Ivory, Apes and Peacocks
by James Huneker · English · Gutenberg #31017 · 477,634 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Ivory, Apes and Peacocks
Author: James Huneker
Release date: January 19, 2010 [eBook #31017]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS
[Illustration: DOSTOÏEVSKY, BY VALLOTON]
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS
JOSEPH CONRAD, WALT WHITMAN,
JULES LAFORGUE, DOSTOÏEVSKY AND TOLSTOY,
SCHOENBERG, WEDEKIND, MOUSSORGSKY,
CÉZANNE, VERMEER, MATISSE, VAN GOGH, GAUGUIN,
ITALIAN FUTURISTS, VARIOUS LATTER-DAY POETS,
PAINTERS, COMPOSERS AND DRAMATISTS
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1915
To
JOHN QUINN
"Every three years once came the ships of Tarshish bringing
gold and silver, ivory and apes, and peacocks."
--_II Chronicles_ 9. 21.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE GENIUS OF JOSEPH CONRAD 1
II. A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN 22
III. THE BUFFOON OF THE NEW ETERNITIES: JULES
LAFORGUE 32
IV. DOSTOÏEVSKY AND TOLSTOY, AND THE YOUNGER
CHOIR OF RUSSIAN WRITERS 52
V. I. ARNOLD SCHOENBERG 89
II. MUSIC OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 104
VI. FRANK WEDEKIND 121
VII. THE MAGIC VERMEER 141
VIII. RICHARD STRAUSS AT STUTTGART 153
IX. MAX LIEBERMANN AND SOME PHASES OF
MODERN GERMAN ART 173
X. A MUSICAL PRIMITIVE: MODESTE MOUSSORGSKY 190
XI. NEW PLAYS BY HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN,
AND SCHNITZLER 203
XII. KUBIN, MUNCH, AND GAUGUIN: MASTERS OF
HALLUCINATION 222
XIII. THE CULT OF THE NUANCE: LAFCADIO HEARN 240
XIV. I. THE MELANCHOLY OF MASTERPIECES 249
II. THE ITALIAN FUTURIST PAINTERS 262
XV. IN THE WORKSHOP OF ZOLA 275
XVI. A STUDY OF DE MAUPASSANT 288
XVII. PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 301
XVIII. THREE DISAGREEABLE GIRLS 311
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS
I
THE GENIUS OF JOSEPH CONRAD
I
In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to
various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove
something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums;
when the insistent drums of the Great God Réclame are bruising human
tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English
novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid
the clamour of the market-place a book of his is a sea-shell which
pressed to the ear echoes the far-away murmur of the sea; always the
sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard, blue skies or shuddering
symphonically up some exotic beach. Conrad is a painter doubled by a
psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea--and that is his chief
claim to originality, his Peak of Darien. He knows and records its
every pulse-beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an
Elizabethan adventurer and the spaciousness of those times. Imagine a
Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, who bared his
head under equatorial few large stars and related his doings in
rhythmic, sonorous, coloured prose; imagine a man from a landlocked
country who "midway in his mortal life" began writing for the first
time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of
description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not
after the meticulous manner of the modern Paul Prys of psychology, but
following the larger method of Flaubert, who believed that actions
should translate character--imagine these paradoxes and you have
partly imagined Joseph Conrad, who has so finely said that
"imagination, and not invention, is the supreme master of art as of
life."
He has taken the sea-romance of Smollett, Marryat, Melville, Dana,
Clark Russell, Stevenson, Becke, Kipling, and for its well-worn
situations has substituted not only many novel nuances, but invaded
new territory, revealed obscure atavisms and the psychology lurking
behind the mask of the savage, the transpositions of dark souls, and
shown us a world of "kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes,
giraffes, cabinet ministers, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and
constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
itself." In his Reminiscences Mr. Conrad has told us, with the
surface frankness of a Pole, the genesis of his literary début of
Almayer's Folly, his first novel, and in a quite casual fashion throws
fresh light on that somewhat enigmatic character--reminding me in the
juxtaposition of his newer psychologic procedure and the simple old
tale, of Wagner's Venusberg ballet, scored after he had composed
Tristan und Isolde. But, like certain other great Slavic writers,
Conrad has only given us a tantalising peep into his mental workshop.
We rise after finishing the Reminiscences realising that we have read
once more romance, in whose half-lights and modest evasions we catch
fleeting glimpses of reality. Reticence is a distinctive quality of
this author; after all, isn't truth an idea that traverses a
temperament?
That many of his stories were in the best sense "lived" there can be
no doubt--he has at odd times confessed it, confessions painfully
wrung from him, as he is no friend of the interviewer. The white-hot
sharpness of the impressions which he has projected upon paper recalls
Taine's dictum: "les sensations sont des hallucinations vraies."
Veritable hallucinations are the seascapes and landscapes in the South
Sea stories, veritable hallucinations are the quotidian gestures and
speech of his anarchists and souls sailing on the winds of noble and
sinister passions. For Conrad is on one side an implacable realist....
Unforgetable are his delineations of sudden little rivers never
charted and their shallow, turbid waters, the sombre flux of
immemorial forests under the crescent cone of night, and undergrowth
overlapping the banks, the tragic chaos of rising storms, hordes of
clouds sailing low on the horizon, the silhouettes of lazy, majestic
mountains, the lugubrious magic of the tropical night, the mysterious
drums of the natives, and the darkness that one can feel, taste,
smell. What a gulf of incertitudes for white men is evoked for us in
vivid, concrete terms. Unforgetable, too, the hallucinated actions of
the student Razumov the night Victor Haldin, after launching the fatal
bomb, seeks his room, his assistance, in that masterpiece, Under
Western Eyes. But realist as Conrad is, he is also a poet who knows,
as he says himself, that "the power of sound has always been greater
than the power of sense." (Reason is a poor halter with which to lead
mankind to drink at the well of truth.) He woos the ear with his
singing prose as he ravishes the eye with his pictures. In his
little-known study of Henry James he wrote: "All creative art is
magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening,
familiar, and surprising," and finally, "Fiction is history, human
history, or it is nothing." Often a writer tells us more of himself in
criticising a fellow craftsman than in any formal æsthetic
pronunciamiento. We soon find out the likes and dislikes of Mr. Conrad
in this particular essay, and also what might be described as the
keelson of his workaday philosophy: "All adventure, all love, every
success, is resumed in the supreme energy of renunciation. It is the
utmost limit of our power." No wonder his tutor, half in anger, half
in sorrow, exclaimed: "You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote."
I suppose a long list might be made of foreigners who have mastered
the English language and written it with ease and elegance, yet I
cannot recall one who has so completely absorbed native idioms, who
has made for himself an English mind (without losing his profound and
supersubtle Slavic soul), as has Joseph Conrad. He is unique as
stylist. He first read English literature in Polish translations, then
in the original; he read not only the Bible and Shakespeare, but
Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, and Thackeray; above all, Dickens. He
followed no regular course, just as he belongs to no school in art,
except the school of humanity; for him there are no types, only
humans. (He detests formulæ and movements.) His sensibility, all
Slavic, was stimulated by Dickens, who was a powerful stimulant of the
so-called "Russian pity," which fairly honeycombs the works of
Dostoïevsky. There is no mistaking the influence of the English Bible
on Conrad's prose style. He is saturated with its puissant, elemental
rhythms, and his prose has its surge and undertow. That is why his is
never a "painted ship on a painted ocean"; by the miracle of his art
his water is billowy and undulating, his air quivers in the torrid
sunshine, and across his skies--skies broken into new, strange
patterns--the cloud-masses either float or else drive like a typhoon.
His rhythmic sense is akin to Flaubert's, of whom Arthur Symons wrote:
"He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with
every mood, or for the convenience of every fact; ... he has no fixed
prose tune." Nor, by the same token, has Conrad. He seldom indulges,
as does Théophile Gautier, in the static paragraph. He is ever in
modulation. There is ebb and flow in his sentences. A typical
paragraph of his shows what might be called the sonata form: an
allegro, andante, and presto. For example, the opening pages of Karain
(one of his best stories, by the way) in Tales of Unrest:
"Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs [he is
writing of the newspaper accounts of various native risings in the
Eastern Archipelago]--sunshine and the glitter of the sea. A strange
name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere
of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume as of
land-breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights; a
signal-fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff;
great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful
and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of white surf
thunders on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the reefs; and
green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level
of a polished sea like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel."
There is no mistaking the _coda_ of this paragraph--selected at
random--beginning at "and"; it suggests the author of Salammbô, and it
also contains within its fluid walls evocations of sound, odour, bulk,
tactile values, the colour of life, the wet of the waves, and the
whisper of the wind. Or, as a contrast, recall the rank ugliness of
the night when Razumov visits the hideous tenement, expecting to find
there the driver who would carry to freedom the political assassin,
Haldin. Scattered throughout the books are descriptive passages with
few parallels in our language. Indeed, Conrad often abuses his gift,
forgetting that his readers do not possess his tremendously developed
faculty of attention.
II
Invention he has to a plentiful degree, notwithstanding his giving it
second place in comparison with imagination. His novels are the novels
of ideas dear to Balzac, though tinged with romance--a Stendhal of the
sea. Gustave Kahn called him un puissant rêveur, and might have added,
a wonderful spinner of yarns. Such yarns--for men and women and
children! At times yarning seemingly for the sake of yarning--true
art-for-art, though not in the "precious" sense. From the brilliant
melochromatic glare of the East to the drab of London's mean streets,
from the cool, darkened interiors of Malayan warehouses to the
snow-covered allées of the Russian capital, or the green parks on the
Lake of Geneva, he carries us on his magical carpet, and the key is
always in true pitch. He never saves up for another book as Henry
James once said of some author, and for him, as for Mr. James, every
good story is "both a picture and an idea"; he seeks to interpret "the
uncomposed, unrounded look of life with its accidents, its broken
rhythms." He gets atmosphere in a phrase; a verbal nuance lifts the
cover of some iniquitous or gentle soul. He contrives the illusion of
time, and his characters are never at rest; even within the narrow
compass of the short story they develop; they grow in evil or wisdom,
are always transformed; they think in "character," and ideality unites
his vision with that of his humans. Consider the decomposition of the
moral life of Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a
prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the
tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call
Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer--a book which
has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further
than in The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor
interior analysis in The Return.
What I once wrote of Henry James might be said of Joseph Conrad: "He
is exquisitely aware of the presence of others." And this awareness is
illustrated in Under Western Eyes and Nostromo--the latter that
astonishing rehabilitation of the humming life on a South American
seaboard. For Nostromo nothing is lost save honour; he goes to his
death loving insensately; for Razumov his honour endures till the
pressure put upon it by his love for Haldin's sister cracks it, and
cracks, too, his reason. For once the novelist seems cruel to the
pathological point--I mean in the punishment of Razumov by the hideous
spy. I hope this does not betray parvitude of view-point. I am not
thin-skinned, and Under Western Eyes is my favourite novel, but the
closing section is lacerating music for the nerves. And what a
chapter!--that thunder-storm driving down the valley of the Rhône, the
haggard, haunted face of the Russian student forced, despite his
convictions, to become an informer and a supposed anarchist (curious
students will find the first hint of the leitmotiv of this monumental
book in An Anarchist--A Set of Six; as Gaspar Ruiz may be looked on as
a pendant to Nostromo). Under Western Eyes is a masterpiece of irony,
observation, and pity. I once described it as being as powerful as
Dostoïevsky and as well written as Turgenieff. The truth is that it
is Conrad at his best, although I know that I may seem to slight the
Eastern tales. It has the colour and shape and gait of the marvellous
stories of Dostoïevsky and Turgenieff--with an absolutely original
motive, and more modern. A magical canvas!
Its type of narrative is in the later style of the writer. The events
are related by an English teacher of languages in Geneva, based on the
diary of Razumov. It is a favourite device of Conrad's which might be
described as, structurally progressing from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous. His novel, Chance, is a specific instance of his
intricate and elliptical method. Several personages of the story
relate in almost fugal manner, the heroine appearing to us in flashes
as if reflected by some revolving mirror. It is a difficult and
elusive method, but it presents us with many facets of character and
is swift and secular. If Flaubert in Sentimental Education originated
a novel structure in fiction, Conrad may claim the same honour; his
edifice, in its contrapuntal presentation of character and chapter
suspensions, is new, tantalisingly, bewilderingly, refreshingly, new.
The colour is toned down, is more sober than the prose of the Eastern
stories. Sometimes he employs the personal pronoun, and with what
piquancy as well as poignancy may be noted in the volume Youth. This
contains three tales, the first, which gives the title-key, has been
called the finest short story in English, although it is difficult to
discriminate. What could be more thrilling, with a well-nigh
supernatural thrill (and the colouring of Baudelairian cruelty and
blood-lust) than The Heart of Darkness, or what more pathetic--a
pathos which recalls Balzac's Père Goriot and Turgenieff's A Lear of
the Steppe, withal still more pity-breeding--than The End of the
Tether? This volume alone should place Conrad among the immortals.
That he must have had a "long foreground" we find after studying the
man. Sailing a ship is no sinecure, and for Conrad a ship is something
with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be
understood, and it has its ways and whims and has to be petted or
humoured, as in The Brute--that monstrous personification of the
treacherous sea's victim. Like all true artists, Conrad never
preaches. His moral is in suffusion, and who runs may read. We
recognise his emotional calibre, which is of a dramatic intensity,
though never over-emphasising the morbid. Of his intellectual grasp
there is no question. He possesses pathos, passion, sincerity, and
humour. Wide knowledge of mankind and nature he has, and in the field
of moral power we need but ask if he is a Yes-Sayer or a No-Sayer, as
the Nietzschians have it. He says Yes! to the universe and of the
eternal verities he is cognisant. For him there is no "other side of
good and evil." No writers of fiction, save the very greatest,
Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoïevsky, or Turgenieff, have so exposed the
soul of man under the stress of sorrow, passion, anger, or as
swimming, a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a
fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea--they
are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also
recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and
sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen
to him unless what happens to all--failure and death." His heroes are
failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their
failure is recorded with muffled irony. The fundamental pessimism of
the Slavic temperament must be reckoned with. But this pessimism is
implied, and life has its large as well as its "little ironies." In
Chance, which describes the hypertrophy of a dolorous soul, he writes:
"It was one of those dewy, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness,
of the hopeless, obscure magnificence of our globe lost in the
splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.... Daylight is
friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy,
soft nights are more kindly to our littleness."
To match that one must go to Thomas Hardy, to the eloquent passage
describing the terrors of infinite space in Two on a Tower. However,
Conrad is not often given to such Hamlet-like moods. The shock and
recoil of circumstances, the fatalities of chance, and the vagaries of
human conduct intrigue his intention more than the night side of the
soul. Yet, how well he has observed the paralysis of will caused by
fear. In An Outpost of Progress is the following: "Fear always
remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate
and belief, and even doubt; but as he clings to life he cannot destroy
fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible that pervades his
being, that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle
of his last breath...."
III
It has been said that women do not read him, but according to my
limited experience I believe the contrary. (Where, indeed, would any
novelist be if it were not for women?) He has said of Woman: "She is
the active partner in the great adventure of humanity on earth and
feels an interest in all its episodes." He does not idealise the sex,
like George Meredith, nor yet does he describe the baseness of the
Eternal Simpleton, as do so many French novelists. He is not always
complimentary: witness the portrait of Mrs. Fyne in Chance, or the
mosaic of anti-feminist opinions to be found in that story. That he
succeeded better with his men is a commonplace of all masculine
writers, not that women always succeed with their sex, but to many
masters of imaginative literature woman is usually a poet's evocation,
not the creature of flesh and blood and bones, of sense and sentiment,
that she is in real life. Conrad opens no new windows in her soul, but
he has painted some full-length portraits and made many lifelike
sketches, which are inevitable. From the shining presence of his
mother, the assemblage of a few traits in his Reminiscences, to Flora
de Barral in Chance, with her self-tortured temperament, you
experience that "emotion of recognition" described by Mr. James. You
know they live, that some of them go on marching in your memory after
the book has been closed. Their actions always end by resembling their
ideas. And their ideas are variegated.
In Under Western Eyes we encounter the lovely Natalie Haldin, a sister
in spirit to Helena, to Lisa, to any one of the Turgenieff heroines.
Charm is hers, and a valiant spirit. Her creator has not, thus far,
succeeded in bettering her. Only once does he sound a false note. I
find her speech a trifle rhetorical after she learns the facts in the
case of Razumov (p. 354). Two lines are superfluous at the close of
this heart-breaking chapter, and in all the length of the book that is
the only flaw I can offer to hungry criticism. The revolutionary group
at Geneva--the mysterious and vile Madame de S----, the unhappy slave,
Tekla, the much-tried Mrs. Haldin, and the very vital anarchist,
surely a portrait sur le vif, Sophia Antonovna, are testimonies of the
writer's skill and profound divination of the human heart. (He has
confessed that for him woman is "a human being, very much like
myself.") The dialogue between Razumov, the spiritual bankrupt, and
Sophia in the park is one of those character-revealing episodes that
are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions and
undulations, its very recoil on itself as the pair face their
memories, he haunted, she suspicious, touch the springs of desperate
lives. As an etching of a vicious soul, the Eliza of Chance is
arresting. We do not learn her last name, but we remember her brutal
attack on little Flora, an attack that warped the poor child's nature.
Whether the end of the book is justified is apart from my present
purpose, which is chiefly exposition, though I feel that Captain
Anthony is not tenderly treated. But "there is a Nemesis which
overtakes generosity, too, like all the other imprudences of men who
dare to be lawless and proud...." And this sailor, the son of the
selfish poet, Carleon Anthony, himself sensitive, but unselfish, paid
for his considerate treatment of his wife Flora. Only Hardy could have
treated the sex question with the same tact as Conrad (he has done so
in Jude the Obscure).
In his sea tales Conrad is a belated romanticist; and in Chance, while
the sea is never far off, it is the soul of an unhappy girl that is
shown us; not dissected with the impersonal cruelty of surgeon
psychologists, but revealed by a sympathetic interpreter who knows the
weakness and folly and tragedy of humanity.
The truth is, Conrad is always an analyst; that sets him apart from
other writers of sea stories. Chance is different in theme, but not as
different in treatment as in construction. His pattern of narration
has always been of an evasive character; here the method is carried to
the pitch of polyphonic intricacy. The richness of interest, the
startling variety, and the philosophic largeness of view--the tale is
simple enough otherwise for a child's enjoyment--are a few of its
qualities. Coventry Patmore is said to be the poet alluded to as
Carleon Anthony, and there are distinct judgments on feminism and the
new woman, some wholesome truths uttered at a time when man has
seemingly shrivelled up in the glorified feminine vision of mundane
things. The moral is to be found on page 447. "Of all the forms
offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realise it
fully which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of
mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist
the necessity, fail in understanding, and stop voluntarily short ...
they are committing a sin against life."
The Duel (published in America under the title of A Point of Honor) is
a tour de force in story-telling that would have made envious Balzac.
Then there is Winnie Verloc in the Secret Agent, and her cockney
sentiment and rancours. She is remarkably "realised," and is a pitiful
apparition at the close. The detective Verloc, her husband, wavers as
a portrait between reality and melodrama. The minor female characters,
her mother and the titled lady patron of the apostle Michaelis, are no
mere supernumeraries.
The husband and wife in The Return are nameless but unforgetable. It
is a profound parable, this tale. The man discovered in his judgment
of his foolish wife that "morality is not a method of happiness." The
image in the mirrors in this tale produces a ghastly effect. I enjoyed
the amateur anarchist, the English girl playing with bombs in The
Informer; she is an admirable foil for the brooding bitterness of the
ruined Royalist's daughter in that stirring South American tale,
Gaspar Ruiz. Conrad knows this continent of half-baked civilisations;
life grows there like rank vegetations. Nostromo is the most elaborate
and dramatic study of the sort, and a wildly adventurous romance into
the bargain. The two women, fascinating Mrs. Gould and the proud,
beautiful Antonia Avellanos, are finely contrasted. And what a mob of
cutthroats, politicians, and visionaries! "In real revolutions the
best characters do not come to the front," which statement holds as
good in Paris as in Petrograd, in New York, or in Mexico. The Nigger
of the Narcissus and Nostromo give us the "emotion of multitude."
