BY JAMES HUNEKER

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899)
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (1900)
MELOMANIACS (1902)
OVERTONES (1904)
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (1905)
VISIONARIES (1905)
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909)
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (1910)
FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911)
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912)
NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915)
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS (1915)
UNICORNS (1917)
BEDOUINS (1920)

In Preparation

STEEPLEJACK. TWO VOLUMES

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

BEDOUINS

From a photograph by De Meyer

MARY GARDEN—HERSELF

BEDOUINS

MARY GARDEN, DEBUSSY,
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS, BOTTICELLI, POE, BRAHMSODY,
ANATOLE FRANCE, MIRBEAU, CARUSO ON WHEELS,
CALICO CATS, THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT;
IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS; WITH THE SUPREME SIN,
GRINDSTONES, A MASQUE OF MUSIC, AND
THE VISION MALEFIC

BY
JAMES HUNEKER

WITH VARIOUS PORTRAITS OF MARY GARDEN IN
OPERATIC COSTUME

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1920

Copyright, 1920, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published February, 1920

Copyright, 1919, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES CO.
Copyright, 1913, BY THE ESS ESS PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1917, BY THE SUN PRINTING & PUBLISHING ASSN.

THIS BOOK OF BEDOUINS IS DEDICATED
“À la très-belle, à la très-bonne, à la très-chère.”

“J’aime mieux le désert, je retourne chez les Bédouins qui sont libres....”

Gustave Flaubert.

“The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh’s palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats.”

Robert Louis Stevenson.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I
MARY GARDEN

I
SUPERWOMAN

LA BEAUTÉ

“Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poëte un amour
Éternel et meut, ainsi, que la matière.”

—Charles Baudelaire.

That little girl down Boston way, who had mastered William James and Boris Sidis before she was in her teens, behaved badly one afternoon. Possibly it was the sultry weather, or growing pains—in the psychic sphere, of course—or, perhaps, it may have been due to the reflexes from prolonged attention to the Freudian psycho-analysis and the significance of Twilight Sleep; but whatever the cause, that precocious child flew off her serene handle and literally “sassed” the entire household. The tantrum over—she afterward described it as a uric-acid storm—and order reigning once more in Bach Bay, she was severely interrogated by her male parent as to the whys and wherefores of her singular deviation from accustomed glacial intellectual objectivity. Her answer was in the proper key: “My multiple personalities failed to co-ordinate. Hence the distressing lack of centripetal functioning.” She was immediately forgiven. Multiple personalities are to blame for much in this vale of tears; that is, if you are unlucky or lucky enough to be possessed of the seven devils of psychology.

Mary Garden was, no doubt, a naughty little girl in her time. That she climbed trees, fought boys twice her size, stuck out her tongue at pious folk, scandalized her parents, and tore from the heads of nice girls handfuls of hair, I am sure. Hedda Gabler thus treated gentle Thea Elvstad in the play. But was this demon Mary aware of her multiple personalities? Of her complexes? Her art fusion is such perfect synthesis. Subconscious is nowadays an excuse for the Original Sin with which we are saddled by theologians.

Well, one bad turn deserves another, and we may easily picture the wild Scottish thistle defiantly shrugging shoulders at law and order. She did not analyze her Will-to-Raise-Merry-Hell. No genius of her order ever does. There had been signs and omens. Her mother before her birth had dreamed wonderful dreams; dreamed and prayed that she might become a singer. But even maternal intuition could not have foreseen such a swan triumphantly swimming through the troubled waters of life. A swan, did I say? A condor, an eagle, a peacock, a nightingale, a panther, a society dame, a gallery of moving-pictures, a siren, an indomitable fighter, a human woman with a heart as big as a house, a lover of sport, an electric personality, and a canny Scotch lassie who can force from an operatic manager wails of anguish because of her close bargaining over a contract; in a word, a Superwoman.

My dear friend and master, the late Remy de Gourmont, wrote that man differs from his fellow animals—he didn’t say “lower”—because of the diversity of his aptitudes. Man is not the only organism that shows multiple personalities; even in plant life pigmentation and the power of developing new species prove that our vaunted superiorities are only relative. I may refer you to the experiments of Hugo de Vriès at the Botanical Gardens, Amsterdam, where the grand old Dutch scientist presented me with sixteen-leaf clover naturally developed, and grown between sunset and dawn; also an evening primrose—Æonthera Lamarckiana—which shoots into new flowers. Multiple personalities again. In the case of Mary Garden we call her artistic aptitudes “the gift of versatility.” All distinguished actresses have this serpent-like facility of shedding their skin and taking on a fresh one at will. She is Cleopatra—with “serpent and scarab for sign”—or Mélisande, Phryne, or Monna Vanna; as Thaïs she is both saint and courtesan, her Salome breeds horror; and in the simplicities of Jean the Juggler of Notre Dame a Mary Garden, hitherto submerged, appears: tender, boyish, sweet, fantastic; a ray of moonshine has entered his head and made of him an irresponsible yet irresistibly charming youth.

Not without warrant is Karma believed in by people whose imagination cannot be penned behind the bars of Now. Before to-day was yesterday, and to traverse that Eternal Corridor of Time has been the fate of mankind. The Eternal Return—rather say, the Eternal Recommencement—mad as it seems, is not to be made mock of. It is always the same pair of eyes that peer through windows opening on infinity. What the Karmas of Mary Garden? In spirit-land what avatars! Is she the reincarnation of that Phryne of the “splendid scarlet sins,” or the Faustine who crowded into a moment the madness of joy and crime; or the recrudescence of a Sapho who turned her back on the Leucadian promontory, turned from the too masculine Phaon and sought her Anactoria, sought and wooed her with lyric sighs; has she recaptured, this extraordinary Mary of Aberdeen, the soul of Aspasia, who beguiled Pericles and artistic Athens with the sinuous irony of the serpent; and Gismonda, Louise, and Violetta, all those subtle sonorous sinners—was she in her anterior existence any or all of them? Did she know the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome? Henry James has warned us not to ask of an author why he selects a particular subject for treatment. It is a dangerous question to put; the answer might prove disconcerting. And with Miss Garden the same argument holds. Her preference for certain characters is probably dictated by reasons obscure even to herself. With her the play-instinct is imperious; it dominates her daylight hours, it overflows into her dream-life. Again the sounding motive of multiple personalities, Karma, subconsciousness, the profound core of human nature. And on the palette of her art there is the entire gamut of tones, from passionate purple to the iridescent delicacies of iris-grey.

That Mary Garden interprets a number of widely differentiated characters is a critical platitude. Chapter and verse might be given for her excellences as well as her defects. Nor does she depend upon any technical formula or formulas. Versatility is her brevet of distinction. An astounding versatility. Now, the ways and means of the acting-singer are different from actors in the theatre. Dramatic values are altered. The optique of the opera shifts the stock attitudes, gestures, poses, and movements into another and more magnified dimension. Victor Maurel, master of all singing-actors, employed a sliding scale of values in his delineation of De Nevers, Don Giovanni, Iago, and Falstaff. His power of characterization enabled him to portray a Valentine true to type, nevertheless individual; and if there is a more banal figure on the operatic boards than Valentine, we do not know his name (perhaps Faust...!). But every year the space that separates the lyric from the dramatic stage is shrinking. Richard Wagner was not the first composer to stress action; he is the latest, however, whose influence has been tremendously far-reaching. He insisted that the action should suit the singing word. To-day acting and singing are inextricably blended, and I can conceive of nothing more old-fashioned and outmoded than the Wagnerian music-drama as interpreted in the dramatic terms of the old Wagnerian singers. They walked, rather waddled, through the mystic mazes of the score, shouted or screamed the music, and generally were prodigious bores—except when Lilli Lehmann sang. After all, Wagner must be sung. When Jean de Reszke pictured a Tristan—a trifle of the carpet-knight—he both sang and acted. It was the beginning of the New Wagner, a totally changed Wagner, else his music-drama will remain in dusty pigeonholes. Debussy has sounded the modern key.

There is born, or reborn—nothing is new since the early Florentines—a New Opera, and in its train new methods of interpretation. Merely to sing well is as futile as attempting to act though voiceless. The modern trend is away from melodrama, whether Italian, French, or German; away from its antique, creaking machinery. Debussy patterned after Wagner for a time and then blazed new paths. As Serge Prokofieff so acutely observed to me: “In Pelléas and Mélisande Debussy rewrote Tristan and Isolde.” The emotional scale is transposed to fewer dynamic values and rhythms made more subtle; the action is shown as in a dream. The play’s the thing, and reality is muffled. Elsewhere we have studied the Mélisande of Mary Garden. Like her Monna Vanna, it reveals the virtues and shortcomings of the New Opera. Too static for popular taste, it is nevertheless an escape from the tyranny of operatic convention. Like the rich we shall always have “grand opera” with us. It is the pabulum of the unmusical, the unthinking, the tasteless. Its theatricalisms are more depressing than Sardou’s. The quintessence of art, or the arts, which the modern Frenchmen, above all, the new Russian composers (from the mighty Slavic races may come the artistic, perhaps the religious salvation of the world—for I am a believer in Dostoievsky’s, not Tolstoy’s, Christianity), are distilling into their work is for more auditors than the “ten superior persons scattered throughout the universe” of whom Huysmans wrote. There is a growing public that craves, demands, something different from the huge paraphernalia of crudely colored music, scenery, costume, lath and plaster, and vociferous singing. Oh, the dulness, the staleness, the brutal obviousness of it all! Every cadence with its semaphoric signalling, every phrase and its accompanying gesture. Poetry is slain at a stroke, the ear promise-crammed, but imagination goes hungry. The New Art—an art of precious essences, an evocation, an enchantment of the senses, a sixth sense—is our planetary ideal.

And in the New Opera Mary Garden is the supreme exemplar. She sounds the complex modern note. She does not represent, she evokes. She sings and she acts, and the densely woven web is impossible to disentangle. Her Gaelic temperament is of an intensity; she is white-hot, a human dynamo with sudden little retorsions that betray a tender, sensitive soul, through the brilliant, hard shell of an emerald personality; she is also the opal, with it chameleonic hues. Her rhythms are individual. Her artistic evolution may be traced. She stems from the Gallic theatre. She has studied Sarah Bernhardt and Yvette Guilbert—the perfect flowering of the “diseuse”—but she pins her faith to the effortless art of Eleonora Duse. The old contention that stirred Coquelin and Henry Irving does not interest her so much as does Duse. We have discussed the Coquelin-Irving crux: should an actor leave nothing to chance or should he improvise on the spur of high emotions?—that is what the question comes to. Miss Garden denied her adherence either to Coquelin or Irving. I asked her to give us a peep into her artistic cuisine while she prepared her sauces. Notwithstanding her refusal to let us participate in the brewing of her magic broth, I still believe that she sided with Coquelin. She is eminently cerebral. And yet her chief appeal is to the imagination. Not a stroke of her camel’s-hair brush, not the boldest massing of colors, are left to chance. She knows the flaming way she came, she knows the misty return. Not a tone of her naturally rich, dark voice but takes on the tinting of the situation. This doesn’t forbid a certain latitude for temperamental variations, which are plentiful at each of her performances. She knows tempo rubato and its value in moods. She has mastered, too, the difficult quality described by William Gillette as the First-time Illusion in Acting. Various are the Mary Gardens in her map of art.

And she is ours. Despite her Scottish birth she has remained invincibly Yankee. Despite long residence in her beloved Paris, enough American has rubbed off on her, and the resilient, dynamic, overflowing, and proud spirit that informs her art and character are American or nothing. Race counts. Can any good come out of our Nazareth of art? The answer is inevitable: Yes, Mary Garden. She is Our Mary. Lyrically, dramatically ours, yet an orchid. Dear old Flaubert forcibly objected to Sarah Bernhardt being called “a social expression.” But she was, and this despite her Dutch ancestry and the exotic strain in her blood. Miss Garden may not emphasize her American side, but it is the very skeleton of her artistic organism. Would that an Aubrey Beardsley lived to note in evanescent traceries her potent personality, a rare something that arouses the “emotion of recognition,” but which we cannot define. “Come,” said Berlioz to Legouvé in the early years of the third decade of the last century. “I am going to let you see something which you have never seen, and some one whom you shall never forget.” Berlioz meant the playing and personality of Frédéric Chopin. Garden is leagues asunder from Chopin—who was the rarest apparition of his age; but as an interpretative artist she is rare enough for sympathetic writers to embalm in the amber of their pagan prose; definitely to pin to their pages this gorgeous dragon-fly.

Another bribe to her audience is the beauty of Mary Garden. But I do not wish here to dwell upon its value in her unforgettable portrayals of the dear dead grand ladies, the stately courtesans of the dim past. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote a poem, though not in verse, depicting a crowd assembled in the canvas house of the Interpreter of Past Things.

George Moore thus Englished “The Future Phenomenon.” A showman tells the despairing, ugly men and women of his wonderful prize. “No sign regales you of the spectacle within, for there is not now a painter capable of presenting any sad shadow of it. I bring alive (and preserved through the years by sovereign science) a woman of old time. Some folly, original and simple, in ecstasy of gold, I know not what she names it, her hair falls with the grace of rich stuffs about her face and contrasts with the blood-like nudity of her lips. In place of her vain gown she has a body; and her eyes, though like rare stones, are not worth the look that leaps from the happy flesh; the breasts, raised as if filled with an eternal milk, are pointed to the sky, and the smooth limbs still keep the salt of the primal sea....” You think of fair-haired Mélisande as she exquisitely murmurs her pathetic “Je ne suis pas heureuse ici.”

Some years ago in Paris I saw and heard the Garden Traviata. The singing was superlative; she then boasted a coloratura style that would surprise those who now only know her vocalization. It was, however, the conception and acting that intrigued me. Originality stamped both. The death scene was of unusual poignancy; evidently the young American had been spying upon Bernhardt and Duse. This episode adumbrated the marvellous death of Mélisande, the most touching that I can recall in either the lyric or dramatic theatre. It is a pity that she cannot find sterner stuff than Massenet, Leroux, Fevrier, and the rest of that puff-paste decorative school. There are composers, too, of more vital calibre than Camille Erlanger. Debussy is a master; but there must be newer men who could view Mary Garden as the ideal exponent of their music. Meanwhile, she has discovered a rôle in which she would pique the curiosity of the most uncritical mossbacks. She has added Isolde to her long list. Mary Garden and Isolde! Incredible! Nevertheless, an interesting experiment this if she could be persuaded to voice the sorrows of the Irish Princess. It would be no longer Wagner. It would suffer a rich sea-change. Wagner muted, perhaps Wagner undone; certainly unsung if we remember glorious Olive Fremstad. But a magical Isolde, with more than a hint of the perversely exotic we feel in Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of Isolde and Tristan. The modern note again. Beardsley paraphrasing Botticelli; Watteau plucking at the robe of Rubens; Debussy smiting the chords of Wagner. Such an Isolde would be too bewildering to be true.

II
INTIMATE

“Et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches, des drapeaus, des hanches d’or....”

—Tentation de Saint Antoine (slightly altered).

The penalty of publicity is one which singers seldom evade. Little need to give the reason, nevertheless, for sensitive souls it is a trial to see one’s personality put in the wash, squeezed, and hung up to dry with other linen in the pitiless laundry of the press. Some singers are born advertisers, some achieve advertising, but few have advertising thrust upon them. That sort usually fade into shadow-land rather than face the fierce white light which beats about the operatic throne. Really, it must be disconcerting for a woman singer to hear herself discussed as if she were a race-horse. Every point in her make-up is put on a platter ready to serve hot in the newspapers. You fancy yourself overhearing the conversation of jockeys and trainers. “Oi sye, Bill, that there filly is goin’ queer. Jest look at her fetlocks, and her crupper is gettin’ too heavy. Take her out for an hour’s spin on the downs. Breathe her a bit and then give her a hard sweatin’ run and a rub down. No water, Bill, mind ye, or I’ll knock yer block off.”

The private life of a prima donna is not unlike that of a racing mare’s. Flesh reduction, with all the succulent food—and champagne—are banished; indulgence spells decadence, and decadence is eagerly noted by the psychic detectives known as music-critics. We are not in the game to find fault as simple souls imagine, but to register values, vocal and personal. It’s a pity, but this is a condition and not a theory. We have heard of a Mary Garden cult. Now, as has been said by Dr. Wicksteed, a cult is always annoying to those who do not join in it, and generally hurtful to those who do. But is there such a Garden cult? We doubt it. She has a certain elect following, and for those admirers she can do no wrong. She has aroused the critical antagonism of some who, rightly enough, point out her obvious limitations. To these the gruff reply of Brahms is appropriate. A presuming youth called his attention to a theme in a work of his which was evidently borrowed from Mendelssohn. “That any fool can see,” said the crusty Johannes. The voice of Miss Garden is sometimes a voice in the wilderness: sandy, harsh, yet expressive. The same may be said of Geraldine Farrar, who every year is gravitating toward the zone, not of silence, but of the singing-actress. A Gallic, not an Italian zone. Voice does not play the major rôle; acting, that is, dramatic characterization, does. Not to recognize in Miss Garden the quintessence of this art—not altogether a new one, and its most perfect flowering is the art of Yvette Guilbert—is to miss the real Mary Garden. Voilà tout! We saw a like misunderstanding of Eleonora Duse. Immediately she was compared, and unfavorably, with Sarah Bernhardt, when she was achieving something vastly different, and, I think, vastly finer. Sarah was more brilliant, Duse more human; the one an orchestra, the other an exquisitely balanced string quartet. Mary Garden is the nearest approach to Duse on the lyric stage.

Mary Garden, too, is “different,” in the sense Stendhal meant that banal word. Her cadenced speech is not singing in the Italian manner. To begin with, her tonal texture is not luscious. But there are compensations. Every phrase is charged with significance. She paints with her voice, and if her palette is composed of the cooler tones, if the silver-greys and sombre greens of a Velasquez predominate, it is because she needs just such a gamut with which to load her brush. She is a consummate manipulator of values. To be sure, we do not expect the torrential outbursts of Margaret Matzenauer. Why confuse two antithetical propositions? I don’t look at one of the Paul Cézannes in the rare collection of Miss Lillie Bliss expecting the gorgeous hues of a Monticelli. Cézanne is a master of values. And if these similes seem far-fetched—which they are not; music and color are twins in the Seven Arts—then let us pitch upon a more homely illustration: Mary Garden is an opal, Margaret Matzenauer a full-blown rose. Voltaire said that the first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet; the second, an ass. I hope Mme. Matzenauer will accept the simile in the poetic sense.

Nuance, which alone makes art or life endurable, becomes an evocation with Miss Garden. I lament that she is not in a more intimate setting, as the misted fire and rhythmic modulations of her opaline art and personality are lost in such a huge auditorium as the Lexington Theatre. I saw her, a slip of a girl, at Paris, early in this century, and framed by the Opéra Comique, of whose traditions she is now the most distinguished exponent. She was then something precious: a line of Pater’s prose, the glance of one of Da Vinci’s strange ladies; a chord by Debussy; honey, tiger’s blood, and absinthe; or like the enigmatic pallor we see in Renaissance portraits; cruel, voluptuous, and suggesting the ennui of Watteau’s L’Indifférent.

She is all things to all critics.

There are those who see in her the fascinating woman. And they are justified in their belief. There are those who discover in her something disquieting, ambiguous; one of Baudelaire’s “femmes damnées” from whom he fashioned his Beethovenian harmonies, fulgurating, profound: “Descendez le chemin de l’enfer éternel! ... flagellés par un vent qui ne vient pas du ciel.” ... And there is still another group to which I adhere, one that envisages Mary in the more lucid light of an admirable artist, who has fashioned of her body and soul a rare instrument, giving forth the lovely music of attitude, gesture, pose, and rhythm. There are moments when she evokes the image of the shadow of a humming-bird on a star; and often she sounds the shuddering semitones of sex, as in Thaïs. The Mélisande moods are hers, the dim, remote poesy of antique sonorous tapestries; and the “modern” note of Louise, grazing the vulgar, though purified by passion. But the dissenters no doubt believe in the Cambodian proverb when estimating the singing of both Geraldine Farrar and Mary Garden. It runs thus: When in Hades it is bad form to speak of the heat.

Do you remember the night when Mary Garden came from the refectory of the monastery in Le Jongleur, and—oh, the winsome little devil!—paused on the stairway to remark to her audience: “La cuisine est très bonne”?

The accent was indescribable. At Paris they admired her individual French streaked with exotic intonations. That night it revealed the universal accent of a half-starved lad who had just filled his tummy; a real “tuck-out.” The joy of life! How human she was! It is the sartorial technique of Miss Garden that is supreme. Her taste in costumes is impeccable. In the eternal game of making masculine eyes misbehave, she is quite irresistible. But this orchidaceous Circe, this uncommon or garden variety, does not with her fatal philtres transform men into the unmentionable animal; rather does she cause them to scurry after their vocabulary and lift up their voices in rhetorical praise. And that is something to have accomplished. Did you ever read Casuals of the Sea, by William McFee, a fiction I had the honor to introduce to the American reading public? On page 443 there occurs at the chapter end the following dialogue: “Mother!” “Yes, Minnie.” “Mother, I was just thinking what fools men are! What utter fools! But oh, mother, dear mother, what fools we are, not to find it out—sooner!” Minnie had seen a bit of life on the Continent; she was then snug in the land-locked harbor of stagnant matrimonial waters. But she understood men. Miss Garden is a profounder philosopher than Minnie Briscoe. She knew her public “sooner,” and the result is—Mary Garden. Qui a bu, boira!

I have been asked whether Miss Garden believes that she is the wonderful artiste I believe her to be. I really don’t know. But I feel assured that if she discovers she does not measure up to all the qualities ascribed to her she will promptly develop them; such is the plastic, involutionary force of this extraordinary woman.

III
THE BABY, THE CRITIC, AND THE GUITAR

George Saintsbury, that blunt literary critic who always called a cat a cat, wrote a study of Charles Baudelaire in an English magazine at least forty years ago. It practically introduced the poet to English readers, although Swinburne had imported no little of the “poisonous honey from France” in Laus Veneris. Prof. Saintsbury told of a friend to whom he had shown the etching of François Flameng after Herrera’s The Baby and the Guitar. “So,” said the friend, “you like this picture. I always thought you hated babies!” The remark is a classic example of that sin against the holy ghost of criticism, the confusion of two widely varying intellectual substances; a mixing up of the babies with a vengeance. The anecdote may serve to point a moral if not to adorn my sermon.

The operatic undertow of the past season cast up strange flotsam and jetsam and derelicts, usually in the shape of letters. Letters signed and unsigned. Two I select as illustrating the Baby and the Guitar crux. I stand for the Baby and two celebrated singing girls represent the Guitar. Both letters are unsigned, both reveal a woman’s handwriting, though different women. The first roundly accuses the dignified author of being madly in love with Mary Garden; the second wonders why I worship Margaret Matzenauer. Now, the venerable age of the present alleged and versatile “great lover”—Leo Ditrichstein should look to his laurels!—might serve as an implicit denial of these charges, were it not the fact that there are hoary-headed sinners abroad seeking whom they may devour. If I were a young chap I should pay no attention, but being as old as I am I proudly confess my crimes, merely pausing to ask, who isn’t in love with Mary Garden and Margaret Matzenauer? Their audiences, to an unprejudiced eye, seem to be very much so, men, women, and children alike. Why not that worm-of-all-work, the music-critic? We, too, have feelings like any other humans. But worse follows. A sympathetic singer sent me a telegram which read thus: “Why doesn’t your wife put you behind bars?” to which I promptly replied, Celtic fashion, by asking another question: “Which one?” meaning, of course, which bar. Here is a concrete case of the Baby and the Guitar muddle. One can’t praise the art of Mary Garden without loving the woman! One can’t admire the opulent voice of Margaret Matzenauer without being dragged a hopeless slave at her triumphant chariot wheels; a critic butchered to make a prima donna’s holiday! Absurd!

