races and religions, and thus one man's
+spiritual meat may be another's emetic.</p>
+
+<p>Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate
+The Brook Kerith. The title is applied
+to a tiny community of Jewish mystics,
+the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps
+the Scriptural Kedron? This brotherhood
+had separated from the materialistic
+Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of
+burnt sacrifices or Temple worship; furthermore,
+they practised celibacy till a schism within
+their ranks drove the minority away from the
+parent body to shift for themselves. A young
+shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, a
+carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother&mdash;they
+have other sons&mdash;is a member of this
+community. But too much meditation on the
+prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a
+wandering prophet, John the Baptist, the precursor
+of the long-foretold Messiah, lead him
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+astray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan,
+Jesus becomes a theomaniac&mdash;he believes
+himself to be the son of God, appointed by the
+heavenly father to save mankind; especially
+his fellow Jews. Filled with a fanatical fire, he
+leads away a dozen disciples, poor, ignorant
+fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of
+Joseph, the only son of a rich merchant of
+Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel are devoted
+to the psychology of this youthful philosopher,
+who, inducted into the wisdom of the
+Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding, a fervent
+Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets.
+The dialogues between father and son
+rather recall Erin, hardly Syria. Joseph becomes
+interested in Jesus, follows him about, and
+the fatal day of the crucifixion he beseeches his
+friend Pilate to let him have the body of his
+Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs,
+then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two
+holy women Mary and Martha, places the corpse
+of the dead divinity in a sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots
+of Jerusalem (heated to this murder by the
+High Priest) the title of the book might have
+been &quot;Joseph of Arimathea.&quot; He is easily the
+most viable figure. Jesus is too much of the god
+from the machine; but he serves the author for
+the development of his ingenious theory. Finding
+the Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly
+and after dark to the house of his father,
+hides him and listens unmoved to the fantastic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+tales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas
+are everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second
+crucifixion, so Joseph takes him back to the
+Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation
+of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body,
+he gradually wins back health and spiritual
+peace. He regrets his former arrogance and
+blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the
+insidious temptings of the demon. It seems
+that in those troubled days the cities and countryside
+were infested by madmen, messiahs,
+redeemers, preaching the speedy destruction
+of the world. For a period Jesus called himself
+a son of God and threatened his fellow men
+with fire and the sword.</p>
+
+<p>Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived
+with his flocks. The idyllic pictures are in Mr.
+Moore's most charming vein; sober, as befits
+the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned
+an undulating prose, each paragraph a page
+long, which flows with some of the clarity and
+music of a style once derided by him, the style
+coulant of that master of harmonies, Cardinal
+Newman. He is a great landscape-painter.</p>
+
+<p>Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's
+crook to his successor and contemplates a retreat
+where he may meditate the thrilling events
+of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes.
+He is vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem,
+with Timothy lost somewhere in Galilee,
+he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquent
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+pages follow. Paul relates his adventures under
+the banner of Jesus Christ. A disputatious
+man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any
+easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse
+of Pauline Christianity, differing from the
+tender message of Jesus; that Jesus of whom
+Havelock Ellis wrote: &quot;Jesus found no successor.
+Over the stage of those gracious and
+radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof curtain,
+wrought of systematic theology and formal
+metaphysics, which even the divine flames of
+that wonderful personality were unable to
+melt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>If this be the case then Paul was, if not the
+founder, the foster-father of the new creed.
+A seer of epileptic visions&mdash;Edgar Saltus has
+said of the &quot;sacred disease&quot; that all founders
+of religions have been epileptics&mdash;Paul, with
+the intractable temperament of a stubborn
+Pharisee, was softened by some Greek blood,
+yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: &quot;He speaks of
+sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion,
+and other theological bric-a-brac, as if these
+things were realities.&quot; For Paul and those
+who followed him they were and are realities;
+from them is spun the web of our modern civilisation.
+The dismay of Paul on learning from
+the lips of Jesus that he it was who, crucified,
+came back to life may be fancy. The sturdy
+Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words
+of Jesus issuing from the blinding light on the
+road to Damascus: &quot;Paul, Paul, why persecutest
+thou me?&quot; naturally enough denounced
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+Jesus as a madman, but accepted his
+services as a guide to C&aelig;sarea, where, in company
+with Timothy, he hoped to embark for
+Rome, there to spread the glad tidings, there
+to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.</p>
+
+<p>On the way he cautiously extracts from
+Jesus, whose memory of his cruel tormentors
+is halting, parts of his story. He believes him
+a half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion
+that he is the original Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus
+gently expounds his theories, though George
+Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends
+in Nirvana, N&eacute;ant, Nada, Nothing! Despairing
+of ever forcing the world to see the light,
+he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist.
+He might have quoted the mystic Joachim
+Flora&mdash;of the Third Kingdom&mdash;who said
+that the true ascetic counts nothing his own
+save only his harp. (&quot;Qui vere monachus est
+nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.&quot;) When
+a man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to
+carry then let him cast it away. Jesus cast
+his cross away&mdash;his spiritual ambition&mdash;believing
+that too great love of God leads to
+propagation of the belief, then to hatred and
+persecution of them that won't believe.</p>
+
+<p>The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked
+people; they love God, yet they hate
+men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts company
+with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear
+that he is not going, as he had contemplated,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+to give himself up to Hanan, the High Priest
+in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the
+heretical sect named after him. Paul, without
+crediting the story, saw in Jesus a dangerous
+rival. The last we hear of the divine
+shepherd is a rumour that he may join a roving
+band of East Indians and go to the source of
+all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia;
+the mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears,
+and on the little coda: &quot;The rest of his
+story is unknown.&quot; We are fain to believe
+that the &quot;rest of his story&quot; is very well known
+in the wide world. The book is another milestone
+along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.</p>
+
+<p>If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, &quot;Superstition
+is the reservoir of all truths,&quot; then, we
+have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark
+forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we
+have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats
+who has uttered the illuminating phrase,
+&quot;My first and for ever message is one and eternal,&quot;
+which is no more a parody of Holy Writ
+than The Brook Kerith, a book which while
+it must have given its author pains to write&mdash;so
+full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and
+the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it&mdash;must
+have been also a joy to him as a literary
+artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief
+in the real Jesus is understandable, though it
+is bound to raise a chorus of protestations.
+But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He
+has, Celt that he is, followed his vision. In
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+every man's heart there is a lake, he says, and
+the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very
+pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to
+him&mdash;though it would be unnecessary, as he
+knows well the quotation&mdash;what
+<ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Barbey d'Aurevilly" id="tnote10b">Barbey d'Aur&eacute;villy</ins>
+once wrote to Baudelaire, and years
+later of Joris-Karel Huysmans, that he would
+either blow out his brains or prostrate himself
+at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the
+past made his genuflections. But they were
+before the Jesus of his native religion; the
+poetic though not profound image he has created
+in his new book will never seem the godlike
+man of whom Browning said in Saul: &quot;Shall
+throw open the gates of new life to thee. See
+the Christ stand!&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<h2>PILLOWLAND</h2>
+
+
+<p>In his immortal essay on the &quot;flat swamp of
+convalescence&quot; Charles Lamb speaks from personal
+experience of the &quot;king-like way&quot; the
+sick man &quot;sways his pillow&mdash;tumbling, and
+tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping,
+and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying
+requisitions of his throbbing temples.
+He changes <i>sides</i> oftener than a politician.&quot;
+How true this is&mdash;even to the italicised word&mdash;I
+discovered for myself after a personal encounter
+with the malignant Pneumococcus,
+backed up by his ally, the pleurisy. Such was
+the novelty of my first serious illness that it
+literally took my breath away. When I recovered
+my normal wind I found myself monarch
+of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet
+seemingly a land without limit,&mdash;who dares
+circumscribe the imagination of an invalid?
+As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on
+the selfishness of the sick man there can be no
+denial. His pillow is his throne&mdash;from it he
+issues his orders for the day, his bulletins for
+the night. The nurse is his prime minister,
+his right hand; with her moral alliance he is
+enabled to defy a host of officious advisers.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot
+against him. Then he is helpless. Then he
+is past saving. His little pet schemes are shattered
+in the making. He is shifted and mauled.
+He is prodded and found wanting. No hope
+for the helpless devil as his face is scrubbed,
+his hands made clean, his miserable tangled
+hair combed straight. In Pillowland what
+Avatar? None, alas! Nevertheless, your pillow
+is your best friend, your only confidant. In
+its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one
+is reduced to an evasive whisper, such is the
+cowardice superinduced by physical weakness)
+&quot;Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none
+of them.&quot; And then you swallow the next
+bitter pill the nurse offers. Suffering ennobles,
+wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in
+my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek,
+terribly meek, sickness makes one. You suffer
+a sea change, and without richness. The most
+annoying part of the business is that you were
+not consulted as to your choice of maladies;
+worse remains: you are not allowed to cure
+yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came
+to grips with the beast. The next time I'll
+go out of my way to select some exotic fever.
+Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I
+had a common or garden variety of lung trouble.
+Pooh! his eyes seemed to say&mdash;I read their
+meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated&mdash;we
+shall have this fellow on his hind-legs in
+a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well too
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+rapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying
+with a slight change of text: &quot;Give me chastity
+and constancy, but not yet.&quot; Give, I said to
+my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer.
+Time takes toll of eternity and I've worked
+my pen and wagged my tongue for twice twenty
+years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The
+divine rights of cabbages and of kings are also
+shared by mere newspaper men. A litany of
+massive phrases followed. But in vain. The
+doctor was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My
+temperature was tropical. My heart beat in
+ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the
+running. I realised as I tried to summon to
+my parched lips my favourite &quot;red lattice
+oaths&quot; that, as Cabanis put it years ago:
+&quot;Man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends.&quot;
+All the velvet vanities of life had vanished.
+I could no longer think in alliterative sentences.
+Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow
+skull like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I
+&quot;concentrated&quot;&mdash;as the unchristian unscientists
+say&mdash;on the nurse, my nurse.</p>
+
+<p>As an old reporter of things theatrical I had
+seen many plays with the trained nurse as
+heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even
+the gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret
+Anglin in a piece whose name I've forgotten.
+I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus
+in which the nurse is depicted as a monster of
+crime incarnate. How mistaken I have been.
+Now, the trained nurse seems an angel without
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+wings. She may not be the slender, dainty,
+blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl of the footlights;
+she is often mature and stout and a lover of
+potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is
+down. She is severe, but her severity hath
+good cause. At first you feebly utter the word
+&quot;nurse.&quot; Later she is any Irish royal family
+name. Follows, &quot;Mary,&quot; and that way danger
+lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her
+&quot;Marie&quot; he is doomed. Every day the newspapers
+tell us of marriages made in pillowland
+between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis,
+and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius
+Hospital staff. Married sons and daughters
+may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental
+bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter
+years hasn't any more chance with a determined
+young nurse of the unfair sex than a
+&quot;snowbird in hell&quot;&mdash;as Brother Mencken
+phrases it.</p>
+
+<p>However, every nurse has her day. She
+finally departs. Your eyes are wet. You are
+weeping over yourself. The nurse represented
+not only care for your precious carcass but
+also a surcease from the demands of the world.
+Her going means a return to work, and you
+hate to work if you are a convalescent of the
+true-blue sort. Hence your tears. But you
+soon recover. You are free. The doctor has
+lost interest in your case. You throw physic
+to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo
+about your embattled bed. You begin sudden
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+little arguments with your wife, just to see if
+you haven't lost any of your old-time virility
+in the technique of household squabbling. You
+haven't. You swell with masculine satisfaction
+and for at least five minutes you are the
+Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary
+giddiness, send you scurrying back to
+your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the familiar
+leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what
+humility of accent: &quot;Mamma!&quot; The Eternal
+Masculine? The Eternal Child! You mumble
+to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on
+that thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to
+be haughty. But she knows you are simply
+a sick grumpy old person of the male species
+who needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although
+the metal be well hidden.</p>
+
+<p>The first cautious peep from a window upon
+the world you left snow white, and find in vernal
+green, is an experience almost worth the miseries
+you have so impatiently endured. A veritable
+vacation for the eyes, you tell yourself, as the
+fauna and flora of Flatbush break upon your
+enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with
+breathless interest the man&#339;uvres of ruddy
+little Georgie in the next garden as he manfully
+deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries,
+his little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear.
+Sturdy Georgie has the makings of a leader.
+He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel,
+and Master-politician; but he will always be
+foremost, else nowhere. &quot;You are the audience,&quot;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+he imperiously bids his companions,
+and when rebellion seemed imminent he punched,
+without a trace of anger, a boy much taller.
+I envied Georgie his abounding vitality. Furtively
+I raised the window. Instantly I was
+spied by Georgie who cried lustily: &quot;Little
+boy, little boy, come down and play with me!&quot;
+I almost felt gay, &quot;You come up here,&quot; I called
+out with one lung. &quot;I haven't a stepladder,&quot;
+he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as remote
+without a ladder as age is separated from
+youth. (Now I'm moralising!) Undismayed,
+Georgie continued to call: &quot;Little boy, little
+boy, come down and play with me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The most disheartening thing about a first
+sickness is the friend who meets you and says:
+&quot;I never saw you look better in your life.&quot;
+It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it
+so crudely. You renounce then and there the
+doctor with all his pomps of healing. You
+refuse to become a professional convalescent.
+You are cured and once more a commonplace
+man, one of the healthy herd. Notwithstanding
+you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer
+King of Pillowland.</p>
+
+
+
+<p></p><hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<h2>CROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN
+FRENCH LITERATURE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>They order certain things better in France
+than elsewhere; I mean such teasing and unsatisfactory
+forms of book-making known as
+Inquiries (&quot;Enqu&ecirc;te,&quot; which is not fair to
+translate into the lugubrious literalism, &quot;Inquest&quot;),
+Anthologies, and books that masquerade
+as books, as Charles Lamb hath it.
+Without a trace of pedantry or dogmatism,
+such works appear from time to time in Paris
+and are delightful reminders of the good breeding
+and suppleness of Gallic criticism. To
+turn to favour and prettiness a dusty department
+of literature is no mean feat.</p>
+
+<p>What precisely is the condition of French
+letters since Catulle Mend&egrave;s published his
+magisterial work on The French Poetic Movement
+from 1867 to 1900? (Paris, 1903.) Nothing
+so exhaustive has appeared since, though a
+half-dozen Inquiries, Anthologies, and Symposiums
+are in existence.</p>
+
+<p>The most comprehensive recently is Florian-Parmentier's
+Contemporary History of French
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+Letters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a
+poet, one of les Jeunes, and an expert swimmer
+in the multifarious cross-currents of the day. His
+book is a bird's-eye view of the map of literary
+France as far as the beginning of the war. He
+is quite frank in his likes and dislikes, and always
+has his reasons for his major idolatries
+and minor detestations.</p>
+
+<p>As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds
+there are several new Anthologies at hand
+which aid us to form our own opinion of the
+younger men's prose and verse. And, finally,
+there is the significant Inquiry of Emile Henriot:
+&quot;A Quoi R&ecirc;vent les Jeunes Gens?&quot; (1913);
+of which more anon.</p>
+<p></p>
+<p>M. Florian-Parmentier is a native of Valenciennes,
+a writer whose versatility and fecundity
+are noteworthy in a far from barren literary
+epoch. He has, with the facility of a lettered
+young Frenchman, tried his hand at every
+form. All themes, so they be human, are welcome
+to him, from art criticism to playwriting.
+He is seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps
+they may not admit this; but the question
+may be answered in the affirmative: Is
+he a safe critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day
+French letters?</p>
+
+<p>He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of
+humour in a critical barometer, the tendency
+of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others
+to form schools, to create c&eacute;nacles, to begin
+fighting before they have any defined ideal.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>
+It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive manifestoes,
+declarations, and challenges, most of them
+rather in the air; though it cannot be denied
+that these ebullitions of gusty temperaments
+do clear that same air, murky with theories
+and traversed by an occasional flash of genius.</p>
+
+<p>After paying his respects to the daily Parisian
+press, which he belabours as venal, cynical,
+and impure, our critic evokes a picture of the
+condition of literary men; not a reassuring
+one. Indeed, we wonder how young people
+can dream of embracing such a profession,
+with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable
+poverty. Unless these aspiring chaps have
+a private income, how do they contrive to
+live?</p>
+
+<p>The answer is, they don't live, unless they
+write twaddle for the Grand Old Public, which
+must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You
+say to yourself, after all Paris is not vastly
+different in this respect from benighted New
+York. Detective stories, melodrama, the glorification
+of the stale triangle in fiction and drama,
+the apotheosis of the Apache&mdash;what are all
+these but slight variants of the artistic pabulum
+furnished by our native merchants in mediocrity?
+Consoled, because your mental and
+emotional climate is not as inartistic as it is
+painted, you return to Florian-Parmentier and
+his divagations. He has much to say. Some
+of it is not as tender as tripe, but none is salted
+with absurdity.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+Then you make a discovery. There is in
+France a distinct class, the Intellectuals, who
+control artistic opinion because of its superior
+claims; a class to which there is no analogy
+either in England or in America. (The French
+Academy is not particularly referred to just
+now.) Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs,
+bohemians, and professors&mdash;all may belong
+to it if they have the necessary credentials:
+brains, talent, enthusiasm. It is the latter
+quality that floats out on the sea of speculation
+many adventuring barks. Each sports a tiny
+pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered
+by some dreamer of proud, impossible dreams.
+But they float, do these frail boats, laden with
+visions and captained by noble ambitions.</p>
+
+<p>Or, another image; a long, narrow street,
+on either side houses of manifold styles&mdash;fantastic
+or sensible, castellated or commonplace,
+baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty,
+these eclectic architectures reflect the souls of
+the dwellers within. The ivory tower is not
+missing, though a half-century ago it was more
+in evidence; the church is there, though sadly
+dwarfed&mdash;France is still spiritually crippled
+and flying on one wing (this means previous
+to 1914); and a host of other strange and familiar
+houses that Jack the poet built.</p>
+
+<p>On the doors of each is a legend; it may be
+Neo-Symbolism, Neo-Classicism, Free-Verse,
+Sincerism, Intenseism, Spiritualists, Floralism
+or the School of Grace, Dramatism and Simultanism,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+Imperialism, Dynamism, Futurism, Regionalism,
+Pluralism, Sereneism, Vivantism,
+Magism, Totalism, Subsequentism, Argonauts,
+Wolves, Visionarism, and, most discussed of
+all, Unanimism, headed by that fiery propagandist
+and poet, Jules Romains.</p>
+
+<p>Now, every one of these cults in miniature
+has its following, its programmes, sometimes
+its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They
+are the numerous progeny of the elder Romantic,
+Realistic, and Symbolistic schools,
+long dead and gathered to their fathers.</p>
+
+<p>Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet Correspondences
+the Symbolists dated; Baudelaire,
+the precursor of so much modern, is to-day
+chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical
+and &aelig;sthetic. His Little Poems in Prose are
+a breviary for the youths who are turning out
+an amorphous prose, which they call Free.
+Paul Verlaine's influence is still marked, for he
+is a maker of Debussy-like music; moonlit,
+vapourish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The
+very quintessence of poetry haunts the vague
+terrain of his verse; but his ideas, his morbidities,
+these are negligible, indeed, abhorred.</p>
+
+<p>The new schools, whether belonging to the
+Extreme Right or Extreme Left, are idealistic
+in their aim and practice; that or nothing.
+The brutalities of Zola and the Naturalistic
+School, the frigid perfection and metallic impassibility
+of the Parnassians are over and
+done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+eye of the ideal. There is a renaissance of
+sensibility. The universe is become pluralistic,
+sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony
+has ceased to be a potent weapon in the armoury
+of poets and prosateurs. It is replaced by an
+ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that
+weeps on the shoulder of one's neighbour, by
+a horror of egoism&mdash;whether masquerading
+as a philosophy such as Nietzsche's, or a poesy
+such as the Parnassians. For these poetlings
+issues are cosmical.</p>
+
+<p>Coeval with this revival of sentiment is a
+decided leaning toward religion; not the &quot;white
+soul of the Middle Ages,&quot; as Huysmans would
+say; not the medi&aelig;val curiosities of Hugo,
+Gautier, Lamartine; but the carrying aloft
+of the banner of belief; the opposition to sterile
+agnosticism by the burning tongues of the
+holy spirit. No dilettante movement this
+return to Roman Catholicism. The time came
+for many of these neophytes when they had
+to choose at the cross-roads. Either&mdash;Or?
+The Button-Moulder was lying in wait for such
+adolescent Peer Gynts, and, outraged and
+nauseated by the gross license of their day and
+hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts, they
+turned to the right&mdash;some, not all of them.
+The others no longer cry aloud their pagan
+admiration of the nymph's flesh in the brake,
+of the seven deadly arts and their sister sins.</p>
+
+<p>In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic
+air has been blowing across the housetops of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+French art and literature. Science is too positive.
+Every monad has had its day. Pictorial
+impressionism is without skeleton. Mysticism
+is coming into fashion again; only, the youngsters
+wear theirs with a difference. Even the
+Cubists are working for formal severity, despite
+their geometrical fanaticism. Youth will have
+its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring
+colours, and those doors in the narrow street
+called &quot;Perhaps,&quot; do but prove the eternal
+need of the new and the astounding. Man
+cannot live on manna alone. He must, to keep
+from volplaning to the infinite, go down and
+gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish
+with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings
+also; else his chamber of dreams
+might overflow into reality, and then we should
+be converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers
+and all.</p>
+
+<p>What were the controlling factors in young
+French literature up to the greatest marking
+date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy
+of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full
+of poetic impulsion, graceful phrasing, and
+charming evocations; a feminine, nervous,
+fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it
+does, from an intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux.
+Maurice Barr&egrave;s is another name to
+conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical
+and slightly cruel egoism; then the
+herald of regionalism, replacing the flinty determinism
+of Taine with the watch-words: Patriotism,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+reverence for the dead&mdash;a reverence
+perilously near ancestor-worship&mdash;the prose-master
+Barr&egrave;s went into the political arena,
+and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive
+&quot;modernism,&quot; an idealistic reactionary.</p>
+
+<p>He is more subtle in his intellectual processes
+than his one-time master, Paul Bourget, from
+whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his
+patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic,
+his sincerity cannot be challenged. That sincerest
+form of insincerity&mdash;&quot;moral earnestness,&quot;
+so called&mdash;has never been his. He is
+no more a sower of sand on the bleak and barren
+shore of negation. Little wonder he is accepted
+as a vital teacher.</p>
+
+<p>Other names occur as generators of present
+schools. Stendhal, Mallarm&eacute;, Georges Rodenbach,
+Rimbaud&mdash;that stepfather of symbolism
+&mdash;Emil Verhaeren&mdash;who is truly an elemental
+and disquieting force&mdash;Paul Adam, Maeterlinck,
+the late Remy de Gourmont&mdash;who contributed
+so much to contemporary thought in
+the making&mdash;Francis Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle
+Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier,
+Jules Laforgue&mdash;and how many others,
+to be found in the pages of Vance Thompson's
+French Portraits, which valuable study dates
+back to the middle of the roaring nineties.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>When we are confronted by a litany of
+strange names, by the intricate polyphony of
+literary sects and c&eacute;nacles, the American lover
+of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly
+does the whirligig of time bring new talents.
+Already the generation of 1900 has jostled from
+their place the &quot;elders&quot; of a decade previous:
+you read of Paul-Napol&eacute;on Roinard, Maurice
+Beaubourg, Hans Ryner&mdash;a remarkable writer&mdash;Andr&eacute;
+Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul
+Fort, Paul Claudel, Andr&eacute; Suar&egrave;s, St&eacute;phane Servant,
+Andr&eacute; Spire, Phil&eacute;as Lebesgue, Georges
+Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations
+deserves an English garb), and you recall some
+of them as potent creators of values.</p>
+
+<p>But if London, a few hours from Paris, only
+hears of these men through a few critical intermediaries,
+such as Arthur Symons, Edmund
+Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan
+spirits, what may we not say of America, a
+week away from the scene of action? As a
+matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism,
+and for those who &quot;create&quot;&mdash;as the jargon
+goes&mdash;that same provincialism is a windshield
+against the draughts of too tempting
+imitation; but for our criticism there is no
+excuse. A critic will never be a catholic critic
+of his native literature or art if he doesn't know
+the literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical
+as this may sound. We lack &aelig;sthetic
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+curiosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism
+America is comparable to a cemetery of clich&eacute;s.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, those of us who went as far
+as the portraits by Vance Thompson and Amy
+Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long,
+narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its
+alternations of Septentrional mists and the
+blazing blue sky of the Midi. This critic, by
+the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He
+will have no admixture of Latin influence. He
+employs what has jocosely been called the
+&quot;Woad&quot; argument; he goes back not to the
+early Britons, but to Celticism. He is a sturdy
+Kymrist, and believes not in literatures transalpine
+or transpyrenean. He loathes the &quot;pastiche,&quot;
+the purveyors of &quot;canned&quot; classics, the
+chilly rhetoricians who set too much store on
+conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner,
+and the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier.
+In his auscultation of genius,
+La Physiologie Morale du Po&egrave;te (1904), may
+be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine
+seems familiar enough now, as does the
+flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of Renan,
+in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has
+had some influence. M. Florian-Parmentier
+does not admire this movement or its prophet,
+Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant
+magic of the word for these budding poets and
+philosophers. It ought to warm the cockles of
+the heart of critics.</p>
+
+<p>And then the generation of 1900&mdash;Alexander
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+Mercereau, Henri Hertz, S&eacute;bastien Voirol,
+Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand Divoire,
+Tancr&egrave;de Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux,
+Mandin, Guillaume Apollinaire&mdash;all workers
+in the vast inane, dwellers on the threshold of
+the future. The past and present bearings of
+the Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated.
+Thus far nothing extraordinary has come from
+it. Balzac is still the mighty one in fiction.
+Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul
+Adam, the brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille&mdash;a
+brilliant, versatile man&mdash;still maintain their
+primacy.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de
+Gourmont, Camille Mauclair, Maeterlinck, Romain
+Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois&mdash;now
+sojourning in America and a thinker of verve
+and originality&mdash;and Henry Houssaye, hold
+their own against the younger generation.</p>
+
+<p>In the theatre there are numerous and vexing
+tendencies: Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging
+his indebtedness to gentle Charles van
+Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has
+disciples; but the theatre is the theatre and
+resists innovation. Ibsen, who had his day in
+Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were
+accepted not because of their novelty, but in
+spite of it. They both were men of the theatre.
+There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are
+Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux,
+and Marie Leneru; but the technique of
+the drama is immutable.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+In the domain of philosophy and experimental
+science we find Emile Boutroux, and
+such collective psychologists as Durckheim,
+Gustave le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names
+such as Binet, Ribot, Michel Savigny, Alfred
+Fouill&eacute;e, and the eminent mathematician, Henri
+Poincar&eacute;&mdash;who finally became sceptical of his
+favourite logic, philosophy, and mathematics.
+This intellectual volte-face caused endless discussion.
+The truth is that intuition, the instinctive
+vs. intellectualism&mdash;what William
+James called &quot;vicious intellectualism&quot;&mdash;is
+swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.</p>
+
+<p>There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies,
+far too much of metaphysics in contemporary
+poetry. Poetry is in danger of suffocating in a
+misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse,
+intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time
+in Bergson caught the fancy of the poets. Naturally
+enough. Literary dogmatism had prevailed
+too long in academic centres. Now it is
+the deliquescence of formal verse that is to be
+feared. Vers-libre, which began with such initiators
+as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud,
+has run the gamut from esoteric illuminism
+to sonorous yawping from the terrace of the
+brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted
+to ask. Voices they have, but not bird-like
+voices.</p>
+
+<p>That fascinating philosopher and friend of
+Remy de Gourmont&mdash;who practically introduced
+him&mdash;must not be overlooked, for he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+had genuine influence. I refer to brilliant
+Jules Gaultier, who evolved from Flaubert's
+Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme&mdash;which,
+succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind
+to appear other than it is; from the philosopher
+to the snob, from the priest to the
+actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.</p>
+
+<p>Of the influence of politics upon art and literature&mdash;which
+happily are no cloistered virtues
+in France&mdash;we need not speak here. M.
+Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and
+bulky book, of which we have only exposed the
+high lights.</p>
+
+<p>Since Jules Huret's Enqu&ecirc;te sur l'Evolution
+Litt&eacute;raire (1890), followed by similar works of
+Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard (1913),
+we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's,
+mentioned above. He put the questions:
+&quot;Where are we? Where are we going?&quot; in <i>Le
+Temps</i> of Paris, June, 1912, to a number of
+representative thinkers and poets, and reprinted
+between covers their answers in 1913.</p>
+
+<p>The result is rather confusing, a cloud of
+contradictory witnesses are assembled, and
+what one affirms the other denies. There are
+no schools! Yes, there are groups! We are
+going to the devil headlong! The sky is full
+of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial!
+Better the extravagances of the decayed
+Romanticists than the debasing realism of the
+modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague
+on all your houses! say the Unanimists. One
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+fierce Wolf (Loup) admitted that at the banquets
+of his c&eacute;nacle he and his fellow poets
+always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was
+it at the Symbolists'? Does it much matter?
+The gesture counts alone with these youthful
+&quot;Fumistes&quot;&mdash;as Leconte de Lisle had christened
+their predecessors.</p>
+
+<p>Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in
+spelling as &quot;Cymbalists&quot; the Symbolists, his
+own followers. Gongs would have been a better
+word. A punster speaks of Theists as those
+who love &quot;le bon Dieu and tea.&quot; The new
+critical school, at its head Charles Maurras,
+do not conceal their contempt for all these
+&quot;arrivistes&quot; and revolutionary groups, believing
+that only a classic renaissance will save
+Young France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces
+in faded accents the ultra-academic
+group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence
+are dead since the war began: Emile Faguet,
+Jules Lema&icirc;tre, and Remy de Gourmont.
+They leave no successors worthy of
+their mettle.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The three volumes of anthology of French
+Contemporary Poets from 1866 to 1916 have
+been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets
+of Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by
+the painstaking M. G. Walch, it comprises the
+verse of poets born as late as 1886. Among
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+the rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell
+in battle, 1914. As epigraph to the new collection
+the editor has used a line from this poet's
+testament: &quot;Ce d&eacute;sir d'&ecirc;tre tout que j'appelle
+mon &acirc;me!&quot; Another anthology of the new poets
+is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson, but the
+Walch collection reveals more promising talents,
+or else the poems are more representative.</p>
+
+<p>Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically
+amusing. But are his contortions
+on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane
+are celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and
+the destruction of all art prior to 1900. The
+new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following
+Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence
+by the neck and wring it! Imagists abound,
+but they are in an aristocratic minority. The
+watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously
+from the confusing lyric symphony
+and they are those of Belgian-born poets&mdash;Emile
+Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year
+was a loss to literature, and Maurice Maeterlinck.
+What living lyric poet has the incomparable
+power of that epical Verhaeren, unless
+it be that of the more sophisticated Gabriele
+d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse
+of Henri de R&eacute;gnier, whose polished art is the
+antithesis of the exuberant, lawless, resonant
+reverberations of Verhaeren?</p>
+
+<p>What thinker and dramatist is known like
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+Maeterlinck, except it be the magical Gerhart
+Hauptmann? Rough to brutality&mdash;for Verhaeren
+at one time emulated Walt Whitman
+(variously spelled as &quot;Walth&quot; and &quot;Withman&quot;);
+with the names of foreigners Paris has
+ever been careless in its orthography, witness
+&quot;Litz&quot; and &quot;Edgard Po&euml;&quot;; he can boast the
+divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal
+order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic
+undertow that sweeps one irresistibly with him.
+But his genius is disintegrating, rather than
+constructive.</p>
+
+<p>Of what French poet among the younger
+group dare we say the same? Grace, lyric
+sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique&mdash;all
+these, yes, but not the power of saying great
+things greatly.</p>
+
+<p>As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to
+Emerson; but his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance
+are his own. He is a seer, and his
+crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes,
+whereas of Verhaeren we may say,
+as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: &quot;The sound
+of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the
+helmets of barbarians.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Henry James tells a story of an argument
+between Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev, the
+Russian novelist declaring that for him
+Ch&acirc;teaubriand was not the Ultima Thule of
+prose perfection. This insensibility to the finer
+nuances of the language angered and astounded
+Zola and Flaubert. They set it down
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+to the fact that none but a Frenchman can
+quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own
+language; which may be true, though I believe
+that for Turgenev the author of Atala was temperamentally
+distasteful.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, when an American makes the
+statement that the two Belgians are superior
+to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as
+a purely personal judgment. But the proposition
+first mooted by a distinguished critic,
+Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and
+Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy,
+was not a bizarre one. The war has effaced
+many artistic frontiers. The majority of the
+little circles that once pullulated in Paris no
+longer exist. Both Verhaeren and Maeterlinck
+are now Frenchmen of the French. Their inclusion
+in the Academy would have honoured
+that venerable and too august body as much
+as the Belgian poets.</p>
+
+<p>As to the war's influence on French letters,
+that question is for soothsayers to decide, not
+for the present writer. After 1870 certain
+psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of
+body and soul had blighted artistic and literary
+Europe. Well, we can only wish for the
+new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy
+of talents and genius as the shining groups from
+1875 to 1914. No need to finger the chaplet
+of their names and achievements. Such books
+as those by Catulle Mend&egrave;s, Florian-Parmentier,
+Lanson, and Walch prove our contention.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<h2>MORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNER</h2>
+
+
+<p>Time was when a fame-craving young man
+could earn a reputation for originality by merely
+going to the market-place and loudly proclaiming
+his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that
+modern critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged
+in placing the life of the composer under
+their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the
+ambitious chap aforesaid.</p>
+
+<p>Never has the music of Wagner been more
+popular than now; his name on the opera billboards
+is bound to crowd a house. And never,
+paradoxical as it may sound, has there been
+such a critical hue and cry over his works and
+personality. The publication of his autobiography
+has much to do with this renewal of interest.
+There is some praise, much abuse, to
+be found in the newly published books on the
+subject. European critics are building up little
+islands of theory, coral-like, some with fantastic
+lagoons, others founded on stern truth, and
+many doomed to be washed away over-night.
+Nevertheless, the true Richard Wagner is beginning
+to emerge from the haze of Nibelheim
+behind which he contrived to hide his real self.</p>
+
+<p>Wagner the gigantic comedian; Wagner the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+egotist; Wagner the victim of a tragic love,
+Wagner tone-poet, mock philosopher, and a
+wonderful apparition in the world of art till
+success overtook him; then Wagner become
+bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted
+by his best friends&mdash;whom he had
+alienated&mdash;without the solace of the men he
+had most loved, the men who had helped him
+over the thorny path of his life&mdash;Liszt,
+Nietzsche, Von B&uuml;low, Otto Wesendonk, and
+how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom
+he had treated with characteristic ingratitude!
+No, Richard Wagner during the sterile years,
+so called, from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented
+man, despite his union with Cosima von B&uuml;low-Liszt
+and the foundation of a home and family
+at Baireuth.</p>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>However, there are exceptions. One is the
+book of Otto Bournot entitled Ludwig Geyer, the
+Stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote about
+it in 1913 for the <i>New York Times</i>. In this
+slender volume of only seventy-two pages the
+author sifts all the evidence in the Geyer-Wagner
+question, and he has delved into
+archives, into the newspapers of Geyer's days,
+and has had access to hitherto untouched
+material. It must be admitted that his conclusions
+are not to be lightly denied. August
+B&ouml;ttiger's Necrology has until recently been
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+the chief source of facts in the career of Geyer,
+but Wagner's Autobiography&mdash;which in spots
+Bournot corrects&mdash;and the life of Wagner by
+Mary Burrell, not to mention other books,
+have furnished Bournot with new weapons.</p>
+
+<p>The Geyers as far back as 1700 were simple
+pious folk, the first of the family being a certain
+Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a
+trombone-player and organist. Indeed, the
+chief occupation of many Geyers was in some
+way or other connected with the Evangelical
+Church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer
+was a portraitist of no mean merit, an actor
+of considerable power&mdash;his Franz Moor was
+a favourite r&ocirc;le with the public&mdash;a dramatist
+of fair ability (he wrote a tragedy, among
+others, named The Slaughter of the Innocents),
+and also a verse-maker. His acquaintance with
+Weber stimulated his interest in music; Weber
+discovered his voice, and he sang in opera.
+Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature
+all the qualities of Wagner. The latter
+was too young at the time of Geyer's death,
+September, 1821, to have profited much by
+the precepts of his stepfather, but his example
+certainly did prove stimulating to the imagination
+of the budding poet and composer. Geyer
+married Johanna Wagner-Bertz (Mary Burrell
+was the first to give the correct spelling of her
+maiden name), the widow of the police functionary
+Wagner (to whose memory Richard
+pays such cynical homage in his obituary),
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+August 14, 1814. She had about two hundred
+and sixty-one thalern, and eight children. A
+ninth came later in the person of C&auml;cile, who
+afterward married a member of the Avenarius
+family. C&auml;cile, or Cicely, was a prime favourite
+with Richard.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+
+<p>Seven years passed, and again Frau Geyer
+found herself a widow, with nine children and
+little money. How the family all tumbled up
+in the world, owing much to the courage, wit,
+vivacity, and unshaken will-power of their
+mother, may be found in the autobiography.
+Bournot admits that Geyer and his wife may
+have carried to the grave certain secrets.
+Richard Wagner until he was nine years old
+was known as Richard Geyer, and on page
+thirteen of his book our author prints the following
+significant sentence: &quot;The possibility
+of Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in
+itself nothing detrimental to our judgment of
+the art-work of Baireuth.&quot;</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>In 1900 a twenty-page pamphlet bearing the
+title Richard Wagner in Zurich was published
+in Leipsic. It was signed Hans B&eacute;lart, and
+gave for the first time to a much mystified
+world the story of Wagner's passion
+for Mathilde Wesendonk, thus shattering beyond
+hope of repair our cherished belief that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+Cosima von B&uuml;low-Liszt had been the lode-stone
+of Wagner's desire, that to her influence
+was due the creation of Tristan and Isolde,
+its composer's high-water mark in poetic,
+dramatic music. Now, B&eacute;lart, not content
+with his iconoclastic pamphlet, has just sent
+forth a fat book which he calls Richard Wagner's
+Love-Tragedy with Mathilde Wesendonk.</p>
+
+<p>We had thought that the last word in the
+matter had been said when Baireuth (Queen
+Cosima I) allowed the publication of Wagner's
+diaries and love-letters to Mathilde&mdash;though
+her complete correspondence is as yet unpublished.
+But B&eacute;lart is one of the busiest among
+the German critical coral builders. He has
+dug into musty newspapers and letters, and
+gives at the close of his work a long list of authorities.
+Yet nothing startlingly new comes
+out of his researches. We knew that Mathilde
+Wesendonk (or Wesendonck) was the first love
+of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not
+his usual self-seeking philandering. We also
+knew that Otto Wesendonk behaved like a
+patient husband and a gentleman&mdash;any other
+man would have put a bullet in the body of
+the thrice impertinent genius; knew, too, that
+Tristan and Isolde was born of this romance.
+But there is a mass of fresh details, petty backstairs
+gossip, all the tittle-tattle beloved of
+such writers, that in company with Julius
+Kapp's Wagner und die Frauen, makes B&eacute;lart's
+new book a valuable one for reference.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+Kapp, who has written a life of Franz Liszt,
+goes B&eacute;lart one better in hinting that the infatuated
+couple transformed their idealism into
+realism. B&eacute;lart does not believe this; neither
+does Emil Ludwig, the latest critical commentator
+on Wagner. But neither critic gives
+the profoundest proof that the love of Richard
+and Mathilde was an exalted, platonic one,
+<i>i. e.</i>, the proof psychologic. I firmly believe
+that if Mathilde Wesendonk had eloped with
+Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan
+and Isolde might not have been finished;
+at all events, the third act would not have
+been what it now is. A mighty longing is better
+for the birth of great art than facile happiness.
+For the first time in his selfish unhappy life
+Wagner realised Goethe's words of wisdom:
+&quot;Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce.&quot; It
+was a bitter sacrifice, but out of its bitter sweetness
+came the honey and moonlight of Tristan
+and Isolde. Wagner suffered, Mathilde suffered,
+Otto Wesendonk suffered, and last, but not
+least, Minna Wagner, the poor pawn in his
+married game, suffered to distraction. Let us
+begin with a quotation on the last page but
+three of B&eacute;lart's book: &quot;Remarked Otto Wesendonk
+to a friend: 'I have hunted Wagner
+from my threshold....'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This was in August, 1858. Wagner first
+met the Wesendonks about 1852, three years
+after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because
+of his participation in the uprising of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+1849. (Wagner as amateur revolutionist!)
+Thanks to the request of his wife Mathilde,
+Otto Wesendonk furnished a little house on
+the hill near his splendid villa for the Wagners.
+First christened &quot;Fafner's Repose,&quot; Wagner
+changed the title to the &quot;Asyl,&quot; and for a time
+it was truly an asylum for this perturbed spirit.</p>
+
+<p>But he must needs fall deeply in love with
+his charming and beautiful neighbour, a woman
+of intellectual and poetic gifts, and to the chagrin
+of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife.
+The gossip in the neighbourhood was considerable,
+for the complete frankness of the
+infatuated ones was not the least curious part
+of the affair. Liszt knew of it, so did the Princess
+Layn-Wittgenstein. An immense amount
+of &quot;snooping&quot; was indulged in by interested
+lady friends of Minna Wagner. She has her
+apologists, and, judging from the letters she
+wrote at the time and afterward&mdash;several
+printed for the first time by Kapp and B&eacute;lart&mdash;she
+took a lively hand in the general proceedings.
+Evidently she was tired of her good
+man's behaviour, and when he solemnly assured
+her that it was the master-passion of his life
+she didn't believe him. Naturally not. He
+had cried &quot;wolf&quot; too often; besides, Minna,
+like a practical person, viewed the possibility
+of a rupture with Otto Wesendonk as a distinct
+misfortune. Otto had not only advanced
+much money to Richard, but he paid twelve
+thousand francs for the scores of Rheingold
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+and Walk&uuml;re and for the complete performing
+rights. Afterward he sent both to King Ludwig
+II as a gift&mdash;but I doubt if he ever got a
+penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed
+the expenses of the Wagner concert
+at Zurich, a little item of nine thousand francs.
+Scandal and calumny invaded his home, the
+fair fame of his wife was threatened. No wonder
+the finale, long deferred, was stormy, even
+operatic.</p>
+
+<p>The lady was much younger than her husband;
+she was born at the close of 1828, therefore
+Wagner's junior by fifteen years. She
+was a Luckemeyer, her mother a Stein; a cultured,
+sweet-natured woman, it is more than
+doubtful if she could have endured Wagner
+as a husband. She did a wise thing in resisting
+his prayers. Not only was her husband a bar
+to such a proceeding, but her children would
+have always prevented her thinking of a legal
+separation. All sorts of plans were in the air.
+When, in 1857, the American panic seriously
+threatened the prosperity of Otto Wesendonk,
+who had heavy business interests in New York,
+gossip averred that Frau Wesendonk would
+ask for a divorce; but the air cleared and matters
+resumed their old aspect. Minna Wagner's
+health, always poor, became worse. It was a
+case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs.
+She daily made scenes at home and threatened
+to tell what she knew. That she knew much
+is evident from her correspondence with Frau
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+Wilk. She said that Wagner had two hearts,
+but while he delighted in intellectual and emotional
+friendship with such a superior soul as
+Mathilde, he nevertheless would not forego
+the domestic comforts provided by Minna.
+Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois.
+Those intolerable dogs, the parrot, the
+coffee-drinking, the soft beds and solicitude
+about his underclothing, all were truly German;
+human-all-too-human.</p>
+
+<p>In September, 1857, the newly married Von
+B&uuml;lows paid the Wagners a visit, and as the
+guest-chamber of the cottage was occupied
+they took up temporary quarters at an inn,
+&quot;The Raven&quot; (Wotan's ravens!) Cosima,
+young, impressionable, turned her face to the
+wall and wept when Wagner played and sang
+for his friends the first and second acts of Siegfried.
+Even then she felt the &quot;pull&quot; of his
+magnetism, of his genius, and doubtless regretted
+having married the fussy, irritable
+Von B&uuml;low&mdash;who had gone down in the social
+scale in wedding a girl of dubious descent.
+(In Paris Liszt for many years was only a strolling
+gipsy piano-player to whom the Countess
+d'Agoult had &quot;condescended.&quot;)</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde Wesendonk entertained the Von
+B&uuml;lows, who went away pleased with their
+reception, above all deeply impressed by the
+exiled Wagner. They so reported to Liszt,
+and Von B&uuml;low did more; as the scion of an
+old aristocratic family, he made many attempts
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+to secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as
+making propaganda for his music. Which
+favours Wagner, who was the very genius of
+ingratitude, repaid later.</p>
+
+<p>In one point Herr Ludwig is absolutely correct:
+the composer was supported by his friends
+from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig intervened.
+The starvation talk was a part of
+the Wagner legend, even the Paris days were
+greatly exaggerated as to their black poverty.
+Wagner was always a spendthrift.</p>
+
+<p>From November, 1857, to May, 1858,
+Wagner set to music the five poems of Mathilde,
+veritable sketches for Tristan. Early
+in September, 1857, the relations between
+Minna and Mathilde had become strained.
+Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde
+in a vulgar manner; worse remained; he had
+sent a letter by the gardener to Frau Wesendonk
+and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke
+the seal, read the contents. To Wagner, this
+was the blackest of crimes; yet can you blame
+her? To be sure, she had no conception of
+her husband's genius. For her Rienzi was his
+only work. Had it not succeeded? So had
+Tannh&auml;user and Lohengrin, also The Flying
+Dutchman, but Rienzi was her darling. How
+often she begged him to write another opera of
+the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed
+to tell us. Otto Wesendonk's wife she firmly
+believed was leading him into a quagmire.
+What theatre could ever produce The Ring?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+One thing, however, Minna did not do, as most
+writers on the subject say she did: she did
+not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the
+time, but only to Wagner. Later she made its
+meanings clear to the injured husband, which
+no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted
+above.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 15%;' />
+
+<p>The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials
+from Liszt, appeared on the scene in May,
+1858, and the entire household was soon in
+an uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded
+Minna to take a cold-water cure at a sanatorium
+some distance from Zurich, so he could handle
+the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano
+performances at the age of sixteen made the
+mature composer both wonder and admire.
+Tausig smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated
+from Liszt, and almost lived on coffee. Here
+is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima
+Von B&uuml;low, who, it must be remembered, was
+both the daughter and wife of famous pianists.
+She said: &quot;Tausig has no touch, no individuality;
+he is a caricature of Liszt.&quot; This, in
+the light of Tausig's subsequent artistic career,
+sounds almost comical; it also shows the intensely
+one-sided temperament of a remarkable
+woman, who banished from her life both
+von B&uuml;low and her father, Franz Liszt, when
+Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude
+she displayed after her Richard's death in
+1883 was not tempered by any human feeling
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>
+toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered.
+She denied herself to him. She became
+a Br&uuml;nnhilde frozen into a symbol of
+intolerable grief.</p>
+
+<p>Of her personal fascination the sister of
+Nietzsche, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, told
+me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von
+B&uuml;low succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein
+also (query: perhaps that is the reason he so
+savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations
+on Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche
+was another victim.</p>
+
+<p>On September 17, 1858, after a general row,
+Wagner left his home on the green hill, his
+&quot;Asyl,&quot; for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures,
+no definite statements. He makes a great
+show of frankness in his diaries, in his autobiography;
+but they were obviously &quot;edited&quot;
+by Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as
+evidence that a mighty emotion had transfigured
+the nature of a genius, and instead of
+an erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in
+the possession of a moving drama of desire
+and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere
+of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked:
+&quot;How Wagner must have loved when he wrote
+the work;&quot; which is sound psychology.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The two books discussed are constructive
+in nature; not so the book by Emil Ludwig,
+Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly
+destructive. Since The Wagner Case by
+Nietzsche&mdash;and not Nietzsche at his best&mdash;there
+has not been written a book so overflowing
+with hatred for Wagner, the man as
+well as the musician. Ludwig is the author
+of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the
+latter a noteworthy achievement. He is thorough
+in his attacks, though he does not measure
+up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's
+poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The
+English critic's studies remain the best of its
+kind, because it is written without parti-pris.</p>
+
+<p>Ludwig slashes &agrave; la Nietzsche, though he
+cannot boast that poet's diamantine style.
+He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic&mdash;a
+painter of moods; he couldn't build a
+Greek temple like Beethoven&mdash;weak as a poet,
+inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan and
+Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise.
+The Ludwig book stirred up a nest of hornets,
+and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper critic
+presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet,
+who calls Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf
+Lexicon, invoked the aid of the law. We know
+only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but
+engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+monster of ingratitude. Hasn't Nietzsche,
+against his own natural feeling, proclaimed
+the futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned
+this lesson from his hard experience with Wagner.
+We also know that Wagner wanted to
+run the universe, but after a brief note from
+Ludwig II he left Munich rather than face
+the angry burghers.</p>
+
+<p>He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there
+he ran up against a wall of granite. Bismarck
+was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as
+did Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner
+wrote sarcastic things about the uselessness
+and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat Ludwig
+II right when he announced from Venice
+that he wasn't in sufficient health and spirits
+to grant the King's request for a performance
+of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened
+theatre with one listener, Ludwig II. (By the
+way, Ludwig II never sat through a performance
+alone of Parsifal. Once and once only,
+years before the completion of the work, he
+heard a performance of the prelude in Munich
+given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff
+letter wounded the sensitive idealist. In 1866,
+a few weeks after the death of Minna Wagner-Planer,
+Cosima von B&uuml;low-Liszt followed Wagner
+to Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude
+of Liszt in the affair was largely inspired
+by the fact that when Richard and Cosima
+married, the latter abjured Catholicism and
+became a Protestant. Liszt, a religious man
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+(despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the luxurious
+region of sentiment), never could reconcile
+himself to this defection on the part
+of a beloved child.</p>
+
+<p>It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner
+a leaning toward mysticism, toward religion:
+witness the mock-duck mysticism and burlesque
+of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach
+came Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual
+life of Wagner. This was in 1854. His friend
+Wille lent him the book. Immediately he
+started to &quot;Schopenhauerise&quot; the Ring, thereby
+making a hopeless muddle of situation and
+character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's
+temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic
+terms. He was not a pessimist, and
+he hopelessly misunderstood his new master.
+Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian;
+and Siegfried, a pessimist at the close.</p>
+
+<p>Nietzsche was right; Schopenhauer proved
+a powerful poison for Wagner. And Schopenhauer
+himself laughed at Wagner's music; he
+remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised
+Wagner, through a friend, to stick to
+the theatre and hang his music on a nail in the
+wall; but when his library was overhauled
+several marginalia were discovered, one which
+he contemptuously wrote on a verse of Wagner's:
+&quot;Ear! Ear! Where are your ears, musician?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Wagner, when Liszt adjured him to turn to
+religion as a consolation, replied: &quot;I believe
+only in mankind.&quot; Ludwig compares this
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+declaration with some of the latter opinions
+concerning Christianity, of which Wagner has
+said many evil things. Wagner's life was a
+series of concessions to the inevitable. He
+modified his art theories as he grew older, and
+with fame and riches his character deteriorated.</p>
+
+<p>He couldn't stand success&mdash;he, the bravest
+man of his day; the undaunted fighter for
+an idea crooked the knee to caste, became
+an amateur mystic and announced his intention
+of returning to absolute music, of writing
+a symphony strict in form&mdash;which, for his
+reputation, he luckily did not attempt. He
+was a colossal actor and the best self-advertiser
+the world has yet known since Nero. But I
+can't understand Herr Ludwig when he asserts
+that from 1866 to 1883 the composer did nothing
+but compose two marches, finish Siegfried
+and G&ouml;tterd&auml;mmerung. Rather a large order,
+considering the labours of the man as practical
+opera conductor, prose writer, poet-dramatist,
+and composer. And then, too, the gigantic
+scheme of Baireuth was realised in 1876.</p>
+
+<p>Comparatively barren would be a fairer
+phrase. After Tristan and Isolde, what could
+any man compose? A work which its creator
+rightfully said was a miracle he couldn't understand.