A genuinely humorous woman is the German skipper's wife in Falk, and
the niece, the heroine who turns the head of the former cannibal of
Falk--this an echo, doubtless, from the anecdote of the dog-eating
granduncle B---- of the Reminiscences--is heroic in her way. Funniest
of all is the captain himself. Falk is almost a tragic figure. Amy
Foster--in the same volume--is pathetic, and Bessie Carvil, of
To-morrow, might have been signed by Hardy. In Youth the old sea-dog's
motherly wife is the only woman. As for the impure witch in The Heart
of Darkness, I can only say that she creates a new shudder. How she
appeals to the imagination! The soft-spoken lady, bereft of her hero
in this narrative, who lives in Brussels, is a specimen of Conrad's
ability to make reverberate in our memory an enchanting personality,
and with a few strokes of the brush. We cannot admire the daughter of
poor old Captain Whalley in The End of Tether, but she is the
propulsive force of his actions and final tragedy. For her we have
"that form of contempt which is called pity." That particular story
will rank with the best in the world's literature. Nina Almayer shows
the atavistic "pull" of the soil and opposes finesse to force, while
Alice Jacobus in 'Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune) is half-way
on the road back to barbarism. But Nina will be happy with her chief.
In depicting the slow decadence of character in mixed races and the
naïve stammerings at the birth of their souls, Conrad is
unapproachable.
In the selection of his titles he is always happy; how happy, may be
noted in his new book, Victory. It is not a war book, though it
depicts in his most dramatic manner the warring of human instincts. It
was planned several years ago, but not finished until the writer's
enforced stay in his unhappy native land, Poland. Like Goethe or
Stendhal, Conrad can write in the midst of war's alarums about the
hair's-breadth 'scapes of his characters. But, then, the Polish is the
most remarkable race in Europe; from leading forlorn hopes to playing
Chopin the Poles are unequalled. Mr. Conrad has returned to his old
habitat in fiction. An ingenious map shows the reader precisely where
his tragic tale is enacted. It may not be his most artistic, but it is
an engrossing story. Compared with Chance, it seems a cast-back to
primitive souls; but as no man after writing such an extraordinary
book as Chance will ever escape its influence (after his Golden Bowl,
Mr. James was quite another James), so Joseph Conrad's firmer grasp on
the burin of psychology shows very plainly in Victory; that is, he
deals with elemental causes, but the effects are given in a subtle
series of reactions. He never drew a girl but once like Flora de
Barral; and, till now, never a man like the Swede, Axel Heyst, who
has been called, most appropriately, "a South Sea Hamlet." He has a
Hamletic soul, this attractive young man, born with a metaphysical
caul, which eventually strangles him. No one but Conrad would dare the
mingling of such two dissociated genres as the romantic and the
analytic, and if, here and there, the bleak rites of the one, and the
lush sentiment of the other, fail to modulate, it is because the
artistic undertaking is a well-nigh impossible one. Briefly, Victory
relates the adventures of a gentleman and scholar in the Antipodes. He
meets a girl, a fiddler in a "Ladies' Orchestra," falls in love, as do
men of lofty ideals and no sense of the practical, goes off with her
to a lonely island, there to fight for her possession and his own
life. The stage-setting is magnificent; even a volcano lights the
scene. But the clear, hard-blue sky is quite o'erspread by the black
bat Melancholia, and the silence is indeed "dazzling." The villains
are melodramatic enough in their behaviour, but, as portraits, they
are artfully different from the conventional bad men of fiction. The
thin chap, Mr. Jones, is truly sinister, and there is a horrid
implication in his woman-hating, which vaguely peeps out in the bloody
finale. The hairy servant might be a graduate from The Island of
Doctor Moreau of Mr. Wells--one of the beast folk; while the murderous
henchman, Ricardo, is unpleasantly put before us. I like the girl; it
would have been so easy to spoil her with moralising; but the Baron
is the magnet, and, as a counterfoil, the diabolical German hotel
keeper. There is too much arbitrary handling at the close for my
taste. Only in the opening chapters of Victory does Mr. Conrad pursue
his oblique method of taletelling; the pomp and circumstance of a
lordly narrative style roll to a triumphant conclusion. This Polish
writer easily heads the present school of English fiction.
His most buoyant and attractive girl is Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) in
the volume alluded to; she, however, is pure Caucasian, and perhaps
more American than European. Her beauty caresses the eye. The story is
a good one, though it ends unhappily--another cause for complaint on
the part of the sentimentalists who prefer molasses to meat. But this
is a tale which is also literature. Conrad will never be coerced into
offering his readers sugar-coated tittle-tattle. And at a period when
the distaff of fiction is too often in the hands of men the voice of
the romantic realist and poetic ironist, Joseph Conrad, sounds a
dynamic masculine bass amid the shriller choir. He is an aboriginal
force. Let us close with the hearty affirmation of Walt Whitman:
"Camerado! this is no book, who touches this, touches a man."
II
A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN
My edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is dated 1867, the third,
if I am not mistaken, the first appearing in 1855. Inside is pasted a
card upon which is written in large, clumsy letters: "Walt Whitman,
Camden, New Jersey, July, 1877." I value this autograph, because Walt
gave it to me; rather I paid him for it, the proceeds, two dollars (I
think that was the amount), going to some asylum in Camden. In
addition, the "good grey poet" was kind enough to add a woodcut of
himself as he appeared in the 1855 volume, "hankering, gross,
mystical, nude," and another of his old mother, with her shrewd,
kindly face. Walt is in his shirt-sleeves, a hand on his hip, the
other in his pocket, his neck bare, the pose that of a nonchalant
workman--though in actual practice he was always opposed to work of
any sort; on his head is a slouch-hat, and you recall his line: "I
wear my hat as I please, indoors or out." The picture is
characteristic, even to the sensual mouth and Bowery-boy pose. You
almost hear him say: "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own
bones." Altogether a different man from the later bard, the heroic
apparition of Broadway, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Chestnut Street. I
had convalesced from a severe attack of Edgar Allan Poe only to fall
desperately ill with Whitmania. Youth is ever in revolt, age alone
brings resignation. My favourite reading was Shelley, my composer
among composers, Wagner. Chopin came later. This was in 1876, when the
Bayreuth apotheosis made Wagner's name familiar to us, especially in
Philadelphia, where his empty, sonorous Centennial March was first
played by Theodore Thomas at the Exposition. The reading of a magazine
article by Moncure D. Conway caused me to buy a copy, at an
extravagant price for my purse, of The Leaves of Grass, and so
uncritical was I that I wrote a parallel between Wagner and Whitman;
between the most consciously artistic of men and the wildest among
improvisators. But then it seemed to me that both had thrown off the
"shackles of convention." (What prison-like similes we are given to in
the heady, generous impulses of green adolescence.) I was a boy, and
seeing Walt on Market Street, as he came from the Camden Ferry, I
resolved to visit him. It was some time after the Fourth of July,
1877, and I soon found his little house on Mickle Street. A policeman
at the ferry-house directed me. I confess I was scared after I had
given the bell one of those pulls that we tremblingly essay at a
dentist's door. To my amazement the old man soon stood before me, and
cordially bade me enter.
"Walt," I said, for I had heard that he disliked a more ceremonious
prefix, "I've come to tell you how much the Leaves have meant to me."
"Ah!" he simply replied, and asked me to take a chair. To this hour I
can see the humble room, but when I try to recall our conversation I
fail. That it was on general literary subjects I know, but the main
theme was myself. In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in
his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not
averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a
fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness
his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the
damnedest simulacrum?" But he was a sphinx the first time I met him. I
do recall that he said Poe wrote too much in a dark cellar, and that
music was his chief recreation--of which art he knew nothing; it
served him as a sounding background for his pencilled improvisations.
I begged for an autograph. He told me of his interest in a certain
asylum or hospital, whose name has gone clean out of my mind, and I
paid my few dollars for the treasured signature. It is now one of my
literary treasures.
If I forget the tenor of our discourse I have not forgotten the
immense impression made upon me by the man. As vain as a peacock,
Walt looked like a Greek rhapsodist. Tall, imposing in bulk, his
regular features, mild, light-blue or grey eyes, clear ruddy skin,
plentiful white hair and beard, evoked an image of the magnificently
fierce old men he chants in his book. But he wasn't fierce, his voice
was a tenor of agreeable timbre, and he was gentle, even to
womanliness. Indeed, he was like a receptive, lovable old woman, the
kind he celebrates so often. He never smoked, his only drink was
water. I doubt if he ever drank spirits. His old friends say "No,"
although he is a terrible rake in print. Without suggesting
effeminacy, he gave me the impression of a feminine soul in a
masculine envelope. When President Lincoln first saw him he said:
"Well, he _looks_ like a man!" Perhaps Lincoln knew, for his remark
has other connotations than the speech of Napoleon when he met Goethe:
"Voilà un homme!" Hasn't Whitman asked in Calamus, the most revealing
section of Leaves: "Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground
toward a real heroic man?" He also wrote of Calamus: "Here the
frailest leaves of me.... Here I shade down and hide my thoughts. I do
not express them. And yet they expose me more than all my other
poems." Mr. Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, when he dismissed Walt
from his department because of Leaves, did not know about the Calamus
section--I believe they were not incorporated till later--but
Washington was acquainted with Walt and his idiosyncrasies, and,
despite W. D. Connor's spirited vindication, certain rumours would not
be stifled. Walt was thirty-six when Leaves appeared; forty-one when
Calamus was written.
I left the old man after a hearty hand-shake, a So long! just as in
his book, and returned to Philadelphia. Full of the day, I told my
policeman at the ferry that I had seen Walt. "That old gas-bag comes
here every afternoon. He gets free rides across the Delaware," and I
rejoiced to think that a soulless corporation had some appreciation of
a great poet, though the irreverence of this "powerful uneducated
person" shocked me. When I reached home I also told my mother of my
visit. She was plainly disturbed. She said that the writings of the
man were immoral, but she was pleased at my report of Walt's sanity,
sweetness, mellow optimism, and his magnetism, like some natural
force. I forgot, in my enthusiasm, that it was Walt who listened, I
who gabbled. My father, who had never read Leaves, had sterner
criticism to offer: "If I ever hear of you going to see that fellow
you'll be sorry!" This coming from the most amiable of parents,
surprised me. Later I discovered the root of his objection, for, to be
quite frank, Walt did not bear a good reputation in Philadelphia, and
I have heard him spoken of so contemptuously that it would bring a
blush to the shining brow of a Whitmaniac. Yet dogs followed him and
children loved him. I saw Walt accidentally at intervals, though never
again in Camden. I met him on the streets, and several times took him
from the Carl Gaertner String Quartet Concerts in the foyer of the
Broad Street Academy of Music to the Market Street cars. He lumbered
majestically, his hairy breast exposed, but was a feeble old man,
older than his years; paralysis had maimed him. He is said to have
incurred it from his unselfish labours as nurse in the camp hospitals
at Washington during the Civil War; however, it was in his family on
the paternal side, and at thirty he was quite grey. The truth is, Walt
was not the healthy hero he celebrates in his book. That he never
dissipated we know; but his husky masculinity, his posing as the Great
God Priapus in the garb of a Bowery boy is discounted by the facts.
Parsiphallic, he was, but not of Pan's breed. In the Children of Adam,
the part most unfavourably criticised of Leaves, he is the Great
Bridegroom, and in no literature, ancient or modern, have been the
"mysteries" of the temple of love so brutally exposed. With all his
genius in naming certain unmentionable matters, I don't believe in the
virility of these pieces, scintillating with sexual images. They leave
one cold despite their erotic vehemence; the abuse of the vocative is
not persuasive, their raptures are largely rhetorical. This
exaltation, this ecstasy, seen at its best in William Blake, is sexual
ecstasy, but only when the mood is married to the mot lumière is
there authentic conflagration. Then his "barbaric yawp is heard across
the roofs of the world"; but in the underhumming harmonics of Calamus,
where Walt really loafs and invites his soul, we get the real man, not
the inflated hum-buggery of These States, Camerados, or My Message,
which fills Leaves with their patriotic frounces. His philosophy is
fudge. It was an artistic misfortune for Walt that he had a "mission,"
it is a worse one that his disciples endeavour to ape him. He was an
unintellectual man who wrote conventionally when he was plain Walter
Whitman, living in Brooklyn. But he imitated Ossian and Blake, and
their singing robes ill-befitted his burly frame. If, in Poe, there is
much "rant and rococo," Whitman is mostly yawping and yodling. He is
destitute of humour, like the majority of "prophets" and uplifters,
else he might have realised that a Democracy based on the "manly love
of comrades" is an absurdity. Not alone in Calamus, but scattered
throughout Leaves, there are passages that fully warrant unprejudiced
psychiatrists in styling this book the bible of the third sex.
But there is rude red music in the versicles of Leaves. They
stimulate, and, for some young hearts, they are as a call to battle.
The book is a capital hunting-ground for quotations. Such massive
head-lines--that soon sink into platitudinous prose; such robust
swinging rhythms, Emerson told Walt that he must have had a "long
foreground." It is true. Notwithstanding his catalogues of foreign
countries, he was hardly a cosmopolitan. Whitman's so-called
"mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself
a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism--what Coleridge called
"the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete
imagination automatically rejected metaphysics. His chief asset is an
extraordinary sensitiveness to the sense of touch; it is his
distinguishing passion, and tactile images flood his work; this, and
an eye that records appearances, the surface of things, and registers
in phrases of splendour the picturesque, yet seldom fuses matter and
manner into a poetical synthesis. The community of interest between
his ideas and images is rather affiliated than cognate. He has a
tremendous, though ill-assorted vocabulary. His prose is jolting,
rambling, tumid, invertebrate. An "arrant artist," as Mr. Brownell
calls him, he lacks formal sense and the diffuseness and vagueness of
his supreme effort--the Lincoln burial hymn--serves as a nebulous
buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives
atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea
and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for
me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of
the poet--ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow,
ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels
where the slag covers rich ore, or plunges into subterrene pools of
nocturnal abominations--veritable regions of the "mother of dead
dogs." Probably the sexlessness of Emerson's, Poe's, and Hawthorne's
writings sent Whitman to an orgiastic extreme, and the morbid,
nasty-nice puritanism that then tainted English and American letters
received its first challenge to come out into the open and face
natural facts. Despite his fearlessness, one must subscribe to Edmund
Clarence Stedman's epigram: "There are other lights in which a dear
one may be regarded than as the future mother of men." Walt let in a
lot of fresh air on the stuffy sex question of his day, but, in
demanding equal sexual rights for women, he meant it in the reverse
sense as propounded by our old grannies' purity leagues. Continence is
not the sole virtue or charm in womanhood; nor, by the same token, is
unchastity a brevet of feminine originality. But women, as a rule,
have not rallied to his doctrines, instinctively feeling that he is
indifferent to them, notwithstanding the heated homage he pays to
their physical attractions. Good old Walt sang of his camerados,
capons, Americanos, deck-hands, stagecoach-drivers, machinists,
brakemen, firemen, sailors, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers,
and he associated with them; but they never read him or understood
him. They prefer Longfellow. It is the cultured class he so despises
that discovered, lauded him, believing that he makes vocal the
underground world; above all, believing that he truly represents
America and the dwellers thereof--which he decidedly does not. We are,
if you will, a commonplace people, but normal, and not enamoured of
"athletic love of comrades." I remember a dinner given by the Whitman
Society about twenty years ago, at the St. Denis Hotel, which was both
grotesque and pitiable. The guest of honour was "Pete" Doyle, the
former car-conductor and "young rebel friend of Walt's," then a
middle-aged person. John Swinton, who presided, described Whitman as a
troglodyte, but a cave-dweller he never was; rather the avatar of the
hobo. As John Jay Chapman wittily wrote: "He patiently lived on cold
pie, and tramped the earth in triumph." Instead of essaying the
varied, expressive, harmonious music of blank verse, he chose the
easier, more clamorous, and disorderly way; but if he had not so
chosen we should have missed the salty tang of the true Walt Whitman.
Toward the last there was too much Camden in his Cosmos. Quite
appropriately his dying word was le mot de Cambronne. It was the last
victory of an organ over an organism. And he was a gay old pagan who
never called a sin a sin when it was a pleasure.
III
THE BUFFOON OF THE NEW ETERNITIES: JULES LAFORGUE
I
"Jules Laforgue: Quelle joie!"
--J.-K.-HUYSMANS.
All victories are alike; defeat alone displays an individual profile.
And the case of Jules Laforgue wears this special aspect. Dying on the
threshold of his twenty-seventh year, coming too old into a world too
young, his precocity as poet and master of fantastic prose has yet not
the complexion of a Chatterton or a Keats. In his literary remains,
slender enough as to quantity, there is little to suggest a fuller
development if he had lived. Like his protagonist Arthur
Rimbaud--surely the most extraordinary poetic apparition of the
nineteenth century--Jules Laforgue accomplished his destiny during the
period when most poets are moulding their wings preparatory to flight.
He flew in youth, flew moonward, for his patron goddess was Selene, he
her faithful worshipper, a true lunalogue. His transcendental
indifferentism saved him from the rotten-ripe maturity of them that
are born "with a ray of moonlight in their brains," as Villiers de
l'Isle Adam hath it. And Villiers has also written: "When the forehead
alone contains the existence of a man, that man is enlightened only
from above his head; then his jealous shadow, prostrate under him,
draws him by the feet, that it may drag him down into the invisible."
Like Watteau, Laforgue was "condemned" from the beginning to "a green
thought in a green shade." The spirit in him, the "shadow," devoured
his soul, pulverised his will, made of him a Hamlet without a
propelling cause, a doubter in a world of cheap certitudes and
insolent fatuities, but barred him proffering his pearls to pigs. He
came before Nietzsche, yet could he have said with Zarathustra: "I
love the great despisers because they are the great adorers, they are
arrows of longing for the other shore." Now Laforgue was a great
despiser.
But he made merry over the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He
seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son
of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the
constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new
buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a
buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a
metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted
his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes
and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted him, though it was an
exasperated urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons has
spoken of his "icy ecstasy" and Maurice Maeterlinck described his
laughter as "laughter of the soul." Like Chopin or Watteau, he danced
on roses and thorns. All three were consumptives and the aurà of decay
floats about their work; all three suffered from the nostalgia of the
impossible. The morbid decadent aquafortist that is revealed in the
corroding etchings of Laforgue is germane to men in whom irony and
pity are perpetually disputing. We think of Heine and his
bitter-sweetness. Again with Zarathustra, Laforgue could say: "I do
not give alms. I am not poor enough for that." He possesses the sixth
sense of infinity. A cosmical jester, his badinage is well-nigh
dolorous. His verse and prose form a series of personal variations.
The lyric in him is through some temperamental twist reversed.
Fantastic dreams overflow his reality, and he always dreams with
wide-open eyes. Watteau's l'Indifferent! A philosophical vaudevillist,
he juggles with such themes as a metaphysical Armida, the moon and her
minion, Pierrot; with celestial spasms and the odour of mortality, or
the universal sigh, the autumnal refrains of Chopin, and the monotony
of love. "Life is quotidian!" he has sung, and women are the very
symbol of sameness, that is their tragedy--or comedy. "Stability thy
name is Woman!" exclaims the Hamlet of this most spiritual among
parodists.
One never gets him with his back to the wall. He vanishes in the
shining cloud of a witty abstraction when cornered. His prose is full
of winged neologisms, his poetry heavy with the metaphysics of ennui.
Remy de Gourmont speaks of his magnificent work as the prelude to an
oratorio achieved in silence. Laforgue, himself, called it an
intermezzo, and in truth it is little more. His intellectual
sensibility and his elemental soul make for mystifications. As if he
knew the frailness of his tenure on life, he sought azure and
elliptical routes. He would have welcomed Maeterlinck's test question:
"Are you of those who name or those who only repeat names?" Laforgue
was essentially a namer--with Gallic glee he would have enjoyed
renaming the animals as they left the Noachian ark; yes, and
nicknaming the humans, for he is a terrible disrespecter of persons
and rank and of the seats of the mighty.
