Variations  

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Variations is a book by American writer James Huneker

COLERIDGE quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as de claring that: "The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is poor because it won t work both ways. All master reformers, here tics, and rebels at first were great corrupters. "Corruption," so-called, is a prime factor in their propaganda. Buddha, Jesus, and Moses; Arms and Aristophanes, Mohammed and Napo leon, Paul and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer here are a few names of men who undermined the current beliefs and practices of their epoch, whether for good or for evil. Rousseau has been accused by Pierre Lasserre as being the greatest corrupter in modern history; yet his name will always be associated with the Constitution of the United States of America. Tom Paine has been called a "dirty little atheist," but he wrote The Rights of Man. In prose of unequalled force and limpidity Pascal denounced the Jesuits as corrupters of youth poor, persecuted Jesu its, who were the "Yellow Peril" of that time. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellec tual" and a philosophic anarch, wrote to Friedrich Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But even i VARIATIONS as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it was they whowere right; he did not understand them; but they understood him and . . . they published his Provincial Letters with notes. The best edi tion is that of the Jesuits. 77 Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting for William Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn t muchmatter whether we consider a great man as either a regenerator or a corrupter. It all de pends on your critical angle of vision. Taine called Napoleon a bandit, notwithstanding the idolatries of his contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from that of his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopen hauer, although he borrowed his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the sincerest friendship of his solitary life his love for Richard Wagner. We know that the most " objective 57 comical old categories, "objective 77 and "subjective 7 philosophies are tinged by the temperaments of their makers; perhaps the chief characteristic of philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for fellow-thinkers. This trait Schopenhauer dis played when he abused Hegel & Co., Berlin, Ltd. Nietzsche attacked Wagner after writing that lucid and comprehensive study of him, Richard Wagner and Baireuth. Wagner was a bitter polemist and didn t spare Meyerbeer and other operatic trusts. He was an amateur phi losopher, his rickety system adorned with VARIOUS plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. But Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful, more origi nal intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He "corrupted" both, though it may be ad mitted that their intellectual and artistic soil was primed for just such corruption. And Scho penhauer, gay old misogynist, was materialist enough to echo an epigram attributed to Fontenelle: "To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked heart." In other words, if your stomach is sound your soul will take care of itself. All Hobbes, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Helvetius, and Condillac are in that phrase. But it is not my intention to stray among the pleasant groves of speculation, taking an occa sional potshot at the strange fauna of metaphysic or admiring its many-colored flora. Some one wrote asking me if Manette Salomon, by de Goncourt the brothers Edmond and Jules, had been translated into English; also if it were the only fiction about art and artists. I can t say yes or no as to the translation; if it is not, it should be; but it is safe to say that Manette is the best novel dealing entirely with paint and painters that I know of. Fiction about art and artists is rare; that is, good fic tion, not the stuff daily ground out by publish ing mills for the gallery gods. A classic ex ample in American literature is The Marble Faun, by Hawthorne. Romola, by George Eliot, is atmospheric with Florentine art and VARIATIONS the genius of place. However, it is to the French that we must go for such literature, Manette being a notable example. It depicts the spiritual and physical decadence of a splen did painting talent, Coriolis, and contains vera cious pictures of the pre-impressionist days in Paris. Balzac in the Unknown Masterpiece has left a model. His Frenhofer is the first of the impressionists withal, a fumbler of genius. In both Daudet and de Maupassant there are stories clustered about the artistic guild. Strong as Death, by de Maupassant, is long enough to be called a novel (roman), though it is but an expanded episode, and a mighty inter esting one, even a touching one, for the usually impassive Guy. Daudet described a Paris Salon on varnishing day in his accustomed facile, feb rile style; but it stems from Goncourt and Zola. Zola s His Masterpiece (L CEuvre) is one of his best-written books. It was said to be a favorite of his, and it justifies his taste. The muchbelauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription of the first Salon of Rejected Painters (Salon des refuses) at Paris in 1863. Napoleon III, after social and political pressure had been brought to bear on him, had consented to a special Salon within the official Salon at the Palais de ITndustrie, where the rejected work of the young luna tics who wished to paint purple turkeys, ver milion water, and black sunsets would be har bored. Ivory hallucinations and girls with car- milion-colored eyes were not barred. It is an 4 VARIOUS enormously clever book, this chiefly deriving from Manette Salomon and Balzac s Frenhofer. Claude Lantier is said to be the portrait of Paul Cezanne, a schoolmate and friend of Zola at Aixen-Provence. When I made the trip from Mar seilles to Aix Cezanne still lived, but I had been warned not to mention the name of Zola, who shows Cezanne in this novel as an impotent groper after impossible ideals. The irritable Paul would go into spasms of rage when Zola was referred to in his presence. Imbecile, traitor, charlatan! These were sample expres sions. A reading of L GEuvre at once convinces you that the artistic procedures of Claude Lan tier and Paul Cezanne are diametrically differ ent. Claude failed and hanged himself. There are contemporary critics who consider Cezanne the greatest master of the impressionist group. But the struggle for artistic veracity on the part of Zola s sorry hero is not unlike the case of Manet. The Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and the subject of a Manet canvas that had scandalized Paris at this period. The fantastic idea of nude females at an al fresco banquet upon the grass, while the other figures were clothed and in their right mind all this was too much for a pur blind public and hostile critics; although there are many examples in Italian renaissance paint ing of the same style of composition. The pic ture became notorious. Manet, like Richard Wagner, knew the uses of advertising. 5 VARIATIONS Poe, Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, inter alia, have dealt with the theme pictorial, and Paul Bourget, in his thrice- charming story, The Lady Who Lost HerPainter. Henry James has written delightful tales, such as The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Tragic Muse this a full-fledged novel in two volumes in which artists appear and live their lives. But it is the particular psycho logic problem involved, rather than theorizing about art, that steers the cunning pen of James. We all recall the woman in The Liar, who de stroyed the portrait of her husband because it revealed to her, at last, the secret of his moral infirmity. In this story John Singer Sargent has been accredited as the psychologist of the brush. There is a nice, fresh young fellow in The Tragic Muse, who, weak-spined as he is, prefers, at the last, his palette and brush to the charms and wealth of Julia Dallow and her ambitious plans for his political career. In The Real Thing werecognize Henry James would call it the " emotion of recognition" one of those un erring strokes that prove the writer to be mas ter-psychologist among English novelists. Anydiscerning painter will tell you that the value of a model who can take the "pose" far out shines crude naturalism. It is the suggestive- ness of the pose with its pictorial implications that sets moving the imagination of the artist. Upon this thesis the novelist has built a semipathetic, amusing, and striking fable. 6 VARIOUS There are painters and sculptors scattered throughout English fiction shall we ever for get Thackeray and Clive Newcome? Ouida has not missed weaving Tyrian purples into the gorgeous patterns of her romantic painters. And Disraeli. And George Bernard Shaw there is a painting creature in his Love Among the Artists. (I contend that an admirable nov elist was killed in Mr. Shaw when he deserted fiction for the playhouse. He won t agree with me, but I should willingly part with all his pref aces for another Byron CashePs Profession.) But it is to George Moore we must go for fiction of this sort. He has devoted more of his pages to paint and painters than other latter-day nov elists. The reason is that George Moore went to Paris, there to study art, and he drifted into the Julian atelier just as would any likely young chap with a well-filled purse and hazy notions concerning art. Those early experiences were not wasted, they cropped up in his stories and critical studies, He became the critical pioneer in England of French impressionist art painters, the champion of Manet, Monet, Degas, and the rest. He even declared, in an article of rare acumen, that if Jemmy Whistler had been a heavier man, with more beef and brawn and beer, as was Rubens, for example, the spiderwaisted American painter might have been as great an artist as Velasquez. To the weighing scales, fellow-artists ! retorted Whistler; never theless, the bolt of Mr. Moore reached the mark. VARIATIONS Whistler s remarks about the Irish critic, espe cially after the Eden litigation, were, so it is reported, not "fit to print." In Spring Days, the first volume of Mr.Moore s trilogy A Modern Lover and MikeFletcher are the other two we are shown ayoung painter who thinks more of petticoats than paint. Mike Fletcher, the most virile and, for some of us, the quintessence of Moore,has its share of paint talk. In A Modern Loverthe hero is an artist who succeeds in the fash ionable world by painting pretty, artificial por traits, thereby winning wealth, popular ap plause, and official approbation. He also makeslove in a fascinating fashion the secret of his mundane success. This same Lewis Seymourlives and paints modish London beauties in rose color. He may be found in Paris and NewYork. He is a type. The sitter for this por trait is said to have been Sir Frederick Leighton, a statement I accept on its face value, and onethat Mr. Moore would probably vehementlydeny. But his irony must have entered the souls of a hundred celebrated humbugs; that is, if they had souls to boast. A Modern Lover, despite the rewriting and consequent deface ment of the original design, is distinctly a paint er s novel and the best of its kind, were it not that subsequently the novelist wrote a master piece, Mildred Lawson, to be found in the vol ume entitled Celibates a Balzacian title, bythe way. Masterly in analysis and description, 8 VARIOUS this story chiefly deals with art. Mildred, a selfish English girl without heart, soul, or tal ent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer vacation. Naturally, no one has ever described the Forest better than Flaubert in Sentimental Education; Flaubert, who wrote better than any one else save Balzac. In this great canvas of Parisian life there are marvellous evocations. There is a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who first reads all the literature of aesthetics before he draws a line, and poses his sitters a la Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, or Titian; in a word, the man of precedent. De Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impressions of the Forest and its paint ers; in particular, Francois Millet. It is only just to Mr. Moore to say that you can t find Mildred Lawson in Flaubert or de Goncourt; no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the very matrix of modern fiction. She is her own cruel, perverse, Moorovian self, and she lives here or London or in the Philip pines. Elsewhere I have classed her as one of the most disagreeable heroines in fiction, an inky sister of Hedda Gabler and Undine Spragg (in Edith Wharton s Custom of the Country). All the one-time novel theories of "plein air" impressionism are discussed in Zola s His Mas terpiece, yet the work as a whole lacks the fine- fibred style and clairvoyance of Manette Salo mon; that breviary for painters which in 1867 anticipated the experimentings, the discoveries, 9 VARIATIONS and the practice of the naturalistic and impres sionist groups, running the gamut from Manet,Monet, to Cezanne, Maufra, and Paul Gauguin. The book is crowded with verbal pictures of art students, atelier and open-air life; painting wasstill one of the romantic arts when de Goncourtwrote. No such psychological manual of the painter has appeared, before or since, ManetteSalomon. The celibate bias of the brothers is revealed in the leading motive oh, that musty, fusty melodramatic idea which is the degra dation of a man s artistic ideals because of the woman Manette, his model he marries. It was Goncourt who introduced Japanese art to Europe; the brothers were friends of the late M. Bing, a pioneer collector in Paris. Andthey foresaw the future of fiction as well as painting. 10 HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS How not to be a genius nowadays is as dif ficult as it is to believe in prohibition. Every other man and woman you meet on the side walks of life is a genius; at least they admit it, or their disciples say they are. People with mere talent are becoming rare. If you happen to write a best seller you are acclaimed a genius. And when you think it over, a man who can sell a million copies of a book compounded of sentimental slush and slimy piety must be a genius. What else is he? An artistic writer? No. Respectable? Yes. In Carlyle s times a person was considered respectable if he owned a gig; he was called a gigman. To-day it is the motor-car that is the symbol of financial well-being. Carlyle had much fun with his gigman. What would he write about those egregious humans who starve themselves and their families in order to sport about the high ways in a mortgaged motor? Popularity may be for dolls, declared Emerson, but it s a mighty asset when all the world is a doll. Even the old Carlyle definition was thrown out of court by Herbert Spencer, himself a prize specimen of one who possessed an infinite capacity for taking pains in his work. Nevertheless, indus try is not necessarily an indication of genius, ii VARIATIONS although elbow-grease has been an underrated factor in the case. The truth is that there are no royal paths to Parnassus. In 1857 Dr. Morel published his Traite des Degenerescences, and gave modern psychiatry its initial springboard. Then Guerensen pro nounced genius a disease of the nerves, and the floodgates of madcap theories were wide opened. We learned much from Magnan, Ribot, the brothers Janet, Maudsley, Esquinol, and Charcot. After their psychological plumber workgenius became a dangerous profession. Youwere likely to be either a madman or a criminal, and such piffling busybodies as Lombroso andNordau tracked you to your lair, measuredyour ears, the cut of your nose and a glance of the eye, Reginald ! (Surely Beau Brummelwas a clothes maniac.) Luckily for the world, genius is still a scarce product, and the charlatan theories were laughed off the map when Nordau wrote his partly amusing and wholly ridiculous book on Degenera tion. The late William James walloped himinto silence. But the vulgar error persists in the mind of the half-baked of culture. Like Mahomet s coffin, it hangs suspended twixt earth and heaven. It bobs up in the so-called new school of Freudian psychoanalysis, which exploits to the reductio ad absurdum the vonHartmann theory of the subliminal conscious ness, with a little spice of soothsaying and dreambook twaddle thrown in to lend an air of novelty. 12 HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS We learn from Dr. Freud that dreams are the result of unfulfilled desires which may mean anything that authors unconsciously reveal themselves in their writings. What an astound ing discovery ! Important if true. O la belle histoire! Cut out the erotic element in this "new" theory and the world would pass it by. Who would read Leaves of Grass for its "poetry" if such chaste, odoriferous "poems" as The Woman Who Waits for Me were absent? Genius is a word that has fallen into disrepute because of its being bandied about so freely by our makers of fiction. That burlesque of a raw-head-and-bloody-bones, Strickland, the al leged painter in Somerset Maugham s melo dramatic "shocker," The Moon and Sixpence, is a case in point. The clever author expects his readers to believe that a staid business man is transformed into a great painter at the age of forty. To be sure, Strickland was what the French call a "Sunday painter," one who potters with color tubes and canvas every seventh day, yet is supposed to accomplish what such men of genius as Degas, Manet, Millet, couldn t in protracted daily toil. And the innocent public swallows such fairy-tales because it believes in miracles. You may be sure of one thing no one in the history of the Seven Arts has mas tered his material save in the sweat of his brow. Works and days. You can t change your psy chology overnight. Mr. Maugham suggested Paul Gauguin, the painter of South Seas land13 VARIATIONS scapes, rich in color, decoration and arabesques. But Gauguin was a real genius. Augustus Johntoo has been dragged in. Ridiculous! Wemention Strickland because he seems to embodythe popular notion of genius. A bolt from the blue, and a stupid Philistine becomes in a trice a scarecrow painter. No, he won t do, anymore than Theodore Dreiser s The Genius will serve as a portrait of one. In Shakespeare youare jostled by genius, but, then, the poet wasa genius of geniuses. He englobed all forms of genius. But is genius a disease, like the tenor voice, or the pearl in a mollusk? It is, we know, a gift that seldom brings happiness to its pos sessor. Either it is unmercifully flouted, or else unrecognized, and no two persons agree as to its specific quality. There is in Poland a poetnovelist-playwright who bears a name that sounds like an unconquered Polish fortress. Heis called Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and when his story, Homo Sapiens, was translated and pub lished here the unhappy man was heartily hated by all proofreaders and compositors. Do youwonder? Possibly that dislike was a factor in the suppression of the book, which wasn t a whit less moral in its implications than the Re-crea tion of William J. Bryan Kent. Stanislaw we mercifully omit the full name has wisely written of genius and has illustrated it in his ex ceedingly vivid personal career. Readers of Strindberg s Inferno, which contains in com14 HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS pression more tortures than Dante s epic, a sort of pemmican hell, need hardly be reminded that the rival to the Swedish dramatist s affections is Stanislaw P. in the guise of a pianist who plays with overwhelming power and pathos the F sharp minor polonaise of Chopin. That is the way the super-subtle Pole courted one of Strindberg s lady-loves; it may have been a matrimo nial rib, but that is a mere detail. Stanislaw asserts in his brochure, Chopin and Nietzsche, that physicians do not busy them selves enough with history; if they did they would recognize that " decadence" has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but only a phase of development quite as important as normality; normality is stupidity, decadence is genius. Is there, he demands, a more notable case of the abnormal than the apostle of Protes tantism, Martin Luther ? We are all children of Satan, he cries. Those rare men who for the sake of their ideals sacrifice the lives and happi ness of thousands, such as Alexander or Napo leon there are more modern instances, if we cared to mention them; or those who dispel the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths of sin be cause sin has depth Poe, Baudelaire, Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin, Schu mann, Nietzsche of such material is genius compounded. Satan is the first philosopher, the first Anarchist, and pain is the foundation of all IS VARIATIONS art and, with Satan, the father of illusions. I quote these luminous reflections to prove howeasy it is to twist a theory so as to suit one s ownpoint of view. The decadence theory is non sense. I may only refer you to Havelock ElhYsmasterly volume of critical essays, entitled Af firmations, for a concise refutation of the heresy; and equally fallacious is the contention of the Polish writer that the normal always spells stupidity. The reverse is often the case. Cole ridge, you may remember, disputed, in his Biographia Literaria, that antique sarcasm of Horace, the " genus irritabile vatum." Hewrote: "The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appeared to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves." Coleridge gives ex amples to uphold this belief. Taine has written in his history of English literature of the sane genius among such old chaps as Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Goethe, all of whomperformed prodigies of labor. No neurasthenia hampered their literary invention. Yet Shake speare created Hamlet, the incarnation of a dis ordered will and a poetic soul astray. Schopenhauer has adequately dealt with the theme and with more conviction-breeding results than many of the later explorers in this field, at his time a field outside of the biological labora tory. He finds that "talent is versatile and be trays more acuteness of discursive than intuitive 16 HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS knowledge." The genius beholds another world because he has a profounder conception of the world which lies before us all, inasmuch as it presents itself with more objectivity and dis tinctness than it does to less favored mortals. Myriad-minded Goethe summed up the question in a memorable phrase. "Genius is incommen surable/ 7 he told Eckermann when discussing Faust. Mozart confessed that music came to him without his volition. So-called secondary selves exist in the subliminal mind, and in certain circumstances may usurp the reign of the pri mary self for varying periods of time, just as a saint and sinner may inhabit one soul. The old theologians spoke of guardian angels and angels of evil. Some see God in an ecstatic vision and others peer into the fiery pit of hell with morose delectation. Don t worry about this moral dichotomy. It s only your various selves at war. When the dissociation becomes a half- dozen split-up personalities struggling for mas tery then it is time to consult a psychiatrist. That way lies the madhouse. But we are all of us the victims of our cells. A genius is a superman a man, according to Dr. Jacobson (see his Possible Clues to the Nature of Genius), plus a secondary personal ity, his genius not residing in the primary self but in his secondary personality. In the one case we have the spiritualistic medium low mentality, irresponsible secondary personality; in the other case we have genius high men17 VARIATIONS tality, super-rational secondary personality. It might be well to remember this fact just nowwhen a wave of debasing superstition is rising everywhere, of which the mildest symptom is the Ouija-board and other clotted nonsense; the gravest symptoms, devil-worship and alleged communication with spirits; after all cataclysmic events, war, pestilence, earthquake, the pro longed nerve-tension causes "new" religions, witchcraft, healers, and prophets of evil to flourish like toadstools in a damp, dank cellar. Mock-turtle mysticism and ineffable silliness. It is not the denial of such so-called "phenom ena" that concerns us, for there are numberless unexplained mysteries in nature; all occult re search is not hocus-pocus; but it is the inter pretation, divine or diabolic, of these happenings to which sensible thinkers object. Bateson, quoted by Dr. Jacobson, "conceives of evolution and life as an unpacking of an original complex." Here we are knocking at the transcendental gates of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. Life is an un coiling. Humanity is a watch-spring of the in finite. Our existence is the progress of a spiri tual tapeworm. Death is the grand vermifuge. Nevertheless, genius is a shy bird. Spear him and put him under the microscope. But first catch your fish. And that is always difficult. Man has chartered the globe, but, probably byreason of an almost ineradicable superstitious timidity, has left the human soul an undis covered country, or, at least, but partially ex- 18 HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS plored. Genius, whether manifesting its power in the arts or in the sciences, is the worthiest theme for the philosopher; not reactionary meta physicians like Bergson, weavers of verbal dreams, spinners of futile cobweb systems; but the biologist, psychiatrist, the practical scientist, for whom the visible as well as the invisible worlds exist. "I breathe, therefore I live," said, in effect, William James. (Essays in Radical Empiricism.) The mind of man has ever been a house divided in itself. Yet it is a consolation to know that our several subliminal personalities may be the cause of our conflicting thoughts. (The late Prof. Muensterburg declared that such a thing as subconsciousness did not exist.) In Faust we read of two spirits that abide in our breast, also the spirit that denied. Mephisto then may be only our second personality. How ever, we haven t answered the question posed at the beginning of this Sunday morning ramble through the tangled forest of minor speculation -how not to be a genius. The answer is as easy as lying never work ! THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGEMOORE I HAD intended writing of the tragic Chopin to-day, but George Moore supervened; he and Atlantic City an odd combination. Mancannot live in music alone, and when Maurice Speiser met me on the boardwalk and lent mehis copy of Avowals (numbered eighty and privately printed for subscribers), I shooed Chopin to the backyard of my consciousness and proceeded to reread Mr. Moore. I say reread because much of the subject-matter in this new, bulky volume saw the light of pub lication years ago in various English and at least one American periodical: Lippincotts , the Fortnightly, et al. Still, it is, all of it, worth while, notwithstanding the fact the old nurse of the County Mayo author wouldn t have blushed at a line therein. Why the book was published as "wicked" by implication is difficult to discover. It should be given to the world at large, after several minor excisions. The one gay anecdote is related in France, and it is so mildly diverting that it will bear repeating here. An eccentric nobleman adorns himself with peacock s feathers for the edification of his pea hens ! Yet people subscribe for the pleasure of such innocent foolery. By all means, let us 20 RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE have Avowals naked and unashamed. Only good Moorovians will endure its leagues of technical literary criticism. The Story Teller s Holiday of last year was another kind of a book. Rather blistering than elevating. But amusing always. There was a time when Mr. Moore was con tent to be called the Irish Flaubert; nowadays he is evidently after the title of the Celtic Casa nova, though hardly in these new avowals. They will never rank in interest with Memoirs of My Dead Life; or, indeed, with his Hail and Farewell Trilogy. For one thing, printed dialogue makes slow reading, even when the prose is the incomparable prose of Walter Savage Landor. The opening chapters are devoted to discussions, purely academic, between Edmund Gosse and George Moore. English prose nar rative is the weakest part of English literature -a paradoxical contention. Mr. Gosse puts up a good fight, but is pulverized by his op ponent, who leaves him gasping on a balcony wrapped in a shawl, feebly expostulating. The Moore dialectic is fairly familiar to his admirers. It is one-third lack of logic and two-thirds per suasion and browbeating. Need I add that the persuasiveness is not wholly divested of a cer tain veiled Donnybrookishness ? Mr. Moore goes for the hated Sassenach, and only those Englishmen who seem to resemble him are treated with consideration; the Rev. Laurence Sterne, whose wheedling prose style is admir21 VARIATIONS ably wedded to his prurient themes ("Are youJewish or ticklish?" he was asked by a critic long ago), is praiseworthy in the eyes of ourcritic. I should have preferred to pose as an adver sary to Mr. Moore the redoubtable Prof. GeorgeSaintsbury, who with a Sam Johnson bluffness would have smashed the Irishman s argumentsat the very first throw out of the box. No doubtabout that. Mr. Moore admits the genius of Landor, Pater, Lamb, De Quincey, in the essay form ; but it is fiction narrative he centres upon,and despite De Foe, Fielding, Jane Austen, not to speak of Dickens, Thackeray and Meredith, he finds no good has come forth from that Brit ish Nazareth. Of the exquisite prose patterns which Cardinal Newman has woven for us hespeaks no word; elsewhere, years past, he hasexpressed his dislike of Newman s flowing style; the "style coulant" abhorred of Charles Baudelaire, especially when it issued from the pen of George Sand. Yet Mr. Moore s Keltic prose (spell it with a K, Samivel !) is like Newmans in so far as both are subtle, sensitive, and rip pling; both avoid dynamic contrasts, both per suade rather than assault. And there is a suspicion of the serpentine in the writings of both men. The spiral prose of The Brook Kerith is a case in point. Can t you see that minotaurof English literary criticism or should I say Torquemada? George Saintsbury frowning and thundering on Mr. Moore, and quoting 22 RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE from his History of English Prose-Rhythms ! A battle of the bookmen, indeed. The recantations of George Moore become increasingly numerous with the passage of the years. I had expected the inclusion in Avowals of his top-notch in criticism, not dealing with the plastic arts naturally his stronghold a criticism that appeared about twenty years ago in Cosmopolis, an international magazine edited, if I remember aright, by Lady Randolph Churchill. Far finer than his study of Zola is this study of Flaubert s Sentimental Education, entitled A Tragic Novel, the tragedy of drab, commonplace living, not that of high heroics or tragic and romantic gestures. But Mr. Moore violently repudiates his Flaubert worship and explains why he doesn t reprint the splendid pages of that particular criticism. Flaubert, it seems, is not a novelist, only a satirist he says something of the same sort earlier con cerning George Meredith and he places him far below Balzac as a creator of character, be low Turgenieff as a teller of tales; he even de cries his style the sanity, simplicity, which, allied to its sonorous harmonies, is one of the most fascinating in French literature. I fancy Mr. Moore suffered from the revulsion which often attacks critical pioneers; as soon as the public, wooed or banged into submission by the critic, begins to admire them the critic moves on; his object accomplished, newer idols must be sought, fresher victories achieved; the old 23 VARIATIONS idol is again become a block of wood. Mr.Saintsbury fought for Baudelaire and Flaubertbefore George Moore; nevertheless, Mr. Moorewas the first English-writing novelist whoadopted Flaubert s methods; recall UntilledFields and Evelyn Inness the manner, of course, not the matter. And there is Swinburne, who after extravagantly praising WaltWhitman violently repudiated the Camden"bard," later inventing the word " Whitmaniac" to signify his contempt for Walt s comical yawping. In humbler fashion I may give as anexample of this critical dog-in-the-manger atti tude my own case. In 1877 I went as a lad tovisit Walt across the Delaware River from myhome, and from him received the kiss of peaceand went away with the glowing brow of theneophyte. I became an ardent Whitmaniacin my teens, and for two decades or more I wroteof W. W. as if he were really a great poet. Ican t read him now, nor can I read the effusionsof his followers. He has been a disruptive force, still is one; to imitate his "poetry" is so easythat an entire new school of lads and lassies are murdering English prosody and filling theurn with their lascivious caterwaulings. Waltis to blame. He did it first in his Children ofAdam. Flaubert is not the only writer from whomMr. Moore has seceded. Being a peculiarlysusceptible Celt, he is always changing his opinions, which is a legitimate function of the24 RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE male as well as the female intellect. At one epoch Dublin never knew when beginning a fresh day whether her favorite son was a Cath olic or a Protestant. It was like a barometrical puzzle. He recanted his Catholicism de canted might be a better word and he changed his mind every morning about his best friend, the poet, William Yeats. The New Irish movement was to be George Moore or it was to be nothing. Finally John Millington Synge ap peared, and the movement, luckily enough, be came Synge. Being dead, this master is spared from the scarifications to which Moore subjected Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady Gregory. Ireland is no longer Erin go bragh ! and the Lord knows what he thinks of Sinn Fein. In fact, since Ireland did not appreciate the genius of George Moore, he abandons Ireland as he abandoned England during the Boer Rebellion. We hear no more of Douglas Hyde or the revival of Erse says the Shan Van Vocht ! He sharply criticised Jane Austen and women writers generally in articles published in the North American Review, but in Avowals Jane is given her just dues, which is well. George Eliot and the Brontes he won t have. He rightfully rates Tolstoy and his absence of true spirituality. The great Russian writer is not a prober of the human soul, despite the accepted belief to the contrary; that is, he doesn t deeply probe. His rendering of reality borders on hallucination. Simply prodigious is his mastery of realism. 25 VARIATIONS Yet Dostoievsky is the profounder man of thepen. He lived and suffered the life that Tolstoyonly wrote about but never experienced. Hisnovels, tedious, explosive, tumultuous, may bethe " psychological mole-runs" of TurgeniefTsdictum; nevertheless they are aglow with vital ity, palpitating with pity for the downtroddenand humiliated, and pullulating with humanity.Dostoievsky, an essentially morbid man, as wasNietzsche, by reason of this very deviation fromnormality, was enabled to sink his plummetinto the darkest recesses of the soul. His self- cruelty had a sadistic tinge. But he is the realpsychologist, not Tolstoy. Deploring Tolstoy s dodging of psychological issues for his religionwas of the old intolerant order and he was suf fering from an excess of moralic acid in theblood, which finally killed his art Mr. Mooreyet refuses to give Dostoievsky a truly exaltedposition. He better likes Turgenieff, nor needwe quarrel with him on this score. Turgenieflrepresents the almost perfect artist, blithe, Greek, charming, while his rival, a Prometheusof the inkpot, groans in travail as he showsus his wounded soul. In the Confessions of aYoung Man the author speaks of Dostoievskyas " Gaboriau with psychological sauce." Whenhe wrote an introduction to a translation ofPoor Folk he had evidently seen a great light. But in Avowals he is back in the Gaboriautrenches. A more definite recantation is his present26 RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE view of Tolstoy. The first avowals, in periodical form, saw him a worshipper at the shrine. I well remember his essay, Since the Elizabethans, and its contemptuous comparison of Tolstoy and Thackeray. English fiction, he said, in effect, never dives below the surface; it is an affair of decoration, never of depth. Well and good. Tolstoy, like Balzac, has no counterpart in Eng lish literature, Mr. Moore says, and maintains his argument with admirable examples. Musi cal analogies are employed. Verdi or Donizetti, never the passionately profound harmonies of Wagner, are overheard in English fiction. With a sense of relief I find that Mr. Moore is still faithful to Walter Pater. The best pages in the volume are those in which he describes the art and personality of the shy, complex author of Marius. It may be remembered, his eulogy of Marius in the early confessions. From this faith he has never swerved. Of Henry James he was not an admirer. He seems not to have gone further than The Portrait of a Lady. He en countered Mr. James at the home of the Robin son girls, Mary and Mabel. Here is a portrait of our famous countryman: "And these thoughts drew my eyes to the round head, already going bald, to the small, dark eyes, closely set, and to the great expanse of closely shaven face. His legs were short, and his hands and feet large, and he sat portentously in his chair, speaking with some hesitation and great care, anxious that every sentence, or if not all, at least every 27 VARIATIONS third or fourth, should send forth a beam ofhumor." Apart from the fact that the eyes ofHenry James were not small, but large andheavy lidded, eyes in which were pictured anentire social world, his description is not withouta certain malicious verisimilitude. The two menwere, naturally enough, antipathetic to eachother. Mr. James failed to recognize the great ness of Esther Waters, and Mr. Moore hatedhumor. He objurgates humor in a writer. Yethe is, consciously or unconsciously, humorous.And what a bon mot was his summing up ofBernard Shaw as being only the " funny manina boarding house." Perhaps. But at the timethat boarding house comprised Europe andAmerica. Moore and Whistler were always clawing andscratching. Both feline, both tenors, and pos sessing the tenor temperament, how could theybe expected to sing in amiable ensemble?Moore relates that James the Butterfly pre sented him with a copy of his Ten o Clock,inscribed: "To George Moore for furtive reading," which is the epitome of irony. ButGeorge never began to repeat the epigramsof "Jemmy," as did Jemmy those of OscarWilde. Whistler, according to friends whoknew, would sit up half the night manufacturingwitticisms. It was to himself, not to Oscar,that he should have applied the remark: "But you will, Oscar, you will." The Irishman wasas spontaneous in his wit as the American con-28 RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE stipated. However, " furtive reading" is dis tinctly good. George Moore paid off his score in his Modern Painting when he wrote of Whis tler that if he had been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted as well as Velasquez. And weight and substance are precisely the qualities lacking in the Whistlerian canvases, which are becoming more attenuated, more ghostly as the years wear on. If it were not for the etchings the next generation would have cause for won derment over the exaggerated praise bestowed upon a painter whose originality principally de rives from his Paris friend, Fantin-Latour, and from the Japanese. But Avowals is good fun. It should be placed on the general market. It s too decent to be locked away in the "enfer" of a bibliophile. Apropos of nothing, did you hear George Moore on the League of Nations? He is convinced enough on that score to exclaim: "There s only one way of bringing about the League. Leave off talking about the President and hang the Kaiser." 29 CRUSHED VIOLETS " GOOD GOD ! I forgot the violets ! " exclaimedWalter Savage Landor, after he had thrown his cook out of the window. This happened atFiesole, near Florence, and within one year of acentury ago. The great prose master had arather excitable temperament, as Charles Dickens has testified. (The novelist put him in Bleak House as Boythorn "with the geniusand much else left out/ as Havelock Ellis says.) Landor dearly loved his flowers, and in his dis may he gave birth to a classic phrase. Nowadays we would gladly put a chef on the throne,so debased has become the world s cuisine. ButLandor was an aristocrat masquerading as afierce democrat and his gesture was a typical one, and in the gentlemanly interest; we mightsay a gentleman s prerogative, one that has gonequite out of fashion. I am minded of his despairing cry when I think of Walter Pater. A member of the deli cious Hermione s family, indelibly recorded byDon Marquis, asked me once upon a time if theprose of Pater didn t remind me of crushed vio lets. I related then and there the adventure of Landor s cook and the flowerbed. Her answerthrew much light on her mentality: "I wonderwhat the cook said?" she asked. But Pater30 CRUSHED VIOLETS prose and crushed violets ! For the life of me I can t bridge this gulf of the dissimilar. Some of Whistler is an indigestion of strawberries and cream; but Pater and violets! Walter Pater wasn t as " precious," as insipid, as his imitators. On a certain occasion Matthew Arnold ad vised Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. It is true Pater is dangerous for students. This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Sir Walter Ra leigh s monograph the best we know of; Rob ert Louis Stevenson s essay on the technical ele ments of style is too technical, valuable as it is has been worn threadbare from Aristotle to Renton and his Logic of Style. Pater produced slowly he wrote five books in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two every year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The chief accusation brought against the Pater method of working and his consequent style is its lack of spontaneity; it is not a natural style. But a "natural style," so called, is not encoun tered in its full flowering more than a half dozen times during the course of a century; perhaps that figure is an exaggeration. The French write all but flawless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France we must go to Ruskin, Newman, and Pater. When we say, "Let us write simple, straightforward English," we are setting a standard that has been reached only by Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and how few VARIATIONS others? There are as many victims of the" natural English" formula as there are of the" artificial" formula of Pater and Stevenson.The first-named write careless, flabby, colorless, undistinguished, lean commercial English, andpass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliche is lord of the para graph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of affected "fine writing," are more easily de tected and denounced by purists, pedants, andother sultry professorial persons. A master,Renan, disliked the teaching of "style" per se - as if the secret could be imparted yet hetoiled over his manuscripts. We recall theFlaubert case. With Pater one should not rushto the conclusion, because he produced slowly, that he was of an artificiality all compact. Forhim prose was a fine art. He could no morehave used a phrase coined by another than hecould have worn the other man s hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his themes the grave and lovely phrases we so envy and admire. Prose "cette ancienne et tres jalouse chose," as it was described by Stephane Mallarme for Pater was at once a pattern and a cadence, apicture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid"poetic-prose," the stillness of his style at mospheric, languorous, sounding sweet under tones is always in the true rhythm of prose. Speed is absent. The tempo is usually lenten. Brilliancy is not pursued; there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp. The sentences uncoil 32 CRUSHED VIOLETS their many-colored lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal imagery, and melodic evoca tion; there is clause within clause that occasion ally confuse; for compensation we are given har monies newly orchestrated, as salient, as mor dant, and as subtly rare as chords in the music of Brahms or Debussy. Sane prose it always is; but seldom simple. It is extremely personal, and while it may not make music for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it garbs. Read Ruskin aloud and then apply the same vocal test to Pater, and the magnificent harmonies of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will make your ear captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, and with modulations more enchanting. Never ora torical, in eloquence slightly muffled, the last manner of Pater hinted at newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, quoting his own words concerning another theme: "It is beauty wrought from within, ... the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions." The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impas sioned, Sir Thomas Browne s richer and full of flashing conceits; there are deeper organ tones in De Quincey, and Ruskin excels in effects, rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is more sinuous, subtle, more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it is, sometimes, and its rich polyphony palls if one is not in the mood, and in greater measure 33 VARIATIONS than the prose of classic masters, for the worldis older and Pater was often weary of life. Butsuggestions of morbidity may be found in everywriter from Plato to Dante, from Dante toShakespeare and Goethe. It is but the faintspice of mortality which lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures. Beautiful artis always challenged as corrupting. There maybe a grain of truth in the accusation. Man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art was invented byhim to console, to disquiet, to arouse. Art maybe a dangerous adventure and also an anodyne,like religion. And unhappily we are losing ourtaste for adventuring amidst dangerous ideas.Once deprived of moral self-determination, ofthe right of private judgment, man soon relapsesinto a vegetable existence. Whenever a newpoet or philosopher appears he is straightwayaccused of tampering with the moral currency.This is only mediocrity s mode of adjusting toomarked mental disproportions. Difference engenders hatred. In this period, when art andliterature are violently despised and persecuted,do not let us be frightened by the word " wicked. " For my part, as an old practitioner in lit erary and artistic poisons, I have never encountered a book or a picture or a sonata that wasso immoral as to kill at twenty paces. So let uscheer up, read Pater, Baudelaire, and the Biblefrom which they derive and blench notbefore the dissonantal batteries of the NeoScythian composers. 