+After the anecdotage of Wagner's
+career is forgotten, after Baireuth has become
+owl-haunted, Tristan and Isolde will be listened
+to by men and women who love or have loved.</p>
+
+<p>It isn't pleasant to read a book like Ludwig's,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+truthful as it may be in parts. Nor should he
+call our attention to the posthumous venom of
+the composer as expressed in his hateful remarks
+concerning Otto Wesendonk. There Wagner
+was his own Mime, his own Alberich, not the
+knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish
+maid till magic did melt his will. Richard
+Wagner was once Tristan.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<h2>MY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTURE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the
+last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled
+there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt,
+if not to hear him. He was then honorary director
+of the Austro-Hungarian section. But
+I could not find him, although I heard of him
+everywhere, of musical f&ecirc;tes and the usual
+glittering company that had always surrounded
+this extraordinary son of fortune. One day
+I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the
+Rue de Rivoli of an October afternoon, when
+in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with
+bushy white hair, his face full of expressive
+warts, and in his mouth a long black cigar,
+which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I
+gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an
+easy job to keep up with the carriage. At
+last, because of a blocked procession, I caught
+up and took a long stare, the object of which
+composedly smiled at me, but did not truly
+convince me that he was Franz Liszt. You
+see there were so many different pictures of
+him; even the warts were not always the same
+in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein
+I swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did.</p>
+
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired,
+and at the advice of Frederick Boscovitz, a
+pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy,
+I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with
+a letter of introduction to the acting secretary,
+Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old to
+enter, being a few months past eighteen. I
+was disappointed and voiced my woes to Lucy
+Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and
+correspondent of several American newspapers.
+Her husband was Vice-Consul Robert Hooper
+and he kindly introduced me to General Fairchild,
+the consul, and after a cross-examination
+I was given a letter in which the United States
+Government testified to my good social standing
+(I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder
+from justice) and extreme youth. Armed with
+this formidable document, I again besieged the
+gates of the great French conservatoire&mdash;whose
+tuition, it must be remembered, is free.
+I was successful, inasmuch as I was permitted
+to present myself at the yearly examination,
+which took place November 13 (ominous
+date). To say that I studied hard and shook
+in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at
+the time in an alley-like street off the Boulevard
+des Batignolles and lived luxuriously on five
+dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a
+day (with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning)
+and practising on a wretched little cottage piano
+as long as my neighbours would stand the noise.
+They chucked boots or any old faggot they could
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+find at my door, and after twelve hours I was so
+tired of patrolling the keyboard that I was glad
+to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to keep
+down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite,
+I would lie in bed till dinner-time. O
+Chopin! O consomm&eacute; and boiled beef! O sour
+blue wine at six cents the litre!</p>
+
+<p>At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists
+say. It was nasty, chilling, foggy autumnal,
+but my long locks hung negligently and my
+velveteen coat was worn defiantly open to the
+wind. I reached the Conservatoire&mdash;then in
+the old building on the Rue du Faubourg Poissoni&egrave;re&mdash;at
+precisely nine o'clock of the morn.
+I was put in a large room with an indiscriminate
+lot of candidates, some of them so young as
+to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep
+we huddled and as my eyes feverishly rambled
+I noticed a lad of about twelve with curling
+hair worn artist fashion; a naughty haughty
+boy he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs
+and audibly inquired: &quot;Is grandpa to play
+with us!&quot; I knew enough French to hate that
+little monster with a nervous hatred. There
+was a tightened feeling about my throat and
+heart and I waited in an agitated spirit for my
+number. A bearded and shy young man came
+in from examination and was at once mocked by
+the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes. Another
+unfortunate, with a roll of music! Then the
+little devil was summoned. We sat up. In ten
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+minutes he returned with downcast mien, flushed
+face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of
+the room, but too late. After shaking hands all
+round we solemnly danced in a circle about the
+now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who
+says youth is ever generous?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Number thirteen!&quot; sang out a voice, and
+I was pushed through a narrow entry and a
+minute later was standing on the historic stage
+of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was
+dim, but I discerned a group of persons somewhere
+in front of me. A man asked me to sit
+down at the grand piano&mdash;of course, like most
+pianos, out of tune&mdash;and I tremblingly obeyed
+his polite request. At this juncture a woman's
+voice inquired: &quot;How old are you, monsieur?&quot;
+I told her. A feminine laugh rippled through
+the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little beard, was
+undeniably gawky, and looked conspicuously
+older than my years. That laugh settled me.
+Queer, creepy feelings seized my legs, my eyes
+were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace
+and my heart beat like a triphammer. I was
+not the first man, young or old, to be knocked
+out by a woman's laugh. (Later I met the
+lady. She was Madame Massart, and the wife
+of the well-known violin master, Massart, of
+the Conservatoire.) Again the demand, &quot;Play
+something.&quot; It was a foregone conclusion that
+I couldn't. I began a minuetto from a Beethoven
+Sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and
+a kaleidoscope of comets, then pitched into a
+presto by the unfortunate Beethoven, and was
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+soon stopped. A sheet of manuscript was
+placed before me. I could have sworn that it
+was upside down, so as a sight-reading test it
+was a failure. I was altogether a distinguished
+failure, and with the audible comment of the
+examining faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled
+across the stage into welcome darkness, and
+without waiting to thank Secretary Rety for
+his amiability I got away, crossing in a hurry
+that celebrated courtyard in which the hideous
+noises made by many instruments, including
+the human voice, reminded me of a torture
+circle in Dante's Inferno.</p>
+
+<p>The United States had no reason to be proud
+of her musical&mdash;or unmusical&mdash;son that dull
+day in November, 1878. When I arrived in
+my garret I swore I was through and seriously
+thought of studying the xylophone. But my
+mood of profound discouragement was succeeded
+by a more hopeful one. If you can't
+enter the Paris Conservatoire as an active student
+you may have influence enough to become
+an &quot;auditeur,&quot; a listener; and a listener
+I became and in the class of Professor Georges
+Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical
+readers will understand my good luck. From
+that spiritual master I learned many things
+about the Polish composer; heard from his
+still supple fingers much music as Chopin had
+interpreted it. Delicate and discriminating in
+style, M. Mathias had never developed into
+a brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he produced
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+effects on the keyboard that sounded
+like emotional porcelain falling from a high
+shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors.
+He also taught me that if a pianist
+or violinist or singer is too nervous before the
+public, then he or she has not a musical vocation&mdash;the
+case of Adolf Henselt to the contrary
+notwithstanding. But better would it
+be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't
+will earnestly enough to succeed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p ><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h2>VIOLINISTS NOW AND
+YESTERYEAR</h2>
+
+
+<p>With the hair of the horse and the entrails
+of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave
+their potent spells. What other instrument
+devised by the hand of man has ever approached
+the violin? Gladstone compared it with the
+locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism
+of the wheeled monster, its type is transitional;
+steam is already supplanted by electricity;
+while the violin is perfection, as perfect as a
+sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression
+of emotion next to the human voice; indeed
+it is even more poignant. Orchestrally massed,
+it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with
+banners. In quartet form it represents the
+very soul of music; it is both sensuous and intellectual.
+The modern grand pianoforte with
+its great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy
+of mechanism is, nevertheless, a monster
+of music if placed beside the violin, with its
+simple curves, its almost primitive method of
+music-making. The scraping of one substance
+against another goes back to prehistoric times,
+nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its
+ingenious manner of producing sound. But
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+the violin, as we know it to-day, is not such an
+old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth
+century before it made its appearance,
+with its varnished and modelled back.</p>
+
+<p>Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the
+violin has had for its votaries men of such widely
+differing temperaments as Paganini and Spohr,
+Wilhelmj and Sarasate, Joachim and Ysaye.
+Its literature does not compare with that of
+the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven, Schumann,
+Chopin, and Brahms have written their
+choicest music, yet the intimate nature of the
+violin, its capacity for passionate emotion,
+crowns it&mdash;and not the organ, with its mechanical
+tonal effects&mdash;as the king of instruments.
+Nor does the voice make the peculiar
+appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G
+below the treble clef, and its top note a mere
+squeak; but it seems in a few octaves to have
+imprisoned within its wooden walls a miniature
+world of feeling; even in the hands of a
+clumsy amateur it has the formidable power
+of giving pain; while in the grasp of a master
+it is capable of arousing the soul.</p>
+
+<p>No other instrument has the ecstatic quality;
+neither the shallow-toned pianoforte, nor the
+more mellow and sonorous violoncello. The
+angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of
+the violin are without parallel in music or
+nature. It is as if this box with four strings
+across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous
+system than all other instruments. It is a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+cry, a shriek, a hymn to heaven, a call to arms,
+an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series of
+multi-coloured visions, a broad song of passion,
+or mocking laughter&mdash;what cannot the violin
+express if the soul that guides it be that of an
+artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is
+the hero, the heroine, the vanguard of every
+composition. As a solo instrument in a concerto,
+its still small voice is heard above the
+din and thunder of the accompaniment. In
+a word, this tiny music-box is the ruler among
+instruments.</p>
+
+<p>Times have changed since 1658 in England,
+when the following delightful ordinance was
+made for the benefit of musical genius, or otherwise:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And be it enacted that if any person or
+persons, commonly called Fiddlers, or minstrels,
+shall at any time after the said first of
+July be taken playing, fiddling, or making
+music in any inn, alehouse or tavern, or shall
+be proffering themselves, or desiring, or entreating
+any person or persons to hear them
+play ... shall be adjudged rogues, vagabonds,
+and sturdy beggars.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Decidedly, England was not then the abode of
+the muses, for the poor actor suffered in company
+with the musician. You wonder whether
+this same penalty would be imposed upon
+musical managers ... they certainly do &quot;entreat&quot;
+the public to listen to their &quot;fiddlers.&quot;
+Yet in 1690 when Corelli, the father of violin
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+playing, led the band at Cardinal Ottoboni's
+house in Rome, he stopped the music because
+his churchly patron was talking, and he made
+an epigram that has since served for other
+artists: &quot;Monsignore,&quot; remarked this intrepid
+musician, when asked why the band had ceased,
+&quot;I feared the music might interrupt the conversation.&quot;
+How well Liszt knew this anecdote
+may be recalled by his retort to a czar of
+Russia under similar circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Until a few months ago I had not heard
+Eugene Ysaye play for years. In the old days
+he had enchanted my ears, and in company
+with Gerardy, the violoncellist and Pugno the
+pianist had made music fit for the gods. Considering
+the flight of the years, I found the art
+of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like
+Liszt, like Paderewski, Ysaye has his good
+moments and his indifferent. He is the Paderewski
+of the strings in his magical interpretations.
+And unlike his younger contemporaries,
+he still carves out the whole block of
+the great classics, sonatas, and concertos. He
+plays little things tenderly, exquisitely, and
+the man is first the musician, then the virtuoso.</p>
+
+<p>I heard neither Paganini nor Spohr. Joachim,
+Wilhelmj, Wieniawski, and Ysaye I have heard
+and seen. My memory assures me of keener
+satisfactions than any book about these giants
+of the four strings could give me. The first violinist
+I ever listened to was in the early seventies.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>
+I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination.
+Yet I remember much. It was
+at the opera, a matinee in the Philadelphia
+Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I
+can't recall her on that occasion, though it
+seems only the other day when Carlotta Patti
+sang the Queen of the Night in The Magic
+Flute, and limped over the stage&mdash;possibly
+the lameness fixed the event in my mind more
+than the music.</p>
+
+<p>A &quot;front&quot; set was dropped between the acts
+at this particular matinee&mdash;I do not recollect
+the name of the opera&mdash;and through a &quot;practicable&quot;
+door came an old gentleman with a
+violin in his hands. He was white-haired, he
+wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to my
+young eyes like a prosperous banker. He
+played. It was as the sound of falling waters
+on a moonlight night. I asked the name of
+the old gentleman. My father said, &quot;Henri
+Vieuxtemps,&quot; which told me nothing then,
+though it means much to me now. What did
+he play? I do not know. Yet whenever I
+hear the younger men attack his Fantaisie
+Caprice, his Ballade and Polonaise, his Concertos,
+I think proudly: &quot;I have heard Vieuxtemps!&quot;
+He was a Belgian, born 1820, died
+1881. His style was finished, elegant, charming.
+He was a pupil of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: De Beriot" id="tnote20">De Bériot</ins> and represented,
+with his master, perfection in the Belgian
+school.</p>
+
+<p>After an interval of some years, I heard the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>
+only pupil of Paganini, as he called himself,
+Camillo Sivori. It was in Paris, 1879. The
+precise day I can't say but my letter from
+Paris which appeared in the Philadelphia <i>Evening
+Bulletin</i> was dated January 31, 1879. I
+still preserve it in a venerable scrap-book. I
+was in my 'teens but I wrote with the courage
+of youthful ignorance as follows: (It almost
+sounds like a musical criticism.) &quot;Although
+it was generally supposed that Sivori, the great
+violinist, would not play this season in Paris,
+he, nevertheless delighted a large audience,
+last Sunday, at the Concert Populaire, with
+his lovely music. He is no longer a young man,
+but the vigour and fire of his playing are immense.
+He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment,
+a Berceuse, his own composition,
+with unapproachable delicacy. It was played
+throughout with the mute. In contrast came
+a Mouvement Perpetuel. Sivori's tone is not
+like that of Joachim or Wilhelmj, but it is sweeter
+than either. It reminds one of gold drawn to
+cobweb fineness. As an encore he played the
+too well known Carnival of Venice. That it
+was given in the style of his illustrious master,
+Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing,
+painful, finally tiresome.&quot; That same season
+I heard Anna Bock, Boscovitz, Di&eacute;mer, Plant&eacute;,
+Theodore Ritter, the two Jaells, fat Alfred and
+his thin wife.</p>
+
+<p>Sivori (1815-1894), dapper, modest, stood
+up in the vast spaces of the Cirque d'Hiver,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>
+which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques
+Pasdeloup and his orchestra. (Jacob Wolfgang
+was the real name of this conductor who braved
+the wrath of his audiences by putting Wagner
+on his programmes; and one afternoon we had
+a pitched battle over Rimsky-Korsakoff's Symphonic
+Poem, Sadko.) Sivori played a tarantella;
+every tone was clearly heard in the great,
+crowded auditorium. Pupils of De B&eacute;riot and
+Paganini I have heard, though I hardly recall
+the style of the former and nothing of the latter.
+But there was little of Paganini's fiery attack
+in Sivori; possibly he was too old. Fire and
+fury I later found in Wieniawski.</p>
+
+<p>I must not omit the name of Ole Bull (1810-1880),
+for, though I heard him as a boy, I best
+remember him in 1880, when he gave his last
+concerts in America. In the fifties, while on a
+visit to my father's house, he went on his two
+thumbs around a dining-table, lifting his body
+clear from the ground. His muscular power
+was remarkable. It showed in the dynamics
+of his robust and sentimental playing. Spohr
+discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of
+his &quot;wonderful playing and sureness of his
+left hand; unfortunately, like Paganini, he
+sacrifices what is artistic to something that is
+not quite suitable to the noble instrument.
+His tone, too, is bad....&quot; For Spohr any
+one's tone was, naturally enough, bad, as he
+possessed the most monumental tone that ever
+came from a violin.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+The truth is that Ole Bull was not a classical
+player; as I remember him, he could not play
+in strict tempo; like Chopin, he indulged in
+the rubato and abused the portamento. But
+he knew his public. America a half-century
+ago, particularly in the regions he visited,
+was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos.
+Old Dan Tucker and the Arkansaw Traveller
+were the mode. Bull played them both, played
+jigs and old tunes, roused the echoes with the
+Star Spangled Banner and Irish melodies. He
+played such things beautifully, and it would
+have been musical snobbery to say that you
+didn't like them. You couldn't help yourself.
+The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was
+a handsome Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan
+and a touch of Liszt in his tall, willowy
+figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair.
+Such white hair! It tumbled in masses about
+his kindly face like one of his native Norwegian
+cataracts. He was the most picturesque old
+man I ever saw except Walt Whitman, at that
+time a steady attendant of the Carl Gaertner
+String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia. (And
+what Walt didn't know about music he made
+up in his love for stray dogs; he was seldom
+without canine company.)</p>
+
+<p>Those were the days when Prume's La M&eacute;lancolie
+and Wieniawski's L&eacute;gende were the
+two favourite, yet remote, peaks of the student's
+r&eacute;pertoire. How we loved them! Then
+came Wieniawski with Rubinstein in 1872-1873,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>
+and such violin playing America had never
+before heard&mdash;nor has it since, let me hasten
+to add. This Pole (1835-1880) was a brilliant
+master. His dash and fire and pathos carried
+you off your feet. His tone at times was
+like molten metal. He had a caressing and
+martial bow. His technique was infallible, his
+temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle,
+fierce. Wieniawski always reminded me of
+a red-hot coal. How chivalric is his Polonaise&mdash;that
+old war-horse! How elegiac his L&eacute;gende!
+His favourite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg,
+the greatest violin talent that has been
+thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg
+had everything when a youth&mdash;temperament,
+brains, musical feeling, and great technical
+ability.</p>
+
+<p>After Wieniawski followed Wilhelmj, who
+did not efface his memory, but plunged one
+into another atmosphere; that of the calm,
+profound, untroubled, and classic. No doubt
+Spohr's tone was larger, yet this is difficult to
+believe. Wilhelmj drew from his instrument
+the noblest sounds I ever heard; not Joachim,
+not Ysaye excelled him in cantabile. He was
+the first to play Wagner transcriptions&mdash;no
+wonder Wagner made him leader of the strings
+at Bayreuth in 1876. How he read the Beethoven
+Concerto, the Bach Chaconne. Or the
+D flat Nocturne of Chopin&mdash;in D. Or the
+much abused Mendelssohn E Minor Concerto&mdash;with
+Max Vogrich accompanying him at
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>
+the piano. A giant in physique, when he faced
+his audience there was something of the majestic,
+fair-haired god Wotan in his immobile
+posture. He never appealed to his public as
+did Wieniawski; there was always something
+of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelmj's
+play. The last time I saw him was at
+Marienbad, shortly before his death, where, a
+stooped-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he
+was taking a Kur. He walked slowly, his hands
+clasped behind him, in his eyes the vacant
+look of one busy with memories. He reminded
+me of Beethoven's pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian,
+was past his prime when I heard him in London.
+He played out of tune&mdash;some of his
+pupils have imitated his failing&mdash;but whether
+in a Beethoven quartet, concerto, sonata with
+piano, he always stamped on your consciousness
+that Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist
+that had ever lived. This is, of course, absurd,
+this unfair comparison of one artist with another.
+Yet it is human to compare, and if a
+violinist can evoke such a vision of perfection,
+then he must be of uncommon powers. Maud
+Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has
+asserted that it took her three years before she
+could recover herself in the presence of Joachim's
+overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as
+not at all assertive. He seemed an &quot;objective&quot;
+player, <i>i. e.</i>, you thought only of Beethoven, of
+Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself of their
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
+Olympian measures. The grand manner is now
+out of fashion. We care more for exotic rhetoric
+than for simple and lofty measures. Sarasate
+and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski
+set my blood coursing faster; but in Joachim's
+presence I felt as if near some old Grecian
+temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped
+gods.</p>
+
+<p>Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely,
+and scratch diabolically. He belonged
+to that old romantic school in which pose and
+gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a
+prominent place. I had an opportunity to
+study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was
+Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He
+brought to my father's house in the early eighties
+his favourite instruments, and such a wild
+night of music I never heard. He played hour
+after hour, everything from Bach to Brahms&mdash;and
+incidentally scolded Brahms for &quot;stealing&quot;
+some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances!
+(Which is a joke, as Brahms only followed
+the examples of Liszt and Joachim in avowedly
+employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did
+such tricks as dashing off in impeccable tune
+his arrangement of the D Flat Valse of Chopin
+in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists
+will understand the feat when I tell them
+that the key was the original one&mdash;D flat.
+He made the walls shiver when he struck his
+bow clangorously in the opening chords of the
+Rackoczy March. What a hero then seemed
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>
+this stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man
+with the face of an unfrocked priest. How he
+could talk in a half-dozen different languages;
+he had travelled enough and encountered enough
+celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with
+his recollections. He was a violinist of unquestionable
+power; that he deteriorated in
+his later years was to have been expected.
+Liszt understood and appreciated Remenyi
+from the first; he nicknamed him &quot;the Kossuth
+of the Fiddle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To recall all the celebrities of the violin I
+have heard since 1870 would be hardly possible.
+I've forgotten most of them, though I do remember
+that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont,
+who ended his life, so rich in possibilities,
+it is said as a billiard marker. He was
+spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad.
+Another wonder-child kept his head, and to-day
+fascinating Fritz Kreisler is a master of
+masters and a favourite in America without
+peer. He first appeared at Boston and in 1888.
+In Paris I recall Marsick and his polished style;
+the gallant Sauret, Johannes Wolf, and the
+brilliant and elegant Timoth&eacute;e Adamowski.
+And in 1880, Marie Tayau and her woman
+quartet, a member of which was Jeanne Franko,
+the sister of the conductors and violinists,
+Sam Franko and Nahan Franko; C&aelig;sar Thomson,
+the miraculous; C. M. Loeffler&mdash;subtle
+player, subtle composer; Sarasate with his
+sweet tone; Brodsky and his masculine manner;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>
+Willy Burmester and his pallid pyrotechnics;
+the learned Schradieck, the Bohemian Ondricek,
+the dashing Ovide Musin, Bernhard Listemann,
+Carl Halir; Gregorowitsch, the languid;
+brilliant Marteau; Alexander Petschinikoff, the
+Russian; the musicianly Max Bendix; the
+astonishing John Rhodes, the wonder-worker
+Kubelik and his icy perfections; Kocian, Willy
+Hess, Efrem Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Arthur
+Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths,
+Von Veczsey, Horszowski&mdash;all have crossed
+the map of my memory. And Franz Kneisel
+and the Kneisel Quartet, dispensers of musical
+joys for decades, but alas! no more. Alas!
+I would not barter memories of their music-making
+for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must
+not forget Joseph White, the Cuban violinist,
+who was with Theodore Thomas one season.
+His style was finished and Parisian. He was
+a mulatto and a handsome man. The night
+I heard him he played the Mendelssohn concerto,
+and at the beginning of the slow movement
+his chanterelle broke. Calmly he took
+concert master Richard Arnold's proffered instrument
+and triumphantly finished the composition.</p>
+
+<p>Three violinists abide clear in my recollection:
+Wieniawski, Wilhelmj, and Ysaye. The
+last named is dearer because nearer, contrary
+to the supposed rule that the older the
+thing the worse it is. Ysaye is the magician
+of the violin. He holds us in a spell with that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>
+elastic, curving bow of his, with those many
+coloured tones, tender, silky, sardonic, amorous,
+rich, and ductile. He interprets the classics
+as well as the romantics; Bach, Beethoven,
+Brahms; Vieuxtemps as well as Sibelius. Above
+all else, his mastery of the violin's technical
+mysteries, looms his musical temperament.
+He has imagination.</p>
+
+<p>I have reserved the women for the last. A
+goodly, artistic company. It is not necessary
+to go back to the Milanolla sisters. We still
+cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her
+broad musicianly manner; the finished style
+of Normann-Neruda, Maris Soldat, the gifted
+and unhappy Arma Senkrah, Nettie Carpenter,
+Teresina Tua&mdash;who did not become a &quot;Fiddle
+Fairy&quot; when she visited us in 1887&mdash;Leonora
+Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maud
+Powell. In Europe many years ago, I heard
+Marcella Sembrich, who, after playing the E
+Flat Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked
+up a violin and dashed off the Wieniawski Polonaise;
+these feats were followed by songs, one
+being Viardot-Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's
+D Major Mazourka. Sembrich is the blue rose
+among great singers. Gericke, Paur, Nikisch
+were at first violinists; so was Fritz Scheel, late
+conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.
+Franz Kneisel is a conductor of great
+skill; so is Frederick Stock, who followed
+Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago
+Symphony Orchestra. Theodore Spiering formerly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+concert-master of the Philharmonic orchestra
+proved himself an excellent conductor.
+But that a little Polish woman could handle
+with ease two instruments and sing like an angel
+besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine
+Morgan is an admirable violin artiste who plays
+solo as well as quartet with equal authority.</p>
+
+<p>Maud Powell has fulfilled her early promise.
+She is a mature artiste, one who will never be
+finished because she will always study, always
+improve. A Joachim pupil, she is, nevertheless,
+a pupil of Maud Powell, and her playing
+reveals breadth, musicianship, beauty of tone
+and phrasing. She is our greatest American
+violin virtuosa.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of
+the many Mischas and Jaschas who mew on
+the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in
+London: &quot;United to an amazing technical
+precision there is a still more amazing emotional
+temperament, all dominated by a powerful
+musical and mental intellect, uncanny in
+one not yet out of his teens. What need to
+add that his conception of Beethoven is neither
+as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as
+Ysaye's? Elman will mature. In the romantic
+or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His
+tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with
+many colours. He displays numberless nuances
+of feeling. The musical in him dominates the
+virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth
+asserts itself, and often, self-intoxicated, he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>
+intoxicates his audiences with his sensuous,
+compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy,
+the boisterousness of the Russian, the swift
+modulation from mad caprice to Slavic despair&mdash;Elman
+is a magician of many moods. When
+I listen to him I almost forget Ysaye.&quot; Yet
+when I heard Ysaye play last season it was
+Elman that I forgot for the moment. After
+all, a critic, too, may have his moods. And
+now comes another conqueror, the lad Jasha
+Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer
+and an artist of such extraordinary attainments
+that the greatest among contemporary violinists&mdash;is
+it necessary to mention names?&mdash;have
+said of him that his art begins where
+theirs ends, and that they will shut up shop
+when he plays here. All of which is a flattering
+tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz,
+however, may be the dark horse in the
+modern fiddle sweepstakes.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+
+<h2>RIDING THE WHIRLWIND</h2>
+
+
+<p>Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood,
+sang: &quot;Shall no new sin be born for men's
+troubles?&quot; And it was an Asiatic potentate
+who offered a prize for the discovery of a new
+pleasure. Or was it a sauce?</p>
+
+<p>Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of
+yesteryear are the commonplaces of to-day.
+Steam, telegraphy, electric motors, wireless,
+and now wireless telephony are accepted as
+a matter of course by the man in the street.
+How stale will seem woman suffrage and prohibition
+after they have conquered. In the
+world of art conditions are analogous. The
+cubist nail drove out the impressionist, and
+the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer
+is sufficiently heavy.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in
+store for those who make a first flight through
+the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether
+captive or free; in the case of the former, a
+trip to the top of the Washington Monument
+or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I
+rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks,
+or about $25, was the tariff) and saw Potsdam
+at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The
+passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+drank, even smoked. The travelling was so
+smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer
+day. No danger was to be apprehended. The
+monster air-ship left its hangar and returned to
+it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked
+the flavour of adventure. And that leads me
+to a personal confession.</p>
+
+<p>I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting
+blood, but only in the Darwinian sense am I
+a &quot;sport,&quot; a deviation from the normal history
+of my family, which has always been devoted
+to athletic pleasures. A baseball match
+in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for
+me. I can't understand the fury of the contest.
+I yawn, though the frenzied enthusiasm of the
+spectators interests me. I have fallen asleep
+over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and
+the biggest bore of all was a Sunday afternoon
+bull-fight in Madrid. It was such a waste of
+potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, shell
+races are puerile, football matches smack of
+obituaries. As for golf&mdash;that is a prelude to
+senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's
+establishment.</p>
+
+<p>The swiftness of film pictures has set a new
+metronomic standard for modern sports. I
+suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard
+is as exciting a game as any; that is, for those
+who like it. A four-voiced polyphony at a
+good gait is positively hair-raising. It beats
+poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.</p>
+
+<p>Conceive me as an elderly person of generous
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+waist measurement, slightly reckless like most
+near-sighted humans; this recklessness is psychical.
+Safety first, and I always watch my
+step; painful experience taught me years ago
+the perils that lurk in ambush for a Johnny-look-in-the-air.</p>
+
+<p>Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated
+me. The fantastic stories of H. G.
+Wells were ever a joy. When the Argonauts
+of the Air appeared, flying was practically assured,
+although a Paris mathematician had
+demonstrated with ineluctable logic that it
+was impossible; as proved a member of the
+Institute a century earlier that birds couldn't
+fly. It was an illusion. Well, the Wrights
+flew, even if Langley did not&mdash;Langley, the
+genuine father of the aeroplane.</p>
+
+<p>Living so long in France and Belgium, I had
+grown accustomed to the whirring of aerial
+motors, a sound not unlike that of a motor-boat
+or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became
+accustomed to this drone above the housetops,
+and since my return to America I have
+often wondered why in the land where the aeroplane
+first flew, so little public interest was
+manifested. To be sure, there are aero clubs,
+but they never fly where the interest of the
+greater public can be intrigued. Either there
+is a hectic excitement over some record broken
+or else the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the
+money devil at the bottom of the trouble?
+Sport for sport's sake, like art for art's sake,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>
+is rarely encountered. The government has
+taken up flying, but that is for pragmatic purposes.
+The aeroplane as a weapon of defence,
+not the aeroplane as a new and agreeable pleasure.
+We are not a disinterested nation; even
+symphony concerts and opera and the salvation
+of souls are commercial propositions. Else
+would our skies be darkened by flying machines
+instead of smoke, and our churches thronged
+with aviators.</p>
+
+<p>Walking on the famous and fatiguing Boardwalk
+of Atlantic City I suddenly heard a familiar
+buzzing in the air and looked up. There it
+was, a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragon-fly,
+speeding from the Inlet down to the million-dollar
+pier. Presently there were two of
+them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilised
+land. On the trolleys were signs: &quot;See the
+Flying Boats at the Inlet!&quot; I did, the very
+next morning. I had no notion of being a passenger.
+I was not tempted by the thought.
+But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I lounged
+down the beach to the Kendrick biplane, and
+stared my full at its slender proportions. A
+young man in a bathing-suit explained to me
+the technique of flying, and insinuated that
+hundreds and hundreds had flown during the
+season without accident. Afternoon saw me
+again on the sands, an excited witness of a
+flight; excited because I stood behind the
+motor when it was started for a preliminary
+tryout&mdash;&quot;tuning up&quot; is the slang phrase of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+the profession&mdash;and the cyclonic gale blew
+my hat away, loosened my collar, and made
+my teeth chatter.</p>
+
+<p>Such a tornadic roar! I firmly resolved that
+never would I trust myself in such a devil's
+contrivance. Why, it was actually riding the
+whirlwind&mdash;and, perhaps, reaping a watery
+grave. What else but that? On a blast of
+air you sail aloft and along. When the air
+ceases you drop (less than forty-five miles an
+hour). And this in a flimsy box kite. Never
+for me! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow
+with a crusty cottage! as we used to say in dear
+old &quot;Lunnon&quot; years ago. Nevertheless, the
+poison was in my veins; cunningly it began to
+work. I saw a passenger, a fat man, weighing
+two hundred and four pounds&mdash;I asked for
+the figures&mdash;trussed up like a calf in the arms
+of a slight, muscular youth, who carried him a
+limp burden and deposited him on a seat in
+the prow of the boat. I turned my head away.
+I am not easily stirred&mdash;having reported
+musical and theatrical happenings for a quarter
+of a century&mdash;but the sight of that stout male,
+a man and a brother (I didn't know him from
+Adam), evoked a chord of pity in my breast.
+I felt that I would never set eyes again on this
+prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the
+spot and returned to my hotel, determined to
+say, &quot;Retro me, Sathanas!&quot; if that personage
+should happen to show me his hoofs, horns,
+and hide.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>
+But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast.
+He had simply set jangling the wires of suggestion,
+and my nerves accomplished the rest.
+One morning, a few days later, I awoke parched
+with desire. I drank much strong tea to steady
+me and smoked unremittingly. Again, during
+the early afternoon, I found myself up the
+beach. &quot;My feet take hold on hell,&quot; I said to
+myself, but it was only hot sand. I teased
+myself with speculations as to whether the
+game was worth the candle&mdash;yes, I had got
+that far, traversing a vast mental territory
+between the No-Sayer and the Yes-Sayer.
+I was doomed, and I knew it when I began to
+circle about the machine.</p>
+
+<p>Courteously the bonny youth explained matters.
+It was a Glenn H. Curtiss hydro-aeroplane,
+furnished with one of the new Curtiss
+engines of ninety horse-power, capable of
+flying seventy to ninety miles an hour, of lifting
+four hundred pounds, and weighing in all
+about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut,
+skinny piano wires that manipulated the steering-gear
+and the plane durable? Didn't they
+ever snap? Of course they were durable, and,
+of course, they occasionally snapped. What
+then? Why, you drop, in spiral fashion&mdash;volplane&mdash;charming
+vocable! But if the engine?&mdash;same thing.
+You would come to earth,
+rather water, as naturally as a child takes the
+breast. Nothing to fear.</p>
+
+<p>Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic City
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>
+product&mdash;he was a professional swimmer and
+life-guard&mdash;and will look after you. The price
+is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars,
+but competition, which is said to be the life of
+trade, had operated in favour of the public.
+Rather emotionally I bade my man good day,
+promising to return for a flight the next morning,
+a promise I certainly did not mean to
+keep. This stupendous announcement he received
+coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian
+banality.</p>
+
+<p>And then I noticed that the blazing sun had
+become darkened. Was it an eclipse, or were
+some horrid, monstrous shapes like the supposititious
+spindles spoken of by Langley devouring
+the light of our parent planet? No, it was
+the chamber of my skull that was full of shadows.
+The obsession was complete. I would go up,
+but I must suffer terribly in the interim.</p>
+
+<p>Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels
+for the unwelcome privilege? I computed the
+cost of various beverages, and as a consoling
+thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the
+Western editor who, missing from his accustomed
+haunts, was later found serenely drunk,
+passionately reading to a group of miners from
+a table his lantern-illuminated speech, in which
+he denounced the cruel raw waste of grain in
+the making of bread when so many honest
+men were starving for whisky. Yet did I feel
+that I would not begrudge my hard-earned
+royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormented
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>
+between the devil of cowardice and the
+deep sea of curiosity I retired and dreamed all
+night of fighting strange birds that attacked
+me in an aeroplane.</p>
+
+<p>I shan't weary you with the further analysis
+of my soul-states during this tempestuous
+period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed much
+tea. Then I resolutely went in company with
+a friend, and we boarded an Inlet car. I had
+the day previous resorted to a major expedient
+of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my
+fluttering resolution, that I was going to fly;
+an expedient that seldom misses, for I should
+never have been able to face the chief clerk,
+the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel
+if I failed to keep my promise.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Boaster! Swaggerer!&quot; I muttered to myself
+en route. &quot;Now are you satisfied? Thou
+tremblest, carcass! Thou wouldst tremble
+much more if thou knewest whither I shall
+soon lead thee!&quot; I quoted Turenne, and I
+was beginning to babble something about
+Icarus&mdash;or was it Ph&aelig;ton, or Simon Magus?&mdash;brought
+to earth in the Colosseum by a
+prayer from the lips of Saint Peter&mdash;when we
+arrived. How I hated the corner where we
+alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister
+in the dazzling sunlight&mdash;a red-hot Saturday,
+September 11, 1915, and the hour was 10.30
+<span class="smcap">A. M.</span> A condemned criminal could not have
+noted more clearly every detail of the life he
+was about to quit. We ploughed through the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+sand. We reached the scaffold&mdash;at least it
+looked like one to me. &quot;Hello, here's a church.
+Let's go in,&quot; I felt like exclaiming in sheer desperation,
+remembering Dickens and Mr. Wemmick.
+I would have, such was my blue funk,
+quoted Holy Scripture to the sandlopers, but I
+hadn't the chance.</p>
+
+<p>I asked my friend, and my voice sounded
+steady enough, whether the wind and weather
+seemed propitious for flying. Never better
+was the reply, and my heart went down to my
+boots. I really think I should have escaped
+if a stout man with a piratical moustache hadn't
+approached me and asked: &quot;Going up to-day?&quot;
+I marvelled at his calmness, and wished
+for his instant dissolution, but I gave an affirmative
+shake of the head. Cornered at last! Handing
+my watch, hat, and wallet to my friend, I
+coldly awaited the final preparations. I had
+forgotten my ear protector, but cotton-wool
+would answer the purpose of making me partially
+deaf to the clangorous vibration of the
+propeller blades&mdash;which resemble in a magnified
+shape the innocent air-fans of offices and
+caf&eacute;s. I essayed one more joke&mdash;true gallows
+humour&mdash;before I was led like a lamb (a tough
+one) to the slaughter. I asked an attendant
+to whom I had paid the official fee if my widows
+would be refunded the money in case of accident;
+but this antique and tasteless witticism
+was indifferently received, as it deserved.
+Finally the young man gave me a raincoat,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me
+clasp his neck he carried me out into shallow
+water and sat me beside the air-pilot, who
+looked like a mere lad in his bathing-clothes.
+My hand must have been trembling (ah, that
+old piano hand), for he inquiringly eyed me.
+The motor was screaming as we flew through
+the water toward the Inlet. I hadn't courage
+of mind to make a farewell signal to my companion.
+Too late, we're off! I thought, and at
+once my trepidation vanished.</p>
+
+<p>I had for some unknown reason, possibly
+because of absolute despair, suffered a rich
+sea-change. We churned the waves. I saw
+tiny sails studding the deep blue. Men fished
+from the shore. As we neared the Inlet, where
+a shambling wooden hotel stands on the sandy
+point, the sound of the motor grew intenser.
+We began to lift, not all at once, but gradually.
+Suddenly her nose poked skyward, and
+the boat climbed the air with an ease that was
+astonishing. No shock. No jerkiness. We
+simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native
+heath&mdash;you will pardon the Hibernicism&mdash;and
+as if determined to pay a visit to the
+round blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant
+blue. And with the mounting ascent I
+became unconscious of my corporeal vesture.
+I had become pure spirit. I feared nothing.
+The legend of angels became a certainty. I
+was on the way to the Fourth Dimensional
+vista. I recalled Poincar&eacute;'s suggestion that
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
+there is no such thing as matter; only holes in
+the ether. Nature embracing a vacuum instead
+of abhorring it. A Swiss cheese universe.
+Joseph Conrad has said &quot;Man on earth is an
+unforeseen accident which does not stand close
+investigation.&quot; But man in the air? Man
+is destined to wings. Was I not proving it?
+Flying is the sport of gods, and should be of
+humans now that the motor-car is become
+slightly &quot;promiscuous.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The Inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were
+a network of silvery ribbons. The heat was
+terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But I
+no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay-fever
+problem. The wind forced me to clench
+my teeth. We were hurled along at seventy
+miles an hour, and up several thousand feet,
+yet below the land seemed near enough to
+touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts
+I wondered that we didn't graze them&mdash;so
+elusive was the crystal clearness of the atmosphere,
+a magic mirror that made the remote
+contiguous. The mast of the sunken schooner
+hard by the sand-bar looked like a lead-pencil
+one could grasp and write a message to Mars.</p>
+
+<p>Hello! I was become lyrical. It is inescapable
+up in the air. The blood seethes. Ecstasy sets
+in; the kinetic ecstasy of a spinning-top. I gazed
+at the pilot. He twisted his wheel nonchalantly
+as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over
+the sides of the cedar boat and was not giddy,
+for I had lived years at the top of an apartment-house,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>
+ten stories high, from which I daily
+viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks;
+besides, I have strong eyes and the stomach of
+a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no nausea.
+Only exaltation as we swooped down to lower
+levels. Atlantic City, bizarre, yet meaningless,
+outrageously planned and executed, stretched
+its ugly shape beneath us; the most striking
+objects were the exotic hyphenated hotel, with
+its Asiatic monoliths and dome, and its vast,
+grandiose neighbour, a mound of concrete, the
+biggest hotel in the world. The piers were
+salient silhouettes. A checker-board seemed
+the city, which modulated into a tremendous
+arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to
+stare seaward. The absorbent cotton in my
+ears was transformed into gun-cotton, so explosive
+the insistent drumming of the motor-engine.
+Otherwise, we flew on even keel, only
+an occasional dip and a sidewise swing reminding
+me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway.
+The initial intoxication began to wear
+off, but not the sense of freedom, a glorious
+freedom; truly, mankind will not be free till
+all fly.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! though we become winged we remain
+mortal. We may shed our cumbersome pedestrian
+habits, but we take up in the air with
+us our petty souls. I found myself indulging
+in very trite thoughts. What a pity that war
+should be the first to degrade this delightful
+and stimulating sport! Worse followed. Why
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>
+couldn't I own a machine? Base envy, you
+see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work.
+No use; we shall remain human even in heaven
+or hell.</p>
+
+<p>I have been asked to describe the sensation
+of flying. I can't. It seems so easy, so natural.
+If you have ever dreamed of flying, I can only
+say that your dream will be realised in an
+aeroplane. Dreams do come true sometimes.
+(Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying
+since.) But as there is an end even to the
+most tedious story, so mine must finish.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the sound of the engine ceased.
+The silence was thrilling, almost painful. And
+then in huge circles, as if we were descending
+the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came
+down, the bow of the flying boat pointing at
+an angle of forty-five degrees. Still no dizziness,
+only a sense of regret that the trip was
+so soon over. It had endured an eternity, but
+occupied precisely twenty-one minutes.</p>
+
+<p>We reached the water and settled on the
+foam like a feather. Then we churned toward
+the beach; again I was carried, this time on
+to solid land, where I had ridiculous trouble
+in getting the cotton from my harassed eardrums.
+Perhaps my hands were unsteady,
+but if they were, my feet were not.</p>
+
+<p>I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making
+record time, and drew the first happy sigh
+in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and
+twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>
+had enjoyed a new pleasure I didn't propose
+to give up the old ones. Then my nerves! And
+when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look
+him in the eye. He flew over Trieste, but I
+flew over my fears&mdash;a moral as well as a physical
+victory for a timid conservative.</p>
+<p></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>
+
+</p><h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+
+<h2>PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING</h2>
+
+<p class="small center">(From the editorial page of the New York <i>Sun</i>,
+December 31, 1916)</p>
+
+
+<p>It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray
+for the dead that they may be loosed from their
+sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs from
+the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye!
+it is those who are about to live, not to die,
+that we should salute. Life is the eternal slayer;
+death is but the final punctuation of the vital
+paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical
+conspiracy of deception encircles us. We
+call it Maya, and flatter our finite sense of
+humour that we are no longer entrapped by
+the shining appearance of things when we say
+aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle that we know
+you for what you are&mdash;the profoundest instinct
+of life: its cruel delight in pretending
+to be what it is not. We are now, all of us who
+think that we think, newly born Fausts with
+eyes unbandaged of the supreme blinders,
+Time and Space. Nature clothes the skeleton
+in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened
+ears overhear the rattling of the bones.
+We are become so wise that love itself is no
+longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religion
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>
+is first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we
+are so minded we may jig to the tune of the
+stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at
+the cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught
+succeeds like negation, and we swear that in
+the house of the undertaker it is impolite to
+speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists.
+And we believe that the devil deserves
+the hindmost.</p>
+
+<p>We live in order to forget life. For our delicate
+machinery of apperception there is no
+longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are the
+acid and alkali of existence. And as too much
+acid deranges the stomach, so vice corrodes
+the soul, and thus we are virtuous by compulsion.
+Yet we know that evil serves its purpose
+in the vast chemistry of being, and if banished
+the consequences might not be for universal
+good; other evils would follow in the train of
+a too comprehensive mitigation, and our end
+a stale swamp of vain virtues. Resist not evil!
+Which may mean the reverse of what it seems
+to preach. The master modern immoralist
+has said: Embrace evil! that we may be over
+and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory,
+goodness, wealth, health, happiness; all toys
+except health; health of the body, of the soul.
+And the first shall be last.</p>
+
+<p>The human soul in health? But there is
+no spiritual health. The mystic, Doctor Tauler,
+has said: &quot;God does not reside in a vigorous
+body&quot;; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>
+dolorous certitude that the most radiant of
+existences ends in the defeat of disease and
+death; that happiness is relative, a word empty
+of meaning in the light of experience, and non-existent
+as an absolute; that the only divine
+oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep
+the prelude to the profound and eternal silence&mdash;why
+then this gabble about soul-states and
+the peace that passeth all understanding?
+Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our
+destinies are, when dynamic, mighty breeders
+of hope; if the powers and principalities of
+darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the
+phagocytes, are dominated by the leucocytes.
+Gods and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and
+other phantasms of the sky, may all be put
+on a microscopic slide and their struggles noted.
+And the evil ones are ever victors in the diabolical
+game. No need to insist on it. In the
+heart of mankind there is a tiny shrine with
+its burning taper; the idol is Self; the propitiatory
+light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in
+vain. We succumb, and in our weakness we
+sink into the grave. If only we were sure of
+the River Styx afterward we should pay the
+ferry-tax with joy. Better Hades than the
+poppy of oblivion. &quot;Ready to be anything in
+the ecstasy of being ever,&quot; as Sir Thomas
+Browne sagely remarks.</p>
+
+<p>The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor,
+who built cathedral-like structures of English
+prose to the greater glory of God and for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>
+edification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt
+upon the efficacy of prayer in a singularly luminous
+passage: &quot;Holy prayer procures the
+ministry and services of angels. It rescinds
+the decrees of God. It cures sickness and obtains
+pardon. It arrests the sun in its course
+and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon.
+It rules over all God's creatures and opens and
+shuts the storehouses of rain. It unlocks the
+cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence
+of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles
+our sufferance and weak faculties with
+the violence of torment and sharpness of persecution.
+It pleases God and supplies all our needs.
+But prayer that can do this much for us can do
+nothing at all without holiness, for God heareth
+not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of
+God and doth His will, him He heareth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps
+the greatest English prose-master save
+John Milton, was a stickler for good works
+as well as faith. He was considered almost
+heterodox because of his violence of speech
+when the subject of death-bed repentance became
+a topic of discussion; indeed, his bishop
+remonstrated with him because of his stiff-necked
+opinions. To joust through life as at
+a pleasure tournament and when the dews of
+death dampen the forehead to call on God in
+your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine
+an act of slinking cowardice. Far better face
+the evil one in a defiant spirit than knock for
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>
+admittance at the back door of paradise and
+try to sneak by the winged policeman into a
+vulgar bliss: unwon, unhoped for, undeserved.
+Therefore the rather startling statement, &quot;God
+heareth not sinners,&quot; read in the light of Bishop
+Taylor's fervent conception of man's duty,
+hath its justification.</p>
+
+<p>But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces
+and &quot;inspissated gloom&quot; should not be
+long maintained when the coursers of the sun
+are plunging southward in the new year; when
+the Huntsman is up at Oyster Bay and &quot;they
+are already past their first sleep in Persia.&quot;
+What a bold and adventurous piece of nature
+is man; yet how he stares at life as a frowning
+entertainment. Why must we &quot;act our antipodes&quot;
+when &quot;all Africa and her prodigies are
+in us&quot;? Ergo, let us be cheerful. God is with
+the world. Let us pray that during the ensuing
+year no rust shall colour our soul into a
+dingy red. Let us pray for the living that they
+may be loosed from their politics and see life
+steadily and whole.</p>
+
+<p>Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves
+to feel holier than our neighbours. Let
+us pray that we be not cursed with the itching
+desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the
+reformer is hard, and he always gets what he
+deserves: the contempt of his fellow men. He
+is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we
+are not struck by religious zeal; religious people
+are not always good people; good people are
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span>
+not envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or
+busybodies, or too much bound up in the
+prospect of the mote in their brother's eye
+and unmindful of the beam in their own.
+Furthermore, good people do not unveil with
+uncharitable joy the faults of women. Have
+faith. Have hope, and remember that charity
+is as great as chastity.</p>
+
+<p>Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful
+of Mother Church, her wisdom, her consolations,
+flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant,
+mumbo-jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the
+sacred name as they epileptically leap, shouting
+glory-kingdom-come and please settle at the
+captain's office.</p>
+
+<p>Though they run on all fours and bark as
+hyenas, they shall not enter the city of the
+saints, being money-changers in the Temple,
+and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and
+its burning pitch than a wilderness of such
+apes of God. Some men and women of culture
+and social position indorse these sorry buffoons,
+the apology for their paradoxical conduct being
+any port in a storm; any degrading circus, so
+it be followed by a mock salvation. But salvation
+for whom? What deity cares for such
+foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion
+is silent and comes from within, and
+not to the din of brass-bands and screaming
+hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make
+the cosmos, but why return to the antics and
+fetishes of our primate ancestors, the cave-dwellers?
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>
+This squirming and panting and
+brief reform &quot;true religion&quot;? On the contrary
+it is a throwback to bestiality, to the
+vilest instincts. A &quot;soul&quot; that has to be saved
+by such means is a soul not worth the saving.
+To the discard with it, where, flaming in purgatorial
+fires, it may be refashioned for future
+reincarnation on some other planet.</p>
+
+<p>Abuse of drink is to be deplored, but Prohibition
+is more enslaving than alcohol. Paganism
+in its most exotic forms is preferable to
+this prize-ring Christianity. One may be
+zealous without wallowing in debasing superstition.
+Again, let us pray for these imbeciles
+and for the charlatans who are blinding them.
+Neither arts and sciences nor politics and philosophies
+will save the soul. The azure route
+lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of
+horn.</p>
+
+<p>Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes,
+who are still suffering from the injustice of
+Man, now some million of years. Let us pray
+that they be given the ballot to prove to them
+its utter futility as a cure-all. With it they
+shall be neither happier nor different. Once
+a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be
+deceived by illusive phrases. If they had not
+been oppressed they would to-day be &quot;free&quot;!
+Alas! free from their sex? Free from the burden
+of family? Free like men to carry on the rude
+labours of this ruder earth? To what purpose?
+To become second-rate men, when
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>
+nature has endowed them with qualities that
+men vainly emulate, vainly seek to evoke their
+spirit in the arts and literature! Ages past
+woman should have attained that impossible
+goal, oppression or no; in fact, adversity has
+made man what he is&mdash;and woman, too. Pray,
+that she may not be tempted by the mirage
+into the desert, there to perish of thirst for the
+promised land. Nearly a century ago George
+Sand was preaching the equality of the sexes,
+and rightly enough. What has come of it?
+The vote? Political office? Professions, business
+opportunities? Yes, all these things, but
+not universal happiness. Woman's sphere&mdash;stale
+phrase!&mdash;is any one she hankers after;
+but let her not deceive herself. Her future
+will strangely resemble her past.</p>
+
+<p>William Dean Howells was not wrong when
+he wrote: Woman has only her choice in self-sacrifice.
+And sometimes not even the choosing.
+Why? Why are eclipses? Why are some men
+prohibitionists? Why do hens cluck after
+laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women
+that their politically ambitious leaders may
+no longer dupe them with fallacious promises&mdash;surely
+a &quot;pathetic fallacy.&quot; But, then,
+females rush in where fools fear to tread.</p>
+
+<p>And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers,
+let us heartily pray that our imperial democracy
+(or is it a democratic empire?), our plutocratic
+republic (or should we say republican
+plutocracy?) may be kept from war; avoid
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>
+&quot;the drums and tramplings of three conquests.&quot;
+But by the Eternal Jehovah, God of battles,
+if we are forced to fight, then let us fight like
+patriotic Americans, and not gently coo, like
+pacifists and other sultry south winds. A
+billion for &quot;preparedness,&quot; but not a penny
+for &quot;pork,&quot; say we.</p>
+
+<p>And by the same token let us pray that
+those thundering humbugs and parasites who
+call themselves labour leaders&mdash;the blind leading
+the blind&mdash;for ever vanish. Because of
+their contumacious acts and egregious bamboozling
+of their victims, because of their false
+promises of an earthly paradise and a golden
+age, they deserve the harshest condemnation.</p>
+
+<p>Like certain Oriental discourses, our little
+Morality which began in the mosque has rambled
+not far from the tavern. Nevertheless,
+let us pray for the living as well as the dead.