And there are others. What of radiant Geraldine with the starry eyes? What of Frieda Hempel, exquisite Violetta, delicious Countess in the Rose-Cavalier? And what of Olive Fremstad, always beautiful, an Isolde whose tenderness is without peer, a Sieglinde who plucks at your heartstrings because of her pity-breeding loveliness, or as that dazzling witch, Kundry; and to whose beauty the years have lent a tragic, expressive mask? There were queens, too, before Agamemnon’s. Lilli Lehmann, Emma Eames, Lillian Nordica, Emma Calvé—did we not burn incense under the nostrils of those beautiful women and great artists? Go to! Nor was our praise accorded only to the girls of yesteryear. The De Reszkes, Victor Maurel, Max Alvary—as perfect a type of the matinée idol as Harry Montague or Charles Coghlan—the stately, if slightly frigid, Pol Plançon—upon them we showered our warmest enthusiasms. And Ignace Jan Paderewski, once Premier Opus I of Poland—was he neglected? The piano god par excellence. No, such generalizations are unfair. The average music-critic or dramatic critic is nothing if not versatile in his tastes. Remember that either one has opportunities to see and hear the most comely faces and sweetest voices. Nevertheless I know of none who ever lost his head. We play no favorites. I also admit that this apologetic tone is the kind of excuse that is accusatory. But——!

But there is another name which slipped the memory of my faultfinders. What of Rosina Galli, whose pedal technique is as perfect as the vocal technique of Miss Hempel; whose mimique is as wonderful in its way as are the hieratic attitudes and patibulary gestures of Mary, the celebrated serpent of Old Nile? Don’t we, to a man, adore Rosina? Thunderous affirmations assail the welkin! And then there is the “poet’s secret,” as Bernard Shaw, the “Uncle Gurnemanz” of British politics, has it. The secret in question is as simple as Polchinelle’s. Do you realize that to a writer interested in his art such women as Mary Garden or Margaret Matzenauer serve as a peg for his polyphonic prose or as models upon which to drape his cloth-of-silver when writing of Geraldine Farrar? A susceptible critic may perforce sigh like a symphonic furnace, but apart from such fatuities he can’t keep up the excitement without a lot of emotional stoking. And coal is so costly this year. That alone negates the assertion of undue sentimentality. Pooh! I shouldn’t give a hang for a critic so cold that he couldn’t write overheated prose, Byzantine prose, purple-patched and swaggeringly rhythmed, when facing these golden girls. “Passionate press agents,” indeed, but in the strict sense intended when Philip Hale struck off that memorial phrase. There is Pitts Sanborn with his “lithe moon-blonde wonderful Mary,” which I envy him; after my spilth of adjectives he limns in five words the garden-goddess, Themes, those singers, for gorgeous vocables; nothing more. Footlight-prose quickly forgotten if you take from the shelf in your library the beloved essays of Cardinal Newman and swim in the cool currents of his silvery style. A panacea for the strained, morbid, fantastic atmosphere of grand opera.

From a photograph by De Strelecki

ROSINA GALLI

A character in one of Goethe’s novels—Wilhelm Meister?—exclaims: “Five minutes more of this and I confess everything!” Another such season of overwrought reportage and my bag of highly colored phrases, all my trick adjectives, would be exhausted, else gone stale, and the same gang of girls ever expecting new and more miraculous homage in four languages with a brass band around the corner. Oh! la! la!

There was one critic that did fall in love with an actress. His name is Hector Berlioz, and he celebrated the charms of Henrietta Smithson, English born, a “guest” at a Parisian theatre, by passionately pounding the kettle-drums in the orchestra. His amatory tattoo, coupled with his flaming locks, finally attracted the lady’s attention, and after she broke her leg and was forced to abandon the stage she had her revenge—she married the kettle-drum critic and composer, and lived unhappily ever afterward. Yet the feeling against critics persists, probably prompted by envy. In a Dublin theatre gallery a fight broke out, and one chap was getting the worst of it. His more powerful adversary was pushing him over the rail into the orchestra, when a wag called out: “Don’t waste him. Kill a fiddler with him!” Nowadays he would say, “Kill a critic.” But sufferance is the badge of our tribe. There are times when I long for the unaffected charm of Heller rather than Chopin; when I prefer to gaze at Wagner’s Grane rather than hear Brunhilde sing.

Mary Garden makes herself beautiful, if only by thinking “beautiful.” “Whatever happens, I must be an emerald,” said Antoninus of the emerald’s morality. Havelock Ellis asserts, “the exquisite things of life are to-day as rare and as precious as ever they were.” She is rare and precious in Mélisande, Monna Vanna, Jean, and other rôles. And what imaginative intensity is hers! But I don’t care a fig for the depraved creatures of the Lower Empire she so marvellously portrays. It is Mary with the strain of mysticism, the woodland fay she shows us, its nascent soul modulating into the supreme suffering and sorrow of motherhood. Her bed of death in Mélisande is one of the high consolations in the memory of a critic whose existence has been spent in the quagmire of mediocrity. In the kingdom of the mystics there are many mansions, and Garden lives in one—at times.

But the détraqué lemans she pictures are often repugnant. The decadent art of Byzance. The Infernal Feminine. A vase exquisitely carved containing corruption. Sculptured slime. You close your eyes—but open your fingers; the temptation to peep is irresistible.

In his illuminative studies of Fremstad, Farrar, Garden, Mazarin, Interpreters and Interpretations, Carl Van Vechten says that to Miss Garden a wig is the all-important thing. “Once I have donned the wig of a character, I am that character. It would be difficult for me to go on the stage in my own hair.” However, she did so in Louise, adds the critic. Felix Orman reports that when he asked her if she would be content to give up singing and become a dramatic artist, she replied: “No. I need the music. I depend on it. Music is my medium of expression.” An art amphibian, hybrid, hers. The flying fish. The bird that swims. The dubious trail of the epicene is not a modern note. Rome and Alexandria knew it. It is vile, soulless, yet fascinating. Miss Garden incarnates it as no other modern since the divine Sarah. She is “cérébrale,” and a cerebral is defined by Arthur Symons as one who feels with the head and thinks with the heart. Richard Strauss is a prime exemplar. The image suggests both apoplexy and angina pectoris, yet it serves. She is as hard as steel in Louise or Cléopâtre, yet how melting as Monna and Mélisande. She may be heartless for all I know, and that is in her favor, artistically considered, for Steeplejack hath enjoined: A cool head and a wicked heart will conquer the world; also, what shall it profit a woman if she saves her soul but loseth love? Cynical Steeplejack? Yet, a half-truth—though not the upper half of that shy goddess, Truth.

As for Margaret Matzenauer, her art and personality transport the imagination to more exotic climes. That sombre and magnificent woman, who seems to have stepped from a fresco of Hans Makart, himself a follower of Paolo Veronese, is a singing Caterina Cornaro. She brought back an element of lyric grandeur to our pale operatic life; a Judith, a Deborah, Boadicea, Belkis, Clytemnestra, Dalila, Amneris, or Aholibah, all those splendid tragic shapes of the antique world, she evokes, and in her singing there is a largeness of dramatic utterance that proclaims her of the line royal: Lehmann, Brandt, Ternina, Fremstad, Schumann-Heink. Is it at all remarkable that I admire Matzenauer?

And now that we have cleared away some cobwebs of misapprehension with the aid of the Baby and the Guitar, let me relate a story of Châteaubriand, that Eternal Philanderer, as I once named him, who met at Rome gay Hortense Allart, afterward Madame Meritens. The supreme master of French prose regretfully exclaimed to her: “Ah, if I had back my fifty years.” Thereupon the sprightly lady replied: “Why not wish for twenty-five?” “No,” moodily returned the Ambassador, “fifty will do.” Which recalls the witty design of Forain, representing a very old man apostrophizing the shadow of his past: “Oh, if I only had again my sixty-five years!” I should be glad to have my threescore and ten if only to tell those great ladies of opera how much I admire them. “Barkis is willin’.”

Another picture and I shall have done. Listen. I, many years ago, visited the Fondation Ste. Perine at Auteuil, an institution endowed by the Empress Eugénie, one in which the benevolence is so cloaked as not to hurt the sensibilities of the resident superannuated ladies and gentlemen. The company boasted noble origins. Among the ladies I met was a Polish-born Marquise, with brilliant eyes and wonderful white hair, her own. She had studied with Chopin. She said he was fickle and that George Sand was often jealous of his pupils. For me she sang in a sweet, true, but quavering voice Chopin’s Maiden’s Wish, and compelled tears. The Marquise then tinkled with a still small tone a Nocturne by Field upon a pianoforte whose ivory keys looked as if they exhaled pearly sighs. She gently coquetted with a touch of exquisite Sarmatian evasiveness. For me she was adorable, although if she had laughed her face would have cracked its artistic plastering. What a new Diana of Poitiers! What wit, fire, malice, were in the glance of her soft, faded blue eyes! What a magically youthful heart! She must have been more than fourscore.

But yet a woman.

IV
INTERPRETER

TO MARY GARDEN AS CLEOPATRA

“C’est Affreux Mourir”

“And now this scorchèd terrace is your sole domain,
Your only subject Roman, dying Anthony;
The outer vastnesses they held, the soldiery
Of Cæsar; their stout captain will not here refrain.
You lived, O Queen, but not to countenance that pain
Which is surrender of the body’s sovereignty;
You take your part; is it the frightful thing to die
And see in dying just the realm you must regain?
You have not let the game play you, my Queen, but fed
The aspic at a famished breast—the rascal fresh
From gluttony a glutton still!—Why, the hot land
Is dim, alone lies Anthony save for the dead—
One more ambition, Queen, for your expiring hand.
The last adventure, woman of imperious flesh!”

—Pitts Sanborn.

CLEOPATRA

Though the first hearing of the work in New York was during the winter of 1919 at the Lexington Theatre, and sung by the Chicago Opera Association, Cleofonte Campanini, director, it had been presented before Chicago audiences when the impersonation of the supersubtle serpent of Old Nile by Mary Garden caused much comment, critical and otherwise. The libretto states that the conception of M. Payen radically differs from Shakespeare’s tragedy—a rather superfluous remark. It does considerably differ, the principal difference being that Shakespeare wrote great poetry as well as great drama.

Payen’s attempt resolves itself into a series of tableaux, the characterization generalized, his verse respectably tepid. In a word, not the Queen that Shakespeare drew. Of this Cléopâtre you dare not say: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” She is more germane to that Queen shown us in the sumptuous prose of Theophile Gautier’s Une Nuit de Cléopâtre than the imperial courtesan who turned the head of Anthony and stirred the pulse of Julius Cæsar to the supreme tune of Shakespeare’s music.

There is plenty of action, some picturesque episodes, and at least one brutal scene. Of love and the talk of love there is no end. Yet it is not all convincing. Moving pictures. You think of Gérôme, of Le Nouy, of the hundred and one painters who have celebrated on canvas this seductive creature of old Egypt. “For her own person, it beggar’d all description; she did lie in her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, o’er-picturing that Venus where we see the fancy out-work nature.”

Cléopâtre is Massenet and the modiste. Brackish-sweet, it is the ultimate expression of musical impotence. Clever craftsman Massenet could turn out martial music and amorous, the clangor of trumpets and voluptuous, dizzy dance measures. But here it is generally bosh. Languid, enervating, it attained a feeble climax in the ballet of the penultimate act. Ambiguous shapes and attitudes crowded the scene. Two dancers slipped and fell, but the recovery was so swift that the tumbled ensemble seemed a veritable climax. Cléopâtre cynically regarded this daring symbolism, though Marc-Antoine seemed rather shocked. And he should have been. Musically speaking, nothing happened in Act I; less followed in Act II, while Act III was a glittering triumph of vacuity. In the last act the asp played protagonist. As its name did not figure on the programme, it probably died from envy, or else inanition, doubtless humming Will Shakespeare’s mournful lay: “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” You also recall Swinburne’s: “Under those low, large lids of hers She hath the histories of all times....”

But the Cléopâtre! A youthful Sphinx, her entrance on the great burnished barge was an evocation. As she faced Antoine so must have looked Sheba’s Queen before the majesty of Solomon. It would have been trying on the nerves of the most pudic potentate from Herod down. A saucy lad, in a later scene, Cléopâtre got in a mix-up at an early-Egyptian boozing-ken. An extraordinary apparition, a fantastic faun of Aubrey Beardsley caught the roving riggish eye of the disguised Queen. She encouraged the advances of the anonymous animal. An Adonis à rebours. Pavley was this delicate monster and his subtle rhythms made Cléopâtre shiver. Here the music was too prudish.

Stravinsky or Richard Strauss would have given the screw an enharmonic wrench. Act III saw the Queen attired at once so sonorously and exquisitely that the vast audience gasped with admiration. It is, however, the tavern scene that will save the tawdry work. The anatomical wigwagging of the two golden lads set the lobby buzzing. Cléopâtre is doomed to packed houses in the future. Nothing succeeds like true spirituality.

Mary Garden is Cléopâtre, as she is Mélisande and Thaïs. It is not a rôle that taxes her dramatic resources or her personal pulchritude. All she did was to look beautiful and turn on the full voltage of her blandishments. Men went to the ground before that dynamic yet veiled glance, like soldiers facing a machine-gun. It is uncanny, the emotion she projects across the footlights and with such simple but cerebral means.

That she would have been burned at the stake a few centuries ago, this lovely witch, is no conjecture. Her nose is not “tip-tilted like the petal of a flower,” as Cléopâtre’s is said to have been; nevertheless, she is the tawny Egyptian. And she has never spoken so eloquently as in this parlando part. Perhaps the most poignant criticism was carelessly uttered by a big policeman who had strayed in during the garden scene. “Some Queen!” he said. And the definitive words had been spoken. Fie on naughty professional opinion after that memorial phrase!

MÉLISANDE

Once upon a time we called this “precious” lyric work Wagner and Absinthe, for there are many rumors of Tristan and Isolde in it, and the opalescent music, drugged with dreams, has the numbing effect of that “green fairy” no longer permitted in la belle France. Like all epigrams, this is only a half-truth. In the Belgian poet’s The Death of Tintagiles—so wonderfully interpreted in tone by Charles Martin Loeffler—his marionettes are beginning to modulate into flesh and blood, and, like the mermaid of the fairy story, the transformation is a painful one. We note the achievement of a new manner in Pelléas and Mélisande. Played in English first by Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the piece created a mixed impression in London, though it may be confessed that, despite the scenic splendor, the acting transposed to a lower realistic key this lovely drama of souls. No play of Maeterlinck’s is so saturated with poesy, replete with romance. There are episodes almost as intense as the second act of Tristan. We listen for King Mark’s distant, tremulous hunting-horns in the forest scene when Pelléas and Mélisande uncover their hearts.

From a photograph copyrighted by Davis and Eickemeyer

MARY GARDEN AS MELISANDE

The second act begins at an immemorial fountain in the royal park. Here the young Prince sits with the wife of his brother. Mélisande is the most convincing full-length portrait of the poet. Exquisitely girlish, she charms with her strange Undine airs. Mélisande is enveloped in the haze of the romantically remote. At times she seems to melt into the green tapestry of the forest. She is a woodland creature. More melancholy than Miranda, she is not without traces of her high-bred temperament; less real than Juliet, she is also passion-smitten. You recall Melusina and Rautendelein. Not altogether comprehensible, Mélisande piques us by her waywardness, her fascinating if infantile change of moods. At the spring the two converse of the water and its healing powers. “You would say that my hands were sick to-day,” she murmurs as she dips her fingers into the pool. The dialogue is as elliptical as if written by Browning or Henry James. But the symbol floats like a flag.

The mad apostrophe to the hair of Mélisande is in key with this moving tableau. Perhaps Maeterlinck took a hint from the mournful tale of his friend, the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-la-Morte), with its reincarnation of a dead woman in the form and features of a live one. The beautiful hair of the new love serves but to strangle her. Pelléas is more tender.

“I have never, never seen such hair as thine, Mélisande. I see the sky no longer through thy locks.... They are alive like birds in my hands.” The last scene, as Mélisande dies of a broken heart, even when read on the printed page, is pity-breeding. It is the tragedy of souls distraught. “She must not be disturbed,” urges the venerable Arkel. “The human soul is very silent.... The human soul likes to depart alone.... It suffers so timorously.... But the sadness, Golaud, the sadness of all we see.... ’Twas a little being so quiet, so fearful, and so silent. ’Twas a poor little mysterious being like everybody.” Pascal comes to the mind here. No matter the splendor of human lives, we must die alone.

The speech of the poet in its rhapsodic rush merges into Debussy’s music. That we shall ever see another such ensemble as at the Manhattan Opera House years ago is doubtful. Mary Garden is Mélisande. No further praise is needful. All her trumpery rôles, Thaïs, Gismonda, Cléopâtre, with their insincere music and pasteboard pathos, are quickly dismissed. Her Mélisande is unforgettable.

MONNA VANNA

This opera was first heard here on February 17, 1914, at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Mary Garden, Vanni Marcoux, and Huberdeau. It had been produced by the Boston Opera Company in December, 1913, and by the present organization January 23, 1918. Miss Garden was the heroine on that occasion, and was greeted with overwhelming applause. The première of the play Monna Vanna occurred at the Nouveau Théâtre, Paris, May 17, 1902. We had the good fortune to see it a week later. Georgette Leblanc was the original Monna. Jean Froment, Darmont, and Lugné Poé were the other principals. The drama enjoyed an immediate success all over Europe from Bergen to Palermo. London alone stood firm against its blandishments. The censor forbade a production. New York first saw it in English with Bertha Kalich at the old Standard Theatre, Harrison Gray Fiske, manager.

As a play it was a new departure for Maeterlinck. It is almost theatric. In the heyday of his glory Sardou never devised anything more arresting than the dénouement—setting aside consideration of the psychologic imbroglio. There are spots in the dramatic scheme which tax the credulity. However, something of the improbable must always be granted a playwright, be he never so logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna hints at a native-born casuist, an Italian Renaissance type of mind. Her love of Colonna could not have been deep-rooted. But she did not betray him in the tent, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral; in a word, not to put an edge too fine upon the sophistries of the situation, this heroine committed an imaginative infidelity as well as uttering a splendid falsehood. The madness of the finale is the logical outcome of her passion for Prinzevalle. All that has gone before in her life had been a bad dream. The true, the beautiful moment is at hand. It will be both her revenge and justification.

She goes to Prinzevalle in his cell. “This must end here; it is too perfect.... It is one blaze about me and within me.... Oh, some death will run its sudden finger round this spark and sever us from the rest!” Thus Browning sings In a Balcony.

The play’s the thing! though it did not seem to catch the conscience of the composer. Nevertheless, Monna Vanna is more grateful to our ears than Gismonda. There are too many “things” that are set to music in the Sardou libretto, while Maeterlinck deals only with the primal passions—love, jealousy, hatred, conflict of wills. There is more unity in action and mood in the older score. The music is Wagnerian from first to final curtain, but it is cleverly assimilated and swifter, more poignant. The introduction to the third act recalls the third act of Valkyrs; so we were not surprised to find Brunhilde pleading, or to hear the chorus shrilly cry out the Valkyr theme. In the tent scene, Tristan and Isolde reign, as might be expected. The first act has been cut and to its advantage.

From a photograph copyrighted by Mishkin

MARY GARDEN AS MONNA VANNA

At our first view of Mary Garden as the mediæval Judith who fetches to Pisa her beloved Holofernes, we frankly confess that the impressions of her interpretation were strong. Monna Vanna will rank in her portrait-gallery among the finest. It far outshines Gismonda, as Monna herself outshines the incredible, erotic Duchess of Athens. There was no attempt to make a disrobing scandal in the tent scene, which would be obviously theatrical flimflam. Miss Garden disposed of the situation simply. She did not appear half-nude, but clothed in exquisitely-toned draperies. But if she did not show her lovely person, she spilled for us the soul of the heroine who saved her country and lost her reputation. In the opening act she did little, but suggested the psychology of a woman who had begun to loathe a supine husband. Note the nuance with which she uttered “J’rai, mon père,” and the repetition when she says it to Colonna. It was like molten steel at first; it was cold, rigid steel, the steel of unalterable resolution the second time. Yet how tender is her “Si” when she turns to her fuming spouse.

There was tenderness in the tent scene, yes, true tenderness, not expressed by the sentimental symbols of the English theatre, but in the restrained terms of the French tradition; therefore, more eloquent, more artistic, despair and pride modulating into amazed joyfulness at meeting her early friend, stern Prinzevalle. But the last scene gave us the most moving side of this wonderful woman’s art. The shock of incredulity caused by her husband’s suspicions, merging into the supreme ecstasy as she grasps the key that is to unlock the future—in sooth, no such acting has been witnessed for a long time. The scale was essentially smaller than Bernhardt’s, but as subtle as the art of Sarah were the indications of love triumphant with death staring her in the face. The tiny play of shadows round her eyes and mouth as she sees her lover trapped were touching. That she was a picture in every act is a matter of course. Her slow steps to the open door most impressive. It was a veritable march to the scaffold. Fevrier’s music in this last episode rings true.

GISMONDA

Of Mary Garden it is always the correct thing to say that she is charming. True. Charming, and also many other qualities she boasts. She is exquisite, and she is sometimes a great dramatic artist. But her voice is a sonorous mirage. The lower register is still rich, sombre in coloring, thrilling when she wills. The gift of temperamental ecstasy is hers, though the character she paints so subtly is hardly worth the powder and shot to blow it sky-high. A sensual prowling panther, notwithstanding the al fresco exhibition of mother-love in Act I.

The panther glides from its midnight jungle to meet its mate, and then Miss Garden’s magic begins to operate. Her soliloquy is the finest bit of psychology expressed in voice, mimique, and with the entire arsenal of her personal beauty that we have seen on any stage, dramatic or lyric, for years. She needs an intimate atmosphere. Her diction, her phrasing, her general grasp of the rôle are most impressive. She has distinction in every pose, distinction in the carriage of her head and arch of the neck.

Her cadenced step in the first scene is replaced by rhythmic movements in the second act that reveal her glowing inner life. She is all flame and gold—except when she sings above the staff. Even then she infuses it with a characteristic timbre. A singing-actress. People like Mary Garden because she has that rarest of artistic virtues—personality.

THAÏS

During the first week of last season’s Chicago opera the temperament of Mary Garden was carefully chained in its cage; nevertheless, we overheard its growls in Gismonda, but the mock-Fafner at the bottom of the cistern outroared Miss Garden’s tame panther. In Monna Vanna there were whimperings and menacing claws. The feline had no chance to spring, not even in the tent scene. At a matinée in the Lexington Theatre Thaïs was sung by the Chicago Opera Association, and now or never! we said, the temperament so artistically expressed, rather canalized and exquisitely distributed, in the two other operas, will leap. It did. In the palace of Thaïs the panther appeared for a few moments—and it assumed the form of hysteria. The famous courtesan of Alexandria experienced a true “conversion,” the physical manifestations of which were well-nigh pathological. “You have created a new shudder,” wrote Victor Hugo to Charles Baudelaire after the production of his Flowers of Evil. The “nouveau frisson” of Miss Garden is thrilling, and must have appalled the well-meaning, stupid Athanael.

This singing-actress does not widely depart from her usual interpretation, except that slight perpetual novelty which we expect from her. Her last scene is beautiful in conception and execution; the “spiritual” flirtation on the mossy bank as piously piquant as ever. The kiss suggested and evaded set us to wondering again at the morose monk. In the early acts Thaïs is too restless. The firm yet plastic lines of the character are thereby disturbed. She looked lovelier than ever, and she did not sing in the best of voice. A trying week was behind her; besides, the domesticated panther must have tugged hard and frequently at its leash.