Some one has said that a criticism is negative if it searches for what
a writer lacks instead of what he possesses. We should soon reach a
zero if we only registered the absence of "necessary" traits in our
poet. He is so unlike his contemporaries--with a solitary
exception--that his curious genius seems composed of a bundle of
negatives. But behind the mind of every great writer there marches a
shadowy mob of phrases, which mimics his written words, and makes them
untrue indices of his thoughts. These shadows are the unexpressed
ideas of which the visible sentences are only eidolons; a cave filled
with Platonic phantoms. The phrase of Laforgue has a timbre capable of
infinite prolongations in the memory. It is not alone what he says,
nor the manner, but his power of arousing overtones from his keyboard.
His æsthetic mysticism is allied with a semi-brutal frankness.
Feathers fallen from the wings of peri adorn the heads of equivocal
persons. Cosmogonies jostle evil farceurs, and the silvery voices of
children chant blasphemies. Laforgue could repeat with Arthur Rimbaud:
"I accustomed myself to simple hallucinations: I saw, quite frankly, a
mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums kept by the angels;
post-chaises on the road to heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a
lake; the title of a vaudeville raised up horrors before me. Then I
explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of words! I ended
by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind" [translation
by Arthur Symons]. But while Laforgue with all his "spiritual
dislocation" would not deny the "sacred" disorder, he saw life in too
glacial a manner to admit that his were merely hallucinations. Rather,
correspondences, he would say, for he was as much a disciple of
Baudelaire and Gautier in his search for the hidden affinity of
things as he was a lover of the antique splendours in Flaubert's
Asiatic visions. He, too, dreamed of quintessentials, of the sheer
power of golden vocables and the secret alchemy of art. He, too,
promenaded his incertitudes, to use a self-revealing phrase of
Chopin's. An aristocrat, he knew that in the country of the idiot the
imbecile always will be king, and, "like many a one who turned away
from life, he only turned away from the rabble, and cared not to share
with them well and fire and fruit." His Kingdom of Green was consumed
and became grey by the regard of his coldly measuring eye. For him
modern man is an animal who bores himself. Laforgue is an essayist who
is also a causeur. His abundance is never exuberance. Without
sentiment or romance, nevertheless, he does not suggest ossification
of the spirit. To dart a lance at mythomania is his delight, while
preserving the impassibility of a Parnassian. His travesties of
Hamlet, Lohengrin, Salomé, Pan, Perseus enchant, their plastic yet
metallic prose denotes the unique artist; above all they are modern,
they graze the hem of the contemporaneous. From the sublime to the
arabesque is but a semitone in his antic mind. Undulating in his
desire to escape the automatic, doubting even his own scepticism,
Jules Laforgue is a Hamlet à rebours. Old Fletcher sings:
"Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley,
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."
II
He seems to have been of an umbrageous character. His life was sad and
simple. He was born August 20, 1860, at Montevideo--"Ville en
amphithéâtre, toits en terrasses, rues en daumiers, rade enorme"--of
Breton parentage. He died at Paris, 1887. Gustave Kahn, the symbolist
poet, describes Laforgue in his Symbolistes and Décadents as a serious
young man, with sober English manners and an extreme rectitude in the
matter of clothes. Not the metaphysical Narcissus that was once
Maurice Barrès--whose early books show the influence of Laforgue. He
adored the philosophy of the Unconscious as set forth by Von Hartmann,
was erudite, collected delicate art, thought much, read widely, and
was an ardent advocate of the Impressionistic painters. I have a
pamphlet by Médéric Dufour, entitled Etude sur l'Æthétique de Jules
Laforgue: une Philosophie de l'Impressionisme, which is interesting,
though far from conclusive, being an attack on the determinism of
Taine, and a defence of Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley. But then we only
formulate our preferences into laws. The best thing in it is the
phrase: "There are no types, there is only humanity," to the wisdom of
which we must heartily subscribe. From 1880 to 1886 Laforgue was
reader to the Empress Augusta at Berlin and was admired by the
cultivated court circle, as his letters to his sister and M.
Ephrussi, his friend, testify. He was much at home in Germany and
there is no denying the influence of Teutonic thought and spirit on
his susceptible nature. Naturally prone to pessimism (he has called
himself a "mystic pessimist") as was Amiel, the study of Hegel,
Schopenhauer, and Hartmann solidified the sentiment. He met an English
girl, Leah Lee, by name, and after giving her lessons in French, fell
in love, and in 1887 married her. It is interesting to observe the
sinister dandy in private life, as a tender lover, a loving brother.
This spiritual dichotomy is not absent in his poetry. He holds back
nothing in his self-revelations, except the sad side, though there is
always an exquisite tremulous sensibility in his baffling art. A few
months after his marriage he was attacked by the fatal malady, as was
his unfortunate wife, and he was buried on his twenty-seventh
birthday. Gustave Kahn notes that few followed him to the grave. He
was unknown except to some choice spirits, the dozen superior persons
of Huysmans, scattered throughout the universe. His wife survived him
only a short time. Little has been written of him, the most complete
estimate being that of Camille Mauclair, with an introduction by
Maeterlinck--who calls his Hamlet more Hamlet than Shakespeare's. In
addition to these, and Dufour, Kahn, De Gourmont and Felix Féneon, we
have in English essays by George Moore, Arthur Symons, Philip Hale,
the critic of music, and Aline Gorren. Mr. Moore introduced Laforgue
in company with Rimbaud to the English reading world and Mr. Symons
devoted to him one of his sensitive studies in The Symbolist Movement
in Literature. Mr. Hale did the same years ago for American readers in
a sympathetic article, The Fantastical Jules Laforgue. He also
translated with astonishing fidelity to the letter and spirit of the
author, his incomparable Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal. I regret having
it no longer in my possession so that I might quote from its delicious
prose. As to the verse, I know of few attempts to translate the
untranslatable. Perhaps Mr. Symons has tried his accomplished hand at
the task. How render the sumptuous assonance and solemn rhythms of
Marche Funèbre: O convoi solennel des soleils magnifiques?
III
"Je ne suis qu'un viveur lunaire
Qui faits des ronds dans les bassins
Et cela, sans autre dessin
Que devenir un légendaire...."
Sings our poet in the silver-fire verse of L'Imitation de Notre-Dame
la Lune, wherein he asks--Mais où sont les Lunes d'Antan. This Pierrot
lunaire, this buffoon of new and dusty eternities, wrote a sort of
vers libres, which, often breaking off with a smothered sob,
modulates into prose and sings the sorrows and complaints of a world
peopled by fantastic souls, clowns, somnambulists, satyrs, poets,
harlots, dainty girls, Chéret posters, pierrots, kings of pyschopathic
tastes, blithe birds, and sad-coloured cemeteries. The poet is a
mocking demon who rides on clouds dropping epigrams earthward, the
earth that grunts and sweats beneath the sun or cowers and weeps under
the stellar prairies. He mockingly calls himself "The Grand Chancellor
of Analysis." Like Nietzsche he dances when his heart is heavy, and
trills his roundelays and his gamut of rancorous flowers with an
enigmatic smile on his lips. It is a strange and disquieting music, a
pageantry of essences, this verse with its resonance of emerald.
Appearing in fugitive fashion, it was gathered into a single volume
through the efforts of friends and with the Moralités légendaires
comprises his life-work, for we can hardly include the Mélanges
posthumes, which consist of scraps and fragments (published in 1903)
together with some letters, not a very weighty addition to the dead
poet's fame. His translations of Walt Whitman I've not seen. Perhaps
his verse is doomed; it was born with the hectic flush of early
dissolution, but it is safe to predict that as long as lovers of rare
literature exist the volume of prose will survive. It has for the
gourmet of style an unending charm, the charm en sourdine of its
creator, to whom a falling leaf or an empire in dissolution was of
equal value. "His work," wrote Mr. Symons, "has the fatal evasiveness
of those who shrink from remembering the one thing which they are
unable to forget. Coming as he does after Rimbaud, turning the
divination of the other into theories, into achieved results, he is
the eternally grown-up nature to the point of self-negation, as the
other is the eternal enfant terrible." Tout était pour le vieux dans
le meilleur des mondes, Laforgue would have cried in the epigram of
Paul Bourget.
The prose of Jules Laforgue recalls to me his description of the
orchestra in Salomé, the fourth of the Moralités légendaires. Sur un
mode allègre et fataliste, un orchestre aux instruments d'ivoire
improvisait une petite overture unanime. That his syllables are of
ivory I feel, and improvised, but his themes are pluralistic, the
immedicable and colossal ennui of life the chiefest. Woman--the
"Eternal Madame," as Baudelaire calls her--is a being both magical and
mediocre; she is also an escape from the universal world-pain. La fin
de l'homme est proche ... Antigone va passer du ménage de la famille
au ménage de la planète (prophetic words). But when lovely woman
begins to talk of the propagation of the ideal she only means the
human species. With Lessing he believes: "There is, at most, but one
disagreeable woman in the world; a pity then that every man gets her
for himself."
It is rather singular to observe in the writings of Marinetti, the
self-elected leader of the so-called Futurists, the hopeless
deliquescence of the form invented by Louis Bertrand in his Gaspard de
la Nuit, and developed with almost miraculous results in Baudelaire
and terminating with Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and Francis Poictevin
("Paysages"). Rimbaud had intervened. In his Illuminations we read
that "so soon as the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place,
a rabbit halted amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells, and
said its prayers to the rainbow through the spider's web. Oh! The
precious stones in hiding, the flowers already looking out ... Madame
X established a piano in the Alps.... The caravans started. And the
Splendid Hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night of the
Pole" (from the translation by Aline Gorren). This, apparently mad
sequence of words and dissociation of ideas, has been deciphered by M.
Kahn, and need not daunt any one who has patience and ingenuity. I
confess I prefer Laforgue, who at his most cryptic is never so wildly
tantalising as Rimbaud.
Moralités légendaires contains six sections. I don't know which to
admire the most, the Hamlet or the Lohengrin, the Salomé or the Persée
et Andromède. Le Miracle des Roses is of an exceeding charm, though
dealing with the obvious, while Pan et la Syrinx has a quality which I
can recall nowhere else in literature; perhaps in the cadences
charged with the magic and irony of Chopin, or in the half-dreams of
Watteau, colour and golden sadness intermingled, may evoke the
spiritual parodies of Laforgue, but in literature there is no
analogue, though Pan is of classic flavour despite his very modern
Weltanschauung. Syrinx is a woodland creature nebulous and exquisite.
Pursued by Pan--the Eternal Male in rut--she does not succumb to his
pipes, and after she has vanished in the lingering wind, he blows
sweeter music through his seven reeds. The symbol is not difficult to
decipher. And who would not succumb to the languorous melancholy of
Andromède, not chained to a rock but living on the best of terms with
her monster, who calls her Bébé! The sea bores her profoundly. She
looks for Perseus, who doesn't come; the sea, always the sea without a
moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made!
When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for
Andromède, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig
disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death
of the monster brings to life a lovely youth--put under the spell of
malignant powers--who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, Son of
Parsifal, the whole machinery of the Wagner opera is transposed to the
key of lunar parody. What ambrosia from the Walhalla of topsyturvy is
this Elsa with her "eyes hymeneally illumined" as she awaits her
saviour. He appears and they are married. Alas! The pillow of the
nuptial couch becomes a swan that carries off Lohengrin weary of the
tart queries made by his little bride concerning love and sex and
other unimportant questions of daily life. This Elsa is a sensual
goose. She is also a stubborn believer in the biblical injunction:
"Crescite et multiplicamini," and she would willingly allow the
glittering stranger Knight to brisé le sceau de ses petites solitudes,
as the Vicar of Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these
tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative
are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories
with a glowworm phosphorescence.
Salomé and her celebrated eyebrows is a spiritual sister of Flaubert's
damsel, as Elsa is nearly related to his Salammbô. She dwells in the
far-off Iles Blanches Esotériques, and she, too, is annoyed by the
stupidity of the sea, always new, always respectable! She is the first
of the Salomés since Flaubert who has caught some of her prototype's
fragrance. (Oscar Wilde's attempt proved mediocre. He introduced a
discordant pathological note, but the music of Richard Strauss may
save his pasticcio. It interprets the exotic prose of the Irishman
with tongues of fire; it laps up the text, encircles it, underlines,
amplifies, comments, and in nodules of luminosity, makes clear that
which is dark, ennobles much that is vain, withal it never insists on
leading; the composer appears to follow the poet.) Laforgue's Salomé
tries to sport with the head of John the Baptist, stumbles, loses her
footing, and falls from the machicolated wall on jagged rocks below,
as the head floats out to sea, miraculously alight. There are wit and
philosophy and the hint of high thoughts in Salomé, though her heart
like glass is cold, empty, and crystalline.
The subtitle of Hamlet, which heads the volume, is--Or, the Results of
Filial Devotion--and the story, as Mr. Hale asserts, is Laforgue's
masterpiece. Here is a Hamlet for you, a prince whose antics are
enough to disturb the dust of Shakespeare and make the angels on high
weep with hysterical laughter. Not remotely hinting at burlesque, the
character is delicately etched. By the subtle withdrawal of certain
traits, this Hamlet behaves as a man would who has been trepanned and
his moral nature removed by an analytical surgeon. He is irony
personified and is the most delightful company for one weary of the
Great Good Game around and about us, the game of deceit, treachery,
politics, love, social intercourse, religion, and commerce. Laforgue's
Hamlet sees through the hole in the mundane millstone and his every
phrase is like the flash of a scimitar.
It is the irony of his position, the irony of his knowledge that he is
Shakespeare's creation and must live up to his artistic paternity;
the irony that he is au fond a cabotin, a footlight strutter, a
mouther of phrases metaphysical and a despiser of Ophelia (chère
petite glu he names her) that are all so appealing. Intellectual
braggart, this Hamlet resides after his father Horwendill's "irregular
decease" in a tower hard by the Sound, from which Helsingborg may be
seen. An old, stagnant canal is beneath his windows. In his chamber
are waxen figures of his mother, Gerutha, and his uncle-father, Fengo.
He daily pierces their hearts with needles after a bad old-fashioned
mediæval formula of witchcraft. But it avails naught. With a fine
touch he seeks for his revenge by having enacted before their
Majesties of Denmark his own play. They incontinently collapse in
mortal nausea, for they are excellent critics.
Such a play scene, withal Shakespearian! "Stability thy name is
woman!" he exclaims bitterly, for he fears love with the compromising
domesticity of marriage. It is his rigorous transvaluation of all
moral values and conventionalities that proclaims this Hamlet a man of
the future. No half-way treaties with the obvious in life, no crooking
the pregnant hinges of his opinions to the powers that be. An anarch,
pure and complex, he despises all methods. What soliloquies, replete
with the biting, cynical wisdom of a disillusionised soul!
"Ah," he sighs, "there are no longer young girls, they are all nurses.
Ophelia loves me because, as Hobbes claims: 'Nothing is more
agreeable in our ownership of goods than the thought that they are
superior to the goods of others.' Now I am socially and morally
superior to the 'goods' of her little friends. She wishes to make me,
Hamlet, comfortable. Ah, if I could only have met Helen of Narbonne!"
A Hamlet who quotes the author of The Leviathan is a Hamlet with a
vengeance.
To him enter the players William and Kate. He reads them his play.
Kate's stage name is Ophelia. "Comment!" cries Hamlet, "encore une
Ophelia dans ma potion!" William doesn't like the play because his
part is not "sympathetic." After they retire Hamlet indulges in a
passionate outburst reproaching the times with its hypocrisy and des
hypocrites et routinières jeunes filles. If women but knew they would
prostrate themselves before him as did the weeping ones upon the body
of the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and
cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the
canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia
is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged
head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pédicure!" This
last is his topmost term of contempt.
His parleying with the grave-diggers is another stroke of wit. One of
them tells him that Polonius is carried off by apoplexy--a bust has
been erected to his memory bearing the inscription, "Words! Words!
Words!" He also learns that Yorick was his half-brother, the son of a
gipsy woman. Ophelia dies--he hears this with mixed feelings--and he
is informed that the young Prince Hamlet is quite mad. The
grave-digger is a philosopher, he thinks that Fortinbras is at hand,
that the best investment for his money will be in Norwegian bonds. The
funeral cortège approaches. Hamlet hides.
His soliloquy upon the skull of Yorick has been partly done into
English by Mr. Symons.
"Alas, poor Yorick! As one seems to hear in this little shell, the
multitudinous roar of the ocean, so I hear the whole quenchless
symphony of the universal soul, of whose echoes this box was its
cross-roads. There's a solid idea!... Perhaps I have twenty or thirty
years to live, and I shall pass away like the others. Like the others?
O Totality, the misery of being there no longer! Ah! I would like to
set out to-morrow and search all through the world for the most
adamantine processes of embalming. They, too, were the little people
of History, learning to read, trimming their nails, lighting the dirty
lamp every evening, in love, gluttonous, vain, fond of compliments,
handshakes, and kisses, living on bell-town gossip, saying, 'What sort
of weather shall we have to-morrow? Winter has really come.... We have
had no plums this year.' Ah! Everything is good, if it would not come
to an end. And thou, Silence, pardon the earth; the little madcap
hardly knows what she is doing; on the day of the great summing-up
before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a piteous _idem_ in the
column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the
column of negligible quantities.... To die! Evidently, one does
without knowing it, as, every night, one enters upon sleep. One has no
consciousness of the passing of the last lucid thought into sleep,
into swooning, into death. Evidently. But to be no more, to be here no
more, to be ours no more! Not even to be able, any more, to press
against one's human heart, some idle afternoon, the ancient sadness
contained in one little chord on the piano!"
And this "secular sadness" pursues the heartless Hamlet to the
cemetery; he returns after dark in company with the buxom actress
Kate. They have eloped.
But the fatal irresolution again overtakes him. He would see Ophelia's
tomb for the last time, and as he attempts to decipher its
inscription, Laertes--idiot d'humanité, the average sensible
man--approaches and the pair hold converse. It is a revelation of the
face of foolishness. Laertes reproaches Hamlet. He has by his trifling
with Ophelia caused her death. Laertes calls him a poor demented one,
exclaims over his lack of moral sense, and winds up by bidding the
crazy Prince leave the cemetery. Quand on finit par folie, c'est qu'on
a commencé par le cabotinage. (Which is a consoling axiom for an
actor.) Hamlet with his naïve irony calmly inquires:
"And thy sister!" This is too much for the distracted brother, who
poignards the Prince. Hamlet expires with Nero's cry on his lips:
"Ah! Ah! _Qualis ... artifex ... pereo!_" And, as the author remarks:
"He rendered to immutable nature his Hamletic soul." William enters
and, discovering his Kate, gives her a sound beating; not the first or
the last, as she apprises us. The poem ends with this motto: Un Hamlet
de moins; la race n'en est pas perdue, qu'on se le dise! Which is
chilly truth.
The artistic beauty of the prose, its haunting assonance, its supple
rhythms make this Hamlet impossible save in French. Nor can the fine
edge of its wit, its multiple though masked ironies, its astounding
transposition of Shakespearian humour and philosophy be aught else
than loosely paraphrased. Laforgue's Hamlet is of to-morrow, for every
epoch orchestrates anew its own vision of Hamlet. The eighteenth
century had one; the nineteenth had another; and our generation a
fresher. But we know of none so vital as this fantastic thinker of
Laforgue's. He must have had his ear close to the Time Spirit, so
aptly has he caught the vibrations of his whirring loom, so closely to
these vibrations has he attuned the key-note of his twentieth-century
Hamlet.
IV
DOSTOÏEVSKY AND TOLSTOY
AND THE YOUNGER CHOIR OF RUSSIAN WRITERS
I
"It is terrible to watch a man who has the Incomprehensible
in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits
playing with a toy called God."
--_Letter to his brother Michael._
In his Criticism and Fiction, Mr. Howells wrote: "It used to be one of
the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which
Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were few
shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is
one of the reflections suggested by Dostoïevsky's novel, The Crime and
the Punishment, that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in
American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as false and as
mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain
nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying."