+Oremus!</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 100%;" />
+
+
+<div class="pagewidth1">
+<div id="books_by">
+
+<div id="books_quotes">
+<h2 class="u">BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER</h2>
+
+
+
+<p><i>What some distinguished writers have said of
+them:</i></p>
+
+<p>Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: &quot;Do
+you know that 'Iconoclasts' is the only book of high
+and universal critical worth that we have had for
+years&mdash;to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It is at
+once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and
+sure.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And of &quot;Ivory Apes and Peacocks&quot; he said, among
+other things: &quot;I have marvelled at the vigilance and
+clarity with which you follow and judge the new literary
+and artistic movements in all countries. I do not
+know of criticism more pure and sure than yours.&quot;
+(October, 1915.)</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Of &quot;Visionaries&quot; Remy de Gourmont wrote, June
+22, 1906: &quot;I am convinced that you have written a
+very curious, very beautiful book, and one of that
+sort comes to us rarely.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, 1909, of
+&quot;Egoists&quot;: &quot;I have browsed through the pages of
+your book and found that you touch in a sympathetic
+style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the
+case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatment is extremely
+rare and courageous.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Dr. Georg Brandes, the versatile and profound
+Danish critic, wrote: &quot;I find your breadth of view
+and its expression more European than American; but
+the essential thing is that you are an artist to your very
+marrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+</div>
+
+<div id="other_books">
+
+
+<h3>IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS</h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Out of the depressing welter of our American writing upon
+&aelig;sthetics, with its incredible thinness and triteness and paltriness,
+its intellectual sterility, its miraculous dulness, its limitless and
+appalling vapidity, Mr. James Huneker, and the small and honorable
+minority of his peers, emerge with a conspicuousness that is
+both comforting and disgraceful.... Susceptibility, clairvoyance,
+immediacy of response, are his; he is the friend of any talent that is
+fine and strange and frank enough to incur the dislike of the mighty
+army of Bourbons, Puritans, and B&#339;otians. He is innocent of
+prepossessions. He is infinitely flexible and generous. Yet if, in
+the twenty years that we have been reading him, he has ever praised
+a commonplace talent, we have no recollection of it. His critical
+tact is well-nigh infallible.... His position among writers on
+&aelig;sthetics is anomalous and incredible: no merchant traffics in his
+heart, yet he commands a large, an eager, an affectionate public.
+Is it because he is both vivid and acute, robust yet fine-fingered,
+tolerant yet unyielding, astringent yet tender&mdash;a mellow pessimist,
+a kindly cynic? Or is it rather because he is, primarily, a temperament&mdash;dynamic,
+contagious, lovable, inveterately alive&mdash;expressing
+itself through the most transparent of the arts?&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Lawrence
+Gilman</span>, in <i>North American Review</i> (October, 1915).</p>
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+<h3>NEW COSMOPOLIS</h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a craftsman
+of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and
+distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He is
+intensely 'modern,' well read in recent European writers, and not
+lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. Ancient serenity
+has laid no chastening hand on his thought and style, but he has
+achieved at times a fineness of expression that lifts his work above
+that of the many eager and artistic souls who strive to be the thinkers
+of New England to-day. He flings off his impressions at fervent
+heat; he is not ashamed to be enthusiastic; and he cannot escape
+that large sentimentality which, to less disciplined transatlantic
+writers, is known nakedly as 'heart interest.' Out of his chaos
+of reading and observation he has, however, evolved a criticism of
+life that makes for intellectual cultivation, although it is of a Bohemian
+rather than an academic kind. Given a different environment,
+another training, Mr. Huneker might have emerged as an
+American Walter Pater.&quot;&mdash;<i>London Athen&aelig;um</i> (November 6, 1915).</p>
+
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+<h3>MELOMANIACS</h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase.
+Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts,
+not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and
+obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually
+playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from
+intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a
+method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written
+over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical
+imagination is a living spring of thought.&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Harold
+E. Gorst</span>, in <i>London Saturday Review</i> (Dec. 8,1906).</p>
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+
+<h3>VISIONARIES</h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy
+and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most
+unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has
+cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds
+no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering, and unblessed.
+But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with
+a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories.&quot;&mdash;<i>London
+Academy</i> (Feb. 3, 1906).</p>
+
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+<h3>ICONOCLASTS:<br />
+<span class="line2">A Book of Dramatists</span></h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which
+we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence.&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">G.
+K. Chesterton</span>, in <i>London Daily News</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+
+<h3>MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN
+MUSIC</h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the
+music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words
+as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping
+strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And
+as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of
+quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and temperament&mdash;a
+string that vibrates and sings in response to music&mdash;we
+get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable
+contribution to the world's tiny musical literature.&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">J.
+F. Runciman</span>, in <i>London Saturday Review</i>.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+<h3>FRANZ LISZT<br />
+
+<span class="with"><i>WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS</i></span></h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $2.00 net</p>
+
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+<h3>CHOPIN: <span class="line2">The Man and His Music</span></h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $2.00 net</p>
+
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+<h3>OVERTONES:<br />
+<span class="line2">A Book of Temperaments</span><br />
+
+<span class="with"><i>WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS</i></span></h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most
+brilliant of all living writers on matters musical.&quot;&mdash;<i>Academy,
+London</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+
+<h3>THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE<br />
+
+<span class="line2">A Book of a Thousand and One Moments</span></h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $2.00 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He talks about Bergson as well as Matisse; he never can keep
+still about Wagner; he hauls over his French library of modern
+immortals, and he gives a touch to George Moore, to Arthur Davies,
+and to many another valiant worker in paint, music, and letters.
+The book is stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected brilliancy.&quot;&mdash;<i>Chicago
+Tribune</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+
+<h3>PROMENADES OF AN
+IMPRESSIONIST</h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the
+technical contributions of C&eacute;zanne and Rodin. Here Mr. Huneker
+is a real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways
+in art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such
+appreciations as the Monticelli and Chardin.&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Frank Jewett
+Mather, Jr.</span>, in <i>New York Nation</i> and <i>Evening Post</i>.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="m" />
+
+
+<h3>EGOISTS<br />
+
+<span class="with"><i>WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS</i></span></h3>
+
+<p class="center">12mo. $1.50 net</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as
+a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very shrewd.&quot;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Royal
+Cortissoz</span>, in the <i>New York Tribune</i>.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK</h3>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div  id="tnotes_full" class="tnote">
+<h2>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES</h2>
+
+
+<p>The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the
+exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also
+inconsistently spelled words.</p>
+
+<p>The full list of changes to the text is as following:</p>
+
+
+<ul>
+<li><a name="ftnote1" id="ftnote1" href="#tnote1">p. 10</a>:
+<em>Lizst</em> changed to <em>Liszt</em></li>
+
+<li><a name="ftnote2" id="ftnote2" href="#tnote2">p. 24</a>:
+<em>Henri de Regnier</em> changed to <em>Henri de Régnier</em></li>
+
+<li><a name="ftnote3" id="ftnote3" href="#tnote3">p. 40</a>:
+<em>immediable</em> changed to <em>irremediable</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote4" id="ftnote4" href="#tnote4">p. 66</a>:
+<em>Maurice Barres</em> changed to <em>Maurice Barr&egrave;s</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote5" id="ftnote5" href="#tnote5">p. 77</a>:
+<em>idylic</em> changed to <em>idyllic</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote6" id="ftnote6" href="#tnote6">p. 83</a>:
+<em>(Consider</em> changed to <em>Consider</em><br />
+Explanation: the opening bracket (with no corresponding closing
+bracket) was removed.</li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote7" id="ftnote7" href="#tnote7">p. 108</a>:
+<em>hippogrifs</em> changed to <em>hippogriffs</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote8" id="ftnote8" href="#tnote8">p. 112</a>:
+<em>misanthrophy</em> changed to <em>misanthropy</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote9" id="ftnote9" href="#tnote9">p. 116</a>:
+<em>Huysman's</em> changed to <em>Huysmans's</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote10" id="ftnote10" href="#tnote10">p. 117</a>, <a name="ftnote10b" id="ftnote10b" href="#tnote10b">p. 276</a>:
+<em>Barbey d'Aurevilly</em> changed to <em>Barbey d'Aurévilly</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote11" id="ftnote11" href="#tnote11">p. 127</a>:
+<em>promegranates</em> changed to <em>pomegranates</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote13" id="ftnote13" href="#tnote13">p. 133</a>:
+<em>Musica</em> changed to <em>Musical</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote14" id="ftnote14" href="#tnote14">p. 156</a>:
+<em>Cujol</em> changed to <em>Cajal</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote15" id="ftnote15" href="#tnote15">p. 165</a>:
+<em>Facino Cano</em> changed to <em>Facino Cane</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote16" id="ftnote16" href="#tnote16">p. 168</a>:
+<em>Frederic Chopin</em> changed to <em>Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric Chopin</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote18" id="ftnote18" href="#tnote18">p. 244</a>:
+<em>I'm a Social-Democrat now.</em> changed to <em>"I'm a Social-Democrat now.</em><br />
+Explanation: opening double quote added.</li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote17" id="ftnote17" href="#tnote17">p. 246</a>:
+<em>sich</em> changed to <em>such</em></li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote19" id="ftnote19" href="#tnote19">p. 246</a>:
+<em>exclaims Maeterlinck," yet</em> changed to <em>exclaims Maeterlinck, "yet</em><br />
+Explanation: the double quote was moved to the next sentence.</li>
+
+
+<li><a name="ftnote20" id="ftnote20" href="#tnote20">p. 327</a>:
+<em>De Beriot</em> changed to <em>De Bériot</em></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<p>Please note that the text contains inconsistently spelled words or
+phrases that were not changed. The following is a list of those
+words. The number in brackets denotes the number of occurences of
+each such word or phrase.</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Cafe (1), Café (1)</li>
+<li>Eugene Ysaye (1), Eugène Ysaye (1)</li>
+<li>Karl Heymann (1), Carl Heyman (1)</li>
+<li>Trocadero (1), Trocadéro (2)</li>
+<li>bird-like (1), birdlike (1)</li>
+<li>bric-à-brac (1), bric-a-brac (1)</li>
+<li>free-will (1), free will (1)</li>
+<li>rusé (1), ruse (1)</li>
+<li>shadow-land (1), shadow land (1)</li>
+</ul>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNICORNS ***
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/39116.txt b/39116.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0bf3b79
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39116.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9233 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Unicorns
+
+Author: James Huneker
+
+Release Date: March 12, 2012 [EBook #39116]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNICORNS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Ewa "czupirek" Jaros and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the
+exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also
+inconsistently spelled words. The full list of both changes to the
+text and the inconsistencies in spelling can be found at the end of
+this file.
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
+
+PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+     UNICORNS. 12mo, _net_, $1.75
+
+     IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     NEW COSMOPOLIS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE. 12mo, _net_, $2.00
+
+     FRANZ LISZT. Illustrated. 12mo, _net_, $2.00
+
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+
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+
+     ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     OVERTONES: A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC. 12mo, _net_, $1.50
+
+     CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC. With Portrait. 12mo, _net_, $2.00
+
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+
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+
+
+
+
+                UNICORNS
+
+
+
+
+                UNICORNS
+
+                   BY
+
+             JAMES HUNEKER
+
+
+    "I would write on the lintels
+      of the door-post, 'Whim.'"
+                          --_Emerson_
+
+
+                NEW YORK
+
+        CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+                  1917
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, by
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+  Published September, 1917
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY THE NEW YORK HERALD COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY THE RIDGEWAY COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1911, 1916, 1917, BY THE SUN PRINTING AND
+        PUBLISHING CO.
+  COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1915, 1916, BY PUCK PUBLISHING CO.
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY NORTH AMERICAN
+  COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL
+
+
+
+
+  THIS BOOK
+  OF SPLEEN AND GOSSIP IS INSCRIBED
+  TO MY FRIEND
+  EDWARD ZIEGLER
+
+
+                            "Come! let us lay a crazy lance in rest
+                            And tilt at windmills under a wild sky."
+                                                  --_John Galsworthy._
+
+
+    "He is a fribble, a sonsy faddle, whose conceits veer with the
+    breeze like a creaking weather-vane. As the sterile moon hath
+    her librations, so must he boast of his oscillations, thinking
+    them eternal verities. A very cockatoo in his perched-up vanity
+    and prodigious clatter...."
+                                [_From "The Velvet Cactus." Anonymous.
+                                  Printed at the Sign of the Cat and
+                                  Cameo, Threadneedle Street, London.
+                                  A.D. 1723. Rare._]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                         PAGE
+
+      I. IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS                                       1
+
+     II. AN AMERICAN COMPOSER: THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL       6
+
+    III. REMY DE GOURMONT: HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND        18
+
+     IV. ARTZIBASHEF                                                33
+
+      V. A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES                                      53
+
+     VI. GEORGE SAND                                                67
+
+    VII. THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL                                   82
+
+   VIII. THE CASE OF PAUL CEZANNE                                   96
+
+     IX. BRAHMSODY                                                 106
+
+      X. THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS                            111
+
+     XI. STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE                         121
+
+    XII. THE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLD                            139
+
+   XIII. ON REREADING MALLOCK                                      151
+
+    XIV. THE LOST MASTER                                           161
+
+     XV. THE GRAND MANNER IN PIANOFORTE PLAYING                    171
+
+     XVI. JAMES JOYCE                                              187
+
+    XVII. CREATIVE INVOLUTION                                      195
+
+   XVIII. FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS                                  203
+
+     XIX. O. W.                                                    212
+
+      XX. A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS                            218
+
+     XXI. THE CLASSIC CHOPIN                                       228
+
+    XXII. LITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITY                              241
+
+   XXIII. THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE                          261
+
+    XXIV. PILLOWLAND                                               277
+
+     XXV. CROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE               283
+
+    XXVI. MORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNER                                300
+
+   XXVII. MY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTURE                               317
+
+  XXVIII. VIOLINISTS NOW AND YESTERYEAR                            323
+
+    XXIX. RIDING THE WHIRLWIND                                     339
+
+     XXX. PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING                                   353
+
+
+
+
+UNICORNS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS
+
+    "The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
+    The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town." ...
+
+
+In the golden book of wit and wisdom, Through the Looking-Glass, the
+Unicorn rather disdainfully remarks that he had believed children to
+be fabulous monsters. Alice smilingly retorts: "Do you know, I
+always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one
+alive before!" "Well, now that we _have_ seen each other," said the
+Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a
+bargain?" "Yes, if you like," said Alice. No such ambiguous bargains
+are needed to demonstrate the existence of Unicorns. That is, not
+for imaginative people. A mythical monster, a heraldic animal, he
+figures in the dictionary as the Monoceros, habitat, India; and he
+is the biblical Urus, sporting one horn, a goat beard and a lion's
+tail. He may be all these things for practical persons; no man is a
+genius to his wife. But maugre that he is something more for
+dreamers of dreams; though not the Hippogriff, with its liberating
+wings, volplaning through the Fourth Dimension of Space; nor yet is
+he tender Undine, spirit of fountains, of whom the Unicorn asked:
+"By the waters of what valley has jealous mankind hidden the source
+of your secrets?" (Cousin german to the Centaur of Maurice de
+Guerin, he can speak in like cadence.)
+
+Alice with her "dreaming eyes of wonder" was, after the manner of
+little girls, somewhat pragmatic. She believed in Unicorns only when
+she saw one. Yet we must believe without such proof. Has not the
+Book of Job put this question: "Canst thou bind the Unicorn with his
+band in the furrow?" As if a harnessed Unicorn would be credible. We
+prefer placing the charming monster, with the prancing tiny hoofs of
+ivory (surely Chopin set him to musical notation in his capricious
+second Etude in F; Chopin who, if man were soulless, would have
+endowed him with one) in the same category as the Chimera of "The
+Temptation of St. Antony," which thus taunted the Sphinx: "I am
+light and joyous! I offer to the eyes of men dazzling perspectives
+with Paradise in the clouds above.... I seek for new perfumes, for
+vaster flowers, for pleasures never felt before...."
+
+With Unicorns we feel the nostalgia of the infinite, the sorcery of
+dolls, the salt of sex, the vertigo of them that skirt the edge of
+perilous ravines, or straddle the rim of finer issues. He dwells in
+equivocal twilights; and he can stare the sun out of countenance.
+The enchanting Unicorn boasts no favoured zone. He runs around the
+globe. He is of all ages and climes. He knows that fantastic land of
+Gautier, which contains all the divine lost landscapes ever painted,
+and whose inhabitants are the lovely figures created by art in
+granite, marble, or wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Betimes he
+flashes by the nymph in the brake, and dazzled, she sighs with
+desire. Mallarme set him to cryptic harmonies, and placed him in a
+dim rich forest (though he called him a faun; a faun in retorsion).
+Like the apocryphal Sadhuzag in Flaubert's cosmical drama of dreams,
+which bore seventy-four hollow antlers from which issued music of
+ineffable sweetness, our Unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those
+who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets. When angered he
+echoes the Seven Thunders of the Apocalypse, and we hear of
+desperate rumours of fire, flood, and disaster. And he haunts those
+ivory gates of sleep whence come ineffable dreams to mortals.
+
+He has always fought with the Lion for the crown, and he is always
+defeated, but invariably claims the victory. The crown is Art, and
+the Lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by its glitter,
+not the symbol. The Unicorn, an idealist, divines the inner meaning
+of this precious fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher's
+stone, and the most brilliant jewel in this much-contested crown.
+Eternal is the conflict of the Real and the Ideal; Aristotle and
+Plato; Alice and the Unicorn; the practical and the poetic;
+butterflies and geese; and rare roast-beef versus the impossible
+blue rose. And neither the Lion nor the Unicorn has yet fought the
+battle decisive. Perhaps the day may come when, weariness invading
+their very bones, they may realise that they are as different sides
+of the same coveted shield; matter and spirit, the multitude and the
+individual. Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish the tyrannies of
+superannuated superstitions, and give the people vision, without
+which they perish. The divine rights of humanity, no longer of
+kingly cabbages.
+
+The dusk of the future is washed with the silver of hope. The Lion
+and the Unicorn in single yoke. Strength and Beauty should represent
+the fusion of the Ideal and the Real. There should be no anarchy, no
+socialism, no Brotherhood or Sisterhood of mankind, just the
+millennium of sense and sentiment. What title shall we give that
+far-away time, that longed-for Utopia? With Alice and the Faun we
+forget names, so let us follow her method when in doubt, and
+exclaim: "Here then! Here then!" Morose and disillusioned souls may
+cry aloud: "Ah! to see behind us no longer, on the Lake of Eternity,
+the implacable Wake of Time!" nevertheless, we must believe in the
+reality of our Unicorn. He is Pan. He is Puck. He is Shelley. He is
+Ariel. He is Whim. He is Irony. And he can boast with Emerson:
+
+    "I am owner of the sphere,
+    Of the seven stars and the solar year,
+    Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain,
+    Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+AN AMERICAN COMPOSER
+
+THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL
+
+
+Whom the gods love----!
+
+Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica may recall the last
+movement, in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on
+tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief of MacDowell that
+nothing is more sublimely awful than "to heighten the darkness of
+tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph." This
+he accomplished in his first sonata, and fate has ironically
+transposed to the life of its composer the cruel and tragic drama of
+his own music. Despite occasional days brightened by a flitting
+hope, the passing of Edward MacDowell has begun. He is no longer an
+earth-dweller. His body is here, but his brain elsewhere. Not mad,
+not melancholy, not sunken in the stupor of indifference, his mind
+is translated to a region where serenity, even happiness, dwells.
+It is doubtless the temporary arrest of the dread mental malady
+before it plunges its victims into darkness. Luckily, with the
+advent of that last phase, the body will also succumb, and the most
+poetic composer of music in America be for us but a fragrant memory.
+
+Irony is a much-abused word, yet does it not seem the very summit of
+pitiless irony for a man of MacDowell's musical and intellectual
+equipment and physical health to be stricken down at the moment
+when, after the hard study of twenty-five years, he has, as the
+expression goes, found himself? And the gods were good to him--too
+good.
+
+At his cradle poetry and music presided. He was a born tone-poet. He
+had also the painter's eye and the interior vision of the seer. A
+mystic and a realist. The practical side of his nature was shown by
+his easy grasp of the technics of pianoforte-playing. He had a
+large, muscular hand, with a formidable grip on the keyboard. Much
+has been said of the idealist MacDowell, but this young man, who had
+in his veins Scotch, Irish, and English blood, loved athletic
+sports; loved, like Hazlitt, a fast and furious boxing-match. The
+call of his soul won him for music and poetry. Otherwise he could
+have been a sea-captain, a soldier, or an explorer in far-away
+countries. He had the physique; he had the big, manly spirit. We are
+grateful, selfishly grateful, considering his life's tragedy, that
+he became a composer.
+
+Here, again, in all this abounding vitality, the irony of the skies
+is manifest. Never a dissipated man, without a touch of the
+improvidence we ascribe to genius, a practical moralist--rare in any
+social condition--moderate in his tastes, though not a Puritan, he
+nevertheless has been mowed down by the ruthless reaper of souls as
+if his were negligible clay. But he was reckless of the most
+precious part of him, his brain. He killed that organ by overwork.
+Not for gain--the money-getting ideal and this man were widely
+asunder--but for the love of teaching, for the love of sharing with
+others the treasures in his overflowing storehouse, and primarily
+for the love of music. He, American as he was--it is sad to speak of
+him in the past tense--and in these piping days of the pursuit of
+the gold piece, held steadfast to his art. He attempted to do what
+others have failed in, he attempted to lead, here in our huge, noisy
+city, antipathetic to aesthetic creation, the double existence of a
+composer and a pedagogue. He burned away the delicate neurons of the
+cortical cells, and to-day he cannot say "pianoforte" without a
+trial. He suffers from aphasia, and locomotor ataxia has begun to
+manifest itself. It would be tragedy in the household of any man; it
+is doubly so in the case of Edward MacDowell.
+
+He has just passed forty-five years and there are to his credit some
+sixty works, about one hundred and thirty-two compositions in all.
+These include essays in every form, except music-drama--symphonic
+and lyric, concertos and sonatas for piano, little piano pieces of
+delicate workmanship, charged with poetic meanings, suites for
+orchestra and a romance for violoncello, with orchestral
+accompaniment. As a boy of fifteen MacDowell went to the Paris
+Conservatoire, there entering the piano classes of Marmontel. It was
+in 1876. Two years later I saw him at the same institution and later
+in comparing notes we discovered that we had both attended a concert
+at the Trocadero, wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant brother
+of Anton, played the B flat minor concerto of a youthful and unknown
+composer, Peter Illyitch Tschaikovsky by name. This same concerto
+had been introduced to America in 1876 by Hans von Buelow, to whom it
+is dedicated. Rubinstein's playing took hold of young MacDowell's
+imagination. He saw there was no chance of mastering such a
+torrential style in Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany. He had
+enjoyed lessons from Teresa Carreno, but the beautiful Venezuelan
+was not then the virtuosa of to-day.
+
+So MacDowell, who was accompanied by his mother, a sage woman and
+deeply in sympathy with her son's aims, went to Frankfort, where he
+had the benefit of Karl Heymann's tuition. He was the only pianist I
+ever heard who could be compared to our Rafael Joseffy. But his
+influences, while marked in the development of his American pupil,
+did not weaken MacDowell's individuality. Studies in composition
+under Joachim Raff followed, and then he journeyed to Weimar for his
+baptism of fire at the hands of Liszt. That genial Prospero had
+broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted himself to the culture of
+youthful genius and his own compositions. He was pleased by the
+force, the surety, the brilliancy and the poetic qualities of
+MacDowell's playing, and he laughingly warned Eugen d'Albert to look
+to his laurels. But music was in the very bones of MacDowell, and a
+purely virtuoso career had no attraction for him. He married in 1884
+Marian Nevins, of New York, herself a pianist and a devoted
+propagandist of his music. The pair settled in Wiesbaden, and it was
+the happiest period of MacDowell's career. He taught; he played as
+"guest" in various German cities; above all, he composed. His entire
+evolution is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic
+monograph. It was in Wiesbaden that he laid the foundation of his
+solid technique as a composer.
+
+I once asked him during one of our meetings how he had summoned the
+courage to leave such congenial surroundings. In that half-smiling,
+half-shy way of his, so full of charm and naivete, he told me his
+house had burned down and he had resolved to return home and make
+enough money to build another. He came to America in 1888 and found
+himself, if not famous, at least well known. To Frank van der
+Stucken belongs the glory of having launched the young composer, and
+so long ago as 1886 in the old Chickering Hall. Some would like to
+point to the fact that America was MacDowell's artistic undoing, but
+the truth is against them. As a matter of musical history he
+accomplished his best work in the United States, principally on his
+farm at Peterboro, N. H.--hardly, one would imagine, artistic soil
+for such a dreamer in tones. But life has a way of contradicting our
+theories. Teaching, I have learned, was not pursued to excess by
+MacDowell, who had settled in Boston. Yet I wish there were
+sumptuary legislation for such cases. Why should an artist like
+MacDowell have been forced into the shafts of dull routine? It is
+the larger selfishness, all this, but I cling to it. MacDowell
+belonged to the public. Joseffy belongs to the public. They
+doubtless did and do much good as teachers, but the public is the
+loser. Besides, if MacDowell, who was a virtuoso had confined
+himself to recitals he might not----
+
+Alas! all this is bootless imagining. He launched himself with his
+usual unselfishness into the advancement of his scholars, and when
+in 1896 he was called to the chair of music at Columbia the
+remaining seven years of his incumbency he gave up absolutely to his
+classes. A sabbatical year intervened. He went to Switzerland for a
+rest. Then he made a tour of the West, a triumphal tour; and later
+followed the regrettable difference with Columbia. He resigned in
+1904, and I doubt if he had had a happy day since--that is, until
+the wave of forgetfulness came over him and blotted out all
+recollections.
+
+As a pianist I may only quote what Rafael Joseffy once said to me
+after a performance of the MacDowell D minor concerto by its
+composer: "What's the use of a poor pianist trying to compete with a
+fellow who writes his own music and then plays it the way MacDowell
+does?" It was said jestingly, but, as usual, when Joseffy opens his
+mouth there is a grain of wisdom in the speech. MacDowell's French
+training showed in his "pianism" in the velocity, clarity, and
+pearly quality of his scales and trills. He had the elegance of the
+salon player; he knew the traditions. But he was modern, German and
+Slavic in his combined musical interpretation and fiery attack. His
+tone was large; at times it was brutal. This pianist did not shine
+in a small hall. He needed space, as do his later compositions.
+There was something both noble and elemental in the performance of
+his own sonatas. At his instrument his air of preoccupation, his
+fine poetic head, the lines of which were admirably salient on the
+concert stage, and his passion in execution were notable details in
+the harmonious picture. Like Liszt, MacDowell and his Steinway were
+as the rider and his steed. They seemed inseparable. Under the
+batons of Nikisch, Gericke, Paur, and Seidl we heard him, and for
+once at least the critics were unanimous.
+
+When I first studied the MacDowell music I called the composer "a
+belated Romantic." A Romantic he is by temperament, while his
+training under Raff further accentuated that tendency. It is a
+dangerous matter to make predictions of a contemporary composer, yet
+a danger critically courted in these times of rapid-fire judgments.
+I have been a sinner myself, and am still unregenerate, for if it be
+sinful to judge hastily in the affirmative, by the same token it is
+quite as grave an error to judge hastily in the negative. So I shall
+dare the possible contempt of the succeeding critical generation,
+which I expect--and hope--will not calmly reverse our dearest
+predictions, and range myself on the side of MacDowell. And with
+this reservation; I called him the most poetic composer of America.
+He would be a poetic composer in any land; yet it seems to me that
+his greatest, because his most individual, work is to be found in
+his four piano sonatas. I am always subdued by the charm of his
+songs; but he did not find his fullest expression in his lyrics.
+
+The words seemed to hamper the bold wing strokes of his inspiration.
+He did not go far enough in his orchestral work to warrant our
+saying: "Here is something new!" He shows the influence of Wagner
+slightly, of Grieg, of Raff, of Liszt, in his first Orchestral
+Suite, his Hamlet and Ophelia, Launcelot and Elaine; The Saracens
+and Lovely Alda, the Indian Suite, and in the two concertos. The
+form is still struggling to emerge from the bonds of the
+Romantics--of classic influence there is little trace. But the
+general effect is fragmentary. It is not the real MacDowell,
+notwithstanding the mastery of technical material, the genuine
+feeling for orchestral colour, which is natural, not studied. There
+are poetic moods--MacDowell is always a poet--yet no path-breaker.
+Indeed, he seemed as if hesitating. I remember how we discussed
+Brahms, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. The former he admired as
+a master builder; the latter piqued his curiosity tremendously,
+particularly Also Sprach Zarathustra. I think that Tschaikovsky made
+the deepest appeal, though he said that the Russian's music sounded
+better than it was. Grieg he admired, but Grieg could never have
+drawn the long musical line we find in the MacDowell sonatas.
+
+The fate of intermediate types is inevitable. Music is an art of
+specialisation: the Wagner music-drama, Chopin piano music, Schubert
+songs, Beethoven symphony, Liszt symphonic poems, and Richard
+Strauss tone-poems, all these are unique. MacDowell has invented
+many lovely melodies. That the Indian duet for orchestra, the
+Woodland Sketches, New England Idyls, the Sea Pieces--To the Sea is
+a wonderful transcription of the mystery, and the salt and savour of
+the ocean--will have a long life, but not as long as the piano
+sonatas. By them he will stand or fall. MacDowell never goes
+chromatically mad on his harmonic tripod, nor does he tear passion
+to tatters in his search of the dramatic. If he recalls any English
+poet it is Keats, and like Keats he is simple and sensuous in his
+imagery, and a lover of true romance; not the sham ecstasies of mock
+mediaeval romance, but that deep and tender sentiment which we
+encounter in the poetry of Keats--in the magic of a moon half veiled
+by flying clouds; in the mystery and scent of old and tangled
+gardens. I should call MacDowell a landscape-painter had I not heard
+his sonata music. Those sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse, and
+Keltic, with their broad, coloured narrative, ballad-like tone,
+their heroic and chivalric accents, epic passion, and feminine
+tenderness. The psychology is simple if you set this music against
+that of Strauss, of Loeffler, or of Debussy.
+
+But it is noble, noble as the soul of the man who conceived it.
+Elastic in form, orchestral in idea, these sonatas--which are looser
+spun in the web than Liszt's--will keep alive the name of MacDowell.
+This statement must not be considered as evidence that I fail to
+enjoy his other work. I do enjoy much of it, especially the Indian
+Orchestral Suite; but the sonatas stir the blood, above all the
+imagination. When the Tragica appeared I did not dream of three such
+successors. Now I like best the Keltic, with its dark magic and its
+tales of Deirdre and the "great Cuchullin." This fourth sonata is as
+Keltic as the combined poetic forces of the neo-Celtic renascence in
+Ireland.
+
+I believe MacDowell, when so sorely stricken, was at the parting of
+the ways. He spoke vaguely to me of studies for new symphonic works,
+presumably in the symphonic-poem form of Liszt. He would have always
+remained the poet, and perhaps have pushed to newer scenes, but,
+like Schumann, Donizetti, Smetana and Hugo Wolf, his brain gave way
+under the strain of intense study. The composition of music involves
+and taxes all the higher cerebral centres.
+
+The privilege was accorded me of visiting the sick man at his hotel
+several weeks ago, and I am glad I saw him, for his appearance
+dissipated the painful impression I had conjured up. Our interview,
+brief as it was, became the reverse of morbid or unpleasant before
+it terminated. With his mental disintegration sunny youth has
+returned to the composer. In snowy white, he looks not more than
+twenty-five years old, until you note the grey in his thick,
+rebellious locks. There is still gold in his moustache and his eyes
+are luminously blue. His expression suggests a spirit purged of all
+grossness waiting for the summons. He smiles, but not as a madman;
+he talks hesitatingly, but never babbles. There is continuity in his
+ideas for minutes. Sometimes the word fits the idea; oftener he uses
+one foreign to his meaning. His wife, of whose devotion, almost
+poignant in its earnestness, it would be too sad to dwell upon, is
+his faithful interpreter. He moves with difficulty. He plays
+dominoes, but seldom goes to the keyboard. He reads slowly and, like
+the unfortunate Friedrich Nietzsche, he rereads one page many times.
+I could not help recalling what Mrs. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche
+told me in Weimar of her brother. One day, noticing that she
+silently wept, the poet-philosopher exclaimed:
+
+"But why do you weep, little sister? Are we not very happy?"
+
+MacDowell is very happy and his wife is braver than Nietzsche's
+sister. One fragment of his conversation I recall. With glowing
+countenance he spoke of the thunderbolt in his wonderfully realistic
+piano poem, The Eagle. There had been a lightning-storm during the
+afternoon. Then he told me how he had found water by means of the
+hazel wand on his New Hampshire farm--a real happening. As I went
+away I could not help remembering that the final words I should ever
+hear uttered by this friend were of bright fire and running water
+and dream-music.
+
+    [The above appeared in the New York _Herald_, June 24, 1906,
+    and is reprinted by request. Edward MacDowell died January 23,
+    1908.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+REMY DE GOURMONT
+
+HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND
+
+     "Je dis ce que je pense"--R. DE G.
+
+
+I
+
+Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar
+yellow cover a new book, with card enclosed from "Remy de Gourmont,
+71, rue des Saints-Peres, Paris." Sometimes I received as many as
+two in a year. But they always found me eager and grateful, did
+those precious little volumes bearing the imprint of the _Mercure de
+France_, with whose history the name of De Gourmont is so happily
+linked. And there were post-cards too in his delicate handwriting on
+which were traced sense and sentiment; yes, this man of genius
+possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality. His personal charm
+transpired in a friendly salutation hastily pencilled. He played
+exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument, and knew the value of
+time and space. So his post-cards are souvenirs of his courtesy, and
+it was through one, which unexpectedly fell from the sky in 1897, I
+began my friendship with this distinguished French critic. His
+sudden death in 1915 at Paris (he was born 1858), caused by
+apoplexy, was the heroic ending of a man of letters. Like Flaubert
+he was stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no more fitting
+end for a valiant soldier of literature. He was a moral hero and the
+victim of his prolonged technical heroism.
+
+De Gourmont was incomparable. Thought, not action, was his chosen
+sphere, but ranging up and down the vague and vast territory of
+ideas he encountered countless cerebral adventures; the most
+dangerous of all. An aristocrat born, he was, nevertheless, a
+convinced democrat. The latch was always lifted on the front door of
+his ivory tower. He did live in a certain sense a cloistered
+existence, a Benedictine of arts and letters; but he was not, as has
+been said, a sour hermit nursing morose fancies in solitude. De
+Gourmont, true pagan, enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had,
+despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean soul. But of a
+complexity. He never sympathised with the disproportionate fuss
+raised by the metaphysicians about Instinct and Intelligence, yet
+his own magnificent cerebral apparatus was a battle-field over which
+swept the opposing hosts of Instinct and Intelligence, and in a
+half-hundred volumes the history of this conflict is faithfully set
+down. As personal as Maurice Barres, without his egoism, as subtle
+as Anatole France, De Gourmont saw life steadier and broader than
+either of these two contemporaries. He was one who said "vast things
+simply." He was the profoundest philosopher of the three, and never,
+after his beginnings, exhibited a trace of the dilettante. Life soon
+became something more than a mere spectacle for him. He was a
+meliorist in theory and practice, though he asserted that
+Christianity, an Oriental-born religion, has not become spiritually
+acclimated among Occidental peoples. But he missed its consoling
+function; religion, the poetry of the poor, never had for him the
+prime significance that it had for William James; a legend, vague,
+vast, and delicious.
+
+Old frontiers have disappeared in science and art and literature. We
+have Maeterlinck, a poet writing of bees, Poincare, a mathematician
+opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space; solid matters
+resolved into mist, and the law of gravitation questioned. The new
+horizons beckon ardent youth bent on conquering the secrets of life.
+And there are more false beacon-lights than true. But if this is an
+age of specialists a man occasionally emerges who contradicts the
+formula. De Gourmont was at base a poet; also a dramatist, novelist,
+raconteur, man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and,
+lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering were his
+accomplishments. He is a poet in his Hieroglyphes, Oraisons
+mauvaises, Le Livre des Litanies, Les Saintes du Paradis, Simone,
+Divertissements--his last appearance in singing robes (1914); he is
+a raconteur--and such tales--in Histoires magiques, Prose moroses,
+Le Pelerin du silence, D'un Pays lointain, Couleurs; a novelist in
+Merlette--his first book--Sixtine, Le Fantome, les Chevaux de
+Diomede, Le Songe d'une Femme, Une Nuit au Luxembourg, Un C[oe]ur
+virginal; dramatist in Theodat, Phenissa, Le vieux Roi, Lilith; as
+master critic of the aesthetics of the French language his supremacy
+is indisputable; it is hardly necessary to refer here to Le Livre
+des Masques, in two volumes, the five volumes of Promenades
+litteraires, the three of Promenades philosophiques; as moralist he
+has signed such works as l'Idealisme, La Culture des Idees, Le
+Chemin de Velours; historian and humanist, he has given us Le Latin
+mystique; grammarian and philologist, he displays his learning in Le
+Probleme du Style, and Esthetique de la Langue francaise, and
+incidentally flays an unhappy pedagogue who proposed to impart the
+secret of style in twenty lessons. He edited many classics of French
+literature.
+
+His chief contribution to science, apart from his botanical and
+entomological researches, is Physique de l'Amour, in which he
+reveals himself as a patient, thorough observer in an almost new
+country. And what shall we say to his incursions into the actual,
+into the field of politics, sociology and hourly happenings of Paris
+life; his Epilogues (three volumes), Dialogues des Amateurs, the
+collected pages from his monthly contributions to _Mercure de
+France_? Nothing human was alien to him, nor inhuman, for he
+rejected as quite meaningless the latter vocable, as he rejected
+such cliches as "organic and inorganic." Years before we heard of a
+pluralistic universe De Gourmont was a pragmatist, though an
+idealist in his conception of the world as a personal picture.
+Intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words, he might have
+fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that some one would write a History of
+Ideas. At the time of his death the French thinker was composing a
+work entitled La Physique des M[oe]urs, in which he contemplated a
+demonstration of his law of intellectual constancy.
+
+A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was like most Frenchmen an ardent
+patriot. The little squabble in the early eighties over a skit of
+his, Le Jou-jou--patriotisme (1883), cost him his post at the
+National Library in Paris. As a philosopher he deprecated war; as a
+man, though too old to fight, he urged his countrymen to victory, as
+may be noted in his last book, Pendant l'Orage (1916). But the
+philosopher persists in such a sorrowful sentence as: "In the
+tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte." To show his mental
+balance at a time when literary men, artists, and even philosophers,
+indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Jugements his calm admission
+that the war has not destroyed for him the intellectual values of
+Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He owes much to their thought as
+they owed much to French thought; Goethe has said as much; and of
+Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer was a disciple. Without being a
+practical musician, De Gourmont was a lover of Beethoven and Wagner.
+He paid his compliments to Romain Rolland, whose style, both chalky
+and mucilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated and spun-out series
+Jean-Christophe. Another little volume, La Belgique litteraire, was
+published in 1915, which, while it contains nothing particularly new
+about Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, Van Lerberghe, Camille
+Lemonnier, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is excellent reading. The French
+critic was also editor of the _Revue des Idees_, and judging from
+the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Querlon as long ago as 1903,
+he was a collaborator of numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson,
+English humour, or Thomas a Kempis with the same facility as he
+dissected the mystic Latin writers of the early centuries after
+Christ. Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by the plodding
+crowd of college professors, his general adversaries. But his
+erudition could not be challenged; only two other men matched his
+scholarship, Anatole France and the late Marcel Schwob. And we have
+only skimmed the surface of his accomplishments. Remy de Gourmont is
+the Admirable Crichton of French letters.
+
+
+II
+
+Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably expected from this
+diversity of interests, yet the result is quite the reverse. The
+artist in this complicated man banished confusion. He has told us
+that because of the diversity of his aptitudes man is distinguished
+from his fellow animals, and the variety in his labours is a proof
+positive of his superiority to such fellow critics as the mentally
+constipated Brunetiere, the impressionistic Anatole France, the
+agile and graceful Lemaitre, and the pedantic philistine Faguet. But
+if De Gourmont always attains clarity with no loss of depth, he
+sometimes mixes his genres; that is, the poet peeps out in his
+reports of the psychic life of insects, as the philosopher lords it
+over the pages of his fiction. A mystic betimes, he is a
+crystal-clear thinker. And consider the catholicity evinced in Le
+Livre des Masques. He wrote of such widely diverging talents as
+Maeterlinck, Mallarme, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Paul Adam; of
+Henri de Regnier and Jules Renard; of Huysmans and Jules Laforgue;
+the mysticism of Francis Poictevin's style and the imagery of
+Saint-Pol-Roux he defined, and he displays an understanding of the
+first symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, while disliking the
+personality of that abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of
+new talent literally made visible and vocal by our critic? It is a
+pleasure to record the fact that most of his swans remained swans
+and did not degenerate into tame geese. In this book he shows
+himself a profound psychologist.
+
+Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive his chimeras in double
+harness and safely. His best fiction is Sixtine and Une Nuit au
+Luxembourg, if fiction they may be called. Never will their author
+be registered among best-sellers. Sixtine deals with the adventures
+of a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In Un C[oe]ur virginal we
+touch earth, fleshly and spiritually. This story shocked its
+readers. It may be considered as a sequel to Physique de l'Amour. It
+shows mankind as a gigantic insect indulging in the same apparently
+blind pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also shows us the
+"female of our species" endowed with less capacity for modesty than
+the lady mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting, too,
+is the psychology of the heroine's virginal soul, not, however,
+cynical; cynicism is the irony of vice, and De Gourmont is never
+cynical. But a master of irony.
+
+Une Nuit au Luxembourg has been done into English. It handles with
+delicacy and frankness themes that in the hands of a lesser artist
+would be banished as brutal and blasphemous. The author knows that
+all our felicity is founded on a compromise between the dream and
+reality, and for that reason while he signals the illusion he never
+mocks it; he is too much an idealist. In the elaborately carved
+cups of his tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and nectar,
+there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He could never have said with
+Proudhon that woman is the desolation of the just; for him woman is
+often an obsession. Yet, captain of his instincts, he sees her
+justly; he is not subdued by sex. With a gesture he destroys the
+sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist and marches on to new
+intellectual conquests.
+
+In Lilith, an Adamitic Morality, he reveals his Talmudic lore. The
+first wife of our common ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the
+accomplice of Satan in the corruption of the human race. Thus
+mediaeval play is epical in its Rabelaisian plainness of speech.
+Perhaps the Manichean in De Gourmont fabricated its revolting
+images. He had traversed the Baudelairian steppes of blasphemy and
+black pessimism; Baudelaire, a poet who was a great critic. Odi
+profanum vulgus! was De Gourmont's motto, but his soul was
+responsive to so many contacts that he emerged, as Barres emerged, a
+citizen of the world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did not long
+content him, although he never relinquished his detached attitude of
+proud individualism. He saw through the sentimental equality of J.J.
+Rousseau. Rousseau it was who said that thinking man was a depraved
+animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth. Man is an affective
+animal more interested in the immediate testimony of his senses than
+in his intellectual processes. His metaphysic may be but the
+reverberation of his sensations on the shore of his subliminal self,
+the echo of the sounding shell he calls his soul. And our critic had
+his scientific studies to console him for the inevitable sterility
+of soul that follows egoism and a barren debauch of the sensations.
+He did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His artistic
+sensibility was his saviour.
+
+Without being a dogmatist, De Gourmont was an antagonist of
+absolutism. A determinist, (which may be dogmatism a rebours), a
+relativist, he holds that mankind is not a specially favoured
+species of the animal scale; thought is only an accident, possibly
+the result of rich nutrition. An automaton, man has no free will,
+but it is better for him to imagine that he has; it is a sounder
+working hypothesis for the average human. The universe had no
+beginning, it will have no end. There is no first link or last in
+the chain of causality. Everything must submit to the law of
+causality; to explain a blade of grass we must dismount the stars.
+Nevertheless, De Gourmont no more than Renan, had the mania of
+certitude. Humbly he interrogates the sphinx. There are no isolated
+phenomena in time or space. The mass of matter is eternal. Man is an
+animal submitting to the same laws that govern crystals or brutes.
+He is the expression of matter in physique and chemistry. Repetition
+is the law of life. Thought is a physiological product;
+intelligence the secretion of matter and is amenable to the law of
+causality. (This sounds like Taine's famous definition of virtue and
+vice.) And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical laboratories?
+It is not the rigid old-fashioned materialism, but a return to the
+more plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism of the Dutch
+botanist, Hugo de Vries. For De Gourmont the Darwinian notion that
+man is at the topmost notch of creation is as antique and absurd as
+most cosmogonies; indeed, it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of
+creation. Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian symbols. Voila
+l'ennemi! said De Gourmont and put on his controversial armour. What
+blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his!
+
+Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many scientists that
+bird life came later on our globe than the primates from whom we
+stem. The law of thermal constancy proves it by the interior
+temperature of birds. Man preceded the carnivorous and ruminating
+animals, of whom the bodily temperature is lower than that of birds.
+The ants and bees and beavers are not a whit more automatic than
+mankind. Automatism, says Ribot, is the rule. Thought is not free,
+wrote William James, when to it an affirmation is added; then it is
+but the affirmation of a preference. "L'homme," asserts De Gourmont,
+"varie a l'infini sa mimique. Sa superiorite, c'est la diversite
+immense de ses aptitudes." He welcomed Jules de Gaultier and his
+theory of Bovaryisme; of the vital lie, because of which we pretend
+to be what we are not. That way spells security, if not progress.
+The idea of progress is another necessary illusion, for it provokes
+a multiplicity of activities. Our so-called free will is naught but
+the faculty of making a decision determined by a great and varied
+number of motives. As for morality, it is the outcome of tribal
+taboos; the insect and animal world shows deepest-dyed immorality,
+revolting cruelty, and sex perversity. Rabbits and earthworms
+through no fault of their own suffer from horrible maladies. From
+all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual constancy.
+The human brain since prehistoric times has been neither diminished
+nor augmented; it has remained like a sponge, which can be dry or
+saturated, but still remains itself. It is a constant. In a
+favourable environment it is enriched. The greatest moment in the
+history of the human family was the discovery of fire by an
+anthropoid of genius. Prometheus then should be our god. Without him
+we should have remained more or less simian, and probably of
+arboreal habits.
+
+
+III
+
+A synthetic brain is De Gourmont's, a sower of doubts, though not a
+No-Sayer to the universe. He delights in challenging accepted
+"truths." Of all modern thinkers a master of Vues d'ensembles, he
+smiles at the pretensions, usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of
+so-called "general ideas." He dissociates such conventional grouping
+of ideas as Glory, Justice, Decadence. The shining ribs of
+disillusion shine through his psychology; a psychology of nuance and
+finesse. Disillusioning reflections, these. Not to be put in any
+philosophical pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the eclecticism
+of Victor Cousin as from the verbal jugglery and metaphysical
+murmurings of Henri Bergson. The world is his dream; but it is a
+tangible dream, charged with meaning, order, logic. The truest
+reality is thought. Action spoils. (Goethe said: "Thought expands,
+action narrows.") Our abstract ideas are metaphysical idols, says
+Jules de Gaultier. The image of the concrete is De Gourmont's
+touchstone. Theophile Gautier declared that he was a man for whom
+the visible world existed. He misjudged his capacity for
+apprehending reality. The human brain, excellent instrument in a
+priori combinations is inept at perceiving realities. The "Sultan of
+the Epithet," as De Goncourt nicknamed "le bon Theo," was not the
+"Emperor of Thought," according to Henry James, and for him it was a
+romantic fiction spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster, greyer
+world is adumbrated in the books of De Gourmont. He never allowed
+symbolism to deform his representation of sober, every-day life. He
+pictured the future domain of art and ideas as a fair and shining
+landscape no longer a series of little gardens with high walls. A
+hater of formulas, sects, schools, he teaches that the capital crime
+of the artist, the writer, the thinker, is conformity. (Yet how
+serenely this critic swims in classic currents!) The artist's work
+should reflect his personality, a magnified reflection. He must
+create his own aesthetic. There are no schools, only individuals. And
+of consistency he might have said that it is oftener a mule than a
+jewel.
+
+Sceptical in all matters, though never the fascinating sophist that
+is Anatole France, De Gourmont criticised the thirty-six dramatic
+situations, reducing the number to four. Man as centre in relation
+to himself; in relation to other men; in relation to the other sex;
+in relation to God, or Nature. His ecclesiastical _fond_ may be
+recognised in Le Chemin de Velours with its sympathetic exposition
+of Jesuit doctrine, and the acuity of its judgments on Pascal and
+the Jansenists. The latter section is as an illuminating foot-note
+to the history of Port-Royal by Sainte-Beuve. The younger critic has
+the supple intellect of the supplest-minded Jesuit. His bias toward
+the order is unmistakable. There are few books I reread with more
+pleasure than this Path of Velvet. Certain passages in it are as
+silky and sonorous as the sound of Eugene Ysaye's violin.
+
+The colour of De Gourmont's mind is stained by his artistic
+sensibility. A maker of images, his vocabulary astounding as befits
+both a poet and philologist, one avid of beautiful words, has
+variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant, a quality that has
+informed the finer intellects of France since Montaigne. His
+literary equipment is unusual. A style as brilliant, sinuous, and
+personal as his thought; flexible or massive, continent or coloured,
+he discourses at ease in all the gamuts and modes major, minor, and
+mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a Latinist; a classic,
+not a romantic style. His formal sense is admirable. The tenderness
+of Anatole France is absent, except in his verse, which is less
+spontaneous than volitional. A pioneer in new aesthetic pastures, De
+Gourmont is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though the gift of
+tears nature--possibly jealous because of her prodigality--has
+denied him. But in the curves of his overarching intellect there may
+be found wit, gaiety, humour, the Gallic attributes, allied with
+poetic fancy, profundity of thought, and a many-sided comprehension
+of life, art, and letters. He is in the best tradition of French
+criticism only more versatile than either Sainte-Beuve or Taine; as
+versatile as Doctor Brandes or Arthur Symons, and that is saying
+much. With Anatole France he could have exclaimed: "The longer I
+contemplate human life, the more I believe that we must give it, for
+witnesses and judges, Irony and Pity...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ARTZIBASHEF
+
+
+I
+
+Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away
+from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most
+of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent to-day, and
+invisible, and almost spiritual...." This is a plea for his own
+spiritualised art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions
+within emotions, the shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into
+crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of
+the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there
+has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence, that
+must be disconcerting to Maeterlinck.
+
+It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama, and fiction.
+That vast land of promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out
+place for the theories and speculations of western Europe; no other
+nation responds so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit,
+no other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of
+contemporary thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most
+emotional among living peoples.
+
+Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much
+Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of
+ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt,
+pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were
+bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not
+invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters,
+Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of
+the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new
+fermentation.
+
+Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless
+lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic
+Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov,
+Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the
+romancers)--not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and
+Ivanov--are the men who are fighting under various banners but
+always for complete freedom.
+
+Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young
+man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring
+of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it.
+He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy,
+though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's
+overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony
+which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky,
+despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared
+with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only
+swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism
+incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the
+middle-class and proletarian.
+
+To Andre Villard, his friend and one of his translators, the new
+Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colourless,
+dreary, bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern
+Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef is of Tatar, French, Georgian,
+and Polish blood. His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the
+Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a retired officer, was a small
+landowner. In the lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His
+youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its
+horrors--he has written of them in his first story, Pasha
+Tumanow--and he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for
+a literary weekly in the provinces founded by a certain Miroliuboff,
+to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at
+the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev, Kuprin, and other young
+men who, like Artzibashef, have since "arrived."
+
+His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him
+recognition. This was in 1904. But the year before he had finished
+Sanine, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till
+1908. This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that
+those critics were astray who spoke of the book as a naturally
+pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born
+in the bones of the author and he needed no external stimulus to
+provoke such a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is happier,
+healthier, whether he has married and raised a family, we know not.
+Personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them
+objective.
+
+The world over Sanine has been translated. It is a significant book,
+and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women in the
+Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the
+censorship, and in Germany it had to battle for its life.
+
+It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed
+immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of
+its "defamation of youth," its suicidal doctrine, its depressing
+atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests
+from the clergy, from the press, from society itself.
