TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
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BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
UNICORNS. 12mo, net, $1.75
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS. 12mo, net, $1.50
NEW COSMOPOLIS. 12mo, net, $1.50
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE. 12mo, net, $2.00
FRANZ LISZT. Illustrated. 12mo, net, $2.00
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST. 12mo, net, $1.50
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN. 12mo, net, $1.50
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS. 12mo, net, $1.50
OVERTONES: A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS. 12mo, net, $1.50
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC. 12mo, net, $1.50
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC. With Portrait. 12mo, net, $2.00
VISIONARIES. 12mo, net, $1.50
MELOMANIACS. 12mo, net, $1.50
UNICORNS
UNICORNS
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
“I would write on the lintels
of the door-post, ‘Whim.’”
—Emerson
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published September, 1917
Copyright, 1906, by THE NEW YORK HERALD COMPANY
Copyright, 1907, by THE RIDGEWAY COMPANY
Copyright, 1909, 1911, 1916, 1917, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, by THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
Copyright, 1915, 1916, by PUCK PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1917, by NORTH AMERICAN
Copyright, 1917, by THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL
THIS BOOK
OF SPLEEN AND GOSSIP IS INSCRIBED
TO MY FRIEND
EDWARD ZIEGLER
“Come! let us lay a crazy lance in rest
And tilt at windmills under a wild sky.”
—John Galsworthy.
“He is a fribble, a sonsy faddle, whose conceits veer with the breeze like a creaking weather-vane. As the sterile moon hath her librations, so must he boast of his oscillations, thinking them eternal verities. A very cockatoo in his perched-up vanity and prodigious clatter....”
[From “The Velvet Cactus.” Anonymous. Printed at the Sign of the Cat and Cameo, Threadneedle Street, London. A.D. 1723. Rare.]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
In Praise of Unicorns
An American Composer: The Passing of Edward MacDowell
Remy de Gourmont: His Ideas. The Colour of His Mind
Artzibashef
A Note on Henry James
George Sand
The Great American Novel
The Case of Paul Cézanne
Brahmsody
The Opinions of J.-K. Huysmans
Style and Rhythm in English Prose
The Queerest Yarn in the World
On Rereading Mallock
The Lost Master
The Grand Manner in Pianoforte Playing
James Joyce
Creative Involution
Four Dimensional Vistas
O. W.
A Synthesis of the Seven Arts
The Classic Chopin
Little Mirrors of Sincerity
The Reformation of George Moore
Pillowland
Cross-Currents in Modern French Literature
More About Richard Wagner
My First Musical Adventure
Violinists Now and Yesteryear
Riding the Whirlwind
Prayers for the Living
UNICORNS
UNICORNS
CHAPTER I
IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS
"The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:
The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town." ...
In the golden book of wit and wisdom, Through the Looking-Glass, the Unicorn rather disdainfully remarks that he had believed children to be fabulous monsters. Alice smilingly retorts: "Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!" "Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?" "Yes, if you like," said Alice. No such ambiguous bargains are needed to demonstrate the existence of Unicorns. That is, not for imaginative people. A mythical monster, a heraldic animal, he figures in the dictionary as the Monoceros, habitat, India; and he is the biblical Urus, sporting one horn, a goat beard and a lion's tail. He may be all these things for practical persons; no man is a genius to his wife. But maugre that he is something more for dreamers of dreams; though not the Hippogriff, with its liberating wings, volplaning through the Fourth Dimension of Space; nor yet is he tender Undine, spirit of fountains, of whom the Unicorn asked: "By the waters of what valley has jealous mankind hidden the source of your secrets?" (Cousin german to the Centaur of Maurice de Guérin, he can speak in like cadence.)
Alice with her "dreaming eyes of wonder" was, after the manner of little girls, somewhat pragmatic. She believed in Unicorns only when she saw one. Yet we must believe without such proof. Has not the Book of Job put this question: "Canst thou bind the Unicorn with his band in the furrow?" As if a harnessed Unicorn would be credible. We prefer placing the charming monster, with the prancing tiny hoofs of ivory (surely Chopin set him to musical notation in his capricious second Etude in F; Chopin who, if man were soulless, would have endowed him with one) in the same category as the Chimera of "The Temptation of St. Antony," which thus taunted the Sphinx: "I am light and joyous! I offer to the eyes of men dazzling perspectives with Paradise in the clouds above.... I seek for new perfumes, for vaster flowers, for pleasures never felt before...."
With Unicorns we feel the nostalgia of the infinite, the sorcery of dolls, the salt of sex, the vertigo of them that skirt the edge of perilous ravines, or straddle the rim of finer issues. He dwells in equivocal twilights; and he can stare the sun out of countenance. The enchanting Unicorn boasts no favoured zone. He runs around the globe. He is of all ages and climes. He knows that fantastic land of Gautier, which contains all the divine lost landscapes ever painted, and whose inhabitants are the lovely figures created by art in granite, marble, or wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Betimes he flashes by the nymph in the brake, and dazzled, she sighs with desire. Mallarmé set him to cryptic harmonies, and placed him in a dim rich forest (though he called him a faun; a faun in retorsion). Like the apocryphal Sadhuzag in Flaubert's cosmical drama of dreams, which bore seventy-four hollow antlers from which issued music of ineffable sweetness, our Unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets. When angered he echoes the Seven Thunders of the Apocalypse, and we hear of desperate rumours of fire, flood, and disaster. And he haunts those ivory gates of sleep whence come ineffable dreams to mortals.
He has always fought with the Lion for the crown, and he is always defeated, but invariably claims the victory. The crown is Art, and the Lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by its glitter, not the symbol. The Unicorn, an idealist, divines the inner meaning of this precious fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher's stone, and the most brilliant jewel in this much-contested crown. Eternal is the conflict of the Real and the Ideal; Aristotle and Plato; Alice and the Unicorn; the practical and the poetic; butterflies and geese; and rare roast-beef versus the impossible blue rose. And neither the Lion nor the Unicorn has yet fought the battle decisive. Perhaps the day may come when, weariness invading their very bones, they may realise that they are as different sides of the same coveted shield; matter and spirit, the multitude and the individual. Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish the tyrannies of superannuated superstitions, and give the people vision, without which they perish. The divine rights of humanity, no longer of kingly cabbages.
The dusk of the future is washed with the silver of hope. The Lion and the Unicorn in single yoke. Strength and Beauty should represent the fusion of the Ideal and the Real. There should be no anarchy, no socialism, no Brotherhood or Sisterhood of mankind, just the millennium of sense and sentiment. What title shall we give that far-away time, that longed-for Utopia? With Alice and the Faun we forget names, so let us follow her method when in doubt, and exclaim: "Here then! Here then!" Morose and disillusioned souls may cry aloud: "Ah! to see behind us no longer, on the Lake of Eternity, the implacable Wake of Time!" nevertheless, we must believe in the reality of our Unicorn. He is Pan. He is Puck. He is Shelley. He is Ariel. He is Whim. He is Irony. And he can boast with Emerson:
"I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar's hand and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."
CHAPTER II
AN AMERICAN COMPOSER
THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL
Whom the gods love——!
Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica may recall the last movement, in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief of MacDowell that nothing is more sublimely awful than "to heighten the darkness of tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph." This he accomplished in his first sonata, and fate has ironically transposed to the life of its composer the cruel and tragic drama of his own music. Despite occasional days brightened by a flitting hope, the passing of Edward MacDowell has begun. He is no longer an earth-dweller. His body is here, but his brain elsewhere. Not mad, not melancholy, not sunken in the stupor of indifference, his mind is translated to a region where serenity, even happiness, dwells. It is doubtless the temporary arrest of the dread mental malady before it plunges its victims into darkness. Luckily, with the advent of that last phase, the body will also succumb, and the most poetic composer of music in America be for us but a fragrant memory.
Irony is a much-abused word, yet does it not seem the very summit of pitiless irony for a man of MacDowell's musical and intellectual equipment and physical health to be stricken down at the moment when, after the hard study of twenty-five years, he has, as the expression goes, found himself? And the gods were good to him—too good.
At his cradle poetry and music presided. He was a born tone-poet. He had also the painter's eye and the interior vision of the seer. A mystic and a realist. The practical side of his nature was shown by his easy grasp of the technics of pianoforte-playing. He had a large, muscular hand, with a formidable grip on the keyboard. Much has been said of the idealist MacDowell, but this young man, who had in his veins Scotch, Irish, and English blood, loved athletic sports; loved, like Hazlitt, a fast and furious boxing-match. The call of his soul won him for music and poetry. Otherwise he could have been a sea-captain, a soldier, or an explorer in far-away countries. He had the physique; he had the big, manly spirit. We are grateful, selfishly grateful, considering his life's tragedy, that he became a composer.