Who cares nowadays for the hard-and-fast classifications of idealist,
realist, romanticist, psychologist, symbolist, and the rest of the
phrases, which are only so much superfluous baggage for literary
camp-followers. All great romancers are realists, and the converse may
be true. You note it in Dumas and his gorgeous, clattering
tales--improbable, but told in terms of the real. For my part, I often
find them too real, with their lusty wenches and heroes smelling of
the slaughter-house. Turn now to Flaubert, master of all the moderns;
you may trace the romancer dear to the heart of Hugo, or the
psychologist in Madame Bovary, the archæological novel in Salammbô, or
cold, grey realism as in L'Education Sentimentale, while his very
style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic
periods--is not all this the beginning of that symbolism carried to
such lengths by Verlaine and his followers? Shakespeare himself ranged
from gross naturalism to the quiring of cherubim.
Walter Scott was a master realist if you forget his old-fashioned
operatic scenery and costumes. It is to Jane Austen we must go for the
realism admired of Mr. Howells, and justly. Her work is all of a
piece. The Russians are realists, but with a difference; and that
deviation forms the school. Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian
fiction--Leo Wiener's admirable anthology surprises with its specimens
of earlier men--we see the novel strained through the rich, mystic
imagination of Dostoïevsky; viewed through the more equable,
artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is
seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own
didactic purposes. Realism? Yes, such as the world has never before
seen, and yet at times as idealistic as Shelley. It is not surprising
that Mr. John M. Robertson wrote, as far back as 1891: "In that
strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the
highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in
the production of truthful literary art ... for justice of perception,
soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in
England, with all our freedom, can offer no parallel."
Perhaps "freedom" is the reason.
And what would this critic have said of the De Profundis of Maxim
Gorky? Are there still darker depths to be explored? Little wonder Mr.
Robertson calls Kipling's "the art of a great talent with a cheap
culture and a flashy environment." Therefore, to talk of such
distinctions as realism and romance is sheer waste of time. It is but
a recrudescence of the old classic _vs._ romantic conflict. Stendhal
has written that a classicist is a dead romanticist. It still holds
good. But here in America, "the colourless shadow land of fiction," is
there no tragedy in Gilead for souls not supine? Some years ago Mr.
James Lane Allen, who cannot be accused of any hankerings after the
flesh-pots of Zola, made an energetic protest against what he
denominated the "feminine principle" in our fiction. He did not mean
the books written by women--in sooth, they are for the most part
boiling over with the joy of life--but he meant the feminism of so
much of our novel writing put forth by men.
The censor in Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional
literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America
the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the
hypocrite is the censor. (Though something might be said now about the
pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.) Not that Mr.
Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views--but he puts his
foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional.
With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament. He admires
with a latitude quite foreign to English-speaking critics such diverse
genius as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Galdos, Jane Austen, Emilia
Pardo Bázan, Mathilde Serao--greater than any modern woman writer of
fiction--Henry James, and George Moore. But he admires each on his or
her native heath. That their particular methods might be given
universal application he does not admit. And when he wrote the above
about Dostoïevsky New York was not so full of Russians and Poles and
people from southeastern Europe as it is now. Dostoïevsky, if he were
alive, would find plenty of material, tragedy and comedy alike, on
our East Side.
The new translation of Dostoïevsky in English by Constance Garnett is
significant. A few years ago Crime and Punishment was the only one of
his works well known. The Possessed, that extraordinary study of souls
obsessed by madness and crime, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of
the Dead, and The Idiot are to-day in the hands of American readers
who indorse what Nietzsche said of the Russian master: "This profound
man ... has perceived that Siberian convicts, with whom he lived for a
long time (capital criminals for whom there was no return to society),
were persons carved out of the best, the hardest and the most valuable
material to be found in the Russian dominions.... Dostoïevsky, the
only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn." George Moore
once had dubbed the novelist, "Gaboriau with psychological sauce."
Since then, Mr. Moore has contributed a charming introduction to Poor
Folk, yet there is no denying the force and wit of his hasty epigram.
Dostoïevsky is often melodramatic and violent; his "psychology" vague
and tortuous.
And in the letters exchanged between Nietzsche and Georg Brandes, the
latter writes of Dostoïevsky after his visit to Russia: "He is a great
poet but a detestable fellow, altogether Christian in his emotions,
and quite _sadique_ at the same time. All his morality is what you
have christened 'Slave's' morality.... Look at Dostoïevsky's face:
half the face of a Russian peasant, half the physiognomy of a
criminal, flat nose, little penetrating eyes, under lids trembling
with nervousness, the forehead large and well-shaped, the expressive
mouth telling of tortures without count, of unfathomable melancholy,
of morbid desires, endless compassion, passionate envy. An epileptic
genius whose very exterior speaks of the stream of mildness that fills
his heart, of the wave of almost insane perspicuity that gets into his
head, finally the ambition, the greatness of endeavour, and the envy
that small-mindedness begets.... His heroes are not only poor and
crave sympathy, but are half imbeciles, sensitive creatures, noble
drabs, often victims of hallucinations, talented epileptics,
enthusiastic seekers after martyrdom, the very types that we are
compelled to suppose probable among the apostles and disciples of the
early Christian era. Certainly no mind stands further removed from the
Renaissance."
Of all Dostoïevsky's portraits after Sonia, the saintly prostitute,
that of Nastasia Philipovna in The Idiot is the most lifelike and
astounding. The career of this half-mad girl is sinister and tragic;
she is half-sister in her temperamental traits to Paulina in the same
master's admirable story The Gambler. Grushenka in The Brothers
Karamazov is another woman of the demoniac type to which Nastasia
belongs. Then there are high-spirited, hysterical girls such as
Katarina in Karamazov, Aglaia Epanchin in The Idiot, or Liza in The
Possessed (Besi). The border-land of puberty is a favourite theme with
the Russian writer. And consider the splendidly fierce old women,
mothers, aunts, grandmothers (Granny in The Gambler is a full-length
portrait worthy of Hogarth) and befuddled old men--retired from
service in state and army; Dostoïevsky is a masterly painter of
drunkards, drabs, and neuropaths. Prince Mushkin (or Myshkin) the
semi-idiot in The Idiot is depicted with surpassing charm. He is half
cracked and an epileptic, but is one of the most lovable young men in
fiction. Thinking of him, you recall what Nietzsche wrote of Christ:
"One regrets that a Dostoïevsky did not live in the neighbourhood of
this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who knew just how to
perceive the thrilling charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the
sickly, and the childish." Here is a "moral landscape of the dark
Russian soul," and an exemplification in the Prince Myshkin of The
Idiot, who is evidently an attempt to portray a latter-day Christ.
Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, like Rogozhin in The Idiot,
Stavrogin in The Possessed were supermen before Nietzsche, but all
half mad. A famous alienist has declared that three-fourths of
Dostoïevsky's characters are quite mad. This is an exaggeration,
though there are many about whom the aura of madness and melancholy
hovers. Dostoïevsky himself was epileptic; poverty and epilepsy were
his companions through a life crowded with unhappiness. (Born 1822,
died 1881.) He was four years in Siberia, condemned though innocent as
a member of the Pétrachevsky group. He tells us that the experience
calmed his nerves. His recollections of his Dead House are harrowing,
and make the literature of prison life, whether written by Hugo, Zola,
Tolstoy, or others, like the literary exercise of an amateur. It is
this sense of reality, of life growing like grass over one's head,
that renders the novels of Dostoïevsky "human documents." Calling
himself a "proletarian of letters" this tender-hearted man denied
being a psychologist--which pre-eminently he was: "They call me a
psychologist; it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense
of the word, _i. e._, I depict all the soul's depths."
If he has shown us the soul of the madman, drunkard, libertine, the
street-walker, he has also exposed the psychology of the gambler.
He knew. He was a desperate gambler and in Baden actually starved in
company with his devoted wife. These experiences may be found depicted
in The Gambler.
He has been called the "Bossuet of the détraqués," but I prefer that
other and more appropriate title, the Dante of the North. His novels
are infernos. How well Nietzsche studied him; they were fellow spirits
in suffering. All Dostoïevsky is in his phrase: "There are no ugly
women"--put in the mouth of the senile, debauched Karamazov, a
companion portrait to Balzac's Baron Hulot. His love for women has a
pathological cast. His young girls discuss unpleasant matters. Even
Frank Wedekind is anticipated in his Spring's Awakening by the Russian
in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't
married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very
nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity,"
which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the
planet Jupiter." He was deeply pious, nevertheless a questioner. His
books are full of theological wranglings. Consider the "prose-poem" of
the Grand Inquisitor and the second coming of Christ. Or such an idea
as the "craving for community of worship is the chief misery of man,
of all humanity from the beginning of time." We recognise Nietzsche in
Dostoïevsky's "the old morality of the old slave man," and a genuine
poet in "the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the
stars." His naïve conception of eternity as "a chamber something like
a bathhouse, long neglected, and with spider's webs in its corners"
reminds us of Nietzsche when he describes his doctrine of the Eternal
Recurrence. The Russian has told us in memorable phrases of the
blinding, intense happiness, a cerebral spasm, which lasts the
fraction of a second at the beginning of an epileptic attack. For it
he declares, for that brief moment during which paradise is disclosed,
he would sacrifice a lifetime. Little wonder in the interim of a cold,
grey, miserable existence he suffered from what he calls "mystic
fear," the fear of fear, such as Maeterlinck shows us in The Intruder.
As for the socialists he says their motto is: "Don't dare to believe
in God, don't dare to have property, fraternity or death, two millions
of heads!"
The foundational theme of his work is an overwhelming love for
mankind, a plea for solidarity which too often degenerates into sickly
sentimentalism. He imitated Dickens, George Sand, and Victor Hugo--the
Hugo of Les Misérables. He hated Turgenieff and caricatured him in The
Possessed. It is true that in dialogue he has had few superiors; his
men and women talk as they would talk in life and only in special
instances are mouthpieces for the author's ideas--in this quite
different from so many of Tolstoy's characters. Merejkowski has said
without fear of contradiction that Dostoïevsky is like the great
dramatists of antiquity in his "art of gradual tension, accumulation,
increase, and alarming concentration of dramatic action." His books
are veritably tragic. In Russian music alone may be found a parallel
to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes.
What is more wonderful than Chapter I of The Idiot with its
adumbration of the entire plot and characterisation of the book, or
Chapter XV and its dramatic surprises.
His cardinal doctrine of non-resistance is illustrated in the
following anecdote. One evening while walking in St. Petersburg,
evidently in meditation a beggar asked for alms. Dostoïevsky did not
answer. Enraged by his apparent indifference, the man gave him such a
violent blow that he was knocked off his legs. On arising he picked up
his hat, dusted his clothes, and walked away; but a policeman who saw
the attack came running toward the beggar and took him to the lock-up.
Despite his protest Dostoïevsky accompanied them. He refused to make a
charge, for he argued that he was not sure the prisoner was the
culpable one; it was dark and he had not seen his face. Besides, he
might have been sick in his mind; only a sick person would attack in
such a manner. Sick, cried the examining magistrate, that drunken
good-for-nothing sick! A little rest in jail would do him good. You
are wrong, contradicted the accused, I am not drunk but hungry. When a
man has eaten, he doesn't believe that another is starving. True,
answered Dostoïevsky, this poor chap was crazy with hunger. I shan't
make a complaint. Nevertheless the ruffian was sentenced to a month's
imprisonment. Dostoïevsky gave him three roubles before he left. Now
this kind man was, strange as it may seem, an anti-Semite. His diary
revealed the fact after his death. In life he kept this prejudice to
himself. I always think of Dostoïevsky as a man in shabby clothes
mounting at twilight an obscure staircase in some St. Petersburg
hovel, the moon shining dimly through the dirty window-panes, and
cobwebs and gloom abounding. "I love to hear singing to a street
organ; I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings, when all the
passers-by have pale, green, sickly faces, or when wet snow is falling
straight down; the night is windless ... and the street lamps shine
through it," said Raskolnikov. Here is the essential Dostoïevsky.
And his tenacious love of life is exemplified in Raskolnikov's musing:
"Where is it I've read that some one condemned to death says or thinks
an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on
such a narrow ledge that he would only have room to stand, and the
ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest
around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all
his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live than to
die at once." We feel the repercussion of his anguish when death was
imminent for alleged participation in a nihilistic conspiracy. Or,
again, that horrid picture of a "boxed eternity": "We always imagine
eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But
why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little
room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in
every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it is
that." The grotesque and the sinister often nudge elbows in these
morbid, monstrous pages.
His belief in the unchanging nature of mankind is pure fatalism.
"Afterwards I understand ... that men won't change and that nobody can
alter it and that it's not worth wasting efforts over it.... Whoever
is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. He who
despises most things will be a lawgiver among them, and he who dares
most of all will be most in right. Any one who is greatly daring is
right in their eyes. So it has been till now, and so it always will
be." Thus Rodion, the student to the devoted Sonia. It sounds like
Nietzsche avant la lettre. Or the cynicism of: "Every one thinks of
himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive
himself." He speaks of his impending exile to Siberia: "But I wonder
shall I in those fifteen or twenty years grow so meek that I shall
humble myself before people and whimper at every word that I am a
criminal. Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are sending me
there for, that's what they want. Look at them running to and fro
about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at
heart, and worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be
wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!" (The above
excerpts are from the admirable translation by Constance Garnett.)
As for his own mental condition, Dostoïevsky gives us a picture of it
in Injury and Insult: "As soon as it grew dusk I gradually fell into
that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I've
been ill, and which I shall call mystic fear. It is a crushing anxiety
about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which
does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realised, at
this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable,
horrible misshapen fact." This "frenzied anguish" is a familiar stigma
of epilepsy. Its presence denotes the approach of an attack.
But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoïevsky, its
compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul
he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in
the very roots of his being, and recorded--as did Poe, Baudelaire, and
Nietzsche--the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his
Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into
a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not
without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder
Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the
man foredoomed to morbid crime is unmistakable.
The letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoïevsky came as a revelation
to his admirers. We think of him as overflowing with sentiment for
his fellow man, a socialist, one who "went to the people" long before
Tolstoy dreamed of the adventure, a man four years in prison in
Siberia, and six more in that bleak country under official inspection;
truly, a martyr to his country, an epileptic and a genius. You may be
disappointed to learn from these telltale documents--translated by
Ethel Colburn Mayne--that the Russian writer while in exile avoided
his fellow convicts, was very unpopular with them, and that throughout
his correspondence there are numerous contemptuous references to
socialism and "going to the people." He preferred solitude, he asserts
more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He
gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff--who
never wished him harm. The Dostoïevsky caricature portrait of
Turgenieff--infinitely the superior artist of the two--in The
Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoïevsky never forgave
Turgenieff for this forgiveness. Another merit of these letters is the
light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his
proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer.
Dostoïevsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to
describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff. He was abjectly
poor, gambled when he got the chance (which was seldom), hated Western
Europe, France and Germany in particular, but admired the novels of
George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dickens. He tells us much of
his painful methods of writing ("what do I want with fame when I'm
writing for daily bread?" he bitterly asks his brother), and the
overshadowing necessity that compelled him to turn in "copy" when he
lacked food, fire, friends. No wonder this private correspondence
shows us anything but a lover of mankind, no matter how suffused in
humanitarianism are his books, with their drabs, tramps, criminals,
and drunkards. Turgenieff divined in him Sadistic predispositions; he
was certainly a morbid man; while Tolstoy wrote of him: "It never
entered my head to compare myself with him.... I am weeping now over
the news of his death ... and I never saw the man." Dostoïevsky was a
profound influence on the art and life of Tolstoy.
It may interest musical persons to learn that it was through the
efforts of Adolphe Henselt, piano virtuoso and composer, that
Dostoïevsky was finally allowed to leave Siberia and publish his
writings. Henselt, who was at the time court pianist and teacher of
the Czarina, appealed to her, and thus the ball was set rolling that
ended in the clemency of the Czar. To Henselt, then, Russian
literature is indebted for the "greater Dostoïevsky." Why he was ever
sent to Siberia is still a mystery. He had avowed his disbelief in the
teachings of the Pétrachevsky group, and only frequented their
meetings because "advanced" European literature was read aloud.
Dostoïevsky was never a nihilist, and in his open letter to some St.
Petersburg students he gives them sound advice as to the results of
revolution. Poor man! He knew from harsh experience.
II
Thanks to the Count Melchoir de Vogüé, who introduced Tolstoy to the
French in Le Roman Russe (containing studies of Pushkin, Gogol,
Turgenieff, Dostoïevsky) literary Paris was for a time saturated in
Russian mysticism, and what the clear-headed Alphonse Daudet called
"Russian pity." It was Count de Vogüé, member of the Academy and
Neo-Catholic (as the group headed by Ernest Lavisse elected to style
itself), who compressed all Tolstoy in an epigram as having ("the mind
of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist") On dirait
l'esprit d'un chimiste anglais dans l'âme d'un buddhiste hindou.
The modulation of a soul, at first stagnant, then plunged into the
gulf of hopelessness, and at last catching a glimpse of light, is most
clearly expressed by Leo Nikolaievitch in his Resurrection. That by
throwing yourself again into the mire you may atone for early
transgressions--the muddy sins of your youth--is one of those deadly
ideas born in the crazed brain of an East Indian jungle-haunting
fanatic. It possibly grew out of the barbarous custom of blood
sacrifices. Waiving the tales told of his insincerity by Frau Anna
Seuron, we know that Tolstoy wrestled with the five thousand devils of
doubt and despair, and found light, his light, in a most peculiar
fashion. But he is often the victim of his own illusions. That, Vogüé,
a great admirer, pointed out some years ago. Turgenieff understood
Tolstoy; so did Dostoïevsky, and so does latterly the novelist Dmitri
Merejkowski.
Turgenieff's appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more
pathetic because written on the eve of his death.
Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you
for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well;
that is not to be thought of. But I write in order to tell
you how glad I am to have been your contemporary, and to make
my last earnest request. My friend, return to literary work.
This talent of yours has come from where all else comes. Oh,
how happy I should be could I believe that my entreaty would
prevail with you. My friend, our great national writer, grant
my request.
This may be found, if we remember aright, in the Halperine-Kaminsky
memoir.
Turgenieff, who was the greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy
was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social
notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and
pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have said
if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of
Tolstoy: "I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad
art, except the story, God Sees the Truth, which seeks a place in the
first class, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the
second." Also sprach Tolstoy in that madman's book called What is Art?
a work wherein he tried to outvie Nordau's abuse of beautiful art.
The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, Hamlet, Macbeth, Dante, and Goethe,
are all consigned to the limbo of bad art; bad because not
"understanded of the people." The peasant, the moujik, is to be the
criterion of art, an art which, in that case, ought to be a cross
between fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Vogüé declared
that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of
philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic Faguet
becomes enraged at the puerilities of the Russian. He wrote: "Tolstoy,
comme créateur, comme romancier, comme poète épique, pour mieux dire,
est un des quatre ou cinq plus grands génies de notre siècle. Comme
penseur, il est un des plus faibles esprits de l'Europe."
Not all that, replies Remy de Gourmont; Tolstoy may be wildly
mistaken, but he is never weak-minded. We think it is his strength,
his intensity that sends him caracoling on a dozen different roads in
search of salvation.
How a man lacking the critical faculty may be misled is to be seen in
What is Art? To master his subject the deluded novelist read all the
essays, disquisitions, and works he could find on the theme of
æsthetics. This as a preparation for clear thinking. It reminds one of
that comical artist Pellerin, in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale,
who devoured all the æsthetic treatises, ancient and modern, in search
of a true theory of the beautiful before he painted a picture; and he
had so thoroughly absorbed the methods of various painters that he
could not sit down at his easel in the presence of his model without
asking himself: Shall I "do" her à la Gainsborough, or, better still,
in the romantic and mysterious manner of M. Delacroix, with fierce
sunsets, melting moons, guitars, bloodshed, balconies, and the cries
of them that are assassinated for the love of love?