34 CRUSHED VIOLETS There is another Pater, one far removed from the weaver of colored silken phrases. If he re calls the richness of Keats in the texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Spencer. There are essays of his as cold, as logically adamant, and as tortuous as sentences in the Synthetic Philosophy. Luckily his tendency to abstract reasoning was subdued by the hu manism of his temper. There are not many "purple panels" in his prose; "purple" in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no "fringes of the north star" style. He never wrote in sheer display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern writing he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Words worth, Winckelmann, not to mention those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, Botticelli, Joachim du Bellay. Even the newly gathered minor essays, slight as they are in theme and treatment, reveal the master. Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work, often the artist for art s sake, he may never trouble the main cur rents of literature ; but he will always be a writer for writers, a critic for critics. Little books may have their destiny. Pater was a thinker whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the com poser of a polyphonic prose-music which echoes a harmonious adagio heard within the spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the multi-colored windows of which filters alien daylight. It was 35 VARIATIONS a favorite contention of his that all the artsaspire toward the condition of music. This ideais the keynote of Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius the Epicurean,carried, his life long, "in his bosom across acrowded public place his own soul." Andyet ! BAUDELAIRE S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER WHEN a well-known man dies in England they ask: What did he do? In France: How did he do it? In the United States: How much did he leave? But the Socialist in every land says: He didn t do it! The poetic production of Charles Baudelaire, if put to the same test questions, might easily be conceived as evoking even more variety of responses. Baudelaire has said that nations produce great men against their will. While his position in the poetic firmament of France is that of a star of the first magnitude, there are, nevertheless, dissi dents, especially among foreign critics, who either cannot or will not admit what is become a truism in French criticism. And the critical literature concerning the poet grows apace. His letters to his mother, recently published, make a volume admirably calculated to illumi nate the character of the man. It contains a preface and notes by Jacques Crepet, who, it may be remembered, assisted his father, Eu gene Crepet, in the biographical study of Baude laire, a definitive study, one is tempted to add, for it dissipated a lot of legends (most of them fabricated by the poet himself) and put his house of life into some sort of order. Above 37 VARIATIONS all, it cleared up the rather murky atmosphereof his relations with Jeanne Duval, his BlackVenus, who was in reality a young woman withhardly a moiety of African blood in her veins. But she served as a peg for the poet upon whichto hang some of his most acrid and lovely verse, therefore she must pass muster in any estimateof his disquieting genius. Withal, the exegetical literature is not large. George Saintsbury introduced him to Englishreaders, although Algernon Charles Swinburnehad in practice, if not by precept, brought his " poisonous honey from France" Tennyson s phrase. The Letters (1841-66) were publishedin 1907 by the Mercure de France, which also fathered a bulky volume devoted to the posthumous works (1908). La Plume had in 1893republished from the Belgian edition the condemned pieces from Les Fleurs du Mai, with anextraordinary frontispiece by the Belgian etcher, Armand Rassenfosse. There are some poeticnumbers in this rare plaque eagerly sought for by lovers of exotic literature yet the majorityof the pieces must be read book in one hand, theother hand tightly closing the nostrils. Thesesuppressed poems are not the best Baudelairia.Feli Gautier s illustrated pamphlet (Editions dela Plume) is the most succinct account of thepoet. There is also a handy little volume byAlphonse Seche and Jules Bertaut, garneredfrom various sources, yet of critical merit. Andin 1917, during the heat of conflict, Guillaume BAUDELAIRE S LETTERS Apollinaire prefaced the definitive text of the poems and said some pertinent things of Baude laire. He calls the poet the literary son of Choderlos de Laclos and Edgar Poe a shuddering combination, indeed. The previous collection of Letters are of more general interest, for they are addressed to his most distinguished contemporaries painters, poets, musicians his friend Richard Wagner among the rest men of letters and aristocratic ladies. But in the Letters to his mother, Mme. Aupick, the atmosphere is more dramatic, more intense. A duel is fought from his school days to the year previous to his death; the duel of a man, half crazed with alcohol and drugs, and a mother who failed to understand the queer duck ling of genius she had hatched out in her first marriage. Demands for money fill the ma jority of these epistles. Pleas for his poetic work also loom largely, but poverty is the lead ing motive throughout. We catch more than a profile portrait of the mother; it is not always winning or " motherly. 7 How could it be with such a son? A half-Hamlet, he was jealous of his mother s second husband. It was one of the determining causes in his morbid growth. How has his case so long escaped the psychiatrists of the psychoanalytic school? Albert Mordell, in his Erotic Element in Literature, could have found him a better subject than Stendhal for the (Edipus-complex. Notwithstanding his Flowers of Evil, his diabolic and dandical poses, Baude39 VARIATIONS laire was not a wicked-hearted man. Weakhewas rather than depraved. And too curious ofcertain matters. He did explore the subcellarsof the soul, dive into cesspools, and expose putridsores. A scavenger poet, nevertheless a greatpoet, the greatest since Hugo. To-day his successor to the purple is Gabriele d Annunzio. There was decay in Baudelaire s bones, anecrosis of the moral nature, yet no more ferventbeliever among latter-day poets in God and hisMother has penned their praises, except Verlaine. He did lay too much stress on his admiration for Satan, an admiration well-nighManichean, but he argued rightly when he saidthat one can t believe in the Almighty and notbelieve in the Adversary. Theologically speaking, this is an inexpugnable position; in realitythe world-experiences of the last five years haveuprooted a belief that Satan is bound and sealedin some hellish solitude. Roaming about andseeking whom he may devour, would be the consensus of opinion among pious folk. Baudelairebelieved in the devil because he had a personaldevil. Hence his Litanies to Satan, later imitated by Giosue Carducci in his Hymn to Satan." Salute, O Satana, O ribellione, O forza vindice,Delia ragione !" But in his Litanies the Frenchpoet is more explicit; his refrain is "O Satan,prends pitie de ma longue misere!" And thisfrom the poet of De profundis clamavi and thehymn, in Latin, to Saint Francis (Franciscomeas Laudes) ! 40 BAUDELAIRE S LETTERS A third person has a share in the new Letters, M. Ancelle, the advocate and guardian of the errant Charles. Alternately cajoling and bully ing, the letters addressed him by his charge reveal a curious mentality. The father of Bau delaire bequeathed his son about seventy-five thousand francs, soon dissipated by the in cipient dandy on pictures, furniture, jewelry, bibelots, clothes, and light o loves; yet he seemed to think that his guardian was robbing him, that his mother hated him. In the mists and ecstasies of his wild life he saw nothing clearly except his shining visions, and being of an obstinate nature, he pinned these visions to paper. The history of art can show few more laborious workmen than Baudelaire; his was the technical heroism of which Henry James speaks. Despite his drugs and drinks, he never ceased working, the work of an intellectual galley-slave. He filed his poems. He wrote criticism Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Rich ard Wagner are specimens of his critical clair- voyancy read his Salons and his splendid tribute to the genius of Wagner in his Music of the Future. Luck seemed against him. Like Balzac, he was forever in debt. His mother came to the rescue; his friends were worn out helping him across perilous pecuniary quag mires. Then he fled to Belgium, a country he loathed, and celebrated that loathing in dis tasteful verse, there to be stricken with general paralysis, and later to be brought back to Paris, VARIATIONS to die cared for by the mother he believed inimical to him. The mystery is that he didn t succumb earlier in his life to the perpetual assaultson his health. When his mother married the father of thepoet, Joseph Francis Baudelaire or Beaudelaire she was twenty-seven, her husbandsixty-two. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son, Claude, who, like his half-brother, Charles, died of paralysis. After thedeath of the father the widow married withina year the handsome, ambitious Aupick, thenChef de Bataillon, Lieutenant-Colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honor, later Generaland Ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople,and London. Charles was a frail, nervous youth,but, unlike most children of genius, he was anexcellent scholar and won brilliant prizes atcollege. In this d Annunzio resembled him.His stepfather was proud of him. From theRoyal College at Lyons Charles went to theLycee Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelledin 1839. (He was born in 1821, also the birthyear of Flaubert.) Troubles soon began athome. He disdained his mother and quarrelledwith General Aupick. She has confessed thatshe was partially to blame; in the flush of hersecond love she had forgotten her boy. Hecould not forget nor forgive what he called herinfidelity to the memory of his father. Hamletlike, he was inconsolable. The worthy Bishopof Montpelier, an old family friend, said that42 BAUDELAIRE S LETTERS Charles was a little crazy; that second mar riages usually bring woe in their train. The young poet contented himself with muttering: "When a mother has such a son she doesn t re marry." The reverse was probably the truth. He wrote in his journal: "My ancestors idiots or maniacs ... all victims of terrible passions " ; which was another of his exaggerations. His father was a student, a practical man, a steadygoing bourgeois. On the paternal side the grandfather of Charles was a Champenois peas ant; his mother s people presumably were of Normandy, though little is known of her fore bears. Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken with paralysis, as well he might. Like many others, Baudelaire was a victim to a malady the origins of which were little known in his day. He also believed that his own instability of temperament was the result of the disparity of years in his parents. In the heyday of his blood he was perverse. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that ennui can be best cured by evil ways; sin, Baudelaire found the saddest of diversions. Despite Theophile Gautier s stories about the hashish club, Catulle Mendes denies that the poet was addicted to the hemp habit. What the majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary workers is this prime fact: that men who toil writing poetry and there is no mental toil comparable to it, not even the higher mathematics cannot 43 VARIATIONS indulge in drink or opium without speedy col lapse. The old-fashioned ideas of " inspiration," spontaneity, easy improvisation, of the suddenbolt from heaven, are delusions still hugged bythe world. To be told that Chopin filed at his music for years, that in his smithy Beethovenforged his thunderbolts in the sweat of his sootybrows, that Manet slaved like a dock laborer, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotionto work, may be a disillusion for the sentimental. Yet such is the case. Minerva springingfull-fledged from Jupiter s skull is a pretty fancy,but Balzac and Flaubert did not encourage thatfancy. Work literally killed them, as it killed Poe and Jules de Goncourt. Maupassant wentinsane because he would work and he wouldplay the same day. Baudelaire worked andworried. His debts haunted him. His consti tution was undoubtedly flawed, but that his life was one prolonged debauch is a nightmareof the moral police in some white cotton night cap country. These letters to his mother arethe most human of documents and they provethe contrary. Charles Baudelaire is the sad dest and the profoundest poet in modern litera ture. Speaking of Nietzsche, I am reminded of the study by William M. Salter, Nietzsche theThinker, which happened to be published hereat an inopportune time (1917). It is the mostsatisfactory exposition of the ideas of the great44 BAUDELAIRE S LETTERS poet-philosopher, who, even if he did not create an inclosed system, has given birth to original and suggestive ideas. Mr. Salter has, of course, exploded the erroneous notion that Nietzsche was persona grata with the Prussians. A letter in my possession, though not addressed to me alas ! I have but one written to me be gins thus: "Woe to the victors, for they shall be vanquished!" A veritable prophecy. This was dated 1875, and alluded to the FrancoPrussian War, the consequences of which sor rowed the soul of Nietzsche. The Salter book is testimony to American scholarship; cogent, bold, brilliant, and conclusive. 45 THE TWO TEMPTATIONS THE two Temptations! Sounds melodramatic, doesn t it? But it only refers to thevarious versions of a great book. All goodFlaubertians will rejoice to learn that the earlierdraft of Flaubert s Temptation of St. Antony,has been given a fitting English garb. Thistranslation is made from the 1849 and I ^56manuscripts, edited by Louis Bertrand, and is by Rene Francis. The preface is by Sir GastonMaspero, distinguished archaeologist, and thereis also a prefatory note by Louis Bertrand.This version must not be confounded with thedefinitive one of 1874, Englished in superlativefashion by Lafcadio Hearn and published herein 1910. The new and bulky volume, admirably printed and copiously illustrated, is aliterary curiosity without which no Flaubert col lection would be complete. To be sure, Flaubert translated is Flaubert traduced, for asArthur Symons has written, Flaubert is difficult to translate because he has no fixed rhythm. "His prose keeps step with no regular marchmusic. He invents the rhythm of every sentence ; he changes his cadence with every moodor for the convenience of every fact. He hasno theory of beauty in form apart from what THE TWO TEMPTATIONS it expresses. For him form is a living tiling, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and interprets. Compare the style," continues Mr. Symons, "of Flaubert in his books and you will find that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its subject-matter. In Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, the cadence is always the same; the most exquisite word painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm without difficulty into Eng lish. Once you have mastered the tune you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same." Not so with Flaubert. His is truly polyphonic prose a phrase, by the way, that Amy Lowell uses to describe an amorphous form of prose and poetry. When I invented the com bination years ago I meant only prose, what George Saintsbury would call "numerous prose." See his valuable critical History of English Prose Rhythm. While on a visit in 1845, Flaubert visited Genoa. There, in the Palace Balbi-Senarega - not at the Doria, as Maxime du Camp wrote with his accustomed carelessness the French writer saw an old picture by Breughel (probably Pieter the younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that represents a Temptation of St. Antony. It is dingy in color and far from a masterpiece. But Flaubert, who loved the grotesque, pro cured an engraving of this picture, and it hung till the day of his death in his study at Croisset, near Rouen. I have seen it, as it still hangs in 47 VARIATIONS the Flaubert Museum there. This picture wasthe spring-board for his two Temptations.Their germ may be found in his mystery play,Smarh, with its demon and its metaphysicalcoloring. But Breughel surely set into motionthe mental machinery of the Temptation, whichnever stopped whirring till 1874. The first draft of the Temptation was begunMay 24, 1848, and finished September 12, 1849.The manuscript numbered five hundred andforty pages. Set aside for Madame Bovary,this draft was again taken up and the secondversion was made in 1856; when finished themanuscript was reduced to one hundred andninety-three pages. Not satisfied, Flaubertreturned to the work in 1872, and when readyfor publication in 1874 the number of pageswas one hundred and thirty-six; even then hecut out from ten chapters, three. When a fewyears later the 1856 version was given to theworld French critics were astonished to find it so different from the definitive version of 1874. The critical taste of Flaubert was vindicated.His was true technical heroism. Reading in 1849 the earliest version to his friends Bouilhetand Du Camp he had been bidden to burn thestuff; instead he boiled it down into the 1856version. To his dearest friend, Ivan Turgenieff,he submitted his 1872 draft. Thus it came thatthe wonderfully colored psychic and philosophicpanorama, this Gulliver-like excursion roundand about the master-ideas and religions of the48 THE TWO TEMPTATIONS antique and early Christian worlds was at last published. All the youthful Flaubert, the "spouter" of blazing phrases, the lover of jewelled words, of picturesque and monstrous ideas and situations is in the first turbulent version of the Tempta tion; in the definitive version he is more critical, historical. As his emotions cooled with the years, Flaubert had grown intellectually. The first Temptation is romantic, religious; the 1874 is better composed and sceptical. Ar ranged more dramatically than the first, the author s leanings toward Oriental mysticism and the dominating ideas of the classic world are better revealed in the last version. The psychological gradations of character are more clearly indicated in this version. We cannot agree with Louis Bertrand, editor of the 1856 version, that it is superior to the version of 1874. It seems more novel, that s all. Flaubert was never so much the surgeon as when he operated upon this manuscript. He often hesitated, he always suffered, but he never flinched when his mind was fully resolved. It is for the student a subject of enthralling interest to follow the slow growth of these various versions. " Since Goethe," would be a suggestive title for an essay on the various epics written since his death. The list would not be large. In France there are only the barren rhetorical exercises of Edgar Quinet s Ahasuerus, the insurrec tionary poems of Hugo and the frigidly faultless 49 VARIATIONS verse of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of suchprofound depth and heroic power as Faustthere is not, except the Temptation of St. Antony, which is impregnated by the Faustianspirit though in its development poles apartfrom the older poem that we are not surprised when we learn that the youthful Flaubertwas a passionate admirer of Goethe, even addressing to his memory a long poem in alexandrines. The Temptation is the only poemdespite its prose it is poetic that maybeclassed with Brand or Zarathushtra. At times,in its sweep of execution and grandeur of conception, it grazes certain episodes in Faust. But though it may excel in verbal beauty orin its imaginative presentation of the problemsof volition, it falls short of Goethe s ethicalvision. Faust is a man who wills. "In thebeginning was the act." Antony is static, notdynamic. Faust is tempted by Mephisto, yetdoes not lose his soul. Flaubert s hermit resistsSatan at his subtlest; withal, we do not feelthat his soul is as much worth the saving asFaust s. Man for man, Faust is the more significant; Antony is narrow-minded; indeed,almost besotted by superstition. He crystallizes,also symbolizes, a vanished period of mythology.Faust stands for the man of the present, andinthe second part of the poem the man of thefuture. Ideas are the heroes of Flaubert s epic,though St. Antony s is a metaphysical history,not a human one like Faust s. 50 THE TWO TEMPTATIONS But to Faust alone may the Temptation be compared. George Saintsbury has pronounced this masterpiece to be the most perfect example extant of dream literature. And precisely be cause of its precision in details, its astounding architectonic and its rich-hued waking hal lucinations. THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARYIT is a holy and a wholesome act to visit thegrave of a genius, for the memories there arousedmay serve as a consolation and an inspirationin our spiritually arid existence. I often thoughtof this at Rouen when I went there to visit thetomb of Gustave Flaubert, so happily describedby Francois Coppee as The Beethoven of FrenchProse. A quarter of a century ago I protestedin newspapers and books against the tardyofficial recognition accorded one of the greatprose masters of France which means theworld and one of the most marvellous amongnovelists. In the Solferino Gardens at Rouenthere is the marble memorial by the sculptorChapu, and on the heights of the MonumentalCemetery, in the Flaubert family plot Flaubert s father was a distinguished surgeon andnot far from the Joan of Arc monument, liethe remains of the author of Madame Bovary.His celebrated pupil, Guy de Maupassant, isalso remembered in the Solferino Gardens bya statue; another may be seen in the Pare Monceau. But at the time I began urging someform of a memorial to the master of mastersnothing had been done. Since then the government has made of the old Flaubert homeatCroisset, a half-hour from Rouen, down the52 THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY Seine, a worthy memorial. The house in which such masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Sa- lammbo, Sentimental Education, The Tempta tion of St. Antony, Bouvard and Pecuchet, and the Three Tales were created is now a Flaubert museum. Abbe Prevost is said to have written Manon Lescaut there. The old house still stands, though decaying. Flaubert s study is, however, in fair preservation. The paternal home, occupying a part of the little park, was a dismantled manufactory when last I saw the place. The faithful Colange, for twenty years servi tor in the Flaubert household, kept a cafe in the neighborhood, and was always ready to talk of his master, of Mme. Flaubert, the mother. In vain I tried to get a photograph of that lady. Colange would not sell it, would not even have it reproduced. I have seen the picture of Dr. Achille Flaubert, but I am mote interested in the mothers of men of genius, and I can recall no edition of the works containing the portrait of Mme. Flaubert. But I recall her features. A sweet, mild, intelligent face, betraying evidences of sorrow and resignation. The typical mother. Her son was a celibate, and, with the exception of Louise Colet, he never gave his mother any worriment over women. And it was that lady, whose portrait was recently exhibited at the Courbet retrospec tive exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum, who was the disturber, not Flaubert. There 53 VARIATIONS had been an affair, and understanding the honorable nature of the man, the wily humbug Louiseendeavored to make trouble. She wrote Mme.Flaubert, a deeply pious woman; she harried Gustave, who, like most literary psychologists and sounders of feminine souls, wasnaive in the practical conduct of his love-affairs. The epitaph of Louise Colet was composed by Maxime Ducamp: "Here lies thewoman who compromised Victor Cousin, madeAlfred de Musset ridiculous, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr; requiescat in pace." A mean, spiteful masculine witticism this,though well deserved. Of Ducamp a likeepitaph might be fabricated: Hie jacet theman who slandered Baudelaire, traduced hisloving friend Gustave Flaubert, and who wascritically snuffed out of existence by GuydeMaupassant. I have preserved a card sent to me by Mme.Franklin Grout, dated from Villa Tanit, Antibes, in which she expressed her gratitude forseveral things I wrote regarding the necessityof a Flaubert museum at Croisset; also for thetruth in the Ducamp matter. Mme. Groutwas the Caroline Commanville of the Flaubertcorrespondence, the beloved niece of the master, for whom he sacrificed his personal fortune,a considerable one for a man of letters fortyyears ago (about one million two hundredthousand francs). Her husband, M. Commanville, had suffered from reverses, and Flaubert,54 THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY the supposed egoist, cold-blooded, self-centred, an epicurean of literature, calmly deprived himself of his last franc and, nearly sixty years of age, went into harness. His noble act was accomplished without the flaring of trumpets. There were no publishers " blurbs" then; nowa days this transaction in hearts and bonds would be yawped to the thousand winds of publicity; luckily, the sensitive great man was spared that vulgar fate. After the death of her hus band, Caroline Commanville remarried; her second husband was the Dr. Grout who at tended Guy de Maupassant during his fatal illness at the famous Maison Blanche. Think of it ! I saw the great Flaubert in the flesh. I may quote Browning: "Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to you?" . . . Set me down as hopelessly romantic, as a cultivator of the cult of great artists in an age when there are only imitators or pigmies. It s born in me, this species of ar tistic snobbery. I can t help it. Every now and then some professorial rabbit pokes its pink snout from the academic hutch and passionately pipes, "Romance is the ruin of the world !" and retires on gliding paws. After his naughty proclamation I always take down from the shelf Alice in Wonderland and read with re newed delight the conversation of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. No romance in the world? Of that particular professorial rabbit Daisy Ashford might say: Render unto 55 VARIATIONS Caesar s wife the things that are suspicious!Even academic rabbits are romantic; else theirbreeding propensities have been enormouslyexaggerated. Flaubert is my romance. Above all, Flaubert was a musician, a musicalpoet. His ear was the final court of appeal,and to make sonorous cadences in a languagethat lacks the essential richness, the diapasonicundertow of the English, is just short of themiraculous. Until the time of Chateaubriandand Victor Hugo the French language was lessa liquid, plastic collocation of sounds thanaformal pattern, despite the clarity and precisionof the eighteenth century; one must go backtothe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forricher, more pregnant speech. Omnipresentwith Flaubert was the musician s idea of composing a masterpiece that should float becauseof its sheer style. Lyric verbal ecstasy quiteoverpowered him. He was born December21,1821. As Henry James has said, he is oneofthe glories of French literature. Doubtlessthere will be a fitting commemoration of hisone hundredth birth anniversary two yearshence, and I hope that America will be represented at Rouen on that occasion. ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES MY first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, though brief, will be ever memorable for me. I was not precisely "summoned" to Oyster Bay on Election Day early in November, 1915, though I gladly accepted Col. Roosevelt s in vitation in the light of a " royal command," and went over to Long Island in company with John Quinn, who had arranged the meeting, and Francis J. Heney, once public prosecutor in San Francisco. I had received several letters from the Colonel of Colonels, of which I recall two significant sentences. One ended: "What a trump John Quinn is!" The other begins: "I have just received your New Cosmopolis. My son Kermit, whose special delight is New York, would probably appreciate it more than I do, for I am a countryman rather than a man of the pavements." Now, I had always thought of Theodore Roosevelt as a "man of the pave ments," notwithstanding his delight in roughriding across Western prairies. Personally I found him the reverse of either : a scholarly man, fond of music and the fine arts he showed me a number of canvases by the late Marcius Sim mons, a young American painter, who had been greatly influenced by Turner. The colonel had an excellent library of Colonial literature, and 57 VARIATIONS was fond of digging out pregnant sentences forquotation in his speeches from early preachersand statesmen. He appeared to be interestedin my comparison between his prose style andthe prose style of President Woodrow Wilson:the one swift, concise, full of affirmations, striking sentences, and notable for its absence ofglitter. For the colonel reality was greater thanrhetoric; while the prose of Mr. Wilson is eminently professorial, preserving as it does a nicebalance of sound and sense; above all, "literary" prose, the prose of the study, never dynamic,seldom brilliant; prose "standardized," eighteenth-century, smooth, sinuous, flexible, andever-illuding prose. My distinguished host showed some of thetrophies he had acquired in Europe whenonthat historic grand tour; and, as I had not visitedhim in the guise of a professional interviewer,Idid not write at the time of what I saw; but nowI may do so without violating the intimacies ofprivate hospitality. One thing that interestedme was a photograph of the late Andrew Carnegie, taken in Berlin during the military manoeuvres; both Carnegie and Roosevelt had beenguests of William Hohenzollern, then Kaiser. Itold the colonel that I had been present at theformal opening of the Peace Palace, in September, 1913, at The Hague, and that the day hadbeen so hot that all Holland, there represented,had fled to the beach at Scheveningen, addingthat I believed the palace eventually would be ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES turned into the handsomest cafe in Europe; and I had printed this prophecy (?) in The Times Sunday Magazine, when reporting the solemn humbuggery of the peaceful house-warming. War was discussed with all the zest of the wonderful man. One question I permitted my self: "Colonel, would the Lusitania have been sunk if you had been in the White House?" Snapping his formidable jaw, he exclaimed: " There would have been no Lusitania incident if I had been President." Among other various topics the colonel des canted on the poetical merits of George Cabot Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who died in the very harvest time of his genius. In his introduction to the two volumes of Poems and Dramas, Theodore Roosevelt has never written with such a happy mingling of perspi cacity and tempered enthusiasm. Among the younger American poets I find Lodge of impor tance, not along because of his potential promise, but because of his actual performance. An au thentic poet, his versatility is marked. In his sonnets and lyrics he paid the admiring tribute of youth to Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and Swinburne. He could mimic Walt Whitman, who is fatally easy to parody, and he early succumbed to Schopen hauer and Baudelaire. In at least one of his dramas I found the cosmic ecstasy of Nietzsche; also the doctrine of the Eternal Return. But young Lodge had assimilated a half dozen cul- 59 VARIATIONS tures, and passed far out to sea the perilous rocksof imitation, upon which so many lesser talentshave come to grief. When as an achievementwe consider his Herakles we are amazed at itsmaturity of thought and technical finish. Thepoet, the Maker, confronts us, and in reclothingthe antique and tragic myth with his own lovelylanguage he is, nevertheless, a " modern." Iknow few poets of the new school who mayboast this sense of the vital present, added toadivination and an evocation of "old, unhappyfar-off things and battles long ago." His figuresare not fashioned by academic black magic, butare vital beings, loving, trusting, suffering, andin conflict with ineluctable destiny. He had thelyric art, also the architectural. He was a singerand a builder of the lofty rhyme. His handlingof complex forms and abstruse rhymes wasremarkable. George Cabot Lodge possessed bothvoice and vision. His life, by Henry Adams,shows him to have been a young man beloved byhis friends, among whom were Jonathan Stickney Trumbull, Langdon Mitchell, and the lateSir Cecil Spring-Rice. When I met him in Parishe was a student at the Sorbonne. It was about1896. A charming youth. I may only addnow my humble mite of admiration to the manesof this dead genius. When I saw Dr. Georg Brandes at the HotelAstor a few months before the outbreak of theGreat War I told him that he resembled the bust60 ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES made of him by Klinger. It was the first time I had talked to the celebrated Danish author, to whom I had dedicated Egoists. Then past seventy, as active as a young man, I could see no reason why he shouldn t live to be a cente narian. An active brain is lodged in his nimble body. I had made up my mind to ask him no questions about America. I found him in a rage over the way he was misquoted by some of the interviewers. It should be remembered that primarily he is a cosmopolitan thinker. He writes in English, French, German, and Danish with equal ease. As to the provinciality of our country s literature and the seven arts he has definite opinions; but he was polite enough not to rub them in on me. He was accused of find ing his favorite reading in the "works" of Jack London ! That idea amused him. Among our "moderns" it is Frank Norris he likes; a slight difference, indeed. Emerson, Poe, Whitman in terested him, though not as iconoclasts or path finders. The originality of this trinity he didn t dwell upon; made-over Europeans, he called them; Emerson and German transcendental philosophy; Poe and E. T. W. Hoffmann; Whit man and Ossian Walt s rugged speech is a windy parody of MacPherson s, and Ossian him self* is a windy parody of the Old Testament style. Brandes is an iconoclast, a radical, a non conformist born, and more often a No-Sayer than a Yes-Sayer. The many-headed monster 61 VARIATIONS has no message for him. As he was the first European critic to give us true pictures of Ibsenand Nietzsche, I led him to speak of the poetphilosopher. At Baireuth, where I had gone tohear the Wagner music-drama at its fountainhead and very muddy was the music-making,I am sorry to say I was shown the housewhere was born Max Stirner. My friend said:"When the very name of Richard Wagner is forgotten, Stimer s will be in the mouth of theworld." Of course, this sounded improbable.I know Stimer s book, The Ego and Its Own,knew his real name, Johann Kaspar Schmidt,and that he had been a poor, half-starved school master in Berlin, and, in 1845, imprisoned by thePrussian Government. This intellectual anarchrather call him nihilist, for, compared withhis nihilism, Bakunin s is only revolutionary re sistance was to become later the most powerful disrupting force in Europe ! I couldn t believe it. But now I recall my friend s prophecywhen I read of the doings of the Russian Bolsheviki. Not Nietzsche, but Stirner, has beenthe real motor force in the contemporary revolution. No half-way house of socialism for theReds ! And that is the lesson of Artzibachev s Sanine, the import of which the majority ofcritics missed, partially because of the imperfectEnglish translation many suppressions andalso because they missed the significance of thenew man, who, while continuing the realistic tradition of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, was di- 62 ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES ametrically opposed to their sentimental Brother hood of Man toujours that old fallacy of Rousseau ! and preached the fiercest individ ualism, violently repudiating Nietzsche and his aristocratic individualism. It may be said in passing that a reaction to individualism is bound to come; the lesson of the war will not be lost. Nor the teaching of Emerson. After the present overt suppression of the individual, the pen dulum will surely swing from tyrannical social ism to the greater freedom of the individual. And it can t come quickly enough here in America. Dr. Brandes sets more store by Nietzsche than Stimer; he was the first to call Nietzsche a "radical aristocrat." We switched to the theme of Strindberg. Brandes said: "Yes, he was mad. Once he visited me and told me of a call he had made at a lunatic asylum near Stockholm. He rang the bell and asked the physician if he Strindberg, the greatest of dramatists was crazy; to which the doctor replied: My dear Mr. Strindberg, if you will only consent to stay with me six weeks and talk with me every day, I promise to answer your question. " After that Brandes had no doubts on the question. Brandes is not only the dis coverer of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, but he himself is a revaluer of old valuations. Therein lies his significance for this generation. In 1888 he wrote to Nietzsche: "I have been the best hated man in the north for the last four 63 VARIATIONS years. The newspapers rave against me everyday, especially since my long feud with Bjornson,in which all the moral German newspaperstake sides against me." . . . To-day he is re garded as a reactionary by the Reds. The affec tions of Brandes have always been bestowedupon the literatures of England and France.Of his Main Currents, Maurice Bigeon has saidthat Brandes did for the nineteenth centurywhat Sainte-Beuve did for the seventeenth century in his History of Port Royal. What is vital, what makes for progress, what has lasting influ ence in social life? asks the Dane in his MainCurrents. He will remain the archetype ofcosmopolitan critics for future generations. Ahumanist, the mind of Brandes is steel-colored. Ductile, when white-hot, it flows like lava froma volcano in eruption; but always is it steel, whether liquefied or rigid. Pre-eminently it is the fighting mind. He objects to being described as " brilliant." The model of Brandesas a portrait-painter of ideas and individuals is Velasquez, because "Velasquez is not brilliant, but true." Yet he is brilliant and lucid, and steel-like, whether writing of Shakespeare or Lassalle.An ardent upholder of Taine and the psychologyof race, he contends that in the individual, notin the people, lies the only hope for progress.He is altogether for the psychology of the indi vidual. Like Carlyle, he has the cult of thegreat man. The fundamental question is 64 ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES can the well-being of the race, which is the end of all effort, be attained without great men? "I say no, and again, no!" he cries. He is a firm believer in the axiom that every tub should stand on its own bottom; and in our earthly pasture, where the sheep think, act, or vote to order, the lesson of Brandes is "writ clear": To myself be true ! that truth set forth with double facets by Ibsen in Peer Gynt and Brand. Also by Emerson. Beware of the Bogy the cow ardly spirit of compromise, with its sneaking prudent advice; Go around! For mobs and mob-made laws Georg Brandes has a mighty hatred. He, too, is a radical aristocrat whose motto might be: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth! With his Hebraic irony he stung to the quick the spiritual sloth of Denmark. His life was made unpleasant at the Copenhagen University; but he had behind him the younger generation. He knew that to write for the intrenched and prejudiced class would be a waste of ink. He exploded his verbal bombs beneath the national ark and blew sky-high stale and false ideals. He became a national figure after he had been recognized as a world critic. Not the polished writer that was Sainte-Beuve, not the possessor of a synthetic intellect like Hippolyte Taine s, Brandes is the broadest-minded man of the three, and upon his shoulders their critical mantles have fallen. Agitated as he was by the war his letters to me were full of references to it - 65 VARIATIONS he was philosopher enough to plunge into the profoundest work. He has finished two studies on such divergent themes as Goethe and Vol taire. Let us hope both books be given an English garb and speedy publication. 66 PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHINGWHEN an etcher of Joseph Pennell s caliber talks about his art it behooves both critic and public to sit up and listen. Mr. Pennell is en dowed with a special gift for making people sit up. He loves to startle. He is occasionally choleric, he indulges in righteous indignation over the blindness of critics and fumes betimes because of the indifference of the world at large concerning the finer shades of art. Nevertheless, he always says something pertinent, even when it runs contrary to popular opinion, or sneers at critical canons. He is well within his rights as an artist to attack professional critics, for critics and their criticism are a perpetual nuisance an incontrovertible statement that will, we are sure, be smilingly indorsed by the majority of the pesky critters. In his newly published and magnificently illustrated Etchers and Etching, Mr. Pennell has rendered a genuine service to students and amateurs, for not only does he re veal the secrets of his prison house, but he also reveals with a frankness that is fascinating his opinions of other etchers as compared with his god, Whistler, and incidentally tells his readers that if they do not agree with him they are un varnished damphools ! VARIATIONS Bully old Joe ! He is the joy of honest re viewers and the terror of them that are notfirmly grounded in their artistic technique. Herein he puts himself through all his familiar paces. Of all the graphic arts, etching is themost superior! Of all etchers, living or dead,James McNeill Whistler is the greatest ! Fromthis supreme judgment there is no appeal. Andthe curious part is that Mr. Pennell gives youchapter and verse to back up his argument. Inall that pertained to the delicate and difficult art of etching, Whistler was the master. NotRembrandt, who was careless as to the printingof his plates, careless as to finesse, and not givento slicking up his work; not Meryon, who was,according to Pennell, an indifferent etcher, andno artist should be mentioned in company withthe peerless Whistler. There is but one Allahin etching, and Pennell is his prophet. Salaamalaiekum! Rembrandt and Whistler? TheApocalypse and the Butterfly ! There is no denying the enthusiasm of an ex pert. And there is no denial of the propositionthat a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in etching as in criticism. Yet there is somethingto be said for the much-abused critics. Artists who discuss their art are sometimes biassed, to put it mildly. The principal critical pronouncements that have endured were not made by pro fessionals; on the contrary, such writers asWincklemann, Goethe, Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire especially Baudelaire Zola68 PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING (rather negligible), Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geoffrey, Huysmans, Mauclair, Charles Morice, Octave Mirbeau, R. A. M. Stevenson, George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Sturge Moore, Bernhard Berenson, John Van Dyke, W. C. Brownell, Royal Cortissoz, and others, have contributed more to the right un derstanding of the plastic arts than any opposing list of painters, sculptors and engravers you may assemble. Sift names and opinions, and for one Fromentin, one Whistler, one Reynolds, you will find a hundred writers who, non-professional as they were and are, have considerably added to our enlightenment in matters artistic. Not all critics are "men who have failed in literature and art," as Balzac said. The tech niques of the various arts are, naturally enough, best known to the practitioners thereof. Yet Curator Frank Weitenkampf of our Public Li brary has written one of the most valuable books in the arts graphic, How to Appreciate Prints. Its union of technical insight and catholicity of judgment has been justly praised by all discern ing etchers. The Discourses of Sir Joshua are, take them by and large, the best of their kind because most temperate. What wouldn t we give for the critical writings of Leonardo da Vinci, whose prose, what we have of it, proves him a master. Vasari is an immortal gossip. William Blake was narrow in his outlook. Fancy ruling out from court the pictures of Rubens ! Degas was a wit who abominated art VARIATIONS critics more than Mr. Pennell. He abusedHuysmans, the first to make public his rare genius. Millet, Rousseau, Constable said in teresting things of their art, of their contemporaries. "There is no isolated truth," de clared Millet. "A good thing is never donetwice," wrote Constable; or Alfred Stevens s definition of art as "nature seen through theprism of an emotion," which epigram evidentlyZola remembered in his Experimental Novel.Rodin has also uttered much wisdom. Fromentin s studies of Dutch masters is a standard book,although he missed Vermeer probably becausethe work of that master of masters was attrib uted to other men, notably to Terburg. Ruskin did much to muddle public opinionwith his intemperate praise of Turner and his purblind estimate of Whistler. Who shall denythat he was a force making for good? WalterPater painted with words, not only making beautiful phrases but memorable criticism. PhilipGilbert Hamerton often blundered, and Pennellimpales him, also abundantly quotes from him.The written and reported words of artists arealike precious to layman and critic. That theartist, Mr. Pennell for example, prefers etchingto writing is natural; so might the critic if he hadthe pictorial gift. Art is art, not nature; andcriticism is criticism, not always art. It professes to interpret the artist s work, and at bestit mirrors his art unavoidably intermingled withthe personal temperament of the critic. At the70 PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING worst, the critic lacks temperament, and when this is the case Heaven help artist and public ! Walter Raleigh sums up the question in a sen tence: "Criticism, after all, is not to legislate nor to classify, but to raise the dead." The magical art of evocation ! Few critics possess the gift, but, then, fewer are the artists who boast it. That painters or etchers can get along without professional criticism we know from history, but that they themselves play the critic successfully is open to doubt. And are they any fairer to younger talent than official criticism? It is an inquiry that should be fraught with sig nificance for professionals. Artists, great and various, have sent forth their pupils into the world. As befits honest criticism, have they at all recognized the pupils of other men; played fair with those whose practice and theory were at the opposite pole to their own? The answer is a decided negative; the examples that might be adduced, legion. Recall what Velasquez said to Salvator Rosa, according to Carl Justi. Sal- vator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he did not think Raphael the best of all the painters he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: "To be plain with you, Raphael does not please me at all." In art criticism a Robert Schumann is yet to appear; and notwithstanding his catholicity in taste, Schumann missed Wag ner, as did Berlioz. Perhaps Stendhal saw the weakness in such criticisms when he remarked: "Difference engenders hatred." VARIATIONS To leave historical generalities for the particulars of contemporary criticism, let us open abook that has recently appeared, entitled DeDavid a Degas, by Jacques-Emile Blanche,famous portraitist, charming causeur, brilliantpenman, sympathetic and sometimes causticcritic. M. Blanche, a painter by "the grace ofGod," for his talents are many, considers suchdiverse artists as Ingres, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Fantin-Latour a notably fine estimateDegas one of the best essays AubreyBeardsley a masterly miniature of a marvellous draftsman and the redoubtable Whistler.On page 35 M. Blanche writes of the etchingsand lithographs of the American artists, that theywere not worthy of their reputation; that theParis series frankly lean on Meryon, recall hiswork; others are freer, occasionally pretty,though weak, without character in their pictur esque quality of vignette, a genre wherein laterMariano Fortuny excelled ! We are here far fromPennell s dictum that Whistler is the greatestetcher that ever lived. What does JacquesBlanche know about etching? probably will behis comment if he reads the critique in question.And we should quite agree with the etcher if he should make some remark; such one-sidedverdict, despite the fact that M. Blanche is tobe listened to with respect when he talks of artand artists deserves rebuke ! It again confirmsthe attitude attributed to George Saintsburythat all discussion of contemporaries is convex72 PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING sation, not criticism. Mr. Pennell, who also slaughters the reputations of the living and dead, might put this witticism in his pipe and smoke up. The late William M. Laffan, a practical etcher, one who etched for his bread and butter, as he assured us, wrote in the Sun newspaper, of which he was the proprietor at the time of Whis tler s death, that the plates of the etcher Whistler would outlive Whistler the painter. Mr. Laffan, who possessed a flair for criticism, prophesied aright. He said too that there were no such things as replicas, which is the truth. Many Whistler canvases are sadly deteriorating, critical enthusiasm concerning them is cooling the artist Whistler is now seen not to be an isolated apparition but a synthesis of his own enthralling self, based on the art of Courbet, Fantin, Albert Moore, the Japanese and the inevitable Velas quez; but the etchings and lithographs of this truly versatile genius, being things of beauty, will be a joy forever. They are his legacy to the elect. And yet, must the "grand manner" of line-engravings irretrievably vanish to make place for the sketchy, fussy etching? Not only is Brother Pennell a brother to dragons ! narrow in his estimates of all the great etchers, but he is unjust to workers in other black-and-white mediums. Old-fashioned line-engraving is mechanical, and was so tedious to execute that the process was abandoned for still more mechanical though simpler methods. Not, however, till the patient engravers had be73 VARIATIONS queathed to art a gallery of stately portraits andlandscapes, minutely, if somewhat elaborately,recorded. Etching, be it never so fine, so personal, cannot compete with the masters of line,because etching lacks depth and substance. Itis improvisation at the best; at its worst it isalmost feline in its scratchings. Mezzotint, too,is a noble art. It is often smudgy, to be sure,but it has tonal splendor, which etching has not,despite the magical suggestion of tone in theWhistler plates. After reading Mr. Pennellsexposition of the pains and perils consequentupon the production of a perfect etching, thefinished plates of Marc Antonio, Richard Earlomor Masson s gray-haired man, do not seemawhit more mechanical. There are tricks in alltrades. Whistler s supremacy did not aloneconsist in his virtuosity with the needle, but inhis personality as poet and mystic. Rembrandtwas greater artist than etcher; in his days themanipulation of material was not so consummate as during the Wliistlerian epoch, yet heisby all odds the bigger man. A rude scratch ofhis and you see the glories of heaven, the gloomof hell. There is a fulness, a richness, a solidity,an architectural quality in Meryon missing inWhistler, Pennell to the contrary notwithstanding. In the evocation of the intangible, theevanescent, of the exquisite, Whistler has neverhad a rival, and as a technician he is foremost;but George Moore was not far astray whenhesaid that if "Jemmy" had been fifty pounds74 PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING heavier he might have painted like Velasquez. In the last analysis his work lacks weight, sub stance, virile power, though not imagination, and that quintessential quality is worth a wil derness of beefy, brilliant, magisterial canvases. All this is beside the mark, which is the su perb Pennell volume. Agree with him or not, he writes with vigor, demolishing shams and humbuggery, and his words, if often intem perate, are prompted by burning sincerity. He is never smug nor self-satisfied. He sees through the hole in our national millstone of art. His ideal is the linear, and at a time when sloppy drawing, barbarous color and grotesque com position have become our shibboleth, his warn ings are salutary. His is the cult of beauty for beauty s sake, the only culture in art. Etching to him is the still small voice of an art abused by amateurs, too often tortured by artists (you think of the big plates of Frank Brangwyn). He is fair to the Bohemian, Wenzel Hollar, who, to be seen at his best, one must go to Prague, to the Hollareum, there in the Rudolphinum, where his amazing work may be studied in its entirety. Mr. Pennell pays a rather grudging tribute to Seymour Haden, while admitting the beauty of his plate, Sunset in Ireland, and he warmed the cockles of our heart by his discriminating praise of the splendid etcher that was Felicien Rops. At the conclusion he peremptorily exclaims: "I know of no other great etchers." Oh, yes, you 75 VARIATIONS do, Joseph Pennell! You are too modest byhalf. Demme, sir, as old Joseph Bagstock wouldsay, old Joey B., begad, sir, you know a chapnamed Pennell who sometimes etches like anangel. And also lithographs. We ll eat ourhat if his scraped mezzotint, Wrens City, isn t a beautiful plate ! IN PRAISE OF PRINTS (TO JOSEPH PENNELL) THE gallery is rather narrow, but long and lofty; the light is diffused and gentle. A tiny staircase leads to mysterious retreats where, Piranesi-like, may be descried other galleries, though not peopled by the prisoners of the fantastic Italian etcher. A familiar voice wel comes the visitor who, weary of the monotonous mobs on the avenue, finds here a haven where, surrounded by the ingratiating arts of blackand-white mezzotinting, etching, lithograph and line-engraving he may soothe his soul and rest his bones. The color-scheme is har monious. A dark panelling, and for the smaller galleries a more cheerful though neutral tone, is observed. Moving slowly about he sees some black spots on the wall; at close range they resolve themselves into ingenious patterns. Stacked in portfolios are prints. On large tables more of them sprawl. In the rear room there is, perhaps, an exhibition of etchings or mezzo tints, but seldom of line-engravings. A young Scotsman shows his mettle the Scotch take to the needle as ducks do to grass. Why are line-engravings never hung nowadays? You are told that taste has changed since the golden age of engraving ruled our walls. And changed for the worse, thinks the fanatic of pure line. 77 VARIATIONS Yonder, above a huge bin, in which are storedrare prints, hangs the Moses of Philippe deChampaigne, engraved by Edelinck. It is alargely moulded composition. The Hebrew lawgiver, on whose noble features linger the reflec tions of Jehovah s divine illumination, the hornsof light emanating from Mount Sinai, holdsthe rod in one hand, supporting with the otherthe table of the laws. A picture in the grandmanner. Therefore, to be passed by in favor ofsome cryptic scratches on a small plate, a signedproof by an artistic nobody, who designs andetches in a mediocre fashion. Yet his work is eagerly snapped up, while the rhythmic line ofEdelinck is not even looked at, rich as it is as an interpretation or artistic performance." Engraving is so mechanical, don t you thinkso ! " is the usual reason advanced for the neglect of this branch of black-and-white. But,by the same token, no more mechanical thanthe myriads of fussy little plates of the etchers,for the most part without distinction in styleor technique. Nevertheless, etching is a swiftermethod for registering illusion, and in all thearts George Moore says there are nine, notseven the chief thing is to create illusion. Etching rules. Why? Because an artist ofoverwhelming genius set upon the art his seal. Because it is a consurnmate medium for expressing personality, and in all the arts personality is the slogan of the hour. We must bareour souls in our work, cry young folk; the rest, 78 IN PRAISE OF PRINTS art included, can go hang! But the question is whether these same souls are worth the bother of such exposure. When Rembrandt or Meryon, Whistler, or Pennell exhibited their personali ties on their plates the result was: primo, art; secundo, personalities. In a word, not even the perky, cantankerous side of Whistler in tervened between his art and his public; the nobler phases of his character, and there were many, shone clear and truthfully. The mas sive bulk of Rembrandt s personality is reflected in his work with the needle; yet what magnifi cent art is his ! Also a dangerous beacon in a stormy sea for lesser etchers. We love etching. It is the most concise and delicate of all artistic stenography. The scratched line, its symbol, is less complex than the convention of the so- called "steel" engraver, who works in a denser, richer medium, despite the allegation that his is a chilly art. So is sculpture chilly. All de pends on the man handling the chisel, or in engraving the wielder of the burin. The richest of the mediums is copper mezzotinted, or scraped plate. It sometimes gives muddy re sults. Etching has more personal charm; line- engraving is chaster, loftier in style, because more objective. If a certain formal rigidity or hardness may be urged against the less personal art of line- engraving, what cannot be said of the thin, facile, shallow impressionism of the etched plate? Above all else, structure is lacking, and 79 VARIATIONS it is too often a vehicle for piffling anecdote,or the stamping-ground of the superficial dauber.Mezzotint is not always a satisfactory means of expression. It too is mainly reproductive, whileits seductive, velvety surfaces may easily degenerate into monotonous formulas. BetweenValentine Green and his interpretations of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Richard Earlom s evoca tion of an incandescent forge, and the apocalyptic visions of a John Martin, there is thewide and ineluctable gulf of technical mastery.Martin may have been half-mad, like WilliamBlake as are most mystics viewed in thecold light of worldly reason but he possessedvision; while Green and Earlom, accomplishedcopper-scrapers as they were, only saw thesuperficies of things eternal. To-day John Martin s crude prints may be had for a penny, andthe fantastic Piranesi is a drug in the shops.Neither this mezzotinter nor etcher revealsthat mysterious "quality" essential in thearts. It is quality, then, that appeals in etchingand mezzotint. It was quality that appealedwhen the specimen plates of the master engravers were in vogue. Well and good. Butwhy doesn t that quality continue to makethe same appeal now to our fastidious taste asit did a half century ago? Naturally enough,the answer is Fashion, which has decreed thatthe grand old line-engravings be hung in cre puscular hallways. To be sure, there is a corri- 80 IN PRAISE OF PRINTS dor in the Pitti Palace, Florence, a sun-flooded hallway upon which sing the marvels of lyric line-engravings. Fashion says: admire the signed etching, coddle the impertinent remarque proof; Fashion has set topnotch figures for the English mezzotinters of English portraiture. By leaps and bounds the prices of Green and a few of his contemporaries have been mount ing, so that to own a Gainsborough or a Sir Joshua portrait in mezzotint is to proclaim yourself a person of means. Nor should there be a protest against these exalted prices. Rare art can never be high enough; besides, the domain of mezzotinting will soon be as bare of practitioners as that of line-engraving. S. Arlent Edwards is a name that occurs to us in mezzotinting. Joseph PennelPs essays in that medium reveal his mastery; while the artist that is Timothy Cole, stands solitary as probably the last of distinguished woodengravers, as Mandel may be said to have been the last of famous European line-engravers. The once haughty elder sister of the arts graphic is now become their Cinderella. Who but an anonymous minority cares for the stately engraved pictures of the past? How their dig nified style reproaches the heedless haste of latter-day photographic reproductions ! Yet, what modern mechanical process can match the slowly executed plates of Mantegna, Marc Antonio Ramondi, Albrecht Diirer, or Nanteuil who engraved after his own designs ? From 81 VARIATIONS the finesse of the Behams to the majestic sweep of Bervic, or the virtuosity of Antoine Masson- consider his head of Brisacier, the GrayHaired Man has not every manner, every mood, every technique been reproduced rather, let us say, interpreted in the terms of line- engraving? The engraved plate can state as succinctly as the etched the linear fretwork and silhouette of forms. Among other resources, the engraved plate is a method of the disposing of mass. It is more subtle than mezzotint in the indication of character, and is seldom so monotonous; while to the impressionism and often insignificant patterns of etching it opposes a static quality, opposes with its synthetic quali ties of the permanent, the majestic, the gracious, and the powerful. As a medium it is as supple as either etching or scraped copper, though in this attribute it yields to wood-engraving. What cannot line-engraving do in the wayof interpretation? Think of the variety of technical styles and artistic individualities. Ambushed behind every laboriously engraved "steel" plate steel is only in use since 1820 there lurks a personality. Think of Mantegna, a master of line in his painting; of Lucas, of the quaint Martin Schongauer, of Altdorfer, Wierix who aped Rembrandt in his version of The Three Trees of Sadeler and Goltzius; of Caracci, Wille, Nanteuil, Raphael Morghen, Visscher, with his Sleeping Cat and his RatCatcher; of the Brevets, of William Sharp, 82 IN PRAISE OF PRINTS Robert Strange, and Woolet, the English trio; and George Friedrich Schmidt is still a name to conjure with. A litany of names might be recited of engravers who have made master pieces. To-day, when we are in such a hurry to go nowhere to see nothing, the lenten and aristocratic art of line-engraving has lost its glamour, its significance. Nevertheless, a beau tiful art it will always remain, beautiful not withstanding the fluctuations of fashion. We feel that the pendulum of popular taste will surely swing back to this method of black-andwhite, despite its slow, painful process of pro duction. After an optical debauch in color, line is regaining its old supremacy. What else meant the apparition of cubism but a revolt against a too fluid impressionism! If this be true of easel-paintings it will come truer of line- engraving. The Sisters Five should walk abreast, not processionally line, mezzotint, etching, wood-cutting and lithography are their names. And no one of this family is handsomer, more stately, more decorative, less <e spotty" on a wall than the classics of line-engraving. NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD A DISTINGUISHED Russian diplomat, a visitor now in America, has asked us not to judge Russia too hastily; above all, not to abandonhopes for her future. The deposition of the Romanovs could not be accomplished without a social cataclysm and the presence of whatNicholas Murray Butler has so happily called "an inverted autocracy," that is to say, contem porary Bolshevikism. But the newcomers, after tumbling over thrones and dynasties, cannot beexpected to halt at any half-way house of out worn political expediency. Their slogan is: All or Nothing. Everything is permitted. Pre cisely the device on the victorious standards of that strange Old Man of the Mountain, fromwhose followers we derive the sinister word"Assassin." Yet we are fain to believe that, as nothing long endures, the tremendous Russian muddle will be straightened out sometime. In the bad old days when the Russian moujik wasnot singing songs saturated with vodka, he spunlegends shot through with the fantastic or grimwith the pain of life. In the European concert his formidable bass voice made the voices of his neighbors seem thin and piping. Napoleonprophesied that before the end of the nineteenth century Europe would be either republican or 84 NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD cossack, and a Moscow journal has proclaimed that the "twentieth century belongs to us." One need not be a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of a Russian for his coun try is a veritable passion. And from lips parched by the desire of liberty, though the Russian be persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, and murdered, this passion is ever voiced with unabated in tensity. What eloquent apostrophes have their great writers made to their native land! The youngest among the great nations, herself a na tion with genius, she must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. How Turgenieff praised her noble tongue: "O! mighty Russian language!" . . . Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a sojourner among English ideas. Ivan Turgenieff, a Musco vite doubled by a Greek artist, was called a cos mopolitan by Dostoievsky that profound and sombre soul and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was not sufficiently national; whereas to western ears it once smacked too much of the Kalmuck. Naturally, Anton Ru binstein suffered from the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. The case of Modeste Moussorgsky is altogether different. If Russian music, the organized musical speech of the nation, owes much to Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, never theless Michael Glinka was its father. Like 85 VARIATIONS Weber, he lovingly plucked from his native soil its wild flowers of melody, and gave them anoperatic setting in his Ruslan and Life for theCzar. In his turn and representing the elder school are Darjomisky and Serov, while withNew Russia blazoned on their banners follow Cesar Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balikirev, Glazounov, Stcherbatchev, Rachmaninov,Arensky, Moussorgsky, and, last not least, Scriabin. It might prove interesting to compare thecosmopolitanism of Tschaikovsky with Turgenieffs. George Moore insists with Celtic obstinacy that Turgenieff is the greatest master of fiction, greater even than Flaubert, because his art is effortless. Certainly, the Russian is themost artistic among novelists. Tschaikovskywas suspiciously regarded by the lesser nativechoir, while the big men, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and Tolstoy had an army of imitators, who wore their blouses untucked in their trou sers. It was a symbol. Their watchword was:We are going to the People ! From the Intelli gentsia, the students, to the peasant himself, this ominous cry was heard. It is still sounded.Its echoes are in Western ears. The Great WhiteCzar would not heed the warning. Going to the People is a phrase indicating a savage reaction against cosmopolitan influences; Russia hadsuccessively suffered from the invasions of English, French, and German ideas, customs, manners, costumes. The rabid Slavophilist would86 NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD have none of these. He disliked Italian pictures, loathed German philosophy, despised French literature, and hated English politics. Yet, from these seemingly disparate elements was born a national consciousness, a national culture. Its eclecticism caused its disintegration. To comprehend latter-day Russian music we should remember that the national spirit per vades its masterpieces. And that spirit is not in a special compartment separated from the seven arts, but waters their roots. With us art is a tender flower, isolated as if in a hothouse. The artist in America lives in a vacuum, or else creates his own atmosphere. In Russia, "bar barous" Russia, as we condescendingly refer to her, an artist is first a patriot. The English critic, John M. Robertson, wrote in 1891: "In that strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the highest life of the people . . . there yet seems to be no cessation in the production of truthful literary art, ... for jus tice of perception, soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in England with all our freedom, can offer no parallel. " Tyranny, then, may be forcing ground for genius ! From Gogol to Artzibachev Russian literature achieved its spiritual freedom despite the Czar and Si beria. The reason we speak of these writers and composers is because to know them is to grasp the psychology of Russian music, which is so often inspired by the poems, novels, and dramas of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoievsky, 87 VARIATIONS TurgeniefT, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Gorky, Andreyev, Artzibachev, and by the paintings of Repin,Perov, Verestchagin, and, in the case of Prokofieff, by Boris Anisfeld. We have elsewhere made a critical comparisonof Dostoievsky with Moussorgsky; no need to refer to it here, except to say that when Dostoievsky wrote, "The soul of another is a darkplace, and the Russian soul is a dark place," he accurately plotted his nation s psychic curve. And let it be said in passing that the author of Crime and Punishment had developed the mystic idea (your Russian is nothing if not mystical) that from Russia must come the salvation of the peoples of the earth from Russian Christi anity. This notion became an obsession of the great-souled writer, in whose KaramasovBrothers and The Possessed (Besi), may be foundthe leading motives of Nietzsche s philosophy:the superman, the eternal recurrence, the fan tastic idea that eternity may be in a "boxed-in" bathhouse, an idea that Henri Barbusse, who is saturated with Dostoievsky, develops in L Enfer, that infinity is contained within us. Eternity is Now. Tolstoy, who was best described byCount Melchior de Vogue in his epigram as having "the mind of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist" ("On dirait 1 esprit d un chimiste anglais dans 1 ame d un buddhistehindou") has not played as influential a role among Russian composers because he was essen tially tone-deaf. His Kreutzer Sonata demon88 NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD strates how a man ignorant of music, great artist that he is, may write himself down ab surdly. In comparison Dostoievsky is a spiri tual reservoir of musical certitudes; while in Turgenieff, thanks to a natural sensibility and years of musical cultivation while sojourning in the household of the Viardot-Garcias at Paris

• - surely the happiest as well as the most artistic

" menage a trois" in history he wrote of the art with sympathy and understanding. The further one dives into the Orient the more chromatic become the arts, especially the tonal art. The chromatic scale was once the shib boleth of the Neo-Russian composer, and, being the artistic offspring of Liszt and the Slav, he vainly sought to veil his paternity by painting it over with local color. It was then a trackless and seldom explored country his, full of yawn ing harmonic precipices, melodies that are at once heavenly and hideous like the mouth of a pretty woman with missing front teeth; moun tainous ideals, bleak surprises, and rugged vistas. To-day matters have changed. The younger generation, headed by the astonishing Alexander Scriabin, has thrown chromaticism to the dogs. The whole-tone scale is monarch. Arnold Schoenberg declared the scale must escape the House of Bondage and be free from scholastic shackles. Modulation is to be as Free Love, which may supersede marriage according to the recent programme of the Reds. Rebikov, Stravinsky, Serge Prokofieff, and Leo Ornstein 89 VARIATIONS have long ago nailed their color to the mast. Itis unequivocally scarlet. Notwithstanding theseeming anarchy in all these social and artistic manifestations, we believe that to the Slav is the future. Out of darkest Russia may emergethe next world-composer. Scriabin may be onlythe Precursor of the new evangel. Dostoievskyis right. There is enough fire of righteousnessin the Russians to burn up the world and all its wickedness. Russia is the matrix heavy withunborn genius, and who shall bear down tooheavily now on her sorrow and travail ? Waterseeks its level. A country is no greater than hergreat men. And how truly great are those wehave just named ! New lamps for old. A newand glorious Russia for the old. Avos ! 90 CEZANNE CEZANNE was pre-eminently occupied with the problem of space and its corollaries, bulk, weight, density, and with the still more stu pendous problem of getting on a flat surface the suggestion of a third dimension thickness. To achieve even a suggestion proves him a genius. And he was a genius. His supreme technical qualities are volume, ponderability, and a per sonal color-scheme. What s the use of asking whether he is a sound draftsman or not? He is a master of " edges," a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke to me of the defective eyesight of Cezanne; but disease boasts its discoveries as well as health. Possibly his " abnormal" vision gave him glimpses of a reality denied to other painters. He advised students to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tone. He practised what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the professional artist. Did Cezanne possess the temperament he was always talking about? If he did, his temperament was not precisely dec orative or flamboyant. An unwearying experimenter, he seldom "fin ished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home VARIATIONS at Aix. I saw the spot. The pictures do notclosely resemble it that is, in the photographicsense which simply means that Cezanne hadthe vision and I had not. A few themes withpolyphonic variations filled his simple life; art was submerged by its apparatus. His was the centripetal, not the centrifugal, temperament.In the domain of his rigid, intense ignorance there was little space for climate, charm, hardlyfor sunshine. Recall the blazing blue sky andsun of Provence, the tropical riot of its vegeta tion, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and thensearch for this mellow richness and misty, goldenair in the pictures of the master. You wont find them in his dim, muffled surfaces, thougha mystic light permeates his landscapes. It 19 the sallow-sublime in its apotheosis. He did notpaint portraits of Provence as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L Arlesienne. Cezanne sought for profounder meanings. Thesuperficial, the facile, the staccato, the merelybrilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "ab stract" painter as the self-contradictory atelier jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. Heplays a legitimate "trompe-Pceil" on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, cruel delineation of acertain hill on old Mother Earth which exposes her bare torso, her bald, rocky pate and grav elled feet. The hallucination is inescapable. As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, as austere in linear economy and as analytical as CEZANNE Stendhal or Ibsen, the art of Cezanne never becomes truly lyric except in his still life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion to him may be as beautiful as a naked woman. Taste is not one of his marked traits. The chiefest misconception of Cezanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him chief of a school, which he is, but declare him to be the greatest painter since the Byzantines. This assertion I have read in cold type. There is a lot of inutile talk about " significant form 5 by propagandists usually rotten bad painters. As if form had not always been " significant." When the impressionists as a school, now out moded as the Barbizons, began to issue their prospectuses, the emphasis was laid upon form; form having served its purpose must go at least become subordinate to color and its de composition. The suave line of Raphael had degenerated into the insipid arabesques of Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Cabanel. No deny ing these truths, since become platitudes. Form is again in the ascendant, impressionism having in its turn become deliquescence. No one denies Cezanne s preoccupation with form, nor Courbet s, either. Consider the Oman s landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, painted by the crassest realist among French artists, though he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper, more petulant mode of envisaging the world ; yet what better example of "significant form" and solid 93 VARIATIONS structural sense than Courbet s? Nevertheless, Cezanne quite o ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive sometimes you can t see the ribs of his landscapes because of the skeleton. Cezanne s was a twilight soul. And a humorless one. His early painting was quasi-struc tural, well-nigh modelling. Always the archi tectural sense. His rhythms are often elliptical. He has a predilection for the asymmetrical.Yet he is a man who lent to an art of two dimensions, the illusion of a third. His tactile valuesare raised to the nth degree. His color is per sonal. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, a half century ago, he wrote of Cezanne s work as con taining the prodromes of a new art. The handling of his material alone absorbed him, and notits lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical ele ments. He despised "literary" painting. Hisportraits are charged with character. But hesometimes profoundly ponders unimportant matters loses himself in a desert of sandy the orizing. The tang of the town is not in his portraits of places. His leaden, metallic landscapes seldomspontaneously arouse to activity the jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. In his groups of bathing women there is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt, as heavyflanked as Percheron mares. They are as uglyas the females of Degas, and twice as truthful. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had notraffic. If you don t care for his graceless nudes,94 CEZANNE you may console yourself with the axiom that there is no disputing tastes with the taste less. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a pantomime score by Stravinsky. But what thrice subtle sonorities, what opulent color- chords may be found in his compositions. His fruits savor of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he paints an onion it reveals a certain grace. Vollon dram atizes it, or embroiders its homely shape with luxuriant decorations. When Cezanne paints an onion you smell it. His apples are seem ingly falling off the table. How despairing are the efforts of his imitators to get those slant ing surfaces covered with fruit and vegetables that have just been brought in by the cook. You say, Miraculous! and make a gesture to prevent the ripe stuff from sliding to the floor. The "representation" abhorred of the Cubists in its most pregnant shapes is there. Cezanne did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the ideas, manners and aspects of his gen eration. With the classic retort of Manet, he could have replied to those who taunted him with not "finishing" his pictures, "Sir, I am not a historical painter." Nor need we be dis concerted in any estimate of him by the depress ing snobbery of collectors who don t know B from bull s foot but go off at half-trigger in 95 VARIATIONS their enthusiasm when a hint is dropped as to the possibilities of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cezanne is the painting idol of the present crowd, as were Manet and Moneta few decades ago. These aesthetic fluctuations should not distract us. Henner, Cabanel, Bourguereau too, were idolized once upon a time andserved to make a millionaire s holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniabletruth that Cezanne has, in the eyes of the younger generation, become a tower of strength which intrigues critical fancy. Cezanne is sin cere to the core, yet even stark sincerity doesnot, of necessity, imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his synthetic power he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and the early Italians. At times he achievedthe foundational structure of Courbet, thoughI don t think he had either the brains or the painting temperament of his elder contemporary,whose portee was at times tremendous. Hostile critics declare that the canvases of St. Paulof Provence are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans personal charm. However, "pop ularity is for dolls," says Emerson. I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon of 1901 a large picture by Maurice Denis, entitled Hommage a Cezanne, the idea of which was mani festly inspired by Manet s Hommage a FantinLatour, or Fantin s Batignolle School. TheMaurice Denis canvas depicts a still-life byCezanne on a chevalet, which is surrounded by CEZANNE the figures of certain painters Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard. Cezanne is posed standing and is ap parently embarrassed, which was his natural condition. There was a special Cezanne Salle, as there was one devoted to Eugene Carriere, but Cezanne held the place of honor. With all his naive vanity he was dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give him credit for a peasant astuteness, he was rather suspicious of the demonstration. But he stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, all the while looking like a bourgeois Buddha. To-day a Cezanne of quality is costly. Why not? When juxtaposed with many modern painters his vital art makes other pictures seem linoleum or papier mache. The nervous, shrink ing man I saw at Aix and later at Paris would have been astounded at the praise printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon as did his school-friend Zola for a seat in the Academy none the less, he disliked notoriety. He loved hard work. He loved his solitude. With a fresh batch of can vases he trudged every morning to his pet land scape, the Motive, he called it, and it was there that he daily slaved with genuine technical heroism. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial no tary. Like John La Farge, he hated shaking hands. A rare impersonality. 97 VARIATIONS Goethe has told us that because of his limita tions we may recognize a master. The limita tions of Cezanne are patent. An investigator, experimenter, even fumbler, he did not deem it wise to stray from his chosen, if narrow, field. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding JohannSebastian Bach following Richard Strauss. The very notion is monstrous. Yet, figuratively speaking, this order constitutes the case of Ce zanne. He arrived on the pictorial scene after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, and symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made like Puvis de Chavannes, but one born with an un affected crabbed simplicity. Paul Cezanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, also as a painter, pure, without pre occupation in schools or ideas. No man whowields a brush need ask for a more enduring epitaph. 98 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? "How shall we sing the Lord s song in a strange land?" I couldn t help recalling these words of the Psalmist, these and the opening, "By the rivers of Babylon," in which is com pressed the immemorial melancholy of an en slaved race, when I heard Sophie Braslau intone with her luscious contralto, a touching Hebrew lament, "Eili Eili Lomo Asovtoni?" at a con cert last winter. Naturally I believed the mel ody to be the echo of some tribal chant sung in the days of the Babylonian captivity, and per haps before that in the days of the prehistoric Sumerians and the epic of Gilgamesh. Others have made the same error. Judge of my sur prise when in a copy of The American Jewish News I read that the composer of Eili Eili is living, that his name is Jacob Kopel Sandier, that he wrote the music for a historical drama, Die B ne Moishe (The Sons of Moses), which deals with the Chinese Jews. Mr. Sandier had written the song for Sophie Carp, a Yiddish ac tress and singer. The Sons of Moses was a failure, and a new piece, Brocha, the Jewish King of Poland, was prepared. (Not alluding to Pan Dmowski.) It was produced at the Windsor Theatre in the Bowery. The song, not the play, was a success. Then the music 99 VARIATIONS drifted into queer company, for music is a living organism and wanders when it is not controlled. Finally Sophie Braslau got hold of it, and the composer, who was directing a choir in a Bronxsynagogue, was astounded to hear of the accla mations of a Metropolitan Opera House Sundaynight audience. His daughter has listened to Eili Eili and brought home the good news. After troublesome preliminaries " Meyer Beer," the pen name of the musical editor of The American Jewish News, was able to prove beyond peradventure of a doubt the artistic parentage of the song, and Jacob Sandier is in a fair way of being idolized in his community, as he should be. Eili Eili lomo asovtoni? may be found in Psalm 22, the first line of the second verse in Hebrew. In the English version the words of David are in the first verse: "My God, my God,why hast thou forsaken me?" And in the St. Mark s Gospel we read: "And at the ninth hourJesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ? which is, being interpreted : My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Chapter 15, verse 34.) The exegetists and apologists, as well as sciolists, have made of this immortal phrase a bone of theological con tention. Schmiedel, who with Harnack believes the words to have been uttered by our Saviour, nevertheless points out various details which pre figure the same things in the crucifix the just man hanging on the stake, the perforated handsand feet, the mocking crowd, the soldiers gam100 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? bling for the clothes, everything takes place as described in the Psalm. Lublinski (in Dogma, p. 93) and Arthur Drews (in The Historicity of Jesus, p. 150) demur to the orthodox Christian conclusions of Harnack and Schmiedel. A be loved master, the late Solomon Schechter, dis posed of the question in his usual open style. "The world is big enough," he has said to me, for both Jehovah and Jesus, "for two such grand faiths as the Hebrew and the Christian." But he saw Christianity only in its historical sequence, and not as a continuator of Judaism; rather, a branching away from the main trunk. If it had not been for Constantine, the world might be worshipping Mithra to-day, was the erudite and worthy man s belief. Enveloped in the mists of the first two centuries Christianity seems to have had a narrow escape from the doctrines of Mithraism. That Salomon Reinach practically admits in his Orpheus, a most sig nificant study of comparative religions from the pen of this French savant. Once upon a time I played the organ in a "shool," a reformed, not an orthodox, syna gogue; played indifferently well. But my ac quaintance with the Jewish liturgy dates back to my boyhood in Philadelphia, where I studied Hebrew, in company with Latin. The reason? My mother fondly hoped that I might become a priest the very thought of which makes me shudder now. The religious in me found vent in music, and my love of change was gratified 101 VARIATIONS by playing the Hebrew service on Shabbas(Saturday) and the Roman Catholic on our Sabbath. Probably that is why I was affected by Sophie Braslau s singing of Eili Eili. RosaRaisa has put the song in her repertory, andonly on Easter Sunday last did Sarah Borni sing it, although it appeared on the programme as a composition of Kurt Schindler s, an error quickly rectified by Miss Borni, who did not know the authorship till too late. "Such songs," commented this soprano, "come but once in a mans lifetime." Dorothy Jardon will no doubt sing Eili Eili, as she sang for the first time a Jahrzeit, a Kaddish by Rhea Silberta, at the Hippodromelast Sunday. Mr. Sandier has come into his own, and it is gratifying to record that the credit is largely due to Meyer Beer and The AmericanJewish News. I have always entertained a peculiar admira tion for the Jews and Judaism. It began with the study of Semitic literature of the Talmud,above all of Hebrew poetry, the most sublime in our language, as Matthew Arnold asserts in his comparative estimate of Greek and Hebraic cul tures. My dearest friends have been, still are, of that race. Prejudice, social or political, against the Jew, I not only detest, but I havenever been able to comprehend. My early play mates were Jewish boys and girls. I have stood under the "Choopah" (marriage canopy), andhave seen many a Bar-Mitzvah; even sat "Shivah" for the dead father of intimate friends. 102 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? From Rafael Joseffy to Georg Brandes; from the brilliant Hungarian virtuoso that was Joseffy - whose father, a learned rabbi, I visited at Buda pest in Pest-Ofen in 1903, when he was eighty-four, an Orientalist, a linguist with twenty-six languages, ancient and modern, at the tip of his tongue to Professor Brandes, the Danish scholar, an intellectual giant, and a critic in the direct line of Sainte-Beuve and Taine both men I knew and loved. Whether the Jew has attained the summits as a creator in the seven arts I cannot speak authoritatively, although the Old Testament furnishes abundant evidences that he has in poetry. Disraeli (Beaconsfield), who liked to tease Gladstone by calling him "Frohstein" and pointing to his rugged Jewish prophet s features, has written of his race most eloquently. I should like to quote a passage in its entirety, but time and space forbid. But an excerpt I permit myself the luxury of reproduction: "The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, the in spiration fervid with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus, and which we have pre served unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which the ancients recog nized as most divine and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation. . . ." He goes on: "There is not a company of singers, not an or chestra in a single capital, that is not crowded with our children under feigned names which 103 VARIATIONS they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion whichyour posterity will some day disclaim with shameand disgust. . . ." Lord Beaconsfield mentions Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn as Jewish composers, andPasta and Grisi among the singers. Probably hehad not heard Rossini s witticism uttered on his deathbed: "For heaven s sake, don t bury mein the Jewish cemetery ! " Nor did Beaconsfieldlook far enough ahead when he wrote "dark aversion" which is wonderful. To-day theboot is on the other leg. It may be Gentileswho will be forced to change their names toJewish. I could easily sign myself "Shamus Hanuchah" -leaving out the "lichts" -orpattern after the name Paderewski jokinglywrote on his photograph: "For Jacob Hunekerstein." And I am ashamed to confess that I knowJews who themselves are ashamed of havingbeen born Jews. Incredible ! In Vienna I haveseen St. Stefan s Cathedral crowded at the no clock high mass by most fervent worshippers,the majority of whom seemed Semitic, whichprompted me to propound the riddle : When is aJew not a Jew? Answer: When he is a RomanCatholic in Vienna. But you never can tell. As Joseffy used to say when some musician witha nose like the Ten Commandments was intro duced, as, for example, Monsieur Fontaine, "He means Brunnen, or, in Hebrew, Pischa. Heis not a Jew, but his grandmother wore a schei- 104 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? teP" (the wig still worn by orthodox Jewish women). The truth is that among the virtuosi, singers, actors, the Jew holds first place. Liszt and Paganini are the exceptions, and Paganini could easily pass in an east side crowd as Jehudah. As to the Wagner controversy, not started by Nietzsche, but by Rossini and Meyerbeer, who referred to Wagner as Jewish, that was set tled by O. G. Sonneck in his little book, Was Wagner a Jew? but only after I had introduced to the columns of the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1913, a book by Otto Bournot, en titled Ludwig Geyer. Geyer was, as you may remember, the stepfather of Richard Wagner. Bournot had access to the Baireuth archives and delved into the newspapers of Geyer s days. August Bottiger s Necrology had hitherto been the chief source. Mary Burrell s Life of Wagner was the first to give the true spelling of the name of Wagner s mother, which was Bertz, which may be Jewish or German, as you like. The Geyers as far back as 1700 were pious folk. The first of the family mentioned in local history was a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a trombone player and organist. Indeed, the Geyers were largely connected with the evangelical church. Ludwig Geyer, virtually acknowledged by Baireuth as the real father of Richard Wagner, looked Jewish (which proves nothing, as I have seen dark, Semitic fisher-folk on the coast of Galway) and displayed Jewish versatility. For that matter the composer von 105 VARIATIONS Weber looked like a Jew, as does Camille Saint-Saens. When I ventured to write of this racialtrait much more marked in his youth theFrench composer sent me a denial, sarcasticallyasking how a man with such a "holy" nameas"Saint-Saens" could be Jewish. But LeopoldGodowsky, who was intimate with him, has toldme that he took his mother s name. As toWagner, a little story may suffice. In 1896 Iattended the Wagner festival at Baireuth. Between performances I tramped the Franconianhills. My toes hurt me. Looking for a corncutter, I found one not far from the Wagnerhouse. The old chap seated me in his doorway,probably to get better light, and as he crouchedover my feet in the street I asked him if he hadknown Richard Wagner. "Know Wagner!" he irascibly replied. "He passed my shop everyday. Many the times I cut his corns. Oh,no ! not here; over yonder" he jerked his headin the direction of Wahnfried. I inquired whatkind of a looking man was Wagner. "He wasa little bow-legged Jew, and he always wore along cloak to hide his crooked legs." Enfin ! thetruth from the mouth of babes. This beats.Nietzsche and his "Vulture" Geyer. Not religion, not nationality, but race, countsin the individual. Wagner looked like a Jew.And there are many red-haired Jews with pugnoses and light blue eyes. Renan in Le Judaismehas shown us how non-Jewish elements were inthe course of time incorporated within the race.106 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? The Chazars of eastern Europe are Jews, only a thousand years old. Dr. Brandes in a confes sion of his views on the subject has said in The Journal for Jewish History and Literature, published at Stockholm (Teldscript for Judisk Historia), and quoted by Bernard G. Richards in a capital study of Brandes "from the fif teenth to the sixteenth year of my life I regarded Judaism purely as a religion." But when he was abused as a Jew then Georg Brandes felt him self a genuine Jew. Many a man has found himself in a similar position. Atavistic im pulses, submerged in subconsciousness, may ex plain why certain men, Gentiles, scholars, by nature noncombatants, have left their peaceful study, jeopardized their life, ruined their reputa tion, to battle for an obscure Jew Dreyfus. Zola, of Greek-Levantine origin, perhaps Italian and Jew, was one of those valiant souls who fought for the truth. Anatole France, born Thibault, another. Count Thibault, at the time of the Dreyfus uproar, challenged the great writer who signs himself Anatole France to prove his right to that distinguished Roman Catholic name. That the gentle Anatole is the very spit and spawn of a Jew, so far as appearance goes; that since Heine (baptized a Christian) no such union of mocking irony and tender, poetic emo tion can be noted in the work of any writer, are alike valueless as testimony. Nevertheless, many believe in this Hebraic strain; just as they feel it in the subtlety of Cardinal Newman s 107 VARIATIONS writing he was of Dutch stock and in the humor of Charles Lamb. Both Englishmen are credited with the " precious quintessence," as Du Maurier would say. I have had to stand a lot of good-natured fun poked at me for my Jewish propensity. I canstand it, as I have a solid substratum of history for my speculations. Some years ago The Contemporary Review printed an article entitled "The Jdw in Music," with this motto from OscarWilde s Salome: "The Jews believe only in whatthey cannot see." The writer s name wassigned: A. E. Keeton. Not even the assertion that Beethoven was a Belgian is half so icono clastic as some of the assumptions made in this study. "When Mozart first appeared as aprodigy before the future Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, she announced that a genius must not be a Jew. The original name, Ozart, was changed. Mozart was baptized ! Whichanecdote makes the scalp to freeze, though notbecause of its verisimilitude. Beethoven andRubinstein looked alike; ergo! But then theydidn t. In the case of Chopin he was certainly Jewish-looking, especially in the Winterhalter and Kwiatowski portraits. His father camefrom Nancy, in Lorraine, thickly populated byJews. The original name, Szopen, or Szop, is Jewish. His music, especially the first Scherzo in B minor, has a Heine-like irony, and irony is a prime characteristic of the Chosen (or Choosingas Zangwill puts it) race ! But all this is in the 108 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? key of wildest surmise. Wagner was born in the ghetto at Leipsic; yet that didn t make him Jewish, any more than the baptism of Mendels sohn made him Christian. Georges Bizet was of Jewish origin, he looked Jewish; but the fact that he married the daughter of Halevy (HaLevi), the composer of La Juive, didn t make the composer of Carmen a Jew. Neither religion nor nationality are any more than superficial factors in the nature of men and women. Race alone counts. Once upon a time I wrote a Jewish story, The Shofar Blew at Sunset. Maggie Cline liked it; so did Israel Zangwill. I preserve a letter from Mr. Zangwill telling me of his liking. The story appeared in Mile New York, now de funct. It was afterward translated into Yid dish, though it did not give general satisfaction in either camp, Jewish or Christian. It revelled in the cantillations and employed as leading mo tive the Shofar, or ram s-horn blown in the syna gogues on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. The scroll of the Torah also appeared. But these liturgical references didn t offend; it was my sur prising denunciation of Jewish materialism in New York that was the rock of offence. I say surprising, for what is a Christian-born doing in another field and finding fault? I m sure I can t say why, unless that in writing the tale I unconsciously dramatized myself as a reproach ing voice. There was much in my strictures of that son of Hanan who prowled through the 109 VARIATIONS streets of the Holy City in the year A. D. 62, crying aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!" I remember that I predicted because of the lux ury of the American Jew the lofty Jewish ideal ism might be submerged in a flood of indifference and disbelief. Prosperity would prove the snag. In the heart of the Jew is the true Zion, not in success nor in some far-away land. Naturally,that didn t please the Zionists. One profes sional Jewish publication, no longer in existence, said that I preached like a Rabbi (Reb), butthought like a goi. The word "Chutzpah" wasalso used. Yet, wasn t I right ? It is the spiri tual Ark of the Covenant, the spirit of the law, and not the letter that killeth, which should beenshrined in the heart of the Jew. He maydream of Palestine, of its skies of the "few large stars," a land overflowing with milk and honey;but in the depths of his soul it is the living Godto whom he must go for spiritual sustenance. God the eternal reservoir of our earthly certi tudes ! Schma Ysroel ! no SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY IN these piping times of peace when the body politic is afflicted with socialism, bolshevism, and other cutaneous disorders, it is a pleasing and a profitable task to reread Socialistic Fallacies, by M. Yves Guyot, who for years has been a deter mined and consistent opponent of the bleak and dismal "science" and the author of a number of books on the subject. Luckily for those who can t read French, Socialistic Fallacies has been translated and should prove a manual to com bat and confute the sophistries of socialism with the writer s arsenal of arguments. M. Guyot has been a deputy, a municipal councillor, minis ter of public works. He advocated the revision of the Dreyfus case, and he was political editor of Le Siecle (1892-1903). He is also editor of Journal des Economistes (since 1909) and editor of UAgence Economique et Financieres (since 1911). He has written much about the great war and its causes (also translated) and kindred themes. Therefore a man who knows what he is talking about. In his drastic attack on socialistic fallacies he thus concludes: " There are three words which socialism must erase from the facades of our public buildings, the three words of the repub lican motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Libin VARIATIONS erty, because socialism is a rule of tyranny;equality, because it is a rule of class; fraternity, because its policy is that of class war." M.Guyot might have quoted Napoleon, a realist, a cynic in politics, for he knew its seamy side, who said: "Tell men they are equal and theywon t bother about liberty." And in this matter men may change, mankind never. Socialism, that word of so many meanings,has itself become meaningless. Guyot shows useach variety, analyzes its particular fallacy, andthough not a victim to the craze for statistics, he furnishes many pages of figures to matchthose of his adversaries. He attacks Karl Marxon his weakest flank, and, incidentally, proveshim not to have been a proletarian, but the son- in-law of a Prussian Junker. The selfishness of Marx, his tyrannical behavior, his unphilosophical wrath when opposed by two such intellectual giants as Bakunine and Lassalle; his jealous at titude toward Ferdinand Lassalle, especially after his tragic death, are all well known. Thesetraits do not reveal a man overflowing with true brotherly love. Able, but frequently unscru pulous, men amuse the idle and attract the multitude such are the leaders of the cause whichhas made such headway in Germany, addsGuyot, whose words in the light of contempo raneous history are positively prophetic. Theseleaders are plagiarists, with some variations, of all the communist romances originally inspired by Plato. Their greatest pundits, Marx and112 SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY Engels, have built up their theories upon a sen tence of Saint-Simon and three phrases of Ricardo s. Our author gives these examples: " German socialism is derived from two sources: (i) The French doctrine of Saint-Simon, The way to grow rich is to make others work for one/ which in Proudhon s mouth becomes the exploitation of man by man/ (2) Three for mulas of Ricardo, viz. : (a) labor is the measure of value; (b) the price of labor is that which pro vides the laborer in general with the means of subsistence, and of perpetuating his species without either increase or diminution; (c) profits decrease in proportion as wages increase." Formula (b) became the "iron law of wages" enunciated by Lassalle. Inverted dogmatism all these stale subterfuges. The French doctrines and Ricardo s three formulas were transformed into the theory of Rodbertus, "the normal time of labor," and the "surplus labor" theory of Karl Marx and Engels. Guyot calmly demonstrates the fallacies of these sonorous assumptions. He asks the where abouts of the Utopias of Fourier, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc s organization of labor, or of Prou dhon s bank of exchange that Proudhon who has been permanently saddled with Brissot s famous phrase: "Property is theft." (Philo sophical Examination of Property and Theft, 1780.) No Socialist has succeeded in explain ing the conditions for the production, the re muneration, and the distribution of capital in a "3 VARIATIONS collectivist system. No Socialist has succeeded in determining the motives for action which an individual would obey. When pressed for ananswer, they allege that human nature shall be metamorphosed, but that the individual re mains a constant quantity ! Rank materialism all this, and absolutely without vision. Socialism is a hierarchy on a military basis imported from Germany. Karl Marx did not concern himself with the incentives to action which are to be placed before men in communistic society, and his followers carefully evade the question. When they do attempt to deal with it, they fall into grotesque errors, as did the late French leader, Jaures. Kautsky asks howthe workman is to be made to take an interest in his work, and he can find no incentive other than the force of habit. Like mechanical toys, men will do the same thing every day because they did it the day before. This is merely teaching tricks to animals, the organization of reflex action causing the individual mechanically to do to-morrow what he did yesterday. Nor is this a discovery of scientific socialism; the or ganizers of churches, of armies, discovered the trait long ago, employing it as a means of dis cipline under the sanctions of allurement andcoercion; allurement, by preferments, decora tions, and honorary distinction; coercion, bymeans of more or less cruel and rigorous punish ments. Bebel declared that "a man who will not work has not the right to eat." This is 114 SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY being condemned to death by starvation; and a man who does less work than, in the opinion of the executive, he ought to do, shall be put upon a restricted diet; so, after all, the collectivist ideal ends in servile labor. To replace a king or a president there will be an " executive," which means several instead of one tyrant. Good old King Log is always a better ruler than King Stork. For one thing, he is not so vora cious as the ferociously hungry feathered biped. Socialism, then, is only one more strait-jacket to torture the individual. It may be said that man is ready for every form of sacrifice save one: nowhere and at no time has he been found to labor voluntarily and constantly from a disinterested love for others. Man is only compelled to productive labor by necessity, by the fear of punishment, or by suit able remuneration. The Socialists of to-day, like those of former times, constantly denounce the waste of competition. Competition involves losses, but biological evolution, as well as hu manity, proves that they are largely compen sated by gain. Furthermore, there is no ques tion of abolishing competition in socialistic con ceptions; the question is merely one of the sub stitution of political for economic competition. If economic competition leads to waste, and claims its victims, it is none the less productive. Political competition has secured enormous plunder to great conquerors, such as Alexander, Caesar, Tamerlane, and Napoleon; it always de- "5 VARIATIONS stroys more wealth than it confers upon the vic tor. The Socialist formulates a theory of rob bery and calls it restitution to the disinherited." Disinherited by whom? Disinherited of what?Let them produce their title-deeds! They call it expropriation, but that is a misnomer; whatthey set out to practise is confiscation. Georges Bernard says that " socialism will be a regime of authority." On this point Guyot grimly agrees with him. In reality it will be the mostoppressive spiritual and material system ever invented by man. Socialist action has a depressing effect on all fixed capital, and, he continues, "in order to carry on a policy of preserving the political equilibrium, of giving a few bones to the demagogues to gnaw, concessions are made to the policy of spoliation." What, then, remains of socialism when we come to close quarters with it? And what are the prospects of this spolia tion and tyranny ? The socialistic party cannotbalance up a governmental majority without destroying government itself, for it cannot ad mit that government fulfils the minimum of its duties (this was written before 1914). When astrike breaks out the intention of the strikers is that security of person and property shall not be guaranteed. Socialist policy represents con tempt for law, and all men, whether rich or poor, have an interest in liberty, security, andjustice, as the private interest of each individual is bound up with these common blessings. But116 SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY Socialists despise them all. "The socialism of Karl Marx s disciples betrays a long apprentice ship to servitude," declares M. Reinach. A law, the object of which is to protect each man s property, is supported by all who possess anything, and where is the man in advanced societies who is incapable of being robbed be cause he possesses nothing? A law of spoliation may be passed and carried into effect, but in the event of its results be coming permanent it runs the risk of destroying the government which has assumed the respon sibility of it. Socialist policy is a permanent menace to the liberty and security of citizens, and, therefore, cannot be the policy of any gov ernment, the primary duty of which is to exact respect for internal and external security. If it fail therein it dissolves and is replaced by an archy; and, inasmuch as every one has a horror of that condition, which betrays itself by the oppression of violent men banded together solely by their appetites, an appeal is made to a strong government and to a man with a strong grip, and then the risk is incurred of relapsing into all the disgraces and disasters of Caesarism. In several sections of this admirable work, M. Guyot scrutinizes the various Utopias from Plato to Proudhon: Sir Thomas More, the King dom of the Incas, Campanella, the Jesuits in Paraguay, Moselly, Robert Owen, Fourier, the American Phalanx, the Oneida Community, Cabet, the Icarians, and other unsuccessful ex- 117 VARIATIONS perimenters. Utopia is always within sight, butnever reached. It is, in the charming parlance of the hour, a pipe-dream; these Utopias always cut their throats to spite their thirst. And pre cisely where socialism was expected to be a buffer against world wars, it dismally failed. From time to time the everlasting busybodyasks himself why a plea for mediocrity is not a fitting theme to interest ambitious essayists. Supermen and supper-rogues have been done to the death in print, yet few words are accorded to the garden variety of the human plant. Instead we are keyed to the loftiest pitch; exaggeration is a national neurosis. We are all professional altruists, and, as every one knows, altruism is the art of making our neighbor unhappy because of our oppressive happiness. And yet not a wordfor mediocrity, which is the backbone of ournation, the staple of its political, artistic, andliterary productions. Not a word for the manin the street, whose collective opinion KingOpinion, the most despotic of tyrants rules us, whose vote counts heavier than the vote of the "exceptional" being perched on the house top. (A majority of exalted souls would turn America into a wilderness.) And all because the excellent word "mediocrity" is become de based in meaning. At one time it stood for the golden mean, for a happy equilibrium of forces, moral and physical. It spelled happiness to its possessor we refer to the mediocre tem perament and if a man had enough money to 118 SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY keep the wolf from the door he was content. That is the precise word content; to be con tented is a gift of the gods. But to us nowadays it means that you are merely commonplace, without social ambitions, without intellectual eminence. And this is not well. Notwithstanding the fact that we are a united nation of over one hundred millions of people, we are each in his own fashion endeavoring to escape the imputation of mediocrity. Alas! in vain. Number is mediocrity. We think and drink to order, vote as we are bidden by our wives, and wear the clothes given us by destroy ers of sartorial taste. Wherefore, then, this mad desire to be exceptional? Whence this op timism that shudders in the presence of genuine art and espouses the vulgar because it better agrees with fat nerves? Let us acknowledge the truth. It is because, happily for us, we are all mediocre; because genius is not a normal con dition of humanity, and that talent is much less rare than our national vanity admits. However, let us pluck up courage. The future which is said by some to belong to socialism will work out the problem of mediocrity, especially if socialism is involved; mediocrity and socialism are not poles asunder. Concrete houses filled with people who will eat, drink, and think alike will cover the land. Everything will be of con crete, even our political opinions. In his con crete Capitol a concrete President will devise concrete laws. Art, music, and literature will 119 VARIATIONS be so concrete that our native Gradgrinds, hungry for hard facts, will be ravished into the seventh concrete heaven. Made a law, mediocrity will do away with our present mortifyingdoubts, deceptions, and pretensions. O HappyTime ! And this coming age of concrete, whereinall must walk and look alike, is it not a dreamcompared with which Dante s Inferno would bea Garden of Armida? Said a great poet-philosopher: "And many a man has gone into the desert and suffered fromthirst with the camels rather than sit about the cistern with dirty camel drivers." No wonderWilliam James wrote that "the whole atmos phere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dish-watery to people who still keep a sense of life s more bitter flavors." Andhow much more that is insipid and mawkish will follow under socialistic regimentation! "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundreds of thousands, of the party, of the sec tion to which we belong, and our opinion pre dicted geographically as the North or the South?" These words were not uttered by aSocialist; they emanated from the crystal-clear intellect of our greatest Individualist, RalphWaldo Emerson. 1 20 CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? RATHER hotly I argued the question with my editor: "After all, music critics are men and brethren," I said. " Except when they are sis ters," he ironically interposed. I sternly re sisted a temptation to blush, and continued: "Because I love Chopin must I forever write of his music toujours perdrix ! It s an in digestion of strawberries, clotted cream, and green-eyes. I m suffering from spring-fever. Let me write a story about the circus." "Why not Ibsen?" interposed my editor, who is subtle or nothing. "He was a grand man," I assented, "but in the present case he is only a red-herring across the trail. Suppose I mix up Chopin with sawdust merely for the sake of the melange?" My chief assented, wearily. There are more important problems on the carpet than Chopin. Had I ever been to the circus ? What a singu lar question! Yet, yet ! No, I confessed to myself, I had not been to the circus for at least three decades. Critics are tame cats away from their regular guests. In the concert room or at the play, armed with our little hammers, we are as brave as plumbers; but on a roof garden, in church, at a circus, or innocently slumbering, we are the mildest gang of pirates that ever scut- 121 VARIATIONS tied an American sonata or forced ambitiousleading ladies to walk the plank. We may goalone to the theatre with impunity and anotherfellow s girl, but at the circus we need a nurseto show us the ropes and keep us from falling under the elephants hoofs. I know, becauseI went one Sunday night to the Hippodromeand liked John McCormack s singing immensely;so much indeed that I forgot to criticise andnearly fell over the edge of the box, so uncriti cally did I applaud. A private nurse notnecessarily old say I is the only safety for acritic out of his element; otherwise a sense of the dignity of our calling is not maintained. Therefore, I swallowed my Chopin schemewithout undue fervor and went to the circus. No matter which one. All circuses are in anattractive key to me. Thackeray said the samething about the play, and said it better. Anycircus will serve as a peg for my sawdust symbolism. Any Garden will do, so that it has acapitalized initial letter. (No allusion to Magical Mary.) The circus ! What a corrective for the astringent Ibsen or the morbidezza of Sar- matia s sweet singer, Chopin ! The circus ! It is a revelation. One thing I regretted that I could not be a boy again, with dirty hands, ashining brow, and a heart brimming over withjoy. Peter Pan! Oh! to recapture that first careless rapture, as Browning or some otherwriting Johnny said; surely he must have meantthe circus, which is the one spot on our muddy122 CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? planet where rapture rhymes with the sawdust ring. "Have you ever seen Hedda Gabler?" I asked of the Finland giantess. We were wedged in front of the long platform at the Garden, upon which were the Missing Link, the SnakeEnchantress, the Lion-Faced Boy, the English Fat Girl so fat the Human Skeleton, the Welsh Giant, the Lilliputians, tattooed men, a man with an iron skull, dancers, jugglers, gunspinners, "lady" musicians, and the three- legged boy. Eternal types at the circus. The noise was terrific, the air dense with the aura of unwashed humanity. This aura was twin to the aura in a monkey house. But I enjoyed my "bath of multitude," as Charles Baudelaire names it, and I should not have bothered the tall creature with such an inept question. She coldly regarded me: "No, I haven t seen Hedda to-day, but I re member George Tesman always teased her with one question, What do you know about that, Hed? J Shoo! Sardou for mine." "Do you read George Blarney Shaw?" I persisted. "He ought to be in a cage here. He would draw some crowds. But I m told he lives in Germany now on account of the beer." I backed away quickly as an East Side family consisting of a baker s dozen, would allow. Why had I asked such a question of a perfect stranger? This giantess, I mused before the rhinoceros with the double prongs, is Finnish. That s why she knew 123 VARIATIONS the name of Hedda Gabler. Why didn t I speakof Rosmersholm ? Rebecca West had Finnishblood in her veins. Careful, careful this Ibsen obsession must be surmounted, else I shall be inquiring of the giraffe if neck or nothing is the symbol of Brand. All or Nothing ! of course.How stupid of me. Among the animals I re gained my equilibrium. Their odors evokedmemories. Yes, I recalled the old-time circus, with its compact pitched canvas tent on NorthBroad Street, Philadelphia: the pink lemonade,the hoarse voice of the man who entreated usto buy tickets there were no megaphones inthose days the crisp crackling of the roastingpeanuts, the ovens revolved by the man fromRavenna, the man from Ascoli, and the man fromMilan. They followed the circus all the wayfrom Point Breeze, and I swear they were to mefar more human than the policemen who gentlywhacked us with their clubs when we crawledunder the tent. The sense of smell is first aid to memory.As I passed the cages saluting our pre-Adamicrelatives, bidding the time of day to the zebu,nodding in a debonair fashion to the yak, Icould not help longing for my first circus. Again I saw myself sitting in peaceful agony ona splintery plank; again I felt the slaps andpinches of my tender-hearted Aunt Sue nowin Paradise, I hope; again my heart tugged like a balloon at its moorings as the clowns jumpedinto the ring, grimacing, chortling, and fascinat124 CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? ing us with their ludicrous inhumanity. Again we sat, a lot of noisy rapscallions, on the stoop of Edwin Forrest s home the old Forrest man sion is still on the west side of Broad Street and how we tumbled to the sidewalk when that terrific tragedian opened the door and trans fixed us with his glittering glance. I can still see his leonine head with its shock of iron-gray curls, his exposed bull-neck, and hear his angry roar: "Get to blank out of here, you blanketyblanks ! " It was the giant s voice of Metamora, Coriolanus, Lear that we heard, an echo from the grand period in the history of the American theatre; but we didn t know that. We were mischievous boys, and made mock of the mighty Edwin, no doubt adding insult to injury by twiddling derisive thumbs at our noses. Other days, other ways. I sighed as I tore myself loose from the prehensile trunk of a too friendly baby elephant and passed into the huge auditorium where Gilmore had played. Ah! the sad, bad, glad, dear, dead, tiresome, povertystricken, beautiful days when we were young imbeciles and held hands with a fresh " ideal" every week (sometimes two). Ah! the senti mental "jag" induced by peanut eating, and the chaste, odoriferous apes. It is time. We seat ourselves. I look about me. Two resplendent gentlemen wearing eve ning clothes at high noon, after the daring man ner of our Gallic cousins, toll a bell. I became excited. Why those three and thirty strokes? 125 VARIATIONS What the symbolism ! Chopin, or Ibsen; again, I groaned, and turned my attention to myneighbors, one of whom I could feel, thoughdid not see. I raised my voice, employing cer tain vocables hardly fit to print. The effect was magical. " Johnny, take your feet out of the gentleman s collar. That s a good boy." It was the soothing voice of a mother. Bless herclairvoyance! I sat comfortably back in myseat. Johnny howled at the interference withhis pleasure. I felt sorrow for him. Childhoodis ever individualistic, even pragmatic. But Ionly had one collar with me, and it was well thematter thus ended. Hurrah ! Here they come ! A goodly band.The clowns ! the clowns ! Some hieratic owl ofwisdom has called the clown the epitome of mankind. He certainly stands for something, this " full-fledged fool," as good old Tody Hamiltonused to write, and "surcharged with the Roeof Fun," which phrase beats Delaware shad.Odds fish! There was only one Hamilton.What a Rabelaisian list of names boast thesemerry clowns ! If the years have passed overthe skulls of these lively rascals, jolly boys donot show them. The same squeaks, the iden tical yodling, the funny yet sinister expressionof the eyes, the cruel, red-slitted mouths nota day older than ten did I seem as they cametumbling in and began their horse-play, punctuated with yelling, yahoo gestures, ribald ejacula tions, and knockabout diversions. It must all 126 CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? mean something, this hooting, in the economy of the universe, else "life is a suck and a sell," as Walt Whitman puts it. As in a dream-mirror I saw Solness slowly mount the fatal tower when Hilda Wangel cries to him: "My my Masterbuilder!" She sings The Maiden s Wish, and he hears the harps of Chopin hum in the air. I rub my ears. It is not Hilda who is crying, but a pet pig in a baby carriage, wheeled by a chalkfaced varlet. How difficult it is to escape the hallucinations of the critical profession. I couldn t forget Chopin or Ibsen even at the circus. It was with relief, after more bellmanship from the man with the shiny silk hat and spiked coat, as the elephants majestically entered. Followed the horses. Tumblers and wirewalkers, women who stood on their heads and smiled as they do in life. Something like the "inverted pyramid," as James Hinton called modern civilization plastic poseurs, Oriental jugglers, the show was let loose at last. Human projectiles were launched through midair to the tap of a drum. My nerves forbade me to look at them, so I read a programme advertisement of wall-paper for bathrooms. Some people like such horrible sights. I do not. They dare not precisely formulate to themselves the wish that "something" would happen, and when it does they shudder with sadistic joy. I close my eyes when the Whirl of Death or any other sensational act is staged. "Something" might happen. 127 VARIATIONS The mad dancers delight our rhythmic sense as they make marvellous arabesques. Thechariot races stir the blood. The crash aroundcurves, the patters of gleaming metal excite so that you stand up, and, brushing the feet of inevitable Johnny from your neck (notwith standing his remonstrances), you shout withwoolly mouth and husky voice. Instinctively you turn down your thumbs: "Pollice verso," which Bayard Taylor translated "the perverse police." You remember the Ger6me painting?"This beats Ibsen," I hilariously exclaimed to Johnny s mother. (She was a comely matron.)"His name is John, and when he gets home his father will beat him," she tartly replied. Withthe prevoyance of boyhood Johnny burst into despairing howls. I at once folded up my mind.A million things were happening in the haze of the many rings. The New Circus is polyphonic,or nothing. Enough ! Filled to the eyes with the dis tracting spectacle, ear-drums fatigued by the blare and bang of the monster brass band, mycollar quite wilted by Johnny s shoemaker, mytemper in rags because of the panting, struggling army of fellow-beings, I reached the avenuein safety, perspiring, thirsty, unhappy. LikeStendhal, after his first and eagerly longed-for battle of love, I exclaimed: "Is that all?" Insooth, it had been too much. The human sen- sorium is savagely assaulted at the twentiethcentury circus. I was in pessimistic enough128 CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? humor to regret the single ring, the antique japes of a solitary clown, and the bewitching horsemanship of Mile. Leonie, with her gauze skirts and perpetual rictus. As a matter of fact, we wouldn t endure for five minutes the old- fashioned circus and its tepid lemonade. Where are the mullygrubs of yesteryear? But the human heart is perverse. It always longs for the penny and the cake in company, while in eluctable destiny ever separates them. Perhaps my editor was right. Render unto Chopin the things that are Chopin s; send Ibsen back to his Land of the Midnight Whiskers. Smell the sawdust at the Garden, not forgetting that the chilly, dry days are at hand when even Panem et Circenses shall be taboo; when pipe and prog and grog will be banned; when these United States shall have been renamed Puritania; when a fanatically selfish minority shall take all the joy from life. Ergo, carpe diem ! I thank you. 129 ART AND ALCOHOL WHAT will be the reactions among artistic men and women summarily deprived of wine andmalt beverages ? I asked this of Manager GattiCasazza the other day at the Metropolitan OperaHouse. He is not a drinking man, but the con temptuous shrug of his shoulders showed mehis position in the thrice-vexed controversy. Singers, one and all, are accustomed to mildalcoholic refreshment. If they go beyondbounds the effect on their voices is soon mademanifest, but usually being foreign-born, theyhave been in the habit of drinking light winesat meal time, perhaps beer after a performance,for good beer relaxes nerve-tension. Peopledon t drink beer to become intoxicated; theydrink it because it lets down the pressure of aday s work better than whiskey or wine. Beeris not an intoxicant; it is a depressant. The crythat "the workingman must have his beer" is far too exclusive. The professional man, thebrain-worker, needs beer, and the singer or musician sometimes singers are not musicians ! after a nerve-exhausting performance finds in wine or beer a veritable solace. Matthew Arnold wrote that the American funny man was anational calamity. What would he have said to the plans of certain misguided females to 130 ART AND ALCOHOL found " recreation centres" where, after eight hours exhausting daily grind, the workman could listen to " instructive reading" ye gods ! and drink non-alcoholic beverages (supertaxed?). Little wonder Bolshevism is growing apace in an America that soon will be a vast Dry Tortugas. In one of hsr always interesting novels Ger trude Atherton depicts a poet whose inspiration dried up when he stopped drinking. Swinburne is said to have been Mrs. AthertonJ s model; when the English poet ceased his cognac his muse did not fly far afterward. If he had not become temperate in regard to spirituous liquors the greatest Victorian poet would have died. Walter Savage Landor, and after him Byron, wrote that brandy is a drink fit only for heroes. The puny physique of Swinburne could ill brook alcoholic excesses. His friend and protector, Theodore Watts-Dunton, literally saved the effervescent Algernon Charles from sudden death. As a rule lyric poets need no stimulant. Youth is the propulsive force to their lyricism. If Byron drank heavily at times, Shelley was ever a water-drinker. No rules can be formu lated. There is Bernard Shaw, the "Uncle Gurnemanz" and venerable busybody of inter national politics. He is a fierce teetotaler. He has confessed that family reasons prompted him to become so, although Archdale Reid in Hered ity has shown that acquired traits are not in herited; that the children of drunkards are sel- VARIATIONS dom drunkards (prohibitionists declare the opposite, but figures can be made to lie). By thesame token the sons of clergymen are not often pious. Nature abhors uniformity. If Shawhad taken his ale like the British workmen heharangues, he would not have been the pestifer ous nuisance he is to-day. But, like all "re formers," "uplifters," and public nuisances, hehas a weak stomach. Because he is virtuous ! -the motto of all these Malvolios, these tailless foxes. Mind your own business ! Ah ! that s the true golden rule. There would be no warsif this custom prevailed. The late Lombroso-Levi, formulator of manyingenious and amusing theories concerning thestigmata of genius, has collected some names of men who drank, nevertheless who contrived to leave the world in their debt for their art. MaxNordau followed his "master" with his absurdtome on Degeneration, and then the system,chiefly framed for imbeciles, quite collapsed. Professor William James sent the cardboardstructure into thin air when he revealed its numerous inconsistencies. Any stigma applicable to genius or talent may be found in your shoe maker, butcher, or policeman, from megalomaniato alcoholism, from faun-like ears with attachedlobes to an unholy greed for other people s money. Let us look at Lombroso s list of al coholic men of genius. He writes that Alex ander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules (some thirst !). Julius Caesar 132 ART AND ALCOHOL was often carried home on the shoulders of his friends so was a certain highest dignitary in the United States during the last century, and a mediocrity he was. Socrates, Seneca, Alcibi- ades, Cato, Peter the Great, the Czarina Cath erine were notorious boozers. Tiberius Nero was nicknamed Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and Mahomet II died in delirium tremens. Jan Steen and Frans Hals were heavy imbibers. Hals, who lived to an advanced age and painted masterpieces to the last, was drunk every night. So was Monticelli, absinthe proving his ruin. George Morland drank, and Turner, too; both drank to excess. As for the poets and literary men, the litany is long. Henry Murger, Gerard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoff mann, Addison, Steele, Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Hartley Cole ridge, James Clarence Mangan, Ernest Dowson, Swinburne Rossetti, who drugged and Cole ridge, De Quincey and Mme. de Stael abused opium. In the domain of music examples are as thick as bombs were at Verdun. Handel swallowed a mighty amount of firewater, for he was a mighty man. Gluck drank far more than was good for him. It was a pleasing habit of his to have a harpsichord placed in some pretty rural spot, where, with a regiment of bottles, he played and composed. He died, so it is said, of brandy. Tasso drank, Baudelaire drugged and drank, and Lenau, poet, died from alcohol. Mozart and 133 VARIATIONS Beethoven abused wine. Beethoven was often"a little how come ye so!" Modern instancesmultiply. Singers, players, actors, authors,composers how many there are about whoseheads is the aura of alcoholism ! Alcohol hasbeen the nursing bottle of genius, and of manycommonplace citizens may not the same be said ? Woe to him who abuses the priceless gift. Heis doomed. And doomed, too, is the prohibi tionist who overindulges in flapjacks and fried steak. Native cookery has slain more than therum mills of the universe. And notwithstand ing our vaunted cosmopolitanism, a natural outcome of the great war, the village pump is to be our national Totem. Butchered to make aprohibitionist holiday; that prohibition whichhas elevated " legislation" to the dignity of asport. RichardWagner possessed an irritable stomach,but was comforted by a glass of good wine (as apparently was St. Paul). Walt Whitmanneither smoked nor drank. Poor Guy de Maupassant began with wine, and, in the wake of erotic excesses, he resorted to opium, even to ether, which he would put on his handkerchiefand apply to his nostrils. Such a hatred of reality was his ! He well deserved the appella tion of "Taureau triste," as he was surly towardthe end of a brilliant career. Flaubert, like Zola, was chary of excess, except in literary work. Be chaste in your life that you may beviolent in your art ! he enjoined de Maupassant.134 ART AND ALCOHOL Turgenieff, Daudet, Huysmans, Gounod, Goncourt, were not alcoholic. Bizet, it is said, died of absinthe, not of disappointment over the fail ure of Carmen; which didn t fail, as Philip Hale has shown us. Goethe was wild in his youth, drank wine, pursued the golden girl, yet he cannot by any stretch of imagination be placed in the ranks of the drunkards. The alcoholic neurosis exists in the individual, who drinks be cause he is neurotic, and is not necessarily neu rotic because he is a drunkard. As usual, the prohibitionists have put the cart before the horse, being ignorant, or pretending to be, of facts dis closed by modern biological research. These fanatics suffer from what might be called psy chical dandruff. What am I trying to prove? Nothing. Al cohol inspired or spurred on these men, and we are the inheritors of their visions. Naturally, to the boneheads who engineer reforms, all art is dangerous, is immoral. Art, like religion, is also an opiate. God made the dawn, but the devil invented the evening. The Seven Arts are the invention of men in revolt against the tedium of life. Killing time is only killing one s self, for we are crucified at the crossroads of Time and Space (with the Button-Moulder lurk ing around the corner). To escape the eternal ennui man created the arts, and music, the most soothing of the seven, has drugged his dreams and made fantastic the rude angles of concrete life. Perhaps music is only a majestic noise. 135 VARIATIONS Sometimes it bruises the soul as do bells the air. It can retire majestically into the recesses of theimagination, like the faint roar of surf withdrawnon the beach of Time. It may be a ballet fortriphammers or as splendidly sonorous as thecolor chords of Picasso or the tortured mechanisms of Marcel Duchamps. But always anopiate, a consoler. The truth is that our existence without somebuffer between our naked souls and the chill wind of empty spiritual space would be inconceivable. Man devised Time and Space symbols of his terrifying ignorance in the presence of eternity and religion and the artswherewith he might cloak his nakedness. Allthe rest is vanity. Prohibition is only a symptom of the everlasting propensity of intolerantminds to fashion others after their own meanimage. There is no need to worry over it. Like other tyrannical devices to enslave the willof mankind, it will be tested, found wanting, anddropped. And the best way to hasten the decease is to enforce rigidly the law. But comewhat may, art and alcohol are inseparablywedded, as in the Greek myth Apollo and Dionysos imaged beauty and ecstasy. 136 THE TRAGIC CHOPIN CHOPIN has bequeathed to us six scherzos. The four that comprise a group are opus 20, in B minor; opus 31, B flat minor; opus 39, C sharp minor, and opus 54, E major. The two remaining scherzos are in the second sonata, opus 35, and in the third sonata, opus 58. They are in the respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions are evi dences of the power, originality, variety, and delicacy of Chopin. The scherzo is formally not his invention. Beethoven and Mendels sohn anticipated him. But he remodelled the form and filled it with a surprisingly novel con tent, though not altering its three-four measure. With the Beethoven scherzo we realize the swing, the robustiousness and, at times, the rude jollity. In the Mendelssohn scherzo we enjoy the velocity and finish. Light without heat, true scherzando moods; indeed, more scherzo-like than Chopin s, Mendelssohn s sense of elfin joy stemmed from the early Italian masters of the pianoforte. Rossini voiced this belief after hearing the scherzo a capriccio from the nimble fingers of Felix himself, and said to the composer: "That smells of Scarlatti." And it does recall Domenico Scarlatti, whose compositions, slight as to structure, are replete with gracious vitality 137 VARIATIONS and a surface skimming of sentiment like thecurved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.A terrible though beautiful domain is theChopin scherzo. Only two have the lightnessof touch, clarity in atmosphere and bustlinggaiety of the conventional scherzo: the otherfour are fierce, grave, ironic, sardonic, fiery, passionate, even hysterical, and most melancholy.In several the moods are pathologic; in all, magical. The scherzo in E, opus 54, may bebest described by the thrice commonplace word,delightful. It is sunny music, and its sweep andswiftness are compelling. The five preludingbars of half-notes, unison, strike the keynoteof optimism. What follows is like the rufflingof tree-tops by warm southern winds. Thelittle upward flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar, in major thirds and fourths, has beencleverly utilized by Saint-Saens in the scherzoof his G minor piano concerto, opus 22. Thefanciful embroidery of the single finger passagesis never opaque; a sparkling, bubbling freedomand freshness characterize this Chopin scherzo,a composition not heard too often in public,possibly because there are few pianists, likeJoseffy or De Pachmann, to play it. Its emotional content is not deep; it lies well within thecategory of the elegant, the capricious. Itsfourth page contains an episode which at first blush suggests the theme of the A flat valse,opus 42, with its comminglement of duplex and138 THE TRAGIC CHOPIN triple rhythms. Although the piu lento is in C sharp minor, it betrays little sadness; it is but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges the wind-swept moorland. This scherzo in E is a mood of joyousness; as joyous as the witty, sensitive, umbrageous com poser ever allowed himself to become. Its coda is not so forcible as the usual Chopin coda. There is a dazzling flutter of silvery scale at the close. Altogether a charming work. Closely allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo from the B minor sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation is genial though not surprisingly ingenious. It some what savors of Weber. It might go on forever. The resolution is not intellectual; it is purely one of tonality. The thought is tenuous. But it is highly embroidered relief after the first movement of the sonata. Nor is the trio in B particularly noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo, which challenges Mendelssohn on his native heath. It may be considered as an intermezzo, also as a prelude to the lyric measures. We are on firm and familiar footing when the first page is opened of the B flat minor scherzo, the second in order of composition. Who has not heard with interest those overarching and questioning triplets which Chopin could never make his pupils play sufficiently tombe " ? He told De Lenz: "It must be a charnel-house." Alas! These same vaulted phrases have since become banal. This scherzo, like the lovely 139 VARIATIONS A flat Ballade, is cruelly tortured by the ambitious musical flapper. Yet how great, howvigorous, it all is; how it abounds in sweetnessand light when the music falls from the fingers of a master ! It is a Byronic poem "so ten der, so bold, as full of love as of scorn," to quoteSchumann. Has Chopin ever penned a moredelicious song than this in D flat, with its stray ing over the tonal borderland? It is the highnoon of life. The dark bud of the introductionhas come to a perfect flowering, and with whatmiracles of scent, shape, and color ! The secondsection has the quality of sane wit. It is seriousto severity, yet its meanings are noble. Thebrief excursion that follows is the awakeningfrom a wondering dream; no suggestion there ofpallid morbidities. And how supremely weldedis the style with the subject; what masterlywriting evolved from the genius of the instru ment ! Then, fearful that he has dwelt too longupon his ideas, Chopin, in a rapturous flight, soars away to clear sky. After the repetitioncomes the development section, and while it is ingenious and effective in a chaotic way, nevertheless it is here that the composer is at his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of Beethoven,which permitted him to survey his material fromevery point of view, Chopin could not boast. He is a great composer, but he was also a greatpianist. He nurses his themes with construc tive frugality, and sometimes the mechanicallimitation of the piano checks his imagination.140 THE TRAGIC CHOPIN The well-sounding is considered as much as the clearly thought. There is logic in his exposi tion, though it is often piano, not music, logic. A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off in the spontaneous urge of the earlier pages, force us to feel easier with the return of the first theme. The coda is brilliant. This scherzo in B flat minor bids fair to remain the favorite among its fellows. It is neither cryptic nor repellent, like the first and third scherzo. It is a perennial joy to pupil and public. Like the soliloquy in Hamlet, the B flat minor scherzo is become a popular quotation. Its predecessor in B minor, opus 20, is the profounder of the pair, but not so melodious. It is the most shrill and hysterical of the scherzos. Though in the ironic vein, it is Chopin recklessly throwing himself to the winds of remorse a Manfred mood, a mood of self-torture, a con fession from the first chord to the last. Within the dream inclosed by its gates of tonal brass there is the struggle of an imprisoned soul. It is the unhappiest and the most riotous of the Pole s works, and it is also unduly long. Its emotional keynote is too tense to permit of the repetitions marked by the composer. These repetitions are unsuited to present taste, which, above all, demands brevity. Poignancy and prolixity are mutually exclusive. The piece greatly gains when played without "da capo." Its first part is so drastically harsh that the 141 VARIATIONS succeeding melody in B, with its lilting tenths- "the sweet slumber of the moonlight on thehill" - after the tragic strain comes as benison. This scherzo seems to possess a personal message. Chopin, like Robert Louis Stevenson, wasconsumptive. Slender of frame, as was theScotch writer, his spirit was leonine. His waspsychic bravery. He could write terrible music,conjure up desperate images. A sense of stifled longing, of the inability to compass his lofty ambitions, fill this first scherzo. It is the trag edy of Chopin s life compressed within a fewpages; the tragedy of one whose spirit wasweaker than his flesh. The arabesques after the eight-bar introduc tion some of them muted bars, as is Chopin s wont has a spiritual resemblance to the prin cipal figure in the Fantasie-Impromptu, opus66; but instead of the ductile triplets, as in thebars of the Impromptu, the figure in the scherzois divided between the hands, while the harsh ness of the mood is emphasized by the anticipa tory chord in the left hand. The vitality of this first page is positively electrifying. Thequestioning chords at the close of the section are as imaginative as any passage ever writtenby the composer. The half-notes E and theupleaping appogiaturia are evidences of his originality in minor details. These occur before the modulation into the lyric theme andwith some slight dashes before the dash into thecoda. The second section, in agitato, contains142 THE TRAGIC CHOPIN several knotty harmonic problems; they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony. Here Chopin is bold to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the very gates of heaven or hell. But the thunder and surge, after waxing, soon wanes and spends itself. The soul has stormed itself into sheer weariness. By critical consent, the molto piu lento is a masterpiece. Written in the luscious key of B, it is like a woven enchantment. Chopin attains most subtle effects with broken accords in tenths. The only other slow movements comparable to this are the B major episode in the B minor octave study, opus 25, and the largo of the B minor sonata. The Garden of Armida or the Vale of Tempe are evoked by all three tone- poems. Mark how the composer resumes his first savage mood. It is a picture of contrasted vi olences. Beware of the "da capo." Too many repetitions provoke satiety. Rather attack at once the coda that most dramatic of Chopin s codas. Bold, breathless, startling, is this im petuous ride cross country. The heavy accen tuation on the first note of every bar should not obscure one s rhythmic sense to the second beat in the left, which is likewise accented. This produces mixed rhythms, which add to the murkiness, confusion, and despair of the finale. These daring dissonances so daring, so logi cal, so dramatic how they must have rasped the nerves of Chopin s contemporaries! And 143 VARIATIONS they should be rigorously insisted upon. Noveiled half-lights. All bridges are burned. Naught remains but catastrophe. To his doomgoes this musical Childe Roland! The DarkTower crumbles as the poet dauntlessly blowshis slug-horn. The scherzo ends in overwhelm ing ruin. The last page is a supreme offering to the god of pessimism. Even though the sneering fretfulness of anunhappy sick-brained man disturbs its sharp contours, the third scherzo in C sharp minor, opus 39, is the most dramatic and the finest moulded of them all. It is capricious to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It seethes with scorn if such an extravagantexpression may be allowed; but it is extravagant, full of fire and fury, yet signifying something. A word as to the tempo: The scherzos, with a few exceptions, are marked presto, but we mustremember that it is the presto of Chopin s time, also of his piano action. His favorite Pleyel piano was light and elastic in action. To-dayactions are heavier, the key dip greater, thoughthe elasticity is the same. Therefore the tempiof these scherzos or should I write scherzi ? - ought to be moderated, otherwise the musicloses its significant ponderability, not to say dignity, when we adopt the old-fashioned timemarkings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may be taken at a presto pace that is, a commodious presto, the scherzo in E major must be144 THE TRAGIC CHOPIN played presto; also the one in E flat, as both are of the velocity genre; but when the thought takes on a graver hue, where the mastery of utterance and nobility of phrase are to be con sidered, then moderate your pulse-beat. The scherzo in C sharp minor is a special sufferer from a too hurried speed. Architectonics are blurred, details jumbled and grandeur of style is absent. And if you start with such a fiery tempo, how shall you secure contrast in the coda, which should be fairly shot from the finger-tips? Or would you emulate Schumann in his G minor sonata, in the finale, which begins prestissimo, and is later ordered by the com poser to become still more prestissimo ? Achieve a presto, by all means, but consider the heavier tonal mass of the modern piano. This C sharp minor scherzo is a massive com position, yet replete with fitful starts and rhyth mic surprises. The chorale and its trio are Chopinesque as to fioritura and in harmonic basis. Throughout the narrative tone is dra matic; even in the "meno mosso" it never tar ries. The coda is built on an effect of persistent iteration. It is excellently adapted to the key board. The composition has affinities with the dark and grotesque conceptions of Hoffmann, Poe, or Coleridge. Its acid irony recalls Heine. It is like fantastic architecture seen in a dream; about it hover perpetual gloom and the despair ing things that circle in the night. It is like a tale from Poe s iron-bound, melancholy volume VARIATIONS of the Magi and across its portal is written the word, Spleen. Remains the E flat minor scherzo from the second sonata. It is the most powerful of the set. To interpret, one needs breadth of style, heroic spirit, abetted by wrists of steel. Thebig Rossinian one-bar crescendo at the begin ning taxes the strength. The composition is elemental; the chromatic whistling of the windin the chord of the sixth makes true storm-music. There is menacing gloom in the initial bars; the blissful song is not quite uninterrupted bliss; there is always a tempest that threatens. Thedescending octaves, which seem to invite us to the infernal regions, are swept away by the storm-theme, and once more we are madly pro jected through space. Satanic pride, a challenge to fate, the defiance of the microcosm to the threatening macrocosm; these and other char acteristics may be imagined in this profoundwork. It depends on the listener. With Chopinas with Rome, you carry away what you fetch to either man or city. But your little Peter s pence of sympathy has suffered a rich changein the return. We are the gainers. Some day, no longer as remote as when the fallacious belief that the music of any particular nation is better than another s, perhaps Chopin may standwhere he should, next to Bach, Mozart, and Bee thoven. There is no such thing as map-music;there is only beautiful music. And you cannever play Chopin beautifully enough. 146 PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN TO-DAY the Impromptus of Chopin are well- nigh impossible in the concert-room. Those delights of all true " flappers," the FantasieImpromptu in C sharp minor, and the A flat Impromptu are played too often, that is, played badly. The first part of the Fantasie-Impromptu is taken at too swift a pace, and, in consequence, sounds too much like an etude, when in reality its arabesques do hint at some thing more emotional. The figuration suggests that of the B minor scherzo, not, however, so pregnant with dramatic meanings. And that second section in D flat, how it is dragged, how it is sprawled and drawled ! In company with the second theme of the Funeral March, it is the most sentimental of its composer. The greater Chopin is revealed in the second Im promptu, the one in the key of F sharp major. It is a sheaf of moods organically more bound together than seems at a first hearing. Because of its true impromptu spirit, its vagrant moods, its restless outpouring of fancies, it has been rather disregarded by some Chopinists, who, hidebound as any academic critic, are shocked by the changes in tonality, and, being unimag147 VARIATIONS inative, are shocked also by the capricious shift ing of moods; one dream melts into another,and after a repetition of those sweetly attunedchords at the close, a vigorous affirmationawakens the listener as would a sudden clapof thunder during a peaceful evening in June.There are several enigmatic bars of modulationthat have puzzled purists and still are disquiet ing even to excursionists through the tangledharmonic underwoods of Ornstein and Stra vinsky. I refer to a transitional passage after the march-like measures and immediately before the return of the principal melody. Else where I have compared them to the creakingof a rusty hinge in the dooryard where WaltWhitman s lilacs last bloomed. The G flat Impromptu, the third in the published orderthe Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66, is pos thumous was seldom heard in recital till Vladimir de Pachmann, master expositor ofthe more delicate phases of the Polish composer,revived it in his programme. Since then it is become more familiar. It is charming with its spiral figuration, though less novel than its two predecessors. The Mazurkas, those impish, morbid, gay,sour, dour, graceful little dances, I need notdwell upon here at length. For the majorityof pianists they are a sealed book, and if youhave not a savor of Slav in you pray do notdisturb them with your literalism. De Pachmann, Godowsky, Paderewski, Gabrilowitsch,148 PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN and Josef Hofmann play them wonderfully, but how few others. I recall a story told me by Rosenthal, whose colossal performances here are memorable. He wished to hear from De Pachmann s nimble fingers his own version of the Mazurkas and paid the Russian a visit one evening. Pachmann did not greet Rosenthai too sympathetically. "Ah !" he exclaimed, when Moriz, the octave-thunderbolt, explained the reason for his unexpected appearance. "Ah ! but I play the Mazurkas so badly. Now, if I had your technique" his eyes fairly sparkled with malicious irony "I might be able to play them!" However, he was persuaded, and once seated at the piano he didn t leave it till he had almost finished the entire collection; and Cho pin wrote many of these dances. (At least fifty-one, if you include several of doubtful authenticity). How did he play them, this perverse magical artist? Rosenthal told me that he had never heard such beautiful, subtle, and treacherous playing; the treachery was the manner in which he interpreted the music. Not an accent was correct, the phrasing was falsified, though the precise notation was ad hered to, and all delivered with a variety of touches positively exquisite. " There!" cried De Pachmann, as he finished, "that is the only way to play the Mazurkas." And he smiled with his eyes. "Not!" thought Rosenthal, who thanked his colleague and hurried into the open air where he could explode. Talk 149 VARIATIONS about camouflage! The joke was later whenRosenthal teased De Pachmann about histrickery and the Chopinzee absolutely grinnedwith joy. Surely, as Sam Johnson remarked,the reciprocal civility of authors is one of themost risible scenes in the farce of life. Thesplenetic doctor could have joined musiciansto authors. Chopin has composed some marvellous musicin the Mazurka form. Consider the three orfour of these dances in the key of C sharp minor,the poetic one in B flat minor, the one with themorbidly insistent theme in B minor or thatsad, appealing example in F minor, the last which Chopin is said to have put on paper. Its fixed idea, its hectic gaiety and acrid gloomreveal a sick brain, the brain of a dying man.But there are many other Mazurkas filled withdaylight cheerfulness. Of the greater Chopinposterity will probably acclaim the Polonaisesin F sharp minor, A flat major and the Fantaisie-Polonaise in the same key. There is awealth of fantasy in this Polonaise, opus 61;its restless tonalities, the beauty of the first theme, the vaporous deliquesence later of this theme, the violent mood changes and harmonicgrandeur left this work to the elect of the composer. The F sharp minor Polonaise and theso-called Siberian in E flat minor, as well as thePolonaise in C minor are nothing if not virile. They demand men as well as pianists to inter pret them. PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN Liszt pronounced the F sharp minor Polonaise pathologic. As a matter of fact, it surpasses in sombre grandeur the Heroic Polonaise, opus 53, notwithstanding the thundering cannons and cavalry charges of the more popular of the pair. The triplets in eight notes of the introduction achieve a splendid climax of sus pense before the entrance of the chief theme. Soon octaves and chords supplant the single notes of the melody. There is epical breadth which at each reiteration becomes bigger, so big that it almost overflows the frame of the keyboard, in suggestion becomes orchestral. The second subject in the major (D flat) is less drastic, is an excellent contrast figure. The strange intermezzo in A which precedes the Mazurka is not enigmatic if you hear it as a sinister roll of drums. I think of Rembrandt s Night Watch, and its muffled morning music. Its intent is manifest, it leads to the second theme, now transposed to the despairing key of C sharp minor; the Mazurka which follows tempted Liszt or his amanuensis, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein to the most extravagant panegyric. Its brace of double notes, thirds and sixths are lovely in hue and scent, but pray do not languish your tempo, else the episode soon becomes sugary. Again the Polonaise resumes its elemental chant, a chant which grows huger in rancorous woe until the very bottom of the pit of desolation is reached, and, without a gleam of light, comes the code with VARIATIONS mutterings of the main theme, and only in thevery last bar we hear with positive relief asmashing F sharp in octaves. What does it all mean? Some obscure psychological drama of the composer s soul in whichhe vents his spleen, indignation and defiance,and rages against the ineluctable canons ofdestiny. In a sense this Polonaise is pathologic.It appeals to the nerves. It lacerates the pulpof our sensibility, it is morbid, but it is alsomagnificent. It is not sensational like the twoPolonaises of Liszt in E major and C minor,though it is equally brilliant. Arthur Friedheim played the Chopin Polonaise superbly atone time. It suited his saturnine mood. I fancy, however, that Franz Liszt s performancemust have been the supreme exemplar. Thereis a loftiness of mood coupled with the heroicpatterns of this piece which place it in the cate gory of masterpieces. It reminds one of a sullen, rugged landscape in the style of Salvator Rosa,a solitary human in the foreground, distracted,who lifts suicidal hands to the darkling, indif ferent skies. It is the tragedy of Man, who is no longer, as in the old-fashioned geocentricconception of the universe, the centre of things, but discovers himself alone, deserted by thefamiliar signs and stars in his cosey firmament,and despairs. The tragedy of unfaith. Thetragedy of love that slays. Unhappy Chopinwas baptized a Roman Catholic, so was GeorgeSand. Both were, to put the case mildly, slack152 PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN in the practices of their church. Chopin was of a pious bent. He concealed his attachment to the French sphinx of the inkpot from his mother in War saw because he feared to pain her. She was profoundly religious. Madame Sand, who didn t wear trousers and smoke all day, as cari cature proclaims, was cruel to her consumptive genius. She appreciated his work, but his humors were antic. She called Frederic "mon cher cadavre," and this "corpse" must have grated on his nerves. Oh ! if he had possessed but a tithe of her saving sense of humor. But Chopin was not given to jesting over his love. He flirted and mildly diverted himself; the Sand affair was deadly serious to him. When the spirit moved her she betrayed him (let us politely call it spirit rather than temperament). Her final desertion didn t kill him. It was the liaison that slew the man, body and soul. She robbed him of love, faith, and fatherland. His ending, though, was in the proper religious key. According to Turgines, half the countesses in Europe sang him to his death. (Many are still singing their hearers along the same road.) I believe the F sharp Polonaise to be the most subjective from the pen of its composer, even more so than the B minor scherzo, opus 20. The nocturnes are done to death. Let us pass them by. The C sharp minor nocturne is like the one in C minor; both are still free from persecution at the hands of the young 153 VARIATIONS person who has decked the most virile spirit of his age with Parisian millinery. These twonocturnes do not intrigue the fancy of the amateur. In breadth of conception they are Beethovenian. The E major nocturne, a favorite of Josef Hofmann, and the one in B, the Tuberose, in which Paderewski proved so elo quent and whose very title makes H. L.Mencken grit his teeth, are loaded with purestChopin ore. I admire, but with reservations, the transcription of various nocturnes to in struments of the string family. Wilhelmj trans posed the D flat nocturne for violin and LeopoldAuer has arranged the posthumous nocturnein E minor, which Heifetz plays beautifully; yet, effective as they may be, they are not truly Chopinesque. They are too saccharine on the strings; we miss the cool, crystalline tones of the pianoforte. The Berceuse ! Of that wonder-child whocame to us through the pink gates of the dawn,and was rocked to rhythmic dreams in Chopin s Cradle Song, I may only say that in the handsof many pianists it has grown to be a brat of banal visage and muscular proportions. Anululation of the D flat tonality, it has now be come a mere finger study. When Joseffy playedthe composition a poem emerged from the ivories. What of the Preludes? Alone thetwenty-five Preludes would give their creator a claim on immortality. There are technical range and poetic vision; above all, there is 154 PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN humanity. Shades of feeling are explored, depths and altitudes of passion explored. If all Chopin were to be annulled I should plead for the salvation of the Preludes. The cameolike stillness of some is like softly spoken words overheard in a cloister. Truly religious. But thunder-riven Preludes in D minor, in B flat minor, in F minor and E flat minor stir our pulse to sharper vibration. Surpassingly sweet is the elegiac Prelude in B flat. It recalls the nocturnes. The second Prelude with its enig matic questionings is for a rainy day; a day when the soul is racked by doubt or defeat; about it, hovers a grisly something that we dare not define. It may be Chopin s Horla, this sinister music-making. A ray of sunshine, but from a sun that slants in the west is the Prelude in G. What marvels in miniature, what cun ningly wrought jewels! Darker drama maybe found as the D minor Prelude with its ele mental ground bass in angry sea roars somewhere in the background; also in the glit tering scales of the B flat minor Prelude and the declamatory passages of the F minor Pre lude. In the C sharp minor Prelude, opus 45, there are marked anticipations of the later manner of Brahms, not alone in spirit but in figuration. This Prelude is a foretaste of Brahms, the familiar Chopin note not missing. The embroideries of the Barcarolle a fully developed and dramatic Nocturne and of the Bolero are more Polish than Italian or 155 VARIATIONS Spanish. By some critics the Fantaisie, opus49, has been adjudged the most perfect workof the composer. The grave, march-like intro ductions, the insistent, climbing figures in trip lets, the great song in F minor, followed by theenchanting episodes in double-notes, and thepowerful climax reveal another Chopin from thesentimental dreamer, the conventional Thaddeus of Warsaw. There is logical development.There are dramatic scope and intensity. Thelento is peaceful, the coda impressive. Theentire composition is massive, its phraseologylong-breathed. It represents the master at the peak of his powers. 156 THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I WHEN Cosima I, Queen of Baireuth, does enter the eternal shadowland, her passing will not greatly intrigue the attention of a world whose ears buzz with the rumors of mightier happenings. She has been a dweller for years in the Twilights. (She was born December 25, 1837, at Bellagio, Italy, and not in 1840, as the musical annals have it.) She is the last of the famous dynasty founded by her husband, Rich ard Wagner, greatest of modern composers. No one, not even his admirers, dared pretend that Siegfried Wagner would ever succeed his father on the musical throne. A brief span Cosima entertained high hopes for her son s future. He had been coached by Humperdinck and Richter. His operas were produced in European capitals, but to no avail. He could not fill the shadow of his sire, much less write a bar of music worth the whistling. Wotan had fathered a Parsifal, Jr., and Baireuth sympa thized with Cosima s disappointment. It was the second sorrow of a life crowded with happi ness. In 1883 the man she adored as a god died on her bosom at Venice. That tragic event trans formed her from a loving wife to the sternly ambitious woman who ruled the destinies of Baireuth for thirty years. In 1913 the third 157 VARIATIONS sorrow came to her in the unwelcome shape of copyright expiration. The music of Wagnerwas free to every country. Parsifal, the Rhinegold of Baireuth, already had been ravished byan American Alberich; nevertheless, from the shock of the legal decision which blotted Baireuth off the map of music Cosima never recovered. She was become a shadow of her former grandeur. She had outlived her majesty. I first saw her in 1894. It was the summerwhen Lillian Nordica made her debut in the historic opera-house on the hill. Zoltan Doeme,her husband, also appeared. His Parsifal, too, is historic. Queen Cosima I was a tall, gauntwoman with the familiar Liszt profile, her white hair worn a la Liszt, her stride that of a grena dier. She ruled with an iron hand, a hand not encased in a velvet glove like her father s. Atyrant in petticoats was the usual ascription. Not loved, indeed feared, she ran the Baireuth machine with the shrewdness of a TammanyHall politician. Her contemporaries concur in that. A woman of brains, courage, audacity, she recalled for me a second Margravine of Baireuth in her domineering manner. Shewould tolerate no rivals. Conductor after con ductor came and went. When Lilli Lehmanntoward the close of a glorious artistic career sang, in 1896, then Gibraltar met Gibraltar. Lilli hadbeen one of the Rhine-Daughters in 1876. Sheknew her Wagner as well as Cosima. There waswarlike gossip then of which I got my fill. The158 THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I ladies parted the best of friends, of course. Olive Fremstad, a pupil of Lehmann, was one of the Rhine-Daughters that year. Ellen Gulbranson was the Brunnhilde after Lehmann. Alois Burgstaller made a clumsy debut as Sieg fried and Parsifal. Mottl was the reigning fa vorite, Felix of Munich, the first man in whom the inconsolable Cosima showed deep interest after the death of Richard. Cosima, all said and done, was a daughter of Franz Liszt. The last time I saw her was in 1901. With George Moore I stood on the esplanade facing the Franconian valley, and during an entr acte of the Ring we discussed the mediocre conducting of Prince Siegfried Wagner and the fond, foolish affection of his mother. She passed. This time she rode, but that rigid spine, the proud pose of the head, the undimmed hawk-like eyes I amthe widow of Wagner and the daughter of Liszt ! they seemed thus to challenge the gaze of the public proved her still in possession of all her powers. And she was then past sixty. Truly an extraordinary woman this, with her name out of the Italian Renaissance, herself like some be lated and imperious apparition from the Renais sance. Her forebears were just as remarkable. Liszt met her mother, the Countess d Agoult, in the brilliant whirl of his artistic successes at Paris. Chopin had dedicated to her the first book of his Etudes. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her intimates declare that hers was not a 159 VARIATIONS truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, in 1805, at Frankfort-on-Main, Germany. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, a French refugee, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a Hebrew converted to Lutheranism. Marie hadliterary ability, boasted of meeting Goethe once, and in 1827 she married Count Charles d Agoult of Paris. Social sedition was in the air. The"Misunderstood Woman" no new thing then, and still with us was the fashion. GeorgeSand was changing her lovers with every bookshe wrote, and the Countess d Agoult began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued one. Theyeloped. In honor he could not desert the woman. They made Geneva their home temporarily, for both had the nomad heart andwere doomed to pitch their tents in many strange places. In her own right Marie had twentythousand francs yearly income. It cost Liszt exactly three hundred thousand francs to keepup an establishment such as the lady had beenaccustomed to; he earned this at the keyboard, a tidy amount for those days. (There werepianistic money-kings before Paderewski.) Andyet she was not satisfied. Ever insatiable are artistic women. Mme. d Agoult bore him three children Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. Blandine, the beauty of the family, married Emile Ollivier in 160 THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I 1857. She died in 1862. Liszt greatly loved her. Ollivier was later Napoleon s war min ister, and was fooled to the top of his bent by the Mephisto of European politics, Count von Bismarck. He died a few years ago nearly a centenarian, and busy to the last explaining that he was not to blame for losing the tragic Franco-Prussian War. His hell was paved with good intentions before he reached there. Cosima married Hans von Billow, her father s "favorite pupil" (there were hundreds of them), in 1857. True to family form, she ran off with Richard Wagner, and, to the despair of her father, married that fickle gentleman. Her father s discomfiture was the result of Cosima s defection from the Roman Catholic faith. She renounced this faith and became of her hus band s religious persuasion, i. e., nominally a Protestant, in reality a free-thinker. Daniel Liszt, the hope of his father, died in December, 1859, at the age of twenty. Liszt had legitima tized the birth of his children, had educated them, had generously dowered his daughters, and all three were a source of sorrow to him. The high light of comedy was not absent when the gallant Count d Agoult we shan t say " bereaved of his wife," for who shall pretend to analyze the mixed emotions of a man sorely wounded in his pride of race and secretly over joyed at being rid of a pernicious blue-stocking ? - called a family council, which, after due con sideration, pronounced the verdict that Mon161 VARIATIONS sieur Frangois Liszt (they spelled it Litz in Paris) had behaved like a " perfect gentleman" in a certain delicate indiscretion, thereby absolving him from all blame in the matter. Recording angels on high must have wept, andGeorge Meredith lost a theme peculiarly fitted to his ironic pen. But the injured husbandcalmly went to his club every day and died in the odor of mundane sanctity. As might have been foreseen, la d Agoultquarrelled with her Liszt. They parted badfriends. Under the pen-name of Daniel Sternshe attacked him in her souvenirs and novels.He forgave. A most irritating trait in his char acter was his inability to hate his enemies. OfHeine alone he spoke ill. When some one askedhim if Heine s name would be carved on theportals of fame, Liszt replied: "Yes, in letters of mud"; which is manifestly unjust. In 1860Franz and Marie met for the last time, and inParis. He gently told her that the true title ofher souvenirs should have been Poses et Mensonges. She wept. He was quite right. Shewas a detestable poseuse and a fibber. Tragiccomedians, both. They bored each other.Their union recalls Flaubert s profound remarkthat Emma Bovary found in adultery only theplatitudes of marriage. Perhaps other ladieshad supervened in the cometary existence ofLiszt. Like Byron he was the sentimental heroof his day. A Rene of the pianoforte. Readthe recollections of Mme. Adam for a clue to the162 THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I character of Cosima s mother. Liszt sensibly intrusted to the care of his own mother the edu cation of her three grandchildren. She was born at Krems, Lower Austria, and a pious soul. Curious it is that the son of a Hungarian mag nate s overseer should be by the force of cir cumstances and his own genius allied with the aristocracy and high diplomacy in several lands of his time, Liszt Ferencz, whose name trans lated into English would be Frank Flour. Unhappy with the intellectual but irascible von Biilow, Cosima was happy with her Richard. If there were quarrels they were fought behind closed doors. She was not beautiful like her sister Blandine, but she had more brains. An ton Rubinstein loved her; Nietzsche s last re corded writing before his mental eclipse at Turin, 1889, was a passionate phrase meant for her. He was closely allied with the Wagners at Triebschen, and had corrected the proofs of Richard s Autobiography, a garbled version of which has been published with the blue pencil of Baireuth writ large on every page. Some day all the secrets of that prison-house will be divulged. Nietzsche surmised much, and many guesses have furnished stuff for romantic commentators. Romance of the most lurid pattern has enveloped the Liszt Wagner von Biilow d Agoult group. And the greatest influence in Wagner s career was not Cosima but Mathilde Wesendonck, to whom we owe the genesis of that lyric master piece among masterpieces, Tristan and Isolde. VARIATIONS For her spiritual collaboration with Wagner,Mathilde was never forgiven by Cosima after all, a real woman. Liszt participated in the musical inaugura tion of Baireuth, in 1876; the family dissension had been patched up in 1873; but he playedsecond fiddle to his son-in-law. His affectionate daughter saw to that; also saw, in 1886, whenher father had the bad taste to die during thefestival at Baireuth, that he was buried asquietly as possible, for an imposing funeralmight have disturbed the gate-money at thebig barn on the hill. Thrift, Cosima, thrift! At her husband s death she declared that herfather no longer existed for her. Mention of his music was snubbed at Wahnfried in theback yard of which Wagner was buried like acat, as Philip Hale so blandly puts it. Theawful part was to follow. Liszt, instead of beinginterred at Weimar, or Budapest, lies under theshelter of a hideous tomb in Baireuth, devised byhis grandson, Siegfried Wagner who is also an architect. This, another of Cosima s tactless doings. She estranged the old friends of herhusband, with the exception of the faithful Hans Richter, who told me at London in 1901, where he conducted the Ring in Covent Gardenthat Cosima was as great as a woman as Wagner a composer; which was no doubt true; and she was also a meddlesome blunderer. Sheput Baireuth on the map of Cook s Trippers. She botched artistically every performance she164 THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I handled, but she made money; her bankergrandfather s business ability she must have in herited. There is no doubt the tragedy of Ger many added to her sorrows. With her will pass forever the once powerful Wagnerian dynasty. 165 IDLE SPECULATIONS IF it had been hinted a half century ago thatin the veins of Richard Wagner there flowedSemitic blood, laughter would have ensued.The race that Wagner reviled in speech andpamphlet though he never disdained its generosity the hated Jew, daring to claimkinship with him might have set in motion thespleen of the German master. Wagner s hatredof the chosen race is historical. "Das Judenthum in der Musik," is not the only expressionof this contempt and dislike on the part of theman who was born in a Ghetto at Leipzig.Benefits forgotten, he seldom missed a chanceto gibe at Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn or toflout some Hebrew banker who was imprudentenough to advance him funds. The Wagnerianpedigree has been subjected to critical micro scopes. Bournot, who was patronized by Baireuth, wrote concerning Ludwig Geyer, the truefather of the composer, that his family had beenLutheran since 1700. Which proves nothing;race, not nationality, nor yet religion, counts.Geyer, from whom Richard inherited his ver satile aptitudes, was markedly Jewish in features and temperament. So was Wagner. Of theputative father, a Police Magistrate, we knowlittle. In his autobiography Wagner avoidsthe subject. 166 IDLE SPECULATIONS But Wagner s mother, born Johanna Bertz, reveals in her portraits marked characteristics of the Jewish race. There is mystery concern ing her origin; even the name of Bertz was only discovered a few years ago. Bertz, too, like Geyer, is a Jewish name. There is in the po lemical writings of Richard an almost insane hatred of the Jew; and, ironic circumstance, in his music there are the sensuous glow and glitter of the Oriental. It is certainly unlike any music made by a German, with its vibratile rhythms, its dramatic characterization and magnificent decorative frame. "Was Wagner German at all? demands Nietzsche. "We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German. His character itself is in opposition to what has hitherto been regarded as German not to speak of the German musi cian. His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families [Vulture and Eagle, in English]. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the Life of Wagner is a fable. I confess my distrust of every point which solely rests on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride for any truth about himself; nobody was less proud. He remained, like Victor Hugo, true to himself in biographical matters he remained a stage player." 167 VARIATIONS Thus Nietzsche, who knew whereof he spoke,as he was the secretary of the composer at Triebschen when Richard dictated his autobiography;not an official secretary, but a dear friend andconfidant. But Nietzsche must be taken withreservations in the Wagner case. He alter nately adored and abused his idol. Another ofhis favorite contentions was that Schopenhauerruined Wagner s art. The truth is that in Wagner the artist was stronger than Wagner thephilosopher. The reflective man was usuallyovercome by the man poetic. Witness Tristanand Isolde, composed, as Richard confessed, indirect opposition, nay, defiance, of his life s theories. Wagner began with Feuerbach andended a victim to the fascinating black magicof Schopenhauer. But now we know, thanksto James Sully s magisterial work Pessimism,that pessimism and optimism are a question ofpersonal temperament. Wagner succumbed atthe last to the Buddhistic quietism of the Schopenhauerian theories, though his elastic, optimistic nature rebelled at the yoke. In theRing the pessimism never crowds out the vital dramatic power. In Parsifal the vigorous af firmations of the earlier Wagner are absent.He said Nay to the life that had exhaustedhim, and, bathed in a mystic atmosphere, his soul found consolation in the mere contemplation of Roman Catholic symbolism. Nevertheless, hold firmly in your mind thatRichard Wagner the artist was greater than168 IDLE SPECULATIONS Wagner the vegetarian, the anti-vivisectionist, Socialist, revolutionist, Jew-hater, and foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, also greater than Wagner the philosopher and poet-dramatist. He was first and last the musician. For that reason he did not say the last word in the musicdrama. It is a mistaken partisanship that at taches to his every utterance profound signif icance. We should gladly exchange his col lected prose writings for another Tristan. He dearly loved a paradox. A versatile man, he wore many masks. Not that we doubt his sincerity, but that his emotional nature, his craving for excitement, his agitated life often led him to speak and write in misleading terms. He seldom put his best foot foremost when he took up the pen. And the Jews he reviled al ways proved his best friends. We have often wondered where Wagner s religion, metaphysics, his working theory of life, would have led him had he lasted a few years longer. That in his extraordinary brain there had been dimly floating the outlines of a greater work than Parsifal we learn from his correspondence with Franz Liszt. He died with the projected Trilogy incomplete. Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal and the Penitent (Die Biisser) were to have composed this Trilogy of the Willto-Live, Compassion and Renunciation. That negation of the Will-to-Live, so despised by Nietzsche, had gripped him after he became acquainted with Schopenhauer s theories in 169 VARIATIONS 1854. He eagerly absorbed this Neo-Buddhismand at the time of his death he was fully prepared to accept its final word, its bonze-likeimpassivity of the will. In Parsifal he soughtto transpose to tone its hopelessly fatalisticspirit, its implacable hatred of life in the flesh.That the world has lost a gigantic experimentmay be true, but that it has lost the best ofWagner we doubt. In Parsifal his thematicinvention is seldom at high-water mark, notwithstanding his mastery of technical material,his marvellous moulding of spiritual stuff. Parsifal is an abstraction, while Kundry is a "howling hermaphrodite," as Hanslick tastefully calledthe poor hunted hind and harlot. It is withWagner s power of characterization that wemight concern ourselves, as the composer haddrifted into a philosophical nihilism that in tellectual quietism which is a treacherous pitfallfor the thinker who strays across the borderline of Asiatic religions. The Christianity inParsifal seems like the last expiring glimmer ofits values. He deftly drew upon the ritual ofthe Roman Catholic Church, yet in the essential Christianity of the result we place no faith.He went to the Buddhistic roots of Christianity, perhaps for philosophical reasons. However, Nietzsche s attack on Wagner s supposedreligious predilections is wide of the mark; noone was less likely to indulge in sacerdotal sen-timentalism than the musician. The fact is that all was grist that came to his theatrical170 IDLE SPECULATIONS mill. Despite his mysticism he never lost view of the box-office. After the rude knocks of his early career he, like Balzac, realized that money is the Archimedes-lever that lifts the modern world. Money is the leading motive of the Human Comedy, and money it is that is the ruling idea of the Ring. The speculation is at tractive. He changed the title of his Trilogy from The Victors (Die Sieger) to The Penitents. First considered in 1856, the name was altered a quarter of a century later. In the interval Oriental philosophy had supervened with its ac customed effect. It was a critic of acuity who said of Tristan and Isolde that "the thrills relieve each other in squads." Wagner touched the top-notch of his torrid imaginings in this apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. Nothing has been written com parable with its intensity; its double, it is safe to predict, will never be composed. He declared that when he wrote the music he could not have made it otherwise. It is full-blown in its imperfections, glaring excellences, noble turgidity, lack of frugality, economy of thematic resources, dazzling prodigality, soggy prolixity, riotous tonal debaucheries and almost super human enchantments. What boots it to gird against a demoniacal art that thrills and makes mock of theories concerning the divine in music ? We are no longer on the windblown heights with Beethoven, nor do we worship as in the vast Cathedral of Bach. The Schopenhauerian 171 VARIATIONS philosophy hurled at us in the pessimistic dual ism of the love episode avails not to stem the turbulent current of fashion, Tristan and Isolde is the very deification of carnatism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the themewith poetic garlands, yet the stark fact stares at you: The man s desire for the woman andthe woman s desire for the desire of the man,to put the case in Biblical phraseology. Thepotion does but unloosen their tongues; both were mute lovers before Brangaene juggled with the fatal brew. Wagner was the greatest poet of passion odious, misused term in the history of the Seven Arts. And he had amore potent instrument than words at his command, an orchestra that wooes and thunders, that achieves in the surging undertow the soul of love, A mighty master, but a dangerous guide is this same Richard Wagner. THE MASTER BUILDER THUS far this season we have heard the Hmdr-ir./ :::,:: c: Symphony in D, the second. These various performaiHTs were respectively given at con certs by the Symphony Society, the Phffliar- monk Society, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nor were they timnaial happenings. The sym phonic works of Brahms are perennial favorites in New York. There is a gnffirmg reason. Brahms is a transitional bridge between the mighty Beethoven and the modern men. He is the last of the classicists, though not precisely the firsf nf the T"*IV*ntKS Sriiimiaitn was t^t , not Berlioz. But Brahms is more romantic than is commonly realized. It always wfll be a mystery to the present generation why he was called a pedant, a dry-as-dnst composer. He has his doll moments, when philosopher-like he contemplates the nrnbHirns of the universe. He is not dramatic when drama is not demanded by his theme, and he is occasionally drab in orchestral color, though never brilliant in the meretricious sense. He is on the side of the angels. He stands for what is sound, lofty, beautiful as opposed to shallow operatic trivi alities and melodramatic effects. VARIATIONS It was unfortunate that almost at the outset of his career Edouard Hanslick, erudite, witty, malignant, should have posed Brahms as an an tithetical man of straw to Richard Wagner.Doubtless it was a tempting contrast to make:Brahms, the serious symphonist, a reverent fol lower in the broad pathway of Bach and Bee thoven; and Wagner, creator of the musicdrama, of marvellous stage pictures romantic, erotic Wagner. Yet what a fallacy is there. Brahms, as his songs, symphonies, piano, andviolin music prove, was a poetic, a romantic, musician. He could not paint as boldly as Berlioz, but he always had something vital to say, while Berlioz, despite his grandiloquent rhetoric, like Victor Hugo, displayed more manner than matter. As for Wagner well, he, too, absorbed as much of Bach and Beethovenas he could assimilate for his particular usage, and was quite as learned as Brahms. VonBillow had set the pace for Dr. Hanslick and that detractor of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, indeed of all the New Music whenever he saw a headpop up on the horizon he hit it, like the game of Aunt Sally recognized his opportunity andpromptly pitted Brahms against Wagner, with the result that for a long period the musical world labored under the mistaken notion that Brahms was a rusty, musty old pedagogue, with bewhiskered counterpoint and a plentiful lack of melodic invention. And he was just the reverse. 174 THE MASTER BUILDER He died over two decades ago and his vogue has waxed with the years. When we consider the list of his achievements we are amazed at the slow, patient, yet fertile and versatile quali ties of the man. " Their impatience," wrote John Henry, Cardinal Newman, in condemning the major defect of heresiarchs. Brahms was ever patient. Patience might serve as his epi taph. His was a genius that grew from accre tions. His first opus was far from the later Brahms, notwithstanding its potential powers. It was but the acorn which became the great oak of the four symphonies, the piano and the violin concertos, the songs, chamber music, choral compositions, the Songs of Destiny and the Requiem. This massed work is the sum total of a high ideal; stern, unyielding, betimes frostily inhuman, yet logical and consistent. The philosophic bent of his intellect extorts our admiration. For a half century he pursued the beautiful in its most difficult and elusive form, followed it when the fashions of the season mocked at such undeviating devotion, when musical structure was called old-fashioned, sober thought voted down as dull, when the theatre had invaded the tonal realm and menaced it in its very stronghold, the symphony. After all, there is something to be said in favor of the skeleton, whether concealed by human flesh or embodied in religious dogma or encased within the formal walls of musical compositions. Things must have structure to interest mankind; 175 VARIATIONS even the prudish oyster has a shell. Otherwisethe amorphous shreds of the floating jellyfish orthe primeval amoebae would become our ideal. Brahms was homo sapiens. He stood on his hind legs, as did our common forebears, with" probably arboreal habits." And he wroughtthe noblest music since Beethoven. He is the first composer since Beethoven to sound the note of the sublime. Naturally, Wagner is excepted because he did not write absolute music, and we are now dealing onlywith that form. Because of this trait of sublim ity Brahms has been called austere. His aus terity and lack of personal profile sometimeshave made his loftiest music difficult of comprehension. He never splits the ears of thegroundlings. He never makes any concessionsto popularity. Like Ibsen and Manet, he goesout of his way to displease. The facile triumphhe despises. He saw musical Europe filled withsecond and third rate men, and he noted thattheir sole excuse was to give cheap pleasure to the tasteless. This professional parasitism heabhorred; with him the reaction became a species of puritanism. It is a gratifying proof of his flexible mental operations that he understoodand admired Wagner, whose ideals and practice were the antipodes of his own. His workmanship is well-nigh impeccable; formal and con trapuntal mastery marks it. His contribution to the techniques of rhythm is considerable. He literally popularized the cross-relation, redis covered the arpeggio and elevated it to an in- THE MASTER BUILDER teger of the melodic phrase. Wagner did the same for the essential turn. His trait of fidelity, his spiritual obstinacy, are characteristic. There seems to be a notion because Brahms refused to swim the current tendencies that he held himself aloof from hu manity, a bonze, a Brahmin, and not, as he really was, a bard chanting its woes and full- blooded aspirations. It is platitudinous now adays to say that his music throbs with the rich, red blood of humanity. He is the greatest contrapuntalist since Bach (pace Richard Strauss and Max Reger), and the supreme architectonist since Beethoven. Nevertheless, in his songs he is as simple and virile as Robert Burns. His topmost peaks are remote and gleam in an at mosphere too rarefied for dwellers on the plains, but how intimate, how gracious are the happy moments in his chamber-music. Following the romantic side of Schumann, untouched by the fever of the footlights, a realist with imagina tion, both a classicist and a romanticist, he con ducted music to its normal channel by showing that a formal service and a mastery of polyphony are not incompatible with the utterance of new ideas in a new way. Brahms is not reactionary any more than is Wagner. Neither found what he needed in contemporary life and art, so one harked back to the Greeks and Gluck, the other to Beethoven. All progress is crabwise. In the past of the arts may be found the germs of their future. Study the massiveness of the Brahmsian tonal 177 VARIATIONS architecture; study those tonal edifices erectedafter years of toil, consider his fertility in invention, his patience in developing his ideas; consider the ease with which he moves, thoughseemingly shackled by the most exacting offorms, a form not assumed for the sake of overcoming difficulties, but because it was the onlyform in which he could fully express himself.The narrative-tone of the symphonic form and this includes aU its practitioners from Haydnto Tschaikovsky is like blank verse, it hasbeen the chosen field of the greatest masters;and who shall say that either Shakespeare orBeethoven has suffered from its adoption?Even such a Romantic, mad and morbid, asCharles Baudelaire employed as his vehicles ofexpression forms as restricted and rigid as thesonnet and the alexandrine. Note the leavenof genius which militates against pedantry,scholastic aridity, academic music-making, andmusic arithmetical. Consider the intellectualand emotional brain for the seat of the emotions is in the head, not the heart of this composer, and then realize that all art is the arduousvictory of great minds over great imaginations.Recall the introductions to the first and lastmovements of the Symphony in C minor byBrahms. That magnificent work makes bycomparison other men s efforts like facile improvising. Its bases are laid for the brief " eter nity" accorded to all things fashioned by mortalhands. THE MASTER BUILDER Brahms ever consciously schooled his imagi nation. He was his own severest critic. He worked slowly, produced as slowly, and, being of the contemplative rather than of the dramatic, dynamic temperamental type, he incurred the reproach of heaviness. There is enough sedi ment in his collected work to lend truth to this accusation, but from the very cloudiness of the ferment has come the richest of wines. And how refreshing is a draft of this wine after the thin, frothing stuff concocted at the vintage of every season ! He has his metaphysical mood when he wrestles with abstract speculations, as did Pascal or Spinoza. It cannot be said that Brahms, the cryptic philosopher, is as interest ing as Brahms of the symphonies, the F minor piano sonata, the quintet for piano and strings with the same key signature, or the fragrant lyrics. He has the glorious simplicity of Bee thoven, and, like that Master of masters, he does not fear to employ such an elementary modula tion-bridge as the chord of the dominant seventh. A full chord for his orchestra has not the rainbow tints of the first or major chord in the Prelude to The Mastersingers, yet it can sink a shaft into our consciousness quite as profound. He is a thinker, his chilliness is rather in his manner than in his discourse, which often is thrice eloquent. This plodder, at times with out Promethean fire, possesses shoulders wide enough upon which to drape the symphonic mantle of Beethoven. He reminds us of a 179 VARIATIONS mediaeval architect whose life was a prayer, inmarble; who patiently built Gothic cathedralswhich majestically flanked upon mother earth,whose thin pinnacles pierced the vasty blue, andin whose marmoreal naves an army terrible withbanners could worship; while through the stonyforest of arches music flowed as the voices ofmany waters. Brahms is the master-builderof modern music. 180 VERDI S OTELLO THE announcement that Otello is to be pre sented by the Chicago Opera Association next Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Opera House is interesting to lovers of Verdi s hotblooded music drama. That it is not often heard is because of the difficulty in finding singing actors to interpret the work. Since Tamagno and Victor Maurel, the ideal Otello and the ideal lago, we have had no two such interpreters. Antonio Scotti was a remarkable lago, and from time to time some unhappy tenor attempts to bend the bow of Ulysses, but the two artists who set the town on fire twenty-five years ago have not been rivalled. Tamagno with his bar baric cry, " Sangue, sangue " - " Blood, blood ! " is unforgetable. In the killing of Desdemona he fell short of his great dramatic model, the elder Salvini, because, as we have elsewhere related, he left his spectators in doubt as to the disposition of the pillow. But then his Desde- mona was the lovely Emma Eames, and that, no doubt, accounted for the indecision of the murderous and amorous Moor at the fatal moment. Otello in 1887 set the musical world agog with surprise, curiosity, and delight. It reveals little of the narrow, noisy, violent, and vulgar Verdi 181 VARIATIONS of 1850. The character drawing is by a manwho is master of his material. The plot movesin majestical splendor and the musical psychology, especially in the case of lago, is often subtle. Verdi has at last flowered. Much of hisearlier music, despite the admirable melodicflow in Traviata, Rigoletto, Trovatore, smellingranker of the soil, showing abundant thematicinvention, was but the effort of a hot-headedman of the footlights, a seeker after applauseand money. In Otello his musical provincialisms have well-nigh vanished. The writing isclear, the passion controlled, the effects aimed ateasily compassed. The masterly craft of lagois cleverly contrasted with the fiery passion ofOtello, and Shakespeare is suggested; althoughan Italian Shakespeare. However, the Englishpoet is more Italian than the Italian in thismoving drama. Otello is veritable music drama; its composerseldom halts to symphonize his events as doesWagner. Arrigo Boito, most intellectual oflibrettists, has skeletonized the story; Verdismusic endows it with vitality, grace, fleshly contours, brilliancy. The Italian poet has notgravely disturbed the original text. It is buta compliment to his assimilation of the Shakespearian spirit to state that lago s credo, anexplosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seemout of perspective in the picture. It is an intercalation of Boito s, as were the Cypriotechoruses in Act II. The rest is Shakespeare182 VERDI S OTELLO undented, barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo at the close of Act I. As we have said, the characterization is mas terly throughout. Do not let us balk at com parisons, nor, for that matter, at superlatives. With the exceptions of Mozart and Wagner, no composer has thus far lived who could have painted the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin-clinker, set them facing each other, allowing them to work out their fates, musically speaking, as has Giuseppe Verdi. The key to Otello is its characterization. The medium in which Verdi bids his puppets of destiny to move, their fluidity, their humanity, with the complete dissection of their secret springs of action these elements are almost incalculable. Criti cism can only endeavor to disentangle them. Whether he is listening to his cunning Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging like the hardy Numaean lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice, a loving, suffering, living man Shake speare s Othello transposed to a fresco of magnificent tones. The character does not evoke a flashy, oper atic ranter. Nor does lago, either as the bluff soldier or the loathsome serpent stinging his chieftain s soul, ever lag dramatically, ever mimic the conventional attitudes of transpon tine melodrama. It is always lago, "the spirit that denies," perhaps underlined, for music must emphasize the emotions. Desdemona is drawn 183 VARIATIONS in relief to her furious lover and warrior, and asa white cloud of purity in contrast with her coldblooded maligner. Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song.She is a sweet background upon which wasetched the darker, sinister motives of the play.No masculine shadow but her lord s has beenprojected across her snowy, virginal soul. Delicacy and vivacity reveal, little by little, theinner workings of her girlish nature. The otherfigures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches on the second plan, but figures that contribute to thedensity of the dramatic scheme without detracting from our interest in the protagonists. From the opening storm to the stranglingscene the music flows as swiftly as does the actionof the spoken drama. Rich, varied, eloquent,the orchestra seldom tarries in its acute andvivid commentary. There is scant employmentof typical motives; the kiss theme in Act I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otellodies. Only in the handkerchief trio is therepause for instrumental elaboration; but in themain old, set forms are avoided, and while thereare melodic currents they seldom crystallize.The duo at the end of Act I, the Credo of unfaith and Otello s frenzied exhortation in ActII; the tremendous outburst in the followingact, with lago s sardonically triumphant exclamation, " Behold the lion!" as he plants hisscornful heel on the recumbent Otello thenthe final catastrophe these about summarize184 VERDI S OTELLO the high lights. Throughout there are pictur esque and poignant strokes, effects of massed splendor, and hovering about the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, doom, guilt, and melancholy foreboding. Verdi felt the moods of the poet and made them live again in his score. Otello and lago grow before our eyes and ears from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his agonized cry, "Miseria mia," develops into a ferocious savage thirsting for blood. He is the jealous male, who sees red. The multitudinous music is incarnadine with blood. And it is all vocal. It is written for the voice, which is the centre of gravity in this astounding drama of souls bedevilled, and not the orchestra. The pedestal is not bigger than the statue, as is the case with Salammbo. Another such lago, sub tle, sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously attractive fellow, such an impersonation as Victor Maurel s, may never be duplicated. And this remarkable singing actor had the ad vantage of Verdi and Boito s advice when the music drama was produced at Milan, in 1887. Verdi s first idea of a title was lago. This idea does not seem strange after a performance of Maurel. The two most satisfying lagos I remember were Henry Irving and Edwin Booth. Maurel s interpretation paralleled them at every point. Admitted that the singing heightened the im pression, though it weakens the characteriza- VARIATIONS tion, MaurePs lago never betrayed a tendencytoward the melodramatic; as difficult as tread ing on eggs without crushing them, he held amiddle course, and he was both a picture and adramatic happening. Malignant he was, butthat is the "fat" of the part, but he underlinedthe reasons for his wicked actions. lago is also a human being with a sound motive for revenge.I know you will remind me that critical "white washing" is become the fashion, that Nero,Simon Magus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold,Casanova nay, even Lucifer, Prince of Morning, has Anatole France for a defender (in The Revolt of the Angels) are only gettingtheir just dues at the hands of various apolo gists. De Quincey, a master casuist, has saidthat without Judas the drama of Jesus cruci fied would not have occurred. Everything is necessary. Nero was a much-abused monster,though Renan believes him to be the Beastmentioned in the Apocalpyse it seems nowthat there were no "atrocities" during the fab ulous persecutions of the Christians, that Romewas not burned by Nero, who had no fiddle technique; but in the case of lago there is something to be said in his favor. A puredevil, as we conceive devils to be, he was not. A rough, hard-drinking soldier of fortune, headmits himself to be, and to call his advice, "Put money in thy purse," cynical is to contraveneworldly wisdom. Otello had wronged him,lago hated him for it, hated his wife for her al- 186 VERDI S OTELLO leged infidelity Emilia denies her treachery therefore, his revenge is credible. It is his method in achieving this revenge that revolts our sensibilities. The innocent Desdemona is crushed between the upper and lower millstones of inexorable destiny. Maurel did not paint his conception all black, but with many gradations and nuances. Not a movement but meant something; even that famous "psychological crook of lago s left knee." Maurel was eco nomical in gesture. His was an objective char acterization. The drinking song was memo rably, totally unlike his drinking lyrics in Don Giovanni and Hamlet. Suffice to say that Verdi intrusted him with the difficult task of " originating" two such widely-sundered roles as .Falstan" and lago. With them Victor Maurel made operatic history. And now what is the most surprising thing about Otello? I think that it is the fact that it was composed when Verdi was past three score and ten. This seems incredible. It seethes with the passion of middle manhood, with the fervors of a flowering maturity. No one before him had dreamed of setting Shake speare in this royally tragic fashion. Rossini but fluted with the theme. In Verdi, jealousy, love, envy, hatred, are handled by a master music dramatist. It is a wonderful thing that Verdi began it at a time when most men are preparing for the Great Adventure. Reversing the usual processes, this extraordinary Italian 187 VARIATIONS wrote younger music the older he grew. After Aida, Otello. After grim tragedy, joyous comedy Falstaffio. If he had survived until ninety years, Verdi might have bequeathed us an operetta that would have outpointed in wit and sparkling humor the mercurial JohannStrauss. And when we think of the later Verdi we should not forget his faithful friend andfamulus, who played Wagner to his Faust Arriga Boito. 188 FAUST AND MEPHISTO How does Faust wear in the flicker of the footlights? Do the monologues sound with glorious resonance or are they only philosophical fustian? The question is not difficult to answer. The thunder-words of the poet-dramatist still thrill us with their meaning and with their music, the clash of souls still makes thrall of our imagination. To read Faust is to attain the summit of an intellectual peak of Darien. To witness an adequate performance of Faust is to win fresh pleasure for eye and ear. If Ham let inspired Goethe and Marlowe before Shake speare, his Faust in turn created a memorable literature. The very title crowds pages in ency clopaedias. Sculptors chisel masterpieces after reading the poem-play; the Mephisto of the Russian Antokolsky is not easily forgotten and George Grey Barnard was inspired by the famous line, "Two spirits, alas, reside within my breast" (the group is now at the Metropolitan Museum). Painters, almost innumerable, from Ary Scheffer to the rawest art student of yesteryear have traced on the canvas the loves of Gretchen and Faust. Barbier and Carre mutilated the poem in search of effective theatrical material, and Gounod melted with sensuous ecstasy when he made the musical setting. Lenau presented a sinister, half-mad Faust, a self-portrait; the VARIATIONS conservative Spohr surrounded the story withantiquated music. Wagner, perhaps more thanother composers, realized the travailing Faustspirit in his overture, which is a masterpiece. Franz Liszt has of all men evoked within thewalls of his symphonic palace both the static and dynamic Faust and the Gretchen of ourdreams. His Mephisto is the cynical spirit of denial. Berlioz, as in a tremendous fresco, haspainted with torrential energy the infernal glories of the theme. He even dragged his heroto Hungary so that he might give him the pleasure of hearing the Rakoczy March as or chestrated by the audacious Frenchman. ArrigoBoito, only half Latin, with Polish blood in his veins, has given us the ideal Mephisto and daredthe impossible by composing the second partof Goethe s master work. In song Gretchen has been celebrated fromSchubert to the troubadour of yesterday. Inromance, Turgenieff, that gentle giant, has de picted the soul of Faust transposed to Russiansoil. What the Faust spirit worked in anunbalanced temperament may be noted in Nietzsche, whose later rhapsodies stemmedfrom Euphorion s song in the Second Part: "Let me be skipping. Let me be leaping. Tosoar and circle through ether sweeping is nowthe passion that me hath won." Therein is the kernel of the dancing philosopher, Zarathustra, who called man "a bridge connectinganimal and superman." And recall the line in 190 FAUST AND MEPHISTO Faust: "Die ird sche Brust im Morgenrot," which served as a title for one of the unhappy philosopher s sanest books. Goethe is the ma trix of modern thought; he contained Wagner as he contained Nietzsche. Wagner, of course, went to Schopenhauer for his peculiar brand of pessimism. You can t miss the Faustlike touches in Tannhauser; the thirst for illimit able pleasure, the redemption of the eternal- womanly all this is Faust redivivus. John Addington Symonds laments that Marlowe did not follow his Doctor Faustus with a Tann hauser. "He assuredly would have not suffered this high mystic theme to degenerate into any mere vulgarities of a sensual Venusberg," wrote the Englishman, with one eye fastened on Wag ner s version of the wonderful legend. No trivial thirst for carnal pleasures but the desire for beauty beyond human reach would have been Marlowe s conception of the brave old tale. Lohengrin is a Faust, so is Siegfried. Parsifal is Faust in the vapors of mysticism, enveloped by a Buddhistic pity; surely the "Good Friday spell" was born of that exquisite episode near the close of Act I in Faust, where the poetphilosopher gives over his contemplated suicide, ravished by sweet memories of his youth, his Sabbath wandering in spring woods and mead ows.At one time Goethe thought of translating Marlowe. His music is magical. It colored Shakespeare; it created a new dramatic school. 191 VARIATIONS Marlowe is the father of English tragedy. Whatif Shakespeare had died at the same age as Marlowe? "We may admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlowe s Hero and Leander," says Swinburne. Charles Lamb adored Marlowe, though he mocked the "pampered jades of Asia." Yet the hand that fashioned the turgid and bombastic Tamburlane also penned that lovely lyric " Come lie ["live," in re vised editions] with me and be my love" (The Passionate Shepherd). It is as sparklingly pure as a bar of Mozart. But Marlowe is more dra matic poet than dramatist. His characters are set forth with a mass of psychologic details that recall some modern masters. He is an early Browning with a mouth of gold. His words sing. Yet he would never have written the last speech of Paracelsus: "I press God s lamp close to my breast; its splendor soon or late will pierce the gloom." Marlowe was not a believer. The desperate damnation of his Faust chills the blood. "Where gods are not, ghosts abound." Marlowe could surround his unhappy hero with all the machinery of diab olism; Beelzebub, Prince of Flies, the Seven Deadly Sins, imps and goblins. He could utter that thrilling line, "See where Christ s blood streams in the firmament," but he had not the talent of belief for it is both a gift and talent, belief in the unseen. If he had with Browning s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower come, he would have died hopeless, impenitent, as in 192 FAUST AND MEPHISTO reality he did die. His Faust is the archetype of the explorer in the "unplumbed, salt, estrang ing sea" of knowledge. He cries: "Had I as many souls as there be stars I d give them all for Mephistopheles." He craves eternal wisdom, " infinite richness in a little room." Mephistopheles has built for him the walls of Thebes with ravishing music. He would fain have this devil "wall all Germany with brass." He sees Lucifer, "chief lord and regent of the night," and still are his longings unassuaged. This feverish simulacrum of a man who aspired to know things terrestrial and celestial Marlowe incarnated in his tragedy. And what horrors he conjures up in Mephistopheles s description of Hades a description less material, nevertheless revealing a grandeur of conception second only to Dante s. This damned creature of the English poet stands for men who achieve victories or defeats by the force of their intellect. Faust summons spirits from the vasty deep, converses with them when they come, argues, even wrangles, and would circumvent them in discussion. Spiritual ex plorers from Giordano Bruno to Spinoza and Nietzsche are Fausts. And on the plane scien tific so are Galileo and Darwin and Einstein. All who slough off decaying half-truths are Fausts who must suffer for their frankness the plagues of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Sordello s "Dante, pacer of the shore," was a mediaeval Faust whose richly veined ore is 193 VARIATIONS half hidden in the clay of scholasticism. Andso the mountains converse with mountains,Dante with Goethe, Bach with Beethoven,Marlowe with Browning. Human insects, slowly toiling to the summits,from time to time catch glimpses of trailing cloud-glories and overhear the far-off rumblingsof divine events. Then the mists part and another Faust comes to earth, telling us of thestrange secrets he has surprised. "A soundmagician is a mighty god/ sings Marlowe.Goethe said: "Gray are all theories and greenalone life s golden tree." To read Marlowe is to feel the itch of quotation. Has there everbeen anything more vivid or pitiable since Dantethan the English poet s Edward II, in his "cave of care," standing in mire and puddle, "and lest I should sleep, one plays continually upon adrum " ? It is Chinese in its hideous suggestion of torture; we must go to Octave Mirbeau s LeJardin des Supplices, or the newly publishedfiction of Charles Petit, Le Fils du Grand Eunuque, for its match. Faust is a fatalist; "his atheism has a background of terror thinly veiled by the mind s inquisitiveness." Che sara, sara ! he declares, and then berates his satanic famulusfor showing him so little. He knows that the jealous gods have somewhere buried proofs of the origin of all things, and, like Maurice deGuerin, he would have demanded: "But uponthe shores of what ocean have they rolled the stone that hides them?" 194 BOHEMIAN MUSIC IN New Cosmopolis I called Prague the most original city in Europe, not perhaps so melo dramatic as Toledo in Spain, yet quite as orig inal, when you consider that pretty, placid Dresden is only four hours away and that fur ther down the map lies Vienna. As the traveller approaches the Bohemian city as Praha it is known to the natives the cathedral and castles grouped on the hill form a fascinating silhouette against the sky-line. At once the alluring prospects of wood and architecture are evoked, and to the memory comes ? the sangui nary pages of its history. Arthur Symons once wrote that to a Bohemian "Prague is still the epitome of his country; he sees it as a man sees the woman he loves, with her first beauty, and he loves it as a man loves a woman, more for what she has suffered." Needless to add, for me it was love at first sight, this Prague, with its imperial palace and the Hradschin fortress so proudly perched on the Hradcany; the pin nacle of the St. Vitus Cathedral, the four Ottakan towers and the two towers of St. George, which swim so gloriously in the air, a miracle of tender rose and marble white, with golden spots of sunshine, form an ensemble that would intrigue the brush of Claude Monet. VARIATIONS The city proper enchants with its bewildering jumbles of architecture, its historical evocations. The Bridge of Prague, the Town Hall,the Powder Tower, the historic Tyn church,the old Jewish cemetery, the Belvedere, theChapel of St. Wenceslas, the shrine of St. Nepomuc, the Star Hunting Lodge, where in 1620was fought the Battle of the White Mountain,the Rudolphinium to go on like this wouldsend you to the guide-books. There is the modern Representatives House, where you mayenjoy a symphony concert up-stairs, while inthe restaurant on the first floor you can eat anomleba royal, a Fogos fish, a Telec filet specankyand Ledovy creme, ending with an Americkycompote, and tell it not in Gath good lightwine is to be had, or the incomparable productof Pilsen, there pronounced Pizn. I stopped atthe "Blauer Stern," on the Hybernska Ulice,which old-fashioned, comfortable hotel hasprobably changed its name since the war. Evenin 1913 anything German was anathema tothe Bohemians. There is the Bohemian National Theatre. Both Josef Stransky of thePhilharmonic Society and Artur Bodanzky ofthe Metropolitan Opera House and the NewSymphony Orchestra were some years ago conductors at Prague. One afternoon in the Representatives House I listened to a programmecomposed of national music the Scherzo aCapriccioso of Dvorak, a symphony by Smetana, a symphonic poem by Josef Suk and a196 BOHEMIAN MUSIC work by Sdenko Fibich, the latter a composer too little known here, whose piano composi tions were introduced to us more than a decade ago by Florence Mosher and Emily Burbank at their lecture-recitals. One gray morning I went astray while wandering about the twist ing corridors of the "Blauer Stern" and, tempted by the sounds of masterly violin play ing, I stood before a door which bore the legend : " Otokar Sevcik." It might have been his pupils, Jan Kubelik or Kocian, though it was neither. I had seen the brilliant Kubelik at Marienbad, where I went annually to fight my fat and also to war with the rum demon temporarily. Since then Sevcik, the great teacher of aspiring fiddlers, has removed to Vienna. I mention these things concerning the delight ful city of Ema Destinova, Thomas Masaryk who married a New York lady, one of the Misses Garrigue of the well-known musical family; of the city wherein Mozart composed his masterpiece, Don Giovanni "in order to express the thanks of the great master to his dearest citizens of Prague for their ardent reception"; that Prague which is so dramatic to gaze upon, the Slavic city further west, the gateway to the Slavic lands because I have just read with considerable satisfaction a slender pamphlet of fifty pages entitled The Music of Bohemia, by Ladislav Urban, published under the auspices of the Czecho-Slovak Art Clubs of New York City. The author calls his de197 VARIATIONS cidedly interesting contribution a sketch, butit is a sketch in which is compressed much valuable matter. At the start he tells us that"Czech" is the Slav name for the Slav peopleand language in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. The terms used to designate the whole country,the state, are Bohemia and Bohemian/ TheCzechs themselves do not employ this distinc-,tion, continues Mr. Urban, but use the wordCzech in both senses. Slovaks are that peoplewho live in the northwestern part of Hungary,called Slovakia, which with Bohemia forms thepresent republic and nation of the Czechoslovaks. Mr. Urban warns us not to confoundBohemians and gypsies, and cites Balfe s Bohemian Girl as an instance: a full-fledged Czechfolk-melody is introduced as a gypsy tune inthe allegro theme of the overture. There has been bad blood between the Bohemians and Germans since the reign of KingWenceslas (921-935 A. D.). After his assassina tion, Wenceslas was canonized and is a nationalsaint; a folk-song, known as the Choral of St.Wenceslas, is one of the oldest among its kind.The John Huss reformation also aroused thenation, and a battle hymn, "Ye warriors whofor God are fighting," was another product ofthe folk. Bohemia has always been a musicalnation, as Mr. Urban proves by numerous cita tions. Its folk-song literature is rich and varied.He quotes from Seth Watson s Racial Problemsin Hungary: "Singing is the chief passion of198 BOHEMIAN MUSIC the Slovaks. Nothing will find its way so surely to the heart of the Slovak people as a well-sung song. An old peasant woman once complained to a friend of mine that her son was a useless, disappointing fellow. What was the matter? inquired my friend; did he drink or would he not work? Oh, no, said the old woman; but nothing will make him sing. It s a great misfortune." 3 Rather a companionable sort, we think a young man who doesn t sing, whistle or make other disagreeable noises would be a prize in our noisy Tophet of New York. The polka must be credited to Bohemia; it was invented about 1830 by a country girl. This sounds a trifle doubtful, as the dance - called polka, rather pulka, because of the half step is as old as the immemorial hills of Bo hemia, I have been informed by Bohemian critics. There is a polka in Smetana s The Bartered Bride, also a furiant, which means, we are told, "a boasting farmer." Dvorak in his first symphony introduces a furiant in the place of a scherzo. But Mr. Urban is not se duced into that most platitudinous of errors, to wit, that the people make a nation s music. He writes with admirable clearness on the sub ject: "It is no wonder that the richness of folk- art was overestimated in Bohemia at the be ginning of the last century, and led to an error. Folk-art was confused with nationality in art. A false principle was constructed that national art must be based upon folk-music. Thus the 199 VARIATIONS imitation of folk-poetry and folk-melodies wasapproved as the real national art. It is astonishing how long this principle, violating, as itdid, the national law of progress, could endure.All works of this feverish, would-be-nationalperiod belong to history. They live no more,being but imitations." In a footnote to thisinexpugnable statement the author adds with hisaccustomed acuity: "The matter was also discussed in America, where some people saw national American music under the guise of Indianmusic. Nothing is easier for a composer than toimitate the melodies of different nations, preserving their rhythmical or melodic mannerisms."He might have joined negro to Indian as ournational, so-called, musical characteristics. Butthere are no more Indians, in a tribal sense,and as to negro music, the best of it was composed by white men, notably Stephen Foster.Why should Afro-American folk-tunes representAmerica? In MacDowell s Indian Suite thereare authentic Indian themes, while in DvoraksFrom the New World the negroid tunes aremere suggestions; the rhythms of YankeeDoodle are faintly heard as a contrapuntaldevice; in a word, the Americanism of Dr.Dvorak s plenary composition is as Americanas his own name, not to mention the fact thatits chief motto is taken from Schubert s unfinished symphony (Tchaikovsky went to thesame source for the principal theme of his Eminor, the fifth, symphony, hence the accusa-200 BOHEMIAN MUSIC tion that Dvorak borrowed from the Russian. Arcades ambo !) But the negro folk-tune as a basic element for the American composer was short-lived. Its logical conclusion landed us in the dubious and never delectable region of ragtime, and there let it lie forever. The musi cal culture of America must have its roots in more national soil, must stem from neither the aboriginal natives nor yet from the one-time slaves. It must be American or it will not be at all. At present our supreme composer is Charles Martin Loeffler, by virtue of his individual genius. I suspect all map-music; patriotism may cloak humbuggery or worse (Dr. John son says it does). So let us first make good music, and the national ingredients will take care of themselves. Mr. Urban devoted special sections to the chief composers of Bohemia Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak, Zdenko Fibich, Vitezslav Novak, and Josef Suk. There are, of course, many others, but within the scope of his little study these five suffice. Naturally, the palm of superiority is awarded Smetana, whose music we heard last season, thanks to Josef Stransky, himself a Bohemian. Smetana is the Bohemian composer par excellence. There is a foreign alloy in Dvorak, especially the later Dvorak, that rules him from entering into competition with his fellow-countryman. Dvorak remained a peasant even in his best works, which were written before he came to New York in 1892. 201 VARIATIONS The New World Symphony is pleasing andwears well, notwithstanding its unblushingplagiarisms that excerpt from the Venusbergbacchanale in Tannhauser quite takes yourbreath away; quotation marks are sadly neededin music ! but it remains presumably Czechish,and only faintly American. We much prefer his earlier Slavic Dances, the orchestral scherzoand the Husitzka overture. As for the newermen, it is to be hoped that Bodanzky andStransky and Stokowski conductors nowadays seem to be sky-high will give them all a hearing. Quality, not quantity, rules Bohemian music, a music racy of the national soil, nevertheless not without the larger, profounderaccents of universal music. 202 THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? NOTWITHSTANDING the fact that he played the flute and ranked Rossini above Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer said some notable things about music. Here is a wise observation of his: "Art is ever on the quest, a quest and a divine adventure;" although this restless search for the new often ends in plain reaction, prog ress may be crabwise and still be progress. We fear "progress," as usually understood, is a glittering "general idea" that blinds many to the truth. Reform in art is like reform in politics. You can t reform the St. Matthew Passion music or the fifth symphony. Is Par sifal a reformation of Gluck? This talk of re forms is confusing the historic with the aesthetic. Art is a tricksy quantity and, like quicksilver, is ever mobile. As in all genuine revolutions, the personal equation counts the heaviest, so in dealing with the conditions of music at the present time we ought to study the tempera ment of our music-makers and let prophecy sulk in its tent as it may. One thing is certain: The old tonal order has changed forever; there are plenty of signs and wonders in the musical firmament to prove this. Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a contemporary of 203 VARIATIONS Debussy and an equally gifted musician, CharlesMartin Loeffler, was experimenting before Debussy in a dark but delectable harmonic region. The tyranny of the diatonic and chromaticscales, the tiresome revolution of the majorand minor modes, the critical Canutes who sit at the edge of the musical sea and say to the modern waves, "Thus far and no further!" and then hastily abandon their thrones and rushto safety, else to be overwhelmed all these are of the past, whether in art, literature, music,or let Nietzsche speak in ethics. Evenphilosophy has changed its garb and logic is "a dodge," as Prof. Jowett used to say. Everystronghold is being assailed, from the "divine" rights of property to the common chord of Cmajor. If Ruskin had written music-criticism hemight have amplified the connotations of his famous phrase, the "pathetic fallacy," for weconsider it a pathetic fallacy (though not in the Ruskinian sense) in criticism to be over shadowed by the fear that, because some of our predecessors misjudged Wagner, Manetand Ibsen, we should be too tender in our judg ments of our contemporaries. Here is "the pathos of distance" run to seed. The musicof to-day may be the music of to-morrow, butif not, what then ? It may satisfy the emotionalneeds of the moment, yet become a stale formulato-morrow. What does that prove? ThoughBach and Beethoven built their work on the 204 THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? broad bases of eternity employing that tre mendous term in a limited sense; no art is "eter nal" - nevertheless, one may enjoy the men whose music is of slight texture and " modern." Nor is this a plea for mediocrity. Mediocrity we shall always have with us; mediocrity is mankind in the normal, and normal man de mands of art what he can read without running, hear without thinking. Every century pro duces artists who are forgotten in a generation, though they fill the ear for a time with their clever production. This has led to another general idea, that of transition, of intermediate types. But after critical perspective has been attained, it will be seen that the majority of composers fall into this category of the transi tional; not a consoling notion, but an unavoid able conclusion. Richard Wagner had his epi gones. And so had Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Mendelssohn was a feminine variation of Bach, and after Schumann followed Brahms Brahms, who threatens to rival his great ex emplar. Yet I can recall the incredulous smiles when, twenty-five years ago, I called the Brahms compositions "The Music of the Future." The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama and the symphonic poem have been continued with personal modifications by Richard Strauss. Max Reger pinned his faith to Brahms and ab solute music, though not without an individual variation. In considering his Sinfonietta, the Serenade, the Hiller Variations, the Prologue 205 VARIATIONS to a Tragedy, the Lustspiel overture, the twoconcertos respectively for pianoforte and violin, we are struck not so much by the masterlyhandling of old forms as by the stark, emotional content of these compositions. It is anerror to dismiss his music as merely academic.He began as a Brahmsianer, but he did notsucceed, as did his master, in fusing form andtheme. There is a Dionysian strain in him that too often is in jarring discord with the intellec tual structure of his work. The furor teutonicus in conflict with the scholar. Yet at one periodReger was considered the rival of Strauss, though that day has long passed. ArnoldSchoenberg now divides the throne. And there were many other claimants Rezinek, d Albert, Ernest Boehe, Walter Braunfels, MaxSchillings, Hans Pfitzner, Klose, Ehrenberg,Noren, Franz Schreker, and the younger choir whose doings are analyzed weekly by clever Cezar Searchinger in the pages of the MusicalCourier. Their name is legion. They enter the lists sounding golden trumpets of self-praise and are usually forgotten after a solitary per formance of their huge machines, whether operaor symphony. Size seems to be the primerequisite. Write a music-drama that consumesthree nights in its performance, a symphonythat takes a hundred men, with a chorus of a thousand, to play and sing. Behold ! You are a modern among moderns. But your name is as mud the following year. Exceptions are 206 THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? Mahler and Bruckner, yet I have my suspicions that when the zeal of William Mengelberg has abated, then the Mahler craze will go the way of all flesh, despite the fact that he has com posed some thrilling pages. Otherwise, his symphonic structures are too mastodonic to endure; like those of Berlioz, they are topheavy with ennui, and many chambers are empty of significant ideas or vital emotions. Musical intellectualism at its extreme Kamchatska. Our personal preferences incline us to the new French music. To be sure, substance is often lacking, but you are not oppressed by the abomination of desolation which lurks in the merely huge, by what Mr. Finck calls Jumboism in music. The formal clarity, the charm ing color sense, the sprightly, even joyful, spirit, combined with an audacious roving among revolutionary ideas, all endear these youngsters to us. Debussy is their artistic sire, Ravel their stepfather, and if d Indy does not fall into this category, being a descendant of Franck, he is none the less admirable as a musician. Stravinsky outpoints them all in the imprevu, as does the incredible ProkofiefT a man to be carefully estimated, one who thus far hasn t put his best foot foremost in America. The Richard Strauss case is no longer a moot one. He has in all probability given his best work, and superlative work it is, despite its slag, scoriae, rubble, and refuse. He is the chief of a school, 207 VARIATIONS a position from which he can never be dislodged, and when history sifts the pretensions of all the second and third rate men of his generation, his figure will be found standing close to Wagner s and Berlioz s and Liszt s. An epigone? Yes. But an epigone of individual genius. With Arnold Schoenberg freedom in modulation is not only permissible but an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of overtones, andhis music is not only planned horizontally andvertically but in a circular fashion. There is in his philosophy no such thing as consonance or dissonance, only perfect ear training. (Wequote from his Harmony; a Bible for Super men). He writes: "Harmonic fremde Tone gibt es also nicht" and a sly dig at old-timers "sondern nur dem Harmonie-system fremde." After carefully listening to his "chaos" a cer tain order disengages itself; his madness is methodical. For one thing, he abuses the in terval of the fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond harmonies in which remotest keys lovingly hold hands donot dissipate the sensation of a central tonality somewhere the cellar, on the roof, in the gut ter, up above in the sky so high. The inner ear tells you that his D minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether played, in that key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man who has declared: "I decide my form during composition only through feeling," a procedure which in other composers works 208 THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? might be called improvisation. Every chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion aroused by the poem or idea which gives birth to the composition. Such antique things as the cyclic form or community of themes are not to be found in Schoenberg s bright lexicon of anarchy. He boils down the classic sonata form to one movement and begins developing his theme as soon as it is announced. We should be grateful that he announces it at all; themeless music is the rage at present. So, as it may be seen, the new dogmatism is more dogmatic than the old. The absence of rule in Schoenberg is an inflexible, cast-iron law of necessity as tyrannical as the Socialism that has replaced Czarism with a more oppres sive autocracy, the rule of the unwashed, manyheaded monster. Better one tyrant than a million. There is no music of yesterday or to morrow. There is only the music of Now. 209 LISZT S ONLY PIANO SONATATHAT two young American-born pianists, John Powell and Louis Cornell, should haveselected recently Liszt s only piano sonata for their programmes, and during the same week,is sufficiently significant to call for comment.It is a sign of the times. Many of the innova tions in modern writing for the instrument maybe directly traced to this same B minor sonatar, and when we name it as the composer s solitary excursion into the classical domain, it is withfull consciousness that Liszt s "fantasia quasisonata," after a reading of Dante, in Annees dePelerinage, is hardly to be described as a sonata. What is a sonata? Liszt answers the questionin his highly original work. He rejects the oldorder of three or four separate movements, sub stituting a more complete organism. It maynot be, formally speaking, the Haydn, Mozart,or early Beethoven sonata. Liszt employs as aspring-board the last sonatas of Beethoven to launch him into novel territory (study opus noin A fiat and you will recognize the truth of this contention). Charles Souilier has declared that the sonataexpired with the eighteenth century, which gaveit birth. This is a rather risky statement. If true, we should have missed such beautiful music210 LISZT S ONLY PIANO SONATA in the form Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt. The Hungarian s astonishing use of the leading-movement and its metamorphosis, one theme of the slow introduction, as Shedlock, in his book on The Pianoforte Sonata, is the source whence he derives the principal part of his tone picture, and, adds Mr. Shedlock, "everything depends on the quality and latent power of the fertilizing germ." But on the first page of the B minor sonata may be found Wotan s chief theme, the scream of Kundry, and a color scheme which Wagner later incorporated in the Ring and Parsifal. So the "fertilizing germ" is not missing. As for the form, that is easily dis cernible. Liszt has spun a complex web, his sonata is an arabesque, and a logical one, for nothing is more inexorably logical than a seem ingly loose rhapsody. The chief fault of this composition is not its form or lack of melodic invention, but its length it demands at least thirty-five minutes to play caused by repeti tions, though in different keys, thus defeating the very purpose for which it was composed, i. e., suppression of unnecessary episodes and breaks in the continuity. The same criticism holds good for the Symphonic Poems. Liszt s influence was not only profound upon his contemporaries witness Wagner but on the latter-day school, headed by Richard Strauss, whose tone poems are inconceivable without Liszt s discoveries. He also inspired the Rus sians, and his impressionism is the base of 211 VARIATIONS Debussy and Ravel s piano music. RimskyKorsakoff we long ago christened the Russian Berlioz, yet he owes Liszt more; from Berlioz he learned how to paint orchestrally, but in his manner of composition he leans heavily on the Hungarian. Sadko comes from Liszt s symphonic poem, Ce qu on entend sur la montagne, while Antar and Scheherazade come fromHarold and the Faust symphony. As a Frenchcritic has written: "The brand of Liszt remains ineffaceable" on those charming works of Rimsky-Korsakoff. Like Moses, Liszt saw the Promised Land, but was destined never to enter it. He suffered the fate of intermediate types. He was recognized too late. Dr. Frederick Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, has wisely said: "Be, however, the ultimate fate of his works what it may, there will always remain to Liszt the fame of a daring striver, a fruitful originator, and a wide-ranging quickener." The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt s original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy told the present writer that the B minorsonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it "lies" so beautifully for the hand. Nowork of Liszt, with the possible exception of his etudes, is as interesting. Agreeing with those critics who declare that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure, and also with those who assert the work to be an organic amplification of the old obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven s last sonata period 212 LISZT S ONLY PIANO SONATA as a starting-point for his plunge into futurity agreeing with these warring factions, we find fascinating music in this sonata. What a dra matic work it is ! It stirs the blood. It is in tense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (Wotan s theme), the leap from C to the Asharp below how Liszt has stamped this and the succeeding intervals as his own! Power there is, sardonic power, like the first phrase of the E flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your con sciousness in the theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D s! What follows might be a drama enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Ber lioz and Saint-Saens and Raff come to the mind as masters of the grisly and supernatural. But the thin, sharp flames of hell hover about the brass, wood-wind, and shrieking strings in the Liszt orchestra. The chorale, usually the meat of the Lisztian composition, now appears and in dogmatic affirmation proclaims the religious belief of the composer; our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major, when follows the insincerity of it all in the harmonic sequences. Here, surely, it is not a whole-hearted belief, only theatric attudinizing; after the faint re turn of the first motive is heard the sigh of sen- 213 VARIATIONS timent, of passion, of abandonment, which en genders the suspicion that when Liszt was notkneeling in prayer he was prostrate before woman. He blends piety and passion in themost mystically amorous fashion; with the can-tando expressivo in D begins some lovely music,secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx. But the rustle of silken attire is behind everybar; sensuous imagery, a delicate perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah! naughty Abbe, have a care ! After all thy ton sures and chorales, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of amelody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpledcheek and sunny tresses ! Wilt thou permit herto make away with thy spiritual resolutions? Vade retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme, so triumphantlyproclaimed at the outset, is now solemnlysounded with choric pomp and power. Thenbegins the hue and cry of diminished sevenths, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of in toxicating colons kaleidoscopically moves onward. Again the devil tempts our musical St. Antony, this time in octaves and in the key of A major. He momentarily succumbs, but thatgood old family chorale is repeated, and evenif its orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Satan is routed and early pietybreaks forth in an alarming fugato, which, like the domestic ailment known as a bad conscience, 214 LISZT S ONLY PIANO SONATA is happily short-winded. Another flank move ment of the Eternal Feminine, this time in the seductive key of B, made mock of by this mu sical Samson, who in stretta quasi presto views his weakness with contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the bass triplets frames it as a picture to weep or rage over. All this finally leads to prestissimo finale of startling splendor. In the literature of the piano there is nothing more exciting. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is painted on every bar. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the musical anvil tremble under the sledge-hammer blows of this tonal Attila. Then follow a few bars of the Beetho ven-andante, a moving return to the earlier themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean abode, whence it emerges, a Magyar Wotan, majestically vanishing not in the mists of Valhalla but in the bowels of Gehenna; then a genuine Lisztian chord-sequence followed by a profound stillness in the major. The B minor sonata displays Liszt s power, Liszt s weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long infernal, not a "heavenly length" -it is noble, drastic, cerebral, and it is blazing with exotic hues. It is also cynical and insincere. Liszt, more than other composers, Meyerbeer and Berlioz excepted, excelled in depicting a sneering, cynical sensuality. Also insincerity. And when you come to think it over, it takes genius to suggest in tones the insincere. This 215 VARIATIONS feat Liszt achieved. In his symphony to Fausthe succeeds better with the Mephisto picture than in his characterization of Marguerite. Butto deny the B minor sonata a commanding posi tion in the Pantheon of piano music would befolly. And interpreted by an artist saturatedin the Liszt tradition, such as Arthur Friedheimwho has intellectual power and never resorts to mere sentimentalism the work almost compasses the sublime. Away from the glitter of the concert-roomthis extraordinary Hungarian, inspired after the loftiest in art, yet in the atmosphere of aristo cratic salons, or of the papal court, Liszt wasnot altogether admirable. We have heard cer tain cries calling heaven to witness that hewas anointed of the Lord (which he was not); also that if he had not cut and run to sanctuaryto escape the petticoats one was his egregious Polish Princess we might never have heardof Liszt the Abbe. This theory is not far fromthe truth. Among the various penalties under gone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glos saries. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the composer Liszt has had many things read into his music which do not belong there. He set great store by his sacred compositions, his masses andhis psalms, and he was bitterly disappointedbecause Rome did not espouse his reforms in churchly music, notwithstanding his close friend ship with Pope Pius IX. But there is a vein of insincerity running throughout this music, 216 LISZT S ONLY PIANO SONATA despite its ecclesiastic pomp and operatic color ing. Perhaps the best estimate of Franz Liszt is the purely human one. He was a virile mu sical genius, and was compact of the usual pleasing and unpleasing faults and virtues as is any great man not born of a book. 217 DREAMING OF LISZT PHILIP HALE once wrote that they buried Richard Wagner in the back yard like a cat; which is irreverent yet a bald statement of the fact. Liszt is also buried at Baireuth, in a for lorn pagoda designed by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner, who, at the time of his grandfather s death, was a student of architecture. After apilgrimage to this tomb in the cemetery in the Erlangerstrasse, for I count myself among the Lisztianer, and also after hearing several operas of Siegfried I reached the conclusion that, not withstanding critical opinion to the contrary, the young man wisely abandoned his archi tectural dreams. But it is another kind of dream that I would describe this Sunday morning. When a young chap, I was crazy to see, to hear, Liszt, and while I think that the old man with long white hair and warts on his face was the real Liszt I met him on the Rue deRivoli in 1878 still the possibility of a closer view haunted my sleeping and waking hours, and, finally armed with letters of introduction from a well-known French pianist, a pupil of the musical Merlin, and a Paris music publisher, I found myself one evening at the Gare de 1 Est, en route for Strasburg, thence to Stuttgart, and Weimar. In those times, forty years ago, we travelled slowly. 218 DREAMING OF LISZT A lovely morning in May saw me walking through a sun-smitten lane on the road to the garden-house where his Serene Highness was living. I had sent my introductions to the royal household the previous evening. I had been summoned. The hedges were white wirh spring blossoms, the air redolent of bockbier. Ah ! thronging memories of youth. Suddenly a man on horseback, his face red with excite ment, his beast covered with lather, dashed by, shouting, "Make way for the Master. He comes. He comes ! " Presently a venerable being with a purple nose a Cyrano de Cognac nose appeared, and walking. His hair streamed in the wind. He wore a monkish habit, and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat of the pattern affected by Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville. "It must be Liszt or the Devil," I cried, and the only Liszt smiled, his warts growing more purple, his expression most benignant. He waved to me a friendly hand, that formidable hand, which, like a steamhammer, could crush steel or crack the shell of an egg, so sensitive was it. "Both Liszt and the Devil," he grunted, and then I knew myman. I kissed his hand, made the sign of the cross, for I was addressing an ecclesiastic, an Abbe, though one without a tonsure, and created a deacon by Pope Pius IX, called Pio Nono in Italy, but in Rome affectionately nicknamed " Pianino " because of his love of piano music, Liszt s in particular. 219 VARIATIONS He invited me to refreshments at the CzernyCafe, but as it was crowded we went across thestreet to the garden of the Elephant Hotel,there to be surrounded by a throng of little Liszts, pupils, male and female, who mimickedthe old, old gentleman in an absurd manner.They wore their hair on their shoulders, theysprinkled this hair with flour, they even wentso far as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They donned semi-sacerdotalrobes, they held their hands in the peculiarstyle of the Master; they, too, sported shovelshaped hats, and from time to time they in dulged in patibulary gestures. But, good Lord,how they could down the beer ! Enfin, after some diplomatic skirmishing Iwas invited to the afternoon musicale and wentwith the gang to the pretty little home of Lisztin the ducal park. Liszt was amiable. Heknew that I was nervous, so he asked a fewpromising young beginners, such as ArthurFriedheim, Alfred Reisenauer, Moriz Rosenthai, Emil Sauer, Richard Burmeister, to openthe ball. After I heard them I wished myselfin Buxtehude. I had proclaimed myself as anardent upholder of the Thalberg school, whichchampions a singing touch and pearly scales. I had studied all the Thalberg fantasies onoperatic airs with Charles H. Jarvis of Phila delphia, who could read prima vista any musiccomposed by man, god, or devil. You will estimate my musical and intellectual equip220 DREAMING OF LISZT ment of those days when I tell you that mybattle-horse was the Prayer from Moses in Egypt, arranged by Thalberg, and my favorite reading the prose of Chateaubriand; in few words, lush, luxuriant, and overblown romanti cism. The step to Ouida s novels and the Henselt etudes was not far. All that I detest now in music and literature was then my passion. Like Ephraim I was sealed to my idols, and the chief- est was Thalberg, natural son of Prince Lichtenstein, a handsome piano virtuoso with aristo cratic side-whiskers, a smooth pianistic style, and a euphonious touch. Liszt called to me. "Tiens ! let us hear some music by an admirer of my old friend Sigismund Thalberg." I did not miss the veiled irony of the speech, the slight underlining of " friend," for I had read of the historical Liszt-Thalberg duel in Paris during the third decade of the last century. But memories soon annulled myagony. What a via dolorosa I traversed from my chair to the piano by the way, a Steinway concert-grand. I shall not forget to mydying hour that chamber wherein I stood the most fateful afternoon of my life. Liszt, with his powerful profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He was the illuminated focus of a picture that is burnt into my memory cells. The pupils were wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious points of light for 221 VARIATIONS eyes. I, too, felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere of which Liszt was theliving reality. Urged by a hypnotic will I went to the piano,sat before it, and in my nervous misery lifted the fall-board and paused to decipher the nameof its maker; that s how I discovered Steinway.My act did not pass unperceived. Whisperingensued, followed chuckling, and some one said: "He must have begun as a piano salesman." It was the voice of the witty Rosenthal, and it utterly disconcerted me. Facing me on thewall was Ary SchefTer s portrait of Chopin, anddoubtless prompted by the subject, my fingers groped among the keys and I began, withoutrhyme or reason, the weaving prelude in Dofthe immortal Pole. My insides were shakinglike a bowl of disturbed jelly, though outwardlyI was as calm as growing grass. Oddly enoughmy hands did not falter, the music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vainThalberg s Art of Singing on the Pianoforte. I finished. Not a murmur was heard. ThenLiszt s voice cut the sultry air: "I had expectedThalberg s tremolo study," he casually remarked,avenging himself with an epigram on his oldrival a half century after their battles. ButThalberg didn t hear it. I did. I took the hintand bowed myself out of the royal presence, permitted by the boss to kiss his technique-ladenfingers, and without stopping for my hat andwalking-stick in the ante-chamber I went away.222 DREAMING OF LISZT Then tempted by the cool of the woods I strayed across to Goethe s Garden House. At the mo ment I preferred poetry to music. Neverthe less, I had played for Liszt. Rotten playing, of course, yet a historical fact. But when I compiled a life of the Grand Old Man of Hun gary I hadn t the courage to put my name in that long list of reputed pupils, though I dare say I didn t play any worse than some of them. Ask Arthur Friedheim. My hat and stick I sent for. I was not pre cisely in a jubilant mood, though I joined the Liszt lobby that night at the Hotel "Zum Elefanten." It was a goodly crowd, the majority of whom achieved musical fame later. In the Weimar of those days Liszt walked and talked, smoked big black cigars, drank his share of brandy, played, composed, and prayed he seldom missed early mass. Despite his Hun garian origin, his early French training, there emerged through the palimpsest of his brilliant and complex personality the characteristics of his mother, an Austrian born. He loved Ger man music, German ways. He liked to speak that tongue in preference to French. Of the Magyar language he knew little. But his music is Hungarian enough; Hungarian in the sense that Tchaikovsky s is Russian i. e., cosmo politan. However, there s a lot of nonsense written about that fetish of a certain critical school, the fetish of nationalism in music. Liszt would have been invincibly Liszt even if he 223 VARIATIONS had been born in Boston. And that tropically passionate town does not in the least resembleBudapest. At the Liszt museum his old housekeeperPaulina Apel I must ask Albert Morris Bagby if she still lives showed me its numerousmemorials. What a collection of trophies, jewels, manuscripts, orders, pictures, letters, and testimonials from all over the globe. Iread a letter from Charles Baudelaire to Liszt, which is not to be found in the volume dedicatedto his correspondence. Gifts from royaltyabound. In glass cases are the scores of Christus, the Faust Symphony, Orpheus, Hungaria,the Berg Symphony, Totentanz, and Festklaenge. Besides the Steinway in the music-room there was an old instrument dating backto the forties; for the little piano upon whichhe studied as a child you must go to the Budapest museum. At Weimar may be seen marblehands of Liszt s, Beethoven s, and Chopin s; also the long, nervous, spider-like fingers ofLiszt clasping the slender hand of the PrincessSayn-Wittgenstein. Like Chopin, Liszt at tracted princesses and other exalted personagesin petticoats as does sugar buzzing flies. And then I woke up. I had been dreamingin my Parisian attic in 1878. When I wentfor the first time to Weimar in 1896 Liszt hadbeen dead ten years. 224 A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD IN a half-forgotten study of Flaubert s mas terpiece, L Education Sentimentale, which he rightly calls A Tragic Novel, George Moore compares the great Frenchman to Brahma " creating the passing spectacle of life to relieve his eternal ennui. 1 . . . Now, Leopold Godowsky is not Brahma, and he has never suffered from ennui, thanks to his tremendous capacity for work; yet I can t help picturing him as a sort of impassive Asiatic deity seated before the keyboard of his instrument calmly surveying the eternal spectacle of music and its many masques. All schools, all styles, he knows, but upon this vast knowledge he has no desire to make any personal comment. Passionless, pas sionate, objective and subjective, his crystal- clear comprehension of the musical universe has made him apparently assume the attitude of an omniscient spectator, though he is neither one nor the other. Louis Ehlert asked Karl Tausig probably the greatest of all piano vir tuosi why he did not offer up a small sacrifice to the human needs of the masses. The Pole replied: "I am not sentimental; neither my life nor my education intended me to be so." Ehlert persisted. "How would it be if you were to give us an historical representation of the 225 VARIATIONS sentimental?" he suggested. Tausig shook hishead and shrewdly smiled. He never mafic-concessions to public taste, and he was calledinhuman, cold, objective. His master, Liszt,was the reverse, overflowing with the milk ofhuman music, spontaneous and prodigal in hisplay. Tausig the obverse of the medal; yet Ibelieve that Liszt and Tausig were the pianoDioscuri, and not Liszt and Chopin. Chopinas a pianist has a niche all his own. In an article several years ago and in themagazine section of The Times, I wrote thatLeopold Godowsky is a pianist for pianists, asShelley is a poet for poets. But everybodyreads Shelley nowadays, and no doubt compareshim unfavorably with the ear-splitting verseof the cacophonous young poets of the hour.Leopold Liebling took exception to my ascription, and I fancy he is right; every musical person listens to the alluring playing of Godowskyquite impervious to the fact that there are aspects of his art which will always escape them.In his playing he is transcendental. This doesntmean that he is frostily objective; he is human,emotional, and has at his finger ends all styles.It is the fine equilibrium of intellect and emotion that compels our admiration. No one playsChopin like Godowsky, no, not even that trickykobold, Vladimir de Pachmann. Paderewskiis more emotional, Josef Hofmann extorts aricher, a more sonorous tone from the wires;nevertheless, Godowsky is a Chopinist in a class226 A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD apart. He doesn t drip honey in the nocturnes as does Irr.ace Jar.. Prerr.ie: of Poland; he car/: thunder the polonaises like his friend Jozio from Cracow; but these qualities he gives us in his own scale of tonal values. He is a powerful man with muscles that are both velvet and steeL "When he wishes he, too, can sound the orches tral note; but, then, he seldom wishes this. His feeling for the limitations of the piano recalls the words of Rafael Joseffy: "I m not a brass band"; Joseffy, who, in his abhorrence of a smeary touch produced his legato with the aid of the pedals, and what an aristocratic floating touch was his! What poetry! What atmos phere! Setting aside his Chopin interpretations, which we take for granted, as he is Slavic, have you heard Godowsky play Mozart, or the neg lected Haydn; or Schubert, Schumann? Of his Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms I shall not write. I can only repeat all schools are at his beck, and if they are "perfect pictures, perfectly framed and hung," as Josefly said of his beloved master, Tausig, there is also the personal equa tion, for me, full of magic. Sensationalism, the pianistic fracas, posing for the gallery, all the bag of cheap tricks this great pianist eschews. He is master of the art of playing the piano beautifully. His exquisitely plastic phrasing, artistic massing of colors, above all the nobility of his conception little wonder I call him a Brahma of the keyboard, far-fetched as the 227 VARIATIONS simile may sound. To Godowsky all other pianists could go to school, if for nothing else butthe purity of his style, his kaleidoscopic tint-ings, his polyphony. And it must be admittedthat pianists I have spoken to about him admithis power. He does not boast the grand manner of Josef Hofmann, yet Hofmann is reportedto have told his manager that he enjoyed listen ing in a room to Godowsky more than playingto crowded and enthusiastic multitudes at hisown concerts. Truly a fraternal and noblesentiment ! If it comes to sheer sensationalism,then Godowsky easily leads them all, Rosenthainot excepted. I refer you to his paraphrases ofChopin, Weber, and Johann Strauss, and thesupreme ease with which he conquers them.Brahma, indeed. Although as he plays he looksmore like Buddha under his Bodh tree conjuringbeautiful sounds from sky and air and the murmuring of crystalline waters. It must be nearly twenty years ago, anyhoweighteen, that I entertained Vladimir de Pachmann in my Dream Barn on Madison Avenueat Seventy-sixth Street. The tenth floor, aroom as big and as lofty as a cathedral. Alas! where are such old-fashioned apartments to-day? After eating a duck, a kotchka, cooked Polishfashion, and borsch, beet soup, with numerousSlavic side-dishes, preceded by the inevitablezakuska those appetite-slaying bonnes bouchesDe Pachmann fiercely demanded cognac. Iwas embarrassed. Not drinking spirits, I had228 A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD inconsiderately forgotten the taste of others. De Pachmann, who is a child at heart, too often a naughty child, cried to heaven that I was a hell of a host ! He said this in Russian, then in French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, Eng lish, and wound up with a hearty Hebrew "Raca!" which may mean hatred, or revenge, certainly something not endearing. But the worst was to come. There stood my big Steinway concert grand piano, and he circled about the instrument as if it were a dangerous mon ster. Finally he sniffed and snapped: "My con tract does not permit me to play a Steinway." I hadn t thought of asking him, fearing Chopin s classic retort after a dinner party at Paris: "Ma dame, j ai mange si peu!" Finally I saw the hole in the millstone and excused myself. When I returned with a bottle of abominable cognac the little man s malicious smile changed to a look of ecstasy, and he was not a drinking man ever; but he was accustomed to his "petit verre" after dining, and was ill-tempered when deprived of it. Such is human nature, something that Puri tans, prohibitionists, and other pernicious busybodies will never understand. And then this wizard lifted the fallboard of my piano and, quite forgetful of that "contract," began playing. And how he did play! Ye gods! Bacchus, Apollo, and Venus and all other pleasant celestial persons, how you must have revelled when De Pachmann played! In the more intimate at mosphere of my apartment his music was of a 229 VARIATIONS gossamer web, iridescent, aerial, an aeolian harpdoubled by a diabolic subtlety. Albert RossParsons, one of the few living pupils of Tausig,in reply to my query, How did Joseffy comparewith Tausig? answered: "Joseffy was like themulticolored mist that encircles a mighty mountain; but beautiful." So Pachmann s weavingenchantments seemed in comparison to Godowsky s profounder playing. And what did Vladimir, hero of double-notes,play ? Nothing but Godowsky, then new to me.Liszt had been his god, but Godowsky was nowhis living deity. He had studied, mastered, andmemorized all those transcendental variationson Chopin studies, the most significant variationssince the Brahms, aPaganini scaling of the heightsof Parnassus; and I heard for the first time theparaphrase of Weber s Invitation to the Valse, amuch more viable arrangement than Tausigs;also thrice as difficult. However, technique, assheer technique, does not enter into the musicalzone of Godowsky. He has restored polyphonyto its central position, thus bettering in that respect Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. I havecalled attention elsewhere to Godowsky s solosonata, which evokes images of Chopin andBrahms and Liszt only in the scherzo. Instead of exhuming such an "ungrateful," unpianistic composition as Tschaikovsky s Sonatain G, pianists of caliber might more profitablyintroduce the Godowsky work. He is too modest or else too indifferent to put it on his programme. It "lies" so well for the keyboard,230 A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD yet there is no denying its difficulties, chiefly polyphonic; the patterns are intricate, though free from the clogging effects of the Brahms sonatas. De Pachmann delighted his two audi tors from 10 P. M to 3 A. M. It is safe to wager that the old Carrollton never heard such musicmaking before or since. When he left, happy over his triumph I was actually flabbergasted by the new music he whispered: "Hein! What you think ! You think I can play this wonderful music? You are mistaken. Wait till you hear Leopold Godowsky play. We are all children, all woodchoppers, compared with him!" Curiously enough, the last is the iden tical phrase uttered by Anton Rubinstein in re gard to Franz Liszt. Perhaps it was a quotation, but De Pachmann meant it. It was the sin- cerest sentiment I had heard from his often in sincere lips. We were all three surprised to find a score of people camping out on the curved stairway and passages, the idealist, a colored lad who ran the elevator, having succumbed to sleep. This impromptu Godowsky recital by a marvellous pianist, for De Pachmann was a marvel in his time, must have made a grand hit with my neighbors. It did with me, and when Godowsky returned to New York I had last heard him in the middle nineties of the previous century I lost no time in hearing him play in his inimitable manner those same works. A pianist who can win the heartiest admiration of such contemporaries as De Pachmann and Joseffy and Josef Hofmann I could adduce many 231 VARIATIONS other names must be a unique artist. Andthat Godowsky is. When he isn t teaching or playing with orchestra or in recitals Mr. Godowsky spends hisleisure in pedagogic work. There is a widespreading education scheme which has St. Louisas headquarters, the name of which I ve for1 gotten, though the name doesn t much matter,as musicians the country over know it. For thisMr. Godowsky is editing the classics and romantics of piano literature. He is also composingthe most charming music imaginable for theearlier and middle grades of students; music thathas genuine musical values, with technical.Imagination and instruction blended. Pegasusharnessed to the humbler draught horse. If youthink of Schumann s various albums for theyoung you may surmise the spirit of the Godowsky curriculum. I have been reading throughhis Miniatures for four-hands (Carl Fischer, NewYork), three suites, twelve numbers in all, inwhich the treble is for the pupil of extreme simplicity yet demanding attention to the melodicline, and amply developing the rhythmic sense.With their fanciful titles, tiny mood-pictures,( these Miniatures are bound to attract all teach->ers of the instrument. Leopold Godowsky is amaster pedagogue, as well as a master of mastersamong virtuosi. He belongs to the race of suchgiants as Paganini, Liszt, Tausig and heis" different." 232 CONTEMPORARY BRAN YESTERDAY was housecleaning in my office, which I need hardly tell you is situated under my hat. The principal debris to be removed and dumped into the waste-paper basket were letters addressed to this department. Their number was appalling, the accumulation of weeks, as the music editor has little time for answering letters. A dozen concerts a day, opera almost every night, do not make for the life tranquil. Now, letters, anonymous or signed, are always interesting, especially those in the first category. Praise and blame run neck and neck; cinquante-cinquante, in classic parlance. Occasionally abusive missives arrive, breathing fire and fury, and these are of psy chologic import. You ask yourself why? And lose yourself in an interesting labyrinth of specu lation. The small boy who chalks naughty words or figures on wall spaces during the spring of the year testifies to the rising sap of the bud ding season; it is an outlet for his nascent emo tions. Presumably this is the case with those whose handwriting reveals their uneasy sex. But why do they select the present incumbent of this chair of criticism ? William James, when he dissected Dr. Nordau, twenty-five years ago, pointed out as a major symptom of the too 233 VARIATIONS critical Max what is called by psychiatrists coprolalia, or a tendency to indulge in vulgar, abusive language. When certain inhibitions of polite society are removed the patient indulgesin vile speech, and writes nasty and usuallyanonymous letters for reasons only known to himself or herself. Writers of anonymous let ters are described as cowardly, but this is onlyhalf the truth; they are also sick-brained, suffer ing from mild hysteria, and as soon as they trans fer to paper the expression of their petty spite are temporarily relieved; there is "a load off their minds/ 7 as they put it. This doesn t mean that all anonymous letters are abusive; some of them are pleasant reading. A blushing maiden records her admiration. A"violinist" tells me that I have overpraisedRaoul Vidas, although I was not at the concertin question, Sunday being my day of respite from the boiler shop; now and again pertinentcriticism is received, but, whether signed or unsigned, all these communications only prove thattheir recipient s casual writing is closely read, and that is a minor consolation. Then there arethe letters asking for advice, and these contain, harder nuts to crack. Why warn a young manor woman that musical criticism as a profession is a delusion and a snare ? Neither one will be lieve you. Why suggest to an ambitious youngcomposer that any other avocation will bringhim, if not happiness, then, at least, bread andbutter? But the stone hankers after the star, 234 CONTEMPORARY BRAN and who shall mock its aspiration ? How often have we felt like crying aloud: "Hats on, gentle man, this is not a genius!" reversing the his toric utterance of Robert Schumann. A critic should be clairvoyant, but sometimes he is not. And little wonder. Paste passes for diamonds, skim-milk masquerades as cream. But it is always well to face the rising, not the setting sun. Write only for young; the old will not heed you, being weary of the pother of life and art. To the young belongs the future. Hurrah for Ornstein and Prokofieff, or the ideals they represent! Progress always traverses a circle, it is more imaginary than real, but we must have the illusion of progress, else spiritually decay. Without vision people perish. Nice copybook axioms, paste them in your bonnet. In Emile Hennequin s La Critique Scientifique introduced to English readers by John Mackinnon Robertson in his New Essays Towards a Critical Method the brilliant Frenchman, unhappily dead before his time, advanced the idea that every critic should, in the preface of his book, set forth not only his qualifications, but also his prejudices, his limi tations. This procedure might shed a dry light on what follows, although it would seem un necessary, as all these virtues and defects are implicit in the critics work. However, Mr. Rob ertson has elaborated the theory and frankly exposes himself. I am minded of this by a signed letter, evidently written by a gentleman, 235 VARIATIONS which came to this department shortly after anotice had appeared criticising the Oratorio So ciety. The critic, it seems, must have been in a disgruntled humor when he declared that theoratorio form was as obsolete as the mastodon,or some other prehistoric monster; perhaps hemeant hippopotamus. The writer of the communication protests, and logically, against send ing a man to criticise choral singing when he is not in sympathy with such. Other people, numerous people, find in oratorio the musical staff of life. Why, then, trample on their feelings? The answer is an unqualified assent to the argu ment. As I signed the criticism in question, and as I was bored to death at the time, there is nothing left for me but to apologize also put on paper my objections, thus following theadvice of the distinguished French critic. AndI fear I shall make out a poor case for the defense. In the first place, on the night of the Oratorioconcert, our oratorio editor, yielding to a per fectly human impulse about the fourth timein his life accompanied the sporting editor toa marvellous wrestling match between El Greco,the Terrible Greek (his real name is said to beTheototocopulous), and Goya, better known as the Man-Strangler. Which one first went to the mat on that tremendous occasion need notconcern us now; suffice to say that I was butch ered to make the oratorio editor s holiday. Whydo I dislike oratorio ? I meekly retort I don t. I love it, and my correspondent is right 236 CONTEMPORARY BRAN when he asserts that the form has served as a vehicle for most masterly music. Think of Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn. I know it. I have heard and loved choral singing for a half century. Masterpieces ^ never weary, but, as Arthur Symons says, books about books soon pass away, and there are some of us who prefer to read than "see" Hamlet, although I agree with Brander Matthews that the only test of a play is "the fire of the footlights." In a word, public performance may rob the masterpiece of its original grandeur and we must predicate grandeur for the B minor Mass, for the Messiah, for Elijah. This sounds as if I were about to lay the blame on the particular performance of the Oratorio Society a cowardly evasion of my duty. On the contrary, I confess that with the exception of the inevitable limitations of amateur singing Signor Setti choruses are not plentiful I had never heard the Oratorio So ciety sing with such refreshing vigor as the week before last. Remember, too, that I heard the society under Leopold Damrosch, when it sang The Damnation of Faust at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and young Walter con ducted a chorus in the wings. You will ask, You love the noble music in this form, why write deprecatingly of it? Because it is my unshakable conviction that such music does not belong in the concert room, but in a church. After hearing the Passion music in Bach s old St. Thomas s Church, or the Brahms 237 VARIATIONS Requiem in a historical church, the anomaly of singers in festive array singing in concert halls is too much for my sense of eternal fitness. Yes,critics have "nerves," and it needs a remarkable interpretation of the Messiah or kindredcompositions to stir me. I am only answeringfor myself qui s excuse, s accuse ? and donot presume to gainsay the feelings of pious folk who regard the Messiah as a sacred function. But for those who tell me that the mock-turtleChristianity of Parsifal is "sacred" I merelyretort : " A fig for the mystic capon." Naturally,a concert room better serves the practical pur pose of singing organizations here than the houseof God; yet I prefer the church, for the spec tacle of five hundred humans, with their mouthswide open bawling the text would it not dis tract one? Sacred fiddlesticks! you exclaimwhen a tenor, faultlessly clad, arises and solemnlyintones, "And Jesus said," the remainder of thespeech being uttered by some one else. ^Esthetically, oratorio has not a leg to stand on. It is neither fish nor flesh. How dull was Samson et Dalila till sung in costume and before the foot lights ! And it is not by any means very dra matic. Still, to many who do not visit theopera for religious reasons, oratorio is a species of emotional outlet. It is a half-way house, acompromise you may enjoy both drama andreligion. Another thing I am weary of themusic, as I weary when I see Hamlet or hear theFifth Symphony, or look at the Dresden Ma238 CONTEMPORARY BRAN donna. I am not apologizing for this weakness, only trying to explain its genesis. William Gil lette has written about the " first-time" element in acting; or why an actor must ceaselessly re new the freshness of his original inspiration. Would that some sympathetic writer deigned to take up the cudgels for the ear-sick music critic. It is difficult, nay, impossible, to recap ture that first rapture when Tristan, or the C minor Symphony, or Hamlet, swam into our ken. That is why I did not "react" the other night at the Oratorio Society, and why, as my critique was reprehensible, I am now making a clean breast of the matter and crying : Peccavi ! And here is my old friend Frank Sealey mildly complaining that it was not his fault that his electric organ " ciphered" for a bar during the evening. As I have literally sat at Brother Sealey s feet for nearly thirty years since the opening of Carnegie Hall it is not necessary to assure him that I never doubted that it was the fault of the organ, not his. He is a rock of certitude on the organ bench. But I did enjoy Wolf-Ferrari s Vita Nuova, a beautifully fash ioned score, too sweetly sentimental in spots for the austere and lovely sonnets of the deathless Dante; nevertheless, a tour de force, happily illustrating my primal contention that the ora torio form is as obsolescent as the epic; the spirit, I mean, rather than the form, for the bony framework is there, but the age of piety, the profound piety that prompted the composition 239 VARIATIONS of such glorious music as Bach s or Handel s, has quite vanished, to be replaced by machinemade music, the "movies," and other stimulat ing arts. Contemporary bran is filling, but it nourishes not the soul. Need I add, when theOratorio Society sings the Messiah at Christmastide, that the regular oratorio editor, a singularly pious person, will report the annual occurrence ! That night, perhaps, I shall enjoy the brutalbut diverting spectacle of a wrestling match.It all depends on the amiability of the sportirgeditor. 240 A MOOD REACTIONARY I CONSIDER such phrases as the " progress of art," the " improvement of art," and " higher average of art" as distinctly harmful and mis leading. How can art improve ? Is art a some thing, an organism that is capable of growing into a fat maturity? If this be so, then, by the same token, it can become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with the honors due its useful career. It was Henrik Ibsen who asserted that the vital values of a truth lasted at the longest about twenty years; after that the particular truth rolled into error. Now, isn t this quibble concerning "artistic improvement" as fallacious as the vicious circle of the dramatist from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers or is it the Land of the Midnight Bun? Contrariwise, Bach would be dead, Mozart moribund, Beethoven in middle-aged decay. Instead, what is the musical health of these three composers? Have we a gayer, blither, more youthful scapegrace writing to-day than Mozart? Is there a man among the mod erns more virile, passionate, profound, or noble than Beethoven? And Bach is the boy of the trinity. The Well-Tempered Clavichord is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. In it may be found the past, present, future of music. It is the Fountain of Eternal Youth. 241 VARIATIONS As a matter of cold fact, it is your modernwho is ancient; the ancients were younger.Recall the Greeks and their naive joy in crea tion. In sorrow the twentieth-century manbrings forth his art. His music betrays it. Itis sad, complicated, hysterical, morbid. Noneed to mention Chopin, who was neurotic an empty medical phrase nor Schumann, whocarried in him the seeds of madness ; nor Wagner,who was a typical decadent on an epical scale. Sufficient for the argument to adduce the namesof Berlioz, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, and RichardStrauss. Some Sunday when the weather is wretched, when icicles hang by the wall, and" ways be foul" and "foul is fair and fair is foul," I shall tell you what I think of the "blond barbarian" who sets to music crazy philosophies,bloody legends, sublime tommyrot, and the pic tures and poems of his friend. At present I amnot in the humor nor have I the space. Goodwhite paper is become a luxury, like freedomof speechlessness and other indelicacies of thenational cuisine. As I understand the jargon of criticism, Berlioz is the father of modern instrumentation.That is, he says nothing original or significantin his music, but he says it magnificently. Apurple, pompous rhetorician, a Chateaubriandof the orchestra. His style covers a multitudeof musical or unmusical defects with theflamboyant cloak of chromatic charity. Hepins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his242 A MOOD REACTIONARY compositions, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to fill in his big, sonorous, empty frame with an adequate picture. Your picture is not the same as mine. I swear that the young man who sits next to me, with a silly chin, goggle eyes, and a cocoa- nut-shaped head, sees as in a flattering mirror, the idealized image of a strong-jawed, ox-eyed, classic-browed youth, a mixture of Napoleon and Byron. I loathe the music that makes its chief appeal to the egotism of mankind, all the while slyly insinuating that it only addresses the imagination. Yes, the imagination of your own splendid ego in a white waistcoat driving a new model car through the White Light district on an immoral afternoon in the puberty of spring. Let us pass to the Hungarian piano virtuoso, who posed as a great composer. That he lent his hard cash and musical themes to his precious son-in-law, Richard Wagner, is undeniable. Liszt admits it himself. But, then, beggars must not be choosers, and Liszt gave Wagner mighty poor stuff at times. We believe that Wagner liked far better the solid shekels than the notes of hand. Liszt would have had little to say if Berlioz had not preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master of musical snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded - both in brass and wood that his so-called symphonies were neither fish, nor form, nor good red tunes. What ho ! cried Master Franz, I ll give them a dose homoeopathic. He did, 243 VARIATIONS and he named his prescription Symphonic Poem,or, if you will, Poeme Symphonique, which is not the same thing. Nothing so tickles thevanity like this sort of verbal fireworks. "It leaves so much to the imagination/ murmursthe fat man with a 22-collar and a No. 6 hat. It does. And his kind of imagination goodLord ! Liszt, nothing daunted because hecouldn t shake out an honest throw of a tunefrom his technical dice-box, proceeded to buildhis noise on so-called themes, claiming that in this method he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach s themes are subjects for fugal treatment,Liszt s are used symphonically. The parallel is uncritical. Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention. Bach had, and in abundance;witness his chorals, masses, oratorios, preludes,suites, fugues. However, the Berlioz ball hadto be kept a-rolling; the formula was easy.Liszt named his poems, named his very notes,put dog-collars on his harmonies yet no onewhistled after them. Whoever whistled a Liszttune? Tschaikovsky kept one eye on Liszt and Berlioz, the other on Bellini and Gounod. Whatwould have happened if he had been one-eyedI cannot pretend to say. In love with lush,sensual melody, infatuated with the gorgeouspyrotechnical effects of Berlioz and Liszt, alsothe pomposities of Meyerbeer, this Russian, whobegan too late in his studies, succeeded in manufacturing a number of ineffectual works. On244 A MOOD REACTIONARY them he bestowed strained, fantastic titles, empty, meaningless, pretty,, and as he was con- trapuntally short-winded, he made his so-called tone-poems shorter than Liszt s. He had little aptitude for the symphonic form, and his de velopment section is always his weak point. Too much Italian sentiment, and a sentiment that is often hectic and morbid. He raves or whines like the people in Russian fiction. I think he was touched in the upper story, that is, till I heard the compositions of R. Strauss of Munich. What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of all that is gay, witty, sparkling, spontaneous in music. After Mozart, give me Strauss Johann, not Richard. No longer the wheezings, gaspings, short- breathed phrases of Liszt. No longer the sen suality, loose construction, formlessness and vodka besotted peasant dances of Tschaikovsky, but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt and the classics. Richard Ostrich knows his little affair. He is clever, he is skilled. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts. His early songs are singable. It is his vile, perverse orgies of orchestral noises that wound my ears. No normal man ever erected such mad architectural tonal schemes. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad music. He lacks melody. He dotes on ugliness. He suffers from the uglification complex. He writes to distracting, unheavenly lengths, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn t for- 245 VARIATIONS get to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn t Don Juan shades of Mozart it is DonQuixote shades of Cervantes. This literarytitle humbug serves as the plaster for ourbroken heads and split eardrums. Berlioz,Tschaikovsky and R. Strauss are not for all time. The truth is that musical art has gone farafield from the main travelled road, has beenled into blind alleys and dark forests. If thisart has made no "progress in fugue, song, sonata,symphony, string quartet, oratorio, opera," whohas " improved" on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann,Chopin? Name, name, I ask. What s theuse of talking about the "higher average ofto-day?" How much higher? You mean thatmore people go to concerts, more people enjoymusic, than fifty or a hundred years ago. Dothey? I doubt it. Of what use all our hugetemples of worship if the true gods of art nolonger be worshipped therein? Numbers provenothing. Majorities are not always in theright. There has been no great original musiccomposed since the death of Beethoven, for, strictly speaking, the music-drama of Wagneris a synthesis of the arts, and, despite his indi vidual genius, in union there is death in thecase of the Seven Arts. United we fall, dividedwe stand! The multiplication of orchestras,opera-houses, singing societies, and concerts arenot indicative that general culture is achieved.246 A MOOD REACTIONARY Quality, not quantity, should be the shibboleth. The tradition of the classics is fading, soon it shall vanish. We care little for the masters. Modern music worship is a fashionable fad. People go to listen because they think it the mode. Alack and alas ! that is not the true spirit in which to approach the Holy of Holies, Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. Oremus ! 247 MUSICAL "POTTERISM" POTTERISM is a clever, amusing satire on theBritish philistine which has had considerablevogue in London and New York. It was writtenby Rose Macaulay, who is said to have a dozennovels to her credit. The lady has evidentlyread Shaw profitably; that is, Nietzsche strainedthrough the Shaw sieve, for G. B. S. never hadan original idea. She defines Potterism as aframe of mind, not a set of opinions. Potterismis only a new word for an old thing cant, or,as we say, humbug, and, on its more seriousside, hypocrisy. Smug self-satisfaction is itskeynote. Will Irwin in a flash of divinationdefined the particular quality as "highbrow," a species of sterile intellectualism which irritatessensible people because of the lofty, condescending attitude assumed by certain persons who,terribly at ease in Zion, are seemingly in thesecret councils of the Almighty. Don Marquisdaily tilts at assthetic sham in his stimulatingSun Dial column, and Gelett Burgess, the author of the deathless Purple Cow, long ago hitout at the Potterism of his time. Potterism,like the rich, is always with us. We are all ofus more or less Potterites. Dickens paintedthe tribe, beginning with Mrs. Leo Hunter, notforgetting Podsnappery. Thackeray s scimitarprose cut through snobbish pretenses, while a248 MUSICAL "POTTERISM" French philosopher, Jules de Gautier, in his Bovaryisme, has demonstrated that we are victims of the world illusion to pretend to be otherwise than we are. It is a law of life, a superstition, this game of self-illuding, and superstition is the cement of civilization. Therefore, Miss Macaulay has dealt with nothing novel, but she has written an agree able variation on the theme of human weak ness, and the most engaging quality of her for mula is its elasticity. No matter the depart ment of life, Potterism lurks thereabouts. Musical Potterism, for example, is everywhere rampant. It bobs up in music criticisms and peeps forth in daily intercourse. "Give me good old Mozart/ cries the classical Potterite, "and keep your modern kickshaws. Mozart is good enough for me!" Alas, we think Mo zart is too good for this bonehead, who no doubt prefers a Broadway comic opera to The Mar riage of Figaro. Another of the exasperating Potterites is the haunter of concert halls who spends his time in comparing violinists, pianists, singers, orchestras. Criticism thrives on com parisons. That we know; but the infernal hair splitting over this bald subject gets on your nerves. Music and morals is another favorite grouping of two widely sundered things. Not so, asserts the uplifter who seeks sermons in running Bachs and usually finds immoral rub ble. Of all the damnable nuisances in the Vale of Tone, commend me to your moralizer. He 249 VARIATIONS is too much in evidence nowadays, and his per nicious influence will, I feel certain, close everytheatre, opera-house, picture-gallery, and bookin our present United States of Slaves. There is too much critical cant concerningthe classics of music. How uncritical we are ! We say Mozart and Beethoven just as we sayGoethe and Schiller. Such bracketing is bubblingbosh. It is almost Hegelian in its identification of opposites. We can understand the conjunction of Mascagni and Leoncavello in Cavalleriaand Pagliacci, a managerial marriage, with oureye on the box office. But Bach and Beethoven.Or Schumann and Chopin. How absurd andlazy-minded is such association of names ! Oneof the most ingrained of Potterisms is that thegallery at the opera is the repository of themost precious criticism. For gallery, read thestandees at our opera the rail birds, so called. As a matter of fact, the most illegitimate applause comes from these quarters. Does a tenorbawl, a basso bellow, a soprano scream, thunderous explosions prove our contention. WhenGalli-Curci sang off key at the Lexington Theatre last season she was hailed in an unmistakably cordial manner. We have noticed thesame lack of taste at the San Carlo, Naples; atLa Scala, in Milan; in Paris, Berlin, and London. Italian audiences, especially of the topgallery, are supposed to possess finer ears thanother people. More musical Potterism. Theyapplaud in Italy, as they applaud in New York250 MUSICAL "POTTERISM" or London, the singers with the stentorian or extremely high voices; whether they sing in tune or not, whether they rhythmically distort the musical phrase or not, matters little to these fanatics for noise. And invariably they drown the orchestra if the singer happens to end a few bars before it. That the composition should be allowed to terminate logically does not enter into their unmusical comprehension. To bruise their muscular palms and shout is their idea of sensibility. We do not refer now to the official claque, if there be one at the opera, but to the diabolical hand-clapping and hurrahing which is becoming a formidable menace to the enjoy ment of the musical portion of the audience. No applause is tolerated during Parsifal until act-ends, no applause is tolerated at Tristan and Isolde until the curtain falls, and what a relief it is not to be forced to endure the belch ing enthusiasm and vulgar fist-thumping in the middle of a musical phrase ! Why, then, are not Italian and French operas given the same chance? We are indeed barbarians in this cult of noise. We can t even escape noise within our opera-house. It would be a wise regulation if applause could be confined within legitimate limits at the end of each act. It might not please some singers, who are so avid of applause that they actually hire it by the yard, but it would be a boon to the occupants of the stalls and boxes at the Metropolitan. Hasta la vista ! 251 VARIATIONS We blush to utter such Potterisms. Thereshould be no necessity for these obvious criti cisms. Another annoying Potterism is the growing hero-worship of conductors nothing rare,by the way, in the history of art. We rememberTheodore Thomas in his palmy days; rememberthat smoothly fitting dress coat of his. Yes,there were many women who attended thePhilharmonic Society concerts to gaze ecstati cally upon the shapely back and harmoniousmovements of this handsome conductor. Another prima donna conductor was Arthur Nikisch of the Boston band. He waved lily-whitehands; his weaving motions fascinated theeye. They seemed in their rhythmic varietythe externalization of the music he was interpreting, and, according to Delsarte and Daicroze, they were. But both Thomas and Nikischwere great conductors Nikisch still is; indeed, he is the dean of great conductors. Hispersonal mannerisms were and are taken as amatter of course. We do not include ArthurBodanzky among the prima-donna baton heroes.Nevertheless, he is a hero, and a hero alwaysin a hurry. He is the most precise and businesslike of our conductors. He seems as if he weremaking a train to Eldorado. Yet it is only afancy. He is absolutely master of his technicaland intellectual resources. The enormous dynamic energy of the man, his driving power, areconcentrated at the tip of his stick. If the Boston Symphony Orchestra boasts a demon drum252 MUSICAL "POTTERISM" mer, the National Symphony Orchestra can boast a demon conductor. Bodanzky is de moniacal when he cuts loose. At the second Tristan performance he galloped his men at such a pace that the singers could only pant after them. A great conductor is Artur with the Weber profile and the propulsive right hand. If he had a calm left hand like Thomas or Nikisch his readings would benefit thereby. But how stimulating is his conducting! You swing along on the crest of exaltation and for get the composer s intentions in the tumultuous symphonic sea. A brilliant apparition, a stork of genius, but with brains, always brains. The dark horse of American conductors is Ossip Gabrilowitsch. That young man will bear watching. His antipodes is Walter Damrosch, who is as familiar a spectacle nowadays as Trinity Church. Walter leaves nothing to chance. He doesn t believe in the imprevu; with him the unexpected never happens. There is a sense of security at his Symphony Society, the sort of security that appeals to you when sitting under a long beloved preacher. Since 1881, on and off, we have sat metaphorically at the feet of Walter Damrosch, and not once has he startled, not once has he altogether disappointed us. He is safe, sane, and sometimes sopo rific. But he never uses rouge or pencils the eyebrows of his interpretations; perfume is to him abhorrent. Good old Walter! His has 253 VARIATIONS been a long race, and his a sober victory. Leopold Stokowski is a pocket edition of Nikisch,a Nikisch without genius. He is the ideal primadonna conductor and exudes sweetness and light (Einstein says that light exudes), and as regardsthe technique of the baton he has all his contemporaries beaten to a frazzle save one, ArturoToscanini. Such economy of gesture, suchweighty significance in every motion are praise worthy. His musicianship is excellent, his memory remarkable, although commanding in tellectuality is absent. He too has a sinuousline in his back that enchants his feminine audience. He is graceful, and inevitably makeshis entrance carrying his baton as if it were ababy. The Philadelphia Orchestra is largelycomposed of mediocre material, but thanks tothe admirable disciplinarian, that is, Stokowski,it sounds at times as if of prime quality. Andtonal quality is precisely what it lacks. Itsconductor hypnotizes his audience into think ing it is so. Ah, these Poles! The Orientalmango magic trick over again. Stokowski is young, blond, and has a Chopinesque head, butin profile his chin is as diffident as a poachedegg. Pierre Monteux, like a happy nation, hasno personal history. He is an accomplishedchef. We enjoy his cuisine. There is a savorytouch of the Midi in his musical ragouts. Andto my horror I find myself indulging in the mostreprehensible musical Potterism. 254 MY "CHILDE ROLAND" IF you keep good company too long it is dif ficult to remain a decent member of society. This sounds like a faded paradox, but I mean it. No doubt vaso-motor reflex action is the cause. Try it yourself. Frequent the abodes of the self-righteous, of prohibitionists, of re formers and uplifters generally, and you will soon crave moral wood-alcohol, possibly the more vicious benzine. Too much opera drives me back to the church, and thence to the House of the Flesh where the spirit sleepeth. Because he was a clergyman s son and brought up in a moral straight jacket, dosed with moralic acid, Friedrich Nietzsche exploded such a phrase as " Christianity, alcohol the two great means of corruption" to civilization. I have often wondered why he dragged in rum? (This is a variant on Whistler s epigram.) However, I m not attempting unimaginary conversations, nor describing insurrections in oyster-shells. A Scotch proverb warns us: " Never tell your foe when your foot sleeps"; nevertheless I shall make a confession that in volves both feet, also my sleeping cortical cells. The good company mentioned above chiefly consisted of young, ambitious composers, an approved gang of musical chaps who delighted 255 VARIATIONS in symphonically setting poetic ideas, whetherfrom Byron, Nietzsche, Ben De Casseres, ord Annunzio. And when I say symphonically Imean symphonic poems, for the great symphonists were long ago voted by this coterie as"old stuff." Liszt and Richard Strauss wereour springboards. The Debussy influence wasyet to come. It was Tchaikovsky who mostappealed to us. Realism, not imagination, wasour shibboleth. As all my friends were composing I took it into my head to go them onebetter, to be more realistic than the ultra-real ists. I had, so I fancied, the necessary science.I consulted young Henry Hadley, who wasquite a promising lad at that time, and he advised after putting me through a course ofcontrapuntal sprouts to go ahead and domy worst, which worst would only mean spoil ing music-paper, while my best ! Whoknows ? I fancied that I had mastered the tools ofmy trade, that I knew every form from a songto a symphony, and that my scoring comprisedthe entire gamut of orchestral pigments yousee, false modesty didn t stand in the way so I began to cast about for my poetic subjectand its musical counterpart, hoping such is the audacity of youth that the appearanceof the pair would be simultaneous, as in thedual-composing of Richard Wagner. I didn t expect much, did I? Well, one fine night, asI wearily tossed on my folding bedouin, my256 MY "CHILDE ROLAND" musical imagination began to work. I remem ber now that it was a spring night, the moon rounded, lustrous, and silvering the lake be neath my window. I had been re-reading for the hundredth time Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, from my favorite poet, Robert Browning, with its sinister coloring, its spiritual overtones. Yet until that moment it had never suggested musical treatment. Perhaps it was the exquisite cool of the night, its haunting mellow atmosphere, that fermented in my brainbox. I went to the window. Suddenly I saw a huge fantastic cloud shadow project a jagged black pattern on the water. Presto! I had my theme. It came with an electric snap that blinded me for an instant. It would be the first motive of my symphonic poem, Childe Roland. It was thought in the key of B minor, a key emblematic of the dauntless knight who to "the dark tower came," unfettered by ene mies, physical or spiritual. How my imagination seethed the night through, as I am one of those unhappy men who, the moment an idea comes to them, must develop it to the bitter end. Childe Roland kept me on tenterhooks till dawn. I heard the call of his "dauntless horn," and saw the "squat tower." The knight s theme, so it seemed to me, was Roland incarnated in tone. I over heard its underlying harmonies with the in strumentation, all sombre, gloomy, the note of gladness missing. I treated my theme with 257 VARIATIONS vitality, announcing it on the English horn,with a strange rhythmic background suppliedby the tympani; the strings in division playedtremolando, the brass was staccato and muted.It was novel enough to me, although this description must sound banal to modern ears. After seven months of agonizing revision, pruning, clipping, cutting, and hawking it about forthe inspection of my friends, and getting laughedat for my pains, I finished the unwieldy work.But the performance ! Diplomacy won the day.A music-critic, who could compose a symphonicpoem was more of a rarity in those far-awaydays than now, when children make fugueswhile you wait. There was an interview withHerr Kapellmeister Schnabelowsky and a def inite promise. I shall spare you details of theseventeen rehearsals, hours and hours in duration, when my amateurish orchestration washeld up to scorn by the conductor for the delec tation of the band (though I always paid forhis beer at Liichow s). The audience at theconcert had the pleasure of reading in the programme-book the entire poem, Childe Roland,no doubt wondering what it meant. My symphonic poem would make clear the dark, dubioussayings of the poet. I believed then in the powerof music to portray definite soul-states, to mirrormoods, to depict, though indefinitely, commonevery-day physical facts. My composition was adequately played, ofthat there was no doubt. Give the Herr Kapell258 MY "CHILDE ROLAND" meister his due. It was only ninety minutes long remember it was a symphonic poem, not a symphony and I sat in nervous perspira tion as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, to the squat tower theme, the "sudden little river" motive, the horrid engine of war motive, the sinister grinning false-guide theme, in short, to the many motives of the poem with its tre mendous apotheosis, ending with the blast from the slug-horn of the dauntless knight. I hope you are acquainted with this extraordinary poem, for I have met confirmed Browningites who had never read it. After Paracelsus and Sordello it is my daily sustenance. The apothe osis theme I sounded with twelve trombones, twenty-one basset horns, one calliope and a chorus of one thousand two hundred, with a vacuum choir for celestial coloring. It almost brought down the roof and I was the happiest person in the audience. As I went away I en countered an old friend, the critic of The Dis ciples of Tone, who said to me: "Mon cher maitre, I congratulate you, it beats Richard Strauss all hollow. Who and what was your Childe Roland? Was he any relative of Byron s Childe Harold? No, yes, no? I suppose the first theme represented the galumping of his horse, and that funny tri angular fugue meant the horse was lame in one leg and going it on three. Adieu! again con gratulations. I m in a hurry." He fled. Tri angular fugue! Why, that typified the cross2 59 VARIATIONS roads before which Childe Roland hesitates.How I detested that unimaginative critic ! Iwas indeed disheartened. Then I was salutedby a musical lady: "It was grand, perfectly grand, but why didyou introduce a funeral march in the middle?You know in the poem Childe Roland is notkilled till the end." I thanked her with a wryface. The funeral march she alluded to wasnot a march but the Quagmire theme, thatquagmire from which queer faces threateninglymock at the brave knight. Hopeless, thoughtI, musical people have no imagination. In themorning newspapers I was treated ratherroughly. I was accused of cribbing my opening theme from the overture to The FlyingDutchman, and giving it a rhythmic twist formy own ends as if I hadn t conceived it onthe spur of an inspired minute! I was alsotold that I couldn t write a fugue, that myor chestration was overladen, my part-writingcrooked, while the work as a whole was deficientin symmetry, development, repose, above all in coherence. This last was too much. If Browning s poem was pictured in my music,why, then, Browning was to be blamed for theincoherence, not I. I had faithfully followedhis poetic narrative. Years later, when I became a member of the critical guild, I saw in aclearer light the reasons for those divagations.You can t fool all the critics all the time. Months afterward I read in his book, The260 MY "CHILDE ROLAND" Beautiful in Music, by Edward Hanslick, that " Definite feelings and emotions are unsus ceptible of being embodied in music." So I had been on a false track. Charles Lamb and Hanslick had reached the same conclusion by diverse roads. I realized that my symphonic poem Childe Roland told nothing to its hearers of Browning s poem; that my own subjective and overthrown imaginings were not worth a rush; that as music the composition had ob jective existence, though not as a poetical pic ture, which must be judged on its musical merits alone; its themes, development, formal excel lence, and not because of its arbitrary fidelity to a literary programme. When I set about analyzing, I discovered what poor stuff I had produced; how my fancy had tricked me into believing that my half dozen heavily instru mented themes, with their restless migrations into many tonalities were " souls and tales mar vellously mirrored," when they were nothing of the kind. In reality my ignorance of form, and lack of contrapunted knowledge, had made me label the work a " symphonic poem" an elastic, high-sounding, pompous, and empty tithe. In a spirit of revenge on my fatuity I rearranged the score for small orchestra and it is now played in the circus under the better understood name of The Patrol of the Night-Stick, and the critical press has particularly praised the graphic power of the night-stick motive and the verisimilitude 261 VARIATIONS of the quick " get-away" of the burglars in theelaborate coda. Alas ! poor Childe Roland. If our young composers would study Hanslick s book much good might accrue. It is all very well to give your composition a grandiosetitle, but do not expect that your audience willunderstand your idea. We may be thinking ofsomething quite different, according to our re spective temperaments. I may enjoy the formalmusical side; my neighbor, for all I know, will, in imagination, have buried his rich, irritableold aunt; therefore your paean of gladness, withits clamor of brazen trumpets, means for himthe triumphant ride home from the cemeteryand the anticipated joys of the post-mortuarybaked meats and the subsequent jag. Younever can tell. 262 "OSCAR" AND DVORAK WELL I remember the day when Oscar Hammerstein first entered the office of the Musical Courier and introduced himself to Editor Marc A. Blumenberg. The year may have been 1888, perhaps 1889. He told Mr. Blumenberg that he was worth a million dollars, which sum he had made from a patent cigar-cutting machine; he also said that he was the editor of a trade journal devoted to the tobacco industry. Blu menberg looked at me, winked, and shook his head. The future impresario, with that ironical smile of his, noticed the incredulous movement and asked: "You think I m meshugah? I ll prove that I m not crazy," and he produced irre fragable evidence that he was neither crazy nor poverty-stricken. He was worth more than a million, and Marc immediately became inter ested. Who wouldn t have? Oscar was then dreaming of opera in English. The failures of American operatic companies had only blazed a trail for him, a trail that would be bound to end in success. He thought that good singing in our native language at moderate prices would solve the problem. Every experimenter starts out with that simple thesis, a dangerous one, as opera has little to do with art, music, good sing ing, or vernacular speech. 263 VARIATIONS Opera is an exotic. It is a fashionable function or nothing. Oscar was told this by Blumenberg, but he in turn shook his head. Heproposed to be another Columbus and showthem the egg trick. He had a hundred predecessors, and no doubt he will have a thousandsuccessors. But somehow the egg never stands;that is, in English. There was much pow-wowing between thetwo editors that I can t recall. The less I understand a libretto the more I enjoy the music.I agree with Harry B. Smith, who has said thatwhen an opera is a success the composer getsthe credit; when a failure, the blame is saddledupon the book. As the librettist of Robin Hoodand a string of other De Koven and Smithoperas, Mr. Smith knows what he is talkingabout. W. S. Gilbert was in the same rockingboat with Arthur Sullivan. Later, Oscar Hammerstein was to settle the question by writingboth words and music for The Kohinoor, thuspatterning after Richard Wagner. But at firsthe was rather timid. I don t believe he tookBlumenberg s advice, or, indeed, the adviceof any one, except Campanini s. Opera at theHarlem Opera House followed after an interval.It was not an enlivening affair. When I readin some obituary articles that Hammerstein hadengaged Lilli Lehmann, Schumann-Heink, Alvary, Fischer, and others for his One Hundredand Twenty-fifth-Street season, I also shook myhead. I can t remember such an imposing ar-264 "OSCAR" AND DVORAK ray as they say in funeral notices at the old Harlem Opera House. Does any one? I remember the burning mountain in Auber s Masaniello, or The Dumb Girl of Portici (what a film it would make, this dumbness), and there were other mediocre revivals, not worthy of critical consideration. However, Oscar was not to be discouraged. He proceeded to play the game with energy and recklessness. He was a gambler born. Organ izing opera companies, vaudeville shows, erect ing opera-houses in New York, Philadelphia, London, building theatres, playing with men and millions, what were the achievements of Henry E. Abbey or Colonel Jack Haverly com pared with those of this shrewd, ever-witty, goodtempered Hebrew, who was more prodigal with his own money than other managers were, and are, with the capital of strangers? Hammerstein s original operetta was once upon a time as celebrated as his hat. The com position was the result of a wager made by Oscar and Gustave Kerker, the composer of The Belle of New York, Castles in the Air, and a dozen other popular pieces. Kerker is a well- trained musician, and, naturally, he was rather sceptical when Oscar boasted of his musical genius. Whatever gifts Oscar may have pos sessed, modesty was not one of his failings. I have heard him quote with gusto Goethe s dic tum as to the modesty of fools. At a table one afternoon a quarter of a century ago, at the old 265 VARIATIONS Gilsey House, in the cafe, sat Oscar, Kerker,Charles Alfred Byrne, dramatic critic and libret tist; Henry Neagle, then dramatic editor of theNew York Recorder since defunct and thepresent writer. Taunted by some one, Oscarbecame excited and offered to compose an opera,words and music, within forty-eight hours.Gus booked the bet the amount of which I veforgotten. Rooms were engaged in the Gilsey,an upright piano installed, and, cut off from theworld, Hammerstein began tapping out tunes- he was a one-fingered virtuoso scribblingverse, and altogether making himself extremelybusy. I forgot to say that Gus Kerker hadagreed to orchestrate the masterpiece. Then we had lots of fun. Louis Harrisonengaged a relay of hand-organs to play underthe composer s windows, but Oscar never winced.The hotel authorities had to telephone the policein order to get rid of a string of Italian pianoorganists passionately grinding out popular melodies on Twenty-ninth Street. Plates of sinis ter ham sandwiches were sent to his room, accompanied by a brigade of cocktails. And thetray was always returned empty, with the composer s thanks. I ve forgotten the other prankswe played, and all to no purpose. Complaintswere made at the hotel office that a wild manwas howling and thumping the keyboard; again,uselessly, for, barricaded, the composer refusedto give up the fort. Exhausted, but smiling,Oscar at the end of the allotted time invited the266 "OSCAR" AND DVORAK jury on awards to listen to his music. It proved a tuneful hodge-podge, also proved the com poser s retentive memory. Every operetta com poser was represented. The book was a joy. It would have pleased little Daisy Ashford. (Why doesn t some humor-loving musician set The Visiters to music?) Kerker threw up the sponge. He had to pay the bet. The curious side of the affair is that the operetta was actually produced at the New York Theatre a few months later, reinforced by extra numbers, considerably "edited," and it met with some success. To be sure, the composer was also the owner and man ager of the three theatres clustered under one roof. That first night of The Kohinoor was not only notorious, it was side-splitting. The au dience, of the true Tenderloin variety, laughed themselves blue in the face. I can only recall that the opening chorus consumed a third of the first act. Oscar knew the art of camouflage years before the word was imported. Two comicstage Jews alternately sang, "Good morning, Mr. Morgenstern; good morning, Mr. Isaacstein," while the orchestra shifted the harmonies to avoid monotony. I fancy that was a device of Kerker s. Oscar "composed" a second oper etta, but it never achieved the popularity of The Kohinoor. During a certain period the Hammerstein hat was without duplicate, except that worn by William M. Chase, the painter. Nevertheless, the Hammerstein hat was unique, not alone for 267 VARIATIONS the gray matter it covered, but because of itsatmospheric quality. It was a temperamentalbarometer. When the glass had set fair thetilt of the hat was unmistakable. If stormclouds had gathered on the vocal horizon thehat registered the mood and righted itself likea buoy in agitated waters. Its brim settledover the eyes of its owner; his people flurriedinto anonymous corners. Or else the hat waspushed off his forehead: unbuttoned then hissoul. You might dare to approach and beg forseats. A weather gauge was Oscar s hat. Askhis one-time famulus, W. J. Guard. He knew.Or Mary Garden. Oscar had hurled his hatat her head in the long ago. What a brimithad, this hat. Oh! the breadth and flatnessthereof. How glossy its nap, in height howimposing. To have described Hammerstein without his hat would have been as disastrous as togive the Ring without Wotan. Shorn of it theowner would have been like Alberich sans Tarnhelm. As an Irishman would have said: Hishat was his heel of Achilles. Oscar sporteditwhile sleeping. Inside was stencilled the wisdomof Candide: "II faut cultiver notre Jardin."(Mary, of course.) Many painters yearnedtoportray that hat in Oscar s dome of action.The impressionists would have painted it incomplementary tones; the late William M. Chasewould have transformed it into a shiny still-life.George Luks would have made it a jest forHades; Arthur B. Davies would have changed268 "OSCAR" AND DVORAK it into a symbol the old Hebraic chant, Kol Nidre, might have been heard echoing around its curved surfaces, as echoes the Banshee on a funereal night in dear old Tipperary. It was a hat cosmopolitan, alert, joyous, both reticent and expensive. It caused a lot of people sleep less nights, did this sawed-off stovepipe with its operatic airs. Why did Oscar Hammerstein wear it? For the same reason that a miller wears his hat, and not for tribal or political reasons. Requiescat in Oscarino ! Pardon my Latin. But Oscar musical? Oscar a man of fine mu sical tastes or intelligence? Basta! He had the native wit to select as General for his oper atic army a skilled conductor and a musician of judgment and vision. That is the reason New York had such a wide and novel repertory of fered to it at the Manhattan Opera House. When Signor Cleofonte Campanini left Hammerstein his musical fortunes began to wane. But as a dynamic driving force I cannot name his equal, except Jack Haverly, or Barnum. When I was on the professional staff of the National Conservatory the only musical in stitution in this country that deserved the ap pellation I was intrusted by the President, Jeannette M. Thurber, with the care on his arrival of Dr. Antonin Dvorak, Bohemian com poser and musical director of the Conservatory. For the "man in the street" his name means his 269 VARIATIONS Humoresque as played by the inimitable FritzKreisler, or wheezed out by some unmusicalinstrument of torture; canned music; in the consecrated phrase of Arthur Whiting, " musicalwaxworks." But Dvorak also composed TheNew World symphony, and other trifles; these,however, do not trouble or soothe the digestionof table d hotes. With "Old Borax," as Parkerthe composer affectionately called Dvorak,intow I assured Mrs. Thurber that he wouldbesafe in my hands, and then I proceeded to showhim certain sections of our old town, chiefly thenear east side. As he was a fervent RomanCatholic I found a Bohemian church for him;he invariably began his day by attending thefirst mass. Jauntily I invited him to taste thetreacherous national drink called whisky cocktail. He nodded with that head which lookedlike an angry bulldog bearded. At first hescared me with his fierce Slavonic eyes, yet hewas as mild-mannered a musical pirate as everscuttled a pupil s counterpoint. I alwaysthought of him as a boned-pirate. But I madea mistake in believing that American strongwaters would upset his nerves. We began ourrounds at Goerwitz s, then, as now, ScheffelHall, which stood across the street from theNational Conservatory. Later we went downto Gus Liichow s; for a musician not to be seenat Liichow s argued that he was unknowninthe social world of tone. We traversed thegreat thirst belt of the neighborhood. At each270 "OSCAR" AND DVORAK stopping-place Doc Borax absorbed a cocktail or two. He seemed to take to them as a pro hibitionist takes to personal abuse. Now, alcohol I abhor. Therefore I stuck to my usual three-voiced invention of hops, malt, and water. We conversed in German, for he knew no English, and I rejoiced at meeting a man whose Teutonic accent, above all whose grammar, was worse than mine. Yet we got along swimmingly an appropriate enough image, as the thirst-weather was wet, though not squally. He told me of his admiration for Brahms and of that composer s admiration for Dvorak. I agreed with Brahms. After he had put away about nineteen cocktails, maybe more, I said, rather thickly: "Master, don t you think it s time we ate something?" He gazed at me through those jungle whiskers, which met his tumbled hair half way. He grunted: "Eat! I no eat. We go to Houston Street. You go, hein! We drink the slivavitch. It makes warm after beer." I didn t go that evening to the East Houston Street cafe with Dr. Antonin Dvorak. I never went there with him, for I not only feared the slivavitch, but also that deadly Humoresque played by a fake gypsy fiddler, attired in a red coat and wearing an in effable grin. Such a man as Old Borax was as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon to a shipwrecked sailor. His head was like iron. He could drink as much spirits as I could beer, and never turn a hair. I tell this 271 VARIATIONS anecdote, not for a moral purpose, but as one of the rapidly vanishing specimens of rum-lore, soon to become legendary. Next year the na tion will be put in cotton-wool and its feeble will coddled by noble precepts and winning words from mouths smoking with fiery wisdom. And yet it was a better time when Hammerstein smoked or Dvorak drank than the dusty prospect ahead for baffled thirsts. 272 ENRICO CARUSO ENTUCO CARUSO is dead. The enormous dis placement caused by this lamentable happening is not alone confined to the artistic sphere but literally to the entire civilized world. We doubt if there are more than a half dozen public men on the globe to-day whose demise would so stir the universal imagination as has the passing of the incomparable tenor, for it must not be for gotten that the voice of Caruso has been heard, still is, and always will be listened to, from the equator to both poles, thanks to his vocal records, meagre, mechanical things, if you will, yet at least the simulacrum of his golden organ. It is a curious commentary on Theophile Gautiers famous poetic dictum that empires perish but art endures; that many of the great names con temporary with Caruso s will surely be forgotten, but the memory of his achievements not. Man kind always recalls with satisfaction the artists who have given pleasure to the senses. Kings are embalmed in deathless verse or live on the canvas of poet and painter. Yet where to-day are the monarchs who patronized Shakespeare, or Velasquez, or Moliere? Their very titles would be forgotten were it not for art. But actor and singer have not the luck of creative artists; they do but interpret, there- 273 VARIATIONS fore, with their disappearance from the paintedscene, for the majority there is naught but oblivion. The happy few who seem as of yesterdayare, in the musical world: Patti, Rubinstein,Liszt, Rubini, Chopin as pianist Paganini,Malibran, and Lilli Lehmann. Great exemplars.To this brief list is now added Caruso. Andhehas one tremendous advantage over his cele brated predecessors his voice is a living reality,after a fashion. That same voice has givenprofound satisfaction in hundreds of thousandsof homes scattered over the world; that voicecheered the boys in the trenches during theWorld War. After all, it is a sort of immortality, this record, about as vital as we may hopefor in a universe of changeless change. Enrico Caruso is dead. There have been andwill be other tenors, yet for this generation hismemory is something sacred and apart. It is doubtful if the Metropolitan Opera House willagain echo such golden music as made by histhroat that is, doubtful in our time. Whenhe first came here, not two decades ago, therewas a rich fruitiness to his tones that evokedsuch disparate images as the sound of a Frenchhorn and a golden autumnal sunset. Alwaysthe word golden comes to the lips. Golden,with a thrilling human fibre. Not the finishedvocal artist that he developed into, neverthelessthere was something indescribably fresh, luminous and youthful in the singing of the earlyCaruso. I had heard him in London before he274 ENRICO CARUSO sang here, which, alas ! was to be his last home. Veteran as I was I could hardly trust my ears when he poured forth a golden stream of music, and with effortless art. It needed no critical clairvoyancy to predict that a star of the first magnitude had arisen in the firmament of art. That was in 1902, and since then this star grew in lustre and beauty till the day of his death. Caruso had not even then achieved his grand artistic climax. He was ever a prodigious student. There will not be any critical dispute as to Caruso s place in the history of his art. Even in the brief span of life accorded the present writer Caruso looms formidably. Originally a lyric, he ended as a heroic tenor. His vocal range was extraordinary. In his repertory he demonstrated his catholicity. From Meyer beer s Les Huguenots to Flotow s Marta, from Rigoletto to Pagliacci, there are few lyric works that he missed. La Forza del Destino was re vived for him by Mr. Gatti-Casazza, and he could squander his extraordinary art on such a trifle as Mascagni s Lodoletta. But to all his undertakings he brought a refreshing sincerity and tonal beauty. It is not to be denied that he was happier in Italian than French music; his Rhadames outshone his Faust. Neverthe less, he overcame the seemingly insuperable difficulties of a foreign style and diction, and his John of Leyden in Le Prophete and Eleazer in La Juive rank among his greatest achievements, 275 VARIATIONS not to mention his Samson. There was thenote of the grand manner in the assumption ofJohn and incomparable pathos in the delineationof Halevy s persecuted and vengeful old Hebrew.As an actor he grew amazingly the last decadeof his artistic career. Compare his lighthearted, frivolous Duke in Rigoletto with thevenerable Jew in La Juive. Then we realizehow far intense study intelligently directed maycarry a singer. It has often been a cause ofcritical wonderment why Caruso never sang themusic of Richard Wagner. What a Lohengrinhe would have been, what a Parsifal, yes, evena Tristan ! He knew every note of these roles. Once for my delectation he hummed the plain tive measures of the dying Tristan. Tearscame to my eyes, so penetratingly sweet washis tone, so pathetic his phrasing. I have heard tenors from Brignoli, so fat thathe waddled, to the Spaniard Gayarre; from ItaloCampanini to Masini, Nicolini and the sten torian Tamagno; no one of these boasted theluscious voice of Caruso. Some have outpointed him in finesse, Bonci; Tamagno out-roared him; Jean de Reszke had more personalcharm and artistic subtlety; there have beenfierier Turridus and more sympathetic DonJoses, but Caruso s natural voice was pavedwith lyric magic, it was positively torrential in its golden mellowness. When in his prime, full of verve and unaffected gaiety think of L Elisir d Amore and Marta he was unap276 ENRICO CARUSO proachable. There were many of us who would rather have been Caruso than ruler of these United States. The social man in him was irresistible. Gen erous, overflowing with the joy of life, his sense of humor found one outlet in his caricatures his pencil was clever as well as witty and in the company of his friends. He was a good friend. No need here to speak of his ready re sponse to those in trouble. He was exploited, of course, yet his belief in humanity was never shaken. An Italian patriot, he was also a lover of his adopted land. He was always a boy. He really never grew up. The eternal boy in him, mischievous, mirthful, coupled with his gift of mimicry, endeared him to every one. He fairly bubbled with kindly humor, and not the least among his many admirable traits was his conscientious attitude toward his audiences. Not to disappoint an expectant audience often cost him much personal suffering. He has sung when he should have been in bed with doctors and nurses. In Brooklyn he persisted in sing ing until a ruptured vein filled his throat with blood. The same desire, and not a craving for more fame or money, impelled him to make long and fatiguing trips in order that remote audiences might enjoy his matchless voice. Like the majority of his countrymen, he was frugal in his habits, eating little and drinking less. He abused the use of tobacco, and be cause of his nervousness cigarettes were a seda277 VARIATIONS live. However, they did not fatally hurt histhroat as has been asserted. And consideringhis exalted position and his innumerable temptations, Caruso was hardly a rake. Scandalclustered about his name. Cruel persecutionpursued him, but at the close of his life he washappily married and the father of a passionatelyloved daughter. A democratic man, he at notime bore himself with the arrogant airs of thetraditional tenor. Beloved by his associates,especially beloved by the chorus, he was acces sible to all and sundry. Truly a refreshing contrast to the proverbially haughty signore with ahigh C in his chest. Born of humble parentage, Caruso suffered asevere apprenticeship to his art. In Naples wehave met people who remember him singing inthe streets, around various cafes, in companywith a strummer on the guitar. PasqualeAmato, a fellow-townsman as well as a colleagueat the Metropolitan Opera House, has told meof the far-away days when Enrico sang in twooperas every Sunday at the Teatro Mercadante,at Naples, and of the summers at Salerno when,during entr actes he would drop a string fromhis dressing-room window and draw up a fondprize sardine and cream cheese sandwiches.He was thin then and his appetite was that ofa growing youth. The local manager knew thatthe only way to be sure of him for the twoSunday performances was to lock him in thetheatre till the last curtain had been rung down.278 ENRICO CARUSO He confessed to me that once as a boy his mother had chastised him not gently because he let the household bread bake till it burned. But enough. Books might be crowded with interesting stories of the great man. A good comrade, a loving husband and father, the giant tenor of his generation, Enrico Caruso is dead. But to his admirers he remains the dearest memory hi this drab, prosaic age. 279

Contents

CONTENTS PAGE VARIOUS i How NOT TO BE A GENIUS n THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE . . 20 CRUSHED VIOLETS 30 BAUDELAIRE S LETTERS TO His MOTHER . 37 THE Two TEMPTATIONS 46 THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY 52 ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES 57 PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING .... 67 IN PRAISE OF PRINTS 77 NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD 84 CEZANNE 91 EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? 99 SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY in CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? 121 ART AND ALCOHOL 130 THE TRAGIC CHOPIN 137 PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN .... 147 vii CONTENTS PAGE THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I 157 IDLE SPECULATIONS 166 THE MASTER BUILDER 173 VERDI S OTELLO 181 FAUST AND MEPHISTO 189 BOHEMIAN Music 195 THE Music OF YESTERDAY? 203 LISZT S ONLY PIANO SONATA 210 DREAMING OF LISZT 218 A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD 225 CONTEMPORARY BRAN 233 A MOOD REACTIONARY 241 MUSICAL "POTTERISM" 248 MY "CHILDE ROLAND" 255 "OSCAR" AND DVORAK 263 ENRICO CARUSO . . . 273 vni VARIOUS

Biography of Huneker

MR. HUNEKER S literary career was at its flood when ended by his sudden and unlooked for death. He was perhaps our only, certainly our chief, literary journalist, and his instructive, penetrating, and, above all, entertaining criticism in the field of what he liked to call the Seven Arts was almost always first seen in the periodical press, daily or weekly. Afterward it was sifted and the residue abridged or expanded, burnished or simplified, in its assimilation into appropriate permanent style and stuff. Needless to say it lost none of its bril liance in the process which was always minimized by having been largely forestalled, as it were, in the original composition. The result was not so much merely eminent as literally unique. His books have not only no rivals but no competitors. Alone among American belletristic writers he fol lowed in the French journalistic-literary tradition, illustrated and rendered illustrious by the practice of a long and shining roll of litterateurs. Such a practice tends of itself to popularize its product by inevitably keeping the larger public more or less in mind and therefore eschewing professional pedan tries. The element of personality acquires promi nence as in conversation. Style itself becomes conversational. Huneker is as familiar in address as if he were not often erudite in material. He establishes first of all, however imperceptibly, his relations with his reader. Whatever the effect, it is devoid of dulness, and accordingly the interest PUBLISHER S NOTE of his writing is incontestable even when its value is indeterminate. Composed of essays written since the publication of his last book Bedouins though of necessity lacking the advantage of his personal selection andsupervision, Variations is a worthy companion of its shelf-full of predecessors in its possession of these qualities. Aptly named, it presents perhaps better than any of them a wide-reaching diversity of aesthetic material for the consideration, the illumina tion, and pre-eminently the entertainment of the cultivated. Perhaps, too, it shows a maturertreatment, a mellower temper without a whit less energy, and a greater opulence than ever of the author s stored acquisitions and spontaneous, evenexhilarated, exposition of them. And here andthere amid the wealth of literary and aesthetic mis cellany which he displays and expounds one comes,with greater frequency than ever, upon memorablecrystallizations of experience in the contemplationof these matters. Such truths, too, he exemplifies as well as formulates. No one ever, for instance, credited more completely his own maxim: "There is no disputing tastes with the tasteless," or conformed more cordially to his own injunction: "Write only for the young. The old will not heedyou, being weary of the pother of life and art." There was nothing, however, of which he was less weary, as this his last volume copiously attests, and the explanation, of course, is his unimpairedyouthfulness of mind and spirit.