Here, again, in all this abounding vitality, the irony of the skies is manifest. Never a dissipated man, without a touch of the improvidence we ascribe to genius, a practical moralist—rare in any social condition—moderate in his tastes, though not a Puritan, he nevertheless has been mowed down by the ruthless reaper of souls as if his were negligible clay. But he was reckless of the most precious part of him, his brain. He killed that organ by overwork. Not for gain—the money-getting ideal and this man were widely asunder—but for the love of teaching, for the love of sharing with others the treasures in his overflowing storehouse, and primarily for the love of music. He, American as he was—it is sad to speak of him in the past tense—and in these piping days of the pursuit of the gold piece, held steadfast to his art. He attempted to do what others have failed in, he attempted to lead, here in our huge, noisy city, antipathetic to æsthetic creation, the double existence of a composer and a pedagogue. He burned away the delicate neurons of the cortical cells, and to-day he cannot say "pianoforte" without a trial. He suffers from aphasia, and locomotor ataxia has begun to manifest itself. It would be tragedy in the household of any man; it is doubly so in the case of Edward MacDowell.
He has just passed forty-five years and there are to his credit some sixty works, about one hundred and thirty-two compositions in all. These include essays in every form, except music-drama—symphonic and lyric, concertos and sonatas for piano, little piano pieces of delicate workmanship, charged with poetic meanings, suites for orchestra and a romance for violoncello, with orchestral accompaniment. As a boy of fifteen MacDowell went to the Paris Conservatoire, there entering the piano classes of Marmontel. It was in 1876. Two years later I saw him at the same institution and later in comparing notes we discovered that we had both attended a concert at the Trocadero, wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant brother of Anton, played the B flat minor concerto of a youthful and unknown composer, Peter Illyitch Tschaikovsky by name. This same concerto had been introduced to America in 1876 by Hans von Bülow, to whom it is dedicated. Rubinstein's playing took hold of young MacDowell's imagination. He saw there was no chance of mastering such a torrential style in Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany. He had enjoyed lessons from Teresa Carreño, but the beautiful Venezuelan was not then the virtuosa of to-day.
So MacDowell, who was accompanied by his mother, a sage woman and deeply in sympathy with her son's aims, went to Frankfort, where he had the benefit of Karl Heymann's tuition. He was the only pianist I ever heard who could be compared to our Rafael Joseffy. But his influences, while marked in the development of his American pupil, did not weaken MacDowell's individuality. Studies in composition under Joachim Raff followed, and then he journeyed to Weimar for his baptism of fire at the hands of Liszt. That genial Prospero had broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted himself to the culture of youthful genius and his own compositions. He was pleased by the force, the surety, the brilliancy and the poetic qualities of MacDowell's playing, and he laughingly warned Eugen d'Albert to look to his laurels. But music was in the very bones of MacDowell, and a purely virtuoso career had no attraction for him. He married in 1884 Marian Nevins, of New York, herself a pianist and a devoted propagandist of his music. The pair settled in Wiesbaden, and it was the happiest period of MacDowell's career. He taught; he played as "guest" in various German cities; above all, he composed. His entire evolution is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic monograph. It was in Wiesbaden that he laid the foundation of his solid technique as a composer.
I once asked him during one of our meetings how he had summoned the courage to leave such congenial surroundings. In that half-smiling, half-shy way of his, so full of charm and naïveté, he told me his house had burned down and he had resolved to return home and make enough money to build another. He came to America in 1888 and found himself, if not famous, at least well known. To Frank van der Stucken belongs the glory of having launched the young composer, and so long ago as 1886 in the old Chickering Hall. Some would like to point to the fact that America was MacDowell's artistic undoing, but the truth is against them. As a matter of musical history he accomplished his best work in the United States, principally on his farm at Peterboro, N. H.—hardly, one would imagine, artistic soil for such a dreamer in tones. But life has a way of contradicting our theories. Teaching, I have learned, was not pursued to excess by MacDowell, who had settled in Boston. Yet I wish there were sumptuary legislation for such cases. Why should an artist like MacDowell have been forced into the shafts of dull routine? It is the larger selfishness, all this, but I cling to it. MacDowell belonged to the public. Joseffy belongs to the public. They doubtless did and do much good as teachers, but the public is the loser. Besides, if MacDowell, who was a virtuoso had confined himself to recitals he might not——
Alas! all this is bootless imagining. He launched himself with his usual unselfishness into the advancement of his scholars, and when in 1896 he was called to the chair of music at Columbia the remaining seven years of his incumbency he gave up absolutely to his classes. A sabbatical year intervened. He went to Switzerland for a rest. Then he made a tour of the West, a triumphal tour; and later followed the regrettable difference with Columbia. He resigned in 1904, and I doubt if he had had a happy day since—that is, until the wave of forgetfulness came over him and blotted out all recollections.
As a pianist I may only quote what Rafael Joseffy once said to me after a performance of the MacDowell D minor concerto by its composer: "What's the use of a poor pianist trying to compete with a fellow who writes his own music and then plays it the way MacDowell does?" It was said jestingly, but, as usual, when Joseffy opens his mouth there is a grain of wisdom in the speech. MacDowell's French training showed in his "pianism" in the velocity, clarity, and pearly quality of his scales and trills. He had the elegance of the salon player; he knew the traditions. But he was modern, German and Slavic in his combined musical interpretation and fiery attack. His tone was large; at times it was brutal. This pianist did not shine in a small hall. He needed space, as do his later compositions. There was something both noble and elemental in the performance of his own sonatas. At his instrument his air of preoccupation, his fine poetic head, the lines of which were admirably salient on the concert stage, and his passion in execution were notable details in the harmonious picture. Like Liszt, MacDowell and his Steinway were as the rider and his steed. They seemed inseparable. Under the batons of Nikisch, Gericke, Paur, and Seidl we heard him, and for once at least the critics were unanimous.
When I first studied the MacDowell music I called the composer "a belated Romantic." A Romantic he is by temperament, while his training under Raff further accentuated that tendency. It is a dangerous matter to make predictions of a contemporary composer, yet a danger critically courted in these times of rapid-fire judgments. I have been a sinner myself, and am still unregenerate, for if it be sinful to judge hastily in the affirmative, by the same token it is quite as grave an error to judge hastily in the negative. So I shall dare the possible contempt of the succeeding critical generation, which I expect—and hope—will not calmly reverse our dearest predictions, and range myself on the side of MacDowell. And with this reservation; I called him the most poetic composer of America. He would be a poetic composer in any land; yet it seems to me that his greatest, because his most individual, work is to be found in his four piano sonatas. I am always subdued by the charm of his songs; but he did not find his fullest expression in his lyrics.
The words seemed to hamper the bold wing strokes of his inspiration. He did not go far enough in his orchestral work to warrant our saying: "Here is something new!" He shows the influence of Wagner slightly, of Grieg, of Raff, of Liszt, in his first Orchestral Suite, his Hamlet and Ophelia, Launcelot and Elaine; The Saracens and Lovely Alda, the Indian Suite, and in the two concertos. The form is still struggling to emerge from the bonds of the Romantics—of classic influence there is little trace. But the general effect is fragmentary. It is not the real MacDowell, notwithstanding the mastery of technical material, the genuine feeling for orchestral colour, which is natural, not studied. There are poetic moods—MacDowell is always a poet—yet no path-breaker. Indeed, he seemed as if hesitating. I remember how we discussed Brahms, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. The former he admired as a master builder; the latter piqued his curiosity tremendously, particularly Also Sprach Zarathustra. I think that Tschaikovsky made the deepest appeal, though he said that the Russian's music sounded better than it was. Grieg he admired, but Grieg could never have drawn the long musical line we find in the MacDowell sonatas.
The fate of intermediate types is inevitable. Music is an art of specialisation: the Wagner music-drama, Chopin piano music, Schubert songs, Beethoven symphony, Liszt symphonic poems, and Richard Strauss tone-poems, all these are unique. MacDowell has invented many lovely melodies. That the Indian duet for orchestra, the Woodland Sketches, New England Idyls, the Sea Pieces—To the Sea is a wonderful transcription of the mystery, and the salt and savour of the ocean—will have a long life, but not as long as the piano sonatas. By them he will stand or fall. MacDowell never goes chromatically mad on his harmonic tripod, nor does he tear passion to tatters in his search of the dramatic. If he recalls any English poet it is Keats, and like Keats he is simple and sensuous in his imagery, and a lover of true romance; not the sham ecstasies of mock mediæval romance, but that deep and tender sentiment which we encounter in the poetry of Keats—in the magic of a moon half veiled by flying clouds; in the mystery and scent of old and tangled gardens. I should call MacDowell a landscape-painter had I not heard his sonata music. Those sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse, and Keltic, with their broad, coloured narrative, ballad-like tone, their heroic and chivalric accents, epic passion, and feminine tenderness. The psychology is simple if you set this music against that of Strauss, of Loeffler, or of Debussy.