Tolstoy reaches, after many hundred pages of his essay, the
astoundingly original theory that art "is to establish brotherly
union among men," which was better said by Aristotle, and probably
first heard by him as a Socratic pearl of wisdom. It remained for
Merejkowski to set right the Western world in its estimate of Tolstoy
as man and artist. In his frank study, the facts in the case are laid
bare by a skilled, impartial hand. What he writes is well known among
Russians; it may shock English-speaking worshippers, who do not
accept Tolstoy as a great artist, but as the prophet of a new
dispensation--and it may be said, without beating about the bush, he
rather liked the niche in which he was placed by these uncritical
zealots.
The fate of the engineer hoist by his own petard is Tolstoy's. The
peasants of his country understand him as little as they understand
Beethoven, that Beethoven he so bitterly, so unjustly assailed in The
Kreutzer Sonata. (Poor Beethoven. Why did not Tolstoy select Tristan
and Isolde if he wished some fleshly music, some sensualistic
caterwauling, as Huxley phrased it? But a melodious violin and piano
sonata!) Tolstoy may go barefoot, dig for potatoes, wear his blouse
hanging outside, but the peasantry will never accept him as one of
their own. He has written volumes about "going to the people," and the
people do not want him, do not comprehend him. And that is Tolstoy's
tragedy, as it was the tragedy of Walt Whitman.
Curious students can find all they wish of Tolstoy's psychology in
Merejkowski's book. One thing we cannot forbear dwelling
upon--Dostoïevsky's significance in any discussion of Tolstoy.
Dostoïevsky was a profounder nature, greater than Tolstoy, though he
was not the finished literary artist. All that Tolstoy tried to be,
Dostoïevsky was. He did not "go to the people" (that pose of
dilettantish anarchy)--he was born of them; he did not write about
Siberian prisons from hearsay, he lived in them; he did not attempt
to dive into the deep, social waters of the "submerged tenth," because
he himself seldom emerged to the surface. In a word, Dostoïevsky is a
profounder psychologist than Tolstoy; his faith was firmer; his
attacks of epilepsy gave him glimpses of the underworld of the soul,
terrifying visions of his subconscious self, of his subliminal
personality. And he had the courage of his chimera.
Tolstoy feared art as being too artificial, and, as Merejkowski shows:
"From the dread mask of Caliban peeps out the familiar and by no means
awe-inspiring physiognomy of the obstinate Russian democrat squire,
the gentleman Positivist of the sixties." He never took writing as
seriously as Dostoïevsky; in Tolstoy there is a strong leaven of the
aristocrat, the man who rather despises a mere pen worker. Contrast
Dostoïevsky's attitude before his work, recall the painful parturition
of books, his sweating, remorseful days and nights when he could not
produce. And now Tolstoy tells us that Uncle Tom's Cabin is greater
than Shakespeare. Is it any wonder Turgenieff remonstrated with him?
Is it any wonder if, after reading one of his latter-day tracts, we
are reminded of The Washerwoman of Finchley Common, that classic in
the polemics of sniffling piety? The truth is that Tolstoy, a
wonderful artist in plastic portraiture, consciously or unconsciously
fashioned the Tolstoy legend, as did Richard Wagner the Wagner legend,
Victor Hugo the Hugo legend. Men of genius and imagination are nearly
all play-actors in matters autobiographical.
It is to Dostoïevsky, once the despised outcast, that we must go for
the human documents of misery, the naked soul, the heart of man
buffeted by fate. If you think Resurrection strong, then read
Dostoïevsky's The House of the Dead. If Anna Karenina has wooed
you--as it must--take up The Idiot; and if you are impressed by the
epical magnitude of War and Peace, study that other epic of souls, The
Brothers Karamazov, which illuminates, as if with ghastly flashes of
lightning, the stormy hearts of mankind. Tolstoy wrote of life;
Dostoïevsky lived it, drank its sour dregs--for he was a man accursed
by luck and, like the apocalyptic dreamer of Patmos, a seer of visions
denied to the robust, ever fleshly Tolstoy. His influence on Tolstoy
was more than Stendhal's--Stendhal whom Tolstoy called his master.
Tolstoy denies life, even hates it after having enjoyed it to the
full. His religion in the last analysis is nihilism, and if carried to
its logical conclusion would turn the civilised world into a desert.
Our great man, after his family was in bed, sometimes ate forbidden
slices of beef, and he had been seen enjoying a sly cigarette, all of
which should endear him to us, for it proves his unquenchable
humanity. Yet that roast-beef sandwich shook the faith of thousands.
No--it will not do to take Tolstoy seriously in his attempts at
evolving a parody of early Christianity. He is doubtlessly sincere,
but sincerity is often the cloak for a multitude of errors.
His Katusha--Maslova, as she is more familiarly known in
Resurrection--is a far less appealing figure than the street-walker
Sonia in Dostoïevsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter lives, while
poor Maslova, a crude silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins
the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which
Tolstoy drapes his moral platitudes. She is at first much more vital
than her betrayer, who is an unreal bundle of theories; but in company
with the rest of the characters she soon goes up in metaphysical
smoke. Walizewski asserts that all Tolstoy's later life was a
regrettable pose. "But this is the usual price of every kind of human
greatness, and in the case of this very great man, it is an atavistic
feature of the national ... education, which in his case was
originally of the most hasty and superficial description."
In As the Hague Ordains, the anonymous author attacks "our great
reformer and humbug," Count Leo Tolstoy. She claims that there was
hardly a village in China so abounding in filth and ignorance as the
Tula village of Yasnaya Polyana, beside Tolstoy's country home.
"I wonder," she writes, "why the procession of foreign visitors who go
to Yasnaya Polyana, who lavish adulation and hysterical praises upon
that crass socialist and mischief-maker of his day, never think to
look around them and use their reasoning powers. Would it not be the
logical thing for Yasnaya Polyana to be the model village of Russia?
Something cleaner than Edam or Marken? A little of his magnificent
humanitarianism and benevolence poured upon that unsanitary village on
his own estate would be more practical, it seems to me, than the thin
treacle of it spread over the whole universe. Talk is cheap in Yasnaya
Polyana, and the Grand Poseur plays his part magnificently. Every
visitor goes away completely hypnotised, especially the Americans,
with their frothing about equality and the universal brotherhood of
man. Universal grandmother! All men are just as equal as all noses or
all mouths are equal. The world gets older, but learns nothing, and it
cherishes delusions, and the same ones, just as it did in the time of
the Greek philosophers. Leo Tolstoy might well have lived in a tub or
carried a lantern by day, like the most sensational and theatrical of
the ancients. He is only a past master of réclame, of the art of
advertising. The Moujik blouse and those delightful tableaux of a real
nobleman shoemaking and haymaking make his books sell. That is all.
And, under the unsuspecting blouse of the humanitarian is the fine and
perfumed linen of the dandy. Leo Tolstoy, the Beau Brummel of his
corps in my father's day--the dandy in domino to-day."
III
Tolstoy the artist! When his vagaries are forgotten, when all his
books are rags, when his very name shall be a vague memory, there will
live the portrait of Anna Karenina. How dwarfed are his other
achievements compared with the creation of this woman, and to create a
living character is to be as the gods. Tolstoy has painted one of the
three women in the fiction of the nineteenth century. If the roll-call
of the century is ever sounded, these three women shall have endured
"the drums and tramplings" of many conquests, and the contiguous dust
of those fictional creatures not built for immortality. Balzac's
Valréie Marneffe, the Emma Bovary of Flaubert, and the Russian's Anna
Karenina are these daughters of earth--flesh and blood, tears and
lust, and the pride of life that killeth.
Despite Tolstoy's religious mania, I have never doubted his sincerity
for a moment. It is a mysterious yet potent factor in the psychology
of such an artist as he that whatever he did he did with tremendous
sincerity. That is the reason his fiction is nearer reality than all
other fictions, and the reason, too, that his realities, _i. e._, his
declarations of faith, are nearer other men's fictions. When he writes
of his conversion, like John Bunyan, he lets you see across the very
sill of his soul. And he does it artistically. He is not conscious
that art enters into the mechanism of this spiritual evisceration;
but it does. St. Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of
their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three
there is a touch of the sublime naïveté of childhood's outpourings.
I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points
of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's
extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century. Ibsen's
individualism appeals. Better his torpedo exploding a thousand times
under the social ark than the Oriental passivity of the Russian. There
is hope in the message of Brand; none in Tolstoy's nihilism. One
glorifies the will, the other denies, rejects it. No comparison can be
made between the two wonderful men as playwrights. Yet Tolstoy's
Powers of Darkness is brutal melodrama when compared to Ibsen's
complex dramatic organisms. But what a nerve-shattering revelation is
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. This is the real Tolstoy.
How amateurish is the attitude of the Tolstoy disciple who cavils at
his masterpieces. What is mere art compared to the message! And I say:
what are all his vapourings and fatidical croonings on the tripod of
pseudo-prophecy as compared to Anna Karenina? There is implicit drama,
implicit morality in its noble pages, and a segment of the life of a
nation in War and Peace. With preachers and saviours with quack
nostrums the world is already well stocked. Great artists are rare.
Every day a new religion is born somewhere--and it always finds
followers. But art endures, it outlives dynasties, religions,
divinities. It is with Tolstoy the artist we are enamoured. He may
deliver his message of warning to a careless world--which only pricks
up its ears when that message takes on questionable colour, as in the
unpalatable Kreutzer Sonata. (Yes; that was eagerly devoured for its
morbid eroticism.) We prefer the austerer Ibsen, who presents his men
and women within the frame of the drama, absolutely without personal
comment or _parti pris_--as before his decadence did Tolstoy in his
novels. Ibsen is the type of the philosophical anarch, the believer in
man's individuality, in the state for the individual, not the
individual for the state. It is at least more dignified than the
other's flood of confessions, of hysterical self-accusations, of
penitential vows, and abundant lack of restraint. Yet no one doubts
Tolstoy's repentance. Like Verlaine's it carried with it its own
proofs.
But why publish to the world these intimate soul processes,
fascinating as they are to laymen and psychologists alike? Why not
keep watch with his God in silence and alone? The reason was (only
complicated with a thousand other things, for Tolstoy was a complex
being and a Slav), the plain reason was, we repeat, because Leo
Nikolaievitch was an artist. He obeyed that demon known to Socrates
and Goethe, and minutely recorded his mental and emotional
fluctuations. And with Richard Wagner and Dostoïevsky, Tolstoy is one
of the three most emotional temperaments of the nineteenth century.
Unlike Ibsen or Nietzsche, he does not belong to the twentieth
century; his religion, his social doctrines are atavistic, are of the
past. Tolstoy is what the French call _un cérébral_, which, as Arthur
Symons points out, is by no means a man of intellect. "_Un cérébral_
is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms
itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transformed by emotion."
How well that phrase fits Tolstoy--the fever of the soul! He has had
the fever of the soul, has subdued it, and his recital of his
struggles makes breathless reading. They are depicted by an artist, an
emotional artist, and, despite his protestations, by one who will die
an artist and be remembered, not as the pontiff of a new dispensation,
but as a great world artist.
An admirer has said of him that "confession has become his second
nature"; rather it was a psychological necessity. The voice that cried
from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique
"copy" for newspapers. Alas! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia
that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean,
spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul
of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth
overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in
his early days with poverty; but his message--if you will have a
definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the
Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of
nature definite meanings--as if sheer existence itself is not its own
glorious vindication!)--may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in
all; he is the evangel of the future; his belief is buoyant and
Northern; whereas Tolstoy's sour outlook, his constant girding at the
vanities of life (after he had, Solomon-like, tasted of them to the
full) is Eastern; his is the Oriental fatalism, the hopeless doctrine
of determinism. He discovers a new sin every day. Better one hour of
Nietzsche's dancing madness than a cycle of Tolstoy's pessimistic
renunciations. And all his ethical propaganda does not shake in the
least our conviction of the truth and grandeur of Tolstoy's art.
Of the disciples the son of Tolstoy, Count Ilya, tells us in no
uncertain accents:
My father had good reason for saying that the "Tolstoyites" were to
him the most incomprehensible sect and the furthest removed from his
way of thinking that he had ever come across. "I shall soon be dead,"
he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to
plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been
trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most
important of all, they will forget."
IV
THE YOUNGER CHOIR
Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoïevsky,
Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics. As long as Russian, sonorous and
beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their
successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the
present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation
set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried
with it the best brains of the land. We need not dwell upon the
publicists, nor yet stir the muddy stream of agitation. It has been
the misfortune of Russian literary men to be involved in dangerous
political schisms and revolutionary movements; their misfortune, and
perhaps their good luck. For dramatic material they have never been at
a loss, though their art has suffered, and depth of feeling has been
gained at a sad waste of other qualities. That grand old humourist
Gogol has had no successors. Humour in Russia is a suspected thing.
Even if there were a second Gogol he would never be allowed to put on
the boards a second Revizor. We do not mean to assert that humour has
died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of
those who write nowadays. Since Gogol or coeval with him, only men of
secondary importance have been humourists: Uspenski, Ostrovski,
Saltykov (Chtchédrine), or the author of the novel Oblomov,
Gontcharov by name.
Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of
talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his
days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is
dead. It is when we turn to the living that we realise what a flatland
is Russian literature now. A writer and critic, Madame Z. Hippius,
attempted in the Paris _Mercure de France_ to give an idea of the
situation. She admitted the inadequacy of her sketch. The troubled
political map of Russia has not been conducive to ripe artistic
production. As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with
politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police
comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the assertion that literature in
Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary _milieu_, as an
organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy,
Dostoïevsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius. A glance
back at the times and writings of such critics as Bielinski,
Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov--a remarkable poet--disproves this
statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the
air. He first fashioned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read
Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. Semenov, Walizewski, Melchior de Vogüé, and
Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth and variety of this literature.
Among living prose writers two names are encountered: Maxim Gorky and
Léonide Andreiev. Of the neurotic Gorky there is naught to be said
that is encouraging. He was physically ill when in America and as an
artist in plain decadence. He had shot his bolt in his tales about his
beloved vagabonds. He had not the long-breathed patience or artistic
skill for a novel. His novels, disfigured by tirades and dry attempts
at philosophical excursions, are all failures. When his tramps begin
to spout Nietzsche on their steppes the artificial note is too
apparent. His plays are loose episodes without dramatic action or
climax, sometimes moving, as in the case of Nachtasyl, and discordant
in The Children of the Sun. Gorky had a natural talent; in his stories
a submerged generation became eloquent. And he became a doctrinaire.
Nietzsche finished the ruin that Marx had begun; his art, chiefly
derived from Dostoïevsky and Tchekov, succumbed to a sentimental
socialism.
Andreiev is still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He
is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His
play, Les Ténèbres, reveals the influences of Dostoïevsky and Tolstoy.
It is a shocking arraignment of self-satisfied materialism. A young
revolutionary is the protagonist. The woman in the case belongs to the
same profession as Dostoïevsky's Sonia. Not encouraging, this. Yet
high hopes are centred upon Andreiev. For the rest there is Vladimir
Soloviev, who is a poet-metaphysician with a following. He has mystic
proclivities. Scratch a Russian writer and you come upon a mystic. He
is against clericalism and believes in an "anti-clerical church"!
There is a little circle at Moscow, where a Muscovite review, _La
Balance_ (founded 1903), is the centre of the young men. V. Brusoff, a
poet, is the editor. Balmont and Sologub write for its pages, as do
Rosanow and Merejkowski. In 1898 there was a review started called
_Mir Iskousstva_. Its director was Serge Diaghilev, and it endured
until 1904. Sologub is one of the most promising poets. Block,
Remisov, Ivanov are also poets of much ability. There are romancers
such as Zensky, Kuzmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Chapygin, Serafimovitch,
Zaitzeff, Volnoff; some of these wrote on risky themes. But when the
works of these new writers are closely scrutinised their lack of
originality and poverty of invention are noticeable.
The "poisonous honey" of French decadents and symbolists has attracted
one party; and the others are being swallowed up in the pessimistic
nebula of "mystic anarchy" and fatalism. "Russian pity" suffuses their
work. There is without doubt a national sentiment and a revolt against
western European culture, particularly the French. Russia for the
Russians is the slogan of this group. But thus far nothing in
particular has come of their patriotic efforts; no overwhelming
personality has emerged from the rebellious froth of new theories. If
ever the "man on horseback" does appear in Russia, it is very doubtful
if he will bestride a Pegasus.
Of bigger and sterner calibre than any of the productions of the
others is Sanine, a novel by Michael Artzibaschev, that is being
widely read not only in Russia but in all the world. It was written as
long ago as 1903 the author tells us. He is of Tartar origin, born
1878, of parents in whose veins flowed Russian, French, Georgian, and
Polish blood. He is of humble origin, as is Gorky, and being of a
consumptive tendency, he lives in the Crimea. He began as a
journalist. His photograph reveals him as a young man of a fine,
sensitive type, truly an apostle of pity and pain. He passionately
espouses the cause of the poor and downtrodden, as his extraordinary
revolutionary short stories--The Millionaire among the rest--show.
Since Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons, no tale like Metal Worker
Schevyrjow has appeared in European literature. In it the bedrock of
Slavic fatalism, an anarchistic pessimism is reached. It has been done
into French by Jacques Povolozky. The Russian author reveals plentiful
traces of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Dostoïevsky, and Gorky in his pages;
Tchekov, too, is not absent. But the new note is the influence of Max
Stirner. Michael Artzibaschev calmly grafts the disparate ideas of
Dostoïevsky and Max Stirner in his Sanine, and the result is a hero
who is at once a superman and a scoundrel--or are the two fairly
synonymous? This clear-eyed, broad-shouldered Sanine passes through
the little town where he was born, leaving behind him a trail of
mishaps and misfortunes. He is depicted with a marvellous art, though
it is impossible to sympathise with him. He upsets a love-affair of
his sister's, he quarrels with and insults her lover, who commits
suicide; he also drives to self-destruction a wretched little Hebrew
who has become a freethinker and can't stand the strain of his
apostasy; he is the remote cause of another suicide, that of a
weakling, a student full of "modern" ideas, but whose will is quite
sapped. Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons is recalled more than once,
especially the character of Bazarov, the nihilist. Furthermore, when
this student fails to reap the benefit of a good girl's love, Sanine
steps in and ruins her. Even incest is hinted at. All this sounds
incredible in our bare recital, but in the flow and glow of the richly
coloured narrative everything is plausible, nay, of the stuff of life.
As realists the Russians easily lead all other nations in fiction.
There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from
Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the
bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a
realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have
pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky; there is an old mujik who seems
to have stepped out of Dostoïevsky, yet is evidently a portrait taken
from life. The weak mother, the passionate sister, the sweet womanly
quality of the deceived girl, these are portraits worthy of a master.
Sanine is not the Rogoszin, and his sister is not the Nastasia
Philipovna, of Dostoïevsky's The Idiot; for all that they are distinct
and worthy additions to the vast picture-gallery of Russian fiction.
Sanine himself hardly appeals to our novel readers, for whom a
golf-stick and a motor-car are symbols of the true hero. In a word, he
is real flesh and blood. He goes as mysteriously as he came. The novel
that followed, Breaking Point, is a lugubrious orgy of death and
erotic madness, a symphony of suicide and love and the disgust of
life. Artzibaschev is now in English garb. Thus far Sanine is his
masterpiece.
V
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
I
Two decades ago, more or less, John M. Robertson published several
volumes chiefly concerned with the gentle art of criticism. Mr.
Robertson introduced to the English-reading world the critical
theories of Emile Hennequin, whose essays on Poe, Dostoïevsky, and
Turgenieff may be remembered. It is a cardinal doctrine of Hennequin
and Robertson that, as the personal element plays the chief rôle in
everything the critic writes, he himself should be the first to submit
to a grilling; in a word, to be put through his paces and tell us in
advance of his likes and dislikes, his prejudices and passions.
Naturally, it doesn't take long to discover the particular bias of a
critic's mind. He writes himself down whenever he puts pen to paper.
For instance, there is the historic duel between Anatole France, a
free-lance among critics, and Ferdinand Brunetière, intrenched behind
the bastions of tradition, not to mention the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.
That discussion, while amusing, was so much threshing of academic
straw. M. France disclaimed all authority--he, most erudite among
critics; M. Brunetière praised impersonality in criticism--he, the
most personal among writers--not a pleasing or expansive personality,
be it understood; but, narrow as he was, his personality shone out
from every page.
Now, says Mr. Robertson, why not ask every critic about to bring forth
an opinion for a sort of chart on which will be shown his various
qualities of mind, character; yes, and even his physical temperament;
whether sanguine or melancholic, bilious or eupeptic, young or old,
peaceful or truculent; also his tastes in literature, art, music,
politics, and religion. This reminds one of an old-fashioned game. And
all this long-winded preamble is to tell you that the case of Arnold
Schoenberg, musical anarchist, and an Austrian composer who has at
once aroused the ire and admiration of musical Germany, demands just
such a confession from a critic about to hold in the balance the music
or unmusic (the Germans have such a handy word) of Schoenberg.
Therefore, before I attempt a critical or uncritical valuation of the
art of Arnold Schoenberg let me make a clean breast of my prejudices
in the manner suggested by Hennequin and Robertson. Besides, it is a
holy and unwholesome idea to purge the mind every now and then.
First: I place pure music above impure, _i. e._, instrumental above
mixed. I dislike grand opera as a miserable mishmash of styles,
compromises, and arrant ugliness. The moment the human voice intrudes
in an orchestral work, my dream-world of music vanishes. Mother Church
is right in banishing, from within the walls of her temples the female
voice. The world, the flesh, and the devil lurk in the larynx of the
soprano or alto, and her place is before the footlights, not as a
vocal staircase to paradise. I say this, knowing in my heart that
nothing is so thrilling as Tristan and Isolde, and my memory-cells
hold marvellous pictures of Lilli Lehmann, Milka Ternina, and Olive
Fremstad. So, I'm neither logical nor sincere; nevertheless, I
maintain the opinion that absolute music, not programme, not
music-drama, is the apogee of the art. A Beethoven string quartet
holds more genuine music for me than the entire works of Wagner.
There's a prejudiced statement for you!
Second: I fear and dislike the music of Arnold Schoenberg, who may be
called the Max Stirner of music. Now, the field being cleared, let us
see what the music of the new man is like. Certainly, he is the
hardest musical nut to crack of his generation, and the shell is very
bitter in the mouth.
Early in December, 1912, the fourth performance of a curious
composition by Schoenberg was given at the Choralionsaal in the
Bellevuestrasse, Berlin. The work is entitled Lieder des Pierrot
Lunaire, the text of which is a fairly good translation of a poem
cycle by Albert Guiraud. This translation was made by the late Otto
Erich Hartleben, himself a poet and dramatist. I have not read the
original French verse, but the idea seems to be faithfully represented
in the German version. This moon-stricken Pierrot chants--rather
declaims--his woes and occasional joys to the music of the Viennese
composer, whose score requires a reciter (female), a piano, flute
(also piccolo), clarinet (also bass clarinet), violin (also viola),
and violoncello. The piece is described as a melodrama. I listened to
it on a Sunday morning, and I confess that Sunday at noon is not a
time propitious to the mood musical. It was also the first time I had
heard a note of Schoenberg's. In vain I had tried to get some of his
scores; not even the six little piano pieces could I secure. Instead,
my inquiries were met with dubious or pitying smiles--your music clerk
is a terrible critic betimes, and his mind oft takes upon it the
colour of his customer's orders. So there I was, to be pitched
overboard into a new sea, to sink or float, and all the while wishing
myself miles away.
A lady of pleasing appearance, attired in a mollified Pierrot
costume, stood before some Japanese screens and began to intone--to
cantillate, would be a better expression. She told of a monstrous
moon-drunken world, then she described Columbine, a dandy, a pale
washer-woman--"Eine blasse Wäscherin wäscht zur Nachtzeit bleiche
Tücher"--and always with a refrain, for Guiraud employs the device
to excess. A valse of Chopin followed, in verse, of course (poor
suffering Frederic!), and part one--there are seven poems, each in
three sections--ended with one entitled Madonna, and another, the Sick
Moon. The musicians were concealed behind the screens (dear old Mark
Twain would have said, to escape the outraged audience), but we heard
them only too clearly!
It is the decomposition of the art, I thought, as I held myself in my
seat. Of course, I meant decomposition of tones, as the slang of the
ateliers goes.
What did I hear? At first, the sound of delicate china shivering into
a thousand luminous fragments. In the welter of tonalities that
bruised each other as they passed and repassed, in the preliminary
grip of enharmonics that almost made the ears bleed, the eyes water,
the scalp to freeze, I could not get a central grip on myself. It was
new music (or new exquisitely horrible sounds) with a vengeance. The
very ecstasy of the hideous! I say "exquisitely horrible," for pain
can be at once exquisite and horrible; consider toothache and its
first cousin, neuralgia. And the border-land between pain and pleasure
is a territory hitherto unexplored by musical composers. Wagner
suggests poetic anguish; Schoenberg not only arouses the image of
anguish, but he brings it home to his auditory in the most subjective
way. You suffer the anguish with the fictitious character in the
poem. Your nerves--and remember the porches of the ears are the
gateways to the brain and ganglionic centres--are literally pinched
and scraped.
I wondered that morning if I were not in a nervous condition. I looked
about me in the sparsely filled hall. People didn't wriggle; perhaps
their souls wriggled. They neither smiled nor wept. Yet on the wharf
of hell the lost souls disembarked and wept and lamented. What was the
matter with my own ego? My conscience reported a clean bill of health,
I had gone to bed early the previous night wishing to prepare for the
ordeal. Evidently I was out of condition (critics are like
prize-fighters, they must keep in constant training else they go
"stale"). Or was the music to blame? Schoenberg is, I said to myself,
the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp
daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his
victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you
receive another horrible thrill, all the time wondering over the fate
of the Lunar Pierrot and--hold on! Here's the first clew. If this new
music is so distractingly atrocious what right has a listener to
bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps
Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what
more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect?--for to be
hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object
of all the seven arts.
How does Schoenberg do it? How does he pull off the trick? It is not a
question to be lightly answered. In the first place the personality of
the listener is bound to obtrude itself; dissociation from one's
ego--if such a thing were possible--would be intellectual death; only
by the clear, persistent image of ourselves do we exist--banal
psychology as old as the hills. And the ear, like the eye, soon
"accommodates" itself to new perspectives and unrelated harmonies.
I had felt, without clearly knowing the reason, that when Albertine
Zehme so eloquently declaimed the lines of Madonna, the sixth stanza
of part one, beginning "Steig, o Mutter aller Schmerzen, auf den Altar
meiner Töne!" that the background of poignant noise supplied by the
composer was more than apposite, and in the mood-key of the poem. The
flute, bass clarinet, and violoncello were so cleverly handled that
the colour of the doleful verse was enhanced, the mood expanded;
perhaps the Hebraic strain in the composer's blood has endowed him
with the gift of expressing sorrow and desolation and the abomination
of living. How far are we here from the current notion that music is a
consoler, is joy-breeding, or should, according to the Aristotelian
formula, purge the soul through pity and terror. I felt the terror,
but pity was absent. Blood-red clouds swept over vague horizons. It
was a new land through which I wandered. And so it went on to the end,
and I noted as we progressed that Schoenberg, despite his ugly sounds,
was master of more than one mood; witness the shocking cynicism of the
gallows song Die dürre Dirne mit langen Halse. Such music is
shameful--"and that's the precise effect I was after"--could the
composer triumphantly answer, and he would be right. What kind of
music is this, without melody, in the ordinary sense; without themes,
yet every acorn of a phrase contrapuntally developed by an adept;
without a harmony that does not smite the ears, lacerate, figuratively
speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are
miles asunder, or else too closely related for aural matrimony; no
form, that is, in the scholastic formal sense, and rhythms that are so
persistently varied as to become monotonous--what kind of music, I
repeat, is this that can paint a "crystal sigh," the blackness of
prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon,
the faint sweet odours of an impossible fairy-land, and the strut of
the dandy from Bergamo? (See the Guiraud poem.) There is no melodic or
harmonic line, only a series of points, dots, dashes, or phrases that
sob and scream, despair, explode, exalt, blaspheme.
I give the conundrum the go-by; I only know that when I finally
surrendered myself to the composer he worked his will on my fancy and
on my raw nerves, and I followed the poems, loathing the music all the
while, with intense interest. Indeed, I couldn't let go the skein of
the story for fear that I might fall off somewhere into a gloomy chasm
and be devoured by chromatic wolves. I recalled one extraordinary
moment at the close of the composition when a simple major chord was
sounded and how to my ears it had a supernal beauty; after the
perilous tossing and pitching on a treacherous sea of no-harmonies it
was like a field of firm ice under the feet.
I told myself that it served me right, that I was too old to go
gallivanting around with this younger generation, that if I would eat
prickly musical pears I must not be surprised if I suffered from aural
colic. Nevertheless, when certain of the Schoenberg compositions
reached me from Vienna I eagerly fell to studying them. I saw then
that he had adopted as his motto: Evil, be thou my good! And that a
man who could portray in tone sheer ugliness with such crystal
clearness is to be reckoned with in these topsyturvy times.
I have called Arnold Schoenberg a musical anarchist, using the word in
its best estate--anarchos, without a head. Perhaps he is a superman
also, and the world doesn't know it. His admirers and pupils think so,
however, and several of them have recorded their opinion in a little
book, published at Munich, 1912, by R. Piper & Co.
The life of Arnold Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been
uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still
young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874. He lived there till 1901,
then in the December of that year he went to Berlin, where he was for
a short time conductor in Wolzogen's Bunten Theatre, and also teacher
of composition at Stern's Conservatory. In 1903 he returned to Vienna,
where he taught--he is pre-eminently a pedagogue, even pedantic as I
hope to presently prove--in the K. K. Akademie für Musik. In 1911
Berlin again beckoned to him, and as hope ever burns in the bosom of
composers, young and old, he no doubt believes that his day will come.
Certainly, his disciples, few as they may be, make up by their
enthusiasm for the public and critical flouting. I can't help
recalling the Italian Futurists when I think of Schoenberg. The same
wrath may be noted in the galleries where the young Italian painters
exhibit. So it was at the end of the concert. One man, a sane person,
was positively purple with rage (evidently he had paid for his seat),
and swore that the composer was verrückt.
His compositions are not numerous. Schoenberg appears to be a
reflective rather than a spontaneous creator. Here is an abridged
list: Opus 1, 2, and 3 (composed, 1898-1900); Opus 4, string sextet,
which bears the title, Verklärte Nacht (1899); Gurrelieder, after J.
P. Jacobsen, for solos; chorus and orchestra (1900), published in the
Universal Edition, Vienna; Opus 5, Pelléas et Mélisande, symphonic
poem for orchestra (1902), Universal Edition aforesaid; Opus 6, eight
lieder (about 1905); Opus 7, E string quartet, D minor (1905); Opus 8,
six orchestral lieder (1904); Opus 9, Kammersymphonie (1906); two
ballads for voice and piano (1907); Peace on Earth, mixed chorus à
capella (1908), manuscript; Opus 10, II, string quartet, F-sharp minor
(1907-8); fifteen lieder, after Stefan George, a talented Viennese
poet, one of the Jung-Wien group (1908), manuscript; Opus 11, three
piano pieces (1908); five pieces for orchestra (1909) in the Peters
Edition; monodrama, Erwartung (1909); Glückliche Hand, drama with
music, text by composer, not yet finished (1910); and six piano pieces
(1911). His book on harmony appeared in 1910 and was universally
treated as the production of a madman, and, finally, as far as this
chronicle goes, in 1911-12 he finished Pierrot Lunaire, which was
first produced in Berlin.
* * * * *
One thing is certain, and this hardly need assure my musical readers,
the old tonal order has changed for ever; there are plenty of signs in
the musical firmament to prove this. Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in
his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a contemporary of Debussy, and an
equally gifted musician, Martin Loeffler, was experimenting before
Debussy himself in a dark but delectable harmonic region. The tyranny
of the diatonic and chromatic scales, the tiresome revolutions of the
major and minor modes, the critical Canutes who sit at the seaside and
say to the modern waves: Thus far and no farther; and then hastily
abandon their chairs and rush to safety else be overwhelmed, all these
things are of the past, whether in music, art, literature, and--let
Nietzsche speak--in ethics. Even philosophy has become a plaything,
and logic "a dodge," as Professor Jowett puts it. Every stronghold is
being assailed, from the "divine" rights of property to the common
chord of C major. With Schoenberg, freedom in modulation is not only
permissible, but is an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of
overtones, and his music is not only horizontally and vertically
planned, but, so I pretend to hear, also in a circular fashion. There
is no such thing as consonance or dissonance, only imperfect training
of the ear (I am quoting from his Harmony, certainly a bible for
musical supermen). He says: "Harmonie fremde Töne gibt es also
nicht"--and a sly dig at the old-timers--"sondern nur dem
Harmoniesystem fremde." After carefully listening I noted that he too
has his mannerisms, that in his chaos there is a certain order, that
his madness is very methodical. For one thing he abuses the interval
of the fourth, and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth.
Vagabond harmonies, in which the remotest keys lovingly hold hands, do
not prevent the sensation of a central tonality somewhere--in the
cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up in the sky. The inner ear tells
you that the D-minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether
played, in that key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man
who declares: "I decide my form during composition only through
feeling." Every chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion
aroused by the poem or idea which gives birth to the composition. Such
antique things as the cyclic form or community of themes are not to be
expected in Schoenberg's bright lexicon of anarchy. He boils down the
classic form to one movement and, so it seemed to my hearing, he
begins developing his idea as soon as it is announced.
Such polyphony, such interweaving of voices--eleven and twelve and
fifteen are a matter of course--as would make envious the old tonal
weavers of the Netherlands! There is, literally, no waste ornament or
filling in his scores; every theme, every subsidiary figure, is set
spinning so that you dream of fireworks spouting in every direction,
only the fire is vitriolic and burns the tympani of the ears.
Seriously, like all complex effects, the Schoenberg scores soon become
legible if scrutinised without prejudice. The string sextet, if
compared to the later music, is sunny and Mozartian in its melodic and
harmonic simplicity. They tell me that Schoenberg once wrote freely in
the normal manner, but finding that he could not attract attention he
deliberately set himself to make abnormal music. I don't know how true
this may be; the same sort of thing was said of Mallarmé and Paul
Cézanne and Richard Strauss, and was absolutely without foundation.
Schoenberg is an autodidact, the lessons in composition from Alexander
von Zemlinsky not affecting his future path-breaking propensities. His
mission is to free harmony from all rules. A man doesn't hit on such
combinations, especially in his acrid instrumentation, without heroic
labour. His knowledge must be enormous, for his scores are as logical
as a highly wrought mosaic; that is, logical, if you grant him his
premises. He is perverse and he wills his music, but he is a master in
delineating certain moods, though the means he employs revolt our
ears. To call him "crazy," is merely amusing. No man is less crazy,
few men are so conscious of what they are doing, and few modern
composers boast such a faculty of attention. Concentration is the
key-note of his work; concentration--or condensation formal,
concentration of thematic material--to the vanishing-point; and
conciseness in treatment, although every license is allowed in
modulation.
Every composer has his aura; the aura of Arnold Schoenberg is, for me,
the aura of subtle ugliness, of hatred and contempt, of cruelty, and
of the mystic grandiose. He is never petty. He sins in the grand
manner of Nietzsche's Superman, and he has the courage of his
chromatics. If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I
long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the
suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to
embrace, after abhorring it.
As for Schoenberg, the painter--he paints, too!--I won't take even the
guarded praise of such an accomplished artist as Kandinsky as
sufficient evidence. I've not seen any of the composer's "purple
cows," and hope I never shall see them. His black-and-white
reproductions look pretty bad, and not nearly as original as his
music. The portrait of a lady (who seems to be listening to
Schoenbergian harmonies) hasn't much colour, a critic tells us, only a
sickly rose in her dress. He also paints grey-green landscapes and
visions, the latter dug up from the abysmal depths of his
subconsciousness. Schoenberg is, at least, the object of considerable
curiosity. What he will do next no man may say; but at least it won't
be like the work of any one else. The only distinct reminiscence of an
older composer that I could discover in his Pierrot was Richard Wagner
(toujours Wagner, whether Franck or Humperdinck or Strauss or
Debussy), and of him, the first page of the Introduction to the last
act of Tristan und Isolde, more the mood than the actual themes.
Schoenberg is always atmospheric. So is a tornado. He is the poet
whose flowers are evil; he is the spirit that denies; never a
realist, like Strauss, ingeniously imitating natural sounds, he may be
truthfully described as a musical symbolist.
II
MUSIC OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
Despite the fact that he played the flute and ranked Rossini above
Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer said some notable things about music. "Art
is ever on the quest," is a wise observation of his, "a quest, and a
divine adventure"; though this restless search for the new often ends
in plain reaction, progress may be crab-wise and still be progress. I
fear that "progress" as usually understood is a glittering "general
idea" that blinds us to the truth. Reform in art is not like reform in
politics; you can't reform the St. Matthew Passion or the Fifth
Symphony. Is Parsifal a reformation of Gluck? This talk of reform is
only confusing the historic with the æsthetic. Art is a tricksy
quantity and like quicksilver is ever mobile. As in all genuine
revolutions the personal equation counts the heaviest, so in dealing
with the conditions of music at the present time one must study the
temperament of our music-makers and let prophecy sulk in its tent as
it may.
If Ruskin had written music-criticism, he might have amplified the
meaning of his once-famous phrase, the "pathetic fallacy," for I
consider it a pathetic fallacy--though not in the Ruskinian sense--in
criticism to be over-shadowed by the fear that, because some of our
critical predecessors misjudged Wagner or Manet or Ibsen, we should be
too merciful in criticising our contemporaries. Here is the "pathos of
distance" run to sentimental seed. The music of to-day may be the
music of to-morrow, but if it is not, what then? It may satisfy the
emotional needs of the moment, yet to-morrow be a stale formula. But
what does that prove? Though Bach and Beethoven built their work on
the bases of eternity (employing this tremendous term in a limited
sense), one may nevertheless enjoy the men whose music is of slighter
texture and "modern." Nor is this a plea for mediocrity. Mediocrity we
shall always have with us: mediocrity is mankind in the normal, and
normal man demands of art what he can read without running, hear
without thinking. Every century produces artists who are forgotten in
a generation, though they fill the eye and the ear for a time with
their clever production. This has led to another general idea, that of
transition, of intermediate types. After critical perspective has been
attained, it may be seen that the majority of composers fall into this
category not a consoling notion, but an unavoidable. Richard Wagner
has his epigones; the same is the case with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven.
Mendelssohn was a delightful feminine variation on Bach, and after
Schumann came Brahms.
The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama, so-called, and the
symphonic poem have been continued with personal modifications by
Richard Strauss; Max Reger has pinned his faith to Brahms and absolute
music, though not without a marked individual variation. In
considering his Sinfonietta, the Serenade, the Hiller Variations, the
Prologue to a Tragedy, the Lustspiel Overture, the two concertos
respectively for pianoforte and violin, we are struck not as much by
the easy handling of old forms, as by the stark emotional content of
these compositions. Reger began as a Brahmsianer, but he has not thus
far succeeded in fusing form and theme as wonderfully as did his
master. There is a Dionysian strain in his music that too often is in
jarring discord with the intellectual structure of his work. But there
is no denying that Max Reger is the one man in Germany to-day who is
looked upon as the inevitable rival of Richard Strauss. Their
disparate tendencies bring to the lips the old query, Under which
king? Some think that Arnold Schoenberg may be a possible antagonist
in the future, but for the present it is Reger and Strauss, and no
third in opposition.
The Strauss problem is a serious one. In America much criticism of his
performances has contrived to evade the real issue. He has been called
hard names because he is money-loving, or because he has not followed
in the steps of Beethoven, because of a thousand and one things of no
actual critical value. That he is easily the greatest technical master
of his art now living there can be no question. And he has wound up a
peg or two the emotional intensity of music. Whether this striving
after nerve-shattering combinations is a dangerous tendency is quite
beside the mark. Let us register the fact. Beginning in the path made
by Brahms, he soon came under the influence of Liszt, and we were
given a chaplet of tone-poems, sheer programme-music, but cast in a
bigger and more flexible mould than the thrice-familiar Liszt pattern.
Whatever fate is reserved for Death and Transfiguration, Till
Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Hero's Life, and Don Quixote,
there is no denying their significance during the last decade of the
nineteenth century. For me it seemed a decided step backward when
Strauss entered the operatic field. One so conspicuously rich in the
gift of music-making (for the titles of his symphonies never prevented
us from enjoying their colouring and eloquence) might have avoided the
more facile triumphs of the stage. However, Elektra needs no apology,
and the joyous Rosenkavalier is a distinct addition to the repertory
of high-class musical comedy. Strauss is an experimenter and no doubt
a man for whom the visible box-office exists, to parody a saying of
Gautier's. But we must judge him by his own highest standard, the
standard of Elektra, Don Quixote, and Till Eulenspiegel, not to
mention the beautiful songs. Ariadne on Naxos was a not particularly
successful experiment, and what the Alp Symphony will prove to be we
may only surmise. Probably this versatile tone-poet has said his best.
He is not a second Richard Wagner, not yet has he the charm of the
Lizst personality, but he bulks too large in contemporary history to
be called a decadent, although in the precise meaning of the word,
without its stupid misinterpretation, he is a decadent inasmuch as he
dwells with emphasis on the technique of his composition, sacrificing
the whole for the page, putting the phrase above the page, and the
single note in equal competition with the phrase. In a word, Richard
Strauss is a romantic, and flies the red flag of his faith. He has not
followed the advice of Paul Verlaine in taking eloquence by the neck
and wringing it. He is nothing if not eloquent and expressive,
magnifying his Bavarian song-birds to the size of Alpine eagles. The
newer choir has avoided the very things in which Strauss has excelled,
for that way lie repetition and satiety. [Since writing the above,
Strauss has given the world his ballet The Legend of Joseph, in which
he has said nothing novel, but has with his customary skill mixed anew
the old compound of glittering colours and sultry, exotic harmonies.]
* * * * *
However, Strauss is not the only member of the post-Wagnerian group,
but he is the chief one who has kept his individual head above water
in the welter and chaos of the school. Where are Cyrill Kistner, Hans
Sommer, August Bungert, and the others? Humperdinck is a mediocrity,
even more so than Puccini. And what of the banalities of Bruckner? His
Wagnerian cloak is a world too large for his trifling themes.
Siegfried Wagner does not count, and for anything novel we are forced
to turn our eyes and ears toward the direction of France. After
Berlioz, a small fry, indeed, yet not without interest. The visit made
by Claude Debussy to Russia in 1879 and during his formative period
had consequences. He absorbed Moussorgsky, and built upon him, and he
had Wagner at his finger-ends; like Charpentier he cannot keep Wagner
out of his scores; the Bayreuth composer is the King Charles's head in
his manuscript. Tristan und Isolde in particular must have haunted the
composers of Louise, and Pelléas et Mélisande. The Julien of
Charpentier is on a lower literary and musical level than Louise,
which, all said and done, has in certain episodes a picturesque charm;
the new work is replete with bad symbolism and worse music-spinning.
Debussy has at least a novel, though somewhat monotonous, manner. He
is "precious," and in ideas as constipated as Mallarmé, whose
Afternoon of a Faun he so adequately set. Nevertheless, there is, at
times, magic in his music. It is the magic of suggestiveness, of the
hinted mystery which only Huysmans's superior persons scattered
throughout the universe may guess. After Debussy comes Dukas, Ravel,
Florent Schmitt, Rogier-Ducasse, men who seem to have caught anew the
spirit of the eighteenth-century music and given it to us not through
the poetic haze of Debussy, but in gleaming, brilliant phrases. There
is promise in Schmitt. As to Vincent d'Indy, you differ with his
scheme, yet he is a master, as was César Franck a master, as are
masters the two followers of D'Indy, Albert Roussel and Theodat de
Sévérac. Personally I admire Paul Dukas, though without any warrant
whatever for placing him on the same plane with Claude Debussy, who,
after all, has added a novel nuance to art. But they are all makers of
anxious mosaics; never do they carve the block; exquisite
miniaturists, yet lack the big brush work and epical sweep of the
preceding generation. Above all, the entire school is minus virility;
its music is of the distaff, and has not the masculine ring of crossed
swords.
It is hardly necessary to consider here the fantastic fashionings of
Erik Satie, the "newest" French composer. He seems to have
out-Schoenberged Schoenberg in his little piano pieces bearing the
alluring titles of Embryons desséchés, preludes and pastorales. Apart
from the extravagant titles, the music itself is ludicrous qua music,
but not without subtle irony. That trio of Chopin's Funeral March
played in C and declared as a citation from the celebrated mazurka of
Schubert does touch the rib risible. There are neither time signature
nor bars. All is gentle chaos and is devoted to the celebration, in
tone, of certain sea-plants and creatures. This sounds like Futurism
or the passionate patterns of the Cubists, but I assure you I've seen
and tried to play the piano music of Satie. That he is an arch-humbug
I shall neither maintain nor deny. After Schoenberg anything is
possible in this vale of agonising dissonance. I recall with positive
satisfaction a tiny composition for piano by Rebikoff, which he calls
a setting of The Devil's Daughters, a mural design by Franz von Stuck
of Munich. To be sure, the bass is in C and the treble in D flat,
nevertheless the effect is almost piquant. The humour of the new
composers is melancholy in its originality, but Gauguin has said that
in art one must be either a plagiarist or a revolutionist. Satie is
hardly a plagiarist, though the value of his revolution is doubtful.
The influence of Verdi has been supreme among the Verdists of young
Italy, though not one has proved knee-high to a grasshopper when
compared with the composer of that incomparable Falstaffo. Ponchielli
played his part, and under his guidance such dissimilar talents as
Puccini, Mascagni, and Leoncavallo were fostered. Puccini stopped with
La Bohème, all the rest is repetition and not altogether admirable
repetition. That he has been the hero of many phonographs has nothing
to do with his intrinsic merits. Cleverness is his predominating
vice, and a marked predilection for time-serving; that is, he, like
the excellent musical journalist that he is, feels the public pulse,
spreads his sails to the breeze of popular favour, and while he is
never as banal as Humperdinck or Leoncavallo, he exhibits this quality
in suffusion. Above all, he is not original. If Mascagni had only
followed the example of Single-Speech Hamilton, he would have spared
himself many mortifications and his admirers much boredom. The new
men, such as Wolf-Ferrari, Montemezzi, Giordano, and numerous others
are eclectics; they belong to any country, and their musical
cosmopolitanism, while affording agreeable specimens, may be dismissed
with the comment that their art lacks pronounced personal profile.
This does not mean that L'Amore dei Tre Re is less delightful. The
same may be said of Ludwig Thuille and also of the Neo-Belgian group.
Sibelius, the Finn, is a composer with a marked temperament. Among the
English Delius shows strongest. He is more personal and more original
than Elgar. Not one of these can tie the shoe-strings of Peter
Cornelius, the composer of short masterpieces, The Barber of
Bagdad--the original, not the bedevilled version of Mottl.
In Germany there is an active group of young men: Ernest Boehe, Walter
Braunfels, Max Schillings, Hans Pfitzner, F. Klose, Karl Ehrenberg,
Dohnány--born Hungarian--H. G. Noren. The list is long. Fresh,
agreeable, and indicative of a high order of talent is a new opera by
Franz Schreker, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin (1913). Schreker's
earlier opera, Der ferne Klang, I missed, but I enjoyed the later
composition, charged as it is with fantasy, atmosphere, bold climaxes,
and framing a legendary libretto. The influence of Debussy is marked.
Curiously enough, the Russian Moussorgsky, whose work was neglected
during his lifetime, has proved to be a precursor to latter-day music.
He was not affected in his development by Franz Liszt, whose influence
on Tschaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakof, Glazounof--he less than the
others--was considerable. Like Dostoïevsky, Moussorgsky is
_ur_-Russian, not a polished production of Western culture, as are
Turgenieff, Tschaikovsky, Tolstoy, or Rubinstein. He is not a
romantic, this Russian bear; the entire modern school is at one in
their rejection of romantic moods and attitudes. Now, music is
pre-eminently a romantic art. I once called it a species of emotional
mathematics, yet so vast is its kingdom that it may contain the
sentimentalities of Mendelssohn, the Old World romance of Schumann,
the sublimated poetry of Chopin, and the thunderous epical accents of
Beethoven.
Moussorgsky I have styled a "primitive," and I fancy it is as good an
ascription as another. He is certainly as primitive as Paul Gauguin,
who accomplished the difficult feat of shedding his Parisian skin as
an artist and reappearing as a modified Tahitian savage. But I
suspect there was a profounder sincerity in the case of the Muscovite.
Little need now to sing the praises of Boris Godunoff, though not
having seen and heard Ohaliapine, New York is yet to receive the
fullest and sharpest impression of the rôle notwithstanding the
sympathetic reading of Arturo Toscanini. Khovanchtchina is even more
rugged, more Russian. Hearing it after Tschaikovsky's charming, but
weak, setting of Eugen Onegin, the forthright and characteristic
qualities of Moussorgsky are set in higher relief. All the old
rhetoric goes by the board, and sentiment, in our sense of the word,
is not drawn upon too heavily. Stravinsky is a new man not to be
slighted, nor are Kodaly and Bartok. I mention only the names of those
composers with whose music I am fairly familiar. Probably Stravinsky
and his musical fireworks will be called a Futurist, whatever that
portentous title may mean. However, the music of Tschaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakof, Rachmaninof, and the others is no longer
revolutionary, but may be considered as evolutionary. Again the theory
of transitional periods and types comes into play, but I notice this
theory has been applied only to minor masters, never to creators. We
don't call Bach or Handel or Mozart or Beethoven intermediate types.
Perhaps some day Wagner will seem as original to posterity as
Beethoven does to our generation. Wasn't it George Saintsbury who once
remarked that all discussion of contemporaries is conversation, not
criticism? If this be the case, then it is suicidal for a critic to
pass judgment upon the music-making of his day, a fact obviously at
variance with daily practice. Yet it is a dictum not to be altogether
contravened. For instance, my first impressions of Schoenberg were
neither flattering to his composition nor to my indifferent critical
acumen. If I had begun by listening to the comparatively mellifluous
D-minor string quartet, played by the Flonzaley Quartet, as did my New
York colleagues, instead of undergoing the terrifying aural tortures
of Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire, I might have been as amiable as the
critics. The string sextet has been received here with critical
cordiality. Its beauties were exposed by the Kneisel Quartet. But
circumstances were otherwise, and it was later that I heard the two
string quartets--the latter in F-sharp minor (by courtesy, this
tonality), with voices at the close--the astounding Gurrelieder and
the piano pieces. The orchestral poem of Pelléas et Mélisande I have
yet to enjoy or execrate; there seems to be no middle term for
Schoenberg's amazing art. If I say I hate or like it that is only a
personal expression, not a criticism standing foursquare. I fear I
subscribe to the truth of Mr. Saintsbury's epigram.
It may be considered singular that the most original "new" music hails
from Austria, not Germany. No doubt that Strauss is the protagonist of
the romantics, dating from Liszt and Wagner; and that Max Reger is
the protagonist of the modern classicists, counting Brahms as their
fount (did you ever read what Wagner, almost a septuagenarian, wrote
of Brahms: "Der jüdische Czardas-Aufspieler"?). But they are no longer
proclaimed by those ultramoderns who dare to call Strauss an
intermediate type. So rapidly doth music speed down the grooves of
time. From Vienna comes Schoenberg; in Vienna lives and composes the
youthful Erich Korngold, whose earlier music seems to well as if from
some mountain spring, although with all its spontaneity it has no
affinity with Mozart. It is distinctively "modern," employing the
resources of the "new" harmonic displacements and the multicoloured
modern orchestral apparatus. Korngold is so receptive that he reveals
just now the joint influences of Strauss and Schoenberg. Yet I think
the path lies straight before this young genius, a straight and
shining path.
The little Erich Korngold--in reality a plump, good-looking
boy--presents few problems for the critic. I know his piano music,
replete with youthful charm, and I heard his overture produced by the
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (the fifth concert of the season) under
the leadership of Arthur Nikisch. Whether or not the youth is helped
by his teacher, as some say, there can be no doubt as to his
precocious talent. His facility in composition is Mozartian. Nothing
laboured, all as spontaneous as Schoenberg is calculating. He scores
conventionally, that is, latter-day commonplaces are the rule in his
disposition and treatment of the instrumental army. Like Mozart, he is
melodious, easy to follow, and, like Mozart, he begins by building on
his immediate predecessor, in his case Strauss. Debussy is not absent,
nor is Fritz Delius.
I heard not a little of Der Rosenkavalier. But who would suspect a lad
of such a formal sense--even if it is only imitative--of such clear
development, such climaxes, and such a capital coda! The chief test of
the music--would you listen to it if you did not know who composed
it?--is met. The overture is entertaining, if not very original. Truly
a wonder child.
Hugo Wolf was a song writer who perilously grazed genius, but he
rotted before he was ripe. Need we consider the respective positions
of Bruckner or Mahler, one all prodigality and diffuseness, the other
largely cerebral? And Mahler without Bruckner would hardly have been
possible. Those huge tonal edifices, skyscrapers in bulk, soon prove
barren to the spirit. A mountain in parturition with a mouse! Nor need
we dwell upon the ecstatic Scriabine who mimicked Chopin so deftly in
his piano pieces, "going" Liszt and Strauss one better--or ten, if you
will--and spilt his soul in swooning, roseate vibrations. Withal, a
man of ability and vast ambitions. (He died in 1915.)
More than two years ago I heard in Vienna Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, a
setting to a dramatic legend by Jens Peter Jacobsen. This choral and
orchestral work was composed in 1902, but it sounds newer than the
quartets or the sextet. In magnitude it beats Berlioz. It demands five
solo singers, a dramatic reader, three choral bodies, and an orchestra
of one hundred and forty, in which figure eight flutes, seven
clarinets, six horns, four Wagner tubas. Little wonder the impression
was a stupendous one. There were episodes of great beauty, dramatic
moments, and appalling climaxes. As Schoenberg has decided both in his
teaching and practice that there are no unrelated harmonies, cacophony
was not absent. Another thing: this composer has temperament. He is
cerebral, as few before him, yet in this work the bigness of the
design did not detract from the emotional quality. I confess I did not
understand at one hearing the curious dislocated harmonies and
splintered themes--melodies they are not--in the Pierrot Lunaire. I
have been informed that the ear should play a secondary rôle in this
"new" music; no longer through the porches of the ear must filter
plangent tones, wooing the tympanum with ravishing accords. It is now
the "inner ear," which is symbolic of a higher type of musical art. A
complete disassociation of ideas, harmonies, rhythmic life,
architectonic is demanded. To quote an admirer of the Vienna
revolutionist: "The entire man in you must be made over before you
can divine Schoenberg's art." Perhaps his æsthetik embraces what the
metaphysicians call the Langley-James hypothesis; fear, anxiety, pain
are the "content," and his hearers actually suffer as are supposed to
suffer his characters or moods or ideas. The old order has changed,
changed very much, yet I dimly feel that if this art is to endure it
contains, perhaps in precipitation, the elements without which no
music is permanent. But his elliptical patterns are interesting, above
all bold. There is no such thing as absolute originality. Even the
individual Schoenberg, the fabricator of nervous noises, leans heavily
on Wagner. Wagner is the fountainhead of the new school, let them mock
his romanticism as they may.
Is all this to be the music of to-morrow? Frankly, I don't know, and
I'm sure Schoenberg doesn't know. He is said to be guided by his
daímon, as was Socrates; let us hope that familiar may prompt him to
more comprehensible utterances. But he must be counted with nowadays.
He is significant of the reaction against formal or romantic beauty. I
said the same more than a decade ago of Debussy. Again the critical
watchmen in the high towers are signalling Schoenberg's movements, not
without dismay. Cheer up, brethren! Preserve an open mind. It is too
soon to beat reactionary bosoms, crying aloud, Nunc dimittis! Remember
the monstrous fuss made over the methods of Richard Strauss and
Claude Debussy. I shouldn't be surprised if ten years hence Arnold
Schoenberg proves quite as conventional a member of musical society as
those other two "anarchs of art."
VI
FRANK WEDEKIND
A very deceptive mask is literature. Here is your Nietzsche with his
warrior pen slashing away at the conventional lies of civilisation, a
terrific figure of outraged manhood, though in private life he was the
gentlest of men, self-sacrificing, lovable, modest, and moral to a
painful degree. But see what his imitators have made of him. And in
all the tons of rubbish that have been written about Tolstoy, the
story told by Anna Seuron is the most significant. But a human being
is better than a half-god.
Bearing this in mind I refused to be scared in advance by the
notorious reputation of Frank Wedekind, whose chief claim to
recognition in New York is his Spring's Awakening, produced at the
Irving Place Theatre seasons ago. I had seen this moving drama of
youth more than once in the Kammerspielhaus of the Deutsches Theatre,
Berlin, and earlier the same poet's drama Erdgeist (in the summer,
1903), and again refused to shudder at its melodramatic atrocities.
Wedekind wore at that time the mask Mephistophelian, and his admirers,
for he had many from the beginning, delighted in what they called his
spiritual depravity--forgetting that the two qualities cannot be
blended. Now, while I have termed Frank Wedekind the naughty boy of
the modern German drama, I by no means place him among those spirits
like Goethe's Mephisto, who perpetually deny. On the contrary, he is
one of the most affirmative voices in the new German literature.
He is always asserting. If he bowls away at some rickety ninepin of a
social lie, he does it with a gusto that is exhilarating. To be sure,
whatever the government is, he is against it; which only means he is a
rebel born, hating constraint and believing with Stendhal that one's
first enemies are one's own parents. No doubt, after bitter
experience, Wedekind discovered that his bitterest foe was himself.
That he is a tricky, Puck-like nature is evident. He loves to shock, a
trait common to all romanticists from Gautier down. He sometimes says
things he doesn't mean. He contradicts himself as do most men of
genius, and, despite his poetic temperament, there is in him much of
the lay preacher. I have noticed this quality in men such as Ibsen and
Strindberg, who cry aloud in the wilderness of Philistia for freedom,
for the "free, unhampered life" and then devise a new system that is
thrice as irksome as the old, that puts one's soul into a spiritual
bondage. Wedekind is of this order; a moralist is concealed behind his
shining ambuscade of verbal immoralism. In Germany every one sports
his Weltanschauung, his personal interpretation of life and its
meanings. In a word, a working philosophy--and a fearsome thing it is
to see young students with fresh sabre cuts on their honest
countenances demolishing Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche only to set
up some other system.
Always a system, always this compartmentising of the facts of
existence. Scratch the sentimentalism and æstheticism of a German, and
you come upon a pedant. Wedekind has not altogether escaped this
national peculiarity. But he writes for to-morrow, not yesterday; for
youth, and not to destroy the cherished prejudices of the old. His
admirers speak of him as a unicum, a man so original as to be without
forerunners, without followers. A monster? For no one can escape the
common law of descent, whether physical or spiritual. Wedekind has had
plenty of teachers, not excepting the most valuable of all, personal
experience. The sinister shadow cast by Ibsen fell across the
shoulders of the young poet, and he has read Max Stirner and Nietzsche
not wisely, but too well. He is as frank as Walt Whitman (and as
shameless) concerning the mysteries of life, and as healthy (and as
coarse) as Rabelais. Furthermore, Strindberg played a marked rôle in
his artistic development. Without the hopeless misogyny of the Swede,
without his pessimism, Wedekind is quite as drastic. And the realism
of the Antoine Theatre should not be omitted.
He exhibits in his menagerie of types--many of them new in the
theatre--a striking collection of wild animals. In the prologue to one
of his plays he tells his audience that to Wedekind must they come if
they wish to see genuine wild and beautiful beasts. This sounds like
Stirner. He lays much stress on the fact that literature, whether
poetic or otherwise, has become too "literary"--hardly a novel idea;
and boasts that none of his characters has read a book. The curse of
modern life is the multiplication of books. Very true, and yet I find
that Wedekind is "literary," that he could exclaim with Stephan
Mallarmé: "La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres."
Regarding the modern stage he is also positive. He believes that for
the last twenty years dramatic literature is filled with half-humans,
men who are not fit for fatherhood, women who would escape the burden
of bearing children because of their superior culture. This is called
"a problem play," the hero or heroine of which commits suicide at the
end of the fifth act to the great delight of neurotic, dissatisfied
ladies and hysterical men. Weak wills--in either sex--have been the
trump card of the latter-day dramatist; not a sound man or woman who
isn't at the same time stupid, can be found in the plays of Ibsen or
Hauptmann or the rest. Wedekind mentions no names, but he tweaks
several noses prominent in dramatic literature.
He is the younger generation kicking in the panels of the doors in
the old houses. There is a hellish racket for a while, and then when
the dust clears away you discern the revolutionist calmly ensconced in
the seats of the bygone mighty and passionately preaching from the
open window his version of New Life; he is become reformer himself and
would save a perishing race--spiritually speaking--from damnation by
the gospel of beauty, by shattering the shackles of love--especially
the latter; love to be love must be free, preaches Wedekind; love is
still in the swaddling clothes of Oriental prejudice. George Meredith
once said the same in Diana of the Crossways, although he said it more
epigrammatically. For Wedekind religion is a symbol of our love of
ourselves; nevertheless, outside of his two engrossing themes, love
and death, he is chiefly concerned with religion, not alone as
material for artistic treatment, but as a serious problem of our
existence. A Lucifer in pride, he tells us that he has never made of
good evil, or vice versa; he, unlike Baudelaire, has never
deliberately said: Evil, be thou my good! That he has emptied upon the
boards from his Pandora-box imagination the greatest gang of
scoundrels, shady ladies, master swindlers, social degenerates, circus
people, servants, convicts, professional strong men, half-crazy
idealists, irritable rainbow-eaters--the demi-monde of a subterranean
world--that ever an astonished world saw perform their antics in front
of the footlights is not to be denied, but it must be confessed that
his criminal supermen and superwomen usually get their deserts. Like
Octave Mirbeau, he faces the music of facts, and there are none too
abhorrent that he doesn't transform into something significant.
On the technical side Strindberg has taught him much; he prefers the
one-act form, or a series of loosely joined episodes. Formally he is
not a master, nor despite his versatility is he objective. With
Strindberg he has been called "Shakespearian"--fatal word--but he is
not; that in the vast domain of Shakespeare there is room for them
both I do not doubt; room in the vicinity of the morbid swamps and
dark forests, or hard by the house of them that are melancholy mad.
The oftener I see or read Wedekind the more I admire his fund of
humour. But I feel the tug of his theories. The dramatist in him is
hampered by the theorist who would "reform" all life--he is neither a
socialist nor an upholder of female suffrage--and when some of his
admiring critics talk of his "ideals of beauty and power," then I know
the game is up--the prophet, the dogmatist, the pedant, not the poet,
artist, and witty observer of life, are thrust in the foreground.
There is Hermann Sudermann, for example, the precise antipodes of
Wedekind--Sudermann, the inexhaustible bottle of the German theatre,
the conjurer who imperturbably pours out any flavour, colour, or
liquid you desire from his bottle; presto, here is Ibsen, or Dumas,
or Hauptmann, or Sardou; comedy, satire, tragedy, farce, or the
marionettes of the fashionable world! Frank Wedekind is less of the
stage prestidigitator and more sincere. We must, perforce, listen to
his creatures as they parade their agony before us, and we admire his
clever rogues--the never-to-be-forgotten Marquis of Keith heads the
list--and smile at their rough humour and wisdom. For me, the real
Frank Wedekind is not the prophet, but the dramatist. As there is much
of his stark personality in his plays, it would not be amiss to glance
at his career.
He has "a long foreground," as Emerson said of Walt Whitman. He was
born at Hanover, July 24, 1864, and consequently was only twenty-seven
years old when, in 1891, he wrote his most original, if not most
finished, drama, Spring's Awakening. He studied law four terms at
Munich, two at Zurich: but for this lawless soul jurisprudence was not
to be; it was to fulfil a wish of his father's that he consented to
the drudgery. A little poem which has been reproduced in leaflet form,
Felix and Galathea, is practically his earliest offering to the muse.
Like most beginnings of fanatics and realists, it fairly swims and
shimmers with idealism. His father dead, a roving existence and a
precarious one began for the youthful Frank. He lived by his wits in
Paris and London, learned two languages, met that underworld which
later was to figure in his vital dramatic pictures, wrote
advertisements for a canned soup--in Hauptmann's early play,
Friedensfest, Wedekind is said to figure as Robert, who is a réclame
agent--was attached to circuses, variety theatres, and fairs, was an
actor in tingletangles, cabarets, and saw life on its seamiest side,
whether in Germany, Austria, France, or England. Such experiences
produced their inevitable reaction--disillusionment. Finally in 1905
Director Reinhardt engaged him as an actor and he married the actress
Tilly Niemann-Newes, with whom he has since lived happily, the father
of a son, his troubled spirit in safe harbour at last, but not in the
least changed, to judge from his play, Franziska, a Modern Mystery.
Personally, Wedekind was never an extravagant, exaggerated man. A
sorrowful face in repose is his, and when he appeared on Hans von
Wolzogen's Ueberbrettl, or sang at the Munich cabaret called the
Eleven Hangmen, his songs--he composes at times--Ilse, Goldstück,
Brigitte B, Mein Liebchen, to the accompaniment of his guitar, there
was a distinct individuality in his speech and gesture very attractive
to the public.
But as an actor Wedekind is not distinguished, though versatile. I've
only seen him in two rôles, as Karl Hetman in his play of Hidalla (now
renamed after the leading rôle), and as Ernest Scholtz in The Marquis
of Keith. As Jack the Ripper in The Box of Pandora I am glad to say
that I have not viewed him, though he is said to be a gruesome figure
during the few minutes that he is in the scene. His mimetic methods
recalled to me the simplicity of Antoine--who is not a great actor,
yet, somehow or other, an impressive one. Naturally, Wedekind is the
poet speaking his own lines, acting his own creations, and there is,
for that reason, an intimate note in his interpretations, an
indescribable sympathy, and an underscoring of his meanings that even
a much superior actor might miss. He is so absolutely unconventional
in his bearing and speech as to seem amateurish, yet he secures with
his naturalism some poignant effects. I shan't soon forget his Karl
Hetman, the visionary reformer.
Wedekind, like Heine, has the faculty of a cynical, a consuming
self-irony. He is said to be admirable in Der Kammersänger. It must
not be forgotten that he has, because of a witty lampoon in the
publication Simplicissimus, done his "little bit" as they say in
penitentiary social circles. These few months in prison furnished him
with scenic opportunities; there is more than one of his plays with a
prison set. And how he does lay out the "system." He, like Baudelaire,
Flaubert, and De Maupassant, was summoned before the bar of justice
for outraging public morals by the publication of his play, The Box of
Pandora, the sequel to Erdgeist. He had to withdraw the book and
expunge certain offensive passages, but he escaped fine and
imprisonment, as did his publisher, Bruno Cassirer. He rewrote the
play, the second act of which had been originally printed in French,
the third in English, and its republication was permitted by the
sensitive authorities of Berlin.
If a critic can't become famous because of his wisdom he may
nevertheless attain a sort of immortality, or what we call that
elusive thing, by writing himself down an ass. The history of critical
literature would reveal many such. Think of such an accomplished
practitioner as the late M. Brunetière, writing as he did of Flaubert
and Baudelaire. And that monument to critical ineptitude,
Degeneration, by Max Nordau. A more modern instance is the judgment of
Julius Hart in the publication, _Tag_ (1901), concerning our
dramatist. He wrote: "In German literature to-day there is nothing as
vile as the art of Frank Wedekind." Fearing this sparkling gem of
criticism might escape the notice of posterity, Wedekind printed it as
a sort of motto to his beautiful poetic play (1902), Such Is Life.
However, the truth is that our poet is often disconcerting. His swift
transition from mood to mood disturbs the spectator, especially when
one mood is lofty, the next shocking. He has also been called "the
clown of the German stage," and not without reason, for his mental
acrobatics, his grand and lofty tumblings from sheer transcendentalism
to the raw realism, his elliptical style, are incomprehensible even
to the best trained of audiences. As Alfred Kerr rightfully puts it,
you must learn to see anew in the theatre of Wedekind. All of which is
correct, yet we respectfully submit that the theatre, like a picture,
has its optics: its foreground, middle distance, background, and
foreshortening. Destroy the perspective and the stage is transformed
into something that resembles staring post-Impressionist posters. The
gentle arts of development, of characterisation, of the conduct of a
play may not be flouted with impunity. The author more than the
auditor is the loser. Wedekind works too often in bold, bright primary
colours; only in some of his pieces is the modulation artistic, the
character-drawing summary without being harsh. His climaxes usually go
off like pistol-shots. Frühlings Erwachen (1891), the touching tale of
Spring's Awakening in the heart of an innocent girl of fourteen, a
child, Gretchen, doomed to tragic ending, set all Germany by the ears
when it was first put on in the Kammerspielhaus, Berlin, by Director
Reinhardt at the end of 1906. During fifteen years two editions had
been sold, and the work was virtually unknown till its stage
presentation. Mr. Shaw is right in saying that if you wish to make
swift propaganda seek the theatre, not the pulpit, nor the book. With
the majority Wedekind's name was anathema. A certain minority called
him the new Messiah, that was to lead youth into the promised land of
freedom. For a dramatist all is grist that makes revolve the sails of
his advertising mill, and as there is nothing as lucrative as
notoriety, Wedekind must have been happy.
He is a hard hitter and dearly loves a fight--a Hibernian trait--and
his pen was soon transformed into a club, with which he rained blows
on the ribs of his adversaries. That he was a fanatical moralist was
something not even the broadest-minded among them suspected; they only
knew that he meddled with a subject that was hitherto considered
tacenda, and with dire results. Nowadays the thesis of Spring's
Awakening is not so novel. In England Mr. H. G. Wells was considerably
exercised over the problem when he wrote in The New Machiavelli such a
startling sentence as "Multitudes of us are trying to run this
complex, modern community on a basis of 'hush,' without explaining to
our children or discussing with them anything about love or marriage."
I find in Spring's Awakening a certain delicate poetic texture that
the poet never succeeded in recapturing. His maiden is a dewy
creature; she is also the saddest little wretch that was ever wept
over in modern fiction. Her cry when she confesses the worst to her
dazed mother is of a poignancy. As for the boys, they are interesting.
Evidently, the piece is an authentic document, but early as it was
composed it displayed the principal characteristics of its author:
Freakishness, an abnormal sense of the grotesque--witness that
unearthly last scene, which must be taken as an hallucination--and its
swift movement; also a vivid sense of caricature--consider the trial
scene in the school; but created by a young poet of potential gifts.
The seduction scene is well managed at the Kammerspielhaus. We are not
shown the room, but a curtain slightly divided allows the voices of
the youthful lovers to be overheard. A truly moving effect is thereby
produced. Since the performance of this play, the world all over has
seen a great light. Aside from the prefaces of Mr. Shaw on the subject
of children and their education, plays, pamphlets, even legislation
have dealt with the theme. A reaction was bound to follow, and we do
not hear so much now about "sex initiation" and coeducation. Suffice
it to say that Frank Wedekind was the first man to put the question
plumply before us in dramatic shape.
A favourite one-act piece is Der Kammersänger (1899), which might be
translated as The Wagner Singer, for therein is laid bare the soul of
the Wagnerian tenor, Gerardo, whose one week visit to a certain city
results in both comedy and tragedy. He has concluded a brilliantly
successful Gastspiel, singing several of the Wagnerian rôles, and when
the curtain rises we see him getting his trunks in order, his room at
the hotel filled with flowers and letters. He must sing Tristan the
next night in Brussels, and has but an hour to spare before his train
departs. If he misses it his contract will be void, and in Europe that
means business, tenor or no tenor. He sends the servant to pack his
costumes, snatches up the score of Tristan, and as he hums it, he is
aware that some one is lurking behind one of the window-curtains. It
is a young miss, presumably English--she says: "Oh, yes"--and she
confesses her infatuation. Vain as is our handsome singer he has no
time for idle flirtations. He preaches a tonic sermon, the girl weeps,
promises to be good, promises to study the music of Wagner instead of
his tenors, and leaves with a paternal kiss on her brow. The comedy is
excellent, though you dimly recall a little play entitled: Fréderic
Lemaître. It is a partial variation on that theme. But what follows is
of darker hue. An old opera composer has sneaked by the guard at the
door and begs with tears in his eyes that the singer will listen to
his music. He is met with an angry refusal. Gradually, after he has
explained his struggles of a half-century, he, the friend of Wagner,
to secure a hearing of his work, the tenor, who is both brutal and
generous, consents, though he is pressed for time. Then the tragedy of
ill luck is unfolded. The poor musician doesn't know where to begin,
fumbles in his score, while the tenor, who has just caught another
woman behind a screen, a piano teacher--here we begin to graze the
edge of burlesque--grows impatient, finally interrupts the composer,
and in scathing terms tells him what "art" really means to the world
at large and how useless has been his sacrifice to that idol "art"
with a capital "A." I don't know when I ever enjoyed the exposition of
the musical temperament. The Concert, by Bahr, is mere trifling in
comparison, all sawdust and simian gestures. We are a luxury for the
bourgeois, the tenor tells his listener, who do not care for the music
or words we sing. If they realised the meanings of Walküre they would
fly the opera-house. We singers, he continues, are slaves, not to our
"art," but to the public; we have no private life.
He dismisses the old man.
Then a knock at the door, a fresh interruption. This time it is surely
serious. A young, lovely society woman enters. She has been his love
for the week, the understanding being that the affair is to terminate
as it began, brusquely, without arrière-pensée. But she loves Gerardo.
She clamours to be taken to Brussels. She will desert husband,
children, social position, she will ruin her future to be with the man
she adores. She is mad with the despair of parting. He is inexorable.
He gently reminds her of their agreement. His contract does not permit
him to travel in company with ladies, nor may he scandalise the
community in which he resides. Tenors, too, must be circumspect.
She swears she will kill herself. He smiles and bids her remember her
family. She does shoot herself, and he sends for a policeman,
remembering that an arrest by superior force will but temporarily
abrogate his contract. No policeman is found by the distracted hotel
servants, and, exclaiming: "To-morrow evening I must sing Tristan in
Brussels," the conscientious artist hurries away to his train, leaving
the lifeless body of his admirer on the sofa. Played by a versatile
actor, this piece ought to make a success in America, though the
biting irony of the dialogue and the cold selfishness of the hero
might not be "sympathetic" to our sentiment-loving audiences. The poet
has protested in print against the alteration of the end of this
little piece, _i. e._, one acting version made the impassioned lady
only a pretended suicide, which quite spoils the motivation.
Ibsen must have felt sick when such an artist as Duse asked him to let
her make Nora in Doll's House return to her family. But he is said to
have consented. Wedekind consented, because he was ill, but he made
his protest, and justly so.
The Marquis of Keith is a larger canvas. It is a modern rogues'
comedy. Barry Lyndon is hardly more entertaining. The marquis is the
son of an humble tutor in the house of a count whose son later figures
as Ernest Scholtz. The marquis is a swindler in the grand manner. He
is a Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, for he has lived in the United
States, but instead of a lively sketch is a full-length portrait
painted by a master. You like him despite his scampishness. He is
witty. He has a heart--for his own woes--and seems intensely
interested in all the women he loves and swindles. He goes to Munich,
where he invents a huge scheme for an exhibition palace and fools
several worthy and wealthy brewers, but not the powerful Consul
Casimir, the one man necessary to his comprehensive operation. When
his unhappy wife tells him there is no bread in the house for the next
day, he retorts: "Very well, then we shall dine at the Hotel
Continental." Nothing depresses his mercurial spirits. He borrows from
Peter to pay Paul, and an hour later borrows from Paul to pay himself.
His boyhood friend he simply plunders. This Ernest, in reality the
Graf von Trautenau, is an idealist of the type that Wedekind is fond
of delineating. He would save the world from itself, rescue it from
the morass of materialism, but he relapses into a pathological
mysticism which ends in a sanitarium for nervous troubles. The marquis
is a Mephisto; he is not without a trace of idealism; altogether a
baffling nature, Faust-like, and as chock-full of humour as an egg is
full of meat. He goes to smash. His plans are checkmated. His beloved
deserts him for the enemy. His wife commits suicide. His life
threatened, and his liberty precarious, he takes ten thousand marks
from Consul Casimir, whose name he has forged in a telegram, and with
a grin starts for pastures new. Will he shoot himself? No! After all,
life is very much like shooting the chutes. The curtain falls. This
stirring and technically excellent comedy has never been a favourite
in Germany. Perhaps its cynicism is too crass. It achieved only a few
performances in Berlin to the accompaniment of catcalls, hisses, and
derisive laughter. I wonder why? It is entertaining, with all its
revelation of a rascally mean soul and its shady episodes.
Space, I am sorry to say, forbids me from further exposition of such
strong little pieces as Musik, a heart-breaking drama of a betrayed
girl studying singing who goes to jail while the real offender, the
man, remains at liberty (1907), or of Die Zensur, with its discussion
of art and religion--the poet intrudes--and its terrible cry at the
close: "Oh, God! why art thou so unfathomable?" Or of the so-called
Lulu tragedy (Erdgeist and The Box of Pandora) of which I like the
first act of the former and the second act of the latter--you are
reminded at this point of the gambling scene in Sardou's Fernande--but
as I do not care to sup on such unmitigated horrors, I prefer to let
my readers judge for themselves from the printed plays.
Karl Hetman is an absorbing play in which a man loses the world but
remains captain of his soul; actually he ends his life rather than
exhibit himself as motley to the multitude. As a foil for the idealist
Hetman--who is a sort of inverted Nietzsche; also a self-portrait in
part of the dramatist--there is the self-seeking scamp Launhart who
succeeds with the very ideas which Hetman couldn't make viable, ideas
in fact which brought about his disaster. They are two finely
contrasted portraits, and what a grimace of disgust is aroused when
Launhart tells the woman who loves Hetman: "O Fanny, Fanny, a living
rascal is better for your welfare than the greatest of dead prophets."
What Dead-Sea-fruit wisdom! The pathos of distance doesn't appeal to
the contemporary soul of Wedekind. He writes for the young, that is,
for to-morrow.
The caprice, the bizarre, the morbid in Wedekind are more than
redeemed by his rich humanity. He loves his fellow man even when he
castigates him. He is very emotional, also pragmatic. The second act
of his Franziska, a Karnevalgroteske, was given at the Dresden
Pressfestival, February 7, 1913, with the title of Matrimony in the
Year 2000, the author and his wife appearing in the leading rôles with
brilliant success. It contains in solution the leading motives from
all his plays and his philosophy of life. It is fantastic, as
fantastic as Strindberg's Dream Play, but amusing. In 1914 his
biblical drama, Simson (Samson), was produced with mixed success.
Translated Wedekind would lose his native wood-note wild, and
doubtless much of his dynamic force--for on the English stage he would
be emasculated. And I wonder who would have the courage to produce his
works.
Musik, for example, if played in its entirety might create a profound
impression. It is pathetically moving and the part of the unhappy
girl, who is half crazy because of her passion for her singing-master,
is a rôle for an accomplished actress. If the public can endure
Brieux's Damaged Goods, why not Musik? The latter is a typical case
and is excellent drama; the French play is neither. For me all the man
is summed up in the cry of one of his characters in Erdgeist: "Who
gives me back my faith in mankind, will give me back my life." An
idealist, surely.
The last time I saw him was at the Richard Strauss festival in
Stuttgart, October, 1912. He had changed but little and still reminded
me of both David Belasco and an Irish Catholic priest. In his eyes
there lurked the "dancing-madness" of which Robert Louis Stevenson
writes. A latter-day pagan, with touches of the perverse, the
grotesque, and the poetic; thus seems to me Frank Wedekind.
VII
THE MAGIC VERMEER
I
Who owns the thirty-fifth canvas by Jan Vermeer of Delft? And are
there more than thirty-five works by this master of cool, clear
daylight? I have seen nearly all the pictures attributed to the too
little known Dutchman, and as far as was in
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