+
+In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied libelling the younger
+generation. "Sanine," he says, "is the apology for individualism:
+the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still
+new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong
+representative of the new Russia." And then he adds his own protest
+against the imitators of Sanine, who "flooded the literary world
+with pornographic writings." Now, whatever else it may be, Sanine is
+not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its
+influence has been harmless. We should not forget Werther and the
+trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But
+Sanine is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if
+it be "dangerous," then all the better.
+
+Test all things, and remember that living itself is a dangerous
+affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage,
+individualism more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and
+the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sanine
+is a call to arms for individualists. And recall the Russian saying:
+Self-conceit is the salt of life.
+
+
+II
+
+That Artzibashef denies the influence of Nietzsche while admitting
+his indebtedness to Nietzsche's forerunner, Max Stirner, need not
+particularly concern us. There are evidences scattered throughout
+the pages of Sanine that prove a close study of Nietzsche and his
+idealistic superman. Artist as is Artzibashef, he has densely spun
+into the fabric of his work the ideas that control his characters,
+and whether these ideas are called moral or immoral does not
+matter. The chief thing is whether they are propulsive forces in the
+destiny of his puppets.
+
+That he paints directly from life is evident: he tells us that in
+him is the debris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish
+his ambitions because he had not money enough to buy paper, pencil,
+colour. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush
+of Artzibashef. I may make one exception, that of J.-K. Huysmans.
+The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his
+material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the master of "the
+intensest vision of the modern world"; but Huysmans lacks the
+all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering
+mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist, a love that
+is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men
+prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life.
+
+The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and profound. The leading
+motive of his symphony is as old as Ecclesiastes: "The thing that
+hath been, it is that which shall be." It is not original, this
+theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity; but it has been
+orchestrated anew by Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen,
+Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no
+hidden angles of the truth, at least its illusion in terms of
+terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. With
+such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of life must soon be blasted.
+His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace
+and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura
+of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Artzibashef
+you wonder that the question, "Is life worth living?" will ever be
+answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer
+says, hasten hellward from their birth.
+
+The corollary to this leading motive is the absolute futility of
+action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the
+penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev, in an
+essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed
+of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in
+the present; a Norwegian philosopher, Soeren Kierkegaard, has said
+that he lives forward, thinks backward; he aspires to the future.
+An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to
+disillusionment. He discounts to-morrow.
+
+Russian youth has not always the courage of its chimera, though it
+fraternises with the phantasmagoria of its soul. Its Golden Street
+soon becomes choked with fog. The political and social conditions of
+the country must stifle individualism, else why should Artzibashef
+write with such savage intensity? His pen is the pendulum that has
+swung away from the sentimental brotherhood of man as exemplified
+in Dostoievsky, and from the religious mania of Tolstoy to the
+opposite extreme, individual anarchy. Where there is repression
+there is rebellion. Max Stirner represents the individualism which
+found its vent in the Prussia of 1848; Nietzsche the reaction from
+the Prussia of 1870; Artzibashef forestalled the result of the 1905
+insurrection in Russia.
+
+His prophetic soul needed no proof; he knew that his people, the
+students and intellectuals, would be crushed. The desire of the clod
+for the cloud was extinguished. Happiness is an eternal hoax. Only
+children believe in life. The last call of the devil's dinner-bell
+has sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is only mirage. The
+moonlit air is a ruse of that wily old serpent, nature, to arouse
+romance in the breast of youth and urge a repetition of the life
+processes. We graze Schopenhauer, overhear Leopardi, but the
+Preacher has the mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says none
+of these things outright. The phrases are mine, but he points the
+moral in a way that is all his own.
+
+What, then, is the remedy for the ills of this life? Is its misery
+irremediable? Why must mankind go on living if the burden is so
+great? Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and no matter how
+brilliant we may live, we must all die alone. Pascal said this
+better. In several of his death-bed scenes the dying men of
+Artzibashef curse their parents, mock at religion, and--here is a
+novel nuance--abuse their intellectual leaders. Semenow the student,
+who appears in several of the stories, abuses Marx and Nietzsche. Of
+what use are these thinkers to a man about to depart from the world?
+It is the revolt of stark humanity from the illusions of brotherly
+love, from the chiefest illusion--self.
+
+Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With
+a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch
+he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls
+emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will
+be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only--why must I
+die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life.
+But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than
+annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef
+is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.
+
+He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo,
+Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually
+failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist
+and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of
+truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan
+Lande--now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire--where we
+see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the
+love of his fellows.
+
+It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus
+can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your
+other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and
+heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog,
+a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to
+the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who,
+in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A
+ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur
+Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through
+race suicide.)
+
+But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to
+the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of
+disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is
+worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist
+or royalist--your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of
+silence--a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a
+brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to
+the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic
+fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.
+
+
+III
+
+But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world
+of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have
+only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with
+which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to
+be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the
+blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the
+impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag
+without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to
+draw a moral.
+
+There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome
+young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the
+return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his
+mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister
+Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is
+surprised to note her development. He admires her--too much so for
+our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the
+moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a
+type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto
+might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the
+fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of
+Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of Frederic Moreau; he
+displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes
+him seem an idler on the scene.
+
+When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister
+has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she
+attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but
+philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words.
+Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer
+to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches
+his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows
+out his brains. A passive role is Sanine's in the composition of
+this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us
+as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while
+about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is
+always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind
+whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.
+
+A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read
+him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his
+style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the
+language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again
+perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I
+am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea
+of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating into
+Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert.
+
+Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of
+Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss
+the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned
+Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though,
+naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must
+protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point
+which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in
+which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the
+monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we
+could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it
+was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the
+nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain
+to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given
+fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's,
+whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his
+genius.
+
+The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and
+honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef,
+unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the
+courageous manner--and artistic, too--with which the Russian pursues
+the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a
+psychologist as well as a painter, the exquisite recoil of the
+cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness.
+Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least
+sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a
+flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will
+never bend the bow of Balzac.
+
+Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book
+there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is
+self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and
+her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and
+differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the
+teacher, are extremely attractive.
+
+Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless
+Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be
+bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially
+indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande--who is
+evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever
+Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the
+evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make
+love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like
+candles.
+
+As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that
+the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay
+episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party,
+and pastorals done in a way which would have extorted the
+admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his
+peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a
+meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement--related with
+blasting irony--and drinking festivals which are masterly in their
+sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions,
+landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises,
+revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You
+fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days.
+
+Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked
+as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers
+and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov
+the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new
+order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch
+who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it
+minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most
+latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with
+Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius.
+
+I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left
+for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary
+Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of
+the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal
+sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression. The
+end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in
+one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not
+paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet
+the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving
+family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this
+sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly
+etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire.
+
+This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian
+in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its
+interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to
+self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is
+autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar
+schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but
+infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young
+people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic
+conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the
+other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A
+stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling.
+The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province
+town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot
+down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is
+a time for tears; though I cannot quite believe in this doctor,
+who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the
+Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar
+intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with
+wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only
+interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions
+or their causes.
+
+Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood
+Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by
+the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right,
+ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and
+the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In
+these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and
+despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these
+poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born.
+Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field
+and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has
+been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest
+story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.]
+
+Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan
+in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not
+confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor
+details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and
+crowded, the motivation subtly managed. As is the case with his
+novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the
+steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the
+place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you
+are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to
+Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of
+imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness
+and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or
+four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin
+or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also
+the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish
+writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the
+"chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch,
+and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical.
+
+There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death.
+Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you
+meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not
+be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight
+deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of
+the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of
+mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of
+suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may
+eat roast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to
+the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a
+nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful
+to the last--they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start.
+
+There is a nihilistic doctor--the most viable character of all about
+whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy--a particularly fascinating
+actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by
+a young painter (a Sanine type, _i. e._, Max Stirnerism in action),
+while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly
+pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin
+in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily
+vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and
+boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most
+poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose
+complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is
+reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet
+it compels reflection and rereading. Why?
+
+Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting
+the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is
+lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The
+little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows.
+However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation
+where sanity and cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But
+I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the
+mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that
+most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray
+as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O
+Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to
+believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night,
+beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient
+faith."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES
+
+
+I
+
+In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during
+the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably
+chronicled. News from the various battle-fields took precedence over
+the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected.
+Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American
+citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still
+prevails, when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More
+English than the English, he only practised what he preached, though
+tardily in the matter of his British naturalisation. That he did not
+find all the perfections in his native land is a personal matter;
+but that he should be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply
+the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no
+need of indignation in the matter. Time rights such critical wrongs.
+Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of Henry James is for the
+future.
+
+James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding,
+Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The
+Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions that will influence future
+novelists. In our own days we see what a power James has been; a
+subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul Bourget, Edith
+Wharton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His
+later work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse, is the prose
+equivalent of the seven arts in a revolutionary ferment. A marked
+tendency in the new movements is to throw overboard superfluous
+technical baggage. The James novel is one of grand simplifications.
+
+As the symphony was modified by Liszt into the symphonic poem and
+later emerged in the shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so
+the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's Sentimental Education,
+which, despite its "heavenly length," contains in solution all that
+the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the
+prodigious Rougon-Macquart series; Daudet found therein the
+impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant and Huysmans
+delved patiently and practised characteristic variations. Flaubert
+is the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism. His
+excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric
+significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry James
+disliked Sentimental Education--like other great critics he had his
+blind side--yet he did not fail to benefit by the radical formal
+changes introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of
+Wagner in the music-drama. I call the later James novel a
+simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed
+with; many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice-barren
+modulations from event to event are swept away; unprepared
+dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive
+padding--that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at
+every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method
+James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oblique psychology
+is partly derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal both
+Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their
+psychological splendour. Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not
+to mention that of Jane Austen.
+
+Possibly the famous "third manner" of James was the result of his
+resorting to dictation; the pen inhibits where speech does not.
+These things make difficult reading for a public accustomed to the
+hypnotic passes of successful fiction-mongers. In James nothing is
+forestalled, nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning the curve
+of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its
+bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn of the
+Screw is an exception.) You rub your eyes as you finish; for with
+all your credulity, painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a
+pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation reveal magic in
+their misty attenuations. And there is ever the triumph of poetic
+feeling over banal sentiment. The portraiture in Milly Theale
+and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Milly's life is a miracle, her
+ending, art superlative. The Wings of a Dove is filled with the
+faintly audible tread of destiny behind the arras of life. The
+reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a
+crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is
+more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound of the big drum
+and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the
+novelist concerning causes that do not seem final has been amply
+dealt with by Mr. Brownell. The question whether his story is worth
+the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered; what most
+concerns us now in the James case is his manner, not his matter. All
+the rest is life.
+
+As far as his middle period his manner is limpidity itself; the
+later style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions,
+repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in
+which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at
+the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues
+long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering is this peculiarly
+individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose.
+Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken. His dissonances cannot
+be resolved except in the terms of his own matchless art. His
+meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a
+lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind
+its sister arts I can't say; possibly because every pothouse
+politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter any one who has
+dipped into the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century
+literature, must realise that nowadays we write a parlous prose.
+However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed. The son of a
+metaphysician and moralist--the writings of Henry James, the elder,
+are far from negligible--the brother of the greatest American
+psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, it need
+hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this
+novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, or the
+fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page
+of James than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For Flaubert, who
+modelled his magnificent prose harmonies on the Old Testament,
+Shakespeare, Bossuet, and Chateaubriand, the final test of noble
+prose is the audible reading thereof. Flaubert called it "spouting."
+The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and
+overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical variety. Henry
+James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the
+books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy
+adventure, cheap historical vapidities, and still cheaper
+drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. (But, like the poor,
+the stupid reader we shall always have with us.) In the fiction of
+the future a more complete synthesis will be attained. An
+illuminating essay by Arthur Symons places George Meredith among the
+decadents, the murderers of their mother tongue, the men who shatter
+syntax to serve their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to this
+group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected.
+In his ruthless disregard of the niceties and conventionalities of
+sentence-structure I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet no matter
+how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges
+from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not
+his obscurity (his prose, like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is
+packed with too many meanings), but that his character always speaks
+in purest Jacobean. So do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric
+world. So the men and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the
+fault--or virtue--of all subjective genius; however, not a fault or
+virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy. All in all, Henry James
+is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary
+power and divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the
+cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in
+Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic, his
+deep-veined humanity may be felt by those who read him aright. His
+Americans abroad suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of
+achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Verver. Henry
+James is a faithful Secretary to Society--the phrase is Balzac's--to
+the American afloat from his native mooring as well as at home. And
+his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction.
+
+
+II
+
+Before me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend
+Doctor Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21 East
+Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: "I am not one of 'The
+Bostonians,' but was born in this city April 15, 1843. Believe me,
+truly yours, Henry James." Although he died a naturalised
+Englishman, there seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in
+the minds of his English critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical
+study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James "began
+in New England in 1843." He was born in America in 1843, then a land
+where culture was rare! That delightful condescension in foreigners
+is still extant. Now this isn't such a serious matter, for Henry
+James was a citizen of the world; but the imputation of a New
+England birthplace does matter, because it allows the English
+critic--and how many others?--to perform variations on the theme of
+Puritanism, the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamental
+Puritan--one is forced to capitalise the unhappy word! Apart from
+the fact that there is less Puritanism in New England than in the
+Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous
+New England conscience. He would have been the first to repudiate
+the notion. For him the Puritan temperament has a "faintly acrid
+perfume." To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues and
+refinement, sensibility, intellectuality, is a common enough
+mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good
+things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans.
+He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly
+speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great
+artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he is our first great
+"immoralist," a term that has supplanted the old-fashioned
+amoralist. And he wrote the most unmoral short story in the English
+language, one that also sets the spine trilling because of its
+supernatural element as never did Poe, or De Maupassant.
+
+Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of
+distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr.
+Moore said: "Henry James went to France and read Turgenev. W. D.
+Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." To lend poignancy to
+this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes it, substituting the name of
+De Maupassant for Turgenev's. A rather uncanny combination--Henry
+and Guy. A still more aged "wheeze" bobs up in the pages of Mr.
+Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William
+James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None
+of these things is in the least true. With the prudishness and
+peanut piety of puritanism Henry James has nothing in common. He did
+not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote of him with more
+sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire;
+and Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the
+Russian's or the American's fiction. Furthermore, James is a
+masterly psychologist and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest
+English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.
+
+Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields, he
+writes with authority, though too often in a superlative key. But
+how James would have winced when he read in Mr. Hueffer's book that
+he is or was "the greatest of living men." This surely is a
+planet-struck phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed with startling
+things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about
+Flaubert, whose Sentimental Education is an entire Human Comedy. He
+thinks ill of "big business," that "business and whatever takes
+place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not worth the attention
+of any intelligent being. It is a manner of dirty little affairs
+incompetently handled by men of the lowest class of intelligence."
+But all this in a volume about the most serene and luminous
+intelligence of our times. Mr. Hueffer also "goes for" James as
+critic. He once dared to couple the name of the "odious" George
+Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away, but,
+after all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who was Henry
+James say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of
+writing? As to the "cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats--all human
+life is there," of The Madonna of the Future, we need not take the
+words as a final message; nor are the other phrases quoted: "The
+soul is immortal certainly--if you've got one, but most people
+haven't! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through,
+but it never is." Mr. Hueffer says that James "found English people
+who were just people singularly nasty," and who can say him nay
+after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends on the right note: "And
+for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases
+intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers--a glory
+that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes, and the
+Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national." Neither
+Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential
+Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells, who
+is our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision. And Trollope, by the
+way, will loom larger in the future despite his impersonality and
+microscopic manner.
+
+The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence. To alter his own
+words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a
+portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary
+pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or
+cloud-shadowed; yet in whose depths there is a moving mass of
+exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under hum of
+humanity. We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said of Walter
+Scott: "His works, taken altogether, are almost like a new edition
+of human nature." But we can follow with the coda of that same
+dictum: "This is indeed to be an author." Many more than the dozen
+superior persons mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James novels. His
+swans are not always immaculate, but they are not "swans of the
+cesspool," to quote Landor. There is never an odour of leaking gas
+in his premises, as he once remarked of the D'Annunzio fiction. He
+has the cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gait.
+Like Renan, he abhorred the "horrible mania of certitude" to be
+found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not
+always dot the "i's" of his irony, a subrisive irony. But the
+spiritual antennae which he puts forth so tentatively always touch
+real things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense he boasts. He
+peeps into the glowing core of emotion, but seldom describes it.
+His ears are for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the obvious,
+of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novelist has kept his ear so
+close to quotidian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in
+his crumbling cadences? Not even that virtuoso of the ugly,
+Huysmans, than whom no writer of the past century ever "rendered"
+surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity,
+is as clairvoyant as James.
+
+Fustian and thunder form no part of the James stories, which are
+like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill
+the listening ear. He is an "auditive" as well as a "visualist," to
+employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute
+senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to
+comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite; but, like
+Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single
+wire. Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to
+pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness.
+However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny
+plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and
+end in another. If it's to be pork and molasses or "hog and hominy"
+(George Meredith's words), then let it be these delectable dishes
+through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his
+theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals spin and bathe in
+the blue he weaves a web of gold and lace, and it is marvellously
+spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown from a
+variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther
+Cary has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does
+not take the mechanism of his marionette apart, but lets us examine
+it in completeness. As a psychologist he stands midway between
+Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling, rather than fact.
+
+Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his rhythmic moments of
+libration; he then reveals his other side, a profoundly human,
+emotional one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he holds in
+horror the facile expression of the sentiments. It's only too easy
+to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas
+Huxley calls "sensualistic caterwauling." In the large, generous
+curve of his temperament there is room for all life, but not for a
+lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of
+mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity.
+There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns, for
+patterns there are, though the figure be difficult to piece out. His
+route of emerald is elliptical; follow him who dare! A "wingy
+mystery." He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues.
+His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. His is not
+"the shadow land of American fiction"; simply his supreme tact of
+omission has dispensed with the entire banal apparatus of fiction
+as commonly practised. To use a musical example: his prose is like
+the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art, like
+music, is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique
+melodramatics, set developments and denouements, mastodonic
+structures. The sharp savour of character is omnipresent. His very
+pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into
+remoter harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality.
+Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him
+sympathetically one recalls the saying of Maurice Barres: "For an
+accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue, that between our two
+egos--the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which
+we strive." For Jacobeans this interior dialogue, with its
+"secondary intention" marches like muted music through the pages of
+the latter period. Henry James will always be a touchstone for the
+tasteless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+     Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called
+     George Sand!
+                                                --MRS. BROWNING.
+
+
+I
+
+Who reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her
+centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in
+gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French
+literature. Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman, in
+her psychology, than in her interminable novels. The reason is
+simple; her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never
+created a vital character. Her men and women are bundles of
+attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was
+a wonderful journalist, one is tempted to say the first of her sex,
+and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a shriller
+propagandist, yet she accomplished no more for the cause than her
+French neighbour, not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or
+wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin
+didn't exactly practise what she preached and George Sand did. For
+her there was no talk of getting the vote; her feminism was a
+romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand
+should be enshrined as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no
+means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of
+the intellectual men she met, she had an enormous vogue. Her
+reputation was worldwide.
+
+We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently
+published by Vladimir Karenine (the pen-name of a Russian lady, Mme.
+Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow). This writer has brought
+her imposing work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848, and, as
+much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect
+at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable.
+She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with
+Sand. She has at first-hand from friends and relatives facts
+hitherto unpublished, and she is armed with a library of documents.
+More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the
+fecund writer, and actually analyses their plots, writes at length
+of the characters, and incidentally throws light on her own
+intellectual processes.
+
+Mme. Karenine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking
+historian. While some tales of Sand are worth reading--The Devil's
+Pool, Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all, her
+autobiography--the rest is a burden to the spirit. Her facility
+astounds, and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing
+was like the turning on of a water-tap, the stream always flowed, a
+literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her
+task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant
+shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene,
+flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles
+Baudelaire, and admired by Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais.
+Baudelaire remarked of this "best seller" that she wrote her chefs
+d'[oe]uvre as if they were letters, and posted them. The "style
+coulant," praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked
+accent, relief, individuality. "She is the Prudhomme of immorality,"
+he said--not a bad definition--and "she is stupid, heavy, and a
+chatterer." She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted
+to the intelligent wife of the concierge and the sentimental harlot.
+Which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his
+prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognised
+by all her associates.
+
+Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau--he might
+have added Byron, also--she is false, artificial, inflated,
+exaggerated; ... her style is of a variegated wall-paper pattern.
+She betrays her vulgarity in her ambition to expose her generous
+feelings. She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferable
+artist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and--wrote. Nietzsche,
+like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the
+irresponsible sex. And her immorality? Pere Didon said that her
+books are more immoral than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted
+as they are with false ideas and sentiments. George Sand immoral?
+What bathos! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality.
+As well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral. This literature of
+gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the
+Ibsen plays or AEsop's fables.
+
+Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of the downtrodden shop
+girl are the stigmata of the Sand school. She has written many
+memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such masters as Sainte-Beuve,
+Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and
+Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable
+charm. But her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned--there
+is a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as Ibsen maintained,
+all truths stale and die after two decades, how much less life may
+be allowed a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as evanescent
+as last year's mist.
+
+Mme. Karenine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation,
+so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject;
+indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a
+prude and, if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece
+under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George
+Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of
+lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas
+fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no
+temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of
+Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a
+perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could
+devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose
+delectation! A "cold devil"--a la Felicien Rops. I doubt this.
+Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a
+metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic
+accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many
+poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some
+of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness.
+Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and
+Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same
+kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the
+Sargossian seas of British prudery.
+
+In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was
+neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has
+fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful
+grandmother. She had the featherbed temperament, and soothed
+masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules
+Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She
+died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and
+the idol of the literary world.
+
+How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant
+virtues--save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to
+her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly
+in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of
+morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to
+go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist
+she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she
+didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was
+thrust upon her. At Nohant, her chateau in Berri, there was usually
+a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy
+dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their
+blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his
+famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the
+Shelley-Godwin gatherings.
+
+
+II
+
+George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men;
+with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with one eye
+open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of
+Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor
+hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did
+approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the
+Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to
+toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her
+affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual
+thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight
+days, and Merimee is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he
+tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning
+making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old
+dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish
+Prosper at once grew frigid.
+
+A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en
+compote." And she was incorrigibly naive--they called it "Idealism"
+in those days--witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The
+first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed
+poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she
+had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering
+from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of
+himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike
+Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can
+reread him.
+
+But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six
+years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred
+consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than
+artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man.
+He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This
+sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers
+for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same.
+George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was
+only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in
+disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten
+years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the
+Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled
+with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue
+stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the
+world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than
+from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin
+before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage--and
+the wisdom--to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more
+genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And
+Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.
+
+The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study
+of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly
+perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him
+from her mother--truly a Gallic triangle--but she so contrived
+matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to
+marry her lover, Clesinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme.
+Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would
+side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the
+deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto
+by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her
+young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the
+news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.
+
+Clesinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his
+ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand
+suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of
+her own. Her husband, Francois-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country
+squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his
+dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with
+Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband
+five hundred thousand francs.)
+
+But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her
+desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copious
+soul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as
+metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with
+her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised.
+She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography
+is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for
+she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that
+women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some
+man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand
+wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a
+multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know
+too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.
+
+
+III
+
+Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of
+Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million
+things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not
+without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering
+with their family duties. But they continued, did these same
+refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make
+mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they
+were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices.
+They loved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in
+the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the
+prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a
+blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her
+innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes
+of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our
+days, Sand's is positively idyllic. She is one parent of the Woman
+movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She
+acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to
+do--and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And
+George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the
+courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man
+she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a
+literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the
+New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation
+that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males,
+other tales.
+
+She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was
+the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the
+slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging
+the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed
+to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert
+the kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better
+cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test
+applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed
+herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's
+mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines
+of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with
+Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of
+ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern
+democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was
+always aesthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering
+litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her
+fiction. Her Indianas, Lelias, and the other romantic insurgents
+against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and
+rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her
+stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap.
+
+
+IV
+
+George Sand was not beautiful. Edouard Grenier declares that she was
+short and stout. "Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close
+together." Do you recall Heine's phrase, "Femme avec l'[oe]il
+sombre"? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at
+once of unpolished marble and velvet. "Her nose was thick and not
+overshapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very
+quiet." With these rather negative physical attractions she
+conquered men like Napoleon. Even prim President Thiers tried to
+kiss her and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled
+in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. (Did you ever see
+the Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?) Liszt never
+wholly yielded to her. Merimee despised her in his chilly fashion.
+Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de Musset--who,
+when he was short of money, would dine in an obscure tavern, and,
+with a toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the entrance of some
+fashionable boulevard cafe--seems to have loved her romantically,
+the sort of love she craved. What was her attraction? She had brains
+and magnetism, but that she could have loved all the lovers she is
+credited with is impossible.
+
+There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules Sandeau, who was followed
+by De Musset; after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello--who was jilted
+when he followed her to Paris; Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux,
+Felicien Mallefille, Chopin, Merimee, Manceau, and the platonic
+friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship; the
+correspondence proves it. She went to the Magny dinners with
+Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet. Her influence
+on the grumbling giant of Croisset was tonic. It was she who should
+have written Sentimental Education. But where is that sly old
+voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve, or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many
+tales), or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period,
+notwithstanding Mme. Karenine's denial? She denies the Leroux
+affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say?
+
+Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw and Sand
+buried them at Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks, has
+been corroborated since by Mme. Karenine. What a loss for
+inquisitive critics! George was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she
+was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal
+ancestors. In her mature years she became optimistic, proper,
+matronly. She was a cheerful milch cow for her two children. It is
+delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against
+actresses. Solange she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the
+sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art-for-art.
+
+Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in
+Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left
+Clesinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis
+Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in
+Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Herve,
+Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the critic who describes her as having
+the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She,
+too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home,
+in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.
+
+Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she
+was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister
+of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell
+into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old
+gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch,
+arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a
+charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly
+said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that
+amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the
+French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name
+of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have
+ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the
+candied thunder of Sand herself.
+
+De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians,
+did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by
+Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly
+called--Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the
+reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that
+interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
+
+
+I
+
+When the supreme master of the historical novel modestly confessed
+that he could do the "big bow-wow strain," but to Jane Austen must
+be accorded the palm of exquisite craftsmanship, there was then no
+question upon the critical map of the so-called "great American
+novel." Sir Walter Scott--to whom such authors of historical novels
+as Chateaubriand and his Martyrs, the Salammbo of Flaubert, and that
+well-nigh perfect fiction, The History of Henry Esmond, by
+Thackeray, yield precedence--might have achieved the impossible: the
+writing of a library, epitomising the social history of "These
+States"--as Walt Whitman would say. After Scott no name but Balzac's
+occurs to the memory; Balzac, who laid all France under his
+microscope (and France is all of a piece, not the checker-board of
+nationalities we call America). Even the mighty Tolstoy would have
+balked the job. And if these giants would have failed, what may be
+said of their successors? The idea of a great American novel is an
+"absolute," and nature abhors an absolute, despite the belief of
+some metaphysicians to the contrary. Yet the notion still obtains
+and inquests are held from time to time, and the opinions of
+contemporary novelists are taken toll of; as if each man and woman
+could give aught else but their own side of the matter, that side
+which is rightfully enough personal and provincial. The question is,
+after all, an affair for critics, and the great American novel will
+be in the plural; thousands perhaps. America is a chord of many
+nations, and to find the key-note we must play much and varied
+music.
+
+While a novelist may be cosmopolitan at his own risk, a critic
+should be ever so. Consider the names of such widely contrasted
+critical temperaments as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, De Gourmont, Matthew
+Arnold, Brandes, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, Henry
+James, Gosse, and W. C. Brownell; all cosmopolitan as well as
+national. The sublime tenuities of Henry James, like the black music
+of Michael Artzibashef, are questions largely temperamental. But the
+Russian is all Slavic, and no one would maintain that Mr. James
+shows a like ingrained nationalism. Nevertheless, he is American,
+though dealing only with a certain side of American life, the
+cosmopolitan phase. At his peril an American novelist sails eastward
+to describe the history of his countrymen abroad. With the critic we
+come upon a different territory. He may go gadding after new
+mud-gods (the newest god invented by man is always the greatest),
+for the time being, and return to his native heath mentally
+refreshed and broadened by his foreign outing. Not so the maker of
+fiction. Once he cuts loose his balloon he is in danger of not
+getting home again.
+
+Mr. James is a splendid case for us; he began in America and landed
+in England, there to stay. Our other felicitous example of
+cosmopolitanism is Henry Blake Fuller, the author of The Chevalier
+Pensieri Vani and The Chatelaine de la Trinite, who was so widely
+read in the nineties. After those charming excursions into a rapidly
+vanishing Europe Mr. Fuller reversed the proceeding of James; he
+returned to America and composed two novels of high artistic
+significance, The Cliff Dwellers and With the Procession, which,
+while they continued the realistic tradition of William Dean
+Howells, were also the forerunners of a new movement in America. It
+is not necessary to dwell now on The Last Refuge, or on that
+masterly book of spiritual parodies, The Puppet-Booth. But Mr.
+Fuller did not write the great American novel. Neither did Mr.
+Howells, nor Mr. James. Who has? No one. Is there such a thing?
+Without existing it might be described in Celtic fashion, this
+mythical work, as pure fiction. Let us admit for the sake of
+argument that if it were written by some unknown monster of genius,
+it would, like Lewis Carroll's Snark, turn into a Boojum.
+
+Henry James has said that no one is compelled to admire any
+particular sort of writing; that the province of fiction is all
+life, and he has also wisely remarked that "when you have no taste
+you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste," and may
+we add, when you have no discretion you perpetrate the shocking
+fiction with which America is deluged at this hour. We are told that
+the new writers have altered the old canons of bad taste, but "plus
+ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." A liquorish sentimentality is
+the ever-threatening rock upon which the bark of young American
+novelists goes to pieces. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.) Be
+sentimental and you will succeed! We agree with Dostoievsky that in
+fiction, as well as in life, there are no general principles, only
+special cases. But these cases, could they not be typical? even if
+there are not types, only individuals. And are men and women so
+inthralled by the molasses of sentimentalism in life? Have the
+motion-pictures hopelessly deranged our critical values? I know that
+in America charity covers a multitude of mediocrities, nevertheless,
+I am loath to believe that all one reads in praise of wretched
+contemporary fiction is meant in earnest.
+
+Well, chacun a ses degouts! The "thrilling" detective story, the
+romantic sonorities of the ice cream-soda woman novelist?--with a
+triple-barrelled name, as Rudyard Kipling put it once upon a
+time--or that church of Heavenly Ennui, the historical novel--what
+a cemetery of ideas, all of them! An outsider must be puzzle-pated
+by this tumult of tasteless writing and worse observation. However,
+history in fiction may be a cavalcade of shining shadows, brilliant,
+lugubrious, dull, or joyful happenings; but where Thackeray
+succeeded multitudes have failed. Who shall bend the bow of that
+Ulysses? Native talent, subtle and robust, we possess in abundance;
+thus far it has cultivated with success its own parochial
+garden--which is as it should be. The United States of Fiction.
+America is Cosmopolis.
+
+
+II
+
+As to the Puritanism of our present novels one may dare to say in
+the teeth of youthful protestants that it is non-existent. The
+pendulum has swung too far the other way. And as literary artists
+are rare, the result has not been reassuring. Zola seems prudish
+after some experiments of the younger crowd. How badly they pull off
+the trick. How coarse and hard and heavy their touch. Most of these
+productions read like stupid translations from a dull French
+original. They are not immoral, only vulgar. As old Flaubert used to
+say: such books are false, nature is not like that. How keenly he
+saw through the humbug of "free love"--a romantic tradition of
+George Sand's epoch--may be noted in his comment that Emma Bovary
+found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Ah! that
+much-despised, stupid, venerable institution, marriage! How it has
+been flouted since the days of Rousseau--the father of false
+romanticism and that stupefying legend, the "equality" of mankind.
+(O! the beautiful word, "equality," invented for the delectation of
+rudimentary minds.) A century and more fiction has played with the
+theme of concubinage. If the Nacquet divorce bill had been
+introduced a decade or so before it was in France, what would have
+become of the theatre of Dumas fils, or later, of the misunderstood
+woman in Ibsen's plays? All such tribal taboos make or unmake
+literature.
+
+So, merely as a suggestion to ambitious youngsters, let the novelist
+of the future in search of a novelty describe a happy marriage,
+children, a husband who doesn't drink or gamble, a wife who votes,
+yet loves her home, her family, and knows how to cook. What a
+realistic bombshell he would hurl into the camp of sentimental
+socialists and them that believe a wedding certificate is like
+Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin--a document daily shrinking in
+happiness. Absurdities make martyrs, but of all the absurd and
+ineffectual martyrdoms that of running off with another's wife is
+usually the crowning one. "I don't call this very popular pie," said
+the little boy in Richard Grant White's story; and the man in the
+case is usually the first to complain of his bargain in pastry.
+
+However, categories are virtually an avowal of mental impuissance,
+and all marriages are not made in heaven. In the kingdom of morality
+there are many mansions. When too late you may sport with the
+shade--not in the shade--of Amaryllis, and perhaps elbow epigrams as
+a lean consolation. That is your own affair. Paul Verlaine has told
+us that "j'ai vecu enormement," though his living enormously did not
+prove that he was happy. Far from it. But he had at least the
+courage to relate his terrors. American novelists may agree with
+Dostoievsky that "everything in the world always ends in meanness";
+or with Doctor Pangloss that all is for the best in the best of
+possible worlds. An affair of temperament. But don't mix the values.
+Don't confuse intellectual substances. Don't smear a fact with
+treacle and call it truth. Above all, don't preach. Impiety is an
+indiscretion, yet, don't be afraid to tell the truth. From Jane
+Austen and Walter Scott, the parents of the modern English novel, to
+many modern instances, fiction has thrived best on naked truth. All
+the rest is sawdust, tripe-selling, and sentimentalism. Didn't Mr.
+Roundabout declare in one of his famous papers that "Figs are sweet,
+but fictions are sweeter"? In our land we can't get the latter sweet
+enough. Altruism, Brotherhood of Man Uplifting. These are the
+shibboleths of the "nouvelles couches sociales." Prodigious!
+
+
+III
+
+J.-K. Huysmans declared that in the land of books there are no
+schools; no idealism, realism, symbolism; only good writers and bad.
+Whistler said the same about painting and painters. Setting aside
+the technical viewpoint of such dicta, we fancy that our "best
+sellers" do not preoccupy themselves with the "mere writing" of
+their fictions, but they have developed a formidable faculty of
+preaching. Old-fashioned fiction that discloses personal charm, that
+delineates manners, or stirs the pulse of tragedy--not melodrama, is
+vanishing from publishers' lists. Are there not as many charming men
+and women perambulating the rind of the planet as there were in the
+days when Jane Austen, or Howells, or Turgenev wrote? We refuse to
+believe there are not; but there is little opportunity, in a word,
+no market, for the display of these qualities. The novel with a
+purpose, generally an unpleasant purpose, has usurped the rule of
+the novel of character and manners. Boanerges, not Balzac, now
+occupies the pasteboard pulpit of fiction.
+
+I quoted Henry James to the effect that all life is the province of
+the novelist. Nevertheless, the still small garden wherein is reared
+the tender solitary flower does but ill represent the vaster,
+complicated forest of common humanity. The ivory tower of the
+cultivated egoist is not to be unduly admired; rather Zola's La
+Terre with its foul facts than a palace of morbid art. Withal, the
+didactic side of our fiction is overdone. I set it down to the
+humbug about the "masses" being opposed to the "classes." Truly a
+false antithesis. As if the French bourgeois were not a product of
+the revolution (poor bourgeois, always abused by the novelist). As
+if a poor man suddenly enriched didn't prove, as a rule, the hardest
+taskmaster to his own class. Consider the new-rich. What a study
+they afford the students of manners. A new generation has arisen.
+Its taste, intelligence, and culture; its canned manners, canned
+music--preferably pseudo-African--canned art, canned food, canned
+literature; its devotion to the mediocre--what a field for our
+aspiring young "secretaries to society."
+
+Cheap prophylactics, political and religious--for religion is fast
+being butchered to make the sensational evangelists' holiday--are in
+vogue. They affect our fiction-mongers, who burn to avenge wrongs,
+write novels about the "downtrodden masses," and sermons on social
+evils--evils that have always existed, always will exist. Like the
+knife-grinder, story they have none to tell. Why write fiction, or
+what they are pleased to call fiction? Why not join the brave
+brigade of agitators and pamphleteers? The lay preachers are
+carrying off the sweepstakes. For them Mr. Howells is a
+superannuated writer. Would there were more like him in continence
+of speech, wholesomeness of judgment, nobility of ideals, and in the
+shrewd perception of character.
+
+Fiction, too, is a fine art, though this patent fact has escaped the
+juvenile Paul Prys, who are mainly endeavouring to arouse class
+against mass. It's an old dodge, this equality theory, as old as
+Beelzebub, Lord of Flies. When all fruit fails, welcome envy and
+malicious slandering. When you have nothing else to write about,
+attack your neighbour, especially if he hath a much-coveted
+vineyard. Max Stirner, least understood of social philosophers,
+wrote, "Mind your own business," and he forged on the anvil of
+experience a mighty leading motive for the conduct of life. But our
+busy little penmen don't see in this golden motto a sufficient
+sentimental appeal. It doesn't flatter the "masses." Mr. Bryan a few
+years ago told us that we were all middle class. What is middle
+class? In Carlyle's day it was a "gig-man"; in ours is it the owner
+of a "flivver"? But in the case of Snob vs. Mob, Snob always wins.
+
+This twaddle about "democratic art" is the bane of our literature.
+There is only good art. Whether it deals with such "democratic"
+subjects as L'Assommoir or Germinie Lacerteux, or such "aristocratic"
+themes as those of D'Annunzio and Paul Bourget, it is the art
+thereof that determines the product. I hold no brief for the
+sterile fiction that is enrolled under the banner of "Art for Art."
+I go so far as to believe that a novelist with a beautiful style
+often allows that style to get in the way of human nature.
+Stained-glass windows have their use, but they falsify the daylight.
+A decorative style may suit pseudo-mediaeval romances, but for
+twentieth-century realism it is sadly amiss. Nor is the
+arterio-sclerotic school of psychological analysis to be altogether
+commended. It has been well-nigh done to death by Stendhal,
+Meredith, James, and Bourget; and it is as cold as a star. Flaubert
+urged as an objection to writing a novel, proving something that the
+other fellow can prove precisely the opposite. In either case
+selection plays the role.
+
+The chief argument against the novel "with a purpose"--as the jargon
+goes--is its lack of validity either as a document or as art. A
+novel may be anything, but it must not be polemical. Zola has been,
+still is, the evil genius of many talented chaps who "sling ink,"
+not to make a genuine book, but to create a sensation. Such writers
+lack patience, art, and direction. They always keep one eye on the
+box-office. Indeed, the young men and women of the day, who are
+squandering upon paper their golden genius, painfully resemble in
+their productions the dime novels once published by the lamented
+Beadle or the lucubrations in the Saturday weeklies of long ago.
+But in those publications there was more virility. The heroes then
+were not well-dressed namby-pambies; the villains were villainous;
+the detectives detected real crimes, and were not weavers of
+metaphysical abstractions like your latter-day miracle-workers of an
+impossible Scotland Yard; and the girls were girls, neither
+neurasthenic, nor did they outgolf all creation. The "new" novelists
+still deal with the same raw material of melodrama. Their handling
+of love-episodes has much of the blaring-brass quality of
+old-fashioned Italian opera. They loudly twang the strings of sloppy
+sentiment, which evoke not music, but mush and moonshine. And these
+are our "motion-masters" to-day.
+
+
+IV
+
+There can be no objection to literature and life coming to grips.
+Letters should touch reality. Many a sturdy blow has been struck at
+abuses by penmen masquerading behind fiction. No need to summon
+examples. As for realism--I deny there are commonplace people. Only
+those writers are commonplace that believe in the phrase. It is one
+of the paradoxes of art that the commonplace folk of Thackeray,
+Flaubert, or Anthony Trollope who delight us between covers would in
+life greatly bore us. The ennui is artistically suggested, though
+not experienced by the reader. It is the magic of the novelist, his
+style and philosophy, that make his creations vital.
+
+Dostoievsky says there are no old women--to be sure he puts the
+expression in the mouth of the sensualist Karamazov--and as a
+corollary I maintain that nothing is uninteresting if painted by a
+master hand, from carrots to Chopin. As for the historical novel,
+there is Sentimental Education as a model, if you desire something
+epical in scale and charged with the modern ironic spirit. A
+Flaubertian masterpiece, this book, with its daylight atmosphere;
+the inimitable sound, shape, gait, and varied prose rhythms of its
+sentences, its marvellous gallery of portraits executed in the Dutch
+manner of Hals and Vermeer, its nearness to its environment, and its
+fidelity to the pattern of life. It is a true "historical" novel,
+for it is real--to employ the admirable simile of Mr. Howells.
+
+No need to transpose the tragic gloom of Artzibashef to America; we
+are an optimistic people, thanks to our air and sky, political
+conditions, and the immigration of sturdy peasant folk. Yet we, too,
+have our own peculiar gloom and misery and social problems to solve.
+We are far from being the "shadow-land" of fiction, as a certain
+English critic said. When I praise the dissonantal art of Michael
+Artzibashef it is not with the idea that either his style or his
+pessimism should be aped. That way unoriginality lies. But I do
+contend that in the practice of his art, its sincerity, its
+profundity, he might be profitably patterned after by the younger
+generation. Art should elevate as well as amuse. Must fiction always
+be silly and shallow? It need be neither sordid nor didactic.
+
+William James put the matter in a nutshell when he 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 flavours." And on this fundamentally sound note I must end my
+little sermon--for I find that I have been practising the very
+preaching against which I warned embryo novelists. But, then, isn't
+every critic a lay preacher?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CASE OF PAUL CEZANNE
+
+
+The case of painter Paul Cezanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a
+surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen
+for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a
+corpse, and though Cezanne died in 1906 he is still a living issue
+among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment:
+fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Cezanne question,
+is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often
+misrepresented; Brahms, known now as a Romantic writing within the
+walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist;
+Cezanne, not a revolutionist, not an innovator, vastly interested in
+certain problems, has been made "chef d'ecole" and fathered with a
+lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if
+he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist! cried
+Paul Gauguin--whose work was heartily detested by Cezanne; but truth
+is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well or
+swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about
+Cezanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followers
+raise a clamour over the banality of "representation" in art, and
+their master is the one man in the history of art who squandered on
+canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to
+the soil. Huysmans was called an "eye" by Remy de Gourmont. Paul
+Cezanne is also an eye.
+
+In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon a picture by Maurice Denis
+entitled Hommage a Cezanne, the idea of which was manifestly
+inspired by Manet's Hommage a Fantin-Latour. The canvas depicted a
+still life by Cezanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard,
+Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard.
+Himself (as they say in Irish) is shown standing and apparently
+unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at
+the Autumn Salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far
+made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special Salle, so had Eugene
+Carriere; Cezanne held the place of honour. The critical press was
+hostile or half-hearted. Poor Cezanne, with his naive vanity, seemed
+dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give
+him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious
+and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of
+the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha. In
+The Sun of 1901, 1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death)
+appeared my articles on Cezanne, among the first, if not the first,
+that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to
+the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why
+not? When juxtaposed with most painters his pictures make the others
+look like linoleum or papier-mache.
+
+He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas,
+and aspects of his generation. In 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 a bull's foot, but who go off at
+half-trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a
+painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cezanne is the painting
+idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These
+fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabanel, Bouguereau and
+Henner, too, were idolised once upon a time, and served to make a
+millionaire's holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the
+undeniable truth that Cezanne has become a tower of strength in the
+eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical
+fancy. Sincerity is strength; Cezanne is sincere to the core; but
+even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of
+masterpieces. Before he attained his original, synthetic power he
+patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and several others. He
+achieved at times the foundational structure of Courbet, but his
+pictures, so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans linear
+pattern, sans personal charm. But "Popularity is for dolls," cried
+Emerson.
+
+Cezanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless one. His early
+modelling in paint was quasi-structural. Always the architectural
+sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times and he betrays a
+predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given
+to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third; tactile values
+are here raised to the _n_th degree. His colour is personal and
+rhythmic. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century ago,
+he spoke of Cezanne's work as containing the prodromes of a new art.
+He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric,
+dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital
+and charged with character. And he often thinks profoundly on
+unimportant matters.
+
+When you are young your foreground is huddled: it is the desire for
+more space that begets revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing
+his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all these sporadic outbursts;
+and while a creative talent may remain provincial, even parochial,
+as was the case with Cezanne, a critic must be cosmopolitan or
+nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life
+long, yet paint like an angel; but a provincial critic is a
+contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it
+can't cut butter. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even
+Cabanel has his good points.
+
+The tang of the town is not in Cezanne's portraits of places. His
+leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded
+retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of
+bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore,
+Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica. There is no sex
+appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the
+Empress Eugenie that in front of Courbet's Les Baigneuses (Salon,
+1853) she asked: "Est-ce aussi une percheronne?" Of the
+heavy-flanked Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the
+canvases of Cezanne. The remark of the Empress appealed to the
+truculent vanity of Courbet. It might not have pleased Cezanne. With
+beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don't care
+for his graceless nudes you may console yourself that there is no
+disputing tastes--with the tasteless. They are uglier than the
+females of Degas, and twice as truthful.
+
+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
+slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a
+score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle sonorities, what colour
+chords are in his best work. I once wrote in the Promenades of an
+Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth.
+Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he painted
+an onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would have dramatised
+it. When Cezanne painted one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be
+sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board of my
+sensibility.
+
+The supreme technical qualities in Cezanne are volume,
+ponderability, and an entrancing colour scheme. What's the use of
+asking whether he is a "sound" draughtsman? He is a master of edges
+and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke of his defective
+eyesight; but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The
+abnormal vision of Cezanne gave him glimpses of a "reality" denied
+to other painters. He advised Emile Bernard to look for the
+contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practised what he
+preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by
+those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cezanne the
+"temperament" that he was always talking about? If so it was not
+decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he
+seldom "finished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually
+painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited the spot. The
+pictures do not resemble it; which simply means that Cezanne had the
+vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations
+filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus. And he had
+the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament.
+
+In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate,
+personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky
+and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its
+vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this
+mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master.
+You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire
+series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence,
+as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlesienne. He sought
+for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato,
+and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract"
+painter--as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a
+legitimate trompe-l'[oe]il on the optic nerve. His is not a
+pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient
+delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother
+Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and
+gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the
+orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as
+analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cezanne never becomes truly lyrical
+except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of
+smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him
+is as beautiful as a naked woman. And he possesses a positive
+genius for the tasteless.
+
+The chiefest misconception of Cezanne is that of the theoretical
+fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may
+be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever
+wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I
+saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed
+since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official
+Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety.
+He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch
+of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the
+Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with
+technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as
+some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic
+diabetes. 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, A rare impersonality, I should say.
+
+There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by
+propagandists of the New AEsthetic. As if form had not always been
+significant. No one can deny Cezanne's preoccupation with form; nor
+Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre
+flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he
+seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper and more petulant modern
+mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a
+solid structural sense. But Cezanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his
+feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of
+the skeleton.
+
+Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise
+a master. The limitations of Paul Cezanne are patent to all. He is a
+profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far
+from the territory he called his own then we should not complain,
+for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism
+defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding
+Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems
+monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of
+Cezanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic,
+symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one
+born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes
+recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour
+is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music
+flows as if from a secret spring.
+
+What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam
+majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led
+black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our
+taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow
+more colours than one. Paul Cezanne will be remembered as a painter
+who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No
+man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+BRAHMSODY
+
+
+After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high
+priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a
+wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a
+musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,"
+cried Von Buelow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion
+and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore
+years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first
+cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who
+dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same
+couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms
+wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves
+rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance,
+fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and
+the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach
+guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars.
+And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful
+harmonies. In his music the formulist finds perfect things.
+Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His
+architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he
+strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms
+and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.
+
+The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anaemia, leaving the
+world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius
+since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the
+revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the
+mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future,
+gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois.
+Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew
+aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of
+romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and
+subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even
+Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and
+Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly
+empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short,
+stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the
+Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic
+tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely
+believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But
+how symbolical of Brahms to fall asleep at the very onset of his
+career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of
+the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It
+is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned
+philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great
+composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There
+are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in
+omphalic meditation.
+
+Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A
+dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of
+wings--wings of great, terrifying monsters; hippogriffs of horrid
+mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your
+imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave
+moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician,
+spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and
+concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at
+certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit
+tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often
+dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of
+lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry:
+"Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our
+thirsty eyelids!"
+
+Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three
+piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music--are they not all
+living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a
+great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and
+Theophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a
+Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed
+upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas,
+noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a
+great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet,
+flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He
+is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the
+geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway.
+Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his
+native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a
+disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the
+unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano
+pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of
+childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by
+desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few
+men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first
+rhapsodies--true soul-tragedies--how they unearthed the core of
+pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer
+in himself, thus a believer in men and women.
+
+He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed
+humanity, the dramatic--yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric--modes
+of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their
+ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses
+his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He
+gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared
+wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A
+great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty
+mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths;
+Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the
+company of both giants.
+
+Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern
+soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANS
+
+
+A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of
+playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free
+exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this
+charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the
+most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great
+master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His
+detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like
+Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition,
+Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman
+tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be
+left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same
+class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not.
+Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in
+their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for
+documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because
+of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's
+natural repugnance to such vulgar material. They were aristocrats.
+Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal
+side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff.
+Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less
+acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He
+loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps
+the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive,
+forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and
+religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life
+to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable AEsthetic of
+the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the
+pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue
+sensibility with a repelling misanthropy.
+
+In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K.
+Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some
+intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social
+ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries;
+indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes
+contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which
+is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a
+roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the
+account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming
+and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and
+even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and
+Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable
+phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life
+and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled
+bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a
+literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured
+the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a
+model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the
+Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for
+his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour,
+yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the
+irascible among decorated philistines!
+
+"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
+stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes
+monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility;
+the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your
+eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes,
+but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a
+touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every
+sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or
+an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused
+look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for
+human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur
+Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking
+letters.
+
+Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot
+found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his
+tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very
+restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of
+indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero;
+as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack--published in Zola's
+collection, Les Soirees de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules
+Lemaitre describes them collectively as: a young man with the
+dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness--the critic
+used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in
+Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste
+chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the sadistic
+Bluebeard--these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his
+conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious
+faultfinder.
+
+No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city
+abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His
+critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious
+confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written
+in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraits of
+certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the
+critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as
+the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered
+Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in
+enamelled prose. Whistler, Cheret, Pissarro, Gauguin were praised by
+him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic
+criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for
+Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he
+praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't
+highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent
+pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops
+attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly
+enough. With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is only for the
+connoisseur.
+
+Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first
+critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cezanne, who, he asserts,
+contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one
+who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early
+as 1877.) He found the Cezanne still-life brutally real; above all,
+a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's
+tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot,
+Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cezanne millstone. The
+Provencal was a ruse, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old
+age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber,
+ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientele in
+both professions.
+
+American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the
+matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself
+intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of
+Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception
+of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He
+employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true
+primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of
+the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Gruenewald's Crucifixion is his
+idol. Huysmans's opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is
+stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a
+rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis
+Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in
+prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont
+called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than
+to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is
+pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a
+perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time.
+
+Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same
+literary yoke. His opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them.
+Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group,
+Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude
+notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his
+famous preface to La Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was
+the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called,
+the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than
+either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But
+he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediaeval
+vileness of La Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Leon
+Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a
+friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the
+eccentric company of Barbey d'Aurevilly, in whose apartment he said
+that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did
+not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg
+Saint-Antoine."
+
+Of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke
+with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs."
+His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist,
+left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty
+volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Theophile Gautier
+did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and
+diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmans believed
+in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something
+disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the
+theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou,
+Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no
+feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and
+deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the
+stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"),
+he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by
+dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even
+theatrical.
+
+Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical
+Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as
+well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That
+giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought
+Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling
+salesman--Balzac's Gaudissart--and would play his own Homais, being
+addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer
+Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture.
+Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde
+nationale."
+
+From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux
+maitre," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great
+men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepid water always
+flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it
+would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules
+Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one
+of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel
+Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't
+bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y
+connait, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se defile!" The style and
+thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls
+Maurice Barres "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that
+exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand
+Brunetiere as "constipe," a sound definition of a shrewd,
+unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are
+not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic
+vision deformed ideas as well as objects.
+
+In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anaemic
+hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English
+taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode;
+Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he
+wished. Brunetiere, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny
+bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular
+vaudeville, Le Voyage a Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need
+not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaire by the
+Crepets (Eugene and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To
+become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire
+frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank
+whisky, read _Punch_, and also sought the company of English grooms
+in the Faubourg Saint-Honore. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as
+Brunetiere detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly
+Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French
+literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than
+loved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE
+
+
+I
+
+Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense
+and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with
+cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking;
+witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal
+man[oe]uvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as
+Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three
+writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy
+of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long
+been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose
+commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in
+literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its
+amber, and it is a brevet of immortality--that is, as immortality
+goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoeblack part of
+the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for
+schoolmarms in male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains?
+The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is
+direct, plain, and simple. The writer's keyboard is that humble
+camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of
+movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an
+impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own
+individuality does not always constitute style; for individual
+opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance
+in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here
+occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.
+
+Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice.
+Apes and peacocks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly
+synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric
+message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical
+personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The
+lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes;
+as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond
+compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly
+limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our
+written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird
+in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay
+Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose
+pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid.
+The American critic registers the variations in style and
+sensibility of the Scotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his
+writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility
+is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his
+personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boethius
+would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas
+Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not
+to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because,
+like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist,
+though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a
+clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable
+controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the
+fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have
+forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose
+may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.
+
+If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to
+do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a
+chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a
+humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life,
+the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by
+the college professor--the Eternal Sophomore--about fleeing
+"journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York,
+Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most
+succinct prose, prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare
+to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose,
+"numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of
+English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the
+Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers,"
+as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy
+Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey,
+Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And
+not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of
+Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H.
+Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Chateaubriand of Atala,
+without its hateful note of morbid egotism.
+
+Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be
+patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the
+peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow
+such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the
+Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor
+Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more
+than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of
+Chateaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for
+French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled
+concision of Merimee or the dry-sherry wit of Voltaire are surer
+guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are
+preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the
+Boanerges.
+
+Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of
+English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh,
+"O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou
+hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the
+sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, shine; for thy
+light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which
+is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ...
+utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85,
+hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury.
+And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir
+Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of
+Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest
+and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and
+cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water
+tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other
+harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by
+immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and
+condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous
+"run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton and his
+majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
+nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..."
+and then fall down and worship, for we are in the holy of holies.
+Stevenson preferred the passage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and
+cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has
+written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in
+Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls
+the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k"
+through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and
+classic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word)
+perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says,
+"must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting
+them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity,
+musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and
+rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of
+logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs
+he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.
+
+Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save
+a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor
+Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of
+moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises.
+He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic
+tradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once
+fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the classical creed,
+to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can
+never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be
+repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality."
+The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in
+a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic
+as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have
+undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of
+fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a
+stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those
+of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the
+"unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the
+melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born
+simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours.
+Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and
+languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as
+Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved
+ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the
+solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of
+flutes, peacocks, and pomegranates.
+
+No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose a finer art than
+English, though admitting that in the richer, denser harmonies of
+English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so
+eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of
+distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but
+it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in
+common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts
+by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length
+but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.
+
+But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity
+nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of
+linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting
+one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels
+saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in
+rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we
+are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural
+style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase,
+confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the
+idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham
+Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a
+writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native
+literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of
+classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate
+deliquescence of prose form. For practical every-day needs the
+eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible
+is the Golden Book of English prose.
+
+Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts,
+and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose
+should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the
+monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose
+Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank
+verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the
+metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor
+Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his
+English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl
+of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle
+cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study
+is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on
+Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the
+Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed
+Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by
+Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than
+followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.
+
+He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society,
+medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not
+music-criticism, not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as
+metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even
+the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not
+altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks
+of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is
+better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and
+Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our
+teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to
+lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist,
+like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years
+without knowing it.
+
+
+II
+
+Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a
+music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in
+disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with
+excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts
+easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is
+Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the
+Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose,
+marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you
+doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning these words, because they
+don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a
+sentence and practically tested it by declaiming--spouting, he
+called it--for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase
+adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose
+assonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such
+a phrase as Chateaubriand's in Atala: "Elle repand dans le bois ce
+grand secret de melancholie qu'elle aime a raconter aux vieux chenes
+et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as
+George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech
+the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.
+
+If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted
+and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does,
+and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his
+magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very
+finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That
+is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather
+puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy
+Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have
+rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis
+Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in
+Literature: "The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure
+but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose
+must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it
+must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse."
+(Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers
+libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than
+"anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the
+Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the classical languages,
+be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical
+combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your
+"ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William
+Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs,
+bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and
+proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our
+eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely
+half the story."
+
+The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to
+indorse the axiom of Remy de Gourmont that style is physiological,
+which Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest
+artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor
+Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical
+literature of a much-debated theme, Prose Rhythms, and this without
+minifying the admirable labours of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver
+Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the New York University. One of
+the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its
+strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor
+of a highly organised musical ear, even if he be not a practical
+musician. He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum that the key to
+literature is music; _i. e._, number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss
+Dabney's study, The Musical Basis of Verse, dealing as it does with
+a certain side of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is
+different. It is less "literary" than psychological, less
+psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remy de
+Gourmont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. "Rhythm,"
+he writes in his preface, "is thus regarded as first of all an
+experience, established, as a rule, by motor performance of however
+rudimentary a nature." Here is the man of science at work.
+
+He speaks of the "lost art of rhythm," adduces syncopation so easily
+mastered by those born "timers," the Indians and Negroes,
+pertinently remarks that "no two individuals ever react exactly
+alike. The term 'type' is in many ways a highly misleading fiction."
+Prose Rhythm, he continues, "must be classed as subjective
+organisation of irregular, virtually haphazard arrangement of
+sounds.... The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however,
+is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest upon a series of definite
+temporal units."
+
+Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms: "one the regular
+sound-room belonging to the department of psychology at Columbia;
+the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound-proof cabinet built
+into one end of an underground room belonging to the department of
+physics."
+
+It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it not? Padded cells
+and aural finger-prints!--to make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called
+John Ruskin a Torquemada of AEsthetics. Professor Patterson might be
+styled a Tonal Torturer. But the experimentings were painless. "The
+first object," he informs us, "was to find out, as far as possible,
+how a group of twelve people, ten men and two women, differed with
+respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated
+roughly as the 'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked
+according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in
+various tests, one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease
+in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records on a
+phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pater, a sentence from Henry
+James, a passage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of
+words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes, were tapped upon
+a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph. The
+words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each
+syllable. 'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats. The notes
+were tapped according to their designated time-values. Observer No.
+1, having had long training as a musician, found no technical
+difficulty in the task. The remaining eleven observers, without
+being told the source of the records, heard the five series of
+drumbeats and passed judgment upon them. The most significant
+judgment made was that of Observer No. 7, who declared that all five
+records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large
+number of the observers, especially on the first hearing, found all
+of the records, including even the passage from Chopin, elusive and
+more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of
+accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little
+organisation each observer could be brought to feel in the beats
+corresponding to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage of
+haphazard musical notes." All the data are carefully set down in the
+Appendices.
+
+The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen from his essay on Leonardo
+da Vinci, in The Renaissance. "It is the landscape, not of dreams or
+of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a
+thousand with a miracle of finesse"; subtly rhythmic, too much so
+for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas
+Browne or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the
+former case, the coda from the Urn Burial, or even that
+chest-expanding phrase, "To subsist in bones, and to be pyramidally
+extant is a fallacy in duration." Or, best of all, because of its
+tremendous intensity, the passage from Saint Paul: "For I am
+persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
+principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
+nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
+separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
+Lord." The drum-beat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not
+marked as in the pages of Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in
+Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of common or four-four time,
+and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a
+coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all latter-day composers
+flee as dulness-breeding. The base-rhythm of English prose is, so
+Professor Saintsbury writes, "the paeon, or four-syllabled foot,"
+and, he could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears.
+Variety in rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely quotes from
+Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: "A picture composed in substitutional
+symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus
+more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry." And this
+applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very
+kernel of the art of Paul Cezanne; rhythmic irregularity,
+syncopation, asymmetry.
+
+De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal
+Newman's Grammar of Assent were included among the tests. Also one
+from Henry James; in the preface to The Golden Bowl: "For I have
+nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of
+interesting prose depend all on withheld tests." If, according to
+lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding "purple panels" of
+Bossuet, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and Ruskin, the
+cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be "spouted"; nevertheless, the
+interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin
+nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1,
+simple in rhythmic structure though less interesting than its sister
+nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in common, the second in
+six-eighths time). Professor Patterson knows Riemann and his "agogic
+accent," which, according to that editor of the Chopin Etudes, is a
+slight expansion in the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.
+
+In his treatment of vers libre our author is not too sympathetic. He
+thinks that "in their productions"--free-verse poets--"the
+disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a
+mountain" is suggested. "For those who find this task exhilarating
+vers libre, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle
+cadence, however, which has been claimed as the chief distinction of
+the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have
+surpassed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of
+Walter Pater." They have not, despite the verbal ingenuity,
+banished the impression of dislocation, of the epileptic. In French,
+in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Regnier,
+Stuart Merrill, Viele Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are
+supple, the assonances grateful to the ear, the irregular patterns
+not offensive to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation from
+form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian
+language than to the English. Most of our native vers libre sounds
+like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the
+sidewalk. However, "it's not the gilt that makes a god, but the
+worshipper."
+
+For musicians and writers the interesting if abstruse study of
+Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the
+results in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we have been, all
+of us, talking rhythmic prose our life long.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLD
+
+
+The way the story leaked out was this: A young Irishman from Sligo,
+as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty
+stamped by nature herself, had served two customers over the bar of
+the old chop-house across the street from the opera-house. To him
+they were just two throats athirst; nothing more. They ordered
+drinks, and this first attracted his attention, for they agreed on
+cognac. Now, brandy after dinner is not an unusual drink, but this
+pair had asked for a large glass. Old brandy was given them, and
+such huge swallows followed that the bartender was compelled by his
+conscience to ring up one dollar for the two drinks. It was paid,
+and another round commanded, as if the two men were hurried, as
+indeed they were, for it was during an entr'acte at the opera that
+they had slipped out for liquid refreshments. Against the bar of the
+establishment a dozen or more humans were ranged, and the noise was
+deafening, but not so great as to prevent the Irishman from catching
+scraps of the conversation dropped by the brandy-drinkers. Their
+talk went something like this, and, although Michael had little
+schooling, his memory was excellent, and, being a decent chap, there
+is no need to impeach the veracity of his report.
+
+The taller man, neither young, neither old, and, like his friend,
+without a grey hair, burst out laughing after the disappearance of
+the second cognac. "I say, old pal, who was it wrote that brandy was
+for heroes? Kipling? What?" The other man, stockily built,
+foreign-looking, answered in a contemptuous tone ("sneering-like,"
+as my informant put it):
+
+"Where's your memory? Gone to rack and ruin like your ideals, I
+suppose! Kipling! What do such youngsters know? Doctor Johnson or
+Walter Savage Landor was the originator of the lying epigram; after
+them Byron gobbled it up, as he gobbled up most of the good things
+of his generation, and after him, the deluge of this mediocre
+century. When I told Byron this, at Milan, I think it was, he vowed
+me an ass. Now, it was Doctor Johnson."
+
+"Cheer up, it's not so bad. I remember once at Paris, or was it
+Vienna, you said the same thing about----" and here followed a
+strange name.
+
+"And, anyhow, you are mixing dates; Landor followed Byron, please,
+but I suppose he said it first. I told Metternich of your bon-mot,
+and, egad! he laughed, did that old parchment face. As for
+Bonaparte, upstart and charlatan, he was too selfish to smile at
+anybody's wit but his own, and little he had. Do you remember the
+Congress of Vienna?"
+
+"Do I--1815?"
+
+"Some such year. Or was it in 1750 when we saw Casanova at Venice?
+Well--" At this point the alarm-signal went off, and the mob went
+over to the opera. The young bartender's heart was beating so fast
+that it "leapt up in his bosom," as he described it. Two middle-aged
+men talking of a century ago as calmly as if they had spoken of
+yesterday flustered him a bit. He heard the dates. He noticed the
+perfectly natural manner in which events were mentioned. There was
+no mystification. For the first time in his life Michael was sorry
+the between-act pause was so short, and he longed for the next one,
+though fatigued from the labours of the last. Would these gentlemen
+return for more cognac? In an hour they came back with the crowd,
+again drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about a lot of
+incomprehensible things that had evidently taken place in the
+sixteenth or seventeenth century; at least, Michael overheard them
+disputing dates, and one of them bet the other that the big fire in
+London occurred in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Peppers,
+or Peps--some such name.
+
+"Ah, poor old Pepys," sighed the dark man; "if he had only taken
+better care of himself he might have been with us to-day instead of
+mouldering in his grave."
+
+"Oh, well! you can't expect every one to believe in your Struldbrug
+cure," replied his friend dreamily. "Even Her Majesty, Queen Anne,
+would not take your advice, though Mrs. Masham and Mr. Harley begged
+her to."
+
+"Yes, about the only thing they ever agreed upon in their life.
+Where is Harley to-day?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose in London," carelessly replied the other. "For a
+young bird of several centuries he's looking as fit as a fiddle; but
+see here, Swift, old boy, your bogy-tales are worrying our young
+friend," and with that Michael says they pointed to him, heartily
+laughed, and went away.
+
+He crossed himself, and for a moment the electric lights burned dim,
+so it seemed to the superstitious laddie-buck. But he had had a good
+chance to study the odd pair. They were not, as he repeated, old
+men, neither were they youthful. Say thirty-five or forty years, and
+he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions, the
+brilliancy of their eyes. They were just gentlemen in evening
+clothes and had run across Broadway without overcoats, a
+reprehensible act even for a young man. But they were healthy,
+self-contained, and hard-headed--they took, according to the
+statistician behind the bar, about a quart of brandy between them,
+and were as fresh as daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they?
+"Blagueurs," said I, after I had carefully deciphered the runic
+inscriptions in Michael's mind. (This was a week later.) Two
+fellows out on a lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy. But what
+was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternich, or Mr. Harley to him? Just
+words. Bonaparte he might be expected to remember. It was curious
+all the same that he could reel off the unusual names of Mrs. Masham
+and Casanova. The deuce! was there something in the horrid tale? Two
+immortals stalking the globe when their very bones should have been
+dissolved into everlasting dust! Two wraiths revisiting the glimpses
+of the moon--hold on! Struldbrug! Who was Struldbrug? What his cure?
+I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the worthies of the
+eighteenth century. Struldbrug. Swift. Struldbrug. Sir William
+Temple. Struldbrug--ah! by the great horn spoon! The Struldbrugs of
+the Island of Laputa! Gulliver's hideous immortals--and then the
+horror of the story enveloped me, but, despite my aversion to
+meeting the dead, I determined to live in the chop-house till I saw
+face to face these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity was
+soon gratified, as the sequel will show.
+
+Just one week after the appearance of this pair I stood talking to
+the Irish barman, when I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here
+are my men. I was not mistaken. Two well-built and well-groomed
+gentlemen asked for brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were
+polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare. No wonder I stared.
+They recalled familiar faces, yet I couldn't at once place the
+owners. Presently they went over to a table and seated themselves.
+Loudly calling for a mug of musty ale, I boldly put myself at an
+adjacent spot, and continued my spying tactics. The friends were
+soon in hot dispute. It concerned the literary reputation of Balzac.
+I sat with my mouth wide open.
+
+The elder of the pair, the one called Swift, snapped at his friend:
+"Zounds, sir! you and your Balzac. Hogwash and roosters in
+rut--that's about his capacity. Of course, when your own dull stuff
+appeared he praised you for the sake of the paradox. You moderns!
+Balzac the father of French fiction! You the father, or is it
+grandfather, of psychology--a nice crew! That boy Maupassant had
+more stuff in him than a wilderness of Zolas, Goncourts, and the
+rest. He is almost as amusing as Paul de Kock--" The other, the
+little man, bristled with rage.
+
+"Because you wrote a popular boy's book, full of filth and
+pessimism, you think you know all literature. And didn't you copy
+Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyagers, and Defoe? You satirise every one
+except God, whom you spare because you don't know him. I don't care
+much for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did treat me
+handsomely in praising my Chartreuse----"
+
+"Good God!" I groaned, "it's Stendhal, otherwise Henry Beyle, laying
+down the law to the tremendous author of Gulliver's Travels." And
+yet neither man looked the accepted portrait of himself. Above all,
+no Struldbrug moles were in view. I forgot my former fear, being
+interested in the dispute of these two giant writers who are more
+akin artistically than ever taken cognisance of by criticism. Dead?
+What did I care! They were surely alive now, and I was not dreaming.
+I didn't need to pinch myself, for my eyes and ears reported the
+occurrence. A miracle? Why not. Miracles are daily, if we but knew
+it. Living is the most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion
+proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he wrote:
+
+"Enough, friend Beyle. You are a charlatan. Your knowledge of the
+human heart is on a par with your taste in literature. You abominate
+Flaubert because his prose is more rhythmic than yours."
+
+"I vow I protest," interrupted Stendhal.
+
+"No matter. I'm right. Merimee, your pupil, is your master at every
+point."
+
+I could no longer contain myself, and, bursting with curiosity, I
+cried:
+
+"Pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting such a luminous
+altercation, but, notwithstanding the queerness of the situation,
+may I not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift and Henry
+Beyle-Stendhal?"
+
+"Discovered, by the eternal Jehovah!" roared Swift, adding an
+obscene phrase, which I discreetly omit. Stendhal took the incident
+coolly.
+
+"As I am rediscovered about every decade by ambitious young critics
+anxious to achieve reputations, I am not disturbed by our young
+friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted. Pray, join us in a
+fresh drink and conversation." But I was only thirsty for more talk,
+oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendhal, who regarded me with
+cynical eyes, all the while fingering his little whisker: "Did you
+ever hear Chopin play?"
+
+"Who," he solemnly asked in turn, "is Chopin?"
+
+"He was at his best in the forties, and as you didn't die till----"
+
+"Pardon me, monsieur. I never died. Your Chopin may have died, but I
+am immortal."
+
+"You venerable Struldbrug," giggled Swift. I was disagreeably
+impressed, yet held my ground:
+
+"You must have met him. He was a friend of Balzac--his music was
+then in vogue at Paris--" I stumbled in my speech.
+
+"He probably means that little Polish piano-player who dangled at
+the petticoats of George Sand," interpolated Swift.
+
+"I knew Cimarosa, Rossini I saw, but I never heard of Chopin. As for
+the Sand woman, that cow who chewed and rechewed her literary
+cud--don't mention her name to me, please. She is the village pump
+of fiction; water, wet water. Balzac was bad enough." My heart
+sank. Chopin not even remembered by a contemporary! This then is
+fame. But the immortality of Stendhal, of Swift--what of
+that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps Balzac, Sand, Flaubert
+were still alive. I propounded the question. Swift answered it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Yes, they are alive. My Struldbrugs are meant to symbolise the
+immortality of genius. Only stupid people die. Sand is a barmaid in
+London. Balzac is on the road selling knit-goods, and a mighty good
+drummer he is sure to be; but poor Flaubert has had hard luck. He
+was the reader to a publishing house, and forced to pass judgment on
+the novels of the day--favourable judgment, mind you, on the popular
+stuff. He nearly burst a blood-vessel when they gave him a Marie
+Corelli manuscript to correct--to correct the style, mind you, he,
+Flaubert! The gods are certainly capricious. Now the old chap--he
+has aged since 1880--is in New York reading proof at a daily
+newspaper office. He sits at the same desk with Ben de Casseres, and
+every time he mutters over the rhythm of a sentence Ben raps him on
+the knuckles, and says:
+
+"'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop Flaubert! Some night I'll
+take you over to Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to teach
+you what brilliance and Bovarysme really mean.'" I was shocked at
+this blasphemy, and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to keep my
+temper.
+
+"But isn't Mr. Swift joking?"
+
+"Mr. Swift is always joking," was the far from reassuring reply. To
+fill in the interval I called for the waiter. The ghosts again
+demanded cognac. Stendhal looked like the caricature by Felicien
+Rops, in which his little pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose,
+and protuberant eyes are shown dominating some strange Cosmopolis of
+1932. In life--or death--he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He
+glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in the sad existence of
+the mighty prose master, but he smiled superciliously when I
+reproached him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic fantasy of
+the gods of Greece, alive, and still in hiding, was not precisely
+convincing in the present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion
+ensued, and finally I arose and said good night to my very new and
+very old friends. Swift's picture of the Struldbrugs was realised,
+and it was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should never be seen; in
+their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated
+humour; Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and
+superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my
+dismay.
+
+"You're disappointed. So sorry!" said Swift ironically. "At first I
+was vastly intrigued at the opportunity of talking with one of you
+modern persons, but I see I'm mistaken--ha! Beyle, what d'ye say?"
+
+Stendhal pondered. "Cimarosa, Rossini, and Haydn I knew. Correggio I
+admire, but who was Chopin?"
+
+Stung to anger, I retorted: "Yours is the loss, not Chopin's."
+Whereat Michael, the bartender, merrily laughed, and the company
+joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My head was on the
+chopping-block, and Stendhal was the executioner. Forgetting the
+respect due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger under
+Stendhal's upturned nostrils: "You may be a couple of impostors for
+all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily
+I dislike your petty carping criticisms. Better oblivion than
+immortality for your lean and sinister souls." Again hysterical
+laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful accents, as
+if his vanity had been wounded:
+
+"This saucy Yahoo reads our books and believes in them, but when we
+talk he doubts us. As Sam Johnson used to say, 'The reciprocal
+civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce
+of life.'"
+
+Stendhal boomed out: "He is dead himself but doesn't know it yet.
+All critics are stillborn. But _we_ live on for ever. Garcon! some
+more brandy."
+
+Out on crowded, expressive Broadway I stood, dazed and irritated.
+After all the palaver of authors, it is the critic who has the last
+word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the originality of the idea, I
+went my wooden way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+ON REREADING MALLOCK
+
+
+It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name
+of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most
+discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth
+Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference
+to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth
+Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier
+was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the
+lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's role was that of a philosophical novelist
+and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not
+with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious
+indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of
+castigation, irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific
+dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put
+them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the
+world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer
+burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an
+individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned
+in the seventies--he occupied then a place midway between Bentham
+and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe
+to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society,
+therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side;
+witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass
+and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas
+were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet
+to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of
+print--which is equivalent to saying, out of mind.
+
+With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the
+literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste,
+a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely
+cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the
+individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type.
+Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as
+immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the
+Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong
+family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was
+discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love
+the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is
+demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is
+the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the
+intrigue less intense, and the characterisation more human. The
+unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not
+duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second
+edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no
+apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not
+as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction,
+but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and
+Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
+see God," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode
+ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the
+leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the
+present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid
+sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a
+scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is
+also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham
+philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has
+abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these
+qualities would make him unpopular in our present century.
+
+What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew
+Arnold, Professor Jowett--a fine character etching--Huxley, Tyndall,
+Carlyle, Pater--rather cruelly treated--Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs.
+Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane--how the author juggles
+with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest
+parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely
+related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the
+priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord
+Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about
+town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of
+Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The decor is always
+gorgeous--Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with
+milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces
+there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who
+anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking
+the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls,
+charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered
+calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs.
+Norham, "celebrated authoress and upholder of the people." One of
+the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the
+Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins--a complete picture-gallery
+may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry,
+tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity
+for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman,"
+lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a
+daguerreotype.
+
+But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist
+is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons
+in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such
+polemics. In the moral world there are analogies to the physical,
+and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications,
+its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries,
+the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to
+the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl--now reduced to the
+exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to
+the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have
+their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones
+of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands
+of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign
+catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the
+idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Buechner, and at the
+base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer
+the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds
+about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George
+Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and
+the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is
+your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your
+gaseous invertebrate god? Surely there is sadly required in the
+cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar
+Saltus as its first incumbent.
+
+Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on
+parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the
+bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive
+rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary
+metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day
+thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world
+has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis, the
+modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms
+in molecules--a renewed geology, astronomy, palaeontology, biology,
+embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last
+but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn
+evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de
+Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also
+proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And
+the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become
+another organ. Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish biologist, with his
+neurons--little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred
+to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory
+nerves--has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of
+metaphysicians.
+
+That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?"
+may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock
+acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the
+individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the
+individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual.
+And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the
+colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of
+vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells,
+else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself
+to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory
+Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr.
+Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with
+great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little
+feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may
+take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a
+modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable
+nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded
+not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a
+pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities.
+Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never
+was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the
+socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content
+that comes with sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling
+over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.
+
+Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing
+survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do
+what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will.
+But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion
+to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most
+pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that
+doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there
+never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott
+wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we
+have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain
+the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which
+think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is
+possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists
+and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it
+is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A
+fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without
+vision, old as well as young limp through life.
+
+Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last
+superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From
+Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry; from Werther to Sanine
+it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of
+temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an
+issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth
+living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on
+the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal
+formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually
+a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet
+has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life."
+Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, aesthetic and ethical;
+nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the
+close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle
+the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the
+self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist
+upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable
+annihilation. The holy name of Altruism--social emotion made
+functional--has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of
+discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of
+universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the
+subconscious--what else is his intuition?--is set before the lovers
+of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that
+the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't
+reason! Just dream! The poet Rogers replied to a lady who asked his
+religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is
+that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr.
+Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still
+worth rereading.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE LOST MASTER
+
+
+"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted
+by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think
+of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting
+at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line
+swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus
+as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the
+watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was
+asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared.
+"You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your
+art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus
+Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the
+grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all
+cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The
+painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We
+sat still, hoping against hope.
+
+"See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse
+expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not
+fair." "I didn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the
+reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of
+holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather
+realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told
+you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives
+a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the
+Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would
+you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown?
+Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He
+is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers
+have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued
+in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't
+show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to
+him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints
+for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the
+Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's
+story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's
+Frenhofer--is that the chap's name?--than Browning's Waring. He is
+the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred
+masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we
+stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to
+critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but it rose afar.'"
+"Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend
+of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter,
+now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of
+our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll
+take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.
+
+The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in
+front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle.
+You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus
+far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or
+business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us
+westward until we reached a warehouse--gloomy, in need of repair,
+yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway,
+traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before
+a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so.
+Approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and
+keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The
+eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most
+magnificent I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance.
+If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted
+animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of
+this stranger. We turned anxiously to to our friend. He had
+disappeared. What a trick to play at such a moment. "Who do you
+wish?" rumbled a mellow voice. "Albertus Magnus?" we timidly
+inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute.
+"Ah!" was the reply. Silence. Then, "Come in, please; don't stumble
+over the canvases." We followed the old man, whose stature was not
+as heroic as his head; and we did not fail to stumble, for the way
+was obscure, and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of
+bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets, wretched furniture, and
+all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not
+sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room
+that doubtless concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely
+smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by
+another door, he explained; and, without noticing our discontented
+air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he
+looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the
+biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the brain that came out
+of his wonderful eyes, were as young as to-morrow.
+
+"Isn't he a corker?" irreverently demanded our friend. "He is not
+even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he
+drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he
+calls himself an idealist." The old painter smiled. "I suppose I
+have been described as Waring to you, because I knew Robert
+Browning. I did vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but
+only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or
+kingship, like the original Alfred Domett, called Waring in the
+poem. But when I returned from Italy I was a stranger in a strange
+land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri.
+Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time fashions change in art
+as in dress, and nowadays no one understands me, and, with the
+exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the
+Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines; his line is as
+beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love gold more than did Facino Cane of
+Balzac. Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters.
+Tell me, do you love Titian?" We swore allegiance to the memory of
+Titian. The artist seemed pleased. "You younger men are devoted to
+Velasquez and Hals--too much so. Great as painters, possibly
+greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil
+like runaway balloons. They miss height and depth. Their colour
+never sings like Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of
+their sitters, but never the secret surprised by the Italian. I sat
+at his feet, before his canvases, fifty years, and I'm further away
+than ever--" Our friend interrupted this rhapsody.
+
+"Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas,
+don't you think you are playing on your visitors' nerves, just to
+set them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for
+the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably
+noticed that you had a trump of your own up your sleeve. You love
+Titian. Well, admit it. You don't paint like him, your colour scheme
+is something else, and what you are after you only know yourself.
+Come! trot out your Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or, better
+still, that landscape with a river-bank and shepherds." The old man
+gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light, placed a big easel in
+proper position, fumbled among the canvases that made the room
+smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath.
+"Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt, was the inspiration," murmured
+the master.
+
+The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail
+bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays,
+so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was
+massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not
+even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and
+smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never
+happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into
+air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown.
+Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned
+the restless soul of Vanderdecken pacing his quarter-deck, cursing
+the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic
+composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the
+strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that
+flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the
+storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such
+sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend,
+the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it
+only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then,
+credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the
+reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar
+photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic
+gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all,
+the grip! Only Turner--" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on
+the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a
+new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic
+prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to
+describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in
+which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that
+set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations
+in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged
+triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque;
+then followed apocalyptic visions, in which the solid earth
+staggered through the empyrean after a black sun--a magnetic disk
+doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished."
+Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold
+undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt,
+faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was
+our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not
+help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both
+in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the
+time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the
+belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial
+quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the
+whites--ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche
+hermine"--the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows--what were all
+these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were
+mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity"
+obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare
+as a lyric by Shelley or the playing of Frederic Chopin.
+
+What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus
+only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited
+at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our
+embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he never
+exhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more
+money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is
+a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one
+female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old
+Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint.
+His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this
+beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse
+such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this
+curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus--" "But I must,"
+expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here
+if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who
+think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My
+chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer.
+While I go nowhere--I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years.
+What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we
+took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known
+to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is
+that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders
+and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured
+him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we
+sneered.
+
+Then we crossed over to the club and talked art far into the night.
+Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his
+paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who
+knows? As the Russians say--_Avos!_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE GRAND MANNER IN PIANOFORTE PLAYING
+
+
+Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of
+every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable
+stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats.
+Despite cunning reproductive contrivances the executive musician has
+no more chance of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is
+brief, but brilliant. Glory, then, is largely a question of memory,
+and when the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away then he has
+no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not
+interpretative, art endures. Better be "immortal" while you are
+alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write
+their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while
+the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be
+some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters
+mundane.
+
+Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws of Anton Rubinstein caress
+the keyboard shall never forget the music. He is the greatest
+pianist in my long and varied list. Think of his delivery of the
+theme at the opening of Beethoven's G major concerto; or in that
+last page of Chopin's Barcarolle. It was no longer the piano tone,
+but the sound of distant waters and horns from elf-land. A mountain
+of fire blown skyward, when the elemental in his profoundly
+passionate temperament broke loose, he could roar betimes as gently
+as a dove. Yet, when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining
+pupils of Chopin declared that he was brutal in his treatment of
+their master. He played Rubinstein, not Chopin, said Georges Mathias
+to me. Mathias knew, for he had heard the divine Frederic play.
+Nevertheless, Rubinstein played Chopin, the greater and the
+miniature, as no one before or since.
+
+To each generation its music-making. The "grand manner" in
+piano-playing has almost vanished. A few artists still live who
+illustrate this manner; you may count them on the fingers of one
+hand. Rosenthal, D'Albert, Carreno, Friedheim--Reisenaur had the
+gift, too--how many others? Paderewski I heard play in Leipsic in
+1912 at a Gewandhaus concert under the baton of the greatest living
+conductor, Arthur Nikisch, and I can vouch for the plangent tone
+quality and the poetic reading he displayed in his performance of
+that old war-horse, the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore, my
+admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer was considerably
+increased after hearing his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikisch.
+How far away we were from Manru. Joseffy, who looked upon
+Paderewski, as a rare personality, told me that the Polish Fantasy
+for piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its seeming
+simplicity in figuration. "Only the composer," enthusiastically
+exclaimed Joseffy, "could have made it so wonderful."
+
+But the grand manner, has it become too artificial, too rhetorical?
+It has gone out of fashion with the eloquence of the old histrions,
+probably because of the rarity of its exponents; also because it no
+longer appeals to a matter-of-fact public. Liszt was the first. He
+was dithyrambic. He was a volcano; Thalberg--his one-time
+rival--possessed all the smooth and icy perfections of Nesselrode
+pudding. Liszt in reality never had but two rivals close to his
+throne; Karl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton Rubinstein, the Russian.
+Von Buelow was all intellect; his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms
+were cerebral, not emotional. He had the temperament of the pedant.
+I first heard him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of Music.
+He introduced the Tschaikovsky B flat minor concerto, with B. J.
+Lang directing the orchestra, a quite superfluous proceeding, as Von
+Buelow gave the cues from the keyboard and distinctly cursed the
+conductor, the band, the composition, and his own existence, as
+befitted a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh! he could be fiery enough,
+though in his playing of the Romantics the fervent note was absent;
+but his rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible. You need only
+recall the pungency of his reading of Beethoven's Scherzo in the
+Sonata Opus 31, No. 3. It was staccato as a hail-storm. Two years
+later, in Paris, I heard the same concerto played by Nicholas
+Rubinstein at the Trocadero (Exposition, 1878), the very man who had
+first flouted the work so rudely that Tschaikovsky, deeply offended,
+changed the dedication to Von Buelow.
+
+Anton Rubinstein displayed the grand manner. His style was a
+compound of tiger's blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip
+about his "false notes" (he wrote a Study on False Notes, as if in
+derision), he was, with Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was
+not always in practice and most of the music he wrote for his
+numerous tours was composed in haste and repented of at leisure. It
+is now almost negligible. The D minor concerto reminds one of a
+much-traversed railroad-station. But Rubinstein the virtuoso! It was
+in 1873 I heard him, but I was too young to understand him. Fifteen
+years later, or thereabouts, he gave his Seven Historical Recitals
+in Paris and I attended the series, not once, but twice. He played
+many composers, but for me he seemed to be playing the Book of Job,
+the Apocalypse, and the Scarlet Sarafan. He had a ductile tone like
+a golden French horn--Joseffy's comparison--and the power and
+passion of the man have never been equalled. Neither Tausig nor
+Liszt did I hear, worse luck, but there were plenty of witnesses to
+tell me of the differences. Liszt, it seems, when at his best, was
+both Rubinstein and Tausig combined, with Von Buelow thrown in. Anton
+Rubinstein played every school with consummate skill, from the iron
+certitudes of Bach's polyphony to the magic murmurs of Chopin and
+the romantic rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann. Beethoven,
+too, he interpreted with intellectual and emotional vigour. Yet this
+magnificent Calmuck--he wasn't of course, though he had Asiatic
+features--grew weary of his instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the
+stars in their courses by composing. But his name is writ in ivory,
+and not in enduring music.
+
+Scudo said that when Sigismund Thalberg played, his scales were like
+perfectly strung pearls falling on scarlet velvet; with Liszt the
+pearls had become red hot. This extravagant image is of value. We
+have gone back to the Thalbergian pearls, for too much passion in
+piano-playing is voted bad taste to-day. Nuance, then colour, and
+ripe conception. Technique for technique's sake is no longer a
+desideratum; furthermore, as Felix Leifels wittily remarked: "No one
+plays the piano badly"; just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably. Mr.
+Leifels, as a veteran contrabassist and at present manager of the
+Philharmonic Society, ought to be an authority on the subject; the
+old Philharmonic has had all the pianists, from H. C. Timm, in
+1844--a Hummel concerto--to Thalberg and Rubinstein, Joseffy,
+Paderewski, and Josef Hofmann. Truly the standard of virtuosity is
+higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals
+with programmes that are staggering. The Chopin concertos now occupy
+the position, technically speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn
+concertos. Every one plays Chopin as a matter of course, and, with a
+few exceptions horribly. Yes, Mr. Leifels is right; no one plays the
+piano badly, yet new Rubinsteins do not materialise.
+
+The year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, was a
+memorable one for visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von
+Buelow, but also two beautiful women, one at the apex of her artistic
+career, Annette Essipoff (or Essipowa) and Teresa Carreno, just
+starting on her triumphal road to fame. Essipowa was later the wife
+of Leschetizky--maybe she was married then--and she was the most
+poetic of all women pianists that I have heard. Clara Schumann was
+as musical, but she was aged when I listened to her. Essipowa played
+Chopin as only a Russian can. They are all Slavs, these Poles and
+Russians, and no other nation, except the Hungarian, interpret
+Chopin. Probably the greatest German virtuoso was Adolf Henselt,
+Bavarian-born, though a resident of Petrograd. He had a Chopin-like
+temperament and played that master's music so well that Schumann
+called him the "German Chopin." Essipowa, I need hardly tell you,
+communicated no little of her gracious charm to Paderewski. He
+learned more from her plastic style than from all the precepts of
+Leschetizky.
+
+On a hot night in 1876, and in old Association Hall, I first saw and
+heard Teresa (then Teresita) Carreno. I say "saw" advisedly, for she
+was a blooming girl, and at the time shared the distinction with
+Adelaide Neilson and Mrs. Scott-Siddons of being one of the three
+most beautiful women on the stage. Carreno, still vital, still
+handsome, and still the conquering artist, till her death last
+spring, was in that far-away day fresh from Venezuela, a pupil of
+Gottschalk and Anton Rubinstein. She wore a scarlet gown, as fiery
+as her playing, and when I wish to recall her I close my eyes and
+straightway as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear her; for her
+playing has always been scarlet to me, as Rubinstein's is golden,
+and Joseffy's silvery.
+
+The French group I have heard, beginning with Theodore Ritter, who
+came to New York in company with Carlotta Patti; Plante--still
+living and over eighty, so I have been told by M. Phillipp;
+Saint-Saens, whom I first saw and heard at the Trocadero, Paris,
+with his pupil, Montigny-Remaury; Clotilde Kleeberg, Diemer, Risler;
+the venerable Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin; Raoul Pugno, who
+was veritably a pugnacious pianist, Cecile Chaminade, Marie Jaell,
+and her corpulent husband, Alfred Jaell.
+
+Eugen d'Albert, surely the greatest of Scotch pianists--he was born
+at Glasgow, though musically educated in London--is another
+heaven-stormer. I heard him at Berlin some years ago, in
+Philharmonic Hall, and people stood up in their excitement--Liszt
+redivivus!
+
+It was the grand manner in its most chaotic form. A musical volcano
+belching up lava, scoriae, rocks, hunks of Beethoven--the
+Appassionata Sonata it happened to be--while the infuriated little
+Vulcan threw emotional fuel into his furnace. The unfortunate
+instrument must have been a mass of splintered steel, wood, and wire
+after the musical giant had finished. It was a magnificent
+spectacle, and the music glorious. Eugen d'Albert, whether he is or
+isn't the son of Karl Tausig--as Weimar gossip had it; Weimar, when
+in the palmy days every other pianist you met was a natural son of
+Liszt--or else pretended to be one--has more than a moiety of that
+virtuoso's genius. He is a great artist, and occasionally the magic
+fire flares and lights up the firmament of music.
+
+I think it was in 1879 that Rafael Joseffy visited us for the first
+time; but I didn't hear him till 1880. The reason I remember the
+date is that this greatly beloved Hungarian made his debut at old
+Chickering Hall (then at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street); but I
+saw him in Steinway Hall. Another magician with a peculiarly
+personal style. In the beginning you thought of the aurora borealis,
+shooting-stars, and exquisite meteors; a beautiful style, though not
+a classic interpreter then. With the years Joseffy deepened and
+broadened. The iridescent shimmer was never absent. No one played
+the E minor Concerto of Chopin as did Joseffy. He had the tradition
+from his beloved master, Tausig, as Tausig had it from Chopin by way
+of Liszt. (Tausig always regretted that he had never heard Chopin
+play.) Joseffy, in turn, transmitted the tradition to his early
+pupil, Moriz Rosenthal, in whose repertoire it is the most
+Chopinesque of all his performances.
+
+And do you remember the Chevalier de Kontski, Carl Baermann, Franz
+Rummel, S. B. Mills--who introduced here so many modern
+concertos--the huge Norwegian Edmund Neupert, who lived at the Hotel
+Liszt, next door to Steinway Hall, Constantin von Sternberg, and Max
+Vogrich, the Hungarian with the Chopin-like profile?
+
+In the same school as Joseffy is the capricious De Pachmann; with
+Joseffy I sat at the first recital of this extraordinary Russian in
+Chickering Hall (1890). Joseffy, with his accustomed generosity of
+spirit--he was the most sympathetic and human of great virtuosi--at
+once recognised the artistic worth of Vladimir de Pachmann. This
+last representative of a school that included the names of Hummel,
+Cramer, Field, Thalberg, Chopin, the little De Pachmann (he was then
+bearded like a pirate) captivated us. It was all miniature, without
+passion or pathos or the grand manner, but in its genre his playing
+was perfection; the polished perfection of an intricately carved
+ivory ornament. De Pachmann played certain sides of Chopin
+incomparably; capriciously, even perversely. In a small hall,
+sitting on a chair that precisely suited his fidgety spirit, then,
+if in the mood, a recital by him was something unforgettable.
+
+After De Pachmann--Paderewski. Paderewski, the master-colourist, the
+grand visionary, whose art is often strained, morbid, fantastic. And
+after Paderewski? Why, Leopold Godowsky, of course. He belongs to
+the Joseffy-De Pachmann, not to the Rubinstein-Josef Hofmann, group.
+I once called him the superman of piano-playing. Nothing like him,
+as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano-playing
+since Chopin. He is an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a
+contrapuntalist. Bach and Chopin. The spirit of the German cantor
+and the Polish tone-poet in curious conjunction. His playing is
+transcendental; his piano compositions the transcendentalism of the
+future. That way, else retrogression! All has been accomplished in
+ideas and figuration. A new synthesis--the combination of seemingly
+disparate elements and styles--with innumerable permutations, he has
+accomplished. He is a miracle-worker. The Violet Ray. Dramatic
+passion, flame, and fury are not present; they would be intruders on
+his map of music. The piano tone is always legitimate, never forced.
+But every other attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten
+independent voices recreating the ancient polyphonic art of the
+Flemings. He is like a Brahma at the piano. Before his serene and
+all-embracing vision every school appears and disappears in the
+void. The beauty of his touch and tone are only matched by the
+delicate adjustment of his phrasing to the larger curve of the
+composition. Nothing musical is foreign to him. He is a pianist for
+pianists, and I am glad to say that the majority of them gladly
+recognise this fact.
+
+One evening Godowsky was playing his piano sonata with its subtle
+intimations of Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and its altogether
+Godowskian colour and rhythmic life--he is the greatest creator of
+rhythmic values since Liszt, and that is a "large order"--when he
+was interrupted by the entrance of Josef Hofmann. Godowsky and
+Hofmann are as inseparable as were Chopin and Liszt. Heine called
+the latter pair the Dioscurii of music. In the Godowsky apartment
+stood several concert grands. Hofmann nonchalantly removed his coat
+and, making an apology for disturbing us, he went into another room
+and soon we heard him slowly practising. What do you suppose? Some
+new concerto with new-fangled bedevilments? O Sancta Simplicitas!
+This giant, if ever there was one, played at a funereal tempo the
+octave passages in the left hand of the Heroic Polonaise of Chopin
+(Opus 53). Every schoolgirl rattles them off as "easy," but, with
+the humility of a great artist, Hofmann practised the section as if
+it were still a stumbling-block. De Lenz records that Tausig did the
+same.
+
+Later, Conductor Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera dropped
+in, and several pianists and critics followed, and soon the Polish
+pianist was playing for us all some well-known compositions by a
+certain Dvorsky; also an extremely brilliant and effective concert
+study in C minor by Constantin von Sternberg. From 1888, when he was
+a wonder-child here, Jozio Hofmann's artistic development has been
+logical and continuous. His mellow muscularity evokes Rubinstein. No
+one plays Rubinstein as does this Harmonious Blacksmith--and with
+the piety of Rubinstein's pet pupil. I once compared him to a
+steam-hammer, whose marvellous sensitivity enables it to crack an
+egg-shell or crush iron. Hofmann's range of tonal dynamics is
+unequalled, even in this age of perfected piano technique. He is at
+home in all schools, and his knowledge is enormous. At moments his
+touch is as rich as a Kneisel Quartet accord.
+
+At the famous Rudolph Schirmer dinner, given in 1915, among other
+distinguished guests there were nearly a score of piano virtuosi.
+The newspapers humorously commented upon the fact that there was
+not a squabble, though with so many nationalities one row, at
+least, might have been expected. As a matter of fact, if any
+discussion had arisen it would not have been over politics, but
+about the fingering of the Double-Note Study in G sharp minor of
+Chopin, so difficult to play slowly--the most formidable of
+argument-breeding questions among pianists. A parterre of pianists,
+indeed, some in New York because of the war, while Paderewski and
+Rosenthal were conspicuous by their absence. Think of a few names:
+Joseffy--he died several months later, Gabrilowitsch, Hofmann,
+Godowsky, Carl Friedberg, Mark Hambourg--a heaven-stormer in the
+Rubinstein-Hercules manner--Leonard Borwick, Alexander Lambert,
+Ernest Schelling, Stojowski, Percy Grainger--the young Siegfried of
+the Antipodes--August Fraemcke, Cornelius Ruebner, and--another
+apparition in the world of piano-playing--Ferruccio Busoni.
+
+This Italian, the greatest of Italian piano virtuosi--the history of
+which can claim such names as Domenico Scarlatti, Clementi,
+Fumigalli, Martucci, Sgambati--is also a composer who has set agog
+conservative critics by the boldness of his imagination. As an
+artist he may be said to embody the intellectuality of Von Buelow,
+the technical brilliancy of the Liszt group. Busoni is eminently a
+musical thinker.
+
+America probably will never again harbour such a constellation of
+piano talent. I sometimes wonder if the vanished generation of piano
+artists played much better than those men. Godowsky, Hofmann, the
+lyric and most musical Harold Bauer; the many-sided, richly endowed,
+and charming Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Hambourg, Busoni, and Paderewski
+are not often matched. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a
+prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel
+(not a negro minstrel, for a chalk-burner is necessarily white),
+Mme. Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler--a pianist! The contemporary piano
+hierarchy might be thus classed: Josef Hofmann, a king; Paderewski,
+a poet; Godowsky, a prophet; Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, a sibyl;
+D'Albert, a titan; Busoni, a philosopher; Rosenthal, a hero, and
+Alexander Lambert--a pianist. Well, Mr. Lambert may be congratulated
+on such an ascription; Doehler was a great technician in his day,
+and when the "friend of pianists" (Lambert could pattern after
+Schindler, whose visiting-card read: "l'Ami de Beethoven") masters
+his modesty an admirable piano virtuoso is revealed. So let him be
+satisfied with the honourable appellation of "pianist." He is in
+good company.
+
+And the ladies! I am sorry I can't say, "place aux dames!" Space
+forbids. I've heard them all, from Arabella Goddard to Mme.
+Montigny-Remaury (in Paris, 1878, with her master, Camille
+Saint-Saens); from Alide Topp, Marie Krebs, Anna Mehlig, Pauline
+Fichtner, Vera Timinoff, Ingeborg Bronsart, Madeline Schiller, to
+Julia Rive-King; from Cecilia Gaul and Svarvady-Clauss to Anna
+Bock; from the Amazon, Sofie Menter, the most masculine of Liszt
+players, to Adele Margulies, Yoland Maero, and Antoinette
+Szumowska-Adamowska; from Ilonka von Ravacsz to Ethel Leginska--who
+plays like a house afire; from Helen Hopekirk to Katharine Goodson;
+from Clara Schumann to Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Olga Samaroff, and
+the newly come Brazilian Guiomar Novaes--the list might be unduly
+prolonged.
+
+I heard Paderewski play last spring. Surely he has now the "grand
+manner" in all its dramatic splendour, and without its old-fashioned
+pretentious rhetoric. Nor has he lost the lusciousness of his
+touch--a Caruso voice on the keyboard--or the poetic intensity of
+his Chopin and Schumann interpretations. He is still Prince
+Charming.
+
+Not only do I fear prolixity, but the confusing of critical values,
+for I write from memory, and I admit that I've had more pleasure
+from the "intimate" pianists than from the forgers of tonal
+thunderbolts; that is--Rubinstein excepted--from such masters in
+miniature as Joseffy, Godowsky, Carl Heyman, De Pachmann, and
+Paderewski. I find in the fresh, sparkling playing of Mischa
+Levitski, Benno Moiseivich, and Guiomar Novaes high promise for
+their future. The latter came here unheralded and as the pupil of
+that sterling virtuoso and pedagogue, Isidor Phillipp of the Paris
+Conservatory.
+
+It is noteworthy that only Chopin, Liszt, and Von Buelow were
+Christian born among the supreme masters of the keyboard; the rest
+(with a few exceptions) were and are members of that race whose
+religious tenets specifically incline them to the love and practice
+of music.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+JAMES JOYCE
+
+
+Who is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn,
+who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present
+residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good health--his eyes
+trouble him--and that he was once a student in theology, but soon
+gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of
+the new group of young Irish writers who see their country and
+countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the
+most beautiful and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the
+Isle of Saints for those iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who
+happens to write English, though he often thinks in French; Bernard
+Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the
+Londoners; while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic, and both
+poets. Yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen, who mingles
+angels' pin-feathers with rainbow gold; a magic decoction of which
+we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet, and a realist
+of the De Maupassant breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with
+a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as truthful as Tchekov, and as
+grey--that Tchekov compared with whose the "realism" of De
+Maupassant is romantic bric-a-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce
+is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the
+sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of middle-class life, and he
+sometimes suggests the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical
+methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.
+
+Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair
+traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the
+water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a
+tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries
+is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed
+thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too
+often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls
+easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may
+result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris
+resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it
+depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so
+persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh
+heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a
+hell of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land
+of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but
+you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the
+heart of the peasantry, and Yeats and Lady Gregory brought back
+from the hidden spaces fairies and heroes.
+
+Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish
+priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce
+representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of
+contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic
+character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the
+pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in
+George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew
+Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is
+a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is
+nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and
+Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which
+king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their
+unhappy temperaments.
+
+The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always
+interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the
+daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait
+of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive
+of what follows; also a title that seems to have emerged from the
+catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the
+artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college,
+from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's
+apron-strings to coarse revelry, the hero is put to the torture by
+art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do
+not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of
+J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company
+of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of
+reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and
+the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace
+of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked.
+This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so
+joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of
+richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must
+chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to
+everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.
+
+Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tells
+his student friend about his father. These were his attributes: "A
+medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting
+politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good
+fellow, a story-teller, somebody's secretary, something in a
+distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present a praiser of his
+own past." He could talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a
+turkey--as they say up Cork way. The portrait is well-nigh perfect.
+The wild goose over again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became
+violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of
+riotous living he was transformed into a militant Catholic. The
+reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist, but
+his mind was too speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing.
+To analyse the sensibility of a soul mounting on flaming pinions to
+God is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral
+recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not
+again sink into the slough of Dublin low life. Cranly, the student,
+saw through the hole in his sceptical millstone. "It is a curious
+thing, do you know," Cranly said dispassionately, "how your mind is
+supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." A
+profound remark. Once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic,
+particularly if you are born in Ireland.
+
+Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He neither abuses nor praises. He
+is evidently out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of the
+Jesuits with affection and admiration. The sermons preached by them
+during the retreat are models. They are printed in full--strange
+material for a novel. And he can show us the black hatred caused by
+the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of
+this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with
+verity. At a Christmas dinner the argument between Dante (a certain
+Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father
+carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man and
+woman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles,
+watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his
+temper--he has had several tumblers of mountain dew and is a little
+"how come you so?" He bursts forth: "No God in Ireland! We have had
+too much God in Ireland! Away with God!" "Blasphemer! Devil!"
+screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his
+face. "Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!"
+The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly bowed his head on
+his hands with a sob of pain. "Poor Parnell!" he cried loudly. "My
+dead King." Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted
+that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of
+Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman
+unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab.
+
+There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful.
+Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching
+acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable to the average
+reader. There is relief in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a
+saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr. Joyce. There is no
+ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a
+full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he
+wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and
+the portrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity--as an artistic
+performance--and its passionate personal note, is bound to give
+offence in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish;
+not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales entitled Dubliners
+reveals a wider range, a practised technical hand, and a gift for
+etching character that may be compared with De Maupassant's. A big
+comparison, but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as The
+Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or Two Gallants, and be
+convinced that we do not exaggerate.
+
+Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery.
+Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes.
+From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to Dalkey or Drumcondra;
+from the Monument to Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip
+is unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with Dublinesque
+anecdotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of
+the town. The slackers who pester servant-girls for their shillings
+to spend on whisky; the young man in the boarding-house who succumbs
+to the "planted" charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the
+matrimonial trap--only De Maupassant could better the telling of
+this too commonplace story; the middle-aged man, parsimonious as to
+his emotions and the tragic ending of a love-affair that had hardly
+begun; and the wonderfully etched plate called The Dead with its
+hundred fine touches of comedy and satire--these but prove the claim
+of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A
+malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he
+could say--oh, terrifying irony!--that "mankind is not necessary" in
+the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he may become
+mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of "life's
+more bitter flavours." Insipid novelists are legion. He is
+Huysmans's little brother in his flair for disintegrating character.
+But yet an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a
+vision that too often vanishes before he can pin its beauty on
+canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humour of
+such a story as Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, which would bring to
+a Tammany heeler what Henry James called "the emotion of
+recognition." Ah! the wild goose. The flying dream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CREATIVE INVOLUTION
+
+
+Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to
+the _Strand Magazine_ and later reunited in a book bearing the
+happy title Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers as being
+significant chiefly in their self-revelation. What they tell of
+themselves is of more value than what they write about. Whether
+Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of
+an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes
+widely after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L. Williams,
+M. S., with an apposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams
+deals with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension of Space
+(what we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalised).
+Speculative as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter, a Christian
+Scientist, or a member of any of the other queer rag-tag and bobtail
+beliefs and superstitions--fortune-telling, astrology, selling
+"futures" in the next life, table-rapping, and such like. Cora
+Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the
+brilliant, unhappy Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then, are not
+verbal wind-pudding, but have a basis of mathematics and the
+investigations of the laboratory, where "chemists and physicists
+are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals
+is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity."
+
+We have always enjoyed the idea of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. The
+fact that it is an _x_ in the plotting of mathematicians in general
+does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J. K. F.
+Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved to his own satisfaction the existence
+of a Fourth Dimension when he turned an india-rubber ball inside out
+without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable
+melancholy. No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's Flatland,
+or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford,
+you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion,
+squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of
+the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the
+cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on
+machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of
+positivism craves more spiritual nourishment to-day. Hasn't the
+remarkable mathematician Henri Poincare (author of Science and
+Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method) declared that
+between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth
+there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary
+elimination which have necessitated such inferences? Note the word
+"free"; free-will is restored to its old and honourable estate in
+the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron determinism of the seventies
+and eighties has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Buechner and
+Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly Intuition--a
+dangerous vocable--rules over mere mental processes. (There is, as
+George Henry Lewes asserted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox:
+_i. e._, there are more false facts than false theories current.)
+Science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and
+relativity of things--no mean intellectual feat, by the way--but not
+of the things themselves; one must join, adds Poincare, to the
+faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy. In a word,
+Intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable,
+and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann are as legitimate as
+Euclid's. And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble
+and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles
+now?
+
+Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension. Time may be in two
+dimensions. Heraclitus before Bergson compared Time to a river
+always flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged from this
+stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, would it
+not signify that Time has two dimensions. And where does music stand
+in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical
+structure and melody with its horizontal flow proof that music is
+another dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion of the Fourth
+Spatial Dimension is a spiritual one. Creative Involution is to
+supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution
+described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All
+roads lead to religion. Expel religion forcibly and it returns under
+strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions. Yet religion
+without dogma is like a body without a skeleton--it can't be made to
+stand upright.
+
+Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor,
+just as philosophy is the diversion of professors. Modern science,
+said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's stage when it denied
+religion. But matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become
+spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to
+revise the conclusions of his once famous Belfast address in the
+presence of radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the essential thing
+is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of
+form. From a macrocosmic monster our gods are become microcosmic;
+god may be a molecule, a cell. A god to put in a phial; thus far has
+the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is "a sum of
+scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," says
+Salomon Reinach in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations in
+vain. All is vanity, even doctrinal fluctuations. Goethe has warned
+us that "Man is not born to solve the mystery of Existence; but he
+must nevertheless attempt it, in order that he may learn how to keep
+within the limits of the Knowable." Goethe detested all "thinking
+about thought." Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation.
+
+Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The
+psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different
+from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental
+workings of a jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a
+jury-box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment
+is, as a rule, that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted
+this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant humour) fashion, adding
+that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the
+Great, candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees
+salvation for the single soul in the collective soul--not
+necessarily socialistic--nevertheless warns parents against the
+dangers in our public-school system, where the individuality of the
+child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by class teaching.
+Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the
+ego. Yet to collective consciousness may belong the future. It is
+all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification, the result,
+and the prop of limited class interests. (This was years ago.)
+Stately, sedate, stable is the class that won't tolerate war; a
+class of moral lollipops. War we must have; it is one of the prime
+conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetich,
+taboo is the basis of all superstitions, so the superstition of
+yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's
+Golden Bough--James Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social
+Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a
+glass to hold it; and if patriotism is a crime of lese-majesty
+against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and
+patriotism are precious essences in the scheme of life, and we shall
+always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a
+timely one. At school our children's souls are clogged with bricks
+and mortar, instead of being buoyant and individual.
+
+She quotes--and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt
+quotations--with evident approbation from Some Neglected Factors in
+Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English thinker: "Organic
+life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of
+waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that
+one on which we ourselves, the organisms of to-day, and the human
+societies to which we belong, are swept onward. Here we must
+necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm
+which has brought life so far will carry it on to still greater
+heights in the unknown future?" Rhythm, measured flow, is the
+shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of
+plant and ghost. "I teach you Beyond-Man (superman); Man is
+something that will be surpassed ... once man was ape, and is ape in
+a higher degree than any ape.... Man is a rope connecting animal and
+Beyond-Man." "Believe that which thou seest not," cries Flaubert in
+his marvellous masque of mythologies ancient and modern, The
+Temptation of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same centuries before
+the Frenchman: Believe what is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is
+the price we pay for cognition.
+
+Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though she appreciates his
+plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a
+mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to
+answer Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott's three questions: "1. Bergson
+says, 'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.' Where is the
+specimen on which this allegation is founded? 2. Consciousness is to
+some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson
+thinks he is disproving a crude theory of localisation of mental
+qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from
+local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life
+that intellect can never give. Will Professor Bergson furnish
+instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where
+intellect has failed?" (From Modern Science and the Illusions of
+Professor Bergson, 1912.) These "metaphysical curiosities," as they
+are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lankester in his preface
+to this solidly reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of numerous
+persons, dilettantes, with a craving for an embellished theory of
+the Grand Perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken
+sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the
+air--which, like the earth, hath bubbles, as was observed by the
+greatest of poets--she plants her feet on tangible affirmations. And
+to have faith we must admit the Illative sense of John Henry Newman.
+Thus "the wheel is come full circle." Creative Involution will
+please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author somersaults in
+the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS
+
+
+Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there
+were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his
+philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbed the
+contemporary wisdom of Wittenberg. And let it be said in passing
+that their knowledge did not lag behind ours, metaphysically
+speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet, if he had lived longer, might have
+said that no philosophy would ever solve the riddle of the sphinx;
+that we never know, only name, things. Noah is the supreme symbol of
+science, he the first namer of the animals in the ark. The world of
+sensation is our ark and we are one branch of the animal family. We
+come whence we know not and go where we shall never guess. Standing
+on this tiny Isle of Error we call the present, we think backward
+and live forward. Hamlet the sceptical would now demand something
+more tangible than the Grand Perhaps. My kingdom for a fulcrum! he
+might cry to Horatio--on which I may rest my lever and pry this too
+too solid earth up to the starry skies! What the implement?
+Religion? Remember Hamlet was a Catholic, too sensitive to send
+unshrived to hell's fire the soul of his uncle. Philosophy? Read
+Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and realise that if he were alive to-day the
+melancholy Prince might be a delicate scoffer at all fables. A
+Hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What then the escape? We all need
+more elbow-room in the infinite. The answer is--the Fourth Dimension
+in Higher Space. Eureka!
+
+After studying Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius, or
+the selections in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, even the
+doubting Thomas is forced to admit that here is no trace of rambling
+discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stammered enigmas; on the
+contrary, the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces
+with crystalline clearness the veil of the visible world. As
+literary style we find sharp contours and affirmations. Mysticism is
+not all cobweb lace and opal fire. Remember that we are not
+stressing the validity of either the vision or its consequent
+judgments; we only wish to emphasise the absence of muddy thinking
+in these writings. This quality of precision, allied to an eloquent,
+persuasive style, we encounter in Claude Bragdon's Four Dimensional
+Vistas. The author is an architect and has written much of his art
+and of projective ornament. (He was a Scammon lecturer at the
+Chicago Art Institute in 1915.) He is a mystic. He is also eminently
+practical. His contribution to aesthetics in The Beautiful Necessity
+is suggestive, and on the purely technical side valuable. But Mr.
+Bragdon, being both a mathematician and a poet, does not stop at
+three-dimensional existence. Like the profound English mystic
+William Blake, he could ask: "How do you know but every bird that
+cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your
+senses five?"
+
+What is the Fourth Dimension? A subtle transposition of precious
+essences from the earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in a world
+of three dimensions, the symbols of which are length, breadth,
+thickness. A species of triangular world, a prison for certain souls
+who see in the category of Time an escape from that other
+imperative, Space (however, not the Categorical Imperative of Kant
+and its acid moral convention). Helmholtz and many mathematicians
+employed the "n" dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful in
+some analytical problems, but it is not apprehended by the grosser
+senses. Pascal, great thinker and mathematician, had his "Abyss"; it
+was his Fourth Dimension, and he never walked abroad without the
+consciousness of it at his side. This illusion or obsession was the
+result of a severe mental shock early in his life. Many of us are
+like the French philosopher. We have our "abyss," mystic or real.
+Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician Bolyai, who in 1823
+"declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels, 'I
+will draw two lines through a given point both of which will be
+parallel to a given line.'" Space, then, may be curved in another
+dimension. Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though he does not
+attempt to prove it, as that would be impossible; but he gives his
+readers the chief points in the hypothesis. The "n" dimension may be
+employed as a lever to the imagination. Even revealed religion
+demands our faith, and imagination is the prime agent in the
+interpretation of the universe, according to the gospel of mystic
+mathematics.
+
+Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is interesting to note the
+imagery of transcendentalism through the ages. It is invariably
+geometrical. Spheres, planes, cones, circles, spirals, tetragrams,
+pentagrams, ellipses, and what-not. A cubistic universe. Xenophanes
+said that God is a sphere. And then there are the geometrical
+patterns made by birds on the wing. Heaven in any religion is
+another sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes, many mansions
+for the soul at its various stages of existence. The Bible, the
+mystical teachings of Mother Church--why evoke familiar witnesses?
+We are hemmed in by riddles, and the magnificent and mysterious
+tumult of life asks for the eye of imagination, which is also the
+eye of faith. The cold fire and dark light of the mystics must not
+repel us by their strangeness. Not knowledge but perception is
+power, and the psychic is the sign-post of the future. What do all
+these words mean: matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules,
+electrons, but the same old thing? I am a colony of cells, yet that
+fact does not get me closer to the core of the soul. What will? A
+fourth spatial dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a poetic
+concept.
+
+He calls man a space-eater. Human ambition is to annihilate space.
+Wars are fought for space, and every step in knowledge is based upon
+its mastery. What miracles are wireless telegraphy, flying-machines,
+the Roentgen ray! Astronomy--what ghastly gulfs it shows us in
+space! Time and space were abolished as sense illusions by the
+worthy Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley; but as we are up to our
+eyes in quotidian life, which grows over and about us like grass, we
+cannot shake off the oppression. First thought, and then realised,
+these marvels are now accepted as matter of fact because mankind has
+been told the technique of them; as if any explanation can be more
+than nominal. We shall never know the real nature of the phenomena
+that crowd in on us from lust to dust. Not even that synthesis of
+the five senses, the sixth, or sex sense, with its evanescent
+ecstasy, cuts deeply into the darkness. There may be a seventh
+sense, a new dimension, intimations of which are setting advanced
+thinkers on fresh trails. But there is as yet no tangible proof.
+Philosophers, who, like some singers, bray their brainless
+convictions to a gaping auditory, ask of us much more credence, and
+little or no imagination. As that "old mole," working in the ground,
+gravitation, is defied by aeroplanes, then we should not despair of
+any hypothesis which permits us a peep through the partly opened
+door. Plato's cavern and the shadows. Who knows but in this universe
+there may be a crevice through which filters the light of another
+life? Emerson, who shed systems yet never organised one, hints at
+aerial perspectives. A flight through the sky with the sun bathing
+in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid finite world. In such
+perilous altitudes I have enjoyed this experience and felt a
+liberation of the spirit which has no parallel; not even when
+listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin. Music, indeed, is the
+nearest approach to psychic freedom.
+
+Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Goethe's expression "frozen music,"
+applied to Gothic architecture. (Stendhal appropriated this phrase.)
+For us the flying buttress is aspiring, and the pointed arch is a
+fugue. Our author is rich in his analogies, and like Sir Thomas
+Browne sees "quincunxes" in everything; his particular "quincunx"
+being Higher Space. The precise patterns in our brain, like those of
+the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us to perceive and build the
+universe (otherwise called innate ideas) are geometrical. Space is
+the first and final illusion. Time--which is not "a stuff both
+resistant and substantial," as Henri Bergson declares--is perhaps
+the Fourth Dimension in the guise of a sequence of states, and not
+grasped simultaneously, as is the idea of Space. That Time can
+shrink and expand, opium-eaters, who are not always totally drugged
+by their dreams, assure us. A second becomes an aeon. And space
+curvature? Is it any wonder that "Lewis Carroll," who wrote those
+extraordinary parables for little folk, Through the Looking-Glass
+and Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A topsy-turvy world;
+it is even upside down as an optical image. The other side of good
+and evil may be around the corner. Eternity can lurk in a molecule
+too tiny to harbour Queen Mab. And we may all live to see the back
+of our own heads without peering in mirrors. That "astral trunk"
+once so fervently believed in may prove a reality; it is situated
+behind the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the planet Saturn,
+and by its aid we should be enabled to converse with spirits! The
+pineal gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence us in at
+every step. We fill our belly with the east wind of vain desires. We
+eat the air promise-crammed. This world is but a point in the
+universe, and our universe only one of an infinite series. There was
+no beginning, there is no end. Eternity is now; though death and the
+tax-gatherer never cease their importunings.
+
+All this Mr. Bragdon does not say, though he leans heavily on the
+arcana of the ancient wisdom. The truth is that the majority of
+humans are mentally considered vegetables, living in two dimensions.
+To keep us responsive to spiritual issues, as people were awaked in
+Swift's Laputa by flappers, is the service performed by such
+transcendentalists as C. Howard Hinton, author of The Fourth
+Dimension; Claude Bragdon and Cora Lenore Williams. Their thought is
+not new; it was hoary with age when the Greeks went to old Egypt for
+fresh learning; Noah conversed with his wives in the same
+terminology. But its application is novel, as are the personal
+nuances. The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may be likened to
+a fresh lens in the telescope or microscope of speculation. For the
+present writer the hypothesis is just one more incursion into the
+fairyland of metaphysics. Without fairies the heart grows old and
+dusty.
+
+The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating shapes. As for the
+paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an
+eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush,
+and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired pawnbroker. The
+Eternal Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse for life is
+its brevity. Why, then, do we yearn for that unending corridor
+through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed
+by the burden of our chimera--our ego? I confess that I prefer to
+watch on the edge of some vast promontory the swift approach of
+a dark sun rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar
+spaces to the celestial assignation made at the beginning of Time
+for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the
+populous path of the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding
+with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that apocalyptic
+flare-up--surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing
+in greasy bliss--Higher Space may be manifested and Time and
+Tri-Dimensional Space be no more. The rest is silence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+O. W.
+
+
+It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a
+martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a
+label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar
+Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway
+Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in
+the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with
+his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less
+insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss
+to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class
+morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If
+he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the
+clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people
+who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in
+reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory
+of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he
+tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an
+unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but
+the note of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was
+the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more
+welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far
+more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender
+volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of
+the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and
+facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana--or
+Oscariana--which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early
+portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a
+boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He
+was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers
+think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy,"
+his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and
+"horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as
+was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he
+gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other
+hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know
+him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and
+if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and
+spongers, his end might have been different.
+
+I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was
+Barbey d'Aurevilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably
+modelled--lace cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations.
+But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every
+twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out
+in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the
+man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when
+he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care
+so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne--(in the wholly
+admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to
+O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a
+harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as
+tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his
+Jumbos")--Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter
+Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion
+element, is poor Huysmans's--just look into that masterpiece, A
+Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salome
+is Flaubert in operetta form--his gorgeous Herodias watered down for
+uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece--which
+limps dramatically--would never have been seriously considered if
+not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted
+essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, _i. e._,
+it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical
+anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in any particular. His
+Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The
+fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an
+excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in
+Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the
+hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as
+fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error,
+yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer
+them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very
+gay fancy.
+
+He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed a la Byron and Baudelaire;
+but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid
+or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old
+wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever
+inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book
+gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind
+prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and
+very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more
+witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing
+Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own
+anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing
+an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and
+amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a
+plagiarist from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter
+and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too
+seriously--I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde
+was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't
+knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the
+tragic denouement that has been thrashed to death by those who
+know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he
+called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw
+Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave
+attitude--always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to
+leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though
+neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry
+conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in
+cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a
+second Jesus Christ--which latter statement stuns one. (The
+Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not
+unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as
+quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after
+dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts
+below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me,
+he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne,
+Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readers
+would only take the trouble to study the originals there might be
+less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any
+disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man.
+Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called aesthetic
+movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically
+perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true;
+but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and
+playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the
+"Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly
+individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not--nothing but his
+astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS
+
+
+Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it
+has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed
+success, though the aesthetic principle at the base of his theory is
+eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and
+the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very
+titles are significant--a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is
+the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his
+scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye;
+truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino
+had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young
+man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet
+from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other
+ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at
+Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to
+Japan--only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent
+of armpits--of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New
+York audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese
+crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Theatre d'art, Paris,
+and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made
+with all the arts--except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary
+Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music,
+lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the
+stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple.
+The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and
+greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly
+on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet,
+Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in
+all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black;
+E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in
+his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch
+the ears of credulous ones. Rene de Ghil invented an entirely new
+system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet.
+I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that
+music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands
+of an anarch composer like Illowski--or Richard Strauss. And now New
+York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine.
+It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave
+conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while his
+brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed
+down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a
+wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the
+truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not
+optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since
+I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his etude in D sharp minor.
+Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it.
+I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did
+not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either
+Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its
+composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate
+twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled
+Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious
+premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus,
+the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his
+electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often
+undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously
+practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of
+cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; principally,
+Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if
+not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his Light
+Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. In
+Paris the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows
+with perfume symphonies.
+
+A quarter of a century ago I visited the Theatre d'art, in Paris;
+that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed
+theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't
+enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the
+nombril button, took my Rig-Veda--a sacred buggy--projected my
+astral being, and sailed through space to the French capital, there
+to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts,
+eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were
+deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was
+maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my
+arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of
+violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The
+dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid
+counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a melange that appealed
+to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that
+the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge,
+yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the
+duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly
+cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little
+rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried (astrally, of
+course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by
+Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic."
+
+The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into
+little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor,
+scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo,
+sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this
+chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was
+one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it
+was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that
+made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The
+bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the
+hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion)
+smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the
+lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of
+jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours
+seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips
+glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and
+received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin,
+though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of
+my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I
+touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might
+hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. So
+evidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again
+inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously
+raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort
+of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed
+my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was
+the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your
+pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one
+can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to
+make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed.
+
+Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a
+shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the
+orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The
+steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the
+trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing
+something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to
+Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the
+music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of
+art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the
+ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away,
+but, full of gumbo soup as I was--and you have no idea how soup
+discommodes the astral stomach--I was anchored to my seat, and
+bravely determined not to leave till I had some clew to the riddle
+of the new evangel of the seven--or seventeen--arts. The stage
+remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their
+hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my
+tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish,
+dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and,
+turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely
+asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play,
+piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony,
+cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I
+had appealed looked fearfully about him--I had foolishly forgotten
+that I was invisible in my astral shape--then clutched at his
+windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still
+another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly
+vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too
+absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a
+slow, putrid silence.
+
+Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat
+down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of
+actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the
+orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E
+flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets.
+Suddenly the lights went out, and we were plunged into a blackness
+that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A
+smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we
+were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were
+tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glace, and orchids, and
+the soup supply shifted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these
+contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced.
+Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall
+old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandishing
+aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the
+Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland,
+was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the
+slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly
+the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer
+brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives,
+and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help
+wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My
+cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing
+young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge
+carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must
+have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the
+Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetrated the air, the
+electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to
+the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these
+composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an
+odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse,
+making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing
+the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock,
+with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and
+burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the
+orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs,
+and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac
+steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di
+bassetto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and
+coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical
+banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve
+was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention!
+When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell
+simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis
+of the arts? Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not too much
+time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward,
+wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and
+nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I landed at the Battery it
+was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun
+was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky.
+New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old
+hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my
+cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of
+ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers
+and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE CLASSIC CHOPIN
+
+
+That Chopin is a classic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is
+classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature;
+but that he is of a classical complexion as a composer from the
+beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox.
+Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained
+now, since old party lines have been effaced. To battle seriously
+for such words as Classic or Romantic or Realism is no longer
+possible. Cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once
+wrangled over doctrinal points; as if the salvation of mankind
+depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation
+or consubstantiation. Only yesterday that ugly word "degeneracy,"
+thanks to quack critics and charlatan "psychiatrists," figured as
+a means of estimating genius. This method has quite vanished
+among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another
+misunderstood vocable--decadence. Wagner is called decadent. So is
+Chopin. While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of
+musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis:
+
+"Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a
+classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic
+style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian
+phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful
+because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is
+beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.... Swift's
+prose is classic, Pater's decadent.... Roman architecture is
+classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely
+decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in
+art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest
+degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the
+bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic ... is
+decadent.... All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a
+rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes."
+
+I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth a profound but not
+widely appreciated fact. In art, as in life, there is no absolute.
+Perhaps the most illuminating statement concerning the romantic
+style was uttered by Theophile Gautier. Of it he wrote (in his essay
+on Baudelaire): "Unlike the classic style it admits shadow." We need
+not bother ourselves about the spirit of romanticism; that has been
+done to the death by hundreds of critics. And it is a sign of the
+times that the old-fashioned Chopin is fading, while we are now
+vitally interested in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopin the
+romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous, morbid, and Chopin
+the pianist, need not enter into our present scheme. He has appeared
+to popular fancy as everything from Thaddeus of Warsaw to an exotic
+drawing-room hero; from the sentimental consumptive consoled by
+countesses to the accredited slave of George Sand. All this is truly
+the romantic Chopin. It is the obverse of the medal that piques
+curiosity. Why the classic quality of his compositions, their
+clarity, concision, purity, structural balance, were largely missed
+by so many of his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of his
+obviously romantic melodies he was definitely ranged with the most
+extravagant of the romantics, with Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt; but, as
+a matter of fact, he is formally closer to Mendelssohn. His original
+manner of distributing his thematic material deceived the critics.
+He refused to join the revolutionists; later in the case of Flaubert
+we come upon an analogous condition. Hailed as chief of the
+realists, the author of Madame Bovary took an ironic delight in
+publishing Salammbo, which was romantic enough to please that prince
+of romanticists, Victor Hugo. Chopin has been reproached for his
+tepid attitude toward romanticism, and also because of his rather
+caustic criticisms of certain leaders. He, a musical aristocrat _pur
+sang_, held aloof, though he permitted himself to make some sharp
+commentaries on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz. Decidedly not a
+romantic despite his romantic externalism. Decidedly a classic
+despite his romantic "content." Of him Stendhal might have written:
+a classic is a dead romantic. (Heine left no epic, yet he is an
+indubitable classic.) Wise Goethe said: "The point is for a work to
+be thoroughly good and then it is sure to be classical."
+
+But it is not because of the classicism achieved by the pathos of
+distance that Chopin's special case makes an appeal. It is Chopin as
+a consummate master of music that interests us. In his admirable
+Chopin the Composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley considers Chopin and puts
+out of court the familiar "gifted amateur," "improvisatore of
+genius," and the rest of the theatrical stock description by proving
+beyond peradventure of a doubt that Frederic Francois Chopin was not
+only a creator of new harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but
+also a musician skilled in the handling of formal problems, one
+grounded in the schools of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; furthermore,
+that if he did not employ the sonata form in its severest sense, he
+literally built on it as a foundation. He managed the rondo with
+ease and grace, and if he did not write fugues it was because the
+fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps the divination of his own
+limitations is a further manifestation of his extraordinary genius.
+This does not imply that Chopin had any particular genius in
+counterpoint, but to deny his mastery of polyphony is a grave
+error. And it is still denied with the very evidence staring his
+critics in the face. Beethoven in his sonatas demonstrated his
+individuality, though coming after Mozart's perfect specimens in
+that form. Chopin did not try to bend the bow of Ulysses, though
+more than a word might be said of his two last Sonatas--the first is
+boyishly pedantic, and monotonous in key-contrast, while the 'cello
+and piano sonata hardly can be ranked as an exemplar of classic
+form.
+
+Of the Etudes Kelley says:
+
+"In this group of masterpieces we find the more desirable features
+of the classical school--diatonic melodies, well-balanced phrase and
+period-building--together with the richness afforded by chromatic
+harmonies and modulatory devices heretofore unknown."
+
+Indeed, a new system of music that changed the entire current of the
+art. It was not without cause that I once called Chopin the "open
+door"; through his door the East entered and whether for good or for
+ill certainly revolutionised Western music. Mr. Hadow is right in
+declaring that "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not as far from
+each other as the music of 1880 from that of 1914." And Chopin was
+the most potent influence, in company with Beethoven and Wagner, in
+bringing about that change. I say in company with Beethoven and
+Wagner, for I heartily agree with Frederick Niecks in his recent
+judgment:
+
+"I consider Chopin to be one of the three most powerful factors in
+the development of nineteenth-century music, the other two being, of
+course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute originality of Chopin's
+personality, and that of its expression through novel harmony,
+chromaticism, figuration justifies the assertion. And none will deny
+the fact who takes the trouble to trace the Polish master's
+influence on his contemporaries and successors. The greatest and
+most powerful composers came under this influence, to a large
+extent, by the process of infiltration."
+
+Kelley gives us chapter and verse in the particular case of Wagner
+and his absorption of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the
+late Anton Seidl many times for my particular benefit.
+
+However, this only brings us to Chopin the innovator, whereas it is
+the aspect of the classic Chopin which has been neglected. "As far
+back as 1840 Chopin was employing half-tones with a freedom that
+brought upon him the wrath of conservative critics," writes Hadow,
+who admires the Pole with reservations, not placing him in such
+august company as has Kelley and Niecks. True, Chopin was a pioneer
+in several departments of his art, yet how few recognised or
+recognise to-day that Schumann is the more romantic composer of the
+pair; his music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness; his
+Carneval the epitome of romantic musical portraiture--with its
+"Chopin" more Chopin than the original. Contrast the noble Fantasy
+in C, Opus 17 of Schumann, with the equally noble Fantasy in F
+minor, Opus 49 of Chopin, and ask which is the more romantic in
+spirit, structure, and technique. Unquestionably to Schumann would
+be awarded the quality of romanticism. He is more fantastic, though
+his fantasy is less decorative; he strays into the most delightful
+and umbrageous paths and never falters in the preservation of
+romantic atmosphere. Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin,
+who, no matter his potentialities, never experimented in the larger
+symphonic mould, and as fully imbued with the poetic spirit as
+Schumann; nevertheless a master of his patterns, whether in
+figuration or general structure. His Mazourkas are sonnets, and this
+Fantasy in F minor is, as Kelley points out, a highly complex rondo;
+as are the Ballades and Scherzos. Beethoven, doubtless, would have
+developed the eloquent main theme more significantly; strictly
+speaking, Chopin introduces so much new melodic material that the
+rondo form is greatly modified, yet never quite banished. The
+architectonics of the composition are more magnificent than in
+Schumann, although I do not propose to make invidious comparisons.
+Both works are classics in the accepted sense of the term. But
+Chopin's Fantasy is more classic in structure and sentiment.
+
+The Sonatas in B flat minor and B minor are "awful examples" for
+academic theorists. They are not faultless as to form and do sadly
+lack organic unity. Schumann particularly criticises the Sonata Opus
+35 because of the inclusion of the Funeral March and the homophonic,
+"invertebrate" finale. But the two first movements are distinct
+contributions to Sonata literature, even if in the first movement
+the opening theme is not recapitulated. I confess that I am glad it
+is not, though the solemn title "Sonata" becomes thereby a mockery.
+The composer adequately treats this first motive in the development
+section so that its absence later is not annoyingly felt. There are,
+I agree with Mr. Kelley, some bars that are surprisingly like a
+certain page of Die Goetterdaemmerung, as the Feuerzauber music may be
+noted in the flickering chromaticism of the E minor Concerto; or as
+the first phrase of the C minor Etude, Opus 10, No. 12, is to be
+found in Tristan and Isolde--Isolde's opening measure, "Wer wagt
+mich zu hoehnen." (The orchestra plays the identical Chopin phrase.)
+This first movement of the B flat minor Sonata--with four bars of
+introduction, evidently suggested by the sublime opening of
+Beethoven's C minor Sonata, Opus 111, does not furnish us with as
+concrete an example as the succeeding Scherzo in E flat minor, (for
+me) one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's exquisite formal
+sense. While it is not as long-breathed as the C sharp minor
+Scherzo, its concision makes it more tempting to the student. In
+character stormier than the Scherzo, Opus 39, its thematic economy
+and development--by close parallelism of phraseology, as Hadow
+points out--reveal not only a powerful creative impulse, but
+erudition of the highest order. No doubt Chopin did improvise
+freely, did come easily by his melodies, but the travail of a giant
+in patience--again you think of Flaubert--is shown in the polishing
+of his periods. He is a poet who wrote perfect pages.
+
+The third Scherzo, less popular but of deeper import than the one
+in B flat minor, is in spirit splenetic, ironical, and passionate,
+yet with what antithetic precision and balance the various and
+antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed. And every measure
+is logically accounted for. The automatism inherent in all passage
+work he almost eliminated, and he spiritualised ornament and
+arabesque. It is the triumph of art over temperament. No one has
+ever accused Chopin of lacking warmth; indeed, thanks to a total
+misconception of his music, he is tortured into a roaring tornado by
+sentimentalists and virtuosi. But if he is carefully studied it will
+be seen that he is greatly preoccupied with form--his own form, be
+it understood--and that the linear in nearly all of his compositions
+takes precedence over colour. I know this sounds heretical. But
+while I do not yield an iota in my belief that Chopin is the most
+poetic among composers (as Shelley is among poets, and Vermeer is
+the painter's painter) it is high time that he be viewed from a
+different angle. The versatility of the man, his genius as composer
+and pianist, the novelty of his figuration and form dazzled his
+contemporaries or else blinded them to his true import. Individual
+as are the six Scherzos--two of them are in the Sonatas--they
+nevertheless stem from classic soil; the scherzo is not new with
+him, nor are its rhythms. But the Ballades are Chopinesque to the
+last degree, with their embellished thematic cadenzas, modulatory
+motives, richly decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable
+"content"; above all, in their amplification of the coda, a striking
+extension of the postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning as the
+main themes. The lordly flowing narration of the G minor Ballade;
+the fantastic wavering outlines of the second Ballade--which on
+close examination exhibits the firm burin of a masterful etcher; the
+beloved third Ballade, a formal masterpiece; and the F minor
+Ballade, most elaborate and decorative of the set--are there, I ask,
+in all piano literature such original compositions? The four
+Impromptus are mood pictures, highly finished, not lacking boldness
+of design, and in the second, F sharp major, there are fertile
+figurative devices and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic
+organ-point is original. Polyphonic complexity is to be found in
+some of the Mazourkas. Ehlert mentions a "perfect canon in the
+octave" in one of them (C sharp minor, Opus 63).
+
+Of the Concertos there is less to be said, for the conventional form
+was imposed by the title. Here Chopin is not the Greater Chopin,
+notwithstanding the beautiful music for the solo instrument. The
+sonata form is not desperately evaded, and in the rondo of the E
+minor Concerto he overtops Hummel on his native heath. As to the
+instrumentation I do not believe Chopin had much to do with it; it
+is the average colourless scoring of his day. Nor do I believe with
+some of his admirers that he will bear transposition to the
+orchestra, or even to the violin. It does not attenuate the power
+and originality of his themes that they are essentially of the
+piano. A song is for the voice and is not bettered by orchestral
+arrangement. The same may be said of the classic concertos for
+violin. With all due respect for those who talk about the Beethoven
+Sonatas being "orchestral," I only ask, Why is it they sound so
+"unorchestral" when scored for the full battery of instruments? The
+Sonata Pathetique loses its character thus treated. So does the A
+flat Polonaise of Chopin, heroic as are its themes. Render unto the
+keyboard that which is composed for it. The Appassionata Sonata in
+its proper medium is as thrilling as the Eroica Symphony. The
+so-called "orchestral test" is no test at all; only a confusion of
+terms and of artistic substances. Chopin thought for the piano; he
+is the greatest composer for the piano; by the piano he stands or
+falls. The theme of the grandiose A minor Etude (Opus 25, No. 11) is
+a perfect specimen of his invention; yet it sounds elegiac and
+feminine when compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's C
+minor Symphony.
+
+The Allegro de Concert, Opus 46, is not his most distinguished work,
+truncated concerto as it is, but it proves that he could fill a
+larger canvas than the Valse. In the Mazourkas and Etudes he is
+closer to Bach than elsewhere. His early training under Elsner was
+sound and classical. But he is the real Chopin when he goes his own
+way, a fiery poet, a bold musician, but also a refined, tactful
+temperament, despising the facile, the exaggerated, and bent upon
+achieving a harmonious synthesis. Truly a classic composer in his
+solicitude for contour, and chastity of style. The Slav was tempered
+by the Gallic strain. Insatiable in his dreams, he fashioned them
+into shapes of enduring beauty.
+
+You would take from us the old Chopin, the greater Chopin, the
+dramatic, impassioned poet-improvisatore, I hear some cry! Not in
+the least. Chopin is Chopin. He sings, even under the fingers of
+pedants, and to-day is butchered in the classroom to make a holiday
+for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique. Sometimes the whole
+in his work is subordinated to the parts, sometimes the parts are
+subordinated to the whole. The romantic "shadow" is there, also the
+classic structure. Again let me call your attention to the fact that
+if he had not juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanct tonic and
+dominant, had not distributed his thematic material in a different
+manner from the prescribed methods of the schools, he would have
+been cheerfully, even enthusiastically, saluted by his generation.
+But, then, we should have lost the real Chopin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+LITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITY
+
+
+BARNEY IN THE BOX-OFFICE
+
+_First Scene._ It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is
+in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the
+Savoy (remember this is a play, and the unusual is bound to happen).
+In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science, two
+figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted facade. The
+doors are wide open, a thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking
+to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are as sandy as his wit.
+The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one
+clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his
+face. They are the two Maxes--Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:
+
+"Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?" "By jove, it is, let's
+go in." "Hasn't he a new play on?" "I can't say. I'm only a critic
+of the drayma." "No cynicism, Maxixe," urges Nordau. They approach.
+In unanimous flakes the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard
+on recognising them:
+
+"Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended. I'm giving my
+annual feast in the Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one
+scene. No one may enter, least of all you, Nordau, or you, Sir
+Critic." "Why, what's up, George?" asks in a pleading mid-Victorian
+timbre the little Maxixe. "Back to the woods, both of you!" commands
+George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. "Besides,"
+he confidentially adds, "you surely don't wish to go to a play in
+which your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view." "On
+view!" quoth the author of Degeneration. "Yes, visible on a short
+furlough from Sheol, for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies
+and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest show on earth. I'm in
+it. Lively, please!" A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the
+snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. "I'm no
+Maxixe," he murmurs, "if I can't get into a theatre without paying."
+Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only
+the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.
+
+_Second Scene._ On the stage of the theatre there are two long
+tables. The scene is set as if for a banquet. The curtain is down.
+Some men walk about conversing--some calmly, some feverishly.
+Several are sitting. The lighting is feeble. However, may be
+discerned familiar figures; Victor Hugo solemnly speaking to Charles
+Baudelaire--who shivers (un nouveau frisson); Flaubert in a corner
+roaring at Sainte-Beuve--the old row over Salammbo is on again.
+Richard Strauss is pulling at the velvet coat-tails of Richard
+Wagner, without attracting his attention. The Master, in company
+with nearly all the others, is staring at a large clock against the
+back drop. "Listen for the Parsifal chimes," he says, delight
+playing over his rugged features. "Ape of the ideal," booms a deep
+voice hard by. It is that of Nietzsche, whose moustaches droop in
+Polish cavalier style.
+
+"Batiushka! If those two Dutchmen quarrel over the virility of
+Parsifal I'm going away." The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his
+newest Moujik costume, top-boots and all. In his left hand he holds
+a spade. "To table, gentlemen!" It is the jolly voice of the Irish
+Ibsen, G. B. S. Lights flare up. Without is heard the brumming of
+the audience, an orchestra softly plays motives from Pelleas et
+Melisande. Wagner wipes his spectacles, and Maurice Maeterlinck
+crushes a block of Belgian oaths between his powerful teeth. But
+Debussy doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly strikes
+his soup-spoon on a silver salt-cellar and immediately jots down
+musical notation. "The correspondences of nuances," he sings to his
+neighbour, who happens to be Whistler. "The correspondence of
+fudge," retorts James. "D'ye think I'm interested in wall-paper
+music? Oh, Lil'libulero!" All are now seated. With his accustomed
+lingual dexterity Mr. Shaw says grace, calling down a blessing upon
+the papier-mache fowls and the pink stage-tea, from what he
+describes as a gaseous invertebrate god--he has read Haeckel--and
+winds up with a few brilliant heartless remarks:
+
+"I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods, and demigods, alive or
+dead, to remember that you are assembled here this evening to honour
+me. Without me, and my books and plays, you would, all of you, be
+dead in earnest--dead literature as well as dead bones. As for the
+living, I'll have a shy at you some day. I'm not fond of
+Maeterlinck. ["Hear, hear!" comes from Debussy's mystic beard.] As
+for you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at bettering
+Shakespeare, and, for Richard Strauss--well, I've never tried
+orchestration, but I'm sure I'd succeed as well as you----"
+
+"Oh, please, won't some one give me a roast-beef sandwich? In Russia
+I daren't eat meat on account of my disciples there and in
+England--" It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes him with an
+indignant look, he, the prince of vegetarians: "Give him some salt,
+he needs salting." In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading of the
+confessions of Huysmans. The band, on the other side of the curtain,
+swings into the Kaisermarch. "Stop them! Stop it!" screams Wagner.
+"I'm a Social-Democrat now. I wrote that march when I was a
+Monarchist." This was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up his
+tall, lanky figure, he began: "You mean, Herr Geyer--to give you
+your real name--you wrote it for money. You mean, Richard Geyer,
+that you cut your musical coat to suit your snobbish cloth. You
+mean, the Wagner you never were, that you wrote your various
+operas--which you call music-dramas--to flatter your various
+patrons. Parsifal for the decadent King Ludwig----"
+
+"Pardieu! this is too much." Manet's blond beard wagged with rage.
+"Have we assembled this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or
+are we met to do honour to the only man in England, and an Irishman
+at that, who, in his plays, has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen,
+Nietzsche, Wagner? As for me, I don't need such booming. I'm a
+modest man. I'm a painter." "Hein! You a painter!" Sitting alone,
+Gerome discloses spiteful intonations in his voice. "Yes, a
+painter," hotly replies Manet. "And I'm in the Louvre, my Olympe--"
+"All the worse for the Louvre," sneers Gerome. The two men would
+have been at each other's throats if some one from the Land of the
+Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened. It was Henrik Ibsen.
+
+"Children," he remarks, in a strong Norwegian brogue, "please to
+remember my dignity if not your own. Long before Max Stirner--"
+Nietzsche interrupted: "There never was such a person." Ibsen calmly
+continued, "I wrote that 'my truth is the truth.' And when I see
+such so-called great men acting like children, I regret having left
+my cool tomb in Norway. But where are the English dramatists, our
+confreres? Ask the master of the revels." Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops
+in his head at a practicable door.
+
+"Who calls?"
+
+"We wish to know why our brethren, the English playwrights, are not
+bidden to meet us?" said Maeterlinck, after gravely bowing to Ibsen.
+Smiling beatifically, Saint Bernard replied:
+
+"Because there ain't no such thing as an English dramatist. The only
+English dramatist is Irish." He disappears. Ensues a lively
+argument. "He may be right," exclaims Maeterlinck, "yet I seem to
+have heard of Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Barrie--well, I'll have to
+ask the trusty A. B. C. Z. Walkley." "And the Americans?" cries
+Ibsen, who is annoyed because Richard Strauss persists in asking for
+a symphonic scenario of Peer Gynt. "I'm sure," the composer
+complains, "Grieg will be forgotten if I write new incidental music
+for you." Ibsen looks at him sourly.
+
+"American dramatists, or do you mean American millionaires?" Manet
+interpolated. "No, I fancy he means the American painters who
+imitate my pictures, making them better than the originals, and also
+getting better prices than I did."
+
+"What envy! what slandering! what envious feelings!" sighs
+Nietzsche. "If my doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things
+sublunary is a reality, then I shall be sitting with these venomous
+spiders, shall be in this identical spot a trillion of years hence.
+Oh, horrors! Why was I born?"
+
+"Divided tones," argues Manet, clutching Whistler by his carmilion
+necktie, "are the only--" Suddenly Shaw leaps on the stage.
+
+"Gentlemen, gods, ghosts, idols, I've bad news for you. Max Nordau
+is in the audience." "Nordau!" wails every one. Before the lights
+could be extinguished the guests were under the table. "No taking
+chances," whispers Nietzsche. "Quoi donc! who is this Nordau--a spy
+of Napoleon's?" demands Hugo, in bewildered accents. For answer,
+Baudelaire shivers and intones: "O Poe, Poe! O Edgar Poe." Silence
+so profound that one hears the perspiration drop from Wagner's
+massive brow.
+
+_Third Scene._ It still snows without. Max, the only Nordau, stands
+in silent pride. He is alone. The erstwhile illuminated theatre is
+as dark as the Hall of Eblis. "Gone the idols! All. I need but crack
+that old whip of Decadence and they crumble. So much for a mere
+word. And now to work. I'll write the unique tale of Shaw's Cave of
+Idols, for I alone witnessed the denouement." He spoke aloud. Judge
+his chagrin when he heard the other Max give him this cheery leading
+motive: "I saw it all--what a story for my weekly review." "How
+like a yellow pear-tree!" exclaims the disgusted theorist of mad
+genius. Nordau speeds his way, as from the box-office comes the
+chink of silver. It is G. B. S. counting the cash. Who says a poet
+can't be a pragmatist? The little Maxixe calls out: "Me, too,
+Blarney! Remember I'm the only living replica of Charles Lamb." "You
+mean dead mutton," tartly replied Bernard. The other giggled. "The
+same dear old whimsical cactus," he cries; "but with all your faults
+we love you still--I said still, if that's possible for your tongue,
+George, quite still!" Curtain.
+
+
+THE WOMAN WHO BUYS
+
+She (entering art gallery): "I wish to buy a Titian for my
+bridge-whist this evening. Is it possible for you to send me one to
+the hotel in time?" He (nervously elated): "Impossible. I sent the
+last Titian we had in stock to Mrs. Groats's Dejeuner Feroce." She
+(making a face): "That woman again. Oh, dear, how tiresome!" He
+(eagerly): "But I can give you a Raphael." She (dubiously):
+"Raphael--who?" He (magisterially): "There are three Raphaels,
+Madame--the archangel of that name, Raphael Sanzio, the painter, and
+Raphael Joseffy. It is to the second one I allude. Perhaps you would
+like to see--" She (hurriedly): "Oh! not at all. I fancy it's all
+right. Send it up this afternoon, or hadn't I better take it along
+in my car?" (A shrill hurry-up booing is heard without. It is the
+voice of the siren on a new one hundred horse-power Cubist machine,
+1918 pattern.) She (guiltily): "Tiens! That is my chauffeur,
+Constant. The poor fellow. He is always so hungry about this time.
+By the way, Mr. Frame, how much do you ask for that Raphael? My
+husband is so--yes, really, stingy this winter. He says I buy too
+much, forgetting we are all beggars, anyhow. And what is the
+subject? I want something cheerful for the game, you know. It
+consoles the kickers who lose to look at a pretty picture." He
+(joyfully): "Oh, the price! The subject! A half-million is the
+price--surely not too much. The picture is called The Wooing of Eve.
+It has been engraved by Bartolozzi. Oh, oh, it is a genuine Raphael.
+There are no more imitation old masters, only modern art is forged
+nowadays." She (interrupting, proudly): "Bartolozzi, the man who
+paints skinny women in Florence, something like Boldini, only in
+old-fashioned costumes?" He (resignedly): "No, Madame. Possibly you
+allude to Botticelli. The Bartolozzi I mention was a school friend
+of Raphael or a cousin to Michael Angelo--I've forgotten which.
+That's why he engraved Raphael's paintings." (He colours as he
+recalls conflicting dates.) She (in a hurry): "It doesn't much
+matter, Mr. Frame, I hate all this affectation over a lot of musty,
+fusty pictures. Send it up with the bill. I ought to win at least
+half the money from Mrs. Stonerich." (She rushes away. An odour of
+violets and stale cigarette smoke floats through the hallway. The
+siren screams, and a rumbling is heard in the middle distance.) He
+(waking, as if from a sweet dream, vigorously shouts): "George,
+George, fetch down that canvas Schmiere painted for us last summer,
+and stencil it Raphael Sanzio. Yes--S-a-n-z-i-o--got it? Hurry up!
+I'm off for the day. If any one 'phones, I'm over at Sherry's, in
+the Cafe." (Saunters out, swinging his stick, and repeating the old
+Russian proverb, "A dark forest is the heart of a woman.")
+
+
+SCHOOLS IN ART
+
+"Yes," said the venerable auctioneer, as he shook his white head,
+"yes, I watch them coming and going, coming and going. One year it's
+light pictures, another it's dark. The public is a woman. What
+fashion dictates to a woman she scrupulously follows. She sports
+bonnets one decade, big picture hats the next. So, the public that
+loves art--or thinks it loves art. It used to be the Hudson River
+school. And then Chase and those landscape fellows came over from
+Europe, where they got a lot of new-fangled notions. Do you remember
+Eastman Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you remember the
+Fortuny craze? His Gamblers, some figures sitting on the grass?
+Well, sir, seventeen thousand dollars that canvas fetched. Big price
+for forty-odd years ago. Bang up? Of course. Meissonier, Bouguereau,
+and Detaille came in. We couldn't sell them fast enough. I guess the
+picture counterfeiters' factories up on Montmartre were kept busy
+those times. It was after our Civil War. There were a lot of
+mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a chromo from a Gerome.
+Those were the chaps we liked. I often began with: 'Ten thousand
+dollars--who offers me ten thousand dollars for this magnificent
+Munkaczy?' Nowadays I couldn't give away Munkaczy as a present. He
+is too black. Our people ask for flashing colours. Rainbows.
+Fireworks. The new school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon
+men have had their day. Mind you, I don't claim they are falling
+off. A few seasons ago a Troyon held its own against any Manet you
+put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer in the market, and the
+picture cranks are beginning to tire of the dull greys, soft blues,
+and sober skies. The Barbizons drove out Meissonier and his crowd.
+Then Monet and the Impressionists sent the Barbizons to the wall. I
+tell you the public is a woman. It craves novelty. What's that?
+Interested in the greater truth of Post-Impressionism? Excuse me, my
+dear sir, but that's pure rot. The public doesn't give a hang for
+technique. It wants a change. Indeed? Really? They have made a
+success, those young whippersnappers, the Cubists. Such cubs! Well,
+I'm not surprised. Perhaps our public is tiring of the Academy.
+Perhaps young American painters may get their dues--some day. We may
+even export them. I've been an art auctioneer man and boy over fifty
+years, and I tell you again the public is a woman. One year it's
+dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or hats. Silks or satins.
+Lean or stout. All right. Coming--coming!" Clearing his throat, the
+old auctioneer slowly moves away.
+
+
+THE JOY OF STARING
+
+Watch the mob. Watch it staring. Like cattle behind the rails which
+bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its
+equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece, only
+to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a
+thrice-stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is
+the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the People.
+Our brethren! Mighty idea--but a stale one before Noah entered the
+ark. "Let us go to the people," cried Tolstoy. But we are the
+people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the
+people surge before a picture which represents an old woman kissing
+her cow. Or, standing with eyeballs agog, they count the metal
+buttons on the coat of the Meissonier Cuirassier. It is great art.
+Let the public be educated. Down with the new realism--which only
+recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence.
+(Are we not all middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic?
+Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph--pictures that act.
+Squeaking records. Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness of
+Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical machines. Or chromos.
+Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your "step," watch the
+mob.
+
+
+A DILETTANTE
+
+He is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze over the pupils of
+his eyes. He is never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet,
+when he enters a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step in his
+direction; then they get to cover as speedily as possible,
+grumbling: "Look out! it's only the old bird again." But one of them
+is always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide. He thinks he
+knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross
+and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them.
+He is the embittered dilettante; embittered, because with his
+moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant
+of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month
+in the year. So he rails at the dealers, inveighs against the
+artists, and haunts auction-rooms. He never bids, but is extremely
+solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to
+sit for hours on a small print, until, in despair, the owner leaves.
+Then, with infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving
+matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and
+prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a
+favoured few. He bought it. He selected it. It is a tribute to his
+exquisite taste. And the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence
+by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings and parrot
+ejaculations. Withal, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of
+art. He sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a Duerer; but he puts the
+blame upon his defective eyesight.
+
+
+THE CITY OF BROTHERLY NOISE
+
+Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk
+about any of the narrow streets of this cold-storage abode of
+Brotherly Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the
+venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of
+the abode of brotherly love. Over there the nerve shock is
+ultra-dynamic. As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then,
+will ask the puzzled student of national life, does the venerable
+witticism persist in living? The answer is that in the United
+States a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race
+of humourists. Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets that
+vibrate with the clangour of the loosely jointed machinery, an army
+of carts and the cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling
+people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the
+Schuylkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all
+these and a thousand other things place New York in a more modest
+category; in reality our own city emits few pipes in comparison with
+the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls over the map of
+Pennsylvania. Yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke
+flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is stunned by the
+welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first
+crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of "society" was
+forced to go northward to this Mahomet of operatic music; else
+forego Richard Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden, and Oscar's
+famous head-tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years
+Market Street had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians.
+Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue
+was Cimmerian darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company,
+accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say "Girard
+Avenue" or "Spring Garden" without blushing, because of their
+increased knowledge of municipal topography. Society trooped
+northward. Motor-cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar
+Street. Philadelphia boasts a much superior culture in the
+crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found
+there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom
+Street hangs his banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper
+soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder.
+
+The difference in the handling of the social "hammer" between
+Philadelphia and New York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be thus
+illustrated: At the clubs in Philadelphia they say: "Dabs is going
+fast. Pity he drinks. Did you see the seven cocktails he got away
+with before dinner last night?" In Boston they say: "Dabs is quite
+hopeless. This afternoon he mixed up Botticelli with Botticini. Of
+course, after that--!" Now, in New York, we usually dismiss the case
+in this fashion: "Dabs went smash this morning. The limit! Serves
+the idiot right. He never would take proper tips." Here are certain
+social characteristics of three cities set forth by kindly disposed
+clubmen. As the Chinese say: An image-maker never worships his
+idols. We prefer the Cambodian sage who remarked: "In hell, it's bad
+form to harp on the heat."
+
+
+THE SOCIALIST
+
+The socialist is not always sociable. Nor is there any reason why he
+should be. He usually brings into whatever company he frequents his
+little pailful of theories and dumps them willy-nilly on the carpet
+of conversation. He enacts the eternal farce of equality for all,
+justice for none. The mob, not the individual, is his shibboleth.
+Yet he is the first to resent any tap on his shoulder in the way of
+personal criticism. He has been in existence since the coral atoll
+was constructed by that tiny, busy, gregarious creature, and in the
+final cosmic flare-up he will vanish in company with his fellow man.
+He is nothing if not collective. His books, written in his own
+tongue, are translated into every living language except sound
+English, which is inimical to jargon. If his communal dreams could
+come true he would charge his neighbour with cheating above his
+position; being a reformer, the fire of envy brightly burns in his
+belly--a sinister conflagration akin to that of Ram Dass (see
+Carlyle). In the thick twilight of his reason he vaguely wanders,
+reading every new book about socialism till his confusion grows
+apace and is thrice confounded. From ignorance to arrogance is but a
+step. At the rich table of life, groaning with good things, he turns
+away, preferring to chew the dry cud of self-satisfaction. He would
+commit Barmecide rather than surrender his theory of the "unearned
+increment." He calls Shaw and Wells traitors because they see the
+humorous side of their doctrines and, occasionally, make mock of
+them. The varieties of lady socialists are too numerous to study.
+It may be said of them, without fear of being polite, that females
+rush in where fools fear to tread. But, then, the woman who
+hesitates--usually gets married.
+
+
+THE CRITIC WHO GOSSIPS
+
+He has a soul like a Persian rug. Many-coloured are his ways, his
+speech. He delights in alliteration of colours, and avails himself
+of it when he dips pen into ink. He is fond of confusing the
+technical terms of the Seven Arts, writing that "stuffing the
+ballot-box is no greater crime than constipated harmonics." But what
+he doesn't know is that such expressions as gamut of colours,
+scales, harmonies, tonal values belong to the art of painting, and
+not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote and gossip than of
+history. But what's the use! You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic
+will quote for you, with his gimlet eye of a specialist boring into
+your own, the story which was whispered to Anthony Trollope (in
+1857, please don't forget) if he would be so kind (it was at the
+Uffizi Galleries, Florence) as to show him the way to the Medical
+Venus. This is marvellous humour, and worth a ton of critical
+comment (which, by Apollo! it be). But, as Baudelaire puts it:
+"Nations, like families, produce great men against their will"; and
+our critic is "produced," not made. In the realm of the blind, the
+cock-eyed is king. The critic is said to be the most necessary
+nuisance--after women--in this "movie" world of ours. But all human
+beings are critics, aren't they?
+
+
+THE MOCK PSYCHIATRIST
+
+If for the dog the world is a smell, for the eagle a picture,
+for the politician a Nibelung hoard, then for the psychiatrist
+life is a huge, throbbing nerve. He dislikes, naturally, the
+antivivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection of his fellow
+creatures. It's a mad world for him, my masters! And if your ears
+taper at the top, beware! You have the morals of a faun; or, if your
+arms be lengthy, you are a reversion to a prehistoric type. The only
+things that are never too long, for our friend the "expert" of rare
+phobias, are his bills and the length of his notice in the
+newspapers. If he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and Eve in
+Milton's Paradise behave too much like married people, he quickly
+resents any tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception. He
+maintains that religious feeling is only "a mode of reaction," and
+our conscience but a readjusting apparatus. His trump-card is the
+abnormal case, and if he can catch tripping a musician, a poet, a
+painter, he is professionally happy. Homer nodded. Shakespeare
+plagiarised. Beethoven drank. Mozart liked his wife's sister. Chopin
+coughed. Turner was immoral. Wagner, a little how-come-ye-so!
+Hurray! Cracked souls, and a Donnybrook Fair of the emotions. The
+psychiatrist can diagnose anything from rum-thirst to sudden death.
+Nevertheless, in his endeavour to assume the outward appearance of a
+veritable man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one of the
+hermit-crab as described in E. H. Banfield's Confessions of a Beach
+Comber (p. 132). "The disinterested spectator," remarks Professor
+Banfield, "may smile at the vain, yet frantically anxious efforts of
+the hermit-crab to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a
+flattering misfit; but it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until
+he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic
+contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail in a No. 5
+shell abandoned." The mock psychiatrist is the hermit-crab of
+psychology. And of the living he has never been known to speak a
+word of praise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOORE
+
+
+I
+
+Dear naughty George Moore--sad, bad, mad--has reformed. He tells us
+why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky
+enough to read; for, the American edition is expurgated, nay,
+fumigated, as was the Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic
+Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail and Farewell, Ave and
+Salve being the titles of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is
+sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell,
+the poet and painter, better known as "AE." in a more sympathetic
+fashion. When Vale was announced several years ago as on the brink
+of completion I was moved to write: "I suppose when the final book
+appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his
+soul, not to say, his shop. But I have my serious doubts." After
+reading Vale I still had them. Only death will end the streaming
+confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by
+the pen. (This latter sentence is not a quotation from the sacred
+books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave chained to the
+ink-well.)
+
+I said that Vale is expurgated for American consumption. Certainly.
+We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America--thanks to the
+mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters--that a hearty oath
+scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George
+calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank
+malodorous soil with his war-worn agricultural implement. When he
+returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the national
+literary and artistic movement, he found a devoted band of brethren:
+William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Synge,
+Edward Martyn, Russell, and others.
+
+I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the neo-Celtic awakening.
+Yeats was the prime instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally
+discovered Synge, the dramatist--in reality the only strong man of
+the group, the only dramatist of originality--and, with his
+exquisite lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland, a fabulous,
+beautiful Erin, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton,
+Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault.
+
+As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering
+gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town,
+given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the
+smoking-room of the Shelbourne, and a few hours later the clubs
+will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day,
+and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of
+enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of
+novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't
+been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his
+usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults.
+
+But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have
+removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren
+will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like
+chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy
+will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a
+calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now
+old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far
+as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh!
+in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the
+"lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume
+(see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his
+tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these
+lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set
+you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once
+called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen
+and ink. Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for
+physical quarrels.
+
+He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though
+he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats;
+what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as
+possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a
+crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet
+belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been
+thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin
+bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave
+him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to
+exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn,
+very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing
+as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very
+bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned--I
+speak figuratively--and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who
+slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till,
+bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each
+other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception
+to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I
+didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself
+seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight.
+
+He "got even" with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a
+capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all
+over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant
+conversion he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties,
+mental and temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented
+itself and he hurried to the Cathedral for advice. He sent in his
+name to the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed:
+"Moore, Moore, oh, that man again! Well, give him another pair of
+blankets." In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings, were
+added to the apocryphal anecdote--which, by the way, set smiling the
+usually impassive Moore, who can see a joke every now and then.
+
+Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in Vale of
+his riding dangerous mounts; and when challenged at an English
+country house did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to
+hounds the better part of a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take
+the "dare," although when he reached his room he found his boots
+full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Any one reading
+his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart.
+In Vale he describes his father's stable at Castle Moore, County
+Mayo.
+
+Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his
+complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new
+imprudences in black and white, we may expect? He has paid his
+respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all
+camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of
+Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised
+John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered"
+by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I
+only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at
+Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is
+not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as
+diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and
+an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the
+only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the
+same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian
+experiences--it is the best part of the book--and to my way of
+thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris;
+London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas,
+Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of
+1880--what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and
+delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's
+work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London
+was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow
+head of George Moore--that colour so admired by Manet and so
+wonderfully painted by him--in the academic camp. He replied with
+all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on
+tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated
+mediocrities--on the pictorial side, at least--though John Millais
+was a talent--and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of
+Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe
+pinches on the other foot--it is George who is a belated critic of
+the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and
+many are the wordy battles waged at the Cafe Royal, London, when
+Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of
+Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other
+Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for
+modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some
+impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable
+granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its
+critics.
+
+
+II
+
+In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that
+the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks
+otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the
+synoptic Gospels. The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the
+life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one
+that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth
+his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in
+Salammbo, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style
+that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such
+sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely
+tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped
+forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme
+bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic
+character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless,
+Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama
+in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by
+temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can
+no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did
+Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open
+letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years
+heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey
+d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans,
+Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious
+pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a
+formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the
+Index before it was written. And yet we find in it George Moore
+among the prophets.
+
+Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur
+Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There
+are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life,
+written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by
+Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge,
+ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au
+Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar
+Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The
+Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with
+blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that
+M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea,
+in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied,
+sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator
+who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple
+authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the
+third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided
+by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the
+Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in
+the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature.
+The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffuses every page of The Brook
+Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something
+perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called
+"blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution
+makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies
+of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and
+Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently
+"blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation
+or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions,
+and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.
+
+Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate The Brook
+Kerith. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics,
+the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps the Scriptural
+Kedron? This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic
+Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or Temple
+worship; furthermore, they practised celibacy till a schism within
+their ranks drove the minority away from the parent body to shift
+for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph,
+a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother--they have other
+sons--is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the
+prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John
+the Baptist, the precursor of the long-foretold Messiah, lead him
+astray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a
+theomaniac--he believes himself to be the son of God, appointed by
+the heavenly father to save mankind; especially his fellow Jews.
+Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor,
+ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the
+only son of a rich merchant of Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel
+are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who,
+inducted into the wisdom of the Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding,
+a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets. The
+dialogues between father and son rather recall Erin, hardly Syria.
+Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal
+day of the crucifixion he beseeches his friend Pilate to let him
+have the body of his Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs,
+then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women Mary and
+Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre.
+
+If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem (heated to
+this murder by the High Priest) the title of the book might have
+been "Joseph of Arimathea." He is easily the most viable figure.
+Jesus is too much of the god from the machine; but he serves the
+author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the
+Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to
+the house of his father, hides him and listens unmoved to the
+fantastic tales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are
+everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second crucifixion, so Joseph
+takes him back to the Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation
+of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back
+health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and
+blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of
+the demon. It seems that in those troubled days the cities and
+countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching
+the speedy destruction of the world. For a period Jesus called
+himself a son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the
+sword.
+
+Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived with his flocks. The
+idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein; sober, as
+befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned an undulating
+prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the
+clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant
+of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great
+landscape-painter.
+
+Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's crook to his successor
+and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling
+events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is
+vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem, with Timothy lost
+somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquent
+pages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus
+Christ. A disputatious man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any
+easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline
+Christianity, differing from the tender message of Jesus; that Jesus
+of whom Havelock Ellis wrote: "Jesus found no successor. Over the
+stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof
+curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics,
+which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were
+unable to melt."
+
+If this be the case then Paul was, if not the founder, the
+foster-father of the new creed. A seer of epileptic visions--Edgar
+Saltus has said of the "sacred disease" that all founders of
+religions have been epileptics--Paul, with the intractable
+temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek
+blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of salvation,
+of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as
+if these things were realities." For Paul and those who followed him
+they were and are realities; from them is spun the web of our modern
+civilisation. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus
+that he it was who, crucified, came back to life may be fancy. The
+sturdy Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing
+from the blinding light on the road to Damascus: "Paul, Paul, why
+persecutest thou me?" naturally enough denounced Jesus as a madman,
+but accepted his services as a guide to Caesarea, where, in company
+with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad
+tidings, there to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.
+
+On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his
+cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a
+half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original
+Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George
+Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Neant,
+Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the
+light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have
+quoted the mystic Joachim Flora--of the Third Kingdom--who said that
+the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui
+vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a
+man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it
+away. Jesus cast his cross away--his spiritual ambition--believing
+that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then
+to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.
+
+The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they
+love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts
+company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is
+not going, as he had contemplated, to give himself up to Hanan, the
+High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical
+sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in
+Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is
+a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to
+the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the
+mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda:
+"The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the
+"rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book
+is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.
+
+If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir
+of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the
+dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope
+Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating
+phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is
+no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which
+while it must have given its author pains to write--so full of
+Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is
+it--must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The
+poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is
+understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of
+protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt
+that he is, followed his vision. In every man's heart there is a
+lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very
+pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him--though it would
+be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation--what Barbey
+d'Aurevilly once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel
+Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate
+himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his
+genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native
+religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his
+new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in
+Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the
+Christ stand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+PILLOWLAND
+
+
+In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles
+Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick
+man "sways his pillow--tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and
+lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the
+ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes
+_sides_ oftener than a politician." How true this is--even to the
+italicised word--I discovered for myself after a personal encounter
+with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the
+pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it
+literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I
+found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet
+seemingly a land without limit,--who dares circumscribe the
+imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on
+the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow
+is his throne--from it he issues his orders for the day, his
+bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right
+hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of
+officious advisers. But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot
+against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little
+pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled.
+He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as
+his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled
+hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas!
+Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant.
+In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an
+evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical
+weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them."
+And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers.
+Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in
+my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness
+makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most
+annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to
+your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure
+yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast.
+The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever.
+Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden
+variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say--I read their
+meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated--we shall have this
+fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well
+too rapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight
+change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give,
+I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time
+takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue
+for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine
+rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper
+men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor
+was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My
+heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I
+realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red
+lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a
+digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of
+life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative
+sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull
+like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"--as the
+unchristian unscientists say--on the nurse, my nurse.
+
+As an old reporter of things theatrical I had seen many plays with
+the trained nurse as heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even the
+gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret Anglin in a piece
+whose name I've forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus in
+which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How
+mistaken I have been. Now, the trained nurse seems an angel without
+wings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired
+girl of the footlights; she is often mature and stout and a lover of
+potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but
+her severity hath good cause. At first you feebly utter the word
+"nurse." Later she is any Irish royal family name. Follows, "Mary,"
+and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her
+"Marie" he is doomed. Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages
+made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis,
+and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius Hospital staff. Married
+sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental
+bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years hasn't any more
+chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a
+"snowbird in hell"--as Brother Mencken phrases it.
+
+However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are
+wet. You are weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only
+care for your precious carcass but also a surcease from the demands
+of the world. Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work
+if you are a convalescent of the true-blue sort. Hence your tears.
+But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in
+your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo
+about your embattled bed. You begin sudden little arguments with
+your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time
+virility in the technique of household squabbling. You haven't. You
+swell with masculine satisfaction and for at least five minutes you
+are the Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness,
+send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the
+familiar leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what humility of
+accent: "Mamma!" The Eternal Masculine? The Eternal Child! You
+mumble to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on that
+thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to be haughty. But she knows
+you are simply a sick grumpy old person of the male species who
+needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well
+hidden.
+
+The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow
+white, and find in vernal green, is an experience almost worth the
+miseries you have so impatiently endured. A veritable vacation for
+the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of Flatbush
+break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless
+interest the man[oe]uvres of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden
+as he manfully deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries, his
+little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the
+makings of a leader. He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel, and
+Master-politician; but he will always be foremost, else nowhere.
+"You are the audience," he imperiously bids his companions, and
+when rebellion seemed imminent he punched, without a trace of anger,
+a boy much taller. I envied Georgie his abounding vitality.
+Furtively I raised the window. Instantly I was spied by Georgie who
+cried lustily: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!"
+I almost felt gay, "You come up here," I called out with one lung.
+"I haven't a stepladder," he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as
+remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. (Now I'm
+moralising!) Undismayed, Georgie continued to call: "Little boy,
+little boy, come down and play with me!"
+
+The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend
+who meets you and says: "I never saw you look better in your life."
+It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You
+renounce then and there the doctor with all his pomps of healing.
+You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured
+and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd.
+Notwithstanding you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer King
+of Pillowland.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+CROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE
+
+
+I
+
+They order certain things better in France than elsewhere; I mean
+such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of book-making known as
+Inquiries ("Enquete," which is not fair to translate into the
+lugubrious literalism, "Inquest"), Anthologies, and books that
+masquerade as books, as Charles Lamb hath it. Without a trace of
+pedantry or dogmatism, such works appear from time to time in Paris
+and are delightful reminders of the good breeding and suppleness of
+Gallic criticism. To turn to favour and prettiness a dusty
+department of literature is no mean feat.
+
+What precisely is the condition of French letters since Catulle
+Mendes published his magisterial work on The French Poetic Movement
+from 1867 to 1900? (Paris, 1903.) Nothing so exhaustive has appeared
+since, though a half-dozen Inquiries, Anthologies, and Symposiums
+are in existence.
+
+The most comprehensive recently is Florian-Parmentier's Contemporary
+History of French Letters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a poet,
+one of les Jeunes, and an expert swimmer in the multifarious
+cross-currents of the day. His book is a bird's-eye view of the map
+of literary France as far as the beginning of the war. He is quite
+frank in his likes and dislikes, and always has his reasons for his
+major idolatries and minor detestations.
+
+As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds there are several new
+Anthologies at hand which aid us to form our own opinion of the
+younger men's prose and verse. And, finally, there is the
+significant Inquiry of Emile Henriot: "A Quoi Revent les Jeunes
+Gens?" (1913); of which more anon.
+
+M. Florian-Parmentier is a native of Valenciennes, a writer whose
+versatility and fecundity are noteworthy in a far from barren
+literary epoch. He has, with the facility of a lettered young
+Frenchman, tried his hand at every form. All themes, so they be
+human, are welcome to him, from art criticism to playwriting. He is
+seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps they may not admit this;
+but the question may be answered in the affirmative: Is he a safe
+critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day French letters?
+
+He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of humour in a critical
+barometer, the tendency of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others
+to form schools, to create cenacles, to begin fighting before they
+have any defined ideal. It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive
+manifestoes, declarations, and challenges, most of them rather in
+the air; though it cannot be denied that these ebullitions of gusty
+temperaments do clear that same air, murky with theories and
+traversed by an occasional flash of genius.
+
+After paying his respects to the daily Parisian press, which he
+belabours as venal, cynical, and impure, our critic evokes a picture
+of the condition of literary men; not a reassuring one. Indeed, we
+wonder how young people can dream of embracing such a profession,
+with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable poverty. Unless
+these aspiring chaps have a private income, how do they contrive to
+live?
+
+The answer is, they don't live, unless they write twaddle for the
+Grand Old Public, which must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You
+say to yourself, after all Paris is not vastly different in this
+respect from benighted New York. Detective stories, melodrama, the
+glorification of the stale triangle in fiction and drama, the
+apotheosis of the Apache--what are all these but slight variants of
+the artistic pabulum furnished by our native merchants in
+mediocrity? Consoled, because your mental and emotional climate is
+not as inartistic as it is painted, you return to Florian-Parmentier
+and his divagations. He has much to say. Some of it is not as tender
+as tripe, but none is salted with absurdity.
+
+Then you make a discovery. There is in France a distinct class, the
+Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior
+claims; a class to which there is no analogy either in England or in
+America. (The French Academy is not particularly referred to just
+now.) Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs, bohemians, and
+professors--all may belong to it if they have the necessary
+credentials: brains, talent, enthusiasm. It is the latter quality
+that floats out on the sea of speculation many adventuring barks.
+Each sports a tiny pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered
+by some dreamer of proud, impossible dreams. But they float, do
+these frail boats, laden with visions and captained by noble
+ambitions.
+
+Or, another image; a long, narrow street, on either side houses of
+manifold styles--fantastic or sensible, castellated or commonplace,
+baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty, these eclectic
+architectures reflect the souls of the dwellers within. The ivory
+tower is not missing, though a half-century ago it was more in
+evidence; the church is there, though sadly dwarfed--France is still
+spiritually crippled and flying on one wing (this means previous to
+1914); and a host of other strange and familiar houses that Jack the
+poet built.
+
+On the doors of each is a legend; it may be Neo-Symbolism,
+Neo-Classicism, Free-Verse, Sincerism, Intenseism, Spiritualists,
+Floralism or the School of Grace, Dramatism and Simultanism,
+Imperialism, Dynamism, Futurism, Regionalism, Pluralism, Sereneism,
+Vivantism, Magism, Totalism, Subsequentism, Argonauts, Wolves,
+Visionarism, and, most discussed of all, Unanimism, headed by that
+fiery propagandist and poet, Jules Romains.
+
+Now, every one of these cults in miniature has its following, its
+programmes, sometimes its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They
+are the numerous progeny of the elder Romantic, Realistic, and
+Symbolistic schools, long dead and gathered to their fathers.
+
+Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet Correspondences the Symbolists
+dated; Baudelaire, the precursor of so much modern, is to-day
+chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical and aesthetic. His
+Little Poems in Prose are a breviary for the youths who are turning
+out an amorphous prose, which they call Free. Paul Verlaine's
+influence is still marked, for he is a maker of Debussy-like music;
+moonlit, vapourish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The very
+quintessence of poetry haunts the vague terrain of his verse; but
+his ideas, his morbidities, these are negligible, indeed, abhorred.
+
+The new schools, whether belonging to the Extreme Right or Extreme
+Left, are idealistic in their aim and practice; that or nothing. The
+brutalities of Zola and the Naturalistic School, the frigid
+perfection and metallic impassibility of the Parnassians are over
+and done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind the eye of the
+ideal. There is a renaissance of sensibility. The universe is become
+pluralistic, sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony has ceased
+to be a potent weapon in the armoury of poets and prosateurs. It is
+replaced by an ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that weeps on
+the shoulder of one's neighbour, by a horror of egoism--whether
+masquerading as a philosophy such as Nietzsche's, or a poesy such as
+the Parnassians. For these poetlings issues are cosmical.
+
+Coeval with this revival of sentiment is a decided leaning toward
+religion; not the "white soul of the Middle Ages," as Huysmans would
+say; not the mediaeval curiosities of Hugo, Gautier, Lamartine; but
+the carrying aloft of the banner of belief; the opposition to
+sterile agnosticism by the burning tongues of the holy spirit. No
+dilettante movement this return to Roman Catholicism. The time came
+for many of these neophytes when they had to choose at the
+cross-roads. Either--Or? The Button-Moulder was lying in wait for
+such adolescent Peer Gynts, and, outraged and nauseated by the gross
+license of their day and hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts,
+they turned to the right--some, not all of them. The others no
+longer cry aloud their pagan admiration of the nymph's flesh in the
+brake, of the seven deadly arts and their sister sins.
+
+In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing
+across the housetops of French art and literature. Science is too
+positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is
+without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again; only, the
+youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the Cubists are
+working for formal severity, despite their geometrical fanaticism.
+Youth will have its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring
+colours, and those doors in the narrow street called "Perhaps," do
+but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot
+live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaning to the
+infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish
+with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings also; else his
+chamber of dreams might overflow into reality, and then we should be
+converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers and all.
+
+What were the controlling factors in young French literature up
+to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy
+of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion,
+graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous,
+fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an
+intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barres is another
+name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical
+and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism,
+replacing  the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words:
+Patriotism, reverence for the dead--a reverence perilously near
+ancestor-worship--the prose-master Barres went into the political
+arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive
+"modernism," an idealistic reactionary.
+
+He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time
+master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his
+patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot
+be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity--"moral
+earnestness," so called--has never been his. He is no more a sower
+of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he
+is accepted as a vital teacher.
+
+Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal,
+Mallarme, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud--that stepfather of symbolism
+--Emil Verhaeren--who is truly an elemental and disquieting
+force--Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont--who
+contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making--Francis
+Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de
+Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue--and how many others, to be found in the
+pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study
+dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties.
+
+
+II
+
+When we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the
+intricate polyphony of literary sects and cenacles, the American
+lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the
+whirligig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900
+has jostled from their place the "elders" of a decade previous: you
+read of Paul-Napoleon Roinard, Maurice Beaubourg, Hans Ryner--a
+remarkable writer--Andre Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul Fort,
+Paul Claudel, Andre Suares, Stephane Servant, Andre Spire, Phileas
+Lebesgue, Georges Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations
+deserves an English garb), and you recall some of them as potent
+creators of values.
+
+But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men
+through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Symons, Edmund
+Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we
+not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a
+matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who
+"create"--as the jargon goes--that same provincialism is a
+windshield against the draughts of too tempting imitation; but for
+our criticism there is no excuse. A critic will never be a catholic
+critic of his native literature or art if he doesn't know the
+literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical as this may sound.
+We lack aesthetic curiosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism
+America is comparable to a cemetery of cliches.
+
+Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance
+Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long,
+narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its alternations of
+Septentrional mists and the blazing blue sky of the Midi. This
+critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have
+no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been
+called the "Woad" argument; he goes back not to the early Britons,
+but to Celticism. He is a sturdy Kymrist, and believes not in
+literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche,"
+the purveyors of "canned" classics, the chilly rhetoricians who set
+too much store on conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner, and
+the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier. In his
+auscultation of genius, La Physiologie Morale du Poete (1904), may
+be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar
+enough now, as does the flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of
+Renan, in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has had some
+influence. M. Florian-Parmentier does not admire this movement or
+its prophet, Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant magic of the
+word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the
+cockles of the heart of critics.
+
+And then the generation of 1900--Alexander Mercereau, Henri
+Hertz, Sebastien Voirol, Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand
+Divoire, Tancrede Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux, Mandin, Guillaume
+Apollinaire--all workers in the vast inane, dwellers on the
+threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the
+Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing
+extraordinary has come from it. Balzac is still the mighty one in
+fiction. Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul Adam, the
+brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille--a brilliant, versatile man--still
+maintain their primacy.
+
+Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gourmont, Camille Mauclair,
+Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois--now sojourning
+in America and a thinker of verve and originality--and Henry
+Houssaye, hold their own against the younger generation.
+
+In the theatre there are numerous and vexing tendencies:
+Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness to gentle
+Charles van Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has disciples;
+but the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who
+had his day in Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were accepted
+not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men
+of the theatre. There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are
+Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux, and Marie
+Leneru; but the technique of the drama is immutable.
+
+In the domain of philosophy and experimental science we find Emile
+Boutroux, and such collective psychologists as Durckheim, Gustave
+le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names such as Binet, Ribot, Michel
+Savigny, Alfred Fouillee, and the eminent mathematician, Henri
+Poincare--who finally became sceptical of his favourite logic,
+philosophy, and mathematics. This intellectual volte-face caused
+endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive
+vs. intellectualism--what William James called "vicious
+intellectualism"--is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.
+
+There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of
+metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of
+suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse,
+intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time in Bergson caught the
+fancy of the poets. Naturally enough. Literary dogmatism had
+prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence
+of formal verse that is to be feared. Vers-libre, which began with
+such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud, has run
+the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yawping from the
+terrace of the brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted to ask.
+Voices they have, but not bird-like voices.
+
+That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gourmont--who
+practically introduced him--must not be overlooked, for he had
+genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gaultier, who evolved
+from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme--which,
+succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than
+it is; from the philosopher to the snob, from the priest to the
+actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.
+
+Of the influence of politics upon art and literature--which happily
+are no cloistered virtues in France--we need not speak here. M.
+Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and bulky book, of which
+we have only exposed the high lights.
+
+Since Jules Huret's Enquete sur l'Evolution Litteraire (1890),
+followed by similar works of Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard
+(1913), we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's, mentioned
+above. He put the questions: "Where are we? Where are we going?" in
+_Le Temps_ of Paris, June, 1912, to a number of representative
+thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers their answers in
+1913.
+
+The result is rather confusing, a cloud of contradictory witnesses
+are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies. There are no
+schools! Yes, there are groups! We are going to the devil headlong!
+The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial!
+Better the extravagances of the decayed Romanticists than the
+debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague
+on all your houses! say the Unanimists. One fierce Wolf (Loup)
+admitted that at the banquets of his cenacle he and his fellow poets
+always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was it at the
+Symbolists'? Does it much matter? The gesture counts alone with
+these youthful "Fumistes"--as Leconte de Lisle had christened their
+predecessors.
+
+Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as "Cymbalists"
+the Symbolists, his own followers. Gongs would have been a better
+word. A punster speaks of Theists as those who love "le bon Dieu and
+tea." The new critical school, at its head Charles Maurras, do not
+conceal their contempt for all these "arrivistes" and revolutionary
+groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save Young
+France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces in faded accents the
+ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are
+dead since the war began: Emile Faguet, Jules Lemaitre, and Remy de
+Gourmont. They leave no successors worthy of their mettle.
+
+
+III
+
+The three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from
+1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of
+Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch,
+it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Among the
+rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As
+epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this
+poet's testament: "Ce desir d'etre tout que j'appelle mon ame!"
+Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson,
+but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the
+poems are more representative.
+
+Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But
+are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are
+celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art
+prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following
+Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it!
+Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The
+watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.
+
+Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing
+lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets--Emile
+Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature,
+and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable
+power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more
+sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse
+of Henri de Regnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the
+exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren?
+
+What thinker and dramatist is known like Maeterlinck, except it be
+the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality--for Verhaeren at
+one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and
+"Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been
+careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poe"; he can
+boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal
+order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one
+irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than
+constructive.
+
+Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same?
+Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique--all
+these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly.
+
+As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow
+wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his
+crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of
+Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound
+of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of
+barbarians."
+
+Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and
+Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Chateaubriand
+was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to
+the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and
+Flaubert. They set it down to the fact that none but a Frenchman
+can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which
+may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala
+was temperamentally distasteful.
+
+Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two
+Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a
+purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a
+distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and
+Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one.
+The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the
+little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both
+Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their
+inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too
+august body as much as the Belgian poets.
+
+As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for
+soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870
+certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul
+had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish
+for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and
+genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger
+the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by
+Catulle Mendes, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our
+contention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+MORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNER
+
+
+Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for
+originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly
+proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern
+critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the
+composer under their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the
+ambitious chap aforesaid.
+
+Never has the music of Wagner been more popular than now; his name
+on the opera billboards is bound to crowd a house. And never,
+paradoxical as it may sound, has there been such a critical hue and
+cry over his works and personality. The publication of his
+autobiography has much to do with this renewal of interest. There is
+some praise, much abuse, to be found in the newly published books on
+the subject. European critics are building up little islands of
+theory, coral-like, some with fantastic lagoons, others founded on
+stern truth, and many doomed to be washed away over-night.
+Nevertheless, the true Richard Wagner is beginning to emerge from
+the haze of Nibelheim behind which he contrived to hide his real
+self.
+
+Wagner the gigantic comedian; Wagner the egotist; Wagner the victim
+of a tragic love, Wagner tone-poet, mock philosopher, and a
+wonderful apparition in the world of art till success overtook him;
+then Wagner become bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted
+by his best friends--whom he had alienated--without the solace of
+the men he had most loved, the men who had helped him over the
+thorny path of his life--Liszt, Nietzsche, Von Buelow, Otto
+Wesendonk, and how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom he had
+treated with characteristic ingratitude! No, Richard Wagner during
+the sterile years, so called, from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented
+man, despite his union with Cosima von Buelow-Liszt and the
+foundation of a home and family at Baireuth.
+
+
+I
+
+However, there are exceptions. One is the book of Otto Bournot
+entitled Ludwig Geyer, the Stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote
+about it in 1913 for the _New York Times_. In this slender volume of
+only seventy-two pages the author sifts all the evidence in the
+Geyer-Wagner question, and he has delved into archives, into the
+newspapers of Geyer's days, and has had access to hitherto untouched
+material. It must be admitted that his conclusions are not to be
+lightly denied. August Boettiger's Necrology has until recently been
+the chief source of facts in the career of Geyer, but Wagner's
+Autobiography--which in spots Bournot corrects--and the life of
+Wagner by Mary Burrell, not to mention other books, have furnished
+Bournot with new weapons.
+
+The Geyers as far back as 1700 were simple pious folk, the first of
+the family being a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a
+trombone-player and organist. Indeed, the chief occupation of many
+Geyers was in some way or other connected with the Evangelical
+Church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer was a portraitist of no mean
+merit, an actor of considerable power--his Franz Moor was a
+favourite role with the public--a dramatist of fair ability (he
+wrote a tragedy, among others, named The Slaughter of the
+Innocents), and also a verse-maker. His acquaintance with Weber
+stimulated his interest in music; Weber discovered his voice, and he
+sang in opera. Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature all
+the qualities of Wagner. The latter was too young at the time of
+Geyer's death, September, 1821, to have profited much by the
+precepts of his stepfather, but his example certainly did prove
+stimulating to the imagination of the budding poet and composer.
+Geyer married Johanna Wagner-Bertz (Mary Burrell was the first to
+give the correct spelling of her maiden name), the widow of the
+police functionary Wagner (to whose memory Richard pays such cynical
+homage in his obituary), August 14, 1814. She had about two hundred
+and sixty-one thalern, and eight children. A ninth came later in the
+person of Caecile, who afterward married a member of the Avenarius
+family. Caecile, or Cicely, was a prime favourite with Richard.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seven years passed, and again Frau Geyer found herself a widow, with
+nine children and little money. How the family all tumbled up in the
+world, owing much to the courage, wit, vivacity, and unshaken
+will-power of their mother, may be found in the autobiography.
+Bournot admits that Geyer and his wife may have carried to the grave
+certain secrets. Richard Wagner until he was nine years old was
+known as Richard Geyer, and on page thirteen of his book our author
+prints the following significant sentence: "The possibility of
+Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in itself nothing detrimental
+to our judgment of the art-work of Baireuth."
+
+
+II
+
+In 1900 a twenty-page pamphlet bearing the title Richard Wagner in
+Zurich was published in Leipsic. It was signed Hans Belart, and gave
+for the first time to a much mystified world the story of Wagner's
+passion for Mathilde Wesendonk, thus shattering beyond hope of
+repair our cherished belief that Cosima von Buelow-Liszt had been
+the lode-stone of Wagner's desire, that to her influence was due the
+creation of Tristan and Isolde, its composer's high-water mark in
+poetic, dramatic music. Now, Belart, not content with his
+iconoclastic pamphlet, has just sent forth a fat book which he calls
+Richard Wagner's Love-Tragedy with Mathilde Wesendonk.
+
+We had thought that the last word in the matter had been said when
+Baireuth (Queen Cosima I) allowed the publication of Wagner's
+diaries and love-letters to Mathilde--though her complete
+correspondence is as yet unpublished. But Belart is one of the
+busiest among the German critical coral builders. He has dug into
+musty newspapers and letters, and gives at the close of his work a
+long list of authorities. Yet nothing startlingly new comes out of
+his researches. We knew that Mathilde Wesendonk (or Wesendonck) was
+the first love of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not his usual
+self-seeking philandering. We also knew that Otto Wesendonk behaved
+like a patient husband and a gentleman--any other man would have put
+a bullet in the body of the thrice impertinent genius; knew, too,
+that Tristan and Isolde was born of this romance. But there is a
+mass of fresh details, petty backstairs gossip, all the
+tittle-tattle beloved of such writers, that in company with Julius
+Kapp's Wagner und die Frauen, makes Belart's new book a valuable one
+for reference.
+
+Kapp, who has written a life of Franz Liszt, goes Belart one better
+in hinting that the infatuated couple transformed their idealism
+into realism. Belart does not believe this; neither does Emil
+Ludwig, the latest critical commentator on Wagner. But neither
+critic gives the profoundest proof that the love of Richard and
+Mathilde was an exalted, platonic one, _i. e._, the proof
+psychologic. I firmly believe that if Mathilde Wesendonk had eloped
+with Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan and Isolde
+might not have been finished; at all events, the third act would not
+have been what it now is. A mighty longing is better for the birth
+of great art than facile happiness. For the first time in his
+selfish unhappy life Wagner realised Goethe's words of wisdom:
+"Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce." It was a bitter sacrifice,
+but out of its bitter sweetness came the honey and moonlight of
+Tristan and Isolde. Wagner suffered, Mathilde suffered, Otto
+Wesendonk suffered, and last, but not least, Minna Wagner, the poor
+pawn in his married game, suffered to distraction. Let us begin with
+a quotation on the last page but three of Belart's book: "Remarked
+Otto Wesendonk to a friend: 'I have hunted Wagner from my
+threshold....'"
+
+This was in August, 1858. Wagner first met the Wesendonks about
+1852, three years after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because
+of his participation in the uprising of 1849. (Wagner as amateur
+revolutionist!) Thanks to the request of his wife Mathilde, Otto
+Wesendonk furnished a little house on the hill near his splendid
+villa for the Wagners. First christened "Fafner's Repose," Wagner
+changed the title to the "Asyl," and for a time it was truly an
+asylum for this perturbed spirit.
+
+But he must needs fall deeply in love with his charming and
+beautiful neighbour, a woman of intellectual and poetic gifts, and
+to the chagrin of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife. The
+gossip in the neighbourhood was considerable, for the complete
+frankness of the infatuated ones was not the least curious part of
+the affair. Liszt knew of it, so did the Princess Layn-Wittgenstein.
+An immense amount of "snooping" was indulged in by interested lady
+friends of Minna Wagner. She has her apologists, and, judging from
+the letters she wrote at the time and afterward--several printed for
+the first time by Kapp and Belart--she took a lively hand in the
+general proceedings. Evidently she was tired of her good man's
+behaviour, and when he solemnly assured her that it was the
+master-passion of his life she didn't believe him. Naturally not. He
+had cried "wolf" too often; besides, Minna, like a practical person,
+viewed the possibility of a rupture with Otto Wesendonk as a
+distinct misfortune. Otto had not only advanced much money to
+Richard, but he paid twelve thousand francs for the scores of
+Rheingold and Walkuere and for the complete performing rights.
+Afterward he sent both to King Ludwig II as a gift--but I doubt if
+he ever got a penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed the
+expenses of the Wagner concert at Zurich, a little item of nine
+thousand francs. Scandal and calumny invaded his home, the fair fame
+of his wife was threatened. No wonder the finale, long deferred, was
+stormy, even operatic.
+
+The lady was much younger than her husband; she was born at the
+close of 1828, therefore Wagner's junior by fifteen years. She was a
+Luckemeyer, her mother a Stein; a cultured, sweet-natured woman, it
+is more than doubtful if she could have endured Wagner as a husband.
+She did a wise thing in resisting his prayers. Not only was her
+husband a bar to such a proceeding, but her children would have
+always prevented her thinking of a legal separation. All sorts of
+plans were in the air. When, in 1857, the American panic seriously
+threatened the prosperity of Otto Wesendonk, who had heavy business
+interests in New York, gossip averred that Frau Wesendonk would ask
+for a divorce; but the air cleared and matters resumed their old
+aspect. Minna Wagner's health, always poor, became worse. It was a
+case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs. She daily made
+scenes at home and threatened to tell what she knew. That she knew
+much is evident from her correspondence with Frau Wilk. She said
+that Wagner had two hearts, but while he delighted in intellectual
+and emotional friendship with such a superior soul as Mathilde, he
+nevertheless would not forego the domestic comforts provided by
+Minna. Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois. Those
+intolerable dogs, the parrot, the coffee-drinking, the soft beds and
+solicitude about his underclothing, all were truly German;
+human-all-too-human.
+
+In September, 1857, the newly married Von Buelows paid the Wagners a
+visit, and as the guest-chamber of the cottage was occupied they
+took up temporary quarters at an inn, "The Raven" (Wotan's ravens!)
+Cosima, young, impressionable, turned her face to the wall and wept
+when Wagner played and sang for his friends the first and second
+acts of Siegfried. Even then she felt the "pull" of his magnetism,
+of his genius, and doubtless regretted having married the fussy,
+irritable Von Buelow--who had gone down in the social scale in
+wedding a girl of dubious descent. (In Paris Liszt for many years
+was only a strolling gipsy piano-player to whom the Countess
+d'Agoult had "condescended.")
+
+Mathilde Wesendonk entertained the Von Buelows, who went away pleased
+with their reception, above all deeply impressed by the exiled
+Wagner. They so reported to Liszt, and Von Buelow did more; as the
+scion of an old aristocratic family, he made many attempts to
+secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as making propaganda for his
+music. Which favours Wagner, who was the very genius of ingratitude,
+repaid later.
+
+In one point Herr Ludwig is absolutely correct: the composer was
+supported by his friends from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig
+intervened. The starvation talk was a part of the Wagner legend,
+even the Paris days were greatly exaggerated as to their black
+poverty. Wagner was always a spendthrift.
+
+From November, 1857, to May, 1858, Wagner set to music the five
+poems of Mathilde, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in
+September, 1857, the relations between Minna and Mathilde had become
+strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde in a vulgar
+manner; worse remained; he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frau
+Wesendonk and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke the seal, read
+the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes; yet can
+you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's
+genius. For her Rienzi was his only work. Had it not succeeded? So
+had Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin, also The Flying Dutchman, but Rienzi
+was her darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of
+the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed to tell us. Otto
+Wesendonk's wife she firmly believed was leading him into a
+quagmire. What theatre could ever produce The Ring? One thing,
+however, Minna did not do, as most writers on the subject say she
+did: she did not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the time, but
+only to Wagner. Later she made its meanings clear to the injured
+husband, which no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted above.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared
+on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an
+uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water
+cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle
+the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age
+of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig
+smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost
+lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima
+Von Buelow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and
+wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no
+individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of
+Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also
+shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who
+banished from her life both von Buelow and her father, Franz Liszt,
+when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed
+after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human
+feeling toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She
+denied herself to him. She became a Bruennhilde frozen into a symbol
+of intolerable grief.
+
+Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth
+Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von
+Buelow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that
+is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on
+Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.
+
+On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on
+the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no
+definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his
+diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by
+Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty
+emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an
+erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a
+moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere
+of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have
+loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.
+
+
+III
+
+The two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book
+by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly
+destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche--and not Nietzsche
+at his best--there has not been written a book so overflowing with
+hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the
+author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a
+noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he
+does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's
+poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies
+remain the best of its kind, because it is written without
+parti-pris.
+
+Ludwig slashes a la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's
+diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic--a
+painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like
+Beethoven--weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan
+and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book
+stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper
+critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls
+Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the
+law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but
+engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was a monster of ingratitude.
+Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the
+futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard
+experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the
+universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich
+rather than face the angry burghers.
+
+He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall
+of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did
+Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things
+about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat
+Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in
+sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a
+performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with
+one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a
+performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the
+completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in
+Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded
+the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of
+Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Buelow-Liszt followed Wagner to
+Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair
+was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima
+married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant.
+Liszt, a religious man (despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the
+luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to
+this defection on the part of a beloved child.
+
+It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward
+mysticism, toward religion: witness the mock-duck mysticism and
+burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach came
+Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual life of Wagner. This was in
+1854. His friend Wille lent him the book. Immediately he started to
+"Schopenhauerise" the Ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of
+situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's
+temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was
+not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master.
+Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian; and Siegfried, a
+pessimist at the close.
+
+Nietzsche was right; Schopenhauer proved a powerful poison for
+Wagner. And Schopenhauer himself laughed at Wagner's music; he
+remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised Wagner, through a
+friend, to stick to the theatre and hang his music on a nail in the
+wall; but when his library was overhauled several marginalia were
+discovered, one which he contemptuously wrote on a verse of
+Wagner's: "Ear! Ear! Where are your ears, musician?"
+
+Wagner, when Liszt adjured him to turn to religion as a consolation,
+replied: "I believe only in mankind." Ludwig compares this
+declaration with some of the latter opinions concerning
+Christianity, of which Wagner has said many evil things. Wagner's
+life was a series of concessions to the inevitable. He modified his
+art theories as he grew older, and with fame and riches his
+character deteriorated.
+
+He couldn't stand success--he, the bravest man of his day; the
+undaunted fighter for an idea crooked the knee to caste, became an
+amateur mystic and announced his intention of returning to absolute
+music, of writing a symphony strict in form--which, for his
+reputation, he luckily did not attempt. He was a colossal actor
+and the best self-advertiser the world has yet known since Nero.
+But I can't understand Herr Ludwig when he asserts that from 1866
+to 1883 the composer did nothing but compose two marches, finish
+Siegfried and Goetterdaemmerung. Rather a large order, considering the
+labours of the man as practical opera conductor, prose writer,
+poet-dramatist, and composer. And then, too, the gigantic scheme of
+Baireuth was realised in 1876.
+
+Comparatively barren would be a fairer phrase. After Tristan and
+Isolde, what could any man compose? A work which its creator
+rightfully said was a miracle he couldn't understand. After the
+anecdotage of Wagner's career is forgotten, after Baireuth has
+become owl-haunted, Tristan and Isolde will be listened to by men
+and women who love or have loved.
+
+It isn't pleasant to read a book like Ludwig's, truthful as it may
+be in parts. Nor should he call our attention to the posthumous
+venom of the composer as expressed in his hateful remarks concerning
+Otto Wesendonk. There Wagner was his own Mime, his own Alberich, not
+the knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish maid till magic
+did melt his will. Richard Wagner was once Tristan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+MY FIRST MUSICAL ADVENTURE
+
+
+Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's
+Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz
+Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary director of the
+Austro-Hungarian section. But I could not find him, although I heard
+of him everywhere, of musical fetes and the usual glittering company
+that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One
+day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an
+October afternoon, when in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with
+bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his
+mouth a long black cigar, which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I
+gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an easy job to keep up
+with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I
+caught up and took a long stare, the object of which composedly
+smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz Liszt.
+You see there were so many different pictures of him; even the warts
+were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein I
+swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did.
+
+Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired, and at the advice of
+Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy,
+I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with a letter of introduction
+to the acting secretary, Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old
+to enter, being a few months past eighteen. I was disappointed and
+voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and
+correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was
+Vice-Consul Robert Hooper and he kindly introduced me to General
+Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination I was given
+a letter in which the United States Government testified to my good
+social standing (I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder from
+justice) and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable document,
+I again besieged the gates of the great French conservatoire--whose
+tuition, it must be remembered, is free. I was successful, inasmuch
+as I was permitted to present myself at the yearly examination, which
+took place November 13 (ominous date). To say that I studied hard and
+shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an
+alley-like street off the Boulevard des Batignolles and lived
+luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day
+(with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning) and practising on a
+wretched little cottage piano as long as my neighbours would stand
+the noise. They chucked boots or any old faggot they could find at
+my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the
+keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to
+keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite, I would lie
+in bed till dinner-time. O Chopin! O consomme and boiled beef! O
+sour blue wine at six cents the litre!
+
+At last the fatal day dawned, as the novelists say. It was nasty,
+chilling, foggy autumnal, but my long locks hung negligently and my
+velveteen coat was worn defiantly open to the wind. I reached the
+Conservatoire--then in the old building on the Rue du Faubourg
+Poissoniere--at precisely nine o'clock of the morn. I was put in a
+large room with an indiscriminate lot of candidates, some of them so
+young as to be fit for the care of a nurse. Like lost sheep we
+huddled and as my eyes feverishly rambled I noticed a lad of about
+twelve with curling hair worn artist fashion; a naughty haughty boy
+he was, for he sneered at my lengthy legs and audibly inquired: "Is
+grandpa to play with us!" I knew enough French to hate that little
+monster with a nervous hatred. There was a tightened feeling about
+my throat and heart and I waited in an agitated spirit for my
+number. A bearded and shy young man came in from examination and was
+at once mocked by the incipient virtuoso in pantalettes. Another
+unfortunate, with a roll of music! Then the little devil was
+summoned. We sat up. In ten minutes he returned with downcast mien,
+flushed face, tears in his eyes, and tried to sneak out of the
+room, but too late. After shaking hands all round we solemnly danced
+in a circle about the now sobbing and no longer sinister child. Who
+says youth is ever generous?
+
+"Number thirteen!" sang out a voice, and I was pushed through a
+narrow entry and a minute later was standing on the historic stage
+of the Paris Conservatoire. The lighting was dim, but I discerned a
+group of persons somewhere in front of me. A man asked me to sit
+down at the grand piano--of course, like most pianos, out of
+tune--and I tremblingly obeyed his polite request. At this juncture
+a woman's voice inquired: "How old are you, monsieur?" I told her. A
+feminine laugh rippled through the gloom, for I wore a fluffy little
+beard, was undeniably gawky, and looked conspicuously older than my
+years. That laugh settled me. Queer, creepy feelings seized my legs,
+my eyes were full of solar spectrums, my throat a furnace and my
+heart beat like a triphammer. I was not the first man, young or old,
+to be knocked out by a woman's laugh. (Later I met the lady. She was
+Madame Massart, and the wife of the well-known violin master,
+Massart, of the Conservatoire.) Again the demand, "Play something."
+It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't. I began a minuetto
+from a Beethoven Sonata, hesitated, saw fiery snakes and a
+kaleidoscope of comets, then pitched into a presto by the
+unfortunate Beethoven, and was soon stopped. A sheet of manuscript
+was placed before me. I could have sworn that it was upside down, so
+as a sight-reading test it was a failure. I was altogether a
+distinguished failure, and with the audible comment of the examining
+faculty ringing in my ears, I stumbled across the stage into welcome
+darkness, and without waiting to thank Secretary Rety for his
+amiability I got away, crossing in a hurry that celebrated courtyard
+in which the hideous noises made by many instruments, including the
+human voice, reminded me of a torture circle in Dante's Inferno.
+
+The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical--or
+unmusical--son that dull day in November, 1878. When I arrived in my
+garret I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the
+xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a
+more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an
+active student you may have influence enough to become an
+"auditeur," a listener; and a listener I became and in the class of
+Professor Georges Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical
+readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master I
+learned many things about the Polish composer; heard from his still
+supple fingers much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and
+discriminating in style, M. Mathias had never developed into a
+brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he produced effects on the
+keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high
+shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors. He also taught
+me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before
+the public, then he or she has not a musical vocation--the case of
+Adolf Henselt to the contrary notwithstanding. But better would it
+be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly
+enough to succeed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+VIOLINISTS NOW AND YESTERYEAR
+
+
+With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of
+the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument
+devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone
+compared it with the locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism of
+the wheeled monster, its type is transitional; steam is already
+supplanted by electricity; while the violin is perfection, as
+perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of
+emotion next to the human voice; indeed it is even more poignant.
+Orchestrally massed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with
+banners. In quartet form it represents the very soul of music; it is
+both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its
+great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism is,
+nevertheless, a monster of music if placed beside the violin, with
+its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music-making. The
+scraping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric
+times, nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its ingenious manner
+of producing sound. But the violin, as we know it to-day, is not
+such an old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth century
+before it made its appearance, with its varnished and modelled back.
+
+Restricted as is its range of dynamics, the violin has had for its
+votaries men of such widely differing temperaments as Paganini and
+Spohr, Wilhelmj and Sarasate, Joachim and Ysaye. Its literature does
+not compare with that of the piano, for which Bach, Beethoven,
+Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms have written their choicest music, yet
+the intimate nature of the violin, its capacity for passionate
+emotion, crowns it--and not the organ, with its mechanical tonal
+effects--as the king of instruments. Nor does the voice make the
+peculiar appeal of the violin. Its lowest note is the G below the
+treble clef, and its top note a mere squeak; but it seems in a few
+octaves to have imprisoned within its wooden walls a miniature world
+of feeling; even in the hands of a clumsy amateur it has the
+formidable power of giving pain; while in the grasp of a master it
+is capable of arousing the soul.
+
+No other instrument has the ecstatic quality; neither the
+shallow-toned pianoforte, nor the more mellow and sonorous
+violoncello. The angelic, demoniacal, lovely, intense tones of the
+violin are without parallel in music or nature. It is as if this box
+with four strings across its varnished belly had a rarer nervous
+system than all other instruments. It is a cry, a shriek, a hymn to
+heaven, a call to arms, an exquisite evocation, a brilliant series
+of multi-coloured visions, a broad song of passion, or mocking
+laughter--what cannot the violin express if the soul that guides it
+be that of an artist? Otherwise, it is only a fiddle. It is the
+hero, the heroine, the vanguard of every composition. As a solo
+instrument in a concerto, its still small voice is heard above the
+din and thunder of the accompaniment. In a word, this tiny music-box
+is the ruler among instruments.
+
+Times have changed since 1658 in England, when the following
+delightful ordinance was made for the benefit of musical genius, or
+otherwise:
+
+"And be it enacted that if any person or persons, commonly called
+Fiddlers, or minstrels, shall at any time after the said first of
+July be taken playing, fiddling, or making music in any inn,
+alehouse or tavern, or shall be proffering themselves, or desiring,
+or entreating any person or persons to hear them play ... shall be
+adjudged rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars."
+
+Decidedly, England was not then the abode of the muses, for the poor
+actor suffered in company with the musician. You wonder whether this
+same penalty would be imposed upon musical managers ... they
+certainly do "entreat" the public to listen to their "fiddlers." Yet
+in 1690 when Corelli, the father of violin playing, led the band at
+Cardinal Ottoboni's house in Rome, he stopped the music because his
+churchly patron was talking, and he made an epigram that has since
+served for other artists: "Monsignore," remarked this intrepid
+musician, when asked why the band had ceased, "I feared the music
+might interrupt the conversation." How well Liszt knew this anecdote
+may be recalled by his retort to a czar of Russia under similar
+circumstances.
+
+Until a few months ago I had not heard Eugene Ysaye play for years.
+In the old days he had enchanted my ears, and in company with
+Gerardy, the violoncellist and Pugno the pianist had made music fit
+for the gods. Considering the flight of the years, I found the art
+of the Belgian comparatively untouched. Like Liszt, like Paderewski,
+Ysaye has his good moments and his indifferent. He is the Paderewski
+of the strings in his magical interpretations. And unlike his
+younger contemporaries, he still carves out the whole block of the
+great classics, sonatas, and concertos. He plays little things
+tenderly, exquisitely, and the man is first the musician, then the
+virtuoso.
+
+I heard neither Paganini nor Spohr. Joachim, Wilhelmj, Wieniawski,
+and Ysaye I have heard and seen. My memory assures me of keener
+satisfactions than any book about these giants of the four strings
+could give me. The first violinist I ever listened to was in the
+early seventies. I was hardly at the age of musical discrimination.
+Yet I remember much. It was at the opera, a matinee in the
+Philadelphia Academy of Music. Nilsson was singing. I can't recall
+her on that occasion, though it seems only the other day when
+Carlotta Patti sang the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, and
+limped over the stage--possibly the lameness fixed the event in my
+mind more than the music.
+
+A "front" set was dropped between the acts at this particular
+matinee--I do not recollect the name of the opera--and through a
+"practicable" door came an old gentleman with a violin in his hands.
+He was white-haired, he wore white side-whiskers, and he looked to
+my young eyes like a prosperous banker. He played. It was as the
+sound of falling waters on a moonlight night. I asked the name of
+the old gentleman. My father said, "Henri Vieuxtemps," which told me
+nothing then, though it means much to me now. What did he play? I do
+not know. Yet whenever I hear the younger men attack his Fantaisie
+Caprice, his Ballade and Polonaise, his Concertos, I think proudly:
+"I have heard Vieuxtemps!" He was a Belgian, born 1820, died 1881.
+His style was finished, elegant, charming. He was a pupil of De
+Beriot and represented, with his master, perfection in the Belgian
+school.
+
+After an interval of some years, I heard the only pupil of
+Paganini, as he called himself, Camillo Sivori. It was in Paris,
+1879. The precise day I can't say but my letter from Paris which
+appeared in the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_ was dated January
+31, 1879. I still preserve it in a venerable scrap-book. I was in my
+'teens but I wrote with the courage of youthful ignorance as
+follows: (It almost sounds like a musical criticism.) "Although it
+was generally supposed that Sivori, the great violinist, would not
+play this season in Paris, he, nevertheless delighted a large
+audience, last Sunday, at the Concert Populaire, with his lovely
+music. He is no longer a young man, but the vigour and fire of his
+playing are immense. He gave, with the orchestral accompaniment, a
+Berceuse, his own composition, with unapproachable delicacy. It was
+played throughout with the mute. In contrast came a Mouvement
+Perpetuel. Sivori's tone is not like that of Joachim or Wilhelmj,
+but it is sweeter than either. It reminds one of gold drawn to
+cobweb fineness. As an encore he played the too well known Carnival
+of Venice. That it was given in the style of his illustrious master,
+Paganini, who may say? But it was amazing, painful, finally
+tiresome." That same season I heard Anna Bock, Boscovitz, Diemer,
+Plante, Theodore Ritter, the two Jaells, fat Alfred and his thin
+wife.
+
+Sivori (1815-1894), dapper, modest, stood up in the vast spaces of
+the Cirque d'Hiver, which was engaged every Sunday by Jacques
+Pasdeloup and his orchestra. (Jacob Wolfgang was the real name of
+this conductor who braved the wrath of his audiences by putting
+Wagner on his programmes; and one afternoon we had a pitched battle
+over Rimsky-Korsakoff's Symphonic Poem, Sadko.) Sivori played a
+tarantella; every tone was clearly heard in the great, crowded
+auditorium. Pupils of De Beriot and Paganini I have heard, though I
+hardly recall the style of the former and nothing of the latter. But
+there was little of Paganini's fiery attack in Sivori; possibly he
+was too old. Fire and fury I later found in Wieniawski.
+
+I must not omit the name of Ole Bull (1810-1880), for, though I
+heard him as a boy, I best remember him in 1880, when he gave his
+last concerts in America. In the fifties, while on a visit to my
+father's house, he went on his two thumbs around a dining-table,
+lifting his body clear from the ground. His muscular power was
+remarkable. It showed in the dynamics of his robust and sentimental
+playing. Spohr discouraged him as a boy, but later spoke of his
+"wonderful playing and sureness of his left hand; unfortunately,
+like Paganini, he sacrifices what is artistic to something that is
+not quite suitable to the noble instrument. His tone, too, is
+bad...." For Spohr any one's tone was, naturally enough, bad, as he
+possessed the most monumental tone that ever came from a violin.
+
+The truth is that Ole Bull was not a classical player; as I remember
+him, he could not play in strict tempo; like Chopin, he indulged in
+the rubato and abused the portamento. But he knew his public.
+America a half-century ago, particularly in the regions he visited,
+was not in the mood for sonatas or concertos. Old Dan Tucker and the
+Arkansaw Traveller were the mode. Bull played them both, played jigs
+and old tunes, roused the echoes with the Star Spangled Banner and
+Irish melodies. He played such things beautifully, and it would have
+been musical snobbery to say that you didn't like them. You couldn't
+help yourself. The grand old fellow bewitched you. He was a handsome
+Merlin, with a touch of the charlatan and a touch of Liszt in his
+tall, willowy figure, small waist, and heavy head of hair. Such
+white hair! It tumbled in masses about his kindly face like one of
+his native Norwegian cataracts. He was the most picturesque old man
+I ever saw except Walt Whitman, at that time a steady attendant of
+the Carl Gaertner String Quartet concerts in Philadelphia. (And what
+Walt didn't know about music he made up in his love for stray dogs;
+he was seldom without canine company.)
+
+Those were the days when Prume's La Melancolie and Wieniawski's
+Legende were the two favourite, yet remote, peaks of the student's
+repertoire. How we loved them! Then came Wieniawski with Rubinstein
+in 1872-1873, and such violin playing America had never before
+heard--nor has it since, let me hasten to add. This Pole (1835-1880)
+was a brilliant master. His dash and fire and pathos carried you off
+your feet. His tone at times was like molten metal. He had a
+caressing and martial bow. His technique was infallible, his
+temperament truly Slavic, languorous, subtle, fierce. Wieniawski
+always reminded me of a red-hot coal. How chivalric is his
+Polonaise--that old war-horse! How elegiac his Legende! His
+favourite pupil was Leopold Lichtenberg, the greatest violin talent
+that has been thus far unearthed in America. Lichtenberg had
+everything when a youth--temperament, brains, musical feeling, and
+great technical ability.
+
+After Wieniawski followed Wilhelmj, who did not efface his memory,
+but plunged one into another atmosphere; that of the calm, profound,
+untroubled, and classic. No doubt Spohr's tone was larger, yet this
+is difficult to believe. Wilhelmj drew from his instrument the
+noblest sounds I ever heard; not Joachim, not Ysaye excelled him in
+cantabile. He was the first to play Wagner transcriptions--no wonder
+Wagner made him leader of the strings at Bayreuth in 1876. How he
+read the Beethoven Concerto, the Bach Chaconne. Or the D flat
+Nocturne of Chopin--in D. Or the much abused Mendelssohn E Minor
+Concerto--with Max Vogrich accompanying him at the piano. A giant
+in physique, when he faced his audience there was something of the
+majestic, fair-haired god Wotan in his immobile posture. He never
+appealed to his public as did Wieniawski; there was always something
+of chilly grandeur and remoteness in Wilhelmj's play. The last time
+I saw him was at Marienbad, shortly before his death, where, a
+stooped-shouldered, grey-haired old man, he was taking a Kur. He
+walked slowly, his hands clasped behind him, in his eyes the vacant
+look of one busy with memories. He reminded me of Beethoven's
+pictures.
+
+Joseph Joachim, that mighty Hungarian, was past his prime when I
+heard him in London. He played out of tune--some of his pupils have
+imitated his failing--but whether in a Beethoven quartet, concerto,
+sonata with piano, he always stamped on your consciousness that
+Joseph Joachim was the greatest violinist that had ever lived. This
+is, of course, absurd, this unfair comparison of one artist with
+another. Yet it is human to compare, and if a violinist can evoke
+such a vision of perfection, then he must be of uncommon powers.
+Maud Powell, a distinguished pupil of Joachim, has asserted that it
+took her three years before she could recover herself in the
+presence of Joachim's overwhelming personality. Yet he struck me as
+not at all assertive. He seemed an "objective" player, _i. e._, you
+thought only of Beethoven, of Brahms, as he calmly delivered himself
+of their Olympian measures. The grand manner is now out of fashion.
+We care more for exotic rhetoric than for simple and lofty measures.
+Sarasate and Dengremont charmed me more; Wieniawski set my blood
+coursing faster; but in Joachim's presence I felt as if near some
+old Grecian temple hallowed by the presence of oft-worshipped gods.
+
+Remenyi was a puzzle. He could play divinely, and scratch
+diabolically. He belonged to that old romantic school in which pose
+and gesture, contortion and grimace occupied a prominent place. I
+had an opportunity to study Remenyi (whose Austrian name was
+Hoffman) (1830-1898), at close quarters. He brought to my father's
+house in the early eighties his favourite instruments, and such a
+wild night of music I never heard. He played hour after hour,
+everything from Bach to Brahms--and incidentally scolded Brahms for
+"stealing" some of his, Remenyi's, Hungarian dances! (Which is a
+joke, as Brahms only followed the examples of Liszt and Joachim in
+avowedly employing Hungarian folk melodies). He did such tricks as
+dashing off in impeccable tune his arrangement of the D Flat Valse
+of Chopin in double notes at a terrific tempo. Violinists will
+understand the feat when I tell them that the key was the original
+one--D flat. He made the walls shiver when he struck his bow
+clangorously in the opening chords of the Rackoczy March. What a
+hero then seemed this stout, little, prancing, baldheaded man with
+the face of an unfrocked priest. How he could talk in a half-dozen
+different languages; he had travelled enough and encountered enough
+celebrated people to fill a dozen volumes with his recollections. He
+was a violinist of unquestionable power; that he deteriorated in his
+later years was to have been expected. Liszt understood and
+appreciated Remenyi from the first; he nicknamed him "the Kossuth of
+the Fiddle."
+
+To recall all the celebrities of the violin I have heard since 1870
+would be hardly possible. I've forgotten most of them, though I do
+remember that wonderful boy, Maurice Dengremont, who ended his life,
+so rich in possibilities, it is said as a billiard marker. He was
+spoiled by women, for he was a comely lad. Another wonder-child kept
+his head, and to-day fascinating Fritz Kreisler is a master of
+masters and a favourite in America without peer. He first appeared
+at Boston and in 1888. In Paris I recall Marsick and his polished
+style; the gallant Sauret, Johannes Wolf, and the brilliant and
+elegant Timothee Adamowski. And in 1880, Marie Tayau and her woman
+quartet, a member of which was Jeanne Franko, the sister of the
+conductors and violinists, Sam Franko and Nahan Franko; Caesar
+Thomson, the miraculous; C. M. Loeffler--subtle player, subtle
+composer; Sarasate with his sweet tone; Brodsky and his masculine
+manner; Willy Burmester and his pallid pyrotechnics; the learned
+Schradieck, the Bohemian Ondricek, the dashing Ovide Musin, Bernhard
+Listemann, Carl Halir; Gregorowitsch, the languid; brilliant
+Marteau; Alexander Petschinikoff, the Russian; the musicianly Max
+Bendix; the astonishing John Rhodes, the wonder-worker Kubelik and
+his icy perfections; Kocian, Willy Hess, Efrem Zimbalist, Albert
+Spalding, Arthur Hartman, and a myriad of spoiled youths, Von
+Veczsey, Horszowski--all have crossed the map of my memory. And
+Franz Kneisel and the Kneisel Quartet, dispensers of musical joys
+for decades, but alas! no more. Alas! I would not barter memories of
+their music-making for a wilderness of virtuosi. I must not forget
+Joseph White, the Cuban violinist, who was with Theodore Thomas one
+season. His style was finished and Parisian. He was a mulatto and a
+handsome man. The night I heard him he played the Mendelssohn
+concerto, and at the beginning of the slow movement his chanterelle
+broke. Calmly he took concert master Richard Arnold's proffered
+instrument and triumphantly finished the composition.
+
+Three violinists abide clear in my recollection: Wieniawski,
+Wilhelmj, and Ysaye. The last named is dearer because nearer,
+contrary to the supposed rule that the older the thing the worse it
+is. Ysaye is the magician of the violin. He holds us in a spell with
+that elastic, curving bow of his, with those many coloured tones,
+tender, silky, sardonic, amorous, rich, and ductile. He interprets
+the classics as well as the romantics; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms;
+Vieuxtemps as well as Sibelius. Above all else, his mastery of the
+violin's technical mysteries, looms his musical temperament. He has
+imagination.
+
+I have reserved the women for the last. A goodly, artistic company.
+It is not necessary to go back to the Milanolla sisters. We still
+cherish remembrances of Camilla Urso and her broad musicianly
+manner; the finished style of Normann-Neruda, Maris Soldat, the
+gifted and unhappy Arma Senkrah, Nettie Carpenter, Teresina Tua--who
+did not become a "Fiddle Fairy" when she visited us in 1887--Leonora
+Jackson, Dora Becker, Olive Mead, and Maud Powell. In Europe many
+years ago, I heard Marcella Sembrich, who, after playing the E Flat
+Polonaise of Chopin on the piano, picked up a violin and dashed off
+the Wieniawski Polonaise; these feats were followed by songs, one
+being Viardot-Garcia's arrangement of Chopin's D Major Mazourka.
+Sembrich is the blue rose among great singers. Gericke, Paur,
+Nikisch were at first violinists; so was Fritz Scheel, late
+conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Franz Kneisel is a
+conductor of great skill; so is Frederick Stock, who followed
+Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
+Theodore Spiering formerly concert-master of the Philharmonic
+orchestra proved himself an excellent conductor. But that a little
+Polish woman could handle with ease two instruments and sing like an
+angel besides, borders on the fantastic. Geraldine Morgan is an
+admirable violin artiste who plays solo as well as quartet with
+equal authority.
+
+Maud Powell has fulfilled her early promise. She is a mature
+artiste, one who will never be finished because she will always
+study, always improve. A Joachim pupil, she is, nevertheless, a
+pupil of Maud Powell, and her playing reveals breadth, musicianship,
+beauty of tone and phrasing. She is our greatest American violin
+virtuosa.
+
+I wrote this of Mischa Elman (the first of the many Mischas and
+Jaschas who mew on the fiddle strings) after I heard him play in
+London: "United to an amazing technical precision there is a still
+more amazing emotional temperament, all dominated by a powerful
+musical and mental intellect, uncanny in one not yet out of his
+teens. What need to add that his conception of Beethoven is neither
+as lovely as Kreisler's nor as fascinating as Ysaye's? Elman will
+mature. In the romantic or the virtuoso realm he is past master. His
+tone is lava-like in its warmth. He paints with many colours. He
+displays numberless nuances of feeling. The musical in him dominates
+the virtuoso. Naturally, the pride of hot youth asserts itself, and
+often, self-intoxicated, he intoxicates his audiences with his
+sensuous, compelling tone. Hebraic, tragic, melancholy, the
+boisterousness of the Russian, the swift modulation from mad caprice
+to Slavic despair--Elman is a magician of many moods. When I listen
+to him I almost forget Ysaye." Yet when I heard Ysaye play last
+season it was Elman that I forgot for the moment. After all, a
+critic, too, may have his moods. And now comes another conqueror,
+the lad Jasha Heifetz from Russia, a pupil of Leopold Auer and an
+artist of such extraordinary attainments that the greatest among
+contemporary violinists--is it necessary to mention names?--have
+said of him that his art begins where theirs ends, and that they
+will shut up shop when he plays here. All of which is a flattering
+tribute, but it has been made before. Heifetz, however, may be the
+dark horse in the modern fiddle sweepstakes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+RIDING THE WHIRLWIND
+
+
+Once Swinburne, in a Baudelaire mood, sang: "Shall no new sin be
+born for men's troubles?" And it was an Asiatic potentate who
+offered a prize for the discovery of a new pleasure. Or was it a
+sauce?
+
+Mankind soon wearies. The miracles of yesteryear are the
+commonplaces of to-day. Steam, telegraphy, electric motors,
+wireless, and now wireless telephony are accepted as a matter of
+course by the man in the street. How stale will seem woman suffrage
+and prohibition after they have conquered. In the world of art
+conditions are analogous. The cubist nail drove out the
+impressionist, and the cubist will vanish if the futurist hammer is
+sufficiently heavy.
+
+Nevertheless, there is a novel sensation in store for those who make
+a first flight through the air. I don't mean in a balloon, whether
+captive or free; in the case of the former, a trip to the top of the
+Washington Monument or the Eiffel Tower will suffice; and while I
+rode in a Zeppelin at Berlin in 1912 (100 marks, or about $25, was
+the tariff) and saw Potsdam at my feet, yet I was unsatisfied. The
+passengers sat in a comfortable salon, ate, drank, even smoked. The
+travelling was so smooth as to suggest an inland lake on a summer
+day. No danger was to be apprehended. The monster air-ship left its
+hangar and returned to it on schedule time. The entire trip lacked
+the flavour of adventure. And that leads me to a personal
+confession.
+
+I am not a sport. In my veins flows sporting blood, but only in the
+Darwinian sense am I a "sport," a deviation from the normal history
+of my family, which has always been devoted to athletic pleasures. A
+baseball match in which carnage ensues is a mild diversion for me. I
+can't understand the fury of the contest. I yawn, though the
+frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators interests me. I have fallen
+asleep over a cricket match at Lord's in London, and the biggest
+bore of all was a Sunday afternoon bull-fight in Madrid. It was such
+a waste of potential beefsteaks. Prize-fights disgust, shell races
+are puerile, football matches smack of obituaries. As for golf--that
+is a prelude to senility, or the antechamber to an undertaker's
+establishment.
+
+The swiftness of film pictures has set a new metronomic standard for
+modern sports. I suppose playing Bach fugues on the keyboard is as
+exciting a game as any; that is, for those who like it. A
+four-voiced polyphony at a good gait is positively hair-raising. It
+beats poker. All this is a preliminary to my little tale.
+
+Conceive me as an elderly person of generous waist measurement,
+slightly reckless like most near-sighted humans; this recklessness
+is psychical. Safety first, and I always watch my step; painful
+experience taught me years ago the perils that lurk in ambush for a
+Johnny-look-in-the-air.
+
+Flying in heavier-than-air machines fascinated me. The fantastic
+stories of H. G. Wells were ever a joy. When the Argonauts of the
+Air appeared, flying was practically assured, although a Paris
+mathematician had demonstrated with ineluctable logic that it was
+impossible; as proved a member of the Institute a century earlier
+that birds couldn't fly. It was an illusion. Well, the Wrights flew,
+even if Langley did not--Langley, the genuine father of the
+aeroplane.
+
+Living so long in France and Belgium, I had grown accustomed to the
+whirring of aerial motors, a sound not unlike that of a motor-boat
+or the buzzing of a sawmill. I became accustomed to this drone above
+the housetops, and since my return to America I have often wondered
+why in the land where the aeroplane first flew, so little public
+interest was manifested. To be sure, there are aero clubs, but they
+never fly where the interest of the greater public can be intrigued.
+Either there is a hectic excitement over some record broken or else
+the aviator sulks in his tent. Is the money devil at the bottom of
+the trouble? Sport for sport's sake, like art for art's sake, is
+rarely encountered. The government has taken up flying, but that is
+for pragmatic purposes. The aeroplane as a weapon of defence, not
+the aeroplane as a new and agreeable pleasure. We are not a
+disinterested nation; even symphony concerts and opera and the
+salvation of souls are commercial propositions. Else would our skies
+be darkened by flying machines instead of smoke, and our churches
+thronged with aviators.
+
+Walking on the famous and fatiguing Boardwalk of Atlantic City I
+suddenly heard a familiar buzzing in the air and looked up. There it
+was, a big flying boat like a prehistoric dragon-fly, speeding from
+the Inlet down to the million-dollar pier. Presently there were two
+of them flying, and I felt as if I were in a civilised land. On the
+trolleys were signs: "See the Flying Boats at the Inlet!" I did, the
+very next morning. I had no notion of being a passenger. I was not
+tempted by the thought. But as Satan finds work for idle hands, I
+lounged down the beach to the Kendrick biplane, and stared my full
+at its slender proportions. A young man in a bathing-suit explained
+to me the technique of flying, and insinuated that hundreds and
+hundreds had flown during the season without accident. Afternoon saw
+me again on the sands, an excited witness of a flight; excited
+because I stood behind the motor when it was started for a
+preliminary tryout--"tuning up" is the slang phrase of the
+profession--and the cyclonic gale blew my hat away, loosened my
+collar, and made my teeth chatter.
+
+Such a tornadic roar! I firmly resolved that never would I trust
+myself in such a devil's contrivance. Why, it was actually riding
+the whirlwind--and, perhaps, reaping a watery grave. What else but
+that? On a blast of air you sail aloft and along. When the air
+ceases you drop (less than forty-five miles an hour). And this in a
+flimsy box kite. Never for me! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow
+with a crusty cottage! as we used to say in dear old "Lunnon" years
+ago. Nevertheless, the poison was in my veins; cunningly it began to
+work. I saw a passenger, a fat man, weighing two hundred and four
+pounds--I asked for the figures--trussed up like a calf in the arms
+of a slight, muscular youth, who carried him a limp burden and
+deposited him on a seat in the prow of the boat. I turned my head
+away. I am not easily stirred--having reported musical and
+theatrical happenings for a quarter of a century--but the sight of
+that stout male, a man and a brother (I didn't know him from Adam),
+evoked a chord of pity in my breast. I felt that I would never set
+eyes again on this prospective food for fishes. I quickly left the
+spot and returned to my hotel, determined to say, "Retro me,
+Sathanas!" if that personage should happen to show me his hoofs,
+horns, and hide.
+
+But he did not. The devil is a subtle beast. He had simply set
+jangling the wires of suggestion, and my nerves accomplished the
+rest. One morning, a few days later, I awoke parched with desire. I
+drank much strong tea to steady me and smoked unremittingly. Again,
+during the early afternoon, I found myself up the beach. "My feet
+take hold on hell," I said to myself, but it was only hot sand. I
+teased myself with speculations as to whether the game was worth the
+candle--yes, I had got that far, traversing a vast mental territory
+between the No-Sayer and the Yes-Sayer. I was doomed, and I knew it
+when I began to circle about the machine.
+
+Courteously the bonny youth explained matters. It was a Glenn H.
+Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, furnished with one of the new Curtiss
+engines of ninety horse-power, capable of flying seventy to ninety
+miles an hour, of lifting four hundred pounds, and weighing in all
+about a ton. Was it safe? Were the taut, skinny piano wires that
+manipulated the steering-gear and the plane durable? Didn't they
+ever snap? Of course they were durable, and, of course, they
+occasionally snapped. What then? Why, you drop, in spiral
+fashion--volplane--charming vocable! But if the engine?--same thing.
+You would come to earth, rather water, as naturally as a child takes
+the breast. Nothing to fear.
+
+Young Beryl Kendrick is an Atlantic City product--he was a
+professional swimmer and life-guard--and will look after you. The
+price is fifteen dollars; formerly twenty-five dollars, but
+competition, which is said to be the life of trade, had operated in
+favour of the public. Rather emotionally I bade my man good day,
+promising to return for a flight the next morning, a promise I
+certainly did not mean to keep. This stupendous announcement he
+received coolly. Flying to him was a quotidian banality.
+
+And then I noticed that the blazing sun had become darkened. Was it
+an eclipse, or were some horrid, monstrous shapes like the
+supposititious spindles spoken of by Langley devouring the light of
+our parent planet? No, it was the chamber of my skull that was full
+of shadows. The obsession was complete. I would go up, but I must
+suffer terribly in the interim.
+
+Why should I fly and pay fifteen good shekels for the unwelcome
+privilege? I computed the cost of various beverages, and as a
+consoling thought recalled Mark Twain's story of the Western editor
+who, missing from his accustomed haunts, was later found serenely
+drunk, passionately reading to a group of miners from a table his
+lantern-illuminated speech, in which he denounced the cruel raw
+waste of grain in the making of bread when so many honest men were
+starving for whisky. Yet did I feel that I would not begrudge my
+hard-earned royalties (I'm not a best-seller), and thus tormented
+between the devil of cowardice and the deep sea of curiosity I
+retired and dreamed all night of fighting strange birds that
+attacked me in an aeroplane.
+
+I shan't weary you with the further analysis of my soul-states
+during this tempestuous period. I ate a light breakfast, swallowed
+much tea. Then I resolutely went in company with a friend, and we
+boarded an Inlet car. I had the day previous resorted to a major
+expedient of cowards. I had said, so as to bolster up my fluttering
+resolution, that I was going to fly; an expedient that seldom
+misses, for I should never have been able to face the chief clerk,
+the head waiter, or the proprietor at the hotel if I failed to keep
+my promise.
+
+"Boaster! Swaggerer!" I muttered to myself en route. "Now are you
+satisfied? Thou tremblest, carcass! Thou wouldst tremble much more
+if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!" I quoted Turenne,
+and I was beginning to babble something about Icarus--or was it
+Phaeton, or Simon Magus?--brought to earth in the Colosseum by a
+prayer from the lips of Saint Peter--when we arrived. How I hated
+the corner where we alighted. It seemed mean and dingy and sinister
+in the dazzling sunlight--a red-hot Saturday, September 11, 1915,
+and the hour was 10.30 A. M. A condemned criminal could not have
+noted more clearly every detail of the life he was about to quit. We
+ploughed through the sand. We reached the scaffold--at least it
+looked like one to me. "Hello, here's a church. Let's go in," I felt
+like exclaiming in sheer desperation, remembering Dickens and Mr.
+Wemmick. I would have, such was my blue funk, quoted Holy Scripture
+to the sandlopers, but I hadn't the chance.
+
+I asked my friend, and my voice sounded steady enough, whether the
+wind and weather seemed propitious for flying. Never better was the
+reply, and my heart went down to my boots. I really think I should
+have escaped if a stout man with a piratical moustache hadn't
+approached me and asked: "Going up to-day?" I marvelled at his
+calmness, and wished for his instant dissolution, but I gave an
+affirmative shake of the head. Cornered at last! Handing my watch,
+hat, and wallet to my friend, I coldly awaited the final
+preparations. I had forgotten my ear protector, but cotton-wool
+would answer the purpose of making me partially deaf to the
+clangorous vibration of the propeller blades--which resemble in a
+magnified shape the innocent air-fans of offices and cafes. I
+essayed one more joke--true gallows humour--before I was led like a
+lamb (a tough one) to the slaughter. I asked an attendant to whom I
+had paid the official fee if my widows would be refunded the money
+in case of accident; but this antique and tasteless witticism was
+indifferently received, as it deserved. Finally the young man gave
+me a raincoat, grabbed me around the waist, and bidding me clasp
+his neck he carried me out into shallow water and sat me beside the
+air-pilot, who looked like a mere lad in his bathing-clothes. My
+hand must have been trembling (ah, that old piano hand), for he
+inquiringly eyed me. The motor was screaming as we flew through the
+water toward the Inlet. I hadn't courage of mind to make a farewell
+signal to my companion. Too late, we're off! I thought, and at once
+my trepidation vanished.
+
+I had for some unknown reason, possibly because of absolute despair,
+suffered a rich sea-change. We churned the waves. I saw tiny sails
+studding the deep blue. Men fished from the shore. As we neared the
+Inlet, where a shambling wooden hotel stands on the sandy point, the
+sound of the motor grew intenser. We began to lift, not all at once,
+but gradually. Suddenly her nose poked skyward, and the boat climbed
+the air with an ease that was astonishing. No shock. No jerkiness.
+We simply glided aloft as if the sky were our native heath--you will
+pardon the Hibernicism--and as if determined to pay a visit to the
+round blazing sun bathing naked in the brilliant blue. And with the
+mounting ascent I became unconscious of my corporeal vesture. I had
+become pure spirit. I feared nothing. The legend of angels became a
+certainty. I was on the way to the Fourth Dimensional vista. I
+recalled Poincare's suggestion that there is no such thing as
+matter; only holes in the ether. Nature embracing a vacuum instead
+of abhorring it. A Swiss cheese universe. Joseph Conrad has said
+"Man on earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close
+investigation." But man in the air? Man is destined to wings. Was I
+not proving it? Flying is the sport of gods, and should be of humans
+now that the motor-car is become slightly "promiscuous."
+
+The Inlet and thoroughfare at my feet were a network of silvery
+ribbons. The heat was terrific, the glare almost unbearable. But I
+no longer sneezed. Aviation solves the hay-fever problem. The wind
+forced me to clench my teeth. We were hurled along at seventy miles
+an hour, and up several thousand feet, yet below the land seemed
+near enough to touch. As we swung across the masts of yachts I
+wondered that we didn't graze them--so elusive was the crystal
+clearness of the atmosphere, a magic mirror that made the remote
+contiguous. The mast of the sunken schooner hard by the sand-bar
+looked like a lead-pencil one could grasp and write a message to
+Mars.
+
+Hello! I was become lyrical. It is inescapable up in the air. The
+blood seethes. Ecstasy sets in; the kinetic ecstasy of a
+spinning-top. I gazed at the pilot. He twisted his wheel
+nonchalantly as if in an earthly automobile. I looked over the sides
+of the cedar boat and was not giddy, for I had lived years at the
+top of an apartment-house, ten stories high, from which I daily
+viewed policemen killing time on the sidewalks; besides, I have
+strong eyes and the stomach of a drover. Therefore, no giddiness, no
+nausea. Only exaltation as we swooped down to lower levels. Atlantic
+City, bizarre, yet meaningless, outrageously planned and executed,
+stretched its ugly shape beneath us; the most striking objects were
+the exotic hyphenated hotel, with its Asiatic monoliths and dome,
+and its vast, grandiose neighbour, a mound of concrete, the biggest
+hotel in the world. The piers were salient silhouettes. A
+checker-board seemed the city, which modulated into a tremendous
+arabesque of ocean and sky. I preferred to stare seaward. The
+absorbent cotton in my ears was transformed into gun-cotton, so
+explosive the insistent drumming of the motor-engine. Otherwise, we
+flew on even keel, only an occasional dip and a sidewise swing
+reminding me that I wasn't footing the ordinary highway. The initial
+intoxication began to wear off, but not the sense of freedom, a
+glorious freedom; truly, mankind will not be free till all fly.
+
+Alas! though we become winged we remain mortal. We may shed our
+cumbersome pedestrian habits, but we take up in the air with us our
+petty souls. I found myself indulging in very trite thoughts. What a
+pity that war should be the first to degrade this delightful and
+stimulating sport! Worse followed. Why couldn't I own a machine?
+Base envy, you see. The socialistic leaven had begun to work. No
+use; we shall remain human even in heaven or hell.
+
+I have been asked to describe the sensation of flying. I can't. It
+seems so easy, so natural. If you have ever dreamed of flying, I can
+only say that your dream will be realised in an aeroplane. Dreams do
+come true sometimes. (Curiously enough, I've not dreamed of flying
+since.) But as there is an end even to the most tedious story, so
+mine must finish.
+
+Suddenly the sound of the engine ceased. The silence was thrilling,
+almost painful. And then in huge circles, as if we were descending
+the curves of an invisible corkscrew, we came down, the bow of the
+flying boat pointing at an angle of forty-five degrees. Still no
+dizziness, only a sense of regret that the trip was so soon over. It
+had endured an eternity, but occupied precisely twenty-one minutes.
+
+We reached the water and settled on the foam like a feather. Then we
+churned toward the beach; again I was carried, this time on to solid
+land, where I had ridiculous trouble in getting the cotton from my
+harassed eardrums. Perhaps my hands were unsteady, but if they were,
+my feet were not.
+
+I reached the Inlet via the Boardwalk, making record time, and drew
+the first happy sigh in a week as I sat down, lighted a cigar, and
+twiddled my fingers at a waiter. Even if I had enjoyed a new
+pleasure I didn't propose to give up the old ones. Then my nerves!
+And when I meet Gabriele d'Annunzio I can look him in the eye. He
+flew over Trieste, but I flew over my fears--a moral as well as a
+physical victory for a timid conservative.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING
+
+(From the editorial page of the New York _Sun_, December 31, 1916)
+
+
+It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they
+may be loosed from their sins; and it is as holy a prayer that begs
+from the god of chance his pity for the living. Aye! it is those who
+are about to live, not to die, that we should salute. Life is the
+eternal slayer; death is but the final punctuation of the vital
+paragraph. Life is also the betrayer. A cosmical conspiracy of
+deception encircles us. We call it Maya, and flatter our finite
+sense of humour that we are no longer entrapped by the shining
+appearance of things when we say aloud: Stay, thou art so subtle
+that we know you for what you are--the profoundest instinct of life:
+its cruel delight in pretending to be what it is not. We are now,
+all of us who think that we think, newly born Fausts with eyes
+unbandaged of the supreme blinders, Time and Space. Nature clothes
+the skeleton in a motley suit of flesh, but our supersharpened ears
+overhear the rattling of the bones. We are become so wise that love
+itself is no longer a sentiment, only a sensation; religion is
+first cousin to voluptuousness; and if we are so minded we may jig
+to the tune of the stars up the dazzling staircase, and sneer at the
+cloud-gates of the infinite inane. Naught succeeds like negation,
+and we swear that in the house of the undertaker it is impolite to
+speak of shrouds. We are nothing if not determinists. And we believe
+that the devil deserves the hindmost.
+
+We live in order to forget life. For our delicate machinery of
+apperception there is no longer right or wrong; vice and virtue are
+the acid and alkali of existence. And as too much acid deranges the
+stomach, so vice corrodes the soul, and thus we are virtuous by
+compulsion. Yet we know that evil serves its purpose in the vast
+chemistry of being, and if banished the consequences might not be
+for universal good; other evils would follow in the train of a too
+comprehensive mitigation, and our end a stale swamp of vain virtues.
+Resist not evil! Which may mean the reverse of what it seems to
+preach. The master modern immoralist has said: Embrace evil! that we
+may be over and done with it. Toys are our ideals; glory, goodness,
+wealth, health, happiness; all toys except health; health of the
+body, of the soul. And the first shall be last.
+
+The human soul in health? But there is no spiritual health. The
+mystic, Doctor Tauler, has said: "God does not reside in a vigorous
+body"; sinister; nevertheless, equitable. The dolorous certitude
+that the most radiant of existences ends in the defeat of disease
+and death; that happiness is relative, a word empty of meaning in
+the light of experience, and non-existent as an absolute; that the
+only divine oasis in our feverish activities is sleep; sleep the
+prelude to the profound and eternal silence--why then this gabble
+about soul-states and the peace that passeth all understanding?
+Simply because the red corpuscles that rule our destinies are, when
+dynamic, mighty breeders of hope; if the powers and principalities
+of darkness prevail, our guardian angels, the phagocytes, are
+dominated by the leucocytes. Gods and devils, Ormuzd and Ahriman,
+and other phantasms of the sky, may all be put on a microscopic
+slide and their struggles noted. And the evil ones are ever victors
+in the diabolical game. No need to insist on it. In the heart of
+mankind there is a tiny shrine with its burning taper; the idol is
+Self; the propitiatory light is for subliminal foes. Alas! in vain.
+We succumb, and in our weakness we sink into the grave. If only we
+were sure of the River Styx afterward we should pay the ferry-tax
+with joy. Better Hades than the poppy of oblivion. "Ready to be
+anything in the ecstasy of being ever," as Sir Thomas Browne sagely
+remarks.
+
+The pious and worthy Doctor Jeremy Taylor, who built cathedral-like
+structures of English prose to the greater glory of God and for the
+edification of ambitious rhetoricians, has dwelt upon the efficacy
+of prayer in a singularly luminous passage: "Holy prayer procures
+the ministry and services of angels. It rescinds the decrees of God.
+It cures sickness and obtains pardon. It arrests the sun in its
+course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon. It rules
+over all God's creatures and opens and shuts the storehouses of
+rain. It unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence
+of fire. It stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our sufferance
+and weak faculties with the violence of torment and sharpness of
+persecution. It pleases God and supplies all our needs. But prayer
+that can do this much for us can do nothing at all without holiness,
+for God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God
+and doth His will, him He heareth."
+
+It should not be forgotten that Taylor, perhaps the greatest English
+prose-master save John Milton, was a stickler for good works as well
+as faith. He was considered almost heterodox because of his violence
+of speech when the subject of death-bed repentance became a topic of
+discussion; indeed, his bishop remonstrated with him because of his
+stiff-necked opinions. To joust through life as at a pleasure
+tournament and when the dews of death dampen the forehead to call on
+God in your extremity seemed to this eloquent divine an act of
+slinking cowardice. Far better face the evil one in a defiant spirit
+than knock for admittance at the back door of paradise and try to
+sneak by the winged policeman into a vulgar bliss: unwon, unhoped
+for, undeserved. Therefore the rather startling statement, "God
+heareth not sinners," read in the light of Bishop Taylor's fervent
+conception of man's duty, hath its justification.
+
+But this atmosphere of proverbial commonplaces and "inspissated
+gloom" should not be long maintained when the coursers of the sun
+are plunging southward in the new year; when the Huntsman is up at
+Oyster Bay and "they are already past their first sleep in Persia."
+What a bold and adventurous piece of nature is man; yet how he
+stares at life as a frowning entertainment. Why must we "act our
+antipodes" when "all Africa and her prodigies are in us"? Ergo, let
+us be cheerful. God is with the world. Let us pray that during the
+ensuing year no rust shall colour our soul into a dingy red. Let us
+pray for the living that they may be loosed from their politics and
+see life steadily and whole.
+
+Let us pray that we may not take it on ourselves to feel holier than
+our neighbours. Let us pray that we be not cursed with the itching
+desire to reform our fellows, for the way of the reformer is hard,
+and he always gets what he deserves: the contempt of his fellow men.
+He is usually a hypocrite. Let us pray that we are not struck by
+religious zeal; religious people are not always good people; good
+people are not envious, jealous, penurious, censorious, or
+busybodies, or too much bound up in the prospect of the mote in
+their brother's eye and unmindful of the beam in their own.
+Furthermore, good people do not unveil with uncharitable joy the
+faults of women. Have faith. Have hope, and remember that charity is
+as great as chastity.
+
+Let us pray for the misguided folk who, forgetful of Mother Church,
+her wisdom, her consolations, flock to the tents of lewd, itinerant,
+mumbo-jumbo howlers, that blaspheme the sacred name as they
+epileptically leap, shouting glory-kingdom-come and please settle at
+the captain's office.
+
+Though they run on all fours and bark as hyenas, they shall not
+enter the city of the saints, being money-changers in the Temple,
+and tripe-sellers of souls. Better Tophet and its burning pitch than
+a wilderness of such apes of God. Some men and women of culture and
+social position indorse these sorry buffoons, the apology for their
+paradoxical conduct being any port in a storm; any degrading circus,
+so it be followed by a mock salvation. But salvation for whom? What
+deity cares for such foaming at the mouth, such fustian? Conversion
+is silent and comes from within, and not to the din of brass-bands
+and screaming hallelujahs. It takes all sorts of gods to make the
+cosmos, but why return to the antics and fetishes of our primate
+ancestors, the cave-dwellers? This squirming and panting and brief
+reform "true religion"? On the contrary it is a throwback to
+bestiality, to the vilest instincts. A "soul" that has to be saved
+by such means is a soul not worth the saving. To the discard with
+it, where, flaming in purgatorial fires, it may be refashioned for
+future reincarnation on some other planet.
+
+Abuse of drink is to be deplored, but Prohibition is more enslaving
+than alcohol. Paganism in its most exotic forms is preferable to
+this prize-ring Christianity. One may be zealous without wallowing
+in debasing superstition. Again, let us pray for these imbeciles and
+for the charlatans who are blinding them. Neither arts and sciences
+nor politics and philosophies will save the soul. The azure route
+lies beyond the gates of ivory and the gates of horn.
+
+Let us pray for our sisters, the suffragettes, who are still
+suffering from the injustice of Man, now some million of years. Let
+us pray that they be given the ballot to prove to them its utter
+futility as a cure-all. With it they shall be neither happier nor
+different. Once a woman, always a martyr. Let them not be deceived
+by illusive phrases. If they had not been oppressed they would
+to-day be "free"! Alas! free from their sex? Free from the burden of
+family? Free like men to carry on the rude labours of this ruder
+earth? To what purpose? To become second-rate men, when nature has
+endowed them with qualities that men vainly emulate, vainly seek to
+evoke their spirit in the arts and literature! Ages past woman
+should have attained that impossible goal, oppression or no; in
+fact, adversity has made man what he is--and woman, too. Pray, that
+she may not be tempted by the mirage into the desert, there to
+perish of thirst for the promised land. Nearly a century ago George
+Sand was preaching the equality of the sexes, and rightly enough.
+What has come of it? The vote? Political office? Professions,
+business opportunities? Yes, all these things, but not universal
+happiness. Woman's sphere--stale phrase!--is any one she hankers
+after; but let her not deceive herself. Her future will strangely
+resemble her past.
+
+William Dean Howells was not wrong when he wrote: Woman has only her
+choice in self-sacrifice. And sometimes not even the choosing. Why?
+Why are eclipses? Why are some men prohibitionists? Why do hens
+cluck after laying eggs? Let us pray for warring women that their
+politically ambitious leaders may no longer dupe them with
+fallacious promises--surely a "pathetic fallacy." But, then, females
+rush in where fools fear to tread.
+
+And lastly, beloved sisters and brothers, let us heartily pray that
+our imperial democracy (or is it a democratic empire?), our
+plutocratic republic (or should we say republican plutocracy?) may
+be kept from war; avoid "the drums and tramplings of three
+conquests." But by the Eternal Jehovah, God of battles, if we are
+forced to fight, then let us fight like patriotic Americans, and not
+gently coo, like pacifists and other sultry south winds. A billion
+for "preparedness," but not a penny for "pork," say we.
+
+And by the same token let us pray that those thundering humbugs and
+parasites who call themselves labour leaders--the blind leading the
+blind--for ever vanish. Because of their contumacious acts and
+egregious bamboozling of their victims, because of their false
+promises of an earthly paradise and a golden age, they deserve the
+harshest condemnation.
+
+Like certain Oriental discourses, our little Morality which began in
+the mosque has rambled not far from the tavern. Nevertheless, let us
+pray for the living as well as the dead. Oremus!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
+
+
+_What some distinguished writers have said of them_:
+
+Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: "Do you know that
+'Iconoclasts' is the only book of high and universal critical worth
+that we have had for years--to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It
+is at once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and sure."
+
+And of "Ivory Apes and Peacocks" he said, among other things: "I
+have marvelled at the vigilance and clarity with which you follow
+and judge the new literary and artistic movements in all countries.
+I do not know of criticism more pure and sure than yours." (October,
+1915.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of "Visionaries" Remy de Gourmont wrote, June 22, 1906: "I am
+convinced that you have written a very curious, very beautiful book,
+and one of that sort comes to us rarely."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, 1909, of "Egoists": "I have
+browsed through the pages of your book and found that you touch in a
+sympathetic style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the
+case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatment is extremely rare and
+courageous."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Georg Brandes, the versatile and profound Danish critic, wrote:
+"I find your breadth of view and its expression more European than
+American; but the essential thing is that you are an artist to your
+very marrow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Out of the depressing welter of our American writing upon
+     aesthetics, with its incredible thinness and triteness and
+     paltriness, its intellectual sterility, its miraculous dulness, its
+     limitless and appalling vapidity, Mr. James Huneker, and the small
+     and honorable minority of his peers, emerge with a conspicuousness
+     that is both comforting and disgraceful.... Susceptibility,
+     clairvoyance, immediacy of response, are his; he is the friend of
+     any talent that is fine and strange and frank enough to incur the
+     dislike of the mighty army of Bourbons, Puritans, and B[oe]otians.
+     He is innocent of prepossessions. He is infinitely flexible and
+     generous. Yet if, in the twenty years that we have been reading
+     him, he has ever praised a commonplace talent, we have no
+     recollection of it. His critical tact is well-nigh infallible....
+     His position among writers on aesthetics is anomalous and
+     incredible: no merchant traffics in his heart, yet he commands a
+     large, an eager, an affectionate public. Is it because he is both
+     vivid and acute, robust yet fine-fingered, tolerant yet unyielding,
+     astringent yet tender--a mellow pessimist, a kindly cynic? Or is it
+     rather because he is, primarily, a temperament--dynamic,
+     contagious, lovable, inveterately alive--expressing itself through
+     the most transparent of the arts?"
+          --LAWRENCE GILMAN, in _North American Review_ (October, 1915).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+NEW COSMOPOLIS
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a
+     craftsman of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and
+     distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He is
+     intensely 'modern,' well read in recent European writers, and not
+     lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. Ancient serenity
+     has laid no chastening hand on his thought and style, but he has
+     achieved at times a fineness of expression that lifts his work
+     above that of the many eager and artistic souls who strive to be
+     the thinkers of New England to-day. He flings off his impressions
+     at fervent heat; he is not ashamed to be enthusiastic; and he
+     cannot escape that large sentimentality which, to less disciplined
+     transatlantic writers, is known nakedly as 'heart interest.' Out of
+     his chaos of reading and observation he has, however, evolved a
+     criticism of life that makes for intellectual cultivation, although
+     it is of a Bohemian rather than an academic kind. Given a different
+     environment, another training, Mr. Huneker might have emerged as an
+     American Walter Pater."
+                                 --_London Athenaeum_ (November 6, 1915).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MELOMANIACS
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase. Never
+     did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts,
+     not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and
+     obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were
+     perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of
+     thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness,
+     but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is
+     genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the
+     wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of
+     thought."
+           --HAROLD E. GORST, in _London Saturday Review_ (Dec. 8,1906).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+VISIONARIES
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy
+     and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly
+     moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his
+     heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in
+     these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering, and unblessed. But
+     Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a
+     tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's
+     stories."
+                                      --_London Academy_ (Feb. 3, 1906).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+ICONOCLASTS:
+
+A Book of Dramatists
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in
+     which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every
+     sentence."
+                             --G. K. CHESTERTON, in _London Daily News_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the
+     music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words
+     as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping
+     strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And
+     as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of
+     quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and
+     temperament--a string that vibrates and sings in response to
+     music--we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very
+     valuable contribution to the world's tiny musical literature."
+                          --J. F. RUNCIMAN, in _London Saturday Review_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+FRANZ LISZT
+
+_WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+12mo. $2.00 net
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHOPIN: The Man and His Music
+
+12mo. $2.00 net
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+OVERTONES: A Book of Temperaments
+
+_WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS_
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant
+     of all living writers on matters musical."
+     --_Academy, London_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE
+
+A Book of a Thousand and One Moments
+
+12mo. $2.00 net
+
+     "He talks about Bergson as well as Matisse; he never can keep still
+     about Wagner; he hauls over his French library of modern immortals,
+     and he gives a touch to George Moore, to Arthur Davies, and to many
+     another valiant worker in paint, music, and letters. The book is
+     stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected
+     brilliancy."
+                                                    --_Chicago Tribune_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the
+     technical contributions of Cezanne and Rodin. Here Mr. Huneker is a
+     real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways in
+     art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such
+     appreciations as the Monticelli and Chardin."
+    --FRANK JEWETT MATHER, Jr., in _New York Nation_ and _Evening Post_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+EGOISTS
+
+_WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS_
+
+12mo. $1.50 net
+
+     "Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as
+     a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very
+     shrewd."
+                           --ROYAL CORTISSOZ, in the _New York Tribune_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the
+exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also
+inconsistently spelled words. The oe ligature is indicated by
+[oe].
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The full list of changes to the text is as following:
+
+
+p. 10
+
+"Lizst" changed to "Liszt"
+
+
+p. 24
+
+"Henri de Regnier" changed to "Henri de Regnier"
+
+
+p. 40
+
+"immediable" changed to "irremediable"
+
+
+p. 66
+
+"Maurice Barres" changed to "Maurice Barres"
+
+
+p. 77
+
+"idylic" changed to "idyllic"
+
+
+p. 83
+
+"a critic should be ever so. (Consider" changed to
+"a critic should be ever so. Consider"
+
+Explanation: the opening bracket (with no corresponding closing
+bracket) was removed.
+
+
+p. 108
+
+"hippogrifs" changed to "hippogriffs"
+
+
+p. 112
+
+"misanthrophy" changed to "misanthropy"
+
+
+p. 116
+
+"Huysman's" changed to "Huysmans's"
+
+
+p. 117, p. 276
+
+"Barbey d'Aurevilly" changed to "Barbey d'Aurevilly"
+
+
+p. 127
+
+"promegranates" changed to "pomegranates"
+
+
+p. 133
+
+"Musica" changed to "Musical"
+
+
+p. 156
+
+"Cujol" changed to "Cajal"
+
+
+p. 165
+
+"Facino Cano" changed to "Facino Cane"
+
+
+p. 168
+
+"Frederic Chopin" changed to "Frederic Chopin"
+
+
+p. 244
+
+"I'm a Social-Democrat now." changed to ""I'm a Social-Democrat now."
+
+Explanation: opening double quote added.
+
+
+p. 246
+
+"sich" changed to "such"
+
+
+p. 246
+
+"exclaims Maeterlinck," yet" changed to "exclaims Maeterlinck, "yet"
+
+Explanation: the double quote was moved to the next sentence.
+
+
+p. 327
+
+"De Beriot" changed to "De Beriot"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Please note that the text contains inconsistently spelled words or
+phrases that were not changed. The following is a list of those
+words. The number in brackets denotes the number of occurences of
+each such word or phrase.
+
+  - Cafe (1), Cafe (1)
+  - Eugene Ysaye (1), Eugene Ysaye (1)
+  - Karl Heymann (1), Carl Heyman (1)
+  - Trocadero (1), Trocadero (2)
+  - bird-like (1), birdlike (1)
+  - bric-a-brac (1), bric-a-brac (1)
+  - free-will (1), free will (1)
+  - ruse (1), ruse (1)
+  - shadow-land (1), shadow land (1)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker
+
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