But it is noble, noble as the soul of the man who conceived it. Elastic in form, orchestral in idea, these sonatas—which are looser spun in the web than Liszt's—will keep alive the name of MacDowell. This statement must not be considered as evidence that I fail to enjoy his other work. I do enjoy much of it, especially the Indian Orchestral Suite; but the sonatas stir the blood, above all the imagination. When the Tragica appeared I did not dream of three such successors. Now I like best the Keltic, with its dark magic and its tales of Deirdré and the "great Cuchullin." This fourth sonata is as Keltic as the combined poetic forces of the neo-Celtic renascence in Ireland.
I believe MacDowell, when so sorely stricken, was at the parting of the ways. He spoke vaguely to me of studies for new symphonic works, presumably in the symphonic-poem form of Liszt. He would have always remained the poet, and perhaps have pushed to newer scenes, but, like Schumann, Donizetti, Smetana and Hugo Wolf, his brain gave way under the strain of intense study. The composition of music involves and taxes all the higher cerebral centres.
The privilege was accorded me of visiting the sick man at his hotel several weeks ago, and I am glad I saw him, for his appearance dissipated the painful impression I had conjured up. Our interview, brief as it was, became the reverse of morbid or unpleasant before it terminated. With his mental disintegration sunny youth has returned to the composer. In snowy white, he looks not more than twenty-five years old, until you note the grey in his thick, rebellious locks. There is still gold in his moustache and his eyes are luminously blue. His expression suggests a spirit purged of all grossness waiting for the summons. He smiles, but not as a madman; he talks hesitatingly, but never babbles. There is continuity in his ideas for minutes. Sometimes the word fits the idea; oftener he uses one foreign to his meaning. His wife, of whose devotion, almost poignant in its earnestness, it would be too sad to dwell upon, is his faithful interpreter. He moves with difficulty. He plays dominoes, but seldom goes to the keyboard. He reads slowly and, like the unfortunate Friedrich Nietzsche, he rereads one page many times. I could not help recalling what Mrs. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche told me in Weimar of her brother. One day, noticing that she silently wept, the poet-philosopher exclaimed:
"But why do you weep, little sister? Are we not very happy?"
MacDowell is very happy and his wife is braver than Nietzsche's sister. One fragment of his conversation I recall. With glowing countenance he spoke of the thunderbolt in his wonderfully realistic piano poem, The Eagle. There had been a lightning-storm during the afternoon. Then he told me how he had found water by means of the hazel wand on his New Hampshire farm—a real happening. As I went away I could not help remembering that the final words I should ever hear uttered by this friend were of bright fire and running water and dream-music.
[The above appeared in the New York Herald, June 24, 1906, and is reprinted by request. Edward MacDowell died January 23, 1908.]
CHAPTER III
REMY DE GOURMONT
HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND
"Je dis ce que je pense"—R. de G.
I
Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar yellow cover a new book, with card enclosed from "Remy de Gourmont, 71, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris." Sometimes I received as many as two in a year. But they always found me eager and grateful, did those precious little volumes bearing the imprint of the Mercure de France, with whose history the name of De Gourmont is so happily linked. And there were post-cards too in his delicate handwriting on which were traced sense and sentiment; yes, this man of genius possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality. His personal charm transpired in a friendly salutation hastily pencilled. He played exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument, and knew the value of time and space. So his post-cards are souvenirs of his courtesy, and it was through one, which unexpectedly fell from the sky in 1897, I began my friendship with this distinguished French critic. His sudden death in 1915 at Paris (he was born 1858), caused by apoplexy, was the heroic ending of a man of letters. Like Flaubert he was stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no more fitting end for a valiant soldier of literature. He was a moral hero and the victim of his prolonged technical heroism.
De Gourmont was incomparable. Thought, not action, was his chosen sphere, but ranging up and down the vague and vast territory of ideas he encountered countless cerebral adventures; the most dangerous of all. An aristocrat born, he was, nevertheless, a convinced democrat. The latch was always lifted on the front door of his ivory tower. He did live in a certain sense a cloistered existence, a Benedictine of arts and letters; but he was not, as has been said, a sour hermit nursing morose fancies in solitude. De Gourmont, true pagan, enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had, despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean soul. But of a complexity. He never sympathised with the disproportionate fuss raised by the metaphysicians about Instinct and Intelligence, yet his own magnificent cerebral apparatus was a battle-field over which swept the opposing hosts of Instinct and Intelligence, and in a half-hundred volumes the history of this conflict is faithfully set down. As personal as Maurice Barrès, without his egoism, as subtle as Anatole France, De Gourmont saw life steadier and broader than either of these two contemporaries. He was one who said "vast things simply." He was the profoundest philosopher of the three, and never, after his beginnings, exhibited a trace of the dilettante. Life soon became something more than a mere spectacle for him. He was a meliorist in theory and practice, though he asserted that Christianity, an Oriental-born religion, has not become spiritually acclimated among Occidental peoples. But he missed its consoling function; religion, the poetry of the poor, never had for him the prime significance that it had for William James; a legend, vague, vast, and delicious.
Old frontiers have disappeared in science and art and literature. We have Maeterlinck, a poet writing of bees, Poincaré, a mathematician opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space; solid matters resolved into mist, and the law of gravitation questioned. The new horizons beckon ardent youth bent on conquering the secrets of life. And there are more false beacon-lights than true. But if this is an age of specialists a man occasionally emerges who contradicts the formula. De Gourmont was at base a poet; also a dramatist, novelist, raconteur, man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and, lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering were his accomplishments. He is a poet in his Hieroglyphes, Oraisons mauvaises, Le Livre des Litanies, Les Saintes du Paradis, Simone, Divertissements—his last appearance in singing robes (1914); he is a raconteur—and such tales—in Histoires magiques, Prose moroses, Le Pèlerin du silence, D'un Pays lointain, Couleurs; a novelist in Merlette—his first book—Sixtine, Le Fantôme, les Chevaux de Diomède, Le Songe d'une Femme, Une Nuit au Luxembourg, Un Cœur virginal; dramatist in Théodat, Phénissa, Le vieux Roi, Lilith; as master critic of the æsthetics of the French language his supremacy is indisputable; it is hardly necessary to refer here to Le Livre des Masques, in two volumes, the five volumes of Promenades littéraires, the three of Promenades philosophiques; as moralist he has signed such works as l'Idealisme, La Culture des Idées, Le Chemin de Velours; historian and humanist, he has given us Le Latin mystique; grammarian and philologist, he displays his learning in Le Problème du Style, and Esthétique de la Langue française, and incidentally flays an unhappy pedagogue who proposed to impart the secret of style in twenty lessons. He edited many classics of French literature.
His chief contribution to science, apart from his botanical and entomological researches, is Physique de l'Amour, in which he reveals himself as a patient, thorough observer in an almost new country. And what shall we say to his incursions into the actual, into the field of politics, sociology and hourly happenings of Paris life; his Epilogues (three volumes), Dialogues des Amateurs, the collected pages from his monthly contributions to Mercure de France? Nothing human was alien to him, nor inhuman, for he rejected as quite meaningless the latter vocable, as he rejected such clichés as "organic and inorganic." Years before we heard of a pluralistic universe De Gourmont was a pragmatist, though an idealist in his conception of the world as a personal picture. Intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words, he might have fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that some one would write a History of Ideas. At the time of his death the French thinker was composing a work entitled La Physique des Mœurs, in which he contemplated a demonstration of his law of intellectual constancy.