CARMEN

I attended Miss Garden’s reading of the score for my first time, and freely admit my mixed feelings. We were assured by perfectly honorable lobbyists that the last season the Garden version was much better, more temperamental; and one who had overheard her in Paris swore that she was a seething caldron in Act II. Her interpretation seems to us to be “overpainted,” to employ studio argot. Like the canvas in Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, there is little left of the original design, except perhaps a miraculously painted foot.

There were bits here and there that are admirable; the slow awakening of her interest in the toreador as he thunders forth that supreme song of table d’hôtes. We see some delicate and definitive notations, yet it is lost in the cloudy chaos of the scene. All the strong theatrical points are deliberately renounced; the first tumultuous entrance, the Habanera, Seguidilla, and the duo in Act II. The renunciation suggests technical heroism, but it doesn’t help us much in the development of the character.

Her Carmen is essentially frigid. And it is neither sinister nor sensuous. To be sure, it is different, but then so is Hedda Gabler “different.” We went to see, to hear, Carmen, and Hedda—in a lyric mood—was more often adumbrated than the Mérimée-Bizet gypsy. The disturbing element of the performance was the undeniable fact that, granted her idea of the rôle, she didn’t even “get it across.” She missed fire in Act II, in the card episode particularly. Nor did she look bewitching. We quite understand her avoidance of the conventional posing, hipping, strutting, and inane postures; yet there should have been compensations. (In the days of Calvé the criticism was “Elle se hanche trop.”)

These were slim, not her singing, nor yet the beautiful shawl that might have been designed by Sorolla y Bastida. The famous fan we missed. If Mary Garden had but lavished a tithe of her blandishments on her Don José that she so recklessly, so alluringly bestowed upon Marc-Antoine Maguenat in Cléopâtre, we might have been won over a little to her general conception. This Carmen was a distinguished dame. Lilli Lehmann alone outshone her in aristocratic Sevillian courtesy. But Lilli could sing. And Lilli had not the Aberdeen-cum Philadelphia-cum Chicago-cum Boston complex of Mary.

We have since learned that the singer was grievously indisposed. And she surely missed the Don José of Dalmores and Muratore.

And on this rather chilly note of dissent I prefer to end. Of Miss Garden’s twenty or thirty other rôles it is hardly necessary to speak. Her Louise and Salome, so dissimilar, yet both incomparable, need no belated praise. She is unique. Thus endeth the Book of Mary the Garden.

V
MÉLISANDE AND DEBUSSY

George Moore has remarked that we never speak of Shakespeare or Hugo or Flaubert as the authors of any particular work. Simply to utter their names suffices. I give the illustrations haphazard. Any great artist will do. From Claude Debussy we never ask of what he is the composer. Pelléas and Mélisande is his monument; rather, Mélisande and Pelléas; as, in the case of Isolde and Tristan, it is the woman who is protagonist. Is it because in creating characters of our mother’s sex that the Eternal Masculine is projected across the feminine soul? Or, is woman the genuine, the aboriginal force, that we unwittingly obey, all the while calling her “little woman”? (condescendingly, of course). Oh, what a joke of almost cosmical proportions it would be if the latter supposition be the truer one! But mere male mortals may always console themselves with the ineluctable fact that it is man who has endowed woman with a vital figure in the arts. He has created Ophelia and Gretchen, Beatrice and Francesca, the Milo Venus, the Winged Victory and Isolde, Lady Macbeth and Emma Bovary, Carmen and Mélisande. Honors, then, are even. Even if models existed in nature, the art of man it was that shaped them and breathed life into their clay. But Mélisande is the protagonist in the drama.

The music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s strangely haunting play is so wedded to the moods and situations that as absolute music it is unthinkable. And these moods are usually “con sordino.” Despite his musicianship, Debussy is obviously a “literary” composer; his brain had first to be excited by a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, an episode in fiction, or the contemplation of a picture.

Why demand if the initial impulse be the Monna Lisa or a quatrain by Verlaine? A composer who can interpret in tone the recondite moods of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, or the dramatic prose-poem of Maeterlinck, need not have been daunted by criticism; in sooth, it is the angle of critical incidence that must be shifted to adapt itself to the new optique. Pelléas and Mélisande is a study in musical decomposition; the phrase is decomposed, rhythms are dislocated, the harmonic structure melts and resolves itself into air. His themes are developed in opposition to the old laws of musical syntax. But what have laws in common with genius? Once assimilated, they may be broken as were broken the stone tablets by the mighty iconoclast, Moses. Besides, every law has its holiday. In the Debussyan idiom there seems to be no normal sequence. I say seems, for much water has gone under the bridge since his appearance, and compared with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff he is a conservative; in another decade he may be called a reactionary. Life is brief and art is swift.

Our ears were not accustomed to his novel progressions and the forced marriage of harmonies. His tonalities are vague, but his values just. The introduction to the forest scene when Golaud discovers Mélisande is of an acid sweetness. Without anxious preoccupation Debussy has caught the exact Maeterlinckian note. As it is impossible to divorce music and text—Debussy seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self—so it is needless to dwell upon the characteristic qualities of the score. It is like some antique and lovely tapestry that hypnotizes the gaze. It has the dream-drugged atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; the Poe of the dark tarn of Auber, of Ligeia, of Ellenora, of Berenice, and Helen, those frail apparitions from claustral solitudes and the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, all as exotic as they are incorporeal. It is the complete envelopment of the poem by an atmospheric musical haze shot through with gleams of light never shown before on land or sea.

We pardon the monotone of mood and music, the occasional muffled cacophonies, the lack of exterior action, and the absence of climaxes; after so long waiting for a passionate outburst, when it does come it is overpowering in its intensity. In music the tact of omission has never been pushed so far. From the pianoforte partition little may be gleaned of its poetic fervor, its reticences, its delicate landscapes, psychologic subtleties. The pattern seldom obtrudes, as the web is spun “exceeding fine.” The orchestration reveals the silver-greys of Claude Monet and the fire-tipped iridescence of Monticelli. His musical palette proclaims Debussy a symbolist, one in the key of Verlaine, who loved nuance for its own sake and detested flauntingly brilliant hues. “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance ... et tout le reste est littérature,” sang Paul of the asymmetrical jaws and supernal thirst.

Debussy is the most interesting of contemporary music-makers and the most subtle composer for the pianoforte since Chopin. His originality is not profoundly rooted in the history of his art, but his individuality is indisputable. He is a musician doubled by a poet. He is almost as Gallic as Chopin is Polish. Debussy shows race. His artistic pedigree stems from a grafting of old French composers upon ultramodern methods. Wagner, Chopin, certain aspects of Liszt, and Moussorgsky. The visit he made to Russia in 1879 had important consequences. He read the manuscript score of Boris at Rome, he absorbed Moussorgsky and the whole-tone scale, and this influence contributed to the richness and complexity of his style. Above all, he is a stylist. He has Wagner at his finger-tips, and, like Charpentier, he can’t keep Tristan out of his music; it is his King Charles’s head. Naturally such highly peptonized aural diet is not nourishing. Like the poetry and prose-poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, too much Debussy becomes trying to the nerves. Schumann has spoken of the singularly irritating effect of muted dissonances. Pelléas is nearly all muted. The mental and emotional concentration involved in the hearing of this music fatigues as does no other music; not even Tristan.

The range of ideas, like the dynamic range, is limited. Yet there is magic in his music, the magic of evocation. Not to describe, but to evoke, in effortless imagery, is the quintessence of his art. He is a painter of cameos and aquarelles. Never does he carve from the big block; an exquisite miniaturist, he does not handle a bold brush, nor boast the epical sweep of his predecessors; Berlioz for one. But he is more intimate, he is the poet of crepuscular moods. The sadness of tender, bruised souls is in his pages. Of virility there is little trace, it is music of the distaff, and seldom sounds the masculine ring of crossed swords. Chopin, too, had his nocturnal moments, but he also wrote the A flat Polonaise, with its heroic defiance of a Poland crushed yet never conquered; with its motto: “Jescze Polska nie zginiela!”

Long before his death this French master was critically ranged. Lawrence Gilman, the most sympathetic of his commentators, is also the fairest. To his essays I go for delectation. It would be rash to say that Debussy had achieved his artistic apogee; he may have had surprises in store, but it is safe to conclude that Pelléas and Mélisande is his masterpiece, that the dewy freshness of L’Après Midi d’un Faune would never have been recaptured. The symphonic suite, Printemps, the Nocturnes, La Mer, and Images, at once reveal the strength and limitations of Debussy, who was not a builder of the “lofty rhyme,” though he is a creator of complex rhythms; not a cerebral composer—like Vincent d’Indy, for example—but an emotional one; not a master of linear design, but a colorist; a poet, not an architect. His vision is authentic. He knew that the core of reality is poetry; he lived not at the circumference but the hub of things. He loathed the academic. He is the antipodes of Saint-Saëns. He gave us a novel nuance in music, as did Maeterlinck in literature. (Think of Interior with its motive—again Poe—the fear of fear!) Debussy is a composer of nuance, of half-hinted murmurings of “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” of the rutilant faun with his metaphysical xenomania, of music overheard, and of mirrored dreams. Little wonder he sought to interpret in his weaving tones Baudelaire and Verlaine, Mallarmé and Maeterlinck. He was affiliated to that choir of sensitive and unhappy souls, of which Maurice Maeterlinck is the solitary survivor. A poet himself, Claude Achille Debussy, even if he had never written a bar of music.

One summer evening in 1903 I was introduced to him at a café on the Boulevard des Italiens. Debussy spoke a few polite words when I told him that I belonged to the critical chain-gang. He had written much musical criticism, chiefly memorable for its unsympathetic attitude toward Schubert and Wagner, not because of reasons chauvinistic, but doubtless the result of a natural reaction against the principal educative forces in his life. At least once in his career an artist curses his artistic progenitors. Wagner must have hated Weber because of his borrowings from him, and I am quite sure Chopin despised Hummel; internal evidence may be collated in the Pole’s wide departure from the academic patterns of Hummel’s passage-work. However, Debussy never went so far as his friend Jean Marnold, who in the Mercure de France concludes a comparative study of Pelléas and Tristan in these words: “Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard, qu’il semble aujourd’hui, à sa place adéquate en notre Opéra toulousain.” Yet if Tristan came so late, how is it that there is so much of its music in Pelléas? a fact that Philip Hale doubts. There’s the score. Who steals my idea steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; but he that filches from me my style robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed! (This is reorchestrated to suit the simile.) Tristan always seems to be waiting in the wings when Pelléas is played, awaiting his cue to enter. It never fails to be given by Debussy.

Later I asked Maurice Maeterlinck his opinion of Debussy’s music to Pelléas and Mélisande. It was an imprudent question, for Lucienne Bréval had captured the rôle of Mélisande, not Georgette Leblanc. Maeterlinck is a polite man, and his answer was guarded; nevertheless, his dislike of the music pierced his phrases. To him it was evident that his play needed no tonal embellishment, that it was more poetic, more dramatic, without the Debussy frame. He is quite right. And yet the spiritual collaboration of poet and musician is irresistible. And in the garden of the gods there is only one Mélisande. Some little dramas, like little books, have their destiny. The composer of Pelléas and Mélisande suffered from the nostalgia of the ideal, suffered from homesickness for his patrie psychique, the land of fantasy and evanescent visions. The world will not willingly forget him.

VI
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT

It was twenty minutes to Eternity on a sunny morning in Gotham. The breakfast room was large, airy, and the view of upper Manhattan from the various windows gave one a joyous sense of our quotidian life, its variety and spaciousness. Central Park, a square of dazzling emerald, the erect golden synagogue on the avenue, the silver hubs of the wheels on passing carriages across the East Drive, were pictures for eyes properly attuned. The four eyes, however, in this particular apartment, were busily engaged in devouring, not the dainty breakfast spread before them—eyes eat, too—but the morning newspapers. On the walls were framed photographs. She as Juliet. He as Tristan. She as Isolde. He as Faust. She, Carmen. He, Siegfried. A versatile pair. Theirs had been a marriage prompted by love. A magnificent, a devastating passion had amalgamated their destinies—Paul Bourget would have said “sublimes.” They still loved despite the poignant promiscuity of matrimony, although married nearly a year. They also loved others. And in the morning hours they hated one another with the holy hatred engendered by perfect sympathy. And they were so consumedly happy that they couldn’t stay indoors for a day. It is easy to love fervidly; it is hard to hate intelligently. On one point, however, this wonderful soprano and glorious tenor were united—they despised musical criticism, even when it was unfavorable. Banishing Mildred, the pretty English maid—she was too pretty about six in the evening, so He noticed—to the bedroom, they read the newspapers undisturbed. They read aloud, and occasionally as a duet. She freely embroidered her commentaries. He embellished his with indignant outbursts.

“Dearest, hear this. What a beautiful notice from Spoggs. I appreciate it all the more because he was once épris of that Garden woman. I honestly believe the man is truly in love with me.” “Pooh! Sweetheart, a music-critic has only ink and ice-water in his veins. Spoggs is in love with his hifalutin’ phrases. All the rest is cannonading canaries. If he saw you in the right key he would never speak of your second-act Isolde. That’s just where you fall down, darling. Whereas my third-act Tristan—” “Dear old boy. How you do run on. Always jealous when his poor little wifie is praised.” “I jealous? Of—you!” Longa pausa! Suddenly she exclaims: “Oh, you poor man! Did you read what he said of your make-up last night? I hate that man now. He is so unjust—to you; though he does admire me. Why, what’s the matter, baby? Where are you going? Your coffee is cold—” He storms out of the room, stumbling over Mildred on her knees near the door, either praying or polishing the keyhole with her lustrous eyelashes. Familiarity may breed contempt, but contiguity breeds, tout simple.

It really happened. In this instance I have transposed the key to opera. The true story deals with a well-known actress and her first husband, also her leading man. Two prima donnas under one roof. She read him to his death with unfavorable criticisms. I know of a more curious case. He was an idealist of an idealism so lofty that he often stumbled over the stars, enmeshed himself in constellations and took the sun for footstool. Her eyes, young as yesterday, were like an Irish sea-green mountain lake; at dusk, a sombre pool, profound at dawn as a sun-misted emerald. He painted. She sang. He painted her portrait. Then he painted other women’s portraits. Each portrait he painted was the portrait of his wife. She was beautiful. At first society was amused, flattered, and finally resented the unsought compliment. Time drove the enamored couple asunder. They were too happy. She married again, happily. He remarried. I saw the last portrait he had painted of his second wife, a lovely creature. As in a pictorial palimpsest the features of his first wife showed in the new text; the expression of her eyes peeped through the other woman’s eyes. A veritable obsession this, comparable to the exquisite and melancholy tale of Georges Rodenbach and the dear dead woman of Bruges-la-Morte.

What is the artistic temperament—so-called? Years ago I wrote to great lengths of “The Artist and His Wife,” quoting ancient saws and modern instances to fatten my argument that artistic people are, in private life, very much like others; if anything, more human. I proved, by a string of names beginning with the Robert Brownings and the Robert Schumanns, that artists may marry or mix without fear of sudden death, cross words, bad cookery, rocky behavior, or diminution of their artistic powers. “There are no women of genius,” said that crosspatch celibate, Edmond de Goncourt; “the only women of genius are men.” A half-truth and a whole lie. Artistic men are as “catty” as the “cattiest” women. But why dwell only upon the incompatibility of artists? Doesn’t Mr. Worldly Wiseman sometimes weary of his stout spouse? Why does the iceman in the adjacent alley beat the skinny mother of his children? Or why does a woman who never heard of Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler, or Anna Karenina leave her husband, her family, not for the love of a cheap histrion, but because she thinks she can achieve fame as a “movie” actress? Is it not the call of the exotic, the far-away and unfamiliar? A woman can’t live alone on stone without the bread of life at intervals. The echoes of wanderlust are heard in the houses of bankers, tailors, policemen, politicians, as well as in the studies of artists, poets, and musicians.

But the artist’s misdemeanors get into print first. The news is published early and often. A beautiful young actress, or a rising young portrait-painter, a gifted composer, talented sculptor, rare poet, brilliant pianist, versatile writer—when one of these strays across the barrier into debatable territory, the watchmen on the moral towers lustily beat their warning gongs. It is prime matter for headlines. To the winds strong lungs bawl the naked facts. Depend upon it—no matter who escapes the public hue and cry, the artist is always found out and his peccadilloes proclaimed from pulpits or yawped over the roofs of the world. Why, you ask, should a devotee of æsthetic beauty ever allow his feet to lead him astray? Here comes in your much-vaunted, too-much-discussed artistic temperament—odious phrase! Hawked about the market-place, instead of reposing in the holy of holies, this temperament has become a byword and a stench in the nostrils. Every coney-catcher, prizefighter, or cocotte takes refuge behind “art.” It is become a name accursed. When the tripesellers of literature wish to rivet public attention upon their wares, they cry aloud: “Lo, the artistic temperament!” If an unfortunate woman is arrested she is usually described in the police-blotter as an “actress.” If a fellow and his wife tire of too much bliss, their “temperaments” are aired in the courts. Worse—“affinities” are dragged in. Decent folk shudder and your genuine artist does not boast of his “artistic temperament.” It has become gutter-slang. It is a synonym for rotten “nerves.”

A true artist abhors the ascription of temperament, keeping within the sanctuary of his soul the ideal that is the mainspring of his creation. The true artist temperament is, in reality, the perception and appreciation of beauty, whether in pigment, form, tone, words, nature, or in the loftier region of moral rectitude. It may exist coevally with a strong religious sense. And it may be gayly pagan. But always for the serious artist the human body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, as Mother Church, profoundest of psychologists, has taught. The dignity of men and women dare be violated only at the peril of their immortal souls. The artistic temperament adds new values to every-day life and character. But its possessor must not parade this personal quality as an excuse for self-indulgence. That he leaves to the third-rate artisan, to the charlatan, to the buffoon who grins through a horse collar, to the vicious who shield their vileness behind a torrid temperament. Now, art and sex are correlated. Sex is the salt of life. Art without sex is flavorless, hardly art at all, a frozen simulacrum. All great artists are virile. And their greatness consists in the victory over their temperaments; not in the triumph of mind over matter—futile phrase—but in a synthesis, the harmonious comminglement of intellect and artistic material. Sensualist your artist may be, but if he is naught else, then his technical virtuosity avails him not. He cannot achieve artistic grandeur. The noblest art is the triumph of imagination over temperament.

Too often a rainbow mirage is this entering into wedlock of two congenial souls.

When He whispers—it is the marrying month of June and the moon swims above in the tender blue—“Why, dear, it is just as easy for two to live as one on fifty dollars a week,” the recording angel smiles, then weeps. Nor has the hardy young adventurer spiders on his ceiling. He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the path of wisdom. But She? Oh, She is enraptured. Naturally they will economize; occasional descents into cheap Bohemias; sawdust, pink wine, pinker wit, pinkest women. No new gowns. No balls. No theatres. No operas. No society. It is only to be Art, Art, Art! So they bundle their incompatible temperaments before an official and are made one. At least they are legally hitched. She plays the piano. He paints. A wonderful vista, hazy with dreams, spreads before them. She will teach a few pupils, keep up her practice, and save enough to study some day with a pupil of a pupil of Leschetizky. He will manfully paint, yes, a few portraits, though landscape is his ambition. But it is hard to resist the bribes of our dear common life. They try, they fail.

A year passes. What a difference! Gone are the dreams. There are many spiders on the ceiling now. To pay for the food they eat, to own the roof over their heads, are their ultimate desires. She looks paler. He may or may not drink; it doesn’t much matter. There are no portraits painted; an artist must be doubled by a society man to capture commissions, to enjoy the velvet vulgarities of the new-rich. And artists demand too much of their wives. She must be a social success; also a combination of cook and concubine. Women are versatile. Women are born actresses. It was a woman, not a man, who discovered the art of leading a double life on ten dollars a week. But on thrice that amount they can’t run a household, watch the baby—oh, wretched intruder!—play like Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and look like an houri. To be a steam-heated American beauty, your father must be a billionaire.

The artist-woman is a finely attuned fiddle. You may mend a fiddle, but not a bell, says Ibsen. True, but if you smash your fiddle the music is mute. And every day of fault-finding snaps a string, or reduces its tautness. How long does beauty endure? Begin misunderstandings. Pity, the most subtly cruel of the Seven Deadly Virtues, stalks the studio. Secretly She pities him. Secretly He pities her. Pity breeds hatred. Difference develops discontent. At breakfast, the most trying time of the twenty-four hours—oh, the temperamental breakfasts when we were young and delightfully miserable!—even when you haven’t anything to eat—at breakfast, He pities her flushed face as She runs in from the kitchen with eggs and coffee. No longer is She a sylph in his eyes. The fifty dollars a week seem shrunken, not enough for one to live upon, much less two or three. She pities him because He is flushed from his night’s outing. His appetite, like his temper, is capricious. In her eyes He is the ordinary male brute (feed the brute!). Then He becomes imprudent and flings Schopenhauer at her head. That old humbug of a misogynist, who was always elbow-deep in woman scrapes! But She has no time to retort with Ibsen and Shaw for his swift discomfiture. The milkman is dunning her, and as baby must have pure milk She smiles at her foolish young man and teases him for the money. He looks blankly at her as He dives into empty pockets. This sort of thing may last for years. In reckless despair He may throw his lamp at the moon, She her bonnet over the windmill. Female suffrage will make such conditions impossible in the future by forbidding men the ballot. Like a sensible shoemaker let him stick to his last, or, to shift the image, let him grind the handle of the domestic barrel-organ while She collects the coppers.

It is when the lean years are upon the philandering artist, the years of thin thoughts and bleak regrets, that he may miss the loving wives of his past. Then will he cry in the stillness of his heart: O Time! Eternal shearer of souls, spare me thy slow clippings. Shear me in haste, shear me closely! You see, he remains the literary artist, and in the face of death he wears his shop mask. His artistic affinity, encountered late in their earthly pilgrimage, congratulates herself that her latter lonesome years won’t be burdened by the ills and whims and senile vanity of an old man. She may be a spinster and boast the artistic temperament. Or she may escape that fate by marrying a sensible business or professional man, who pays the freight and admires her pasty painting, her facile, empty music-making, her unplayed plays, unread verse and novels—that are privately printed. Thus doth Nature hit the happy mean. He who could hold hands with a pretty girl in eleven languages consoles himself with his corroded memories. After all, has he not been a success, has he not eluded entangling matrimonial alliances? Ah, the artistic temperament!

During a certain London silly season some enterprising imbecile posed this query: Can a woman on the boards remain virtuous? This absurd question set Great Britain buzzing. His Grace the Archbishop answered, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry rushed into type to record their precious opinions. The theatrical profession rose as a single woman. Mrs. Kendal and Mary Anderson were held up as shining patterns, which they are. But there were many sceptics. George Moore’s Mummer Worship was hurled at the camp of the optimists. Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, and Duse were adduced by the pessimists. Finally it occurred to the one intelligent person in all London to interview George Bernard Shaw.

“Mr. Shaw, do you think a woman can be virtuous in the theatre?”

“Why should she be?” asked St. George, and then and there the moral symposium went up in a burst of uncontrolled laughter. Mr. Shaw is like the little candid girl in the crowd; for him the truth is always naked. So is the artistic temperament.

VII
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU

Octave Mirbeau was a prodigious penman. When Remy de Gourmont called Paul Adam “a magnificent spectacle” he might have said with equal propriety the same of Mirbeau. A spectacle and a stirring one it is to watch the workings of a powerful, tumultuous brain such as Mirbeau’s. He was a tempestuous force. His energy electric. He could have repeated the exclamation of Anacharsis Clootz: “I belong to the party of indignation!” His whole life Mirbeau was in a ferment of indignation over the injustice of life, of literature, of art. His friends say that he was not a revolutionist born; nevertheless, he ever seemed in a pugnacious mood, whether attacking society, the Government, the Institutes, the theatre, the army or religion. There is no doubt that certain temperaments are uneasy if not in opposition to existing institutions, and while his sincerity was indisputable—an imperious sincerity, a sincerity that was perilously nigh an obsession—Mirbeau seemed possessed by the mania of contradiction. After his affiliations with Jules Vallès and the anarchistic group he was nicknamed “Mirabeau,” and, indeed, there was in him much of the fiery and disputatious, though he never in oratory recalled the mighty revolutionist. Nevertheless, he was a prodigious penman.

He was born in Normandy, 1850 (Ernest Gaubert says 1848), the country of those two giants, Gustave Flaubert and Barbey d’Aurevilly. He died early in 1917. His Odyssey, apart from his writings, was not an exciting one. Well born and well educated, he took a violent dislike to his clerical instructors, and as may be noted in Sébastien Roch (1890), he suffered from the result of a shock to his sensibilities because of an outrageous occurrence in the course of his school years. He early went to Paris, like many another ambitious young man, and began as an art-critic, but his first article on Monet, Manet, and Cézanne was also his last in the journal l’Ordre; it created so much scandal by its attack on those mud-gods of art, Meissonier, Cabanel, Lefebvre and Bouguereau, that he was drafted into the dramatic department. There he did not last long. After a violent diatribe against the House of Molière he found himself with several duels on his hands and enjoyed the distinction of a personal reply from Coquelin. He wrote for a little review Les Grimaces, and in 1891 defended Jean Grave’s La Société Mourante and composed a preface for that literary firebrand. He had dipped into the equivocal swamp of politics and had been a sous-préfet (at St. Girons, 1877), but the experience did not lend enchantment to his patriotism. He saw the inner machinery of a democracy greasy with corruption and it served him as material for his political polemics.

His first decade in Paris he wrote for such publications as Chroniques Parisiennes, La France, Gaulois, and Figaro. The entire gamut of criticism was achieved by him. He was fearless. His pen was vitriolic and also a sledge-hammer. Like old Dr. Johnson, if his weapon missed fire he brained his adversary with its butt-end. A formidable antagonist, yet the obverse of his medal shows us a poet of abnormal sensibilities, a leather of all injustice, a Quixote tilting at genuine giants, not missing windmills; also a man of great literary endowment and achievement. His critics speak of a period of discouragement during which he smoked opium, though without ill consequences. His was not a passive temperament to endure inaction. Like others, he had perversely imitated Baudelaire and De Quincey, but soon gave up the attempt. A nature trembling on the verge of lytic pantheism and truculent satire, Mirbeau had a hard row to hoe, and it is gratifying to learn that as he conquered in his art so he conquered himself. He waged war against Octave Mirbeau to the last. And no wonder. He has written stories that would bring a crimson blush to the brow of Satan.

Turning the pages of the principal Paris reviews to which he copiously contributed we find him calling the financial press blackmailers; the law reporters “vermine judiciaire”; French journalism decidedly decadent: “The press kills literature, art, patriotism; it aggrandizes the shop and develops the shopkeeping spirit. It exalts the mediocre painters, sculptors, writers. Its criticism is venal.” As for the theatre—from the frying-pan into the fire! The theatre is the prey of mediocrity, wherein Le Maître de Forges is pronounced a masterpiece!

The comedians (“les tripots revenus; cabotinisme”) of La Comédie Française come in for their share. Emile Zola, naturally enough, has his allegiance, but he dealt hard raps on the skulls of his followers, the Zolaettes, who hung on the fringe of the novelist’s dressing-gown. He admired Barbey d’Aurevilly and Elémir Bourges, as well he might; he attacked Daudet, Paul Bourget, Ohnet, Legouvé, Feuillet, Sarcey—dear old Uncle Sarcey, how Huysmans and Mirbeau did pound him!—and, last and worst, the art-critic of the Figaro, Albert Wolff. But he deserved the flaying.

In La Presse Mirbeau saluted the genius of Rodin, Maupassant, and praised Paul Hervieu. He adored Victor Hugo, not only as supreme poet but as humanitarian—the very quality that to-day so many find monotonous in his lyrics. But there was more than a strain of humanitarianism in Mirbeau. He was truly a Brother to Man, but he never exploited it as do sentimental socialists. It was the spectacle of poverty, of the cruelty of man to man, of the cruelty to animals—he wrote a novel about a dog—that set the blood boiling in his veins and forced him to utter terrible, regrettable phrases. His friends grieved, yet the spectacle was not unlike a volcano in action. That all this was prejudicial to the serenity of his art is not to be doubted. Mirbeau cared little. Let art perish if he accomplished a reform! Yet he has written some almost perfect pages, and in the presence of nature his angry soul was soothed, ennobled. A poet was slain in him before his vision became voice. He loved the figure of Christ and he drifted into the mystic and lovable theories of Kropotkine, Elisée Reclus, and Tolstoy. Their influence is manifested in his Lettres de ma Chaumière (1886). These tales overflow with sympathy and indignation. The French peasant as he is, neither idealized by Millet nor caricatured by Zola, is painted here with an intimate brush—it is painted miasma, one is tempted to add. That he was an unyielding Dreyfusard is a matter of history.

It may be said in passing that Mirbeau had not the stuff in him to make a sound or satisfactory critic of the Fine Arts. He was too one-sided in his Salons, his enthusiasms were often ill-placed, and he resembled Zola in his vocabulary of abuse if any one disagreed with him. M. Durand-Ruel, where he was liked for his sterling qualities, has a pamphlet of Mirbeau’s on the Impressionists. Published here it would have resulted either in a libel suit or a prosecution for obscenity. His definition of a certain art-critic is unprintable. When he hated he stopped short of nothing. A true Celt. But how he could tune down the peg of the false heroic to make sound the mean music of mean souls! There are a dozen men in Paris who were riddled by his shot and shell. He did not spare the Government and told some wholesome truths about the Tonkin affair. But he was not all fire and fury. He had intellectual charity, and the artist in him often prevailed. He was destructive, and he could be constructive. He could be charming and tender, too, and his style ranged from thunder-words to supple-sweet magic.

The constructive in him was artistic, but when the propagandist reins were between his teeth his judgments were muddied by his turbulence. And how clearly he could judge was proved by his clairvoyant article in Le Figaro on an unknown Belgian, by name Maurice Maeterlinck (1890). Mirbeau literally discovered Maeterlinck; and while we now smile over the title of “Belgian Shakespeare,” there is no denying the flair of the Parisian critic. Certainly he made a better guess than the amusing Max Nordau, who once described the author of The Treasures of the Humble as “a pitiable mental cripple.” In 1888 L’Abbé Jules appeared. It was Mirbeau’s first novel. For the chief character he went to his uncle, a priest of rather singular traits. The book became a burning scandal.

Le Calvaire (1887) confirmed the reputation of the young writer. He certainly had a predilection “pour la poésie de la pourriture,” as one critic puts it. But Calvary is a masterpiece and his least offensive fiction. The story of the little soldier who shoots an Uhlan in the war of 1870 and then tries to revive the dead man, finally kissing him on the forehead as a testimony of his fraternal feeling, is touching. Sébastien Roch, the third novel, is full of verity and power only marred by a page, one of the most hideous in French fiction (irrespective of avowedly crapulous stories). But Mirbeau has testified to its truth elsewhere. The hero becomes a victim to aboulia, or the malady of doubt. Happiness is not for him and he dies in the Franco-Prussian conflict. Le Jardin des Supplices (1899) set Paris cynically shivering with a new sensation. This garden of tortures is the most damnably cruel book in contemporary fiction. It was conceived by a Torquemada of sadism. Yet Mirbeau disclaimed any notion of writing for mere notoriety. These sombre pages of blood and obscenity were printed to show the cruelty and injustice of all Governments. The Chinese were selected as masters of the most exquisite tortures. A vile nightmare is the result. It demands strong nerves to read it once through; a rereading would seem incredible. Swift is in comparison an ironical comedian.

Les Mémoires d’une Femme de Chambre (1901) is backstairs gossip, though the purpose is not missing; again satire of the better classes, so-called. Les vingt-et-un jours d’un Neurasthénique (1902) need not detain us, nor such one-act pieces as Vieux Ménage (1901), Amanto (1901), Scrupules (1902), or Le Foyer, with Natanson (1908). He also wrote a preface to Margaret Andoux’s story, Marie Claire. The first important dramatic work of Mirbeau was Les Mauvais Bergers, in five acts, produced at the Théâtre de la Renaissance (December 14, 1897). We can still evoke the image of Sarah Bernhardt in the last act, an act charged with pity and irony. The play, because of its political and social currents, created a dolorous and profound impression. The work has in it something of both The Conquest of Bread and The Weavers. In Les Affaires sont les Affaires, produced at the Théâtre Français (April 20, 1903), Mirbeau is at his satirical best. The play has been shown here, but in a colorless, unconvincing style. In De Feraudy’s hands the character of Isidore Lechat, both a type and an individual—one of our modern captains of industry (in the old days, a chevalier of industry?)—was perfectly exhibited. After witnessing in June of the same year a performance of this bitterly satirical comedy I met the author, who appeared as mild-mannered a pirate as ever cut a poet or scuttled a ship of State.

Paul Hervieu told me at the time that the bark of this old growling mastiff was worse than his bite; but his victims did not believe this. He was, in his dynamic prime, the best-hated publicist in all Paris—and that is saying a lot, for there were also Barbey d’Aurevilly, Ernst Hello, Louis Veuillot, J. K. Huysmans and several other virtuosi in the noble art of making foes. Decidedly, Mirbeau was not a lagger behind those pamphleteers and dealers in corrosive verbal values.

That he could be human was shown in his vertiginous automobile story La 628-E8, where, after retelling what Victor Hugo had hinted at in his Choses vues, Mirbeau made an apology to the daughter—or was it granddaughter?—of Mme. Hanska Balzac for a certain chapter which relates the Russian lady’s doings on the heels of her great husband’s death. Mirbeau was not legally compelled to withdraw this chapter, as it was a thrice-told tale in Paris, but a friend explained to him the lady’s distress and he promptly made the only amend he could. This man had also a prodigious heart.

VIII
ANARCHS AND ECSTASY

Lest we forget. While competition is the life of cocottes, the rival opera companies that fill the air of Gotham with their lyric cries offer to the truly musical only the choice between two despairs; with our accustomed happy indecision we prefer Leopold Godowsky to Puccini. We frankly confess our love of symphonic music, and would rather listen to a Beethoven string quartet played by the Flonzaleys than all the operas ever written; the majority of them depicting soul-states in a sanatorium. However, there is the charm of aversion, and that piques the curious. Music in opera is prodigal, never generous. It is the too-much that appalls. It is as reticent as a female politician and a hundredfold more attractive. Flying fish, these singing-actors. They needs must swim and fly. Winged fish, birds with fins. It is an ambiguous art, the operatic, and it is devised to tickle the ears, dazzle the eyes, of the unmusical and myopic. It breeds personal gossip, never thought. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of Mary Garden’s celebrated eyebrows! (This modern instance, for Mary always goes first, as Henry Arthur of the Jones family would say, does not necessitate Shakespearean quotation marks.)

From Bach to Scriabin, have not all composers been anarchs? At first blush the plodding John Sebastian Bach of the Ill-Tempered Clavichord seems a dubious figure with which to drape the red flag of revolt. He grew a forest of children. He taught early and late. He played the organ in church of Sundays. Nevertheless, his music proves him a revolutionist. And, like any good social democrat, he quarrelled with his surroundings. He even went out for a drink during a prosy sermon—all sermons are necessarily prosy, else they wouldn’t be sermons—and was almost discharged by his superiors for returning late; a perpetual warning to thirsty organists. If Lombroso had been cognizant of this suspicious fact he would have built a terrific structure of degeneration theories with all sorts of inferential subcellars. Stranger still, the music of Bach remains as revolutionary as the hour it was written. No latter-day composer has gone so far as some of his fantasies. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on aristocratic patronage to play the rôles of anarchs; yet tales are extant of their refusal to lick the boots of the mighty or curve the spine of the suppliant. Handel! A fighter, a revolutionist born, a hater of tyrants. And the most virile among musicians except the peasant Beethoven—since the recent war become a Belgian composer! His contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies was like a blow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was a henpecked Croatian, and strange stories are related of this merry little blade, truly a chamber-music husband. Mendelssohn was Bach watered down for general consumption. Schubert and Schumann were anarchs, but the supreme anarch of art was Beethoven, who translated into daily practice the radicalism of his music.

Because of its opportunities for the expansion of the soul, music has ever attracted the strong free sons of the earth. It is, par excellence, the art masculine. The profoundest truths, the most blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police none the wiser. Think of Chopin and Tchaikovsky and the arrant doctrines they preached. It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that has made of music a playground for brave hearts. In his Siegfried and under the long nose of royalty Richard Wagner preached anarchy, put into tone, words, gestures, attitudes, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas, pronouncements so terrible that the Old Man of the Mountain, as Bernard Shaw calls Government, if it but knew, would forbid his music, not because it was penned by a German, but because it is inimical to tyranny, therefore the most democratic music ever composed.

Chopin presents us with a psychic “equivalent of war,” as William James has put it, in portions of his music, notably the polonaises; while Richard Strauss has buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon smothered in roses, or Bakounine and his nihilistic prose. Liszt, midway in his mortal life, was bitten by the socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, and, though a silken courtier, he was an innovator in his music. Brahms was a free-thinker and a democrat, but closely hugged the classic line and seldom strayed from the boundaries of his Romantic park. Berlioz, Hector of the Flaming Locks, was, his life long, a fiery individualist. He would have made a picturesque figure waving a blood-red flag on the barricades. His fantastic symphony is charged with the tonal commandments of anarchy. Richard Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising of 1849, yet he was, with Roeckel and Bakounine, one of its inspirers. Luckily for us he ran away, else Tristan might have remained in the womb of eternal silence. Wagner may be called the Joseph Proudhon among composers; his music is anarchy incarnate, passionately deliberate, like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of Misery (by the way, a subtitle). His very scheme of harmonization is the symbol of a soul insurgent in the music of Richard Strauss. And what shall we say to the exquisite anarchy of Debussy and Ravel? To the cerebral insurrection of Schoenberg? To the devastating sirocco blasts of Scriabin, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff? The Neo-Scythians, who, like their savage forebears, throw across their saddle-bow the helpless diatonic and chromatic scales and bear away their prisoners to their ultimate goal; the unknown land of the sinister duodecuple scale! Ah! we did not heed years ago the wise words of our critical Nestor, H. E. Krehbiel, when he said, “’Ware the Muscovite!” (He denies having used this precise phrase. Too late. We have pinned it to paper and it will go marching down the corridor of destiny wearing his label.) Ecce Cossakus! Bad Latin, but reality. The Tartars are coming. Anarchs all.

And ecstasy! It is not an eminently modern quality in the Seven Arts. Sculpture did for a time resist the universal disintegration, this imbroglio of all the arts. Before Rodin no sculptor had so greatly dared to break the line, had dared to shiver the syntax of stone. Sculpture is a static, not a dynamic, art; therefore, let us observe the rules, preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery! What Mallarmé attempted in poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not represent, but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion; as in music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé, arouse “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” he summons from the vasty deep the spirits of beauty, love, hate, pain, joy, sin, ecstasy, above all, ecstasy. The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth—who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson, and Browning only in occasional exaltation. Like the “cold devils” of Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt too; but Wagner, ill-tempered like all martyrs, was the master adept of his century. Tchaikovsky closely follows him, and in the tiny piano pieces of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown us a variation on the theme: voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul tortured by the very ecstasy of ecstasy. Like Yeats, he is “Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door.” William Blake and his figures rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy. A sadistic strain in all this.

From a photograph copyrighted by Matzene

MARY GARDEN AS SALOME

Scriabin is of this tormented choir; as Arthur B. Davies, our own mystic, primitive painter. And Charles Martin Loeffler. It may be the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the parts against the whole. That ecstasy may be aroused by pictures of love and death, as in the cases of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss, should not, therefore, be adjudged morbid. In the Far East they hypnotize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of art, as in heaven, there are many mansions. It was possibly a relic of his early admiration for the Baudelaire poems that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of love and death, though doubtless the temperament which seeks assuagement in such a comminglement—a temperament more often encountered in mediæval art than now—was natural to Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing madly and mournfully over a corpse, and, throwing herself upon the dead Tristan, she dissolves into the ecstasies of sweet, cruel love; in Salome, Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner; there is the head of a dead man—though on a charger—and there follows a poignant ecstasy not to be found in all music. Both men play with similar counters: love and death, and death and love. In Pisa may be seen (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna’s fresco, The Triumph of Death. It has been set to grotesque music by Liszt in his Dance of Death. Let us not forget the great Italian, Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose magnificent prose, from The Triumph of Death to Forsé Che Si, Forsé Che No, is a pæan to the tutelar gods of humanity, love and death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all flesh are intermingled in Rodin’s astounding fugue, The Gate of Hell. First things and Last things, love and life, bitterness and death, have ever ruled the arts; and all great art is anarchic, cosmos and chaos cunningly proportioned.

But between the sublime and the silly there is only a hair’s breadth. If not guided by tact and vision, the ecstatic in art and literature may degenerate into the erotic, and from the erotic to the tommyrotic is only a step. All this tumultuous imagery, this rhapsody Hunekeresque, is prompted by a photograph of Mary Garden, whose enigmatic eyes collide with my gaze across the Time and Space of my writing-desk. Your memory is wooed by the golden trumpets of Byzance, and when Mary speaks she wears the sacred Zaïmph of Salammbo. Voltaire, in Candide, was wise when he advised us: “Il faut cultiver notre Jardin.”

IX
PAINTED MUSIC

Painted music. The common identity of the Seven Arts was a master theory of Richard Wagner and a theory he endeavored his life long to put into practice. Walter Pater, in his essay on The School of Giorgione, has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative, John Addington Symonds has said some pertinent things on the subject. Camille Mauclair, in Idées Vivantes, seriously proposed a scheme for the fusion of the arts. The fusion would be cerebral, as the actual mingling of sculpture, architecture, music, drama, acting, painting, and dancing could never evoke the sensation of unity. Not thus is synthesis to be attained. It must be the “idea” of the arts rather than their material blending. A pretty chimera! Yet one that has piqued the attention of artists for centuries. It was the half-crazy E. T. W. Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet, stage manager, and a dozen other professions, including those of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of fireworks that dazzled the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the later symbolists.

Persons who hear painting, see music, touch poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the psychical police as decadent, though such notions are as old as art and literature. In his L’Audition Colorée, Suarez de Mendoza has said that the sensation of color-hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colors, is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth. The colored vowels of Arthur Rimbaud, which should be taken as a poet’s crazy prank; the elaborate treatises by René Ghil, which are terribly earnest; the casual remarks that one hears, such as “scarlet is like a trumpet blast”—it was scarlet to the young Mozart; certain pages of Huysmans and Mallarmé, all furnish examples of the curious muddling of the five senses and the mixing of artistic genres. Naturally, this confusion has invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes seeks to transpose the technical terms of one art to another.

Whistler, with his Nocturnes, Color-Notes, Symphonies in Rose and Silver, his Color-Sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases that, in their new estate, took on fresher meanings, while remaining knee-deep in the swamp of the nebulous. Modern composers have retaliated. Musical Impressionism is enjoying its vogue and the New Poetry is desperately pictorial. Soul-landscapes and etched sonnets are titles not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much! There was a time when to say “she had a sweet voice” aroused a smile. What has sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this mélange of terminologies, yet, occasionally, it strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling that the arts have a common matrix, that, emotionally, they are akin. “Her slow smile” in fiction has had marked success, but when I wrote of the “slow Holland landscape,” the phrase was suspiciously regarded. (I probably found it in Verlaine or Rodin.) The bravest critic of the arts was Huysmans, who pitched pell-mell into the hell-broth of his critiques any image that assaulted his fecund brain. He forces us to see his picture; for he was primarily concerned with the eye, not the ear. Flaubert represents in its highest estate a fusion of sound and sense and seeing; he was both an auditive and a visualist. His prose sings, while its imagery sharply impinges upon the optic nerve. Nor are taste and smell neglected—recall the very flavor of arsenic that killed Emma Bovary or the scents of the woodland where that adorable girl lingered with her lover. Joined to those evocations of the five senses there is a classic balance of sentence, phrase, paragraph, page; the syntactic architecture is magnificent, though not excelling the eloquent Bossuet or the pictorial Châteaubriand as to complex, harmonious structure. These three great French writers had polyphonic minds, and their books and the orations of the superb Bossuet englobe a world of ideas and sensations, music and painting.

And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a “comprehensive,” as those with the sixth, or synthetic, sense have been named by Lombroso-Levi? Beginning as a goldsmith’s apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), Botticelli as a painter became the most original in all Italy. His canvases possess powers of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and of the Brothers Poliajuolo, and his vision must have been something more than paint and pattern. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative—rather let us say fanciful, since Coleridge set forth the categories—whose secrets are not to be easily deciphered, and are something more than those portrayed on the flat surfaces of his pictures. Like most artists of his period he painted the usual number of Madonnas; nevertheless, he did not convince his world, or succeeding generations, that his piety was orthodox. During his lifetime suspected of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, is now definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and yet a mystic. Does not the perverse clash in such a temperament produce exotic dissonances?

All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli paced its narrow streets and lived its splendid colored life. His sensitive nature absorbed, as does a sponge water, the impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The secrets lurking in the “new learning”—doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for heaven nor hell, not on the side of Lucifer, nor yet with the starry hosts—were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Città di Vita, in the heresies of the Albigenses, and it may well go back to Origen. Those who could read his paintings—and there were clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence—might make of them what they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy. Matteo Palmieri is reported to have dragged Botticelli into dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of the young. A nature like Botticelli’s, which frankly surrendered to new ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, was swept, no doubt, away in the eddying cross currents of Florentine intellectual movements. Mere instinct never moved him from his moral anchorage, for he was a sexless sort of man. Always the vision. He did not palter with the voluptuous frivolities of his fellow artists, yet his canvases are feverishly disquieting. The sting of the flesh is remote. Love is transfigured, though not spiritually, and not served to us as a barren parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the thin partition between the sexes; a consuming emotion, not quite of this world nor of the next. However, the rebellion that stirred in the bosom of Botticelli never took on concrete aspects. His religious subjects are Hellenized, not after the sterner, more inflexible method of Mantegna, but resembling those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante. His illustrations show us a different Dante, one who might not have altogether pleased that gloomy exile. The transpositions of the Divine Comedy by William Blake seem to sound the depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his “baby Centaurs” and the wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the pair.

His life, veiled toward the last, was not happy, although he was recognized as a great painter. Watteau concealed a cankering secret; so Botticelli. Melancholy is the base of the Florentine’s work. As a young man he created in joy and freedom; but the wings of Dürer’s Bat were outstretched over his brooding head. Melencolia! He could ask if there is anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness. There is more poignant music in his Primavera, in the weary, indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas—Pater calls them “peevish”—in his Venus at the Uffizi, than in the paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite art, which are missing in the lacerated and realistic holy folk of the Flemish Primitives. Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli; but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione; “Big George of Castelfranco.” An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of sense and spirit. Music? Yes, there is the “colored-hearing” of Mendoza. The canvases of Botticelli sound the opalescent overtones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin, whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor from invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance we but overhear. Garlanded in blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth. The light filters through the thick trees, its rifts as rigid as a candle. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in mid-air. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene? What the fable? Music plucked down from vibrating skies, music made visible. A mere masque, laden with the prim, sweet allegories of the day, it is not. That blunt soul, Vasari, saw at best its surfaces. The poet Politian got closer to the core. Centuries later our perceptions sharpened by the stations traversed of sorrow and experience, lend to this immortal canvas a more sympathetic, less literal interpretation.

There is music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi. Still stranger music. Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of the goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese group blowing tiny gem-like buds with their puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping all are vernal breezes, the wind that weeps in little corners, unseen, yet sensed, on every inch of the picture—what are these mundane things but the music of an art, original at its birth, and since never reborn? The larger, simpler, curved rhythms of the greater men, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, are not in Botticelli. Nevertheless, his voice is irresistible.

Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he is no less ethereal; ethereal and also realistic. We can trace his artistic ancestry; but what he became no man could have predicted. Technically, as one critic has written, “he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the shoulder, the elegance of the leg, the little shadow that marks the springing of the neck, and, above all, the carving of the hand; but even more, he understood “le prestige insolent des grands yeux”.”

Pater found his color cold and cadaverous, “and yet the more you come to understand what imaginative coloring really is, that all color is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you like this peculiar quality of color.” Bernard Berenson goes further. To him the entire canvas, Venus Rising from the Sea, presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and movement.... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating motion is always there. And writing of the Pallas in the Pitti galleries, he most eloquently declares: “As to the hair—imagine shapes having the supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to its own desire!” And, after speaking of Botticelli’s stimulating line, he continues: “Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement-values and you will have something that holds the same relation to representation that music holds to speech—and this art exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but in Europe never!... He is the greatest master of lineal design that Europe ever had.”

Again, painted music; not the sounding symbolism of the emotions, but the abstract music of design. Nevertheless, the appeal of Botticelli is auditive. Other painters have spun more intricate, more beautiful webs; have made more sensuous color-music; but the subtle sarabands of Botticelli they have not composed. Here is a problem for the psychiatrist. In paint, manifestations of this order could be set down to mental lesion; that is how Maurice Spronck classifies the sensation. He studied it in the writings of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The giant of Croisset told the Goncourts that to him Salammbo was purple and L’Education Sentimentale grey, Carthage and Paris. A characteristic fancy. But why is it that scientific gentlemen, who predicate genius as eye-strain, do not reprove poets for their sensibility to the sound of words, to the shape and cadence of the phrase? It would appear that only prose-men are the culpable ones if they overhear the harping of invisible harps from Ibsen’s Steeplejacks, or describe the color of the thoughts of Zarathustra. In reality, not one but thousands of people listen in the chill galleries of Florence to the sweet, nervous music of Botticelli. This testimony of the years is for the dissenters to explain. “Fantastico, Stravagante,” as Vasari nicknamed Botticelli, has literally created an audience which learned to use its eyes as he did, fantastically and extravagantly.

He passed through the three stages dear to arbitrary criticism. Serene in his youthful years; troubled, voluptuous, and visionary during the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a convert to Savonarola at the end. He traversed a great crisis not untouched. Certain political assassinations and the Pazzi conspiracy hurt him to the quick. He noted the turbulence of Rome and Florence, saw behind the gayly tinted arras of the Renaissance the sinister figures of supermen and criminals. He never married. When Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a wife he responded: “The other night I dreamed I was married. I awoke in such horror and chagrin that I could not fall asleep again. I arose and wandered about Florence like one possessed.” Evidently not intended by nature to be husband or father. Like Watteau, like Baudelaire, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the thither side of the facile joys of life, Botticelli was not tempted by the usual baits of happiness. His great Calumnia, in the Uffizi, might be construed as an image of the soul of Botticelli. Truth, naked and scorned—we see again the matchless silhouette of his Venus—misunderstood and calumniated, stands in the hall of a vast palace. She points to the heavens. She is a living interrogation-mark. Pilate’s question? Botticelli was adored. But understood? An enigmatic malady ravaged his innermost being. He died poor, solitary, did this composer of luminous chants and pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams, and of angels who long for gods other than those of Good and Evil. You think of the mystic Joachim of Flora and his Third Kingdom; the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit which is to follow the Kingdom of the Father and the Kingdom of the Son; the same Joachim who declared that the true ascetic counts nothing of his own, save only his harp. “Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.” And you also recall St. Anselm, who said that he would rather go to hell sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression.

A grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder at the portals of Paradise, Botticelli had not the courage either to enter or withdraw. He experienced visions that rapt him into the ninth heaven, but when he reported them in the language of his design his harassed, divided spirit chilled the ardors of his art. In sooth, a spiritual dichotomy. And thus it is that the multitude does not worship at his shrine as at the shrine of Raphael. Do they unconsciously note the adumbration of a paganism long dead, but revived for a brief Botticellian hour? Venus or Madonna! Adonais or Christ! Under which god? The artist never frankly tells us. Legends are revived of fauns turned monks, of the gods in exile and at servile labor in a world that has forgotten them, but with a sublimated ecstasy not Heine’s. When we stand before Botticelli and hear the pallid, muted music of his canvases we are certain that the last word concerning him shall not be uttered until his last line has vanished; even then his archaic harmonies may reverberate in the ears of mankind. But always music painted.

X
POE AND HIS POLISH CONTEMPORARY

In the City of Boston, January 19, 1809, a son was born to David and Elizabeth Poe. On March 1, 1809, in the village of Zelazowa-Wola, twenty-eight English miles from Warsaw, in Poland, a son was born to Nicholas and Justina Chopin (Chopena or Szop). The American is known to the world as Edgar Allan Poe, the poet; the Pole as Frédéric François Chopin, the composer. On October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died, poor and neglected, in Washington Hospital at Baltimore, and on October 17, 1849, Frédéric Chopin expired at Paris surrounded by loving friends, among whom were titled ladies. Turgenev has said there were at least one hundred princesses and countesses in whose arms the most wonderful among modern composers yielded up his soul. Poe and Chopin were contemporaries, and, curious coincidence, two supremely melancholy artists of the Beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.

My most enduring artistic passions are for the music of Chopin and the prose of Flaubert. In company with the cool, clear magic of a Jan Vermeer canvas, that of the Pole and Frenchman grazes perfection. But as a lad Chopin quite flooded my emotional horizon. I had conceived a fantastic comparison between Poe and Chopin, and I confess I was slightly piqued when Ignace Jan Paderewski, not then Premier of Poland, assured me that Chopin was born in the year 1810, and not the year earlier. The date chiselled on Chopin’s Paris tomb in Père Lachaise—a sad tribute to the mediocre art of Clésinger, who married Solange Sand—is, after all, the correct one, and this new date, which is also the old, is inscribed on the Chopin Memorial at Warsaw, Poland. I shall not attempt to dispute the claim; even the most painstaking of Chopin biographers, Prof. Frederick Niecks, admits his error. The latest biography, said to be definitive, by the Polish musicograph, Ferdinand Hoesick, I have not seen; the war impeded the translation. Yet I am fain to believe that too many parish registers were in existence, and perhaps the next one that is unearthed may give as new dates either 1808 or 1811. I prefer 1809, while apologizing for my obstinacy. Unhappily for future investigators, Russian Cossacks in 1915 ravaged with torch and sword the birthplace, not only destroying the Chopin monument, but burning his house and the parish church. These once highly esteemed vandals, pogrom heroes, and butchers of thousands of helpless Jewish women, children, and old men, only repeated at Zelazowa-Wola the actions of their forebears at Warsaw during the sanguinary uprising of 1831. The correspondence of Chopin, treasured by his sister, Louise Jedrzejewicza, and the piano of his youth were completely destroyed. (Louise died in 1855, and the other sister, Isabella Barcinska, in 1881.)

The love of Poe began early with me. My father had been a friend of the poet’s in Philadelphia, and a member of the Poe circle during the forties of the last century; “roaring forties”, indeed. That prime old comedian, Billy Burton, the ideal Falstaff of his day; John Sartain, the engraver, and father of William Sartain, the painter; Judge Conrad, who could move his listeners to tears when he recited the Lord’s Prayer; the elder Booth, a noble tragedian much given to drink; Graham, the publisher, and several others whose names have escaped my memory, composed this interesting group. In his memoirs John Sartain has written of Poe and of a certain wild midnight walk in Fairmount Park. I remember the elder Sartain as an infrequent visitor at our house, and I also remember how I hung on his words when he spoke of Poe. My father told me that Poe would become a raving maniac after a thimbleful of brandy, so sensitive was his cerebral mechanism. But other authorities contradict this theory. Poe had been often seen to toss off a tumblerful of cognac neat. Last year at Atlantic City I met Mr. Hutzler, a well-known merchant of Baltimore, a spry young octogenarian and a seasoned raconteur. He told me, and in a vivid manner, of seeing Edgar Poe and Junius Brutus Booth hanging on to the same lamp-post, both helplessly drunk at midday. This happened about 1845, as the boys, Mr. Hutzler among the rest, trooped out to dinner from the public school on Holliday Street. Mr. Hutzler’s memory has a mirror-like clearness, and he described the occurrence as if it had happened yesterday. Like irreverent school-boys, they surrounded the greatest living Shakespearean actor and the greatest American poet and mocked at them.

We lived on North Seventh Street, and twice a day, on my trip to and from school, I passed the house where Poe had lived during his sojourn in Philadelphia, from 1838 to 1844. That house I should not have been able to locate to-day if my friend, Christopher Morley (charming writer, with a name that recalls spacious Elizabethan times: Kit Morley!), hadn’t described it. This house, in which Poe wrote The Raven and The Gold Bug, is at the northwest corner of Seventh and Brandywine Streets. Another critic friend, Albert Mordell, assures me that the old pear-tree in the back yard still bears fruit for the present resident, Mrs. Owens. The house is the rear building of another numbered 530 North Seventh Street. Mr. Mordell sent me a photograph which shows a typical Philadelphia red brick structure with white shutters and marble steps. I have heard of many spots where Poe wrote The Raven, Fordham among the rest, but as boys we told ourselves when we stared at the old building: “Poe wrote his Raven and Gold Bug there!” It is something to remember in these piping times of hypocrisy and universal hatred of art, music, and literature.

It would be a strained parallel to compare Poe with Chopin at all points; nevertheless, chronological coincidences are not the only comparisons that might be instituted without exaggeration. True, the roots of Chopin’s culture were more cosmopolitan, more richly nurtured than Poe’s; the poet, like an air-plant, found his spiritual sustenance from sources unknown to the America of his day. Of Poe’s intellectual ancestry, however, we may form some conception, though his learning was not profound, despite his copious quotations from half-forgotten and recondite authors, Glanvil, for example. Nevertheless, the matchless lines, “Helen, thy beauty is to me like those Nicéan barks of yore,” ... were struck off in the fire of a boyhood passion. Chopin had a careful training under the eye of his Polish teacher, Elsner; but who could have taught him how to compose his Opus 2, the Variations on Mozart’s La ci darem la mano? Both Poe and Chopin were full-fledged artists from the beginning, their individualities and limitations sharply defined. Perhaps the most exquisite music penned by Poe is this same Helen, while the first mazourka of Chopin stamps him as an original poet. In the later productions of these men there is more than a savor of morbidity. Consider the Fantaisie-Polonaise, Opus 61, with its most musical, most melancholy cadences; or the F minor Mazourka, composed during the last illness of Chopin; a sick brain betrays itself in the rhythmic insistence of the theme, a soul-weary Wherefore? In the haunting repetitions and harmonies of Ulalume there is a poetic analogue. This poem, in which sense swoons into sound, possesses a richness of color and rhythmic accent that betoken the mentality of a poet whose brain is perilously unhinged. If alcohol produced this condition, then might a grateful world erect altars to such a wondrous god of evocation. Prohibition has not thus far produced a Poe. But he wasn’t the creation of either alcohol or drugs, though they were contributory causes; they prodded his cortical cells into abnormal activity, made leap the neuronic filaments with surprising consequences. No, a profound cerebral lesion was the real reason why Poe resorted to brandy to soothe his exacerbated nerves, and not because he drank did he go to wrack and ruin. His “case” is like Baudelaire’s and E. T. W. Hoffmann’s; not to mention the names of James Clarence Mangan and Monticelli, one the singer of Dark Rosaleen, the other that master of gorgeous hues, fantasies of enchanted lands and crumbling linear designs.

Poe, then, like Chopin, did not die too soon. Neurotic natures, they lived their lives with the intensity which Walter Pater has declared is the true existence. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits.” Alas! that way madness lies for the majority of mankind, notwithstanding the æsthetic exhortation of Pater. Poe and Chopin fulfilled the Pater conditions during their brief sojourn on our parent planet. They ever burned with the flame of genius, and that flame devoured them. They were not citizens of moral repute. Nor did they accumulate “mortal pelf.” They failed to form habits, and while the psychic delicacy of Chopin proved a barrier against self-indulgence of the grosser sort, he contrived to outrage social and ethical canons even in tolerant Paris. The influence of George Sand, her ascendancy over his volition, worked evil and unhappiness. The delicate porcelain of his genius could not float down-stream in company with her brassy ware without ensuing disaster for the finer of the twain. Alcoholic neurosis did not trouble him, but he was tubercular, and that malady is more fatal than alcoholism. Poe was not precisely a drunkard; probably masked epilepsy accounts for his vagaries; such victims are periodical dipsomaniacs, “circulaires” is the term of the psychiatrists. His personality was winning, his speech electric, his eye alight with genius; but, then, the obverse of the medal! A sad, slouching creature, with a cynic’s sneer, a bitter tongue which lashed friend and foe alike, a gambler, a libertine—what has this unhappy poet not been called? Baudelaire asked whether the critical hyenas could not have been prevented from defacing the tomb of Poe. (He used Rabelaisian language in the original French.) Charles Baudelaire, a spiritual double of Poe, was another unhappy wraith of genius, and of the same choir of self-lacerated and damned souls.

Fancy Poe and Chopin in New York during the prosaic atmosphere of those days! If Chopin had not achieved artistic success at the Soirée of Prince Radziwill in Paris, 1831, he would probably have gone to America, where he might have met Poe. He had declared his intention to leave Paris for New York, and his passport was viséd “passing through.” Poe and Chopin conversing! The idea is rather disquieting. Stendhal, not hoodwinked by Châteaubriand, with his purple phrases and poetic visions of virgin forests and sweet Indian girls in an impossible Louisiana, declared that America was materialistic beyond hope of redemption. Talleyrand knew better. However, it was better for the artistic development of the Polish composer that he remained in the Old World. Think of Chopin giving piano lessons to the daughters of the New-Rich at the fashionable Battery, and Poe encountering him at some conversazione—they had conversaziones then—and propounding to him Heine-like questions: Are the roses at home still in their flame-hued pride? Do the trees sing as beautifully as ever in the moonlight? Are humming-birds and star-dust—Francesca Astra—still as rare as ambergris? At a glance Poe and Chopin would have sympathized. In sensibility the American was not inferior to the Pole. Poe would have felt the “drummed tears” in the playing of Chopin, and in turn Chopin would not have failed to divine the vibrations of Poe’s high-strung nature. Both men were mystics, were seers. What a meeting that would have been; yet inevitable misery might have come to the Pole in unsympathetic New York. A different tale if Poe had gone to Paris and enjoyed a meed of artistic success. Baudelaire, who was born in April, 1821, therefore a young chap in 1845, would have known him and, congenial souls, they would surely have gone to the devil quicker than apart. Baudelaire and Poe! There’s a marvellous combination for you of fantasy, moonlight, rotten nerves, hasheesh, and alcohol! The fine flower of the genius of Poe might have bloomed more fragrantly on French soil; perhaps with the added note of depravity not in his sexless creations, and so corroding a note in Les Fleurs du Mal. Who may dare say! But then we might not have had the sinister melancholia, so sweetly despairing, so despairingly sweet, that we enjoy in the real Poe.

The culture of Chopin was not of a finer stamp than Poe’s, nor was his range so wide. In their intellectual sympathies both were rather narrow, though intense to an emotional poignancy, and both were remarkable in mood-versatility. Born aristocrats, purple raiment became them well. Both were sadly deficient in planturous humor and the Attic salt that conserves the self-mockery of Heine. Irony they possessed to a superlative degree. Both created rhythmic beauty, evoked the charm of evanescence. A crepuscular art; the notations of twilit souls and the “October of the sensations.” Both were at their best in smaller artistic forms. When either one spreads his pinions for symphonic flight we think of Matthew Arnold’s interpretation of Shelley: “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Which phrase truly is of Mat’s own making, yet somehow misses the essential Shelley. Poe and Chopin supremely mastered their intellectual instruments. Artificers in precious cameos, they are of an artistic consanguinity because of their extraordinary absorption in the Beautiful. Poe wrote in English, but was he really as American as Hawthorne and Emerson were American? His verse and prose depict characters and landscapes that belong to No Man’s Land, in that mystic region east of the sun, west of the moon. The American scene was unsympathetic to him, and he refused to become even morally acclimated. His Eldorado is “over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow.” His creations are bodiless; shadow of shadows, the incarnation of Silence, set forth in spectral speech. Unlike any other native-born writer, he sounds better in a French garb; the Baudelaire translations improve his style, and Stéphane Mallarmé has accomplished an almost miraculous transposition of Ulalume. (The Raven—Le Corbeau—by the same master I do not care for as much, and with its refrain, “Jamais plus!” is not so musically sonorous as “Nevermore!”)

Henry Beyle-Stendhal wrote in his witty, malicious manner that “Romanticism is the art of presenting to the people literary works which in the actual state of their habitudes and beliefs are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure; Classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers.” Stendhal is half right. A Classic is sometimes a dead Romantic. But Poe and Chopin remain invincibly Romantic, yet are Classics. Chopin is more human than Poe, inasmuch as he is patriotic. His polonaises are “cannons buried in flowers,” his psychic bravery overflows in the Revolutionary Etude. He is Chopin. And he is also Poland. Like the national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, he struck many human chords, though some of his melodies could dwell in Poe’s “misty mid-region of Weir,” where Beauty boasts an icy reign. There is a disturbing dissonance in the Poe-Chopin case: Poe was a man without a country; Chopin had the priceless possession of Poland. On his heart was engraved “Poland.” The love of Frédéric Chopin for his native land dowered him with a profounder nature than the Lucifer of American poetry, Edgar Allan Poe. But what enigmatic, beautiful souls!

XI
GEORGE LUKS

Of course, I knew in a vague way where Edgecombe Road and Jumel Place spotted the map, for I am a seasoned Manhattan cockney. But, after all, I mixed up the Jumel Mansion and the house of George Luks, and so I asked that painter for some travel indications. He sent me a map that was clarity itself. All I had to do was to sit in the Broadway subway till I reached One Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street; then take the elevator—as deep down in the bowels of the earth as if in the London Underground; on reaching the sidewalk proceed northward to One Hundred and Seventieth Street—the little arrows on the chart are marked; then eastward (another arrow) and behold! Amsterdam Avenue. There you enter a delicatessen bureau and tactfully inquire after Edgecombe Road.

I did all these things, and was recently told on a fine, breezy afternoon by a foreign youth that the road was in front of my face, as was Highbridge Park; around the corner was Jumel Place. Enfin! I said to the polite guide, and nosed my way till I saw an ideal cottage—though rather large for a cottage—with a big studio window facing the north. Recalling what Luks had often said—“To hades with a north light; a man ought to be able to paint in a cellar!”—I wondered. Then I traversed a garden and broke into the house, a burglar, armed with a pen and a bagful of question-marks. It was the home of the only George Luks, who, happy boy, has a painting temperament with an “angel in the house” to protect him from the contact of a world of cruel critics, and is also the possessor of the disposition described as “bubbling.” His favorite exclamation is: “Yours for happiness.” He means it. It is the leading-motive of his life.

Here are domestic comfort, a north light, and plenty of models across the road in the open air, splashed by sunshine or shadowed by trees; babies, goats, nurse-girls, park loafers, policemen, lazy pedestrians, noisy boys, nice little girls with hoops, and the inevitable sparrows. Rocks are in abundance. The landscape “composes” itself. And you are not surprised, when ushered into the great studio on the second floor, to be confronted by canvases registering various phases of the vibrating world hard-by. Since he moved from down-town the painter is becoming more of a plein-airiste.

Luks doesn’t wander afar for subjects. He still loves the familiar, the homely, the simple. It had been several years since I saw his work. Occasionally in Holland I would rim across a canvas by Jan Steen, Adrien Brouwer, or even Hals, that recalled Luks. His artistic affinities are Dutch rather than French; above all, he is an American painter to his blunt finger-tips. Beginning in the field of illustration, he was plunged up to his eyes in New York life. I believe it was Arthur Brisbane who first suggested to him that he should go in for painting in oils.

He went to Düsseldorf and survived that trying experience—a school that would submerge a Manet. Paris followed. But George is not a product of the schools. Theories sit lightly on his mercurial shoulders. He loathes “movements,” and refers to the “new” men, cubists, lamp-post impressionists, and futurists in words that curdle the blood. Indeed, his vocabulary is as variegated and picturesque as his palette. As for the personality of the man—well, it is absolutely impossible to set down on paper any adequate description of him. He is Puck. He is Caliban. He is Falstaff. He is a tornado. He is sentimental. He can sigh like a lover, and curse like a trooper. Sometimes you wonder over his versatility; a character actor, a low comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with human misery, and a human orchestra. The vitality of him!

Perhaps the simile of a man-orchestra is the most fitting. Did you ever see and hear those curious creatures, less rare in our streets a quarter of a century ago than now? I remember one in a small French city, a white-haired fellow who, with fife, cymbals, bells, concertinas—he wore two strapped under either arm—at times fiddles, made epileptic music as he quivered and danced, wriggled and shook his skull. The big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top were cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion hung with bells that pealed when he twisted his long skinny neck. He carried a weather-worn violin with a string or two missing; while a pipe that might have been a clarinet years before emitted but cackling tones from his thin lips. By some incomprehensible co-ordination of muscular movements he contrived simultaneously to sound his armory of instruments; and the whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming, wheezing, and tinkling of metal were appalling. But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the edge of a tune might be discerned sharply cutting through the dense cloud of vibrations, like the prow of a boat cleaving a fog. And the reverberating music swelled, multifarious and amazing, as if a military band, from piccolo to drum, were about to descend upon the town. A clatter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scraping were heard, as the old chap alternately limped and danced in the middle of the roadway.

Now, George Luks is not venerable; he is a comparatively young man, yet he reminds me of that human orchestra. It is an image of lithe activity that he suggests. What has this to do with his art? Much. It is rhythmic, many-colored, intensely alive, charged with character and saturated with humanity, not forgetting humor. Pathos is not absent. In his latest productions I noted with satisfaction more repose, deeper feeling, more solicitude for his surfaces, the modulation of tones; and the same old riotous joy in color for color’s sake. Yes, in his themes he still belongs to the illustrators. He seldom tells a definite story, but there is no mistaking his point of view.

I saw portraits of girls in masquerade that were expressed in terms of beautiful paint. A little red-head, the sheer tonal charm immediate, made me think of both Henner and Whistler. Then a Hals-like head, virile and sincere; a sensitively limned portrait of a young girl, his niece; a large canvas; charming girls under umbrageous trees, a veritable gamut of greens; an old woman who simply cried to be framed and exhibited—how many things did I not stare at, wondering over the inexhaustible fecundity, and groaning over the reckless prodigality, of this gifted man! With a tithe of his talent and personal quality other painters have achieved renown. However, he is not lacking in honors. He has plenty of admirers, plenty of commissions; yet do his friends wish that he would sometimes apply the brakes to that fiery temperament of his and steer his bark into less tumultuous waters. His art would gain thereby in finish, and distinction, and repose. And it might also die.

I once called George Luks “a hand and an eye.” His power of observation is great. He has the intensity of a Spaniard and the realism of a Dutchman. He is both exact and rebellious. Wherever he happens to pitch his tent becomes his studio; preferably in the open. But the East Side is his happy hunting-ground. In the Yiddish restaurants where old men with Biblical heads drink coffee and slowly converse; on Houston Street, when, apparently, the entire population is buying fish Shabbas-abend; in vile corners where the refuse of humanity drift, helpless, hopeless—there Luks catches some gleam of humor or pathos, some touch that Gorky-like brings before us in a dozen strokes of the brush or pencil a human trait which emerges to the surface of this vast boiling kettle like a spar thrown up by an angry sea. All happiness is not lost in those mean streets; a rift of wintry sunlight, a stray tune from some wheezy barrel-organ, and two children waltz with an unconscious zest of life that will survive until they are nonogenarians. Of such contrasts Luks is the master.

His Spielers is like a quivering page from—from whom? The East Side is yet to boast its Dickens. And Dickens would have enjoyed the picture of the little tousled Irish girl, with her red locks, who dances with the pretty flaxen-haired German child, surely a baker’s daughter from Avenue B. Now, you might suppose that this vivid art, this painting which has caught and retained the primal jolt and rhythm of the sketch, must be necessarily rude and unscientific in technique. It is the reverse. This particular picture is full of delicious tonalities. The head of the blonde girl might be from an English eighteenth-century master, and the air—it fills the spaces with a fluid caress.

And his Little Gray Girl, a poor wisp of flesh wearing a grotesque shawl and hat, shivering in the chill of a gloomy evening, sounds touching music. The note of sentiment is not forced; indeed, the passages of paint first catch the eye, modulations of grays and blacks that tell of the artist’s sensitive touch. He has wanton humors. He paints a French coachman, life-size, seated at a café table about to swill brandy. It is so real that you look another way. Or you are shown a collection of beggars who were famous a few years ago on Sixth Avenue, Broadway, the east side, Fulton Market: Matches Mary, the Duchess, the tottering Musician, the old Italian, “Gooda nighta, Boss!” and a host of nocturnal creatures since dead or in the hospital, perhaps in jail. Luks is their interpreter. Nor does he lean to the pessimistic; he is a believer in life and its characteristic beauty. The pretty he abhors.

There is the Duchess. In life she was an elderly hag with a distinguished bearing, a depraved woman of rank, who wore five or six dresses at once, on her head a shapeless yet attractive gear, and in her pocket she carried a fat roll of bills for purposes of dissipation, or bribery, or for bailing out some Tenderloin wreck. She is maleficence incarnate. Just fancy this bird of the night set forth by a sympathetic brush, endowed with a life that overflows the canvas, and you see this grande dame strut by, the embodiment of evil, yet a duchess à la Sir Johsua, though à rebours. It is a sinister art which recalls the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec. With Lautrec the work of Luks has certain affinities. He may never have studied that painter; rather is it a temperamental resemblance, a certain tolerant way of seeing men and things. But Luks is not so cynical as the Frenchman.

And that striking embodiment of Whisky Bill, a once well-known personage in the American Parisian colony! Several judges have praised the Fraser portrait, which we greatly admire for its excellent qualities, but personally we plump for the head of Whisky Bill, the head of a great violinist and also a profound alcoholist. In Gorky’s Nachtasyl there is an old actor who runs about the play exclaiming: “I have poisoned my organism with alcohol.” We have never seen Whisky Bill, but we are sure from the canvas that he has poisoned his organism with alcohol. Nevertheless, a man who thinks, one who has suffered from the mirage of thirst, not one of the Hals or the Steen jovial drinkers. The spleen of life has killed the ideals of Bill. They are submerged in his melancholy eyes. As for his hair, we might almost compare it to Masson’s engraving of the gray-haired man, Guillaume de Brisacier, after Mignard; but with a difference—the hair is treated more luminously in mass than detail.

There are the usual number of studies from life, of Old Mary Curling Her Hair, a companion piece to the Goose Girl. The most characteristic picture in the Luks collection is an ideal head of Bobbie Burns’s Suter Johnnie. Therein is the synthesis of all the more admirable qualities of Luks: humor, technical audacity, solid modelling, vital color, sweet sentiment, and a searching humanity, all of which combined make a vigorous appeal to the spectator. Luks sometimes plays to the gallery, but at the core he is sincere. His feet are set upon the mountain. He is not pausing to grasp at the flowers or the applause. But do not imagine because he is the smiling George Luks with the Napoleonic brow, round cherubic cheeks, and nimble wit, that he is easy to decipher.

As for The Pawnbroker’s Daughter—she might have stepped out from some old Holland master’s studio. The Dutch strain in Luks and his shrewd Yankee humor are here blended in the happiest manner. The girl is carrying a carafe on a tray. The rich comminglement of tones, the tribal “awareness” of the girl’s glance, her tangled hair, and the smouldering splendor of her garb are indicated without a suspicion of bravura; yet one is conscious of virtuosity, clairvoyance, and sympathetic observation.

There is the reverse of the medal. No man is made all of a piece, and the art of Luks has its seamy side. He displays an infernal impatience, that chief sin of heresiarchs, according to Cardinal Newman. He sometimes takes criticism in no amiable way. And the corollary of impatience is haste in execution. Luks seldom finishes a canvas. He must have five hundred stowed away in his studio. Many are not half-begun. Nevertheless, this rough handling of his material—neither irreverent nor careless—bears special fruits. Some subjects respond instantly to this treatment. Swift, brutal, seldom subtle, though suggestive, his portraits leap from the bare canvas into vital being. In the fury of his execution, when the fit is upon him he could cover miles of walls with figures. This itching of the nerves, this tugging of the muscles, which impels a pianist to play until Jericho falls or his listeners die, is but the special artistic organ of any artist keyed up to the pitch of intensity. Luks is the most normal man imaginable. Full of the kindly sap of life, he too often boasts his powers when he should be making lines and color patches. That is his very human side; “human—all too human”—as Nietzsche would say. Slightly inhuman is his capacity for sustained work—mind you, we don’t say sustained in the sense of sticking at one picture until he has exhausted its possibilities, but a capacity for toil, prolonged, laborious.

This exuberance, this boiling over of energy, these dashes at reality, these slices of life, bold portraits of men and women who dare to live, though only painted, this Human Comedy merely hinted at, are testimonies to the creative and tumultuous powers of a man who is of Rabelaisian energies. The saving fact is that Luks is not old, and knows what he most lacks. To advise him to paint like some one else, to make slim silk purses when he so superbly paints sows’ ears, would be futile. He is not academic. He has a grim vein of irony that spells at a glance the tragi-comedy of life—his Parisian sketch-books would have attracted Daumier—and also a superabounding confidence that sometimes leads its owner into dubious, as well as devious, places.

But he is one of our native, commanding talents, and with study and experience must come the purging of the dross; with his mellowing Luks will take his proper place among his contemporaries, and it will be in the seats of the mighty—or nowhere. The only possible schooling that will hasten this result will be the stern self-schooling of George Luks. But he is just the style of man who may bid criticism go hang and nevertheless win out at the end. Like the turbulent and fleshly Bard of Camden, he can “sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” and make of this “yawp” an art extremely personal and arresting.

As a portraitist he has his good days and bad. When he is deeply gripped by his subject he is usually successful. The head of Senator Root was criticised because of a certain hardness and rigidity in texture and pose, but there were critics who declared that the painter’s psychology had revealed the essential Root—austere, profound, Machiavellian statesman and scholar. The self-portrait, like the Smoker of Brouwer, is the record of a passing mood. It is a swift sketch, and is Luks in the heydey of a happy, devil-may-care humor. Truly a ‘human document.’ I admire his landscape, Round Houses at High Bridge. The atmosphere is finely evoked; Luks knows his values. Steam, and again steam, is painted in a delicate scale of pearl-greys.

But even Lux pinxit becomes a long-drawn-out line of light. I bade my hosts good day. “I’ll see you as far as the subway,” said Luks. He accompanied me to the station, where you go down to the train in a lofty elevator, as you do in the gloomy London Underground. I had passed an admirable afternoon with a human painter. Some painters are not human.

XII
CONCERNING CALICO CATS

This is to be a sober Sunday sermon, even though it largely concerns Calico Cats. What is a calico cat? you will ask. The first we ever heard of the strange beast, after the Eugene Field poem, was at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, when Mortimer Wilson conducted a clever orchestral suite in which figured the Funeral of the Calico Cat; that is, a specific cat, one, let it be said in passing, that was quite tiny at the beginning of the music, but grew to monstrous proportions before its interment; a cat that would have put to blush the “Cheshire Puss” of Alice’s in the fable. Cats in calico may be seen on the streets any Gotham summer day, but a calico cat—what in the world may that be? The simulacrum of a feline, an eidolon, such as Mr. Howell once described? We can’t ask Mr. Wilson, because he might refer us to his charming score, which speaks for itself. Verhaeren, the Belgian poet, the greatest living poet at the time of his death at Rouen, with the solitary exception of Gabriele d’Annunzio, Emile Verhaeren has written about “Cats of ebony, Cats of flame,” but, manifestly, a cat can’t be both flaming and calico. We must turn to that lover of cats, Charles Baudelaire, who wrote sonnets to his cats as others have penned praises of their mistresses’ eyebrows. He discovered to France the genius of Richard Wagner and the genius of Edouard Manet, not to mention Poe’s. Jules Claretie relates that Baudelaire said to him, with a grimace: “I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious.”

Now, obviously, this is an invention. Perverse as Baudelaire undoubtedly was, he loved cats too much to torture them. Without knowing it, the late director of the Théâtre Français has described, “avant la lettre,” as the etchers say, the music of the future: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff. But calico cats! Not a spoor of them in all this, so we are forced to fall back upon symbolism, which seems to be the art of saying the reverse of what you think. (I nearly meant this.) In his Hunting of the Snark Lewis Carroll finds that it is a Boojum. Perhaps our calico cat is not a cat at all, but a critic. But then a cat may look at a critic, as a critic is privileged to stare a composer out of countenance. A calico cat may, for all we know, house the soul of a real cat. Therefore, children, do not treat it rudely! It may be watching you with its malignant, beady eyes, ready to spring, ready to scratch when you least expect it! And we should not forget Baudelaire, who would lower his voice when showing his friends some Polynesian idol of wood, bidding them not mock, because once upon a time a deity may have inhabited the rude carving. The remote ancestor of a calico doll may have been that scourge of a vanished geological epoch, the sabre-toothed tiger, just as the iridescent dragon-fly that flashes winged sunshine as it skims is the pitiful reduction of the dread Pterodactyl, the flying saurian, which also reappears as the Jabberwock (furnished with a monocle by Sir John Tenniel, ever a stickler for etiquette). The calico cat might be a prowling version of the Frumious Bandersnatch, with the claws that scratch.

But a truce to paleontology! Let us of the nonce assume that the cat in question stands for the tutelar totem of criticism. A mere figure of speech, “Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère!” I can see my surprised colleagues: He has called us musical lounge lizards, now we are calico cats! What the next recrudescence? In Hindu-land what Avatar? I remember the sage advice of Vance Thompson: When all trumps fail, write about your liver! He was speaking of criticism. Musical trumps are, as a rule, mesugah, in the classic parlance of pinochle; hence I fall back on a hypothetical hepatic condition, i. e., calico cats and criticism; criticism of music, art, literature, or mixed. Swinburne’s theory that “I have never been able to see what should attract a man to the profession of criticism but the noble art of praising” was vitiated in practice by the poet himself, who wrote scurrilously of any one who disagreed with him. “After all, what are critics?” asked Balzac, and later Disraeli-Beaconsfield. “Men who have failed in literature and art.” Mascagni, the Single-Speech Hamilton of Italian composers, cried aloud in resentment that a critic was only a “compositore mancato.” (Probably some fellow musician had wounded him with a pen.)

But every one is a critic, a calico cat, your gallery god, as well as the most stately practitioner of the gentlest art. The difference between your criticism and mine, as I have remarked elsewhere, is that I am paid for mine, and you must pay for your privilege to criticise. As some Paris wit said of a certain actress: “She is not beautiful, she is worse.” A critic is never unjust—he is worse. Nevertheless, I prefer the plain critic’s opinions rather than the professional pronouncement of a composer. He always knows more than the critic, yet I doubt his attitude, which is seldom disinterested. How could it be? Why should it be? Schumann, who “discovered” Chopin and Brahms, missed Wagner. In Wagner he met his critical Waterloo, and as George Moore wrote of Ruskin vs. Whistler: “It is the lot of critics to be remembered by what they have failed to understand.” Berlioz also missed Wagner—Wagner who had helped himself so generously to the ideas on instrumentation of the Frenchman. But Balzac did not miss Stendhal, whose generation refused to recognize his genius. The “creative” critics are few. Montaigne, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Baudelaire, Georg Brandes, Nietzsche, Pater, Benedetto Croce, Havelock Ellis, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Symons, Anatole France, De Gourmont, Edgar Saltus, Brownell—the list might be spun out, but these names suffice. Yet my idol among them, Sainte-Beuve, missed Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was inconsiderate—possibly on account of his affair with Adèle Hugo. Consider the Osrics of literature eternally embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve’s style, a fatal immortality for so many futile butterflies, and you will admit that he still lives when many a mighty reputation has withered.

In sheer wonderment George III asked how the apples got inside the dumpling. How can a critic criticise a creator! Oscar Wilde, shrewd enough when he so willed, has a middle term; critics who are “creative.” But isn’t he the man who looks on while the other fellow does things! He should be artist as to temperament, and he should have a credo. And like most prima donnas, he is “catty.” He need not be a painter to write of painting, a composer to speak of music. His primary appeal is to the public. He is the interpreter. The psycho-physiological processes need not concern us. There are the inevitable limitations. Describing music in terms of prose is hopeless. The only true criticism of music is the playing thereof. We are again confronted by the Vance Thompson crux: write about your liver, or the weather, or calico cats, as I am now doing. All the rest is technical camouflage. Of course, a catholic critic doesn’t mean an unprejudiced one. A critic without prejudices would be a faultless monster, and like Aristides the Just, should be stoned.

Carl Van Vechten has told us of Erich Satie, the eccentric French composer, who sets snails and oysters to music, and, no doubt, has composed a Cooties Serenade for wind instruments with a fine-tooth comb obbligato, and we are amazed at the critical exposition of such a perplexing “case.” To let his music speak for itself, would be unwise, as it is not sufficiently explicative. Rhizopods can’t converse. Just here is where your music-critic, your calico cat, intervenes. After Van Vechten has polished off his man, we feel that we know all about Satie, so much so that we never wish to hear a bar of his crustacean music. The difference between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee is infinitesimal, but that very difference may contain great art.

Professor, now Sir Walter Raleigh, has said that “Criticism, after all, is not to legislate but to raise the dead.” Sometimes it raises hades. Millet declared that “there is no isolated truth”; Constable denied that a good thing is ever done twice, and Alfred Stevens—the Belgian painter, not the English sculptor—defined art as “nature seen through the prism of an emotion,” thus forestalling the more pompous pronouncement of Zola in The Experimental Novel. These are not merely epigrams, but truths. On the other hand, recall what Velasquez is reported to have said to Salvator Rosa, according to Boschini and Carl Justi. Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he did not believe Raphael to be the best of all the painters he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: “Raphael, to be plain with you, for I like to be candid and outspoken, does not please me at all.” There were the mountains criticising, deep calling unto deep. All said and done, a question of temperament, this opinion of one great man about the work of another.

Therefore, brethren, it behooves us to be humble, as pride goeth before a fall. Like the industrious crow, the critic, or, as you will, the calico cat, should hop after the sowers of beauty, content to pick up in the furrowed field the grains dropped by genius. At best the critic sits down to a Barmecide’s feast, to see, to smell, but not to taste the celestial manna vouchsafed by the gods. We are only contemporaries of genius, all of us, and the calico cat is the badge of our tribe. But who dares confess this shocking truth? And who shall bell the calico cat?

XIII
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?

Rather hotly I argued the question with my editor: “After all, music-critics are men and brethren,” I said. “Except when they are sisters,” he ironically interposed. I sternly resisted a temptation to blush and continued: “Because I love Chopin must I forever write of his music—toujours perdrix! It’s an indigestion of strawberries, clotted cream, and green eyes. I’m suffering from spring-fever. Let me write a story about the circus.” “Why not Ibsen?” interposed my editor, who is subtle or nothing. “He was a grand man,” I assented, “but in the present case he is only red-herring across the trail. Suppose I mix up Chopin with sawdust merely for the sake of the mélange?” My chief assented, wearily. There are more important problems on the carpet than Chopin. Jim Beck vs. Pop Hylan in a catch-as-catch-can for the welter-weight championship. Or the celebrated Mrs. J. and the Beethoven-Hamburger steak controversy. Why not Chopin and sawdust? I retired with a thoughtful mien.

Had I ever been to the circus? What a singular question. Yet, yet—! No, I confessed to myself, I had not been to the circus for at least three decades. Critics are tame cats away from their regular guests. In the concert-room or at the play, armed with our little hammers, we are as brave as plumbers; but on a roof garden, in church, at a circus, or innocently slumbering, we are the mildest gang of pirates that ever scuttled an American sonata or forced ambitious leading-ladies to walk the plank. We may go alone to the theatre with impunity and another fellow’s girl, but at the circus we need a nurse to show us the ropes and keep us from falling under the elephants’ hoofs. A private nurse—not necessarily old—say I, is the only safety for a critic out of his element; otherwise a sense of the dignity of our calling is not maintained.

Therefore, I swallowed my Chopin scheme without undue fervor and went to the circus. No matter which one. All circuses are in an attractive key to me. Thackeray said the same thing about the play, and said it better. Any circus will serve as a peg for my sawdust symbolism. Any Garden will do, so that it has a capitalized initial letter. (No allusion to Magical Mary.) The circus! What a corrective for the astringent Ibsen or the morbidezza of Sarmatia’s sweet singer, Chopin! The circus. It is a revelation. One thing I regretted—that I could not be a boy again, with dirty hands, a shining brow, and a heart brimming over with joy. Peter Pan! Oh! to recapture that first careless rapture, as Browning or some other writing Johnny said; surely he must have meant the circus, which is the one spot on our muddy planet where rapture rhymes with the sawdust ring.

“Have you ever seen Hedda Gabler?” I asked of the Finland giantess. We were wedged in front of the long platform at the Garden, upon which were the Missing Link, the Snake-Enchantress, the Lion-Faced Boy, the English Fat Girl—so fat—the Human Skeleton, the Welsh Giant, the Lilliputians, tattooed men, a man with an iron skull, dancers, jugglers, gun-spinners, “lady” musicians, and the three-legged boy. Eternal types at the circus. The noise was terrific, the air dense with the aura of unwashed humanity. This aura was twin to the aura in a monkey-house. But I enjoyed my “bath of multitude,” as Charles Baudelaire names it, and I should not have bothered the tall creature with such an inept question. She coldly regarded me:

“No, I haven’t seen Hedda to-day, but I remember George Tesman always teased her with one question, ‘What do you know about that, Hed?’ Shoo! Sardou for mine.” “Do you read George Blarney Shaw?” I persisted. “He ought to be in a cage here. He would draw some crowds. But I’m told he lives in Germany now on account of the beer.” I backed away quickly as an East Side family consisting of a baker’s dozen would allow. Why had I asked such a question of a perfect stranger? This giantess, I mused before the rhinoceros with the double prongs, is Finnish. That’s why she knew the name of Hedda Gabler. Why didn’t I speak of Rosmersholm? Rebecca West had Finnish blood in her veins. Careful, careful—this Ibsen obsession must be surmounted, else I shall be inquiring of the giraffe if neck or nothing is the symbol of Brand. All or Nothing! of course. How stupid of me. Among the animals I regained my equilibrium. Their odors evoked memories. Yes, I recalled the old-time circus, with its compact pitched canvas tent on North Broad Street, Philadelphia; the pink lemonade, the hoarse voice of the man who entreated us to buy tickets—there were no megaphones in those days—the crisp crackling of the roasting peanuts, the ovens revolved by the man from Ravenna, the man from Ascoli, and the man from Milan. They followed the circus all the way from Point Breeze, and I swear they were to me far more human than the policemen who gently whacked us with their clubs when we crawled under the tent.

The sense of smell is first aid to memory. As I passed the cages saluting our pre-Adamic relatives, bidding the time of day to the zebu, nodding in a debonair fashion to the yak, I could not help longing for my first circus. Again I saw myself sitting in peaceful agony on a splintery plank; again I felt the slaps and pinches of my tender-hearted Aunt Sue—now in Paradise, I hope; again my heart tugged like a balloon at its moorings as the clowns jumped into the ring, grimacing, chortling, and fascinating us with their ludicrous inhumanity.

Other days, other ways. I sighed as I tore myself loose from the prehensile trunk of a too friendly baby elephant and passed into the huge auditorium where Gilmore had played. Ah! the sad, bad, glad, dear, dead, tiresome, poverty-stricken, beautiful days when we were young imbeciles and held hands with a fresh “ideal” every week (sometimes two). Ah! the sentimental “jag” induced by peanut eating, and the chaste, odoriferous apes.

It is time. We seat ourselves. I look about me. Two resplendent gentlemen wearing evening clothes at high noon, after the daring manner of our Gallic cousins, toll a bell. I became excited. Why those three-and-thirty strokes? What the symbolism! Chopin, or Ibsen; again, I groaned, and turned my attention to my neighbors, one of whom I could feel, though did not see. I raised my voice, employing certain vocables hardly fit to print. The effect was magical. “Johnny, take your feet out of the gentleman’s collar. That’s a good boy.” It was the soothing voice of a mother. Bless her clairvoyance! I sat comfortably back in my seat. Johnny howled at the interference with his pleasure. I felt sorry for him. Childhood is ever individualistic, even pragmatic. But I only had one collar with me, and it was well the matter ended thus.

Hurrah! Here they come! A goodly band. The clowns! the clowns! Some hieratic owl of wisdom has called the clown the epitome of mankind. He certainly stands for something, this “full-fledged fool,” as good old Tody Hamilton used to write, and “surcharged with the Roe of Fun,” which phrase beats Delaware shad. Odds fish! There was only one Hamilton. What a Rabelaisian list of names boast these merry clowns! If the years have passed over the skulls of these lively rascals, the jolly boys do not show them. The same squeaks, the identical yodling, the funny yet sinister expression of the eyes, the cruel, red-slitted mouths—not a day older than ten did I seem as they came tumbling in and began their horse-play, punctuated with yelling, yahoo gestures, ribald ejaculations, and knock-about diversions. It must all mean something, this hooting, in the economy of the universe, else “life is a suck and a sell,” as Walt Whitman puts it. As in a dream-mirror I saw Solness slowly mount the fatal tower when Hilda Wangel cries to him: “My—my Master-builder!” She sings The Maiden’s Wish, and he hears the harps of Chopin hum in the air. I rub my ears. It is not Hilda who is crying, but a pet pig in a baby carriage, wheeled by a chalk-faced varlet. How difficult it is to escape the hallucinations of the critical profession. I couldn’t forget Chopin or Ibsen, even at the circus.

It was a relief, after more bellmanship from the man with the shiny silk hat and spiked coat, when the elephants majestically entered. Followed the horses. Tumblers and wire-walkers, women who stood on their heads and smiled—as they do in life, something like the “inverted pyramid,” as James Hinton called modern civilization—plastic poseurs, Oriental jugglers, the show was let loose at last. Human projectiles were launched through mid air to the tap of a drum. My nerves forbade me to look at them, so I read a programme advertisement of wallpaper 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 if it does they shudder with sadistic joy. I close my eyes when the Whirl of Death or any other sensational act is staged. “Something” might happen.

The mad dancers delight our rhythmic sense as they make marvellous arabesques. The chariot races stir the blood. The crash around curves, the patters of gleaming metal excite so that you stand up, and, brushing the feet of inevitable Johnny from your neck (notwithstanding his remonstrances), you shout with woolly mouth and husky voice. Instinctively you turn down your thumbs: “Pollice verso,” which Bayard Taylor translated “the perverse police.” You remember the Gérôme painting?

“This beats Ibsen,” I hilariously exclaimed to Johnny’s mother. (She was a comely matron.) “His name is John, and when he gets home his father will beat him,” she tartly replied. With the prevoyance of boyhood Johnny burst into despairing howls. I at once folded up my mind. A million things were happening in the haze of the many rings. The New Circus is polyphonic, or naught.

Enough! Filled to the eyes with the distracting spectacle, ear-drums fatigued by the blare and bang of the monster brass band, my collar quite wilted by Johnny’s shoemaker, my temper in rags because of the panting, struggling army of fellow beings, I reached the avenue in safety, perspiring, thirsty, unhappy. Like Stendhal, after his first and eagerly longed-for battle with love, I exclaimed: “Is that all?” In sooth, it had been too much. The human sensorium is savagely assaulted at the twentieth century circus. I was in pessimistic enough humor to regret the single ring, the antique japes of a solitary clown, and the bewitching horsemanship of Mlle. 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 ineluctable destiny separates them ever. 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.

XIV
CARUSO ON WHEELS

That trip was all the fault of Billy Guard, better known to the musical world as Signor Guglielmo Guardi—though no relative of the famous painter of Venetian waterscapes by the same name; it is even rumored that Guardi originally hails from the “Quid Dart,” but that knotty question will be solved, no doubt, by future historians. He is none the less 110-percent American in the shade. However, to my story. I was standing in the concourse of the Pennsylvania Station when Billy interrupted my meditation on the evils of near-beer. “Are you going with us?” he hospitably inquired. I was about to board the regular three o’clock train to Philadelphia and I cheerfully accepted his invitation. And then something happened. Not far from us a circle of spectators enclosed as a focal point the natty person of Enrico Caruso and a Red Cross girl. Evidently curiosity had ascended to the blood-heat mark of the human thermometer. With difficulty was the mass kept from swamping the border of safety, and, literally, embracing the well-beloved Italian tenor. What was he doing in such a place at the uncanny hour of 2.30 P. M.? Singers operate their throats all night and sleep out the daylight. It was not difficult to guess that he was going to Philadelphia on the Metropolitan Opera House Special, which during the season leaves every Tuesday afternoon at 2.54, returning some time after 2 o’clock the next morning. The present intermezzo piqued my interest. I shouldered my diminutive frame through the mob, exclaiming, “Tickets, please!” and because of this official camouflage soon reached the centre of attraction. Attired in garb of fashionable hue and cut, Signor Caruso held earnest converse with a pretty Red Cross nurse, whose face beamed with joy. Something had been given which pleased her sense of the fitness of things, and later I heard that Caruso had enrolled the names of his two sons as members of the Red Cross Association; both lads were then fighting in the Italian army; Caruso is patriotic.

“Say, ain’t dat guy Caroos?” was asked of me by one of the chaps at the news-stand. “Doesn’t he get ten thousand dollars a night?” he further queried. “More,” I replied. “Well, he don’t look it,” came the unexpected comment. Young America thus paid tribute to the absence of fuss and feathers in the personality of the singer. It is true Caruso does not look like the typical tenor of Italian opera, nor does he behave like one. There he was, happy as a boy out on a lark, the dingy December day not depressing him, and his spirits so high that we expected him to waltz with that gentle nurse on the finest dancing esplanade in the world. Nor did the young lady seem averse from the diversion. To the disappointment of the crowd—by this time grown to monstrous size—Caruso did not dance, contenting himself with lustily carolling a basketful of precious high notes as he descended to his drawing-room car. Manager Gatti-Casazza would have shuddered if he had been present. His supreme vocal planet prodigally wasting his golden wind in a hall bigger than the Metropolitan Opera House and no box-office in view! Besides, it was flying in the face of nature. Tenors always bundle up to the eyebrows; they do not speak, much less vocalize, and usually are as cross as the proverbial bear. Caruso, who has defied doctors and vocal hygiene since he opened his magical mouth, is a false beacon to other singers. His care-free behavior should be shunned by lesser men who attempt to bend the bow of this great singing Ulysses.

But Caruso is careful about tobacco. He does not enter the compartment where others smoke. He prefers the odor of his own choice cigarettes. I never saw him without one, either in mouth or fingers. The despair he is of any throat specialist. He sits in company with his old friend, Signor Scognomillo, otherwise the Man-Mountain. Sits and smokes. He is to sing and so he doesn’t talk, only smokes, or makes caricatures. Returning is another tale. In hilarious mood, he orders carte-blanche supper for the chorus. He plays pranks on his fellow passengers. Even that most potent, grave, and bearded Signor, Manager Gatti, is forced to smile. Caruso is irresistible. He recalls the far-away days when he sang two operas every Sunday in the Teatro Mercadante at Naples or the good old summer-time at Salerno, when, during entr’actes, he would drop a string from his dressing-room window and draw up the fond prize—sardine and cream-cheese sandwiches. He was thin in those youthful days, and thin boys always have hollow legs that must be filled. Prosperity has not spoiled Caruso. He is human and tolerant, with a big heart, and he is devoid of professional megalomania. In common with oldsters I have railed betimes at altered musical tastes and often declared that in the days of my youth there were better singers. I still abide by this belief. There were vocal giants in those days; but there was not Enrico Caruso.

Since my dear old friend Italo Campanini there has been no one to match Caruso. Italo was a greater actor, indeed more versatile. His Lohengrin, the first I ever heard, I shall never forget. Mr. Finck is happy in his suggestion that Caruso add Lohengrin to his long list of operatic portraits. I have heard tenors from Brignoli to Gayarre, from Campanini to Tamagno, Masini and Nicolini—this second husband of Aunt Adelina Patti wasn’t such a mediocrity as represented by some critics; he suffered only from contiguity to a blazing star of the first magnitude—yet no one possessed a tithe of the vocal richness of Camerado Enrico. Some have outpointed him in finesse, Bonci; Tamagno could have outroared him; Jean de Reszke had more personal charm and artistic subtlety; nevertheless, Caruso has a marvellous natural voice, paved with lyric magic. It is positively torrential in its outpouring, and with the years it grows as mellow as a French horn. Why, there are men in this vast land of ours who would rather be Caruso than the President of the United States of Europe. Can you blame them? In his golden prime, happily mated, full of verve, gayety—and healthy—well, his presence, apart from his art, consoles us for many a gray day on this ocky little orb we inhabit.

The recognition of personality has become in my “middle-years” a veritable obsession. With Henry James I could say that “I have found myself, my life long, attaching values to every noted thing in respect to a great person.” Please strike out “great” from this sentence and substitute “any”; any person is interesting to me. Himself exquisitely aware of the presence of others, Henry James placed his fastidious preference amid certain castes, social and artistic. Like Walt Whitman, I prefer the company of “powerful uneducated persons,” and nothing inhuman or human is foreign to me. I shouldn’t be surprised to find more interesting “stories” among the members of the chorus than in the ranks of the “stars”; but the “stars” alone capture the curiosity of the public, and thus it is that I speak of some of them to-day instead of la bella ragazzina in Mr. Setti’s forces. I was bundled on Manager Gatti’s special car and promptly paid my fare to a conductor who suspiciously appraised my presence; to him I was neither fish nor flesh, nor good red chorus. I should have liked very much to walk through the chorus car, but with Otto Weil on one side and Edward Ziegler on the other I couldn’t escape; furthermore, young Ziegler thus admonished me: “Sir, it’s no place for an elderly inflammable person, is that car full of pretty young song-birds; Pattis and Scalchis en herbe.” I meekly submitted and found myself in a smoking-compartment where a card-table was promptly installed.

A friendly game of old cat bridge-whist. Now, I play Bach inventions every morning, but I can’t play cards. I despise card games, agreeing with my friend J. K. Huysmans, who asserted that a monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of cards because “he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility.” If the distinguished French pessimist and master of jewelled prose could have been with us that day he might have revised his polite judgment. Such gabbling. Such “kachesse,” such feminine squabbles. No hotel piazza on the Jersey coast of an August afternoon could have held a candle to the shrewd repartee and vivacious wrangling over a few painted pasteboards. Antonio Scotti, drumming on the table the rhythm of the Rataplan, would suddenly scowl, and, with Scarpia-like intensity, demand: “Why you play that ace?” And Technical Director Siedle would groan in reply. A flash of lightning from a blue sky. Then Otto Weil banged down his cards and audibly expressed his opinion of his partner’s playing. It is not fit to print. Judels never turned a hair, and he isn’t bald. Even Scotti relaxed for a moment his ferocious Neapolitan air. No one can “stay mad” long with Judels. Pan Ordynski drops in, and Amato, Chalmers, or Althouse. Scotti is smoke-proof. It is pleasant to record that this big operatic organization with its divers nationalities is en route a happy family. Music, after all, is the solvent, the real melting-pot of which we hear so much and see so little in every-day life.

From a photograph by De Strelecki

ROSINA GALLI AS THE PRINCESS IN “LE COQ D’OR”

Caruso is not the only funmaker on the wheels of this Opera Special. Rosina Galli of the dainty, tapering toes and woven paces is always rollicksome. Her imitations would make her fortune in vaudeville. Signor Gatti philosophically reposes after the fatigue of travel and Union League Club terrapin. Scotti munches chicken, resting after his Sergeant Sulpizio rôle, and still strums the Rataplan. Caruso smokes. Friend Scognomillo sleeps with one eye open. Florence Easton, wrung from her triumph as Santuzza, is there. In a compartment sits Geraldine Farrar. She sips coffee. Her mother is with her. So are chicken sandwiches. “Our Jerry” is bright-eyed and keyed up as might be expected. I mention the name “Sid” Farrar, my boyhood’s idol. The ladies become sympathetic. When I stoutly declared that I had never fallen in love with a prima donna during four decades as a music reporter, my “specialty” being admiration of the mothers of singers, the air is charged with interrogation-marks. Why hasn’t some authoritative pen been employed in behalf of the mother of the singer who has succeeded? What a theme! What peeps into a family inferno! I think that Mrs. Farrar could write a better book about her brilliant daughter than did Mrs. Lou Tellegen of herself.

Another time I talk with Frieda Hempel, who is one of the rapidly dwindling race of artists who know Mozart as well as Donizetti. What a Marguerite she would be! On the train she is like her contemporaries. She sits. She chats. For all I know, she may doze. Singers are very human. To fancy them as “gloomy, grand, and peculiar” is to imagine a vain thing. In private they behave like their butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. If they have one weakness peculiar to their tribe, it is never to read newspaper criticism of their performances! This is discouraging for music-critics. But the public likes sentimental flimflam, and the opera singer is pictured as a strange and fearful bird of prey; when seen at close range she is in reality a domesticated fowl. The much-advertised artistic temperament is only intermittent; even arrant bohemians are normal at least twice every twenty-four hours.

The call is sounded. Again New York! A jumble of voices is heard in the smoking-compartment. “If you hadn’t played that trump!”—it is Judels speaking. “Oh!” groans Papa Siedle. Scotti is now whistling the Rataplan. The blond Ordynski, having wished the Polish curse on Otto Weil—“may you have hangnails and dandruff!”—dons his greatcoat. “Addio, Hunekero!” sings Caruso. After refusing Ned Ziegler’s kind offer of “First Aid to Flatbushers,” which means his private car, I find myself alone on the chilly concourse. The hour of disillusionment, three past midnight. I’ve been on and off wheels with Caruso for twelve times sixty minutes. I ponder Flatbush and the possibilities of getting there by dawn. The scrubwomen are at work, a new postwoman saunters along. The luncheon-room cat rubs against me, almost coos with joy. I slink away, being superstitious regarding cherry-colored cats, step-ladders, and cross-eyed theatre managers. (I am writting plays.) Then, resigned to the inevitable, I seek my trusty Glenn Curtiss hydro-aeroplane, which is anchored in the Thirty-third Street enclosure, and fly home to Flatbush-by-the-Sea. I’ve had a crowded and enjoyable day.

XV
SING AND GROW VOICELESS

Sing and grow voiceless! Why not? We know of a dozen methods that are guaranteed to ruin even a Rose Ponselle vocal equipment in thirty lessons by mail, better known as absent treatment. We have had over forty years’ experience in the fair land of song, a scarred battle-field strewn with the shards and wrecks of beautiful voices and high hopes. In no sphere of music are there so many sharks, cormorants, swindlers, humbugs, criminals, as in the ranks of vocal teaching—so-called. The hard-earned, carefully saved money of parents is extorted from victims, who usually return home with health impaired, voices gone, even worse. It is pitiful. It is cruel. What are you going to do about it? The profession of medicine is protected. Why not music? Malpractice is swiftly punished. Why not lock up the rascals who ruin a voice and get money under false pretenses? No, chewing gum in public is of far more importance to people; now a national neurosis, it will soon be elevated to the dignity of a Fine Art. If we had our way we should drive every one of these vocal parasites who infest the temple of music into the swamp of public odium.

Now, having worked off my chronic bad humor, let us look at the matter through the spectacles of the absurd. There is a comic side to everything, from a volcano to a prohibitionist. The fake singing-teachers are as funny as their fakery is pernicious.

I am reminded of all the pamphlets from How to be Happy Though Divorced, How to Starve and Grow Fat when I read the pompous pronouncements of certain Voice Builders. I confess that I am not an expert in vocal hygiene, but I have heard all the great men and women for the past half-century who have made this drab, dreary planet worth living on with their beautiful voices. And that is a brevet of taste. Standards. Without standards we critically perish, says, in effect, Mr. Brownell. I also confess that I don’t know a resonator from a refrigerator, or the difference between a lynx and a larynx. Both growl, I believe, if you rub them the wrong way. I have not the science of W. J. Henderson or Holbrook Curtis. But I do know when a singer slathers her phrases or sings above or below pitch—and there are more who sing sharp than you think. The main thing is that I criticise by ear, not with a laryngoscope or a mirror to peep at the breath-control.

Herbert Witherspoon, not unknown to fame as an operatic artist and concert singer, summed up for me the situation in a phrase. “Opera singers open their mouths too wide.” Hence screaming and bawling which nearly splits sensitive ears. That the public likes shouting on top-tones is only evidence of the public’s appalling taste. Noise, noise, noise! We worship noise in America. Another neurosis. Noise the Ultimate Vulgarity. At last the subway voice has penetrated our opera-houses; charmless, voiceless, vicious. The three dramatic unities in the modern theatre have resolved themselves into Legs, Glitter, Buncombe. On the lyric stage the chief unit is yelling. No wonder they sing and grow voiceless. Purdon Robinson, himself a concert singer of note, in the course of an instructive lecture recently remarked: “My own opinion, backed by thirty years of singing and teaching, has resulted in the belief that a mechanical method makes a mechanical singer”; and “after the voice has been placed and one has it under control, forget it when singing. Try to get at the composer’s meaning, realizing that words in themselves mean little, and that notes in music are simply the symbols by which musical ideas are indicated.” For the average vocalist words are not symbols but cymbals. But Mr. Robinson’s words are golden.

Years ago (do sit still a moment, this is not a spun-out story of my life!) a young woman consulted me about a vocal master. She was a choir singer from the remote South, her parents poor as brewery mice—are to be—and she thought she had a remarkable voice. I say “thought.” Care killed a cat. Thought never slew a larynx. I played a hymn tune. She sang. I shuddered, but was relieved when she told me that her name was Elvina Crow. After all, there is something to be said for Prof. Slawkenbergius and his theory of names as set forth by the veracious Rev. Laurence Sterne. I suggested that if she decided on a career she change her name to “Sgallinacciare,” which appropriately enough means to crow; also a faulty method of singing. “Signorina Sgallinacciare!” How that would ring in the credulous ears of the dear old deluded public, which, Hamlet-like, doesn’t know a hawk from a hand-saw, or, if you prefer, a hernshaw. Shriek and grow rich! Nothing else matters but “mazuma” in the box-office of the Seven Deadly Arts.

It must have been a month after our interview that Miss Crow again visited me. I was at the time assistant professor of applied paleontology, and mightily interested in the psychic life of micro-organisms, so naturally singers came first on the list. Into my large and sympathetic tympani Elvina poured a tale, not of woe, but of thrilling truth. This is not the first time I have related it, yet it improves on repetition, just because of its probability. Not discouraged by my slurring, even portamento, criticism of her voice, the lone girl bravely started to find out the truth herself; the real test of character. She said that her first experience was in the studio of a maestro. She had a letter to him which he barely read. In a rich Italian brogue he bade her be seated. He wore a velvet jacket. He was bald. He smoked cigarettes. The type was perfect.

“I giva da lesson in fiva minuta,” he explained, and then scowled at a tall girl who faced a mirror in a guilty manner as her eyes computed the possible value of the newcomer’s gown. “Must I sit here like a fool?” the professor angrily demanded. His pupil opened her mouth. Elvina eagerly listened. But no sound escaped the lips of the other girl. She gazed into the mirror and mouthed and grimaced, and almost, though not quite, formed words. “Faster,” cried the teacher at the keyboard. The student’s lips moved like a praying mill; she clicked her teeth castanet fashion; and at last with a wild bang on the keyboard the voiceless aria ended. The maestro knitted his dyed eyebrows. “Vara fair, not presto assai. You sing without expression. You are too cold—what shall I call it?” A husky voice asked: “Shall I try it over again?” “Dio mio! girl, how dare you speak after singing such a difficult aria from Rossini’s Cinderella? Your vocal pores are open, you perspire with your lungs—pouf! You die of the inflammatus by, by”—he impatiently pulled at his large nose. “The Inflammatus by Rossini, you mean!” interposed Elvina. “How? No, no, ah! by pneumonia, that’s it.” And he bustled from the instrument. Throwing an old bearskin rug over his speechless singer, he led her to a chair, admonishing her: “Now perspire!” She coughed in a terrifying way while the maestro imperturbably explained his method to Elvina. He did not permit his pupils to open their mouths for a year, during which time he put them through a severe throat and lung drill. All songs were given in vocal miming, with due facial expression, and the ventriloquist was adduced as the highest type of masterly vocal control, for a ventriloquist can sing in his stomach without moving a muscle of his face. Think of Fred Stone and his Very Good Eddie. The Signor became eloquent. Had the young Miss Elvina—Corpo di Baccho! what a pretty name!—had she a little money for tuition? One thousand dollars. Dirt cheap. A second Patti she would become for the money. Sign a contract with him for ten years. Then the movies for a year so that her stage nervousness would wear off, then vaudeville, et puis donc—grand opera. A ravishing prospect. He rolled his eyes ecstatically as he took Elvina’s ten-dollar bill. She escaped. To her taste the method seemed a trifle too swift.

In another part of the town she found the atelier of Mme. Boche. She was about to enter the anteroom unannounced when she heard low moaning sounds, which presently increased in volume and intensity, then suddenly died away in a sickening style. It seemed as if some animal were undergoing vivisection, and Elvina, her sympathies aroused, pushed open the door without knocking. It was a strange sight that met her indignant gaze, a sight that set her wondering, and soon smiling. On a huge mattress, which occupied half the room, were a dozen girls in seaside bathing costume. They lay on their backs, and upon their diaphragms rested twenty-pound weights, and from their closed lips issued the moans made by their respiration. The Madame, a high-nosed old dame, stood by, rattan cane in hand, and in militarist accents gave her commands: “One, two, three—inhale! Hold breath! Shoulders—up! Relax! Down!” And the class went patiently through this ventral drill until completely fagged. After the order to arise a babel of chatter ensued as Elvina told the Madame of her aspirations and the amount of cash she possessed.

“Na! I have the only system for the breathing. My pupils know how to breathe, how to breathe, and, again—how to breathe. There is one necessary thing in singing, the breath. If my pupils can’t stand my system I send them forth.”

Elvina positively feared this martinet. Her pupils’ figures were lanky. She mildly inquired when they sang. “What, sing? Niemals, never, jammai, jamais de la leben! You heard them breathing? Did they breathe or no?” Then turning to her class she resumed: “Young ladies, attention! Fall down! Relax!” Elvina slipped away, muttering as she went: “Calisthenics, not art.” It had cost her another ten dollars.

After a hurried Automat luncheon she proceeded to a crosstown street, the address of which she had read in the newspapers. The window displayed this sign, “Professor Erasmus Brick, Voice Builder.” He was a burly gentleman, the Prof. His linen was not irreproachable, his forehead looked like a mansard roof, and his eyes were shrewd. She named her errand, confided her doubts, hinted at the poverty of her purse. He laughed, and his voice restored her courage, if not her confidence. “My dear Miss, cast your eye round this room and see if I have a piano, a looking-glass, a pulsometer, or any other foreign fiddle-faddle of those Signors or Fraus. I build the voice up into the perfect thing the good Lord intended it to be, and without any extry fixin’s or bricks and mortar. The job is simple if you know how. All this gabble about vocal registers and nasal emission makes me tired. I build up a voice on the word ‘Moo’; jest keep ’em right at that word till the old cow—so to speak—dies of the tune. While you sing I work this pocket-fan. I use it to fan away the breath as you sing ‘Moo.’ By this means the lungs are unobstructed and the voice grows of its free accord. My theory is that the breath kills the voice—Moo!” Elvina passed out, and in the hall a phonograph hoarsely sang: “Do, re, mi, fa, sol. Five dollars. Please put the cash on the mantelpiece.” “That’s a dollar a note,” she calculated. She paid, and her bank-roll became ominously slender.

She found Mlle. Pinson in her apartment, small, stuffy, crowded with rickety furniture, books, china, music, even a parrot. The lady was drinking chocolate. “V’là, Mamselle! I’ve purchased a frugal meal, is it not? I diet myself as carefully as in the days when I was leading soprano at the Grand Opera. Hélas! those miserable days when I was so happy. Oh, Paris! Now sing ‘la,’ Mamselle. No, no, louder, please. C’est bon. You must know that when you sing correctly the vibrations travel to the knee-caps. I test them and know exactly if the tone is formed naturally or not. My vibratory system is the only true one. Yes, twenty dollars will be enough for this time. You have a sweet voice, my dear, and I’ll make a great singer of you in five years.” Elvina faintly asked: “When do I begin on songs?” “What! Songs? Ah! those Americans, they are always in a hurry, what you call get rich in a week! My child, you can’t hurry art. Bonsoir, Mamselle! To-morrow at nine, precisely, and I’ll test your knee-caps. Take one of my pamphlets. Vibration, vibration, vibration!” The parrot opened its beak: “Vibration, vibration, vibration. I’m in for life, chérie. Take me out of jail, chérie.” Elvina sat in a Madison Avenue tram and read the booklet of Mlle. Mimi Pinson, entitled Hygiene for Voiceless Singers. Numerous rules and “Don’ts,” ending with, “Don’t marry. Husbands of opera-singers always collect their wives’ salaries. Vibrate when you breathe. You may achieve fame and happiness. Think blue! It is the color of hope. Vogue la galère!”

“This is becoming monotonous,” said Elvina aloud, and gritting her teeth she packed her duds and returned to her home town with only one dollar and twenty-five cents in her pocket. However, family affection, above all family flapjacks, restored her jarred nerves to their normal pitch. From time to time she sends me programmes of concerts in which she is described: “Our native song-bird, Elvina, Prima Donna Dissoluta.” As Esther Beautiful Queen (newly reorchestrated by Stravinsky) she made a “real hit.” She may have exaggerated a little in her confidences, but I can personally vouch for the heavy weights on pupils’ chests to promote breathlessness. There was advocated such a vocal system two or three decades ago in New York. Sing and grow voiceless! Basta!

XVI
ANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST PHASE

Anatole France is seventy-six years old, but his mind is still vigorous, if that word be not too brisk when applied to such a subtle, supple, undulating intelligence as his. He now writes prose glowing with patriotism. Like the late Remy de Gourmont he shed his cynic’s skin when war invaded his beloved land. And it was not the first time that he, a writer of humanitarian impulses, opened the door of his ivory tower and descended into the stormy arena; witness the Dreyfus case. However, it would be idle to deny that his best work is well behind him. Prefaces to letters to distinguished men and women he occasionally publishes, such as Sur la Voie Glorieuse, or Ce que disent nos morts; but the Anatole France of La Révolte des Anges seems to have vanished forever. In the vast whirlwind of European events his scepticism, irony, and pessimism have given way to pity and tenderness for human suffering. The son of the bookseller Thibaut may figure, some day, in a modern hagiography of those lay-saints who fought for a new spiritual freedom.

The subject-matter composing Sur la Voie Glorieuse is altogether patriotic and contains much that is striking. The cloven hoof of the original faun that lurks somewhere in this Frenchman’s temperament is shown in a passage wherein he groups the Christmas festival with other antique festivals and symbols of Adonis and Mithra. A pagan to the end. Possibly the best pages are devoted to a free translation from Herodotus, a dialogue between the potentate Xerxes and a Spartan slave. The moral rings clear. Of quite different material is fashioned The Revolt of the Angels. We cannot conscientiously recommend the fiction to elderly persons of either sex, though, no doubt, it is favorite reading of the “advanced” college girl. What would be vulgarity in another writer is turned to favor and prettiness by the wand of the Gallic enchanter. Violence, rapine, hissing irony, and Rabelaisian episodes make a feast for lovers of Anatolian literature. Those who have retained any old-fashioned prejudices concerning propriety—morality is out of the running—may expect to be shocked. Has he not said: “Man, seek not to know thyself! Man is not a reasoning animal.”

In this fable the deity that created us is in the new cosmology only a tribal god, who, since he deposed Lucifer in pitched battle, rules tyrannically. He keeps close watch on our mud-pie of a planet because he suspects that numerous angels disguised as men and women are fomenting a second angelic rebellion. With them are the socialists and anarchists, and this gives M. France an opportunity to score monarchical forms of government. The clerical order is lashed. He spares no one. He repeats his familiar axiom: “Les guerres sont toujours les affaires.” There are pages in which sensuality and sheer burlesque are mingled in a disquieting compound. The book is one of the most daring. In its essence it is a supreme revolt against all social systems that uphold slavery: industrial, militaristic, religious, political. The debasing Asiatic systems that still make captive the conscience of mankind are mercilessly attacked, and while the castigating hand is incased in velvet the shining steel is none the less deadly.

Constable, the English landscapist, said that a good thing can’t be done twice. Anatole France has demonstrated the contrary in his latest, let us hope not his last book, Le Petit Pierre, another series of exquisite notations of childhood. His delightful Livre de Mon Ami gave us glimpses of his early days. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in this memoir. The tenderness of M. France, and his power of summoning up the wonder and awe of our youth, may be seen in Abeille; the development of the lad is followed in Pierre Nozière. A portrait of the young Anatole reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth contradict possible weakness in the lower part of the face. It was in the eyes that the future of the child might have been read—they were lustrous, in shape beautiful, with a fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. Such eyes were possessed by the boy Charles Dickens. France has told us that he was a strange child, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St. Simon Stylites, and after that thrilling experience to write a history of France in fifty volumes! In Le Petit Pierre his memory for the important little events of a child’s existence is unusual; evidently nothing has been invented, all happened. Through the haze of the immemorial years there now and then sharply shines some significant incident, some old wives’ tales, a portrait of an elderly contemporary—like the Balzacian Uncle Hyacinthe or the incomparable evocation of the beloved servant Mélanie—a dog, like Caire, the truant parrot, the boy chimney-sweep, and the sweet smile of Pierre’s mother, who seems to be every one’s mother so admirably generalized is the type—what a magician is this writer! Told with naïveté and verve, we feel in every page of Le Petit Pierre the charm of personality.

In clarity Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John Henry Newman, and, while at one time clarity was a conventional quality of French prose, it is rarer to-day. Symbolism has supervened, if not to darken counsel, certainly to trouble verbal values. Never syncopated, moving at a moderate tempo, in transitions smooth, replete with sensitive rejections, crystalline in diction, a lover and a master of large, luminous words, the very marrow of the man, Anatole France is in his style. And what a model he should be for those wilful young writers who boast that lumpy, graceless paragraphs are better suited to their subjects than swift, clear, concise prose. It was not so long ago that one scribe positively glorified in his own dull style; he asserted that it was a truthful reflection of his drab themes. There is, indeed, such a thing as an apposite garbing, a verbal orchestration. The pellucid sentences of Mr. Howells, so free from the overblown, are happily wedded to his admirable character etching. Flaubert, master of ornate, or “numerous” prose, as well as cool, rhythmic prose, wrote Salammbô in a purple, splendid key, and Madame Bovary in the greyer tonalities of the province; yet nothing could be further removed from the style of either novel than Sentimental Education, which is urban and suffused with sober daylight. It was a favorite contention of de Gourmont that at his sovereign best Flaubert is to be found in Bouvard et Pécuchet, the style of which is sinewy, pregnant, powerful. The principal mistake of beginners is to believe that ornament is good style. In Anatole France matter and manner are perfectly welded.

Few writers swim so easily as he under their heavy burdens of erudition. His knowledge is precise, his range wide. He is a humanist. He knows many literatures. He loves learning for the sake of learning. He loves words, treasures them, fondles them, burnishes anew their meanings tarnished by custom. He seldom tarries in the half-way house of epigram. Over all, his interest in humanity sheds a tranquil glow. Without a marked feeling for the dramatic, nevertheless, he surprises mankind engaged in its minute daily acts; those he renders as candidly as snow in the sunshine; just as the old Dutch painters stir our “emotion of recognition” with a simple shaft of light passing through a half-open door, or upon an old wrinkled woman polishing her spectacles. He sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, and notes them with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artistic nature. He deals with ideas so vitally that they seem human. Yet his personages are never abstractions, nor do they serve as pallid allegories. They are all alive from Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano (Sur la Pierre Blanche); from his Penguins to his Angels. A dog, a cat, he depicts with the same love; his dog Riquet bids fair to endure in literature. France is an interpreter of life, not precisely after the manner of the novelist, but life as viewed through the temperament of a poet of extreme delicacy and one doubled by a tolerant philosopher.

This ultramodern thinker, who has outgrown the despotism of positivist dogma, has the soul of a chameleon. He loves, he understands, Christianity with a fervor and a knowledge that surprise, until we measure the depth of his affection for antique cultures. Further to confuse us, he exhibits sympathy with the Hebraic lore. He has rifled the Talmud for half-forgotten tales. He delights in juxtaposing the Greek sophist and the strenuous Paul. He contrasts Mary Magdalen repentant with a pampered Roman matron. He is familiar with the proceeds of science, particularly astronomy. With the scholastic speculations of the Renaissance, with the simple affirmations of mediæval piety, he is as conversant as with the destructive Pyrrhonism of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are his contradictory cultures, so numerous his angles, so avid of impressions is he, that we end in wholly admiring the exercise of a beneficent magic that can blend into a happy synthesis moral dissonances and harmonize such a bewildering moral preciosity. But there are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain. We suspect dupery. However, it is his humor that is the most potent of his solvents. This humor often transforms a doubtful battle into radiant victory. We see him, the protagonist of his own psychical comedy, dancing on a tight rope in the airiest fashion, deliciously capering in the metaphysical void, and, like a prestidigitator, bidding us doubt the very existence of his rope.

Proofs from life gay pagan Anatole does not demand. He has the hesitations of profound erudition. Possessing the gift of paradox, he rejoices in his philosophic indifferentism. Notwithstanding his famous phrase, “the mania of certitude,” Renan was ever pursued by the idea of an Absolute. He cried for proof. To Bertholet he wrote: “I am eager for mathematics.” To him numbers promised rigid reality. Not so, however, to M. France, who could have asked with Ibsen whether two added to two do not make five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne’s “What know I?” he opposes the injunction of Rabelais: “Do what thou wilt!” Of Plato he might have asked, “What is Truth?” and if Plato in turn would have posed the same question, Anatole could reply by handing him a copy of Jardin d’Epicure, that perfect breviary of Anatolian scepticism. In Socrates perhaps he would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude to Montaigne “concerning cats,” or quote Aristotle as to the form of hats. And then we spy him adorning the Wheel of Ixion with garlands. A wilful child of belles-lettres and philosophy, M. France always may be expected to utter the starting, lucent phrase.

He believes in the belief of God. By the gods of all times and climes he swears. His the cosmic soul. A man who infuses into his tales something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère’s Characters, and the Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavors of Racine and La Fontaine superadded, may be pardoned his polychromatic faiths. This chromatism in creeds, a trust in all or none, is rather diverting. But the classic world of thought shows several exemplars for M. France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. Nevertheless, there is a specific note of individuality, a roulade altogether Anatolian in the Parisian. No one but this accomplished sceptic could have devised The Opinions of Jerome Coignard, and his scheme for a Bureau of Vanity (Villiers de l’Isle Adam invented a machine for manufacturing glory). “Man is an animal with a musket,” declares Anatole. Here is a morsel for hypocrites: “Even virtue may be unduly praised. Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we must recognize that it is concupiscence which makes saints.” This sounds like William Blake done into choice French; Blake who has said that “the fool cannot enter the kingdom of heaven be he ever so pious”; that Blake who believed that the road to wisdom lies through the valley of excess.

Henry James has declared that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. According to this rubric, M. France is a many-sided artist. Philosopher as well, he plays with the appearances of life, lifting betimes the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of his spectators with the sight of Buddha’s shadow in some grim cavern beyond. He shows his Gallic tact in decorating the empty spaces of theory and the blank spots of reality. A follower of Kant, in his denial of the objective, we cannot imagine him approving of that sage’s admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. Yet he yearns for faith. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He excels in exposing the splendor of the simple soul, though faith has not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. At the portals of Paradise he lingers, or stoops to pick a rare and richly colored feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty. But he hears not the whirring of the wings whence it has fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France betrays a nuance of Petronius and a touch of St. Francis. Because of this spiritual dislocation—or dare I say bilocation?—he is in art, letters, and life a consummate flowering of the dilettante.

XVII
A MASQUE OF MUSIC

Here is an evocation of a projected Masque of Music. Not a Miltonic hymn in praise of the melting art, nor yet an Alexander’s Feast celebrating its power, after the manner of John Dryden, but a grandiose vision which would embrace the legend of sound from its unorganized beginnings to the to-morrow of the ultimate Kalmuck. It is written with such men as Reinhardt, David Belasco, Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky, Michel Fokine, and Richard Ordynski in view. They, or artists of their calibre, might make the idea viable in the theatre. What music would best envelope my Masque is a question answered by the composers whose names are figuratively deployed. Or what gifted American composers might “set” the Masque in a symphonic poem! Where this kaleidoscope would be produced and how many evenings it might need for complete interpretation are puzzles I do not seek now to solve; suffice to add, that I have for the sake of dramatic unity placed myself at the centre and circumference of this prose recital, as sensations are veritable hallucinations for me. In a performance the spectators would occupy the same relative position.... The curtains of Time and Space drew apart. I stood on the cliff of the World, saw and heard the travailing and groaning of light and sound in the epochal and reverberating void. A pedal-bass, a diapasonic tone that came from the bowels of the firmament, struck fear to my heart; this tone was of such magnitude as might be overheard by the gods. No mortal ear could have held it without cracking. This gigantic flood, this cataclysmic roar, filled every pore of my body. It blew me about as a blade of grass is blown in a boreal blast, yet I sensed the pitch. Inchoate nature, the unrestrained cry of the rocks and their buried secrets—crushed aspirations, and the hidden sorrows of mineral, plants, and animals became vocal. It was the voice of the monstrous abortions of nature, the groan of incomplete or transitional types, born for a moment and shattered forever. All God’s mud made moan for recognition.

It was night. The strong fair sky of the South was sown with dartings of silver and starry dust. I walked under the great windbowl with its few balancing clouds and listened to the whirrings of the infinite. I knew that I was close to the core of existence, and though sound was less vibratile than light, sound touched earth, embraced it, and was content with its eld and homely face. Light, a mischievous Loge; Sound, the All-Mother Erda. I walked on. My way seemed clearer....

Reaching a plain, fabulous and mighty, I came upon a Sphinx, half-buried in sand and looming in the starlight. As I watched her face I felt that the tone had ceased to surround me. The dawn filtered through the dark and there were stirrings abroad in the air. From afar sounded a fluttering of thin tones. As the sun shone rosy on the vast stone, like a clear-colored wind came back the tone from the sea. And in the music-filled air I fell on my knees and worshipped the Sphinx, for music is a window through which we gaze upon eternity. Then followed a strange musical rout of the nations; I saw defile before me Silence, “eldest of all things”; Brahma’s consort, Saraswati, fingered her Vina, and Siva and his hideous mate, Devi, sometimes called Durga; and the brazen heavens were like a typhoon that showered appalling evils upon mankind. All the gods of Egypt and Assyria, dog-faced, moon-breasted, and menacing, passed playing upon dreams, making choric music, black and fuliginous. The sacred Ibis stalked in the silvery footsteps of the Houris; the Graces held hands. Phœbus Apollo appeared. His face was as a shining shield. He improvised upon a many-stringed lyre of tortoise-shell, and his music was shimmering and symphonious. Hermes and his Syrinx wooed the shy Euterpe; the maidens went in woven paces, a medley of masques flamed by, and the great god Pan breathed into his pipes.

I saw Bacchus pursued by ravening Mænads, saw Lamia and her ophidian flute, as Orpheus sorrowfully sped, searching his Eurydice. Neptune blew his wreathéd horn. The Tritons gambolled in the waves. Cybele changed her cymbals. And with his music Amphion summoned rocks to Thebes. Jepthah danced to her death before the Ark of the Covenant, praising the Lord God of Israel. Unabashed behind her leered the rhythmic Herodias, while were heard the praiseful songs of Deborah and Barak as St. Cæcilia smote the keyboard. With her timbrel Miriam sang hymns of triumph. Before the Persian Satrap on his purple litter Abyssinian girls, their little breasts carolling to the sky, alluringly swayed; the air was crowded by the crisp tinklings of tiny bells at wrist and ankles as the Kabaros drummed; and hard by in the brake brown nymphs moved in languorous rhythms, droning hoarse sacrificial chants. The colossus Memnon hymned, priests of Baal screamed as they lacerated themselves with knives, Druid priestesses crooned sybillic incantations. And over this pageant of Woman and Music the proud sun of old Egypt scattered splendid burning rays.

From distant strands and hillsides came the noise of unholy instruments with names, sweet-sounding, and clashing. Nofres from the Nile, Ravanastrons of Ceylon, Javanese gongs, Chinese Pavilions, Tambourahs, Sackbuts, Shawms, Psalteries, Dulcimers, Salpinxes, Keras, Timbrels, Sistra, Crotala, double flutes, twenty-two stringed harps, Kerrenas, the Indian flute called Yo, and the quaint Yamato-Koto. Followed fast the Biwa, the Gekkin, and its cousin the Genkwan; the Ku, named after a horrid god; the Shunga and its cluttering strings, the Samasien, the Kokyu, the Vamato Fuye—which breathed moon-eyed melodies—the Hichi-Riki, and the Shaku-Hachi. The Sho was mouthed by slant-haired yellow boys, while the sharp roll of drums covered with goatskins never ceased. From this bedlam there occasionally emerged a splinter of tune like a plank thrown up by the sea. No melody could I discern, though I grasped its beginnings. Double flutes gave me the modes: Dorian, Phrygian, Æolian, Lydian, Ionian; after Sappho and her Mixo-Lydian mode I longed for a modern accord.

The choir went whirling on with Citharas, Rebecs, Citoles, Domras, Goules, Serpents, Crwths, Pentachords, Rebabs, Pantalons, Conches, Flageolets made of Pelican bones, Tams-tams, Carillons, Xylophones, Crescents of beating bells, Mandoras, Whistling Vases of clay, Zampognas, Zithers, Bugles, Octochords, Naccaras or Turkish Castanets, and Quinternas. I heard blare the two hundred thousand curved trumpets which Solomon had made for his Temple, and the forty thousand which accompanied the Psalms of David. Jubal played his Magrephá. Pythagoras came with his Monochord. To the music of the Spheres Plato listened. The priests of Joshua blew seven times upon Shofars, or rams-horns. Then fell the walls of Jericho. To this came a challenging blast from the terrible horn of Roland of Roncesvalles. The air had the resonance of hell as the Guatemalan Indians worshipped their Black Christ upon the Plaza; and naked Ishtar, Daughter of Sin, stood shivering before the Seventh Gate. A great silence ensued. I saw a green star drop over Judea and thought music itself were slain. The pilgrims with their Jew’s-harps dispersed into sorrowful groups. Blackness usurped the sonorous sun. There was no music in all the universe, and this tonal eclipse lasted long. From remote coasts came faint cries: The Great God Pan is dead! They have slain Our Lord and we know not where to find Him....

I heard as if in a magic mirror the submerged music of Dufay, Okeghem, Josquin Deprès, Orlando di Lasso, Goudimel, and Luther; the cathedral tones of Palestrina, the frozen sweetness of Arezzo, Frescobaldi, Monteverde, Carissimi, Tartini, Corelli, Scarlatti, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Lulli, Rameau, Couperin, Buxtehude, Sweelinck, Byrd, Gibbons, Purcell, and the Bach; with their Lutes, Monochords, Virginals, Harpsichords, Clavicytherums, Clavichords, Cembalos, Spinets, Theorbos, Organs, and Pianofortes, and accompanying them an army, vast, formidable, of the immemorial virtuosi, singers, castrati, the night-moths and midgets of music. Like wraiths they waved desperate ineffectual hands and made sad mimickings of their dead and dusty triumphs.... Again I heard the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, ever new, yet old. In its weaving sonant patterns were the detonations of the primeval world I had just left; also something disquieting and feminine. But the Man predominates in Bach, subtle, nervous, magnetic as he is in this Fantasia.

A mincing, courtly old woman bows low. It is Joseph Haydn, and there is sprightly malice in his music. The glorious periwigged giant of London conducts a chorus of a million. The hailstones of Handel pelt the pate of the Sphinx. “A man!” I cried, as the very heavens stormed out their cadenced hallelujahs. A divine youth approaches. His mien is excellent, and his voice of rare sweetness. His band discourses ravishing music. The primeval tone is there, but feminized, graceful; troupes of painted stage players in fallals and furbelows present pictures of rakes, rustic maidens, and fantastics. An orchestra minces as Mozart disappears. Behold, the great one approaches, and beneath his Jovian tread the earth trembles! Beethoven, the sublime peasant, the conqueror, the god! All that has gone before, all that is to be, is globed in his symphonies, was divined by this seer. A man, the first since Handel! And the eagles triumphantly jostle the scarred face of the Sphinx. Von Weber prances by on his gayly caparisoned arpeggios, Meyerbeer and Verdi follow; all three footlight folk. Schubert, a panpipe through which the wind discourses exquisite melodies; Gluck, whose lyre is stringed Greek fashion, but bedecked with Parisian gauds and ribbons; Mendelssohn, a charming, girlish echo of Bach; Chopin and Schumann, romantic wrestlers with their muted dreams, strugglers against ineffable madness and sorely stricken at the end; Berlioz, a primitive Roc, half-bird, half-human, also a Minotaur who dragged to his Crete all the music of the Masters; and the Turk of the keyboard, Franz Liszt, with Cymbalom, Czardas, and crazy Kalamaïkas pass. But suddenly I noted a shriller tonal accent, the accent of a sun that has lost its sex, a sun that is stricken with moon-sickness. A hybrid appears, followed by a cohort of players. A huge orchestra plays straightway; the Sphinx wears a sinister smile....

Then I saw the tone-color of each instrument. Some malign enchanter had diverted from their natural uses every member of the tonal army. I saw the strings in rainbow hues, red trumpets, blue flutes, green oboes, purple clarinets, horns glorious golden yellow, scarlet trombones, dark-brown bassoons, carmilion ophecleides, as the drums punctured space with ebon crepitations. That the triangle always had been silver I never questioned, but this new chromatic blaze, these novel tintings of tone—what did they portend? Was it a symbol of the further degradation and effeminization of music? Was art become as the sigh of a woman? A vain, selfish goddess was about to be placed on high and worshipped; soon the rustling of silk would betray her sex. Released from the wise bonds imposed upon her by Mother Church, music is now a parasite of the emotions, a modern Circe whose “feet take hold on hell,” whose wand enchants men into listening swine. Gigantic as antediluvian ferns, as evil-smelling and as dangerous, music in the hands of this magician is dowered with ambiguous attitudes, with anonymous gestures, is color become sound, sensuality masking as chaste beauty. This Klingsor evirates, effeminates, disintegrates. He is the spirit who denies all things natural, and his revengeful theatric music goes about in the guise of a woman. She hastens its end, its spiritual suicide is at hand. I lifted my eyes. Surely I recognized that short, dominating figure conducting the orchestra. Was it the tragic comedian, Richard Wagner? Were those his mocking, ardent eyes fading in the morbid mist?

A fat, cowled monk stealthily marches after him. He shades his eyes from the fierce rays of the Wagnerian sun; to him more grateful are moon-rays and the reflected light of lonely forest pools. He is the Arch-Hypocrite of Tone, and he speaks in divers tongues. Brahms it is and he wears the mask of a musical masquerader. Then swirled by a band of gypsies, with guitars, castanets, and led by Bizet. Spain seemed familiar land, Spain with the odors of the boudoir. Gounod and Faust go simpering on tiptoe; a disorderly mass of Cossacks stampeded them, Tchaikovsky at their head. They yelled as they banged upon resounding Svirelis, Balalaikas, and Kobzas, dancing the Ziganka all the while. And as a still more horrible uproar was heard I became suddenly conscious of a change on the face of the Sphinx; streaked with grey it seemed to be crumbling. As the clatter increased I diverted my regard from the massive stone and beheld an orgiastic mob of men and women howling and playing upon instruments of fulgurating colors and vile shapes. Their skins were white, their hair yellow, their eyes of victorious blue.

“Nietzsche’s Blond Barbarians, the Apes of Wagner!” I exclaimed, and I felt the ground giving away. The naked music, pulsatile and opium-charged, turned hysterical as Zarathustra-Strauss waved on his myrmidons with frenzied philosophical motions. Music was become vertiginous, a mad vortex wherein whirled mad atoms madly embracing. Dancing, the dissonant corybantes of the Dionysiac evangel scarce touched earth, thus outvying the bacchantes. The roar of enemy cannon pursued them as the last Superman yielded his ghost to the Time-Spirit....

Then there gravely marched a group of men of cold cerebral expression. They carried steel hammers with which they beat upon their anvils the whole-tone scale. Near by hovered Arnold Schoenberg with Claude Debussy, but they put their fingers into their pained ears as the Neo-Scythians, Scriabine, Stravinsky, Ornstein and Prokofieff hammered with excruciating dynamics hell itself into icy enharmonic splinters. With thunderous peals of ironic laughter the Sphinx sank into the sand, yawning as it vanished and mumbling: “No longer are there dissonances. Nothing is true. All is permitted!” By a mighty effort to escape the nipping arctic air and the harsh grindings of impending icebergs, I fled.

And that is my Masque of Music.

PART II
IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS

“Idols and ambergris and rare inlays....”

—Ezra Pound.

I
THE SUPREME SIN

“Et Diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est.”

—From the Litany of the Damnéd Saints.

“Shall no new sin be born for men’s trouble?”