A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was like most Frenchmen an ardent patriot. The little squabble in the early eighties over a skit of his, Le Jou-jou—patriotisme (1883), cost him his post at the National Library in Paris. As a philosopher he deprecated war; as a man, though too old to fight, he urged his countrymen to victory, as may be noted in his last book, Pendant l'Orage (1916). But the philosopher persists in such a sorrowful sentence as: "In the tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte." To show his mental balance at a time when literary men, artists, and even philosophers, indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Jugements his calm admission that the war has not destroyed for him the intellectual values of Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He owes much to their thought as they owed much to French thought; Goethe has said as much; and of Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer was a disciple. Without being a practical musician, De Gourmont was a lover of Beethoven and Wagner. He paid his compliments to Romain Rolland, whose style, both chalky and mucilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated and spun-out series Jean-Christophe. Another little volume, La Belgique littéraire, was published in 1915, which, while it contains nothing particularly new about Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, Van Lerberghe, Camille Lemonnier, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is excellent reading. The French critic was also editor of the Revue des Idées, and judging from the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Querlon as long ago as 1903, he was a collaborator of numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson, English humour, or Thomas à Kempis with the same facility as he dissected the mystic Latin writers of the early centuries after Christ. Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by the plodding crowd of college professors, his general adversaries. But his erudition could not be challenged; only two other men matched his scholarship, Anatole France and the late Marcel Schwob. And we have only skimmed the surface of his accomplishments. Remy de Gourmont is the Admirable Crichton of French letters.
II
Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably expected from this diversity of interests, yet the result is quite the reverse. The artist in this complicated man banished confusion. He has told us that because of the diversity of his aptitudes man is distinguished from his fellow animals, and the variety in his labours is a proof positive of his superiority to such fellow critics as the mentally constipated Brunetière, the impressionistic Anatole France, the agile and graceful Lemaître, and the pedantic philistine Faguet. But if De Gourmont always attains clarity with no loss of depth, he sometimes mixes his genres; that is, the poet peeps out in his reports of the psychic life of insects, as the philosopher lords it over the pages of his fiction. A mystic betimes, he is a crystal-clear thinker. And consider the catholicity evinced in Le Livre des Masques. He wrote of such widely diverging talents as Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Paul Adam; of Henri de Régnier and Jules Renard; of Huysmans and Jules Laforgue; the mysticism of Francis Poictevin's style and the imagery of Saint-Pol-Roux he defined, and he displays an understanding of the first symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, while disliking the personality of that abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of new talent literally made visible and vocal by our critic? It is a pleasure to record the fact that most of his swans remained swans and did not degenerate into tame geese. In this book he shows himself a profound psychologist.
Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive his chimeras in double harness and safely. His best fiction is Sixtine and Une Nuit au Luxembourg, if fiction they may be called. Never will their author be registered among best-sellers. Sixtine deals with the adventures of a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In Un Cœur virginal we touch earth, fleshly and spiritually. This story shocked its readers. It may be considered as a sequel to Physique de l'Amour. It shows mankind as a gigantic insect indulging in the same apparently blind pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also shows us the "female of our species" endowed with less capacity for modesty than the lady mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting, too, is the psychology of the heroine's virginal soul, not, however, cynical; cynicism is the irony of vice, and De Gourmont is never cynical. But a master of irony.
Une Nuit au Luxembourg has been done into English. It handles with delicacy and frankness themes that in the hands of a lesser artist would be banished as brutal and blasphemous. The author knows that all our felicity is founded on a compromise between the dream and reality, and for that reason while he signals the illusion he never mocks it; he is too much an idealist. In the elaborately carved cups of his tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and nectar, there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He could never have said with Proudhon that woman is the desolation of the just; for him woman is often an obsession. Yet, captain of his instincts, he sees her justly; he is not subdued by sex. With a gesture he destroys the sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist and marches on to new intellectual conquests.
In Lilith, an Adamitic Morality, he reveals his Talmudic lore. The first wife of our common ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the accomplice of Satan in the corruption of the human race. Thus mediæval play is epical in its Rabelaisian plainness of speech. Perhaps the Manichean in De Gourmont fabricated its revolting images. He had traversed the Baudelairian steppes of blasphemy and black pessimism; Baudelaire, a poet who was a great critic. Odi profanum vulgus! was De Gourmont's motto, but his soul was responsive to so many contacts that he emerged, as Barrès emerged, a citizen of the world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did not long content him, although he never relinquished his detached attitude of proud individualism. He saw through the sentimental equality of J.J. Rousseau. Rousseau it was who said that thinking man was a depraved animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth. Man is an affective animal more interested in the immediate testimony of his senses than in his intellectual processes. His metaphysic may be but the reverberation of his sensations on the shore of his subliminal self, the echo of the sounding shell he calls his soul. And our critic had his scientific studies to console him for the inevitable sterility of soul that follows egoism and a barren debauch of the sensations. He did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His artistic sensibility was his saviour.
Without being a dogmatist, De Gourmont was an antagonist of absolutism. A determinist, (which may be dogmatism à rebours), a relativist, he holds that mankind is not a specially favoured species of the animal scale; thought is only an accident, possibly the result of rich nutrition. An automaton, man has no free will, but it is better for him to imagine that he has; it is a sounder working hypothesis for the average human. The universe had no beginning, it will have no end. There is no first link or last in the chain of causality. Everything must submit to the law of causality; to explain a blade of grass we must dismount the stars. Nevertheless, De Gourmont no more than Renan, had the mania of certitude. Humbly he interrogates the sphinx. There are no isolated phenomena in time or space. The mass of matter is eternal. Man is an animal submitting to the same laws that govern crystals or brutes. He is the expression of matter in physique and chemistry. Repetition is the law of life. Thought is a physiological product; intelligence the secretion of matter and is amenable to the law of causality. (This sounds like Taine's famous definition of virtue and vice.) And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical laboratories? It is not the rigid old-fashioned materialism, but a return to the more plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism of the Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries. For De Gourmont the Darwinian notion that man is at the topmost notch of creation is as antique and absurd as most cosmogonies; indeed, it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of creation. Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian symbols. Voilà l'ennemi! said De Gourmont and put on his controversial armour. What blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his!
Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many scientists that bird life came later on our globe than the primates from whom we stem. The law of thermal constancy proves it by the interior temperature of birds. Man preceded the carnivorous and ruminating animals, of whom the bodily temperature is lower than that of birds. The ants and bees and beavers are not a whit more automatic than mankind. Automatism, says Ribot, is the rule. Thought is not free, wrote William James, when to it an affirmation is added; then it is but the affirmation of a preference. "L'homme," asserts De Gourmont, "varie à l'infini sa mimique. Sa supériorité, c'est la diversité immense de ses aptitudes." He welcomed Jules de Gaultier and his theory of Bovaryisme; of the vital lie, because of which we pretend to be what we are not. That way spells security, if not progress. The idea of progress is another necessary illusion, for it provokes a multiplicity of activities. Our so-called free will is naught but the faculty of making a decision determined by a great and varied number of motives. As for morality, it is the outcome of tribal taboos; the insect and animal world shows deepest-dyed immorality, revolting cruelty, and sex perversity. Rabbits and earthworms through no fault of their own suffer from horrible maladies. From all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual constancy. The human brain since prehistoric times has been neither diminished nor augmented; it has remained like a sponge, which can be dry or saturated, but still remains itself. It is a constant. In a favourable environment it is enriched. The greatest moment in the history of the human family was the discovery of fire by an anthropoid of genius. Prometheus then should be our god. Without him we should have remained more or less simian, and probably of arboreal habits.
III
A synthetic brain is De Gourmont's, a sower of doubts, though not a No-Sayer to the universe. He delights in challenging accepted "truths." Of all modern thinkers a master of Vues d'ensembles, he smiles at the pretensions, usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of so-called "general ideas." He dissociates such conventional grouping of ideas as Glory, Justice, Decadence. The shining ribs of disillusion shine through his psychology; a psychology of nuance and finesse. Disillusioning reflections, these. Not to be put in any philosophical pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the eclecticism of Victor Cousin as from the verbal jugglery and metaphysical murmurings of Henri Bergson. The world is his dream; but it is a tangible dream, charged with meaning, order, logic. The truest reality is thought. Action spoils. (Goethe said: "Thought expands, action narrows.") Our abstract ideas are metaphysical idols, says Jules de Gaultier. The image of the concrete is De Gourmont's touchstone. Théophile Gautier declared that he was a man for whom the visible world existed. He misjudged his capacity for apprehending reality. The human brain, excellent instrument in a priori combinations is inept at perceiving realities. The "Sultan of the Epithet," as De Goncourt nicknamed "le bon Théo," was not the "Emperor of Thought," according to Henry James, and for him it was a romantic fiction spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster, greyer world is adumbrated in the books of De Gourmont. He never allowed symbolism to deform his representation of sober, every-day life. He pictured the future domain of art and ideas as a fair and shining landscape no longer a series of little gardens with high walls. A hater of formulas, sects, schools, he teaches that the capital crime of the artist, the writer, the thinker, is conformity. (Yet how serenely this critic swims in classic currents!) The artist's work should reflect his personality, a magnified reflection. He must create his own æsthetic. There are no schools, only individuals. And of consistency he might have said that it is oftener a mule than a jewel.
Sceptical in all matters, though never the fascinating sophist that is Anatole France, De Gourmont criticised the thirty-six dramatic situations, reducing the number to four. Man as centre in relation to himself; in relation to other men; in relation to the other sex; in relation to God, or Nature. His ecclesiastical fond may be recognised in Le Chemin de Velours with its sympathetic exposition of Jesuit doctrine, and the acuity of its judgments on Pascal and the Jansenists. The latter section is as an illuminating foot-note to the history of Port-Royal by Sainte-Beuve. The younger critic has the supple intellect of the supplest-minded Jesuit. His bias toward the order is unmistakable. There are few books I reread with more pleasure than this Path of Velvet. Certain passages in it are as silky and sonorous as the sound of Eugène Ysaye's violin.
The colour of De Gourmont's mind is stained by his artistic sensibility. A maker of images, his vocabulary astounding as befits both a poet and philologist, one avid of beautiful words, has variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant, a quality that has informed the finer intellects of France since Montaigne. His literary equipment is unusual. A style as brilliant, sinuous, and personal as his thought; flexible or massive, continent or coloured, he discourses at ease in all the gamuts and modes major, minor, and mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a Latinist; a classic, not a romantic style. His formal sense is admirable. The tenderness of Anatole France is absent, except in his verse, which is less spontaneous than volitional. A pioneer in new æsthetic pastures, De Gourmont is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though the gift of tears nature—possibly jealous because of her prodigality—has denied him. But in the curves of his overarching intellect there may be found wit, gaiety, humour, the Gallic attributes, allied with poetic fancy, profundity of thought, and a many-sided comprehension of life, art, and letters. He is in the best tradition of French criticism only more versatile than either Sainte-Beuve or Taine; as versatile as Doctor Brandes or Arthur Symons, and that is saying much. With Anatole France he could have exclaimed: "The longer I contemplate human life, the more I believe that we must give it, for witnesses and judges, Irony and Pity...."
CHAPTER IV
ARTZIBASHEF
I
Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual...." This is a plea for his own spiritualised art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions within emotions, the shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence, that must be disconcerting to Maeterlinck.
It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama, and fiction. That vast land of promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out place for the theories and speculations of western Europe; no other nation responds so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit, no other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of contemporary thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most emotional among living peoples.
Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt, pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new fermentation.
Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the romancers)—not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and Ivanov—are the men who are fighting under various banners but always for complete freedom.
Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it. He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy, though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky, despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the middle-class and proletarian.
To André Villard, his friend and one of his translators, the new Russian novelist told something of his life, a life colourless, dreary, bare of dramatic events. Born in a small town in southern Russia (1878), Michael Artzibashef is of Tatar, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. His great-grandfather on the maternal side was the Polish patriot Kosciusko. His father, a retired officer, was a small landowner. In the lad there developed the seeds of tuberculosis. His youth was a wretched one. At school he was unhappy because of its horrors—he has written of them in his first story, Pasha Tumanow—and he drifted from one thing to another till he wrote for a literary weekly in the provinces founded by a certain Miroliuboff, to whom he ascribes his first lift in life. Fellow contributors at the time were Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreiev, Kuprin, and other young men who, like Artzibashef, have since "arrived."
His first successful tale was Ivan Lande. It brought him recognition. This was in 1904. But the year before he had finished Sanine, his masterpiece, though it did not see publication till 1908. This was three years after the revolution of 1905, so that those critics were astray who spoke of the book as a naturally pessimistic reaction from the fruitless uprising. Pessimism was born in the bones of the author and he needed no external stimulus to provoke such a realistic study as Sanine. Whether he is happier, healthier, whether he has married and raised a family, we know not. Personal as his stories are said to be, their art renders them objective.
The world over Sanine has been translated. It is a significant book, and incorporates the aspirations of many young men and women in the Russian Empire. It was not printed at first because of the censorship, and in Germany it had to battle for its life.
It is not only written from the standpoint of a professed immoralist, but the Russian censor declared it pernicious because of its "defamation of youth," its suicidal doctrine, its depressing atmosphere. The sex element, too, has aroused indignant protests from the clergy, from the press, from society itself.
In reply to his critics Artzibashef has denied libelling the younger generation. "Sanine," he says, "is the apology for individualism: the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong representative of the new Russia." And then he adds his own protest against the imitators of Sanine, who "flooded the literary world with pornographic writings." Now, whatever else it may be, Sanine is not pornographic, though I shall not pretend to say that its influence has been harmless. We should not forget Werther and the trail of sentimental suicides that followed its publication. But Sanine is fashioned of sterner stuff than Goethe's romance, and if it be "dangerous," then all the better.
Test all things, and remember that living itself is a dangerous affair. Never has the world needed precepts of daring, courage, individualism more than in this age of cowardly self-seeking, and the sleek promises of altruism and its soulless well-being. Sanine is a call to arms for individualists. And recall the Russian saying: Self-conceit is the salt of life.
II
That Artzibashef denies the influence of Nietzsche while admitting his indebtedness to Nietzsche's forerunner, Max Stirner, need not particularly concern us. There are evidences scattered throughout the pages of Sanine that prove a close study of Nietzsche and his idealistic superman. Artist as is Artzibashef, he has densely spun into the fabric of his work the ideas that control his characters, and whether these ideas are called moral or immoral does not matter. The chief thing is whether they are propulsive forces in the destiny of his puppets.
That he paints directly from life is evident: he tells us that in him is the débris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish his ambitions because he had not money enough to buy paper, pencil, colour. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush of Artzibashef. I may make one exception, that of J.-K. Huysmans. The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the master of "the intensest vision of the modern world"; but Huysmans lacks the all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist, a love that is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life.
The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and profound. The leading motive of his symphony is as old as Ecclesiastes: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be." It is not original, this theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity; but it has been orchestrated anew by Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen, Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no hidden angles of the truth, at least its illusion in terms of terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. With such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of life must soon be blasted. His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Artzibashef you wonder that the question, "Is life worth living?" will ever be answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer says, hasten hellward from their birth.
The corollary to this leading motive is the absolute futility of action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev, in an essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in the present; a Norwegian philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, has said that he lives forward, thinks backward; he aspires to the future. An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to disillusionment. He discounts to-morrow.
Russian youth has not always the courage of its chimera, though it fraternises with the phantasmagoria of its soul. Its Golden Street soon becomes choked with fog. The political and social conditions of the country must stifle individualism, else why should Artzibashef write with such savage intensity? His pen is the pendulum that has swung away from the sentimental brotherhood of man as exemplified in Dostoievsky, and from the religious mania of Tolstoy to the opposite extreme, individual anarchy. Where there is repression there is rebellion. Max Stirner represents the individualism which found its vent in the Prussia of 1848; Nietzsche the reaction from the Prussia of 1870; Artzibashef forestalled the result of the 1905 insurrection in Russia.
His prophetic soul needed no proof; he knew that his people, the students and intellectuals, would be crushed. The desire of the clod for the cloud was extinguished. Happiness is an eternal hoax. Only children believe in life. The last call of the devil's dinner-bell has sounded. In the scenery of the sky there is only mirage. The moonlit air is a ruse of that wily old serpent, nature, to arouse romance in the breast of youth and urge a repetition of the life processes. We graze Schopenhauer, overhear Leopardi, but the Preacher has the mightiest voice. Naturally, the novelist says none of these things outright. The phrases are mine, but he points the moral in a way that is all his own.
What, then, is the remedy for the ills of this life? Is its misery irremediable? Why must mankind go on living if the burden is so great? Even with wealth comes ennui or disease, and no matter how brilliant we may live, we must all die alone. Pascal said this better. In several of his death-bed scenes the dying men of Artzibashef curse their parents, mock at religion, and—here is a novel nuance—abuse their intellectual leaders. Semenow the student, who appears in several of the stories, abuses Marx and Nietzsche. Of what use are these thinkers to a man about to depart from the world? It is the revolt of stark humanity from the illusions of brotherly love, from the chiefest illusion—self.
Artzibashef offers no magic draft of oblivion to his sufferers. With a vivid style that recalls the Tolstoy of The Death of Ivan Illitch he shows us old and young wrestling with the destroyer, their souls emptied of all earthly hopes save one. Shall I live? Not God's will be done, not the roseate dream of a future life, only—why must I die? though the poor devil is submerged in the very swamp of life. But life, life, even a horrible hell for eternity, rather than annihilation! In the portrayal of these damned creatures Artzibashef is elemental. He recalls both Dante and Dostoievsky.
He has told us that he owes much to Tolstoy (also to Goethe, Hugo, Dostoievsky, and much to Tchekov), but his characters are usually failures when following the tenets of Tolstoy, the great moralist and expounder of "non-resistance." He simply explodes the torpedo of truth under the ark of socialism. This may be noted in Ivan Lande—now in the English volume entitled The Millionaire—where we see step by step the decadence of a beautiful soul obsessed by the love of his fellows.
It is in the key of Tolstoy, but the moral is startling. Not thus can you save your soul. Max Stirner is to the fore. Don't turn your other cheek if one has been smitten, but smite the smiter, and heartily. However, naught avails, you must die, and die like a dog, a star, or a flower. Better universal suicide. Success comes only to the unfortunate. And so we swing back to Eduard von Hartmann, who, in his philosophy of the unconscious, counsels the same thing. (A ferocious advocate of pessimism and a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer, by name Mainlander, preached world destruction through race suicide.)
But all these pessimists seem well fed and happy when compared to the nihilists of Artzibashef. He portrays every stage of disillusionment with a glacial calmness. Not even annihilation is worth the trouble of a despairing gesture. Cui bono? Revolutionist or royalist—your career is, if you but dare break the conspiracy of silence—a burden or a sorrow. Happiness is only a word. Love a brief sensation. Death a certainty. For such nihilism we must go to the jungles of Asia, where in a lifelong silence, some fanatic fatidically stares at his navel, the circular symbol of eternity.
III
But if there is no philosophical balm in Gilead, there is the world of the five senses, and a glorious world it may prove if you have only the health, courage, and contempt for the Chinese wall with which man has surrounded his instincts. There are no laws, except to be broken, no conventions that cannot be shattered. There is the blue sky, brother, and the air on the heath, brother! Drop the impedimenta and lead a free, roving life. How the world would wag without work no one tells us. Not didactic, the novelist disdains to draw a moral.
There is much Stirner, some Nietzsche in Sanine, who is a handsome young chap, a giant, and a "blond barbarian." It is the story of the return of the native to his home in a small town. He finds his mother as he left her, older, but as narrow as ever, and his sister Lydia, one of the most charming girls in Russian fiction. Sanine is surprised to note her development. He admires her—too much so for our Western taste. However, there is something monstrous in the moral and mental make-up of this hero, who is no hero. He may be a type, but I don't believe in types; there are only humans. His motto might be: What's the difference? He is passive, not with the fatalism of Oblomov, Gontcharov's hero; not with the apathy of Charles Bovary, or the timid passivity of Frederic Moreau; he displays an indifference to the trivial things of life that makes him seem an idler on the scene.
When the time arrives for action he is no skulker. His sister has been ruined by a frivolous officer in garrison, and she attempts suicide. Her brother rescues her, not heroically, but philosophically, and shows her the folly of believing in words. Ruined! Very well, marry and forget! However, he drives the officer to suicide by publicly disgracing him. He refuses a duel, punches his head, and the silly soldier with his silly code of honour blows out his brains. A passive rôle is Sanine's in the composition of this elaborate canvas, the surface simplicity of which deceives us as to its polyphonic complexity. He remains in the background while about him play the little destinies of little souls. Yet he is always the fulcrum for a climax. I have not yet made up my mind whether Sanine is a great man or a thorough scoundrel. Perhaps both.
A temperamental and imaginative writer is Artzibashef. I first read him (1911) in French, the translation of Jacques Povolozky, and his style recalled, at times, that of Turgenev, possibly because of the language. In the German translation he is not so appealing; again perhaps of the difference in the tongues. As I can't read Russian, I am forced to fall back on translations, and they seldom give an idea of personal rhythm, unless it be a Turgenev translating into Russian the Three Tales of his friend Flaubert.
Nevertheless, through the veil of a foreign speech the genius of Artzibashef shines like a crimson sun in a mist. Of course, we miss the caressing cadence and rich sonorousness of the organ-toned Russian language: The English versions are excellent, though, naturally enough, occasionally chastened and abbreviated. I must protest here against the omission of a chapter in Breaking Point which is a key to the ending of the book. I mean the chapter in which is related the reason why the wealthy drunkard goes to the monastery, there to end his days. Years ago Mr. Howells said that we could never write of America as Dostoievsky did of Russia, and it was true enough at the time; nor, would we ever tolerate the nudities of certain Gallic novelists. Well, we have, and I am fain to believe that the tragic issues of American life should be given fuller expression, and with the same sincerity as Artzibashef's, whose strength is his sincerity, whose sincerity is a form of his genius.
The very air of America makes for optimism; our land of milk and honey may never produce such prophets of pessimism as Artzibashef, unless conditions change. But the lesson for our novelists is the courageous manner—and artistic, too—with which the Russian pursues the naked soul of mankind and dissects it. He notes, being a psychologist as well as a painter, the exquisite recoil of the cerebral cells upon themselves which we call consciousness. Profoundly human in his sympathies, without being, in the least sentimental, he paints full-length portraits of men and women with a flowing brush and a fine sense of character values. But he will never bend the bow of Balzac.
Vladimir Sanine is not his only successful portrait. In the book there are several persons: the disgraced student Yourii, who is self-complacent to the point of morbidity; his lovely sister, and her betrothed. The officers are excellently delineated and differentiated, while the girls, Sina Karsavina and her friend the teacher, are extremely attractive.
Karsavina is a veracious personality. The poor little homeless Hebrew who desires light on the mystery of life could not be bettered by Dostoievsky; for that matter Artzibashef is partially indebted to Dostoievsky for certain traits of Ivan Lande—who is evidently patterned from Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Wherever Sanine passes, trouble follows. He is looked on as possessing the evil eye, yet he does little but lounge about, drink hard, and make love to pretty girls. But as he goes he snuffs out ideals like candles.
As Artzibashef is a born story-teller, it must not be supposed that the book is unrelieved in its gloom. There are plenty of gay episodes, sensational, even shocking; a picnic, a shooting-party, and pastorals done in a way which would have extorted the admiration of Turgenev. Thomas Hardy has done no better in his peasant life. There are various gatherings, chiefly convivial, a meeting of would-be intellectuals for self-improvement—related with blasting irony—and drinking festivals which are masterly in their sense of reality; add to these pages of nature descriptions, landscapes, pictures of the earth in all seasons and guises, revealing a passionate love of the soil which is truly Russian. You fairly smell the frosty air of his Winter days.
Little cause for astonishment that Sanine at its appearance provoked as much controversy, as much admiration and hatred as did Fathers and Sons of Turgenev. Vladimir Sanine is not as powerful as Bazarov the anarchist, but he is a pendant, he is an anarch of the new order, neither a propagandist by the act, but a philosophical anarch who lazily mutters: "Let the world wag; I don't care so that it minds its own business and lets me alone." With few exceptions most latter-day fiction is thin, papery, artificial, compared with Artzibashef's rich, red-blooded genius.
I have devoted so much attention to Sanine that little space is left for the other books, though they are all significant. Revolutionary Tales contains a strong companion picture to Sanine, the portrait of the metal-worker Schevyrjoy, who is a revolutionist in the literal sense. His hunted life and death arouse a terrific impression. The end is almost operatic. A captivating little working girl figures in one episode. It may be remarked in passing that Artzibashef does not paint for our delectation the dear dead drabs of yesteryear, nor yet the girl of the street who heroically brings bread to her starving family (as does Sonia in Crime and Punishment). Few outcasts of this sort are to be found in his pages, and those few are unflinchingly etched, as, for example, the ladies in The Millionaire.
This story, which is affiliated in ideas with Sanine, is Tolstoyian in the main issue, yet disconcertingly different in its interpretation. Wealth, too, may become an incitement to self-slaughter from sheer disgust. The story of Pasha Tumanow is autobiographical, and registers his hatred of the Russian grammar schools where suicides among the scholars are anything but infrequent. Morning Shadows relates the adventures of several young people who go to Petrograd to seek fame, but with tragic conclusions. The two girl students end badly, one a suicide, the other a prisoner of the police as an anarchist caught red-handed. A stupefying narrative in its horrid realism and sympathetic handling. The doctor gives us a picture of a pogrom in a tiny Russian province town. You simply shudder at the details of the wretched Jews shot down, ripped open, maltreated, and driven into the wilderness. It is a time for tears; though I cannot quite believe in this doctor, who, while not a Jew, so sympathises with them that he lets die the Chief of Police that ordered the massacre. Another story of similar intensity, called Nina in the English translation, fills us with wonder that such outrages can go unpunished. But I am only interested in the art of the novelist, not in political conditions or their causes.
Perhaps the most touching story in Revolutionary Tales is The Blood Stain, confessedly beloved by its author. Again we are confronted by the uselessness of all attempts to right injustice. Might is right, ever was, ever will be. Again the victims of lying propagandists and the cruel law lie "on stretchers, with white eyes staring upward. In these eyes there was a look, a sad, questioning look of horror and despair." Always despair, in life or death, is the portion of these poor. [This was written in 1915, before the New Russia was born. Since the beginning of the war Artzibashef has served in the field and hospitals. He has written several plays, one of which, War, has been translated. It is a terrific arraignment of war. His latest story, The Woman Standing in the Midst, has not yet appeared here.]
Without suggesting a rigid schematology, there is a composition plan in his larger work that may be detected if the reader is not confused by the elliptical patterns and the massive mounds of minor details in his novel Breaking Point. The canvas is large and crowded, the motivation subtly managed. As is the case with his novels, the drama plays in a provincial town, this time on the steppes, where the inhabitants would certainly commit suicide if the place were half as dreary as depicted. Some of them do so, and you are reminded of that curious, nervous disease, indigenous to Siberia, named by psychiatrists "myriachit," or the epidemic of imitation. A man, a sinister rascal, Naumow, preaches the greyness and folly of living, and this "Naumowism" sets by the ears three or four impressionable young men who make their exit with a bare bodkin or its equivalent. Naumow recalls a character in The Possessed, also the sinister hero of The Synagogue of Satan by the dramatic Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. To give us a central point the "chorus" of the novel is a little student who resembles a goldfinch, and has a birdlike way of piping about matters philosophical.
There are oceans of talk throughout the novels, talks about death. Really, you wonder how the Russians contrive to live at all till you meet them and discover what normal people they are. (It should not be forgotten that art must contain as an element of success a slight deformation of facts.) The student watches the comedy and tragedy of the town, his brain flaming with noble ideas for the regeneration of mankind! Alas! Naumow bids him reflect on the uselessness of suffering from self-privation so that some proletarian family may eat roast larks in the thirtieth century. Eventually he succumbs to the contagion of resemblance, takes to drink, and hangs himself to a nail in the wall, his torn gum shoes, clinging to his feet, faithful to the last—they, Dickens-like, are shown from the start.
There is a nihilistic doctor—the most viable character of all about whose head hovers the aura of apoplexy—a particularly fascinating actress, an interesting consumptive, two wretched girls betrayed by a young painter (a Sanine type, i. e., Max Stirnerism in action), while the officers of the garrison and club life are cunningly pictured. A wealthy manufacturer, with the hallmarks of Mr. Rogozhin in Dostoievsky's The Idiot, makes an awful noise till he luckily vanishes in a monastery. Suicide, rapine, disorder, drunkenness, and boredom permeate nearly every page. Breaking Point is the most poignant and intolerable book I ever read. It is the prose complement of Tschaikovsky's so-called Suicide Symphony. Browning is reversed. Here the devil is in heaven. All's wrong in the world! Yet it compels reflection and rereading. Why?
Because, like all of his writings, it is inevitable, and granting the exaggeration inherent in the nature of the subject, it is lifelike, though its philosophy is dangerously depressing. The little city of the steppes is the cemetery of the Seven Sorrows. However, in it, as in Sanine, there is many an oasis of consolation where sanity and cheerfulness and normal humans may be enjoyed. But I am loath to believe that young Russia, Holy Russia, as the mystagogues call her, has lost her central grip on the things that most count; above all, on religious faith. Then needs must she pray as prayed Des Esseintes in Huysmans's novel A Rebours: "Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith."
CHAPTER V
A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES
I
In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably chronicled. News from the various battle-fields took precedence over the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected. Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still prevails, when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More English than the English, he only practised what he preached, though tardily in the matter of his British naturalisation. That he did not find all the perfections in his native land is a personal matter; but that he should be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no need of indignation in the matter. Time rights such critical wrongs. Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of Henry James is for the future.
James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions that will influence future novelists. In our own days we see what a power James has been; a subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul Bourget, Edith Wharton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His later work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse, is the prose equivalent of the seven arts in a revolutionary ferment. A marked tendency in the new movements is to throw overboard superfluous technical baggage. The James novel is one of grand simplifications.
As the symphony was modified by Liszt into the symphonic poem and later emerged in the shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which, despite its "heavenly length," contains in solution all that the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the prodigious Rougon-Macquart series; Daudet found therein the impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant and Huysmans delved patiently and practised characteristic variations. Flaubert is the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry James disliked Sentimental Education—like other great critics he had his blind side—yet he did not fail to benefit by the radical formal changes introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of Wagner in the music-drama. I call the later James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice-barren modulations from event to event are swept away; unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oblique psychology is partly derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal both Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their psychological splendour. Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not to mention that of Jane Austen.
Possibly the famous "third manner" of James was the result of his resorting to dictation; the pen inhibits where speech does not. These things make difficult reading for a public accustomed to the hypnotic passes of successful fiction-mongers. In James nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning the curve of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn of the Screw is an exception.) You rub your eyes as you finish; for with all your credulity, painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation reveal magic in their misty attenuations. And there is ever the triumph of poetic feeling over banal sentiment. The portraiture in Milly Theale and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Milly's life is a miracle, her ending, art superlative. The Wings of a Dove is filled with the faintly audible tread of destiny behind the arras of life. The reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound of the big drum and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the novelist concerning causes that do not seem final has been amply dealt with by Mr. Brownell. The question whether his story is worth the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered; what most concerns us now in the James case is his manner, not his matter. All the rest is life.
As far as his middle period his manner is limpidity itself; the later style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering is this peculiarly individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose. Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken. His dissonances cannot be resolved except in the terms of his own matchless art. His meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I can't say; possibly because every pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter any one who has dipped into the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century literature, must realise that nowadays we write a parlous prose. However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed. The son of a metaphysician and moralist—the writings of Henry James, the elder, are far from negligible—the brother of the greatest American psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, it need hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, or the fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page of James than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For Flaubert, who modelled his magnificent prose harmonies on the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Bossuet, and Châteaubriand, the final test of noble prose is the audible reading thereof. Flaubert called it "spouting." The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical variety. Henry James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, cheap historical vapidities, and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. (But, like the poor, the stupid reader we shall always have with us.) In the fiction of the future a more complete synthesis will be attained. An illuminating essay by Arthur Symons places George Meredith among the decadents, the murderers of their mother tongue, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to this group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected. In his ruthless disregard of the niceties and conventionalities of sentence-structure I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet no matter how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not his obscurity (his prose, like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is packed with too many meanings), but that his character always speaks in purest Jacobean. So do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric world. So the men and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the fault—or virtue—of all subjective genius; however, not a fault or virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy. All in all, Henry James is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary power and divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic, his deep-veined humanity may be felt by those who read him aright. His Americans abroad suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Verver. Henry James is a faithful Secretary to Society—the phrase is Balzac's—to the American afloat from his native mooring as well as at home. And his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction.
II
Before me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend Doctor Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21 East Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: "I am not one of 'The Bostonians,' but was born in this city April 15, 1843. Believe me, truly yours, Henry James." Although he died a naturalised Englishman, there seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in the minds of his English critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James "began in New England in 1843." He was born in America in 1843, then a land where culture was rare! That delightful condescension in foreigners is still extant. Now this isn't such a serious matter, for Henry James was a citizen of the world; but the imputation of a New England birthplace does matter, because it allows the English critic—and how many others?—to perform variations on the theme of Puritanism, the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamental Puritan—one is forced to capitalise the unhappy word! Apart from the fact that there is less Puritanism in New England than in the Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous New England conscience. He would have been the first to repudiate the notion. For him the Puritan temperament has a "faintly acrid perfume." To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues and refinement, sensibility, intellectuality, is a common enough mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans. He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he is our first great "immoralist," a term that has supplanted the old-fashioned amoralist. And he wrote the most unmoral short story in the English language, one that also sets the spine trilling because of its supernatural element as never did Poe, or De Maupassant.
Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr. Moore said: "Henry James went to France and read Turgenev. W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." To lend poignancy to this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes it, substituting the name of De Maupassant for Turgenev's. A rather uncanny combination—Henry and Guy. A still more aged "wheeze" bobs up in the pages of Mr. Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None of these things is in the least true. With the prudishness and peanut piety of puritanism Henry James has nothing in common. He did not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote of him with more sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire; and Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the Russian's or the American's fiction. Furthermore, James is a masterly psychologist and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.
Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields, he writes with authority, though too often in a superlative key. But how James would have winced when he read in Mr. Hueffer's book that he is or was "the greatest of living men." This surely is a planet-struck phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed with startling things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about Flaubert, whose Sentimental Education is an entire Human Comedy. He thinks ill of "big business," that "business and whatever takes place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not worth the attention of any intelligent being. It is a manner of dirty little affairs incompetently handled by men of the lowest class of intelligence." But all this in a volume about the most serene and luminous intelligence of our times. Mr. Hueffer also "goes for" James as critic. He once dared to couple the name of the "odious" George Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away, but, after all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who was Henry James say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of writing? As to the "cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats—all human life is there," of The Madonna of the Future, we need not take the words as a final message; nor are the other phrases quoted: "The soul is immortal certainly—if you've got one, but most people haven't! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through, but it never is." Mr. Hueffer says that James "found English people who were just people singularly nasty," and who can say him nay after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends on the right note: "And for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers—a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes, and the Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national." Neither Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells, who is our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision. And Trollope, by the way, will loom larger in the future despite his impersonality and microscopic manner.
The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence. To alter his own words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or cloud-shadowed; yet in whose depths there is a moving mass of exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under hum of humanity. We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said of Walter Scott: "His works, taken altogether, are almost like a new edition of human nature." But we can follow with the coda of that same dictum: "This is indeed to be an author." Many more than the dozen superior persons mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James novels. His swans are not always immaculate, but they are not "swans of the cesspool," to quote Landor. There is never an odour of leaking gas in his premises, as he once remarked of the D'Annunzio fiction. He has the cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gait. Like Renan, he abhorred the "horrible mania of certitude" to be found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not always dot the "i's" of his irony, a subrisive irony. But the spiritual antennæ which he puts forth so tentatively always touch real things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense he boasts. He peeps into the glowing core of emotion, but seldom describes it. His ears are for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the obvious, of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novelist has kept his ear so close to quotidian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in his crumbling cadences? Not even that virtuoso of the ugly, Huysmans, than whom no writer of the past century ever "rendered" surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity, is as clairvoyant as James.
Fustian and thunder form no part of the James stories, which are like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill the listening ear. He is an "auditive" as well as a "visualist," to employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite; but, like Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single wire. Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness. However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and end in another. If it's to be pork and molasses or "hog and hominy" (George Meredith's words), then let it be these delectable dishes through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals spin and bathe in the blue he weaves a web of gold and lace, and it is marvellously spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown from a variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther Cary has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does not take the mechanism of his marionette apart, but lets us examine it in completeness. As a psychologist he stands midway between Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling, rather than fact.
Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his rhythmic moments of libration; he then reveals his other side, a profoundly human, emotional one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he holds in horror the facile expression of the sentiments. It's only too easy to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas Huxley calls "sensualistic caterwauling." In the large, generous curve of his temperament there is room for all life, but not for a lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity. There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns, for patterns there are, though the figure be difficult to piece out. His route of emerald is elliptical; follow him who dare! A "wingy mystery." He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues. His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. His is not "the shadow land of American fiction"; simply his supreme tact of omission has dispensed with the entire banal apparatus of fiction as commonly practised. To use a musical example: his prose is like the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art, like music, is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique melodramatics, set developments and dénouements, mastodonic structures. The sharp savour of character is omnipresent. His very pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into remoter harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality. Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him sympathetically one recalls the saying of Maurice Barrès: "For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue, that between our two egos—the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which we strive." For Jacobeans this interior dialogue, with its "secondary intention" marches like muted music through the pages of the latter period. Henry James will always be a touchstone for the tasteless.
CHAPTER VI
GEORGE SAND
Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called George Sand!
—Mrs. Browning.
I
Who reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French literature. Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman, in her psychology, than in her interminable novels. The reason is simple; her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never created a vital character. Her men and women are bundles of attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was a wonderful journalist, one is tempted to say the first of her sex, and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a shriller propagandist, yet she accomplished no more for the cause than her French neighbour, not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin didn't exactly practise what she preached and George Sand did. For her there was no talk of getting the vote; her feminism was a romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand should be enshrined as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of the intellectual men she met, she had an enormous vogue. Her reputation was worldwide.
We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently published by Vladimir Karénine (the pen-name of a Russian lady, Mme. Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow). This writer has brought her imposing work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848, and, as much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable. She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with Sand. She has at first-hand from friends and relatives facts hitherto unpublished, and she is armed with a library of documents. More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the fecund writer, and actually analyses their plots, writes at length of the characters, and incidentally throws light on her own intellectual processes.
Mme. Karénine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking historian. While some tales of Sand are worth reading—The Devil's Pool, Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all, her autobiography—the rest is a burden to the spirit. Her facility astounds, and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing was like the turning on of a water-tap, the stream always flowed, a literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene, flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles Baudelaire, and admired by Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais. Baudelaire remarked of this "best seller" that she wrote her chefs d'œuvre as if they were letters, and posted them. The "style coulant," praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked accent, relief, individuality. "She is the Prudhomme of immorality," he said—not a bad definition—and "she is stupid, heavy, and a chatterer." She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted to the intelligent wife of the concierge and the sentimental harlot. Which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognised by all her associates.
Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau—he might have added Byron, also—she is false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated; ... her style is of a variegated wall-paper pattern. She betrays her vulgarity in her ambition to expose her generous feelings. She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferable artist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and—wrote. Nietzsche, like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the irresponsible sex. And her immorality? Père Didon said that her books are more immoral than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted as they are with false ideas and sentiments. George Sand immoral? What bathos! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality. As well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral. This literature of gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the Ibsen plays or Æsop's fables.
Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of the downtrodden shop girl are the stigmata of the Sand school. She has written many memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such masters as Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable charm. But her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned—there is a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as Ibsen maintained, all truths stale and die after two decades, how much less life may be allowed a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as evanescent as last year's mist.
Mme. Karénine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation, so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject; indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a prude and, if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose delectation! A "cold devil"—à la Félicien Rops. I doubt this. Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness. Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the Sargossian seas of British prudery.
In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful grandmother. She had the featherbed temperament, and soothed masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and the idol of the literary world.
How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant virtues—save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was thrust upon her. At Nohant, her château in Berri, there was usually a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the Shelley-Godwin gatherings.
II
George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men; with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with one eye open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight days, and Mérimée is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish Prosper at once grew frigid.
A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en compote." And she was incorrigibly naïve—they called it "Idealism" in those days—witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can reread him.
But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man. He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same. George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage—and the wisdom—to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.
The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him from her mother—truly a Gallic triangle—but she so contrived matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to marry her lover, Clésinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme. Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.
Clésinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of her own. Her husband, François-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband five hundred thousand francs.)
But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copious soul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised. She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.
III
Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering with their family duties. But they continued, did these same refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices. They loved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our days, Sand's is positively idyllic. She is one parent of the Woman movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to do—and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males, other tales.
She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert the kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was always æsthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her fiction. Her Indianas, Lélias, and the other romantic insurgents against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap.
IV
George Sand was not beautiful. Edouard Grenier declares that she was short and stout. "Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close together." Do you recall Heine's phrase, "Femme avec l'œil sombre"? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at once of unpolished marble and velvet. "Her nose was thick and not overshapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very quiet." With these rather negative physical attractions she conquered men like Napoleon. Even prim President Thiers tried to kiss her and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. (Did you ever see the Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?) Liszt never wholly yielded to her. Mérimée despised her in his chilly fashion. Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de Musset—who, when he was short of money, would dine in an obscure tavern, and, with a toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the entrance of some fashionable boulevard café—seems to have loved her romantically, the sort of love she craved. What was her attraction? She had brains and magnetism, but that she could have loved all the lovers she is credited with is impossible.
There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules Sandeau, who was followed by De Musset; after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello—who was jilted when he followed her to Paris; Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux, Félicien Mallefille, Chopin, Mérimée, Manceau, and the platonic friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship; the correspondence proves it. She went to the Magny dinners with Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet. Her influence on the grumbling giant of Croisset was tonic. It was she who should have written Sentimental Education. But where is that sly old voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve, or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many tales), or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period, notwithstanding Mme. Karénine's denial? She denies the Leroux affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say?
Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw and Sand buried them at Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks, has been corroborated since by Mme. Karénine. What a loss for inquisitive critics! George was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal ancestors. In her mature years she became optimistic, proper, matronly. She was a cheerful milch cow for her two children. It is delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against actresses. Solange she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art-for-art.
Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left Clésinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Hervé, Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the critic who describes her as having the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She, too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home, in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.
Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch, arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the candied thunder of Sand herself.
De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians, did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly called—Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity.