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Title: Overtones, a book of temperaments
        Richard Strauss, Parsifal, Verdi, Balzac, Flaubert, Nietzsche, and Turgénieff

Author: James Huneker

Release date: April 29, 2023 [eBook #70670]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVERTONES, A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




OVERTONES




BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER


  OVERTONES: A Book of Temperaments. _With Frontispiece._ $1.25,
  _net_.

  MELOMANIACS. 12mo. $1.50.

  CHOPIN: The Man and His Music. _With Portrait._ $2.00.

  MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC. 12mo. $1.50.

[Illustration: Richard Strauss. (signature)]




  OVERTONES

  A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS

  RICHARD STRAUSS, PARSIFAL, VERDI, BALZAC,
  FLAUBERT, NIETZSCHE, AND TURGÉNIEFF

  BY

  JAMES HUNEKER

  Do I contradict myself?
  Very well, then, I contradict myself.

  WALT WHITMAN

  _WITH PORTRAIT_

  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  1904




  COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY

  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS


  PUBLISHED MARCH, 1904.




  TO

  RICHARD STRAUSS

  A MUSIC-MAKER OF INDIVIDUAL STYLE

  A SUPREME MASTER OF THE ORCHESTRA

  AN ANARCH OF ART

  THIS SHEAF OF STUDIES
  IS ADMIRINGLY INSCRIBED




CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE

     I. RICHARD STRAUSS                                              1

    II. PARSIFAL—A MYSTIC MELODRAMA                                 64
        The Book                                                    73
        The Music                                                   91

   III. NIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST                                   109

    IV. LITERARY MEN WHO LOVED MUSIC                               142
        The Musical Taste of Turgénieff                            142
        Balzac as Music Critic                                     161
        Alphonse Daudet                                            179
        George Moore                                               188
        Evelyn Innes                                               188
        Sister Teresa                                              199

     V. ANARCHS OF ART                                             214

    VI. THE BEETHOVEN OF FRENCH PROSE                              228
        Flaubert and his Art                                       228
        The Two Salammbôs                                          244

   VII. VERDI AND BOÏTO                                            256
        Boïto’s Mefistofele                                        272

  VIII. THE ETERNAL FEMININE                                       277

    IX. AFTER WAGNER—WHAT?                                         307
        The Caprice of the Musical Cat                             307
        Wagner and the French                                      321
        Isolde and Tristan                                         327




I

RICHARD STRAUSS

    We cannot understand what we do not love.
                               —ELISÉE RECLUS.


I

It is easier to trace the artistic lineage of Richard Strauss
to its fountain-head—Johann Sebastian Bach—than to stamp with a
contemporary stencil its curious ramifications. And this is not
alone because of a similar polyphonic complexity, a complex of
themes and their development without parallel since the days of
the pattern-weaving Flemish contrapuntists; but because, like Bach
Strauss has experimented in the _disassociation_ of harmonies, and,
in company with his contemporary, the master-impressionist, Claude
Monet, has divided his tones—set up, instead of the sober classic
lines or the gorgeous color masses of the romantic painters, an
entirely new scheme of orchestration, the basic principle of which
is individualism of instruments, the pure anarchy—self-government—of
the entire orchestral apparatus. This is but a mode of _technique_
and does not necessarily impinge upon the matter of his musical
discourse; it is a distinctive note, however, of the Strauss
originality, and must be sounded in any adequate discussion of his
very modern art.

Borrowing the word with its original connotations from the erudite
and clairvoyant French critic, Rémy de Gourmont, disassociation in
the practice of Strauss is a species of tone chemistry by which
a stereotyped musical phrase is reduced to its virginal element,
deprived of factitious secondary meaning, and then re-created, as if
in the white heat of a retort, by the overpowering and disdainful
will of the composer. We have also the disassociation of ideas
from their antique succession, that chiefly reveals itself, not
in a feverish, disordered syntax, but in the avoidance of the
classic musical paragraph—that symmetrical paragraph as inexorably
formulated as the laws of the Medes and Persians, resulting in a
Chinese uniformity maddening in its dulness and lifelessness unless
manipulated by a man of intellectual power. Strauss is forever
breaking up his musical sentences. He does this in no arbitrary
fashion, but as the curve of the poem is _ideally_ pictured to his
imagination. A great realist in his tonal quality, he is first the
thinker, the poet, the man of multitudinous ideas; you hear the crack
of the master’s whip, a cruel one at times, as he marshals his themes
into service, bidding them build, as built the Pharaohs’ slaves,
obelisks and pyramids, shapes of grandeur that pierce the sky and
blot out from the vision all but their overwhelming and monumental
beauties of form—the form of Richard Strauss. He is, after his own
manner, as severe a formalist as Josef Haydn.

We are now far away from what is called euphony for euphony’s sake;
though it is, as in Bach’s case, art for art with all the misused
phrase implies. Intent upon realizing in tone his vision,—the
magnitude or validity of which we need not yet discuss,—Strauss
allows no antique rubric of fugue or symphony to block his progress;
even the symphonic poem, an invention of Franz Liszt, proves too
cumbersome for this new man of light and air and earth, whose
imagination is at once sumptuous and barbaric. The picture must
overflow the old frames. It must burn with an intense life. It must
be true. As a man who crept before he walked, walked before he ran,
Richard Strauss has the right to our sympathy. He was a wonder-child;
he is one of the world’s great conductors; he wrote symphonies in
the Brahms style during his studious youth; he composed a little
literature of chamber music, piano pieces, a violin concerto, and
many songs prior to the time when he faced the sun of Wagner and
was undazzled by its rays. He knew the scores of Wagner, Liszt,
and Berlioz, has imitated, and has forgotten them in the swirling
torrential tides of his own strange temperament.

Once music was pure rhythm; once it was howling and gesture. It
moved up the evolutionary scale slowly and reached the kingdom of
the instrumental arabesque with difficulty; on this side was the
ecclesiastical liturgy with its rigorous inclusions and suppressions;
on the other, the naïve young art of opera. Let us acknowledge that
Bach was the crowning glory of the art polyphonic, that Palestrina
closed the door behind him on churchly chants, that Beethoven said
the last significant word in the symphony; let us admit these trite
propositions, and we have still perplexing problems to solve. The
song-writers, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, shall not detain us—they
represent but an exquisite province of music. The neo-symphonists,
beginning with Schubert and Schumann and ending with Brahms, are
not to be weighed here. They said much that was novel, but they
adhered to the classic line; they did not draw in the _mass_, to use
the painter’s term. It is to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner that the
new movement should be credited: Liszt, for his prophetic power—he
remodelled the symphonic form, but like Moses, he was destined to
see, not to enter, the promised land; Berlioz, for adding to the
instrumental palette new hues, bewildering _nuances_ and bizarre
splendor; Wagner, for banishing convention from the operatic stage,
furnishing the myth as the ideal libretto, for his bold annexation
of the symphonic orchestra and the extraordinary uses to which he
put it. Yet only one of the three men has held out the torch to
future composers—Franz Liszt. Berlioz’s talent was largely that of a
perverse fresco painter; Wagner quite closed his epoch—one of rampant
romanticism—in his music-drama, and by his powerful genius almost
swerved music from its normal, absolute currents.

He quite flooded the musical firmament with his radiations. There
was but one god and he reigned at Bayreuth; go hence and worship,
or else be cast with the unbelieving into outer darkness where
there is gnashing of teeth! The music-drama was the synthesis of
the arts. It was the panacea of all social evils, and Parsifal we
beheld as another Paraclete! Such arrogation of omnipotence was
bound to encounter reverses. The Wagnerian mixture of words and
music, of drama ranking before music and music playing the handmaid
rôle of commentator, has stood the tests neither of its creator
nor of time. We know our Wagner now; not as a philosopher—shades
of Schopenhauer!—not as a poet—let us not invoke the spirit of
Goethe!—not as a reformer, dramatist, revolutionist, but as a
composer of genius, with a lot of wrong-headed theories, whose
magnificent music floated his doctrines and blinded the younger
generation to their speciousness. It is music, not drama, that rules
in Wagner’s works.

The evil done was this: Music could no longer speak in her own divine
voice without the aid of words, without the hobbling drawbacks
of singers, stage pictures, plots, all the thrice-familiar _mise
en scène_ of the Wagnerian music-drama. Nevertheless, Wagner did
enhance the value of the suggestion in music. He invented his own
stenographic method of speech and with it literally created a new
musical consciousness. A motive means something, is the symbol of
an idea, or state of soul; yet we know that if this motive has to
be accompanied by dramatic gesture or clothed verbally, then all
the worse for it as pure music; it gains visually, but loses on the
imaginative side. Before Wagner, Liszt discovered the power of the
concise phrase and even labelled it; and before Liszt, came Beethoven
in his C minor symphony; while antedating all was Bach, whose music
is a perfect storehouse of motivation.


II

And again we reach Richard Strauss by way of Bach; in the music of
the modern composer the motive achieves its grand climacteric. His
scheme is the broad narrative form, a narration that for sustained
puissance and intensity has never been equalled. The new melody is no
longer a pattern of instrumentation, nor is it an imitation of the
human voice; it is extra-human, on the thither side of speech. It is
neither a pure ravishment of the ear, nor yet an abstruse geometrical
problem worked out according to the law of some musical Euclid.

Now, music of the highest order must make its first appeal to the
imagination; its first impact must be upon the cortical centres.
It must not alone set the feet rhythmically pattering, it must not
merely stir us to emotional thrilling. Not in the sensuous abandon
of dance rhythms, but by thought,—that is, by musical thought, in a
chain of tonal imagery, is the aim of the new music. Walter Pater
believed, Plato-wise, that music is the archetype of the arts. It
was an amiable heresy. But music must stand solitary—it is often too
theatric, as poetry is often too tonal. It must be intellect suffused
by emotion. Its substance is not the substance of its sister arts.
What music has long needed, what Wagner and the church writers before
him sought to give it, is definiteness. The welding of word and tone
does not produce true musical articulateness. We recognize this in
Tristan and Isolde, where incandescent tone quite submerges the word,
the symbol of the idea. Erotic music has never before so triumphed as
in this Celtic drama. And it is like the fall of some great blazing
visitor from interstellar space; it buries itself beneath the smoking
earth instead of remaining royally afloat in the pure ether of the
idea.

The arts cannot be thus fused. When faith moved nations, the world
witnessed the marriage of word and tone in the ritual of the church;
no music has been so definite since Palestrina’s as Wagner’s—until
the music of Richard Strauss was heard. In it we encounter a
definiteness that is almost plastic, though never baldly literal.
As we noted in our rapid survey, the ethic quality of Beethoven,
the philosophic quality of Brahms, the dramatic quality of Wagner,
are all aside from the purpose of Strauss. He seeks to _express_ in
tone alone. The new melody is but an old name for—characterization.
And now we reach at last the core of Strauss, who is a psychological
realist in symphonic art, withal a master symbolist; back of his
surface eccentricities there is a foundational energy, an epic
largeness of utterance, a versatility of manner, that rank him as
the unique anarchist of music. He taps the tocsin of revolt, and
his velvet sonorities do not disguise either their meagre skein of
spirituality or the veiled ferocities of his aristocratic insurgency.

The present writer put this question to Herr Strauss in London in
the summer of 1903: Has he always subjected himself to the tyranny
of an ideal programme before composing? The notion seemed elementary
to him. “All good music has a poetic idea for a basis,” he replied;
and he instanced the Beethoven piano sonatas, the Bach fugues. But
he admitted that his brain caught fire at poetic figures, such
as Don Juan, Don Quixote, Macbeth; Also sprach Zarathustra, Till
Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben. Even a landscape or a seascape
could provoke from him the charming suite of images we find in
his Italia. With the poem of Death and Apotheosis, affixed to the
score after the music had been composed, we may see that Strauss is
not a man pinioned to a formula. But the effect on his hearers of
his message, on those hearers who have submitted to his magic, is
articulate as has been no anterior music. He moulds his meanings
into a thousand forms—for what is form in the academic sense to
this arch-disintegrator? And these forms resolve themselves into
as many more shapes—shapes of beauty, terror, tragedy, comedy,
morose mysticism, ugly platitude; into grimacing runes, shuddering
madness, lyric exaltation, and enigmatic gropings; yet never the
banal rhetoric of the orchestra, the rhetoric that has seduced so
many composers to write for the sake of the sound, for the joy of the
style. Strauss always means something. All is in the narration of his
story, a story suggested with as much art as the inspiring poem; a
misty cloud, perhaps, to the unsympathetic, a pillar of flame to the
initiated. It is a new speech; notes, phrases, groups, movements,
masses of tone, no longer occupy conventional, relative positions in
his tone-poems. The violent disassociation of the old phraseology—his
scores seem to be heard vertically as well as horizontally—smug
harmonization, melodies that fall gratefully into the languid
channels of our memory—in a word, the mechanical disposition of stale
material is transformed, undergoes permutation to make way for a new
syntax, a nervous, intense method of expression, strange elliptical
flights, erratic foreshortenings, with classic and romantic canons
cast to the winds; yet imposing a new grouping, a new harmonic scale
of values, a new order of melody—the melody of characterization,
the melody that pilots the imagination across uncharted territory
into a land overflowing with feeling, intellect, tenderness, and
sublimity, with irony, ugliness, humor, and humanity; a land not
lacking in milk and honey, the land of Richard Strauss! A delectable
region is discovered by this young man when we believed that the
grim old wizard, Wagner, had locked us up forever in his torrid
zone, where, like a Klingsor, he evoked for our parched souls the
shadows of bayaderes and monstrous flowers and monstrous passions!
Lo, another Richard has guided us to a newer domain, which, if not so
fascinatingly tropical, is one where hallucinating chromaticism does
not rule, where a more intellectual diatonic mode prevails. Strauss
is master of a cold, astringent voluptuousness. His head rules his
heart. Above all, he searches for character, for its every trait.
He himself may be a Merlin,—all great composers are ogres in their
insatiable love of power,—but he has rescued us from the romantic
theatric blight; and a change of dynasty is always welcome to slaves
of the music habit.

His music did not exhibit its first big curve of originality until
the publication of Don Juan, opus 20. His intimate charming songs
are the epitome of his peculiar dramatic faculty for clothing in
tone, or rather emptying into music, the meaning of the poet.
Avoiding the more recondite question of form, it may be said that
as in the songs, so is it in his symphonic works. With no other
indication than a title (he cannot be blamed for the extravagances
of the analytical-programme makers), Strauss pours upon our puzzled
and enchanted ears a billow of music terrifying at times: it is a
veritable tidal wave; you see it cresting the rim of the horizon and
rolling toward you sky high. His Don Juan and Macbeth are romantic
in style, and for that reason are praised by those who fear to
desert old milestones and wander in the tangled, fulminating forests
of his later music. With the story of the mediæval German rogue,
Till Eulenspiegel, Strauss unleashes his fantasy. It is a scherzo
in form—how he burlesques the form and its very idea! The color
scheme is daring, oppressively high, and at times we near the cosmic
screech. All is prankishness, darting fancy, consuming irony. The
humor is both rarefied and Teutonically clumsy. Till lives, Till is
scampish, Till is gibbeted. Tone itself is volatilized into fiery
particles that seem to fall upon the listener from dizzily pitched
passages. Such a picture has never been hung in the august halls of
music. It offends. It blazes in the eyes with its brilliant audacity,
and yet it is new music, music gashed and quivering with rhythmic
life. Rhythmically, Strauss is an adventurer into an absolutely novel
clime. He touches hands with the far East in his weaving interior
rhythms.

Death and Apotheosis is a tone-poem, rather Lisztian in its pompous
and processional picture at the close. Its very title calls up the
Weimar master’s Tasso. But it differs inasmuch as it is better
realized externally, while its psychology, morbid in several
episodes, is more masterful. It is not a Tasso, not a poet enthroned
in deathless immortality, but a soul, _the_ soul, which, lying in its
“necessitous little chamber” of death, reviews its past, its youth,
hope, love, conflict, defeat, despair, and at the end its feverish
ecstasy, its sorrowful dissolution. Strauss with a secret tiny brush
has surprised the human heart in travail. It is pathos breeding. The
added touches of realism, the gasping for breath, and the lenten
_tic-toc_ of the heart, should not disquiet us. Æsthetic propriety is
never violated. And Tod und Verklärung is hardly the greatest that is
in Richard Strauss.

The much-discussed Thus spake Zarathustra is not, as has been
humorously asserted, an attempt to make music a camel that will bear
the burdens of philosophy; it is the outcome of profound study in
the vaticinating leaves of Nietzsche’s bible. Its dancing lyricism
is reflected in the Strauss score, which opens with a pantheistic
evocation of sunrise, uplifting in its elemental grandeur. Seldom
has music displayed a result brought about with such comparative
simplicity—a simplicity in inverse proportion to its subtlety. It
invites to the prayer of the sun worshippers as they salute their
round burning god lifting in the blue. The composition is welded by
a giant will. It contains so many incongruous elements, that their
complete amalgamation seems at first hearing an incredible attempt.
It is the old symphonic-poem form of Liszt, but altered, amplified.
The themes appear, disappear, surge to insanity in their passion,
melt into religious appeal, dance with bacchanalian joy, mock,
blaspheme, exhort, and enchant. There is ugly music and hieratic,
music bitter and sweet, black music and white, music that repels and
music that lures—we are hopelessly snared by the dream tunes of this
enharmonic fowler, who often pipes in No Man’s Land on the other side
of good and evil. The ear is ravished, the eye dazzled; every brain
centre is assaulted, yet responds to a new and formidable engine for
stimulating ideas and emotions. The Old-World riddle is propounded
and left unsolved. And we seem to have grazed an Apocalypse of
scepticism in the conflicting tonalities with their sphinx-like
profiles.


III

The greatest technical master of the orchestra, making of it a
vibrating dynamic machine, a humming mountain of fire, Richard
Strauss, by virtue of his musical imagination, is painter-poet and
psychologist. He describes, comments, and narrates in tones of
jewelled brilliancy; his orchestra flashes like a canvas of Monet—the
divided tones and the theory of complementary colors (overtones) have
their analogues in the manner with which Strauss intricately divides
his various instrumental choirs: setting one group in opposition or
juxtaposition to another; producing the most marvellous, unexpected
effects by acoustical mirroring and transmutation of motives; and
almost blinding the brain when the entire battery of reverberation
and repercussion is invoked. If he can paint sunshine and imitate
the bleating of sheep, he can also draw the full-length portrait
of a man. This he proves with his Don Quixote, wherein the nobler
dreamer and his earthy squire are _heard_ in a series of adventures,
terminating with the death of the rueful knight—one of the most
poignant pages in musical literature. Don Quixote is shown as the
quotidian type of man whose day-dreams are a bridge leading to the
drab and sorrowful cell of madness. He is not mocked, but tenderly
treated, by Strauss. It is upon the broad-backed Sancho Panza that
the composer unlooses his quiver of humorous arrows. The score
is thus far—to my taste—the greatest of its maker, the noblest in
subject-matter, in dignity of theme, complexity of handling, and
synthetic power. To show his independence of all musical form,
Strauss selected the most worn—the theme with variations. Amazing
is the outcome. No other composer before him, not even the master
variationist, Brahms, has so juggled and deployed the entire range
of musical material in serried battalions. Virtuosity there is, but
it is the virtuosity that serves a psychologist; never is there
display for decoration’s idle use. All is realistic fancy. A solo
violoncello and a solo viola represent the half-cracked pair of
Cervantes. The madness of Quixote is indicated by a device musically
and psychologically unique. His theme, his character, goes to pieces
in mid-air, after the mania of romance reading. The muting of the
instruments and general muddling of ideas make the picture of
slow-creeping derangement painfully true. Then follow variations,
close in their fidelity to the story, and never unmindful of the
medium in which it is told. Despite the disquieting verisimilitude
of the wind-machine, of the sheep, Strauss has never put forth his
astoundingly imaginative powers to such purpose. We are stunned,
horrified, piqued, yet always enthralled by this masterful ironist
who has conserved his mental sincerity. The finale is soothing,
its _facture_ is a miracle of tonal values. Don Quixote, until he
surpasses it, will remain a monument to Richard Strauss.

The Hero’s Life is nearer the symphony in a formal sense than any of
his newer works. It is his most robust composition. The conception
is breath-catching, for it is a chant of the _Ego_, the tableau
of Strauss’s soul exposed as objectively as Walt Whitman’s when
he sang of his _Me_. The general outline of the work is colossal;
it has no wavering contours, and is virile with a virility that
shocks. It flouts the critics of the composer and shows a stupendous
battle-piece, Tolstoyian in fury, duration, and breadth. Cacophony
rules; yet is not a battle always cacophonous? The old-fashioned
symbols of trumpet-blasts with ornamental passage-work are here
rudely disclaimed; war is cruel, and this episode is repulsive in
its aural cruelty. The ancient harmonic order will be indeed changed
when such a tonal conflict is accepted by the rear-guard. Often we
cannot hear the music because of the score. For the rest, there are
apposite quotations from the composer’s earlier works, and the _coda_
is beautiful with its supreme peace, supreme absorption in Nirvana.

This, then, has Richard Strauss accomplished: He has restored to
instrumental music its rightful sovereignty; it need fear no longer
the encroachment of music-drama, at best a bastard art. Enlarged,
its eloquence enormously intensified, its capacity for rare, subtle
beauty increased tenfold, the modern orchestra has been literally
enfranchised by Strauss from the house of operatic bondage. He has
revolutionized symphonic music by breaking down its formal barriers,
and he has filled his tone-poems with a new and diverse _content_.
In less than an hour he concentrates, relates, makes us see, feel,
and hear more than could be seen, heard, or felt in a music-drama
enduring six. His musical themes, _quâ_ themes, are not to be matched
with Beethoven’s, his melodic invention deviates from the classic
prettiness; yet because of his incomparable architectonics, of
his majestic grip on the emotional, he keeps us hypnotized as his
stately, fantastic tonal structures slowly uprise and unfold like
many-colored smoke from the incantations of legendary Eastern genii.
He absorbs absolutely our consciousness with a new quintessence of
poetic, pictorial, sculptural, and metaphysical art. Music, unaided
by words or theatric device,—for the compositions of Strauss may
be enjoyed without their titles,—has never been so articulate, so
dangerously definite, so insidiously cerebral. Madness may lie that
way; but the flaming magic of the man is ever restrained by deep
artistic reverence. We catch glimpses of vast vistas where dissonance
is king; slow, iron twilights in which trail the enigmatic figures of
another world; there are often more moons than one in the blood-red
skies of his icy landscapes; yet the sacred boundaries of music are
never overstepped. Little matters the niche awarded this composer by
posterity—Richard Strauss is the musical enchanter of our day.


IV

Richard Strauss was born at Munich, June 11, 1864. He is the son
of Franz S. Strauss, formerly first horn player in the Bavarian
Court Band. His father has written studies and other compositions
for his instrument; and, as his son said, “he could play most of
the instruments in the orchestra.” He sat under Wagner’s stick, but
was not a Wagnerian. Once he played so well that Wagner exclaimed,
“I fancy after all, Strauss, you cannot be such an anti-Wagnerian
as they make out, for you play my music so beautifully.” “What has
that got to do with it?” answered the stubborn artist. The mother of
Richard was born Pschorr, and is a daughter of the wealthy Munich
brewer. The boy received his first piano lessons at the age of four
and a half from his mother. Later he studied with August Tombo, a
harp player, and took up the violin under Benno Walter. At the age
of six he composed a three-part song, a valse, and a polka—Schneider
Polka, he called the dance. Before he went to school he had tried
his hand at songs, piano pieces, and an orchestral overture. Sent
to the elementary schools from 1870 to 1874, the gymnasium from
1874 to 1882, and the university from 1882 to 1884, Strauss laid
the foundation of a comprehensive culture, a catholicity in taste,
a love of _belles lettres_, and a general knowledge of the world’s
literature. He early mastered the technics of the piano and violin,
and in 1875, with Kapellmeister Fr. W. Meyer, theory and composition.
This course lasted five years. The composing went on apace. A chorus
for the Electra of Sophocles and a festival chorus were given a
hearing at a gymnasium concert. Three of his songs were sung in 1880;
and in March, 1881, his string quartet in A, opus 2, the scherzo of
which he wrote in his fifteenth year, was played by Benno Walter’s
quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Four days later his first symphony
was accorded a hearing under Hermann Levi, and the extreme youth of
the composer called forth remonstrances. In 1883 Berlin heard his C
minor overture under Radecke. Both are still in manuscript.

Of this formative period Strauss has told us that, “My father kept
me very strictly to the old masters, in whose compositions I had a
thorough grounding. You cannot appreciate Wagner and the moderns
unless you pass through this grounding in the classics. Young
composers bring me voluminous manuscripts for my opinion on their
productions. In looking at them I find that they generally want to
begin where Wagner left off. I say to all such, ‘My good young man,
go home and study the works of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, of
Mozart, of Beethoven, and when you have mastered these art works come
to me again.’ Without thoroughly understanding the significance of
the development from Haydn, _via_ Mozart and Beethoven, to Wagner,
these youngsters cannot appreciate at their proper worth either the
music of Wagner or of his predecessors. ‘What an extraordinary thing
for Richard Strauss to say,’ these young men remark, but I only give
them the advice gained by my own experience.”

Then came a stroke of luck. Von Bülow’s attention being attracted
by the charmingly written and scored serenade (opus 7) in E flat
for thirteen wind instruments, secured it for the repertory of
the Meiningen orchestra. It is scored for two flutes, two oboes,
two clarinets, four horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon (or
bass tuba). His second symphony in F minor was composed during the
season of 1883-1884. It was first played in New York under Theodore
Thomas, December 15, 1884, and later by Walter Damrosch. It shows
many traces of the young composer’s close study of Brahms. The horn
concerto, opus 11, and the piano quartet, opus 13, were composed at
the same period. The latter won a prize. It shows a straining for
bigger effects, as if the form were too cramped for the strenuous
composer. The andante and scherzo are the more agreeable movements.
The Wanderer’s Sturmlied, after Goethe’s poem, beginning, “Wen du
nicht Verlässest, Genius,” revealed the taste for literary themes
and themes that exalt the individuality. This opus 14 is written
for six-voiced chorus, two soprani, one alto, one tenor, two bassi,
and orchestra. It also shows the serious influence of the Brahms
Schicksalslied. A second suite for wind was first given at Munich,
conducted by the composer.

“Bülow, who was very fond of my father,” says Strauss, “interested
himself in me, and I have much to thank him for. He started me on
my conducting career. My first experience of standing before an
orchestra was in connection with the performance of a suite, in
four movements, for wind instruments, which I had composed at his
request. It is still in manuscript. Bülow made me conduct it without
any rehearsal!” This must be the grand suite in B flat, misleadingly
numbered opus 14—the same opus number as the Sturmlied. It is scored
for thirteen wind instruments, and has been heard in London. The
introduction and entire fourth movement are said to be the best.
It is early Strauss. Strauss became music director in Meiningen,
October, 1885, conducted his own F minor symphony and also made his
début as pianist in Mozart’s C minor concerto. Von Bülow honored him
by conducting the concerto.

Strauss had already come under the influence of Alexander Ritter
(1833-1896), a violinist in the Munich Orchestra who had married
a niece of Wagner’s. Ritter, like von Bülow, was a man of strong
magnetic personality, and both were warm-blooded Wagnerians and
Lisztians. As boys they listened to that wonderful performance of
Beethoven’s Choral Symphony given by Wagner at Dresden in 1849, and
the two young gentlemen schoolfellows used to doff their caps every
time they passed the master’s windows in the Ostra-Allee. “Ritter was
exceptionally well read in all the philosophers, ancient and modern,
and a man of the highest culture. His influence,” says Strauss, “was
in the nature of a storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of
the poetic, the expressive, in music, as exemplified in the works
of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz. My symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien,
is the connecting link with the old and the new methods.” The young
composer went to Rome and Naples in the spring of 1886. Strauss tells
an amusing incident. “A few days ago I was conducting this symphony
at Brunswick, when a policeman appeared on the scene and stopped the
performance because, as he said, some condition had not been complied
with. Soon after, however, another policeman came and said the
concert might proceed. This unwarrantable interruption caused great
uproar, and the audience shouted anathemas against the police. At the
close of the symphony I turned to the audience and said, ‘You see,
ladies and gentlemen, in this Italy there are no anarchists!’”

In 1886 he left Meiningen to become third Kapellmeister under Levi
and Fischer. He wrote his tone-poem Macbeth at this period, though it
bears a later opus number than Don Juan. The former, after a revision
and partial rewriting, was dedicated to Alexander Ritter, and first
performed under von Bülow in Berlin. Strauss remained at Munich
until 1890, when he received a call from Weimar. In the ducal city
he shed his pupil’s skin and developed into a brilliant conductor.
His radical tendencies were now beginning to be recognized, and his
espousal of the music of the extreme Left caused his conducting of
Wagner and Liszt to become notable. At Leipsic his influence was felt
as conductor at the Liszt society. He has always warmly defended the
music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz.

In 1892 his lungs were affected and a protracted journey to Greece,
Egypt, and Sicily was necessary. He was not idle, however, for on
his return his grand opera, Guntram, opus 25, and dedicated to his
parents, was produced at Weimar. He married in 1894 Pauline de Ahna,
the daughter of a well-known Bavarian general, and the soprano who
created the Freihild in Guntram.

From Weimar Strauss returned to Munich as Court Kapellmeister, and
three years later he succeeded Levi as general music director. Not
satisfied with matters, he left Munich to become Kapellmeister at
the Berlin Royal Opera, which position he still occupies. He had
conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin after the death of
von Bülow, but the trip from Munich to Berlin was too exhausting,
and Arthur Nikisch was permanently engaged. Strauss has conducted
at Bayreuth, festivals at Liège, Cologne, Leipsic, Milan, Moscow.
In 1897 he visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, and a
year later Zurich and Madrid. In 1903 he conducted, in conjunction
with Wilhelm Mengelberg, a series of concerts in London, a Strauss
festival organized by Hugo Goerlitz. The Amsterdam Symphony
Orchestra, a remarkable aggregation of artists, played. His Parisian
experiences were most gratifying; he appeared in the dual rôles of
conductor-composer, his wife singing his lieder with exquisite taste.

As a conductor he ranks among the great ones. He is particularly
sympathetic in his readings of modern works, though any one who has
heard him direct a Mozart opera can never forget the impressions
gleaned—the blitheness, sanity, sweetness. He is cool, never
eccentric in his beat, and does not play upon his own personality,
as do some other conductors.

A little critical and polemical literature has grown up about the
Strauss case. In addition to the analytical programmes, some of them
too fantastic to be of value, Hans Merian has written an extended
study of Also sprach Zarathustra; Gustav Brecher, Richard Strauss;
Dr. Erich Urban, Strauss _contra_ Wagner—in which Wagner is proved
to be old-fashioned; Urban has also put forth a pamphlet-essay,
Richard Strauss. In his youth, writes Urban, Wagner cried exultantly,
“I am a musician;” in his age he mumbled, “I am a poet.” And he
really believed he had discovered in the Greek an excuse for his
mutilation of drama and music. Then Urban turns to Liszt. Liszt, he
said, went far, but not far enough. He grew timid when he saw the
logical outcome of his experiments. He still clung to the classic,
to the formal. Strauss appears. Urban thinks he showed absolutely no
individual talent until his opus 14, Wanderer’s Sturmlied. His early
work is Schumann, and Schumann at his worst. The learned critic does
not believe that either von Bülow or Ritter counted in the formation
of Strauss. He looks upon Guntram as an accident, and Heldenleben
as an answer to Zarathustra. He does not believe the latter to have
been inspired by Nietzsche,—Strauss composed it when he discovered
that Nietzsche’s philosophy coincided with his own revolutionary
programme. And as the same ideas are expressed in Heldenleben, the
titles could be exchanged without any harm. Truly a Daniel come
to judgment! It is in Heldenleben that Urban sees Strauss at the
top notch of his ideals. Here is musical drama without the words,
scenery, stage, or singers.

Brecher assigns only six periods to the development of his hero.
Brahms has much to say in the early Strauss music. The critic
outlines the orchestra before Strauss came: Haydn was the first real
instrumental writer, one who dispensed with the vocal character;
Mozart lent the orchestra freedom and beauty; Beethoven endowed it
with individuality; Berlioz was all color; Liszt, patterning after
Berlioz, developed thematic variety; and Wagner employed both the
color of Berlioz and Liszt’s theme-weaving for his profounder and
more poetically dramatic music. Strauss followed all these men,
but returned to pure instrumental forms, avoiding in his later
poems the stringent outlines of the absolute scheme, and being more
eloquent than his predecessors. Macbeth and Don Juan belong, says
Brecher, to the third period of Strauss. Death and Apotheosis is a
reactionary period, as is Guntram—too much Liszt and Wagner, too much
chromaticism. From opus 27 to 34 is the fifth period, nearly all
songs, wonderful songs. Till Eulenspiegel belongs to this arbitrary
grouping, and it closes with Also sprach Zarathustra. The sixth
period opens with Don Quixote and Heldenleben. Beauty is routed by
truth. Even Urban thinks Don Quixote is a colossal joke, written to
astound the Philistines.

But these writers are in sympathy with the composer. The terrible
Hanslick of Vienna is not. He, even at the expense of contradicting
himself, praised Wagner’s melodic gifts as an offset to the more
meagre thematic invention of Strauss. His criticism of Also sprach
Zarathustra is not criticism—it is scarification. He heard the
work in Vienna, on a programme in which figured Weber’s Euryanthe
overture, and the C minor symphony of Beethoven. The good doctor
is a joy to read in these days when politeness has closed critical
mouths. He first drags out the memory of Liszt and stamps on
it—Liszt, who begged from literature his subjects for a symphony, and
“making the alms pass as music.” Strauss goes to philosophy instead
of to poetry. And then he slashes to the right and left of him. It
is capital reading, if not convincing. The tone-poems of Richard
Strauss are a musical refutation of Hanslick’s theories. There is no
“content” in music, he declares; “the egg stands, anyhow,” retorts
Columbus-Strauss!

       *       *       *       *       *

The Strauss piano music is hardly inviting to any but the most
devoted. Severe in outline, sombre in hue, it leans not to the
sweet intimacies of Chopin or Schumann. Opus 5 is a solo sonata in
B minor, some thirty pages long. I prefer Tschaïkowsky’s effort in
the same form. If it is not as _klaviermässig_, it is more mellow.
Stern, and in the mood Doric, the several movements of the Strauss
sonata are sinewy rather than plastic, though the adagio in E has
some moving moments. The scherzo is light and bright in execution.
The composition will never become popular. In opus 3 there are some
pieces of interest,—five in all,—and here Schumann’s influence is
writ plain. Dense is the pattern, while the ideas are based on a
poetic idea. Two numbers from opus 9, Stimmungsbilder, will please.
They are a tender Träumerei and a delicate lyrical bit called An
Einsamer Quelle. In the latter the harmonic changes recall Wagner.
The most ambitious piano music is the burleske in D minor for piano
and orchestra. This must have been written in 1885, though it bears
no opus number. It is extremely difficult in the solo part, and not
especially grateful. I can recall no one but Eugen d’Albert and
Herr Backhaus as having played it—the latter at the London Strauss
festival of 1903. Here Brahms is to the fore, the very opening bar
of the piano being the theme of Brahms’s first D minor ballade. But
how different the treatment! Bitter, rather airy, more sardonic than
witty, this burleske demonstrates that the Teuton often unbends
as sadly and stiffly as the Briton. Compare the piece with the
incomparable jesting of Scarlatti’s burlesca, that joke which begins
in G minor and ends in D minor! It is the eternal difference between
the Italian and the German. Crabbed I call this burleske. The ’cello
and piano sonata in F is a capital composition, and so is the sonata
in E flat for viola and piano. His concerto for violin and orchestra
in D minor has never received the attention it deserves; and I wish
for the sake of novelty that the beautiful horn concerto, opus 11,
would be given. For the waldhorn Strauss has a natural sympathy.

The lieder literature is important in quality. He has written nearly
a hundred songs, some of them priceless in idea and workmanship. It
is in this form that his friends and enemies have agreed upon his
melodic invention. This refers to the various collections numbered
opus 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, and 34; but I wonder whether
the later collections in opus 39 and opus 41, 43, and 44 are received
with the same enthusiasm. Some of them are harmonically difficult to
grasp, and many are deceptive; when Strauss seems at his simplest, he
is often most irritatingly complex and recondite. But an overflowing
meed of praise must be awarded the opus 15, the lovely serenade in
F sharp from opus 17, several from opus 21 and 27, and all of opus
29. A critic considers O wärst du mein, from opus 26, number 2,
and Sehnsucht, opus 32, as the most beautiful of all. No mood seems
denied Strauss. His exposition of the most exotic is indicative of a
subtle, rather than a sensuous, musical nature. Yet how simply and
naturally he has indicated a primitive emotion in Jungenhexenlied,
opus 39, number 2. The song is a masterpiece. The sturdy power, the
sheer muscularity, of The Workman from the same set, should make
it beloved of manly male singers. Its great, resounding blows in F
minor stir one’s very soul. And its sentiment is that of healthy
anarchy, as befits the text of the poet Richard Dehmel. Death the
Releaser, Leises Lied, and To my Son complete this opus. The last has
a noble ring. The Silent Longing is the capture of an exquisitely
evanescent mood. There are five numbers in opus 41,—a Cradle Song;
In der Campagna; On the Shore,—full of introspective beauty, a
dashing, vagabondish song; Brother Good-for-nothing; and Whisp’ring
Songs. In all the music seeks the emotional curve, in all is there
absolute fidelity to the poetic theme—that is, fidelity as the
composer conceives it. Of mere sensuous or decorative music-making
there is none. Strauss is ever beset by the idea; whether dramatic,
metaphysical, or romantic-lyric, the idea takes precedence of the
sound that clothes it. So there is little pretence of form, little
thought of vocal exigencies, while the piano accompaniments are
the most difficult ever written. If he hammers out epics in his
orchestral compositions, in his lyrics he is the patient, curious
master of miniature, the ivory worker of shapes exotic.

       *       *       *       *       *

Guntram, for which Strauss wrote his own book, the first opera of
this composer, is not familiar to Americans. It was never a great
success, despite its earnestness and indisputable depth. Modelled
on Wagnerian lines, it has for a subject the doings of The Fighters
for Love, an order of knights, which, Parsifal-like, in the middle
of the thirteenth century wars for the Cross and Brotherly Love; but
with song and not with sword. Guntram, the hero, is a Fighter for
Love, and his adventures and passion for Freihild form the basis of
the book. The preludes to Acts I and II have been played in this
country. The first is a lovely scheme of orchestration, Wagnerian
in texture, and celebrates the yearning desire which the singers
have consecrated to art and to the Cross. The second prelude is a
brilliant, joyous picture of a Festival of Victory. The form and
development are absolutely free. It is interesting to note, on the
last page of the first prelude, an essential-turn that comes straight
from Götterdämmerung. Strauss employs it with skill as a pregnant
motive. While it is too short for concert performance, the prelude
of the last act is the embodiment of yearning and rich in harmonic
life. The great duo of Guntram and Freihild and Guntram’s farewell
are noble specimens of dramatic writing. Nevertheless the work lacks
big wings.

Two later compositions of Strauss, bearing the opus number 42, are
for Männerchor,—Liebe and Altdeutsches Schlachtlied, both after
Herder. Two sixteen-voiced mixed _choruses a capella_ are also
announced. Enoch Arden, opus 38, is a melodrama for piano and
recitative. It is an interesting experiment, being melodious and
effective. Written for von Possart the German tragedian, the weight
of the work falls upon the reader.

At the seventy-seventh Netherrhenish Music Festival in
Aix-la-Chapelle, June, 1900, Strauss produced two Grössere Gesänge,
opus 44, for low voice and orchestra. Decidedly here the bust is in
the orchestra, the pedestal—! The Rückert and Richard Dehmel are the
poets levied upon—the first represented by his Nächtlichtergang, the
other by a Notturno.

Strauss occasionally indulges in flashes of sly humor. Here is a
footnote he appends to his song opus 31, number 2, Wenn:—

  Should any singers think of singing this song, while the nineteenth
  century is still in existence, the composer would advise them to
  transpose it from this point, a half-tone lower (_i.e._ into E
  flat), so that the composition may thus end in the key in which it
  began.

Fuersnot, a Singgedicht in one act, book by Ernst von Wolzogen, music
by Richard Strauss, was produced at the Royal Opera House, Dresden,
November 21, 1901. The libretto is founded on a Netherland story,
entitled, The Fire Famine at Oudenaerde. Emil Paur introduced several
excerpts, sonorous, brilliant music, at a Philharmonic concert.

       *       *       *       *       *

When questioned about his future plans Strauss replied: “I have made
a musical setting to Uhland’s Taillefer for chorus, soli, and full
orchestra. I am surprised that musicians have not availed themselves
of this fresh, magnificent poem before—at least I have heard of no
setting. Altogether one admires Uhland too little these days. When
I was younger I neglected reading him very much; but now I find one
beauty after another in his writing. I also have material for two
symphonic poems, but don’t know which one I shall use—if indeed I
finish any—now. It usually takes two years before a composition
begins to assume form with me. At first there comes to me an idea—a
theme. This rests with me for months; I think of other things and
busy myself with everything but it; but the idea is fermenting of
its own accord. Sometimes I bring it to mind, or play the theme on
the piano, just to see how far it has progressed—and finally it is
ready for use. You see, therein lies the real art of creation—to
know exactly when an idea is ripe, when one can use, must use it.
More and more I cling to the belief that we conscious people have
no control over our creative power. For instance, I slave over a
melody and encounter an obstacle which I cannot surmount, however I
try. This during the course of an evening; but the next morning the
difficulty has surrendered itself, just as though my creative forces
had toiled at it over night. Several years ago I told a friend that I
meant to compose a symphonic poem, Spring. He repeated my remark, and
at the making up of the next music festival programme my Spring was
placed and I was asked to conduct it! The work is not even composed
yet, despite the great number of themes and sketches I have for it.
In fact, I don’t know when I will compose it—if at all. Sometimes a
theme occurs first to me, and I find the poetic mate to it later; but
at others the poetic idea begins to take on musical form. I may even
compose an opera soon. A young Vienna poet has suggested a libretto
which appeals to me very much. A libretto of my own is also receiving
some consideration from me.

“The old metre of poetry, the iambic and trochiac rhythms—also the
rhyme—are useless in music, because the latter has an entirely
different rhythm, and this must necessarily destroy that of poetry
when the two are joined. According to my opinion, the most available
forms are the Nibelungen verses or a free prose. Why cannot music
express philosophy? Metaphysics and music are sisters. Even in music
one can express a view point, and if one wishes to approach the World
Riddle, perhaps it can be done with the aid of music. Is not the
third act of Tristan transcendental philosophy purely? Lastly, my
next tone-poem will illustrate ‘a day in my family life.’ It will be
partly lyrical, partly humorous—a triple fugue, the three subjects
representing papa, mamma, and the baby!” This latter is the Sinfonia
Domestica of which the first performance anywhere, was announced for
March 9, 1904, at Carnegie Hall, New York City.

Jean Marnold, the acute critic of the _Mercure de France_, calls
attention to the “melody of Strauss, which is frankly diatonic,
the tonal character definitely determined.” This statement will
be challenged by those who take the composer’s middle period as a
criterion of his chromatic tendencies. But examine the later themes,
and we are forced to agree with M. Marnold. Arthur Symons finds that
Strauss is cerebral. He writes: “Strauss is what the French call _un
cérébral_, which is by no means the same thing as 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 transfigured
by emotion. Strauss has written a Don Juan without sensuality, and
it is in his lack of sensuality that I find the reason of his
appeal. All modern music is full of sensuality, since Wagner first
set the fevers of the flesh to music. In the music of Strauss the
Germans have discovered the fever of the soul. And that is indeed
what Strauss has tried to interpret.” W. J. Henderson is open to
conviction. He wrote:—

“It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future.
He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in
orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent
attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more
definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an
advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much
imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which
genius understands genius.”

Edward E. Ziegler discerns that Richard Strauss is “a master of music
mathematics and one who is composing music for the present. It is an
easy evasion,” he adds, “to shift the responsibility for what the
living generation cannot easily or will not willingly grasp and to
proclaim that such intricate writing is for the future. But music has
ever reflected life, and no other composer has so nearly approached
a musical expression of our time as has Strauss. The febrile unrest,
the neurotic striving of the hour, all have their musical equivalent
in his greater compositions. Plying the stress of emphasis as
Strauss does is characteristic of the present as is typical his
use of the enormous orchestra. All life has become agitated by the
exaggeration of the hour. It needed but a master like Strauss to
express this truth in music.”

August Spanuth holds that “Richard Strauss may be a monstrous
phenomenon, yet he embodies the domineering spirit of modern music.
For more than two centuries composers have endeavored to vindicate
the cause of programme-music, which the staunch old champions of
‘absolute music’ have fought from the outset. However, after the
efforts of Berlioz and Liszt, Richard Strauss has succeeded in
reversing the question, making it read thus: Is there a future
left for instrumental music outside of the descriptive, pictorial,
illustrative, suggestive, and philosophizing music of to-day?”

Ernest Newman, in a masterly article, concludes with this telling
passage:—

  ... This kind of music adds to our knowledge of man and the world
  as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoy. Certainly
  to any one who knows Strauss’s music to Don Quixote, the story
  of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story
  itself, indeed, has not one tithe of the humor and the profound
  sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in
  this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. And
  here at last we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived
  Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have
  previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute
  creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody
  is now seen to be, not a failing, but a magnificent gift. It is
  the prose of music—a grave, flexible, eloquent prose. His style
  is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as
  it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to
  life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment
  of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect
  compromise of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. “I can
  conceive,” says Flaubert, in one of his letters, “a style which
  should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days,
  in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as
  verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations,
  modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which
  would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on
  which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were,
  in a boat with a good wind aft.”

  No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical
  style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and
  intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to
  the realistic description of character and _milieu_ which is his
  mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner
  _manqué_ nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new
  order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The
  only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes
  says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings.
  Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the one sign of new and
  independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us
  on to the discussion of fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology,
  and of form.


V

Richard Strauss is the most intellectual of musicians. Saint-Saëns
pointed out long ago the master part harmony would play in the
music of the future, and Strauss realized the theory that melody
is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of tone; his master works
are architectural marvels. In structure, in rhythmical complexity,
in striking harmonies, ugly, bold, brilliant, dissonantal, his
symphonic poems are without parallel. Berlioz never dared, Liszt
never invented, such miracles of polyphony, a polyphony beside
which Wagner’s is child’s play and Bach’s is outrivalled. And this
learning, this titanic brushwork on vast and sombre canvases, are
never for formal music’s sake; indeed, one may ask if it is really
music, and not a new art. It is always intended to mean something,
say something, paint some one’s soul; it is an attempt to make
the old absolute music new and articulate. This flies in the face
of Schopenhauer, who declared music to be a presentative, not a
representative, art. In his gallery of psychological portraiture
Strauss becomes a sort of musical Dostoïevsky. He divines,
Maeterlinck-like, the secret tragedy of existence, and paints with
delicacy, with great barbaric masses, in colors that glow, poetic and
legendary figures which yield up their souls to the psychological
genius who questions them. I call the tendency of Strauss _décadent_,
like Wagner’s; both men build up their pictures by a multitude of
infinitesimal touches; both men decompose their themes,—and this is
the highest art of the decadence. Unity is sometimes absent, and also
the power that makes for righteousness, which we find in Beethoven’s
music.

Touching on the moral of this new dispensation in art, I may confess
that I am puzzled by its absolute departure from the ethic of
Christianity. It is not precisely a pagan code that Strauss presents
in his splendid laconic manner; rather is it the ethic of Spinoza
ravished by the rhetoric of Nietzsche. Affirmation of the will, not
its denial, is both preached and practised by this terrible composer.
For him the ineluctable barrier of barriers is the return to
simplicity, the return to the people. He may be simple in his complex
way, and he may sympathize lyrically with the proletarian; yet he
is the aristocrat of aristocrats in art; and his art, specialized,
nervous, and alembicated, may be the call to arms of lonely, proud
souls that refuse to go to the people as did Tolstoy. With Ibsen’s
Brand, not Tolstoy’s, Levin is Strauss in closer communion. And he
may hold the twentieth century in his hand.

During his Italian trip Strauss wrote Aus Italien, opus 16, a
symphonic fantasia that has been heard in America with delight.
It is fresh, vigorous, even somewhat popular, in themes, and
characteristically colored. The orchestration was the envy of the
younger men. Italia was first given in Munich in 1887 under Strauss.
His violin sonata, opus 18, was composed the same year. Then followed
fast the series of daring orchestral frescos that placed the name
of Strauss at the very forefront of living composers. And yet how
un-German his music seems, hatched though it be from the very nest of
the classics! Strauss is not of the same blood as the Vienna dance
composers. He has written a valse; but who could compare the light,
voluptuous Danube music to the ecstatic scarlet dance of the Overman
in Also sprach Zarathustra! Despite the fact that it is preceded only
by Italia, Macbeth, and Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung gives us _in
esse_ all the overpowering qualities of Strauss, chiefest of them
being imagination without the ugliness detected by sensitive natures
in later compositions. Death and Apotheosis is a masterpiece. The
nineteenth century, notwithstanding its devotion to the material,
produced poets and prose masters for whom death had a peculiar
predilection. There is the mystic Maeterlinck, with his sobbing
shadowgraphs of Death the Intruder; Tolstoy, with his poignant
picture of the Death of Iván Illyitch; Arnold Böcklin, that Swiss
master, who sang on elegiac canvas his Toten Insel; and have we not
all read Walt Whitman in his matchless threnody “When lilacs last in
the dooryard bloomed”? It is not strange, then, that Strauss, a lyric
philosopher of the same passionate pattern as Friedrich Nietzsche,
should wrestle with a problem as old as eternity. He does wrestle
with it in his symphonic poem—attacking it in large symbolism, free
from the morbidities of the decadent poets; accomplishes it in a way
that wrings the very heartstrings.

It is the spectacle of a sick man in “a necessitous little chamber”
reviewing his struggles and defeats as the fever cracks his veins and
throttles his life. He has failed as failed Balzac’s Louis Lambert,
as fail all men with lofty ideals. He has reached that “squat tower”
of defeat, death, which Robert Browning chanted in Childe Roland.
To the dark tower he goes, and dauntless at the last, he sets the
slughorn to his lips and blows victory in the very teeth of Death.
Perhaps this most modern of poems gives the key to the Strauss
music better than any other in the English tongue. The dying man
sunken in lethargic slumber, his heart feebly beating in syncopated
rhythms, recalls his childhood, his lusty youth, his mad passion
for life at its thickest. He toils and reaches summits only to hear
the implacable Halt! of destiny. Yet he continues to combat Fate,
but to be laid low. And dying, he triumphs; for his ideal lifts him
to the heights, to “Sun-Smitten Sunium.” He has dared, and daring
conquers. The fable is old—as old as the Prometheus myth. In music
we have it incarnated in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the tonality
of which—C minor, C major—Strauss has adopted. Liszt, too, in his
Tasso, a symphonic setting of Goethe’s tragedy, attempted the same
task, and accomplished it in a brilliant, spectacular fashion.
The thematic grouping of the Strauss poem is simplicity itself
when compared to the towering architectonics of A Hero’s Life and
Thus spake Zarathustra. After a lengthy prologue in which mood,
atmosphere, _Stimmung_ in a word, and echoes of childish babbling are
subtly contrived, the bolt of destruction is let loose, and fever, a
spectre, courses through the allegro. The Ideal motive sounds but in
gasping, broken accents. It is only after the delirium has reached
its climax that a period of repose, an analogy of the lyric period,
is attained. The childhood of the man is lisped naïvely; youth and
its frolicking unconsciousness are aptly portrayed; manly passion
and conflict end the section, for the ominous Halt! is blared out
by the trombones. The development—as in all developments of this
composer—contains miracles of counterpoint buried in passages of
emotional splendor. With cumulative power and pathos we hear a climax
of imposing sonorities; the marchlike motive of the Ideal is given
in all its majesty, and in a C major of rainbow riches the poem
finishes. Strauss has never surpassed the plangency of coloring,
the melting sweetness of this score. He is more philosophic in Also
sprach Zarathustra, more dramatic in Don Juan, more heroic in Ein
Heldenleben; but never has his message been so consoling, never has
he set so vividly over his orchestra the arc of promise. That such
music came forth from his potent youth is a prophecy of an astounding
future. He is the only living issue in music to-day; no other master
has his stride, his stature.

That merry old rogue’s tune, Till Eulenspiegel, is a scherzo-like
rondo picturing the crazy pranks of the historic Tyll Owlglass.
Its grotesque, passionate melancholy, tender violence, its streaks
of broad humor interrupted by mocking pathos, its galloping down a
narrow avenue, at the end of which looms the gibbet, its mockery of
custom, flaunting of the Philistine, and the unrepentant death of
Till,—make it a picture unparalleled in music literature. Scored
brilliantly, the rondo leaves in its trail a whiff of sulphur
and violets. It is fantastic music, fantastically conceived,
fantastically executed.

The score of Also sprach Zarathustra is dated “Begun February 4;
finished August 24, 1896. Munich.” The composer’s words in this
connection must be given:—

“I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s
great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the
development of the human race from its origin, through the various
phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to
Nietzsche’s idea of the Uebermensch.”

Only a musical epitome of the creative processes of the cosmos! The
modesty of Strauss is of a Michelangelo-like magnitude. This new
Faust of music, Nietzsche-Strauss, who would assail the very stars
in their courses, has written some pages in this opus that are of
imposing grandeur. There is an uplifting roar at the opening, an
effect of sunrise—purely imaginary all these musical pictures, yet
none the less startling and credible—as Zarathustra’s trumpets
solemnly intone his motive. These tremendous chords in their naked
simplicity alone proclaim Strauss a man of genius and give him fee
simple to the symphonic heritage of Beethoven and Brahms. The A flat
section is notably melodious and luscious in color. The five-voiced
fugue is ugly yet masterful, and the dance music furious in its
abandonment, corybantic in its revelry. Such laughter has never been
heard in an orchestra. The melodic curve is passional. Strauss is
here tender, dramatic, bizarre, poetic, humorous, ironic, witty,
wicked—simple never. The noble art of simplicity he lacks. This is
the vastest and most difficult score ever penned. It is a cathedral
in tone, sublime and fantastic, with its grotesque gargoyles, hideous
flying abutments, exquisite traceries, prodigious arches, half
gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades,
and heaven-splitting spires,—a mighty musical structure! We go to the
rear-world, are in religious transports, are swept on the passional
curves of that fascinating C minor theme “of Joys and Passions” and
repelled by the fugal aspect of Science. There is “holy laughter” and
dancing; the dancing of the midget, man, in the futile, furtive gleam
of sunshine that bridges the Past and the Future with the Present.
Then those twelve bell strokes—“deep eternity” is heard in the
humming of the metal, and the close is of enigmatic tonality. Nothing
as audacious was ever penned by the hand of man—in music.

The Nature theme is ingeniously designed. It is, in the most natural
of tonalities, C major, and consists of C, the fifth, and the
octave above it. The third is missing out of the chord, and this
makes the “tonal sex” of the chord variable. It is, says Merian,
hermaphroditic, as is Nature itself. Major and minor are not yet
divided. And the missing third makes this theme one of the World
Riddle: “It is the sphinx Nature, who is staring at us with empty,
lustreless eyes, inviting confidence, yet awesome.”

In the midst of the dancing orgy of joy sounds the bell of midnight.
This is the final division, The Song of the Night Wanderer.
Nietzsche, in the later editions of his book, gave this chapter the
heading, The Drunken Song; and on the heavy strokes of _Brummglocke_
he wrote:—

                    ONE!
              O man, take heed!
                    TWO!
        What speaks the deep midnight?
                    THREE!
          I have slept, I have slept—
                    FOUR!
    I have awaked out of a deep dream—
                    FIVE!
              The world is deep,
                    SIX!
        And deeper than the day thought.
                    SEVEN!
              Deep in its woe—
                    EIGHT!
      Joy, deeper still than heart sorrow:
                    NINE!
            Woe speaks: Vanish!
                    TEN!
          Yet all joy wants eternity—
                  ELEVEN!
          Wants deep, deep eternity!
                  TWELVE!

But Strauss chooses this symbol as the time when Zarathustra
begins his journey into eternity. The hour of midnight is the hour
of death, the goal of Zarathustra’s career. This episode is an
emotional parallel to the period when Zarathustra is felled to earth
with conflicting longings. And the Theme of Disgust here stands
forth as the Motif of Death, controlling the scene. Zarathustra’s
earthly death is wonderfully translated into tone. The Theme of
Death struggles with that of earthly strife, and both succumb in a
broken chord of C major. Then without any modulation the Theme of
the Ideal sounds in B major and the transfiguration is achieved.
Again there is a faint reminiscent plea of the conquered themes. The
Theme of the Ideal sways aloft in the higher regions in B major; the
trombones insist on the cryptic unresolved chord of C-E-F sharp; and
in the double basses and celli is repeated C-G-C—the World Riddle.
Emil Paur, ever an ardent Strauss pioneer, produced Also sprach
Zarathustra in New York, December, 1897.

In W. B. Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil, there appears this
characteristic passage: “Have not poetry and music arisen, as
it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their
imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves
and the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of
music or poetry, still cry to us their origin.” The Irish mystic
poet is writing of magic, and I cannot help applying his words to
Richard Strauss, who is the initiator of new art. After hearing
his Till Eulenspiegel conducted by the composer, I was more than
ever impressed by the idea that Strauss is diverting music into
psychologic channels, moulding its plastic forms into shapes that are
really vital, so intense is their personal appeal. Since primitive
man howled his lays to the moon, the art of music has become in
every age more and more definitive; even the classic masters were
not content to play alone with tonal arabesques, but sought to
impress upon their bars a definite mood. In Beethoven the passion
for articulating his meanings literally re-created music. When
Wagner found that he had nothing new to say, he resorted to an old
device—he wedded his music to words. Richard Strauss has now taken
up the chain, the last links of which were so patiently forged by
Franz Liszt. He has at his command all the old enchantments of music;
he can woo and ravish the ear and command the tempests; but this is
not enough. He would have his message still more articulate. He is
a thinker, a philosopher as well as a poet, and deeply religious in
the cosmical sense; he purposes no less a task than the complete
subjugation of men’s imagination. Notes, phrases, groups, movements,
masses of tone are no longer merely sensuous symbols, but the actual
symbols of a language; we must hasten to learn the new speech, which
relates in wonderful tones wonderful things. Tschaïkowsky aimed at
this definiteness, but his passionate, emotional nature clouded the
workings of his intellect. Strauss, too, has had the seven devils of
sensuality in his mansion, but has exorcised them by sheer force of
a great spiritual nature—the man is a spiritualist, a seer in the
broader meanings of these much-worn terms. The vision of approaching
death in his Don Quixote could have been conceived only by one for
whom life and the universe itself were symbols, the living garment by
which we apprehend the Deity.

In our shrewd categories of things intellectual and things emotional,
we partition off too sharply brain and feeling, soul and body.
Life is not a proposition by Euclid; nor is art. It is one of the
functions of music to make us feel, another to make us think; the
greatest masters are ever those who make us both feel and think in
one vivid moment. This Beethoven has done, Wagner has done, and now
Richard Strauss. You cannot call his music frigidly intellectual, as
is often the music of Brahms, nor does it relapse into such debauches
of frenetic passion as Tschaïkowsky’s—the imperial intellect of
Strauss controls his temperament. He is, like Nietzsche, a lyric
philosopher, but never, like Nietzsche, will he allow the problems
of life and art to overthrow his reason. In the thunders of his
scores, I seem to hear the annunciation of a new dispensation, of a
new evangel of art which shall preach the beauty of the soul and the
beauty of body; life on the other side of good and evil.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are many to whom Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben
proved musically baneful. Yet Strauss wears no mask. His own musical
lineaments, convulsed in passion’s grimace, exultant with grandiose
dreams, or distorted by deadly rage, are the naked expression of
his fantastic soul. And to the orthodox his contempt for clear
tonalities, his mockery of the very harmonic foundations of the
art, his juggling with bizarre rhythms—in a word, his avoidance of
the normal, the facile, the smug, and the unoriginal, is as great
a crime against ethics as the lucidly insane proclamations of the
Master Immoralist, Friedrich Nietzsche. Repeated hearings convince
one regarding Strauss’s sincerity. He is working out his own artistic
salvation on his own premeditated lines. He is the solitary soul of
Hauptmann, and he is doomed to mockery until he is understood.

It is impossible to escape the compelling magnetism of the man from
Munich. He is still young, still in his storm and stress period. When
the time for clarification comes, Strauss in this final analysis will
emerge a very big man. His Hero’s Life has its ugly spots—critics
and criticism are objectified in a cruelly sardonic fashion—and that
battlefield will remain for this generation either sheer brutal noise
or else the forefront of the higher æstheticism in music. One way or
the other it matters little; the reputation of Strauss will not stand
or fall by this poem. The main thing to record is the overwhelming
impression of power, anarchistic if you will, that informs Ein
Heldenleben. And all the more disquieting is the discovery that this
Wizard of Dreams wears no antique musical mask—his own is tragic and
significant enough.

And let it be said that for conventional programme music Strauss has
ever manifested a violent aversion. The only clew he gives to his
work is the title. Some commentators do the most mischief, for they
read into this music every imaginable meaning. It is then as absolute
music that Ein Heldenleben may be criticised, though the names of the
various subdivisions give the hearer, if not a key, at least notion
of the emotional trend of this composition. This is the way Richard
Strauss has outlined the scheme of his E flat Symphony, opus 40, his
Eroica:—

I. The Hero. II. The Hero’s Antagonists. III. The Hero’s Consort. IV.
The Hero’s Battlefield. V. The Hero’s Work of Peace. VI. The Hero’s
Retirement from Worldly Life and Strife and Ultimate Perfection. It
must be remembered that this is a purely arbitrary arrangement,
for in the formal sense the ground plan of the symphony would be
thus: The first three sections contain the thematic statements;
the next two—parts four and five—are devoted to the exposition
or free fantasia; the last is a highly elaborate summing up or
coda. Here is the symphonic form in an attenuated shape, the chief
novelty being the introduction in part five—or second division of
the working-out section of new thematic material, modest quotations
from the Strauss earlier symphonic works. There can then be no doubt
as to the identity of the protagonist of this drama-symphony—it is
the glorified image of Richard Strauss. This latter exploitation of
personality need not distress us unnecessarily; Strauss but follows
in the footsteps of Walt Whitman and of his own contemporaries—Rodin,
the sculptor; Gabriel d’Annunzio, in Il Fuoco; Nietzsche, in
Zarathustra; Tolstoy, in all his confessions—despite their inverted
humility; Wagner, in Meistersinger; Franz Stuck, the Munich painter,
whose portrait of his own eccentric self is not the least of his
work. Strauss might appreciatively quote Walt Whitman: “Am I of
mighty Manhattan the son?” as a justification of what paradoxically
could be called his objective egotism. But the composer not only
deifies the normal man, he shadows forth Nietzsche’s supernormal
humanity. He is a very Victor Hugo in his colossal egotism, yet
he names it the ego of mankind. So avoiding all this pother of
philosophy and æsthetics, one is forced to return to the music as
poetic music.

The Hero theme is Beethovian in its diatonic majesty—the
entire section has a Beethoven color, despite its dissonantal
interruptions—while the second section, an amiable picture of the
composer’s adversaries, suggests in a triturated manner the irony,
caricature, and burlesque spirit of Till Eulenspiegel. His critical
adversaries are represented as a snarling, sorry crew, with acrid
and acrimonious souls, duly set forth by the woodwind instruments,
chiefly the oboe; there is also a horrid sounding phrase, empty
fifths for tenor and bass tuba. Then the hero’s wife is pictured
by the solo violin. It is very feminine. It mounts in passion
and interest with the duologue. After that—chaos! It is but the
developing of the foregoing motives. And such an exposition, it
is safe to say, has never been heard since saurians roared in the
steaming marshes of the young planet, or when prehistoric man met in
multitudinous and shrieking combat. Yet the web is polyphonically
spun—spun magnificently. This battle scene is full of unmitigated
horror. One knows that it is the free fantasia, but such a one has
never been conceived before by the mind of man. A battle is not a
peaceful or a pleasant place, especially a modern battlefield. You
can dimly, after several hearings, thread the thematic mazes, but so
discordant are the opposing tonalities, so screaming the harmonies,
and so highly pitched the dynamic scheme, that the normal ear, thus
rudely assaulted, becomes bewildered and finally insensitive. Strauss
has not a normal ear. His is the most marvelous agglomeration of
cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his
powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone
tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of
by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or, rather, overhear,
the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives
us the impression of new overtones, of scales that violate the
well tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones
of Oriental music. And yet there is, besides the barbaric energy
displayed, grandeur in the conception of this extraordinary battle
piece. It evokes the picture of countless and waging hosts; of
forests of waving spears and clashing blades. The din, heat, and
turmoil of conflict are spread over all and the ground piled high
with the slain.

It is all too intricate to grasp at several hearings, though it may
become child’s play for the next generation. Richard Wagner’s case
must not be forgotten at this point. So complex is the counterpoint
of Strauss that one of his commentators recommends the all but
impossible feat of listening to it horizontally and vertically.
In the fifth part we hear themes from the composer’s Don Juan,
Macbeth, Death and Apotheosis, Till Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Don
Quixote, Guntram, and his lovely song, Traum durch die Dämmerung.
With the coda, after some sinister retrospection of an agitated
life, comes peace, pastoral, soul-renewing. And the big E flat chord
that closes the volume is worth the entire composition. It is the
most magnificent and imposing rainbow of tone that ever spanned
the harmonic heavens. Not Wagner’s wonderful C major chord, which
begins the Meistersinger overture, is comparable to the iridescence
of this _Uebermensch’s_ sonorous valedictory. Strauss has not
hesitated to annex some themes from Parsifal and Tristan; there is,
indeed, much Wagner in the score. But do not call this man a madman,
a _décadent_—unless by _décadent_ you mean the expression in its
literary sense as in an undue devotion to the letter at the expense
of the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, and book. He
has great energy, great power of concentration; and his critics—those
he so caustically portrays as snarling and cynical in his very
Till-Eulenspiegel-like second section—those critics, we repeat, must
admit the man’s skill in scoring, in contrapuntal mastery. Whether
all this monumental labor is worth the trouble; whether the very
noticeable disproportion—spiritual and physical—between the themes
and their handling; whether these things are to defy established
canonic conventions and live by virtue of their characteristic
truth and tonal beauty,—are considerations I gratefully relinquish
to the next generation. Naturally there is repellent music in the
score; but then the neo-realists insist on truth, not on the pursuit
of vague and decorative beauty. It is the characteristic _versus_
the ornamental; and who shall dare predict its future success or
extinction? One thing must be insisted upon—the absolute abandonment
of the old musical ideal, else Strauss and his tendencies go by the
board. The well-sounding, the poetic,—in the romantic sense,—are
thrown to the winds in this monstrous orgy; an organized orgy in the
Balzac meaning of the phrase—for Strauss is only mad north-northwest,
and can always tell a harmonic hawk from a hernshaw. In his most
delirious moments he remembers his orchestral palette. And what a
gorgeous, horrible color scheme is his! He has a taste for sour
progressions, and every voice in his orchestral family is forced
to sing impossible and wicked things. He owes much to Beethoven,
Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner,—the Wagner of Tristan and Parsifal,—and
often he compasses both beauty and grandeur.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Strauss tone-poems are dramas without words. What Tschaïkowsky so
eloquently executed as single figures in the character studies of
Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini, Hamlet, and Manfred, Richard
Strauss expands to the compass of a psychical tonal drama, dispensing
with words, with actions, with the machinery of the stage, just as
the great masters of fiction supplanted the makers of epics and their
supernatural furniture by a synthesis in which action, dialogue,
description, comment, are melted into homogeneous narrative. Every
instrument in the Strauss orchestra is an actor that speaks its lines
solo or during an amazing polyphony. After Don Quixote one need not
be told that Strauss is not a mere Tintoretto of the orchestra; he
is, I am not loath to repeat, both painter and psychologist. As the
greatest narrator in modern prose is Gustave Flaubert, so Richard
Strauss is the greatest of musical narrators. There is no longer any
question of form in the classic sense; every music symbol and device
hitherto known in the art of music is utilized and reënforced by the
invention of numberless methods for driving home to the imagination
the Old-World tale of Don Quixote and his squire. It may be objected
here that the story of Cervantes should suffice without any of the
sonorous exfoliations of this composer. Very true. But Strauss only
uses Don Quixote as he uses Zarathustra or Don Juan, as a type of
something that may be discovered in all humanity. Don Quixote the
perfect dreamer may be the Knight of Cervantes or our next-door
neighbor. More terrible still, he may be our true self masked by the
dull garb of life’s quotidian struggle for bread! And to offset the
fantasy of the knight we have the homely wisdom of Sancho Panza, who,
having barked his shins as well as warmed them at the grate of life,
always speaks by the card. A sensible fool, he is not understood
by the foolish sensitivist, the poet who looks aloft and therefore
misses the prizes beloved of most men.

Why is not this a theme fit for musical development? It has every
element dear to the heart of the poetic composer—fantasy, poetry,
broad, obvious humor, realism, nobility of idea, and an almost
infinite number of surfaces fit for the loving brush of a master
painter. Then there is the psychology. Don Quixote, half-mad,
chivalric withal, must be depicted; as a counterfoil the obese humors
of Sancho Panza are ready for celebration. After subjecting this
pair to the minutest musical scrutiny, their voyages and adventures
must be duly set forth. It is evident that here we are confronted by
many difficulties. It is no longer a question of mere musicianship.
Form is a thing of the grammarians, to be discussed behind closed
doors by persons who believe in musty counterpoint and the rules of
the game. A great vital imagination, defying alike gods and men and
capable of shaping his dreams, a man of humor, malice, irony, above
all else irony, tenderness, pity, and the marrow of life, love,—all
these qualities, plus an infernal (or celestial if you like the word
better) science, must the composer of a Don Quixote possess.

Strauss calls his work “Fantastic variations on a theme, of knightly
character.” For the benefit of the musically pious let me add that
it is in the form—broadly—of a Thema con Variazione and Finale.
Therein Strauss may be said to mock his own idealism, as Heine and
Nietzsche once mocked theirs. The realism is after all a realism of
fantasy; for the narrative deals with what the Knight of the Rueful
Countenance imagined and with what his trusty squire thought of
him. With his characteristic _flair_ for an apt subject, Strauss
recognized in the semi-dream-life of Don Quixote a theme pat for
treatment—and how he has treated it! That magnificent gift of irony,
inherent in every sentence he utters, here expands in a soil worthy
of it. A garden of curious and beautiful flowers—flowers of evil as
well as good—blooms in this score. Its close contains some affecting
and noble pages, as affecting as Tschaïkowsky’s, as dignified and
dramatic as Richard Wagner’s. There is no interruption in the
different sections. Don Quixote is “enacted” by the solo violoncello,
the viola represents Sancho Panza. (Perhaps Strauss indulged in a
sly witticism at the expense of the romantic Berlioz and his viola
solo in Harold in Italy.) We first see—some hear, others see—Don
Quixote reading crack-brained romances of chivalry. There are themes
grandiose, mock heroic and crazy in their gallantry. Queer harmonies
from time to time indicate the profound mental disturbance of the
knight. He envisages the ideal woman; giants attack her; he rushes to
the rescue. The muting of the instruments, tuba included, produces
the idea of slow-creeping madness and a turbulent comminglement of
ideas. Suddenly his reason goes, and with a crazy _glissando_ on the
harps and a mutilated version of the knightly theme the unfortunate
man becomes quite mad. From music to madness is but a step after all.
Don Quixote is now Knight Errant.

Then follows, after a new theme rich in characterization, the theme
of Sancho Panza, for the bass clarinet and bass tuba; later always
on the viola. The fat shoulders, big paunch, the mean, good-natured,
lying, gluttonous, constant fellow are limned with the startling
fidelity that Gustave Doré or Daniel Vièrge attained—for music can
give the sense of motion; it is par excellence the art of narration.

The ten variations which ensue are masterpieces. We no longer ask for
the normal eight-bar euphonious melody, for the equable distribution
of harmonies, for order, rhythm, mass, and logic; but, with suspense
unconcealed, follow the line of the story, amazed, delighted,
perplexed, angered, piqued, interested—always interested by the magic
of the narrator. The adventure with the windmills; the victorious
battle against the host of the great emperor Alifanfaron; dialogues
of Knight and Squire; the meeting with the Penitents and the Knight’s
overthrow; his vigil; the encounter with his Dulcinea; the ride
through the air; the journey in the enchanted boat; the conflict
with the two magicians; the combat with the Knight of the Silver
Moon; and the overthrow of Don Quixote and his death,—are so many
canvases upon which are painted with subtle, broad, ironic, and naïve
colors the memorable history heretofore hinted at. The realistic
effects, notably the use of the wind machine in Variation VII, are
not distasteful. Muted brass in Variation II suggests the plaintive
_m-a-a-h-s_ of a herd of sheep. The grunting of pigs, crowing of
roosters, roaring of lions, and hissing of snakes were crudely
imitated by the classic masters; while in the Wagner music-dramas
may be discovered quite a zoölogical collection. Nor is the wind
machine so formidable as it is said to be. It is an effect utilized
to represent the imaginary flight through the air in a wild gale
of Knight and Squire on a wooden Pegasus. We know that it is pure
imagination, for the growling tremolo of the double basses on one
note tells the listener that the solid earth has really never been
abandoned.

Throughout, there are many ravishing touches of tenderness, of
sincere romance; and the finale is very pathetic. His reason
returns—wonderfully described—and the poor, lovable Knight,
recognizing his aberration, passes gently away. Here Strauss utilizes
a device as old as the hills, and one heard in the B minor symphony
of Tschaïkowsky. It is sort of a _basso ostinato_, the _tympani_
obstinately tapping a tone as the soul of the much-tried man takes
flight. Perhaps the accents of a deep-seated pessimism may be
overheard here—for I believe Richard Strauss too great a nature to
remain content with his successes. He recalls to me in this poem the
little mezzotint of John Martin, where Sadak in search of the waters
of oblivion painfully creeps over the cruel edges of terrifying
abysses to misty heights, upon which still more appalling dangers
await the intrepid soul.

Strauss has only reached the midway of his mortal life. A stylist,
a realist in his treatment of his orchestral hosts, a psychologist
among psychologists, a master of a new and generous culture, a
thinker, above all an interpreter of poetic and heroic types of
humanity, who shall say to him: Dare no further! His audacity is only
equalled by his mental serenity. In all the fury of his fantasy his
intelligence is sovereign over its kingdom.




II

PARSIFAL: A MYSTIC MELODRAMA

    I will open my dark saying upon the harp.
                                —PSALM XLIX.


When a certain famous Wagner conductor was in New York not long
ago, he related to musical friends an astonishing story. He had
seen, he declared, the manuscript autobiography of Richard Wagner
at Wahnfried, in Bayreuth, which is to remain unpublished until the
expiration of a certain period. This conductor did not hesitate
to clear up a mystery that, nevertheless, has been an open secret
in Germany for many years—Wagner’s parentage. The conductor said
that Wagner admitted he was the son of Ludwig Geyer. Ludwig Geyer,
painter, poet, dramatist, composer, actor, stage manager,—a versatile
man in everything,—was of Hebraic ancestry. Wagner, therefore, had
a moiety of the blood, and his son Siegfried more than his father,
for Cosima Liszt (von Bülow) Wagner’s maternal grandparents were
the Jewish bankers Bethmann of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Mr. Henry T.
Finck—whose Wagner biography still remains the standard one in the
language—once remarked upon the fact that at Wahnfried, Bayreuth,
the pictures of Wagner’s mother and Ludwig Geyer may be seen, but
that of his reputed father is not on view. Nietzsche, often a
prejudiced witness when his antipathies are aroused, wrote: “Was
Wagner German at all? We have some reasons for asking this. It is
difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a
great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German—that
is all. His character itself is in opposition to what has been
hitherto regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician!
His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an
Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families.” The above
was written about 1887-1888. Setting aside the statement that Wagner
was un-German as meaningless,—men of genius are generally strangers
to their nation,—the other assertion only shows that Nietzsche was in
possession of the secret. He was an intimate of the Wagner household
and knew its history.

And what does this prove? Only that the genius of Richard Wagner,
tinctured with Oriental blood, betrayed itself in the magnificence
of his pictorial imagination, in the splendor of his music, in its
color, glow, warmth, and rhythmic intensity. It also accounts for his
pertinacity, his dislike of Meyerbeer and Heine and Mendelssohn.
He was essentially a man of the theatre, as was Meyerbeer, though
loftier in his aims, while not so gifted melodically. In sooth, he
owes much to the Meyerbeer opera and the Scribe libretto,—Scribe,
who really constructed one of the first viable dramatic books—withal
old-fashioned—for musical setting.

And nothing is more useless than to pin Wagner down to his every
utterance in poem or speech. As Bernard Shaw has acutely pointed out,
Wagner—versatile, mercurial, wonderful Wagner—was a different being
every hour of the day. He explained matters to suit his mood of the
moment,—a Schopenhauerian one hour, a semi-Christian the next. Liszt,
Glasenapp, Heckel, Feustel, all show different portraits of this
man. A German democrat he was—and a courtier, an atheist, and yet
a mystic. Wagner was all things to all men, like men of his supple
imagination.

He abused conductors for playing excerpts from his music in concert,
and then conducted concerts devoted to his own works. He wrote
pamphlets on every subject, and with the prerogative of genius
contradicted them in other pamphlets. He was not always a Wagnerian,
and at times he differed with himself in the interpretation of his
compositions. He was a genius beset by volatile moods, a very busy
man of affairs, and a much-suffering creature. Wandering about the
world for a half-century did not improve his temper, and yet next
to Nietzsche there is no one whose judgments on Wagner’s music I
would regard with more suspicion than—Richard Wagner’s. He was a
born satirist. He loved to play practical jokes, and it would not be
surprising if some day we should learn that Parsifal was one of his
jokes on an epical scale. Remember how he mocked Mozart and Beethoven
and the symphonic form in his own C major symphony, as if to say,
“I, too, can cover the symphonic canvas!” No, Wagner is a dangerous
authority to quote upon Wagner.

Though Liszt was only two years older than Wagner, he was a musician
of experience when Wagner was still a youth. While at the age of
eighteen Wagner published his first sonata, opus 1, which was written
under the direct influence of Haydn and Mozart, Liszt at the same
age had already sketched a great revolutionary symphony, the slow
movement of which, on Liszt’s own showing, has survived in his eighth
symphonic poem, Héróïde Funèbre. By reference to these two early
works, it is easy to determine which of these two masters was the
first to open up new paths. Similarly we find that, during the Rienzi
period, Liszt had already adopted new forms for his compositions of
that date. In Wagner’s later works there often appear themes which
note for note have been anticipated by Liszt. Compare, for their
thematic formation, musical construction, and general coloring,
Orpheus and Tristan and Isolde, the Faust symphony and Tristan, the
Faust symphony and Die Walküre, Benediction de Dieu dans le Solitude
and Isolde’s Liebestod, Die Ideale and the Ring,—Das Rheingold in
particular,—Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlacht and Kundry-Ritt,
The Legend of Saint Elizabeth and Parsifal, Christus and Parsifal,
Excelsior and Parsifal, not to mention many others.

The principal theme of the Faust symphony is to be found in Die
Walküre, and one of its most characteristic themes appears note
for note as the _Blick_ motive in Tristan and Isolde. The Gretchen
motive in Wagner’s A Faust Overture is also derived from Liszt,
and the opening theme of the Parsifal prelude closely follows the
earlier written Excelsior of Liszt. It was during a rehearsal at
Bayreuth in 1876 that Wagner suddenly seized Liszt by the arm and
exclaimed, “Now, papa, here comes a theme which I got from you!”
“All right,” replied the amiable Liszt, “one will then at least
hear it.” The theme in question is the one in the fifth scene of
the second act, which serves to introduce and accompany Sieglinde’s
dream-words, “Kehrte der Vater nun heim?” This theme—see page 179 of
Kleinmichael’s piano score—appears at the beginning of Liszt’s Faust
symphony, which Wagner had heard at a festival of the Allgemeiner
Deutscher Musik Verein in 1861, and during which he burst forth with
these words, “Music furnishes us with much that is beautiful and
sublime; but _this_ music is divinely beautiful.” Wagner owed much to
Liszt besides money, sympathy, and a wife.

Even in the matter of the Niebelungenlied Wagner was anticipated
by Friedrich Hebbel, whose somewhat prosaic dramatic version was
first given at Weimar, in the Grand Ducal Theatre, May 16, 1861. The
author’s wife, a well-known actress, essayed the principal rôle. A
critic said of this Trilogy, “No one hitherto has collated the whole
dramatic treasure of the Niebelung legends and made it playable upon
the modern stage.” Yet, who to-day remembers Hebbel, and who does not
know Wagner’s Trilogy?

But this indebtedness of one genius to another is often sadly
misinterpreted. Handel helped himself, in his accustomed royal
manner, to what he liked, and the tunes of many composers whose names
are long since forgotten are preserved in his scenes like flies in
amber. Shakespeare did not hesitate to appropriate from Plutarch and
Montaigne, from Bandello and Holinshed,—yet he remains Shakespeare.
Wagner, perhaps, was not cautious; and Liszt is too important a
composer to have been thus treated, too important, and also too much
of a contemporary. Why should we cavil? Wagner made good use of his
borrowings, and it is in their individual handling and development
that he still remains Richard Wagner.

Richard Strauss once said: “How necessary to every composer who
writes for orchestra the contact with that body is, I will show you
in one example. It is well known that when Wagner conducted for the
first time Lohengrin, many years after its completion, he exclaimed,
‘Too much brass!’ In his exile he also wrote Tristan and Isolde, a
tone-poem which makes over-great demands upon the orchestra and the
singers. Parsifal, however, he wrote at Bayreuth. He had regained
intimate feeling again with the orchestra and the stage. Hence I
recognize in Parsifal a model of instrumental reserve.”

This quite bears out Arthur Symons’s contention that the best way
to study a great artist is in the works of his decline, when his
invention is on the wane. Another thing, and this should settle the
controversy over that much discussed phrase, “Bühnenweihfestspiel,”
Hanslick, Wagner’s heartiest opponent, wrote in 1882: “I must say
at once that the ecclesiastic scenes in Parsifal did not at the
performance produce nearly as offensive an effect as they do on
one who merely reads the text-book. The actions we see are of a
religious character, but with all their dignified solemnity they are
nevertheless not in the style of the church, but entirely in the
operatic style. Parsifal is and remains an opera, even though it be
called a Bühnenweihfestspiel.”

Touching on the acrimonious controversy over Parsifal’s blasphemy,
I may only say—to every one their belief. No one is forced to see
the melodrama, for a mystic melodrama it is, with the original
connotations of the phrase. The entire work is such a jumble of
creeds that future Bauers, Harnacks, Delitzsches, and other ethical
archæologists will have a terrible task if the work is taken for a
relic of some tribal form of worship among the barbarians of the then
remote nineteenth century. Here in America, the Land of the Almighty
Hysteria, this artificial medley of faded music and grotesque forms
is sufficiently eclectic in character to set tripping the feet of
them that go forth upon the mountains in search of new, half-baked
religions.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now to a complete analysis of the work, an analysis, be it said,
first made at Bayreuth in August, 1901. That it may prove unpleasant
reading for some I do not doubt. I only hope that I shall not be
accused of artistic irreverence. The personal equation counts for
something in criticism. I cannot admire Parsifal, and I am giving my
reasons for this dislike. There is no reason why the criticism that
has so royally acclaimed the beauty of Wagner’s other music-dramas
should be suspected in the case of Parsifal. Why should Parsifal be
hedged as if of “sacred character”? If you tell a Parsifalite that
the opera is blasphemous, he proves volubly, ingeniously, that it
is pure symbolism, that Saracenic, Buddhistic, any but Christian,
ceremonial is employed. But if you turn the tables, and assert that
Parsifal is not sacred, that it should be enjoyed and criticised
like Tristan and Isolde, the Parsifalite quickly jumps the track
and exclaims, “Sir, there is sacred atmosphere in Parsifal, and
not in Tristan!” Oh, this sacred atmosphere! It is worse than
Nietzsche’s Holy Laughter! The question may be summed up thus: If
Parsifal is blasphemous, it should not be tolerated; if it is not
a representation of sacred matter, then we have the privilege of
criticising it as we do a Verdi or a Meyerbeer opera; and Meyerbeer
was an inveterate mocker of religious things—witness Les Huguenots,
Robert le Diable, Le Prophète. How about Halévy’s La Juive? Parsifal,
so it appears to me, is more morbid than blasphemous.

Ready-made admiration is dangerous. It behooves us to study Parsifal
for ourselves, and not accept as gospel the uncritical enthusiasms
of the Wagnerite who is without a sense of the eternal fitness of
things. One ounce of humor, of common sense, puts to flight the
sham ethical and the sham æsthetical of the Parsifal worshippers.
And level-headed study should prove of profit. The composition is a
miracle of polyphonic architecture—and it is also the weakest that
its creator ever planned.


PARSIFAL

    Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil
      Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente
      Vers la chair de garçon vierge que cela tente
    D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil.

      Il a vaincu la femme belle au cœur subtil
    Étalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante;
    Il a vaincu l’enfer, et rentre dans sa tente
      Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril.

    Avec la lance qui perça le flanc suprême!
    Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même
    Et prêtre du très-saint trésor essentiel;

    En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,
      Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel,
    —Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole.
                                   —PAUL VERLAINE.


I

THE BOOK

Parsifal was published in book form on December 25, 1877. The
first act was completed during the winter of 1877-1878, and the
instrumentation of the prelude finished by December 25, 1878. The
spring and summer of 1878 were devoted to the second act, a sketch
of which was prepared October 11 of the same year. The third act
was finished by April 25, 1879, and from 1878 to 1882 the gigantic
task of orchestration was undertaken. In the copying of this Wagner
was assisted by the late Anton Seidl and Engelbert Humperdinck.
The entire first act was not completed until the spring of 1880.
In a villa near Naples he finished the second act, with its garden
scene; and in Palermo, January 13, 1882, the sacred music-drama
was given its final form. July 28 of the same year Parsifal was
first performed at Bayreuth, with Materna as Kundry, Winklemann as
Parsifal, Reichmann as Amfortas; Kindermann sang the phrases allotted
to Titurel, and Scaria was Gurnemanz. The Klingsor was Karl Hill.
Hermann Levi conducted. Thus much for dry statistics.

“Besides my Siegfried,” Wagner wrote August 9, 1849, to Uhlig, “I
have in my mind two tragic and two comic subjects; but not one of
them seems to me to be suitable for the French stage. I have just
found a fifth one; it is indifferent to me in what language it will
appear first; it is Jesus of Nazareth. I have the intention to offer
it to the French and thus to get rid of the whole affair, for I
foresee the indignation this project will excite in my collaborator.”
Wagner’s plan was to make a play in which Christ would be tempted
by Mary Magdalen. This idea was abandoned. With the conception of
Tristan and Isolde came the scheme for a Parsifal. He wrote of this
to Liszt in 1876, being full of Schopenhauer and Buddhism at the
time. The Victors was the sketch found among his papers, the hero
of which is the Eastern prince Ananda, who rejects the love of the
beautiful Princess Prakriti, and by this act of renunciation achieves
his and the woman’s redemption. Parsifal is not far removed from
this sketch. In 1857 near Zurich Wagner became obsessed by the idea,
and on a Good Friday the genesis of Parsifal occurred. In 1864 this
sketch, at the request of Ludwig II, was carefully developed, and
became the complete music-drama.

Wagner has rooted his story in the old legends and history of Wolfram
von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troies. The latter wrote his poem
in 1175, Perceval the Gaul; or, the Story of the Grail; the former
was composed between 1201 and 1210. But the story was centuries old
before Chrétien handled it, its origin probably being Provençal. And
before that it may have sprung from the Moorish, from the Egyptian,
from the Indian, from the very beginnings of literature, for it is
but the old story of might warring against right, evil attempting
to seduce good. It crops out in a modified form in the Arthurian
cycle, for the Round Table and the Grail are united in one. Whether
Perceval, Parzival, or Parsifal, we find the guileless young hero
fighting against wrong and resisting evil. There is even a Romance
of Peredur to be found in the Mabinogion or Red Book, a collection of
Welsh romances. Some believe this Peredur to be the prototype of the
French Perceval. In all these poems there is a Kundry, or Kondrie,
or Orgeleuse, a sorceress; and a King who has sinned—Le Roi Pécheur.
The Knighthood of the Grail is a consecrated community that worships
the sang-real, the precious blood of Jesus Christ, which some say was
caught up in a goblet after the soldier Longinus pierced the side of
the Saviour on Calvary. This lance also plays an important part in
the poems, and in Wagner’s music-drama. Montsalvat is a beautiful
temple in a far-away land—presumably Spain—where the knights of the
Grail, or Graal, meet to receive spiritual nourishment from the holy
chalice containing God’s blood. Every year a white dove descends
from heaven to lend new powers and strength to the miraculous vase
inclosing the blood. These knights are vowed to chastity, and it was
a sin against chastity committed by Amfortas that caused the monarch
all his suffering. Kundry it was who tempted the King. Klingsor, the
enchanter, a eunuch by his own act, prompts Kundry to all this evil.
Gurnemanz, the aged servitor of the Grail, and Titurel, the dead
King, though miraculously alive, father of Amfortas, make up the rest
of the characters in this strange drama of pity and renunciation.

Wagner saw many opportunities in the legends and poems, and as
was his wont synthesized them in the shape we know as Parsifal.
His Parsifal is a born innocent, a pure fool. Wagner pretended to
derive the word from Parsi-fal or Fal-Parsi—_i.e._ Pure Fool—born
after the death of his father, Gamuret, and living alone with his
mother, Herzeleide, in the woods. Attracted by a cavalcade of shining
knights he follows it and finally enters the domain of the Grail.
Let us leave him there and consider that curious composition of the
poet-musician—Kundry. Wagner found some of her characteristics in the
old poems, but to him belongs the credit of creating the woman we see
in his drama. She is Kundry the enchantress, Herodias, who laughed
at Christ, who had John the Baptist beheaded—“she is said to have
laughed when she bore aloft the head,” and it breathed upon her, thus
condemning her to eternal wandering. Besides this, Kundry is also
Gundryggia of the Northern nymphs, the slaying Valkyr. A type of the
eternal temptress, and yet a Magdalen, Wagner calls her the Rose of
Hell, the She Devil, a tempestuous spirit, a perpetual seducer. She
is under Klingsor’s rule, though she humbly serves the Grail Knights
in their estate when she is not asleep. Asleep, Klingsor can summon
her as he wills, and then, instead of the Beneficent Kundry, she
becomes the Demon Kundry.

Now follows the story of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, which I condense
with the help of Maurice Kufferath’s version and from the epitomes of
von Wolzogen, Albert Heintz, and many others. It is assumed before
the curtain rises that the spectator is acquainted with the tale
of the foolish lad Parsifal and his roaming in the forest, bow and
arrow in hand, in pursuit of the “shining men mounted upon noble
steeds.” He loses his way and enters the region of the Grail. At
this point the curtains part and we see a deep wood in a mountainous
district. The book of the play tells us of the scene of action:
“The domains and Castle Montsalvat of the Guardian of the Grail,
with scenery characteristic of the northern mountains of Gothic
Spain. Later Klingsor’s enchanted castle on a southern slope of the
same mountains, looking toward Moorish Spain.” The scene in Act I
represents a clearing upon the border of a beautiful lake. It is
morning. Stretched in slumber upon the ground are Gurnemanz, a pious,
hale old servant of the Grail, and two squires. Brass music awakens
them, and after prayer they prepare to attend the King Amfortas, who
is at the very moment approaching the lake for his bath—he suffers
cruelly from his wound. Two knights appear and inform the others of
this suffering. The balsam of Gawain is without effect. Suddenly
there appears on the edge of the forest a terrible figure. It is
Kundry. Wagner thus indicates her appearance: “in wild garb fastened
high with a hanging girdle of snakes’ skins; black hair, flowing in
loose tresses; dark brown, reddish complexion, piercing black eyes,
at times flaming wildly, but oftener fixed as in death.” She brings
from Arabia a balsam to soothe the King’s pain. Enter Amfortas. He
seeks the cool of the forest after his night of agony. The lake,
too, will give him some surcease to his pain. But Gurnemanz knows
better: “But One thing helpeth—One the helper,” he mutters. Amfortas
repeats the prophecy that once in letters of fire appeared about the
rim of the Grail vase: “Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Thor, harre
sein, den ich erkor;” that is, “By pity waken’d the blameless Fool,
him await my chosen tool.” The King longs for death. Kundry offers
him the balsam. “Of what use the balm? All is useless; rather a bath
in the waters of the lake.” The litter bearing the royal sufferer
moves sadly and slowly away, while Kundry crouches down like a hunted
wild animal. The squires tease her until Gurnemanz recalls to them
that even beasts are sacred within the territory of the Grail. Then
follows a long recital by the elder man, who, in reply to questions,
relates the story of Amfortas and his sin.

Klingsor, enraged at being denied admission to the Order of the
Grail after his mad act of self-mutilation, raised by his infernal
arts a magic castle and gardens not far from Montsalvat. This he
filled with lovely girls, who tempted the Knights of the Round Table.
Amfortas resolved to destroy this Castle of Perdition. Armed with
the sacred lance which pierced the Saviour’s side he laid siege to
Klingsor’s abode. Unluckily for him a supernaturally beautiful woman,
Kundry, was sent by Klingsor,—whose heart was black with envy,—and
waylaid by her Amfortas succumbed to her fascinations. As he was
clasped in her embrace the spear dropped and was seized by Klingsor,
who gave him a fatal thrust in the side. No alleviation was there
for this pain. Even the mystic bread which he occasionally dared to
dispense to his knights did not bring ease. Klingsor kept the sacred
spear, and by its aid hoped some day to capture Montsalvat itself.

When Gurnemanz finishes this harrowing tale the four squires kneel
and sing the above prediction, “Durch Mitleid wissend.” Cries are
suddenly heard, and knights rush in to inform their horrified hearers
that a blasphemer has dared to enter the sacred park and shoot one
of the swans. The culprit is dragged in. It is Parsifal, with his
bow and arrow. The swan lies in death throes before him. While
vainly endeavoring to discover his name, his identity, Gurnemanz
reproaches him for having shed innocent blood, and points out to him
the heinousness of his offence. Parsifal is overcome with shame—and
pity. Here is first indicated the cardinal trait of his character.
He relates to Gurnemanz the little he knows of his early life—with
which the reader is already acquainted—and tells of his mother
Herzeleide. Kundry sneeringly interrupts. His mother is dead from
sorrow at her boy’s desertion. Parsifal, raging, throws himself upon
the woman, but is dragged away. The truth forcing itself upon him, he
grows faint and is revived by water from a spring. At this juncture
Kundry grows sleepy. Well she knows—though the others do not—that
her master is about to summon her. Filled with despair she staggers
into the bushes and is seen no more. Gurnemanz, his heart revived by
the pure foolishness of the lad, begins to hope anew, and the King’s
litter returning to the palace, he again questions Parsifal. “What
is the Grail?” asks in turn the youth. Then the pair appear to move
slowly, and the scene changes, to the accompaniment of the sombre
“Verwandlungsmusik,” from the forest to rocky galleries, finally to
the Byzantine hall of the Holy Grail. All this is accomplished by
scenery which moves in grooves. Parsifal questions Gurnemanz as to
this phenomenon. “I slowly tread, yet deem myself now far,” he says.
“Thou seest, my son, to space time changeth here,” answers Gurnemanz,
which is a choice metaphysical morsel for the admirers of Kant and
Schopenhauer.

Now begins the most solemn scene of the music-drama. To the pealing
of bells, the intoning of trumpets and trombones, the scene of the
Holy Grail is inaugurated. Into the vast hall files the cortége of
the sick monarch, and the Grail Knights, wearing white coats of
arms, a dove embroidered upon a red mantle, advance in double lines
and group themselves about the table. They chant, and boys’ voices
from the middle part of the dome reply, while children’s voices in
the cupola high above join in a celestial chorus. After a profound
silence the voice of Titurel issues from his tomb behind the throne.
The dead man is revived by the potency of the Grail. He bids his
erring son to perform the sacred office, to uncover the Holy Grail.
Then follows a dramatic episode. Conscious of his unworthiness and
showing his bleeding side, Amfortas long resists the request of his
father. It is a part of his expiation that, sinner as he is, he must
officiate at the solemn sacrifice. His protests are not heeded. The
children’s voices from the cupola recall the prediction, “Durch
Mitleid wissend.” Exhausted, pale, and suffering untold agonies,
Amfortas lifts the crystal vase, the Grail. A ray of piercing pure
light falls from above on the chalice—the hall is now dark—which
becomes luminous and glows with purple splendor. Amfortas sings,
“Take this bread, it is my flesh; take this wine, it is my blood
which love has given thee.” The singing by the various choirs breaks
forth anew, and as daylight returns the holy ceremonies conclude
with the kiss of peace by the brethren. The King is carried away,
the knights withdraw as the voices from the cupola sing, “Happy in
faith, Happy in love.” Parsifal, who has been staring about him all
this time, is interrogated by Gurnemanz. The latter has not noticed
the convulsive start made by the pure fool when he sees Amfortas fall
back upon his couch. Pity has entered his heart, though he is not
able to voice this sentiment to Gurnemanz. The latter, angered by
such seeming stupidity, thrusts him roughly from the hall, bidding
him go seek a goose for his gander. Then, saddened by this fresh
disappointment, the old man stands alone in the hall. Like a gleam of
hope an alto voice from the mysterious height repeats the prediction,
“Durch Mitleid wissend,” and is joined by boys’ voices. To this music
the curtains close.

As in the Rheingold, where Nibelheim follows Walhalla, Wagner
gains a violent contrast by placing the action of the second act
in Klingsor’s dread castle. The scene represents the magician’s
laboratory—a sort of Faust-like chamber at the top of a tower. The
place is in semi-darkness, a well-like abyss to the left evoking a
feeling of anticipation. A narrow staircase ascends to an aperture
in the wall, an azure slit of the sky being revealed. The floor is
strewn with implements of sorcery, and on the steps Klingsor, an
Arabian, and fierce looking man with a black beard, is seated gazing
into a wizard’s metallic mirror. By its aid he perceives Parsifal
approaching the castle, having already forgotten his experiences in
Montsalvat and haled by Klingsor’s spell. With a cry of satisfaction
the magician leaves his vantage post, descends, and approaches the
chasm. Throwing incense into it he begins his cabalistic spells; “Up,
Kundry, ascend from the gulf! Come to me. Thy master calls thee, thou
nameless one, primal fiend, rose of hell! Thou who wert Herodias, and
what more! Once Gundryggia, now Kundry; up, up, to thy master; obey
him who has sole power over thee!”

A lovely woman appears enveloped in a misty veil. It is Kundry. She
screams, a blood-curdling scream which modulates into a feeble,
whimpering moan. The dialogue which ensues is not a pleasing one.
Klingsor berates the woman for serving the knights like a beast of
burden, as reparation for her crime against Amfortas. She sneers at
his lost powers, and absolutely refuses to seduce the approaching
Parsifal. But in vain she resists her master. A sound of battle is
heard. Single-handed, Parsifal, without, routs the feeble, enslaved
knights of Klingsor. From his window in the battlements the wizard
views the strife with satisfaction. He would be pleased to see his
weak servitors killed by this robust, handsome youth. Kundry vanishes
to prepare for her fell work of destruction. The tower sinks to
strange, thunderous noises, and we behold Parsifal in a many-colored
tropical garden, dense with flowers of an unearthly hue and splendor.
Almost immediately he is surrounded by girls, living flowers who
coquet, tease, and lure him to ravishing music. The scene is a gay
one. Parsifal repulses one group after another, when suddenly a voice
sings, “Parsifal, stay.” He is deeply moved. “Parsifal? Thus once my
mother called me.” He remembers his name at last. Thus does Wagner
subtly indicate the growing knowledge that passion reveals. A scene
of temptation follows that has no parallel in art or literature.
Lulling the youth’s chaste suspicions by telling him of his mother
Herzeleide, she at last wins him to her side and imprints upon his
lips his mother’s kiss, her own magic kiss. Instead of succumbing
Parsifal leaps to his feet and presses his heart. He cries in agony,
“Amfortas! the wound—the wound! It burns within me, too.” Kundry’s
kiss shows him what the entire Grail did not know—that she was
the cause of the King’s downfall. He understands all now, and his
one thought is to go to the King and relieve his pain. He is the
poor fool who pities. Mad and desperate, Kundry detains him. She
believes that he can, if he so wills it, release her from Klingsor’s
hideous spell. He is to be her saviour; a second one, not the real
Jesus at whom she laughed and meeting whose reproachful gaze she
forever after wandered. She is the real Woman who laughed. Her
laughter shudderingly resounds throughout hell, whenever a sinner
yields to her seductions. But Parsifal is different. Perhaps, being
a frequenter of the Grail land, and a very Erda for wisdom, Kundry
knows of the prediction. She weaves a web of voluptuous beauty;
Parsifal escapes its blandishments. Then finding that this fails, she
curses him, with furious and hysterical curses. “Renounce desire; to
end thy sufferings thou must destroy their source.” Thus Parsifal
enjoins her. But Kundry will not be convinced. “My kiss it was that
made thee clear-sighted. My embrace would make thee divine.” He asks
for the road to Amfortas. She curses him. “Never, never, shall thou
find that road again. The Saviour’s curse gives me power. Wander!”
She frantically summons Klingsor, who appears upon the terrace with
poised spear. The flower girls rush in, and Klingsor hurls the
weapon at the audacious intruder. But it whizzes over Parsifal’s
head, where floating in the air he seizes it and makes the sign of
the cross. A cataclysm ensues. The castle and garden sink into the
earth, accompanied by volcanic explosions, the flower girls become
withered hags, and all the enchanting vista of flowers is transformed
into an arid waste. Kundry falls to the ground prostrated. Parsifal,
surveying this desolate ruin from the shattered ramparts, utters
to Kundry these prophetic words, “Thou knowest where to find me.”
Immediately the curtains veil this effective scene.

Act III brings us back to the Grail confines, where a tender,
idyllic landscape on the edge of a forest discloses a hermit’s
hut, with a spring hard by. It is a spring morning. Gurnemanz,
now a white-haired, sorrowful old man, has relinquished all hope
of a saviour for the King. He feels that unless death intervenes,
Klingsor will become master of the Grail, for he knows nothing of
the stirring events in the preceding act. A low cry in the bushes
apprises him of Kundry’s presence. She is half dead, but is revived
by the old hermit. She feebly moans, “Service, service,” and then
rises and goes to the hut, where she gets a pitcher. This she carries
to the spring, and fills. Gurnemanz marvels at her altered and
penitential appearance. But she makes signs. One is approaching. A
stranger knight in coal black armor, with visor down and spear in
hand, is seen. He gravely advances. Gurnemanz asks his name. The
stranger shakes his head. Adjured to remove his armor, as it is Good
Friday, and no Christian knight must bear arms on that holy day,
the stranger obeys. He plants his spear in the ground, removes his
shield and sword, unfastens his armor, takes off his helmet, and
kneels in fervent prayer before the lance. At once he is recognized
by Gurnemanz as the youth who killed the swan, and the lance is also
remarked with keen emotion. “Oh, blessed day,” cries the old man, who
knows that his King’s saviour is now at hand. Now follows a series
of pictures. They move before the eyes like some strange dream in
a land where life has resolved itself into processional attitudes.
One dissolves into another. The kneeling knight recalls an Albrecht
Dürer, and his blessing by Gurnemanz, his baptism of the repentant
Kundry,—who utters but two words during the act,—and the washing of
his feet Magdalen-like, are all accompanied by music that is almost
gesture, and with gestures that are almost musical. Gurnemanz informs
Parsifal that Amfortas is in sad extremities, his father, Titurel,
no longer strengthened by the Grail, is really dead, and the King
refuses to perform the sacred office. It is this great hour of need
in which Parsifal appears. Parsifal tells Gurnemanz of his weary
wanderings over the earth in search of Montsalvat. Sorely beset by
foes, yet he dare not use the sacred spear. It has been kept intact
from worldly stain or strife. Then follows the soothing Good Friday
magic music episode, when all nature puts on its sweetest attire
to give thanks to the Saviour who suffered. Bells are heard. It is
noon. As in the first act, but by a different route and accompanied
by other music, the scene slowly changes to the domed Temple of the
Holy Grail. The funeral services of Titurel are being held. The hall
is full of mourning knights. Amfortas, his agony at its apex, refuses
to unveil the Grail, and begs his companions to slay him, for he can
no longer endure his pain and shame. Parsifal enters, accompanied by
Gurnemanz. He witnesses the King’s paroxysm, and then advances to
him. With the point of the lance he heals the wound. Kundry dies on
the altar steps, and Parsifal, now King of Montsalvat, mounts the
step and lifts on high in silent invocation the crystal vase. Mystic
voices in the cupola sing “Wondrous work of mercy. Salvation to the
Saviour.” Thus the mystic melodrama ends.

In the first draft of his poem Wagner ended the play with these
words:—

    Great is the charm of desire,
    Greater is the power of renunciation.

In all the complicated web of this drama Pity and Renunciation
are the two principal motives. Wagner drew his themes from all
sources,—sagas, legends, poems, and histories. He incorporated
episodes from the Saviour’s life, and boldly utilized the theme
of the Last Supper. The blood of Christ which Joseph of Arimathea
is said to have received in a chalice becomes the comforting and
eucharistic Grail. Then side by side with all these conflicting
stories he places the semi-Saracenic Klingsor, the very embodiment
of a magician of the Dark Ages, and Kundry, the type of the woman of
all times, the wandering Jewess, the Magdalen. Parsifal is a mediæval
Jesus; the knights of the Holy Grail, Apostles transposed to a later
epoch. As it suited him Wagner violently tossed about and made sport
of the poetic ideas of Chrétien de Troies and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
He Wagnerized everything he touched. The result is Parsifal.

If the poem is charged to the full with Semitic, Buddhistic,
Patristic, Christian, and Schopenhauerian philosophies, the play
affords the great master fresco painter superb opportunities for
scenic display. The son of Geyer, himself a scene painter, dramatist,
poet, and composer, did not fail to take advantage of the chance to
indulge his taste for luxuriant, glowing colors, for sensational
contrasts, lofty spaces, and all the moving magnificence of panoramic
display. There are many tableaux in this drama, genuinely a static
drama. In Act I we see Gurnemanz surrounded by the tender squires,
while Kundry cowers in the foreground. “Doch Vater sag, und lehr’
uns fein; du kanntest Klingsor, wie mag das sein?” The tableau of
the killed swan, with Parsifal admonished by Gurnemanz, is another
noteworthy grouping. Nothing is so impressive, however, as the
spectacle of the sick King being raised, as he elevates the Grail.
Klingsor’s tower is as sinister as an etching by Salvator Rosa. The
flower garden, first with the damsels and then desolate, gives two
striking pictures. Parsifal stands spear in hand. “Du weisst: we
einzig du mich wiedersiehst!” The praying knight in Act III; Parsifal
in white baptismal robe, recalling Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Christ,
and last of all the noble harmonies of the last scene, the descending
dove and the mystic chant:—

    Höchsten Heiles Wunder,
    Erlösung dem Erlöser.


TO A KINGLY FRIEND

    O König! holder Schirmherr meines Lebens!
      Du höchster güte wonnereichster Hort!

           *       *       *       *       *

    Was du mir bist, Kann staunend ich nur fassen,
      Wenn mir sich zeigt, was ohne dich ich war.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Du bist der holde Lenz, der neu mich schmückte,
      Der mir verjüngt der Zweig und Aeste Saft:
                               —RICHARD WAGNER.


II

THE MUSIC

One is filled with admiration at Wagner’s deft use of thematic
material in the score of Parsifal. Despite the exegetical enthusiasm
of von Wolzogen, Heintz, and Kufferath, a very few motives suffice
the master for his polyphonic skill in development. And they are
principally in the prelude—now unhappily a familiar concert room
number. I say unhappily because no composer’s music is less adapted
to concert than Wagner’s. Divorced from the context of gesture,
speech, scenic display, his music becomes all profile. One misses the
full, rich, significant glance of the eye. Wagner is a weaver, not a
form-maker. He can follow a dramatic situation, or burrow deeply into
the core of morbid psychology; but let him attempt to stand alone, to
write music without programme or the fever of the footlights—then he
is the inferior of several men, the inferior of Liszt, Tschaïkowsky,
and Richard Strauss; not to mention Beethoven, Schubert, or Chopin.
I know that this opinion ill accords with the belief of many, yet
I do not think it can be disputed. His preludes and overtures,
containing as they do the leading motives of his dramas, are of
interest only for that reason. Considered as absolute music they are
not noteworthy, notwithstanding their coloring and grandiose themes.
So is it with Parsifal—even more so. The work preëminently smells of
the lamp. It lacks spontaneity. Its subject is extremely undramatic.
Nothing happens for several hours,—nothing but discourses,
philosophical and retrospective. Never has Wagner so laboriously
built a book. It is a farrago of odds and ends, the very dust-bin of
his philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other
fads. You see unfold before you a nightmare of characters and events.
Without simplicity, without lucidity, without naturalness—Wagner is
the great anti-naturalist among composers—this book, through which
has been sieved Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Schopenhauerism,
astounds one by its puerility, its vapidity. Yet because of his
musical genius, Wagner is able to float this inorganic medley, and at
times makes it almost credible. It is an astounding feat of the old
hypnotist—for hypnotist he is in Parsifal as in no other composition.
By sheer force of his musical will, this Klingsor of Bayreuth
hypnotizes his hearers with two or three themes not of themselves
remarkable, as Charcot controls his patients with a shining mirror.

Wagner always selected librettos that threw up a lot of dust for the
erudite. His Tristan demands much delving, and with the Ring and
its complementary literature we shall never finish. The plain fact
in the case is this: Parsifal, despite all its wealth of legend,
its misty, poetic allusiveness, its manufactured mysticism, is
simple old-fashioned opera. And its verse _quâ_ verse is very bad.
The Wagnerites reject this statement as does the devil holy water.
Supposing you enter the Wagner theatre, your brain cells unencumbered
with the memories of Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal, Fal-Parsi, and
the rest of the philological mystification, what do you see?—and
remember that the ideal drama should set forth without previous
knowledge or explanation its dramatic content.

You see an old-fashioned and very tedious opera—setting aside some
of the music; and there is throughout an abuse of the _tremolo_ that
sounds suspiciously Italian. You see a lot of women-hating men,
deceiving themselves with spears, drugs, old goblets, all manners
of juggling formulas, and yet being waited upon by a woman—a poor,
miserable witch. You see a silly youth treated as if he had murdered
a human being because he shot a swan. You see this same dead bird
borne away on a litter of twigs, to noble, impressive music like
a feathered Siegfried. Surely Wagner was without a sense of the
humorous; or was he parodying his own Death of Siegfried, as Ibsen
parodied Ibsen in A Wild Duck? You see a theatrically imposing
temple, modelled after the Duomo of Siena, wherein a maniacal King
raves over an impossible wound, and performs ceremonies recalling the
Roman Catholic communion service. In Act II you are transported to
the familiar land of Christmas pantomime. There a bad magician seeks
to destroy the castle of the noble knights, and evokes a beautiful
phantom to serve his purpose. There are spells, incantations, blue
lights, screaming that makes the blood run cold, and the whole
bagful of tricks that Weber, Marschner, and even Mozart delighted
in. Follows fast the magic garden, and the sirens with rose petals
on head. The foolish boy still eludes temptation. Even the beautiful
witch cannot lure him. All is fairy play, pantomimic transformations,
castles that crumble, thunder-riven gardens, and the whizzing of a
malignant lance. Even that old Gounod ruse, the sign of the cross,
is employed, and with overpowering effect. Now what possesses
a generation which knows Darwin, has read Herbert Spencer, and
can follow with delight the unerring logic of events that unroll
themselves in the Ibsen plays—what possesses this generation of ours
to sit enthralled before all this nebulosity?

The third act is but a faint _replica_ of the first—without its
vigor or novelty. Here the librettist is in sore straits. So he
drags in Magdalen washing the feet of Parsifal which is offensively
puerile. We again see the scenery acting, pantomimic scenery, and
once more we are transported to the Hall of the Holy Grail, where
the music of Allegri, Palestrina, and Vittoria is marvellously
mimicked. Wagner, not being a strikingly original theme-maker,
always borrowed,—borrowed even from Berlioz,—and the results of
his borrowings are often greater than the originals. In a beatific
blaze of glory—after Parsifal has healed the King—this sacred
melodrama ends, and the spectator, drugged by the music, confused
by the bells chanting the tortuous story, and his eyes intoxicated
by feasts of color, staggers away believing that he has witnessed
a great work of art. So he has,—the art of debauch in color, tone,
and gesture. “The highest perfection of an art,” says Ehlert, “is
not always and necessarily the greatest massing together of forces.
It depends upon entirely different conditions. The flower of an art
arises only when a positively artistic individuality creates that
particular work for which it possesses the most marked and exclusive
vocation.” Now Wagner heaps up one art, one idea, upon another. He
little cared for the dramatic proprieties or the feelings of his
audience when he composed Kundry, a ridiculous hag, an Astarte,
a Herodias, a Meg Merrilies, and a Mary Magdalen in one. She is
Azucena when she reveals to Parsifal his parentage—perhaps Wagner
had heard of Il Trovatore!—and she plays Potiphar’s wife to this
effeminate lad. She is of the opera operatic. And Klingsor—is he a
creation, this hater of men and women?—why, he is nothing else but
any giant or any enchanter in any fairy tale. Parsifal, when he is
not a simulacrum of Christ in white baptismal robes, is a peculiarly
foolish bore. Without Siegfried’s buoyancy, Wagner tried hard to
dower him with Siegfried’s youth. But he is only an emasculate
Siegfried. The corpse of Titurel is a horrible idea—yet it fits in
this bogie-man’s play. Wagner, after all, was the creature of his
century, an incurable Romantic, with all the love of the Romantics
for knights, mediæval mysteries, maidens in distress,—in this case a
callow boy,—magicians, and dead men who tell tales. The scenery, too,
never comes up to one’s realization, and as usual Wagner oversteps
the mark by surrounding his hero with too many women. The duo with
Kundry is much more effective. The eye and the ear can grasp the
situation—a stirringly dramatic one, despite the morbid imagination
of the poet who could in his search for voluptuous depravity mingle a
mother’s with a courtesan’s kiss. Here Paris itself is surpassed in
the piquant and decadent. Wagner’s admiration for Baudelaire’s poetry
shows itself in this incident. By the magic of his mother’s name,
Kundry evokes a maudlin filial passion, and with his mother’s name
on her lips she kisses the youth into the first consciousness of his
virility—or a semblance of it, for at no time is Parsifal a normal
young man. His act of renunciation, in his particular case, denies
life.

Again I ask, What is the lure that gathers multitudes to witness this
most nonsensical, immoral of operas? The answer is, The Music, always
The Music. Not Wagner at the flood-tide of his musical passion, nor
the composer of Tristan and Isolde, or the Ring or Die Meistersinger;
yet an aged wizard who had retained his old arts of enchantment, and
so great are they that at times he not only makes one forget his
book, but even the poverty of his themes—Parsifal is not musically
original; rather it is an extraordinary synthesis of styles, an
unique specimen of the arts of combination, adaptation, and lofty
architectonics. Let us glance at the score.

Never has Wagner been so bald in his exposition as in the prelude.
But its simplicity is deceptive. The Love theme,—in A flat, by von
Wolzogen named the Love Feast motive,—the Grail Hope theme, the
Dresden Amen, and the Faith theme,—these and a subsidiary theme, the
Saviour’s Lament, about comprise this overture. And the figure of
the Saviour’s agony contains a few of the most poignant bars Wagner
ever penned. This short episode is infinitely more sincere than
the Faith motive—“What expression would a man like Wagner find for
such an experience?” asks Ehlert. The Speech of Promise, _i.e._ the
prediction “Durch Mitleid wissend,” is charmingly prophetic, but
the first section of Act I drags both dramatically and musically.
I am never disappointed in the Kundry music, for I have long known
it in Liszt’s B minor sonata, and before Liszt it may be found in
the opening bars of Chopin’s B minor sonata. There is much Liszt
in this score. The trick of the twice repeated modulation into the
upper diminished third, as in the case of the Faith theme, is an
old Lisztian device. Kundry’s chief motive is to be found in the B
minor sonata. It is not very characteristic, nor is the evocation of
Arabia. Kundry enters on Valkyrie pinions, and the best thing she
does is her shuddering screech—that same cry of distress so cleverly
utilized by Massenet in Le Cid. Wagner draws heavily upon the second
act of Die Walküre. Indeed Parsifal is full of Wagner quotations:
Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger—there is much in
Gurnemanz’s bars—and even Götterdämmerung—the Rhine daughters’ music
is heard in the garden scene. Amfortas’s suffering motive is not
very convincing, nor are we impressed by the Forest Murmur with
its canonic _appoggiaturas_. Ever this essential turn! As in the
Good Friday magic spell—written years before the opera—the composer
echoes Siegfried and Die Meistersinger,—the first fine, careless
rapture of his wood-music he never recaptured. And this is quite
natural. An old man, Wagner had reached the end of his ammunition.
Many blank cartridges are fired in Parsifal. The Sorcery motive
with its Chopin-like chromaticism has meaning; but I confess I do
not care for Parsifal’s motive, beautifully as it is developed. It
lacks the bold, lusty, clean-cut vigor of his young Siegfried’s horn
call. Wagner musically was always true to himself. He unconsciously
divined the effeminacy of Parsifal’s nature, and his music is a truer
psychological barometer than all the learned pundits who write reams
about the purity of Parsifal. Kundry’s Service theme—in “helpful”
thirds—is by no means so exquisitely musical as the Mitleid motive
in Die Walküre. And what could be more absurd than the use of the
Saviour’s Lament motive as the dead swan is reverently carried away.
The Herzeleide motive is lovely music, especially when it is thrown
into high relief during the next act by Kundry’s blandishments. The
fleeting appearance of the Lohengrin Swan motive is a very happy idea.

We have now reached the last part of the first act with its
_Glockenthema_, its laments of Amfortas,—the accents of woe are
genuine,—and the magnificent tonal panorama of boys’ voices,
bells, choral music. Here, not without reverence, the composer has
successfully emulated the service of Rome. The tripartite choral
divisions recall both Goethe’s Faust and the spherical order of
voices, and the antiphonal choirs of mediæval cathedrals. The effect
is indescribable, especially when the pure, sexless boys’ voices
are heard _a capella_. The consummation of this mystical ecstasy is
reached when the Grail vase is slowly waved aloft. One realizes that
Wagner’s genius, which so often gravitates pendulum-wise between the
sublime and the ridiculous, here approaches the former.

Act II, in which the ruling key seems to be B minor,—as A flat
predominates the preceding act,—naturally introduces fewer new
motives. The Klingsor theme, first heard in Gurnemanz’s slightly
tedious recital, and the Kundry theme are most in evidence in
the stormy prelude. To be quite frank I always find the Flower
Girls’ music a disappointment. The Caress valse theme is a trifle
commonplace, and only Wagner’s polyphonic skill lends the music some
dignity. The evocation of Kundry by Klingsor in the opening scene
is full of demoniacal grandeur. Wagner is nothing if not operatic,
and here he shows that his old Weber skin has not been completely
shed. Kundry’s galloping motive, also employed for Parsifal, is the
familiar Valkyrie figure modified. I heard the Erl-King storm through
several bars, and the triplet figuration of the Flower Girls is from
a trio in one of Schumann’s symphonies—the B flat, if I remember
aright.

The crowning scene of this act—one is tempted to say of the entire
work, for Wagner spreads his music thin over a wide surface—is the
duo of Parsifal and Kundry. Herein the entire gamut of passion,
maternal, exquisite, voluptuous, is traversed by a master hand.
And never has Wagner’s touch been so sure. Intellectually nothing
could be more complete than this delineation, morbid and morose
as it occasionally is. In a dramatic sense it saves the opera.
We hear the Parsifal, the Herzeleide motives—and a supplementary
Herzeleide theme. The outburst of Parsifal after the kiss with
its memories of Amfortas’s suffering is wonderful. The Saviour’s
theme, Kundry’s Yearning theme and Self-Abandonment motive, are
all made up of familiar material. Here the spinning of the web
into something strange and touching is the principal virtue, not
the themes themselves. Klingsor’s sudden appearance and the hurled
lance which is carried out in the score by harps _glissando_
through two octaves, the mourning cries of the pretty girls, and
Parsifal’s final words—all these kaleidoscopic effects impress one
considerably; action is paramount. Parsifal’s music in Es startt der
Blick dumpff auf das Heil’sgefäss may arouse the indignation of the
purist with its direct succession of the G flat major and D minor
triads (page 187 of the vocal score); but to modern ears his scheme
of harmonization is as normal as the book is abnormal. In a Wagner
opera, or, if you will, a music-drama, everything must be accepted,
dissonantal harmonies as well. This composer follows every curve of
his poem, and when a situation demands jarring ugliness, he freely
offers it. Who to-day shall say what is or what is not ugly music?

The music of the last act presents little novel thematic material.
In the gloomy prelude we find epitomized the wandering of Parsifal
in search of the Grail domain, in conjunction with the funeral music
of Titurel. Again the static and contemplative forms a contrast
to the rapid action of the preceding scene. The very pauses seem
pregnant with music. And I must halt here a moment to lay my tribute
of admiration at the feet of Milka Ternina, whose Kundry is a
dramatic and musical creation of rare imagination and technical
skill. She presents three different women—we are perplexed to say
whether Kundry defiant, or Kundry seductive, or Kundry repentant
is the most wonderful. But Ternina is always wonderful! It is in
this scene, with its sun-smitten meadows, its worshipping knight
and mournful penitent, that I agree with those commentators who
perceive the profound influence exerted upon Wagner by early German
and Flemish religious pictorial art. Parsifal’s attitudes here would
suit a Gothic triptych—as M. Charles Tardieu so happily expresses
it. There is little movement, all gesture has been transferred to
the orchestra, and the spectator seems to be participating in one
of those miracle plays or viewing the stiff pictures of a Cimabue
or a woodcut after Dürer. The moving forest and the final scene
lose because of repetition. But what was the poet to do? Only in
Act II does he escape the lack of variety. For instance, in Act
I Parsifal stands for a long time immobile, with his back to the
audience, while Kundry, in the last act, utters but two words.
She is a pantomimic lay figure kept on the stage to emphasize the
resemblance between Jesus and Parsifal. And the feet washing episode
is absolutely unnecessary. It does not help the story. Nowhere but
in Wagner would all this mish-mash of gospel narrative, mediæval
romance, and Teutonic philosophy be tolerated. Yet the Wagnerites sit
through it all as if listening to a new evangel of art, philosophy,
and religion. Perhaps they are. In America, where new religions
sprout daily as do potatoes in a dark cellar, slighter causes have
led to the foundation of a religion—witness the rise and growth
of Mormonism. If religion could ever become moribund, perhaps in
Wagner’s Parsifal would be found the crystallization of many old
faiths, presented in a concrete, though Wagnerized, form. “I know of
but one thing more beautiful than Parsifal,” wrote Alfred Ernest, and
approvingly quoted by M. Kufferath, “and that is any low mass in any
church.” And in this sentence the French author puts his finger on
the weak spot of Parsifal—its lack of absolute sincerity. No matter
how great an art work it may be, it yet lacks the truthful note that
is to be found at any low mass in a Roman Catholic church—about the
most unadorned service I can remember. With all its grandeur, its
pathos, its conjuring of churchly and philosophical motives, its
ravishing pictures and marmoreal attitudes, Parsifal falls short of
the one thing—faith, a faith you may find in any roadside Bavarian
cabin. We have seen that it is weakest musically in the Faith motive
of the prelude, and ethically it suffers from the same sterility.
All the scholarly efforts to make the work an ethical, philosophical,
and an artistic message are futile. Parsifal, even if it will “enjoy
a small immortality,” must remain an opera, a cunning spectacle
devised by a man of genius in the twilight of his powers. It is
Wagner’s own Götterdämmerung, the sunset music of his singular career.

But if this Parsifal music lacks the virile glow and imaginative
power of his earlier music, it is none the less fascinating. Over all
hovers, like the dove in the temple, a rich mellowness, a soothing
quality that is the reverse of his stormy, disquieting, youthful
art. It really seems as if Pity, pity for the tragedy of existence,
for the misery of all animated beings, had filled parts of the
score with a soothing balm. The muted pauses, the golden stream of
tone, and the almost miraculous musicianship fill the listener with
awe. Never before has Wagner’s technical mastery come to such a
triumphant blossoming. And the partition is covered with miniatures
that excite admiration both for their workmanship and their musical
meanings. It was Nietzsche who first called critical attention to
the Lilliputian delicacy of Wagner’s music. A fresco painter, he yet
finds time to execute the most minute and tender jewel-like bits,
that are lost sight and sound of at the first hearing. Never has
Wagner’s instrumentation been so smoothly sonorous, so well mixed,
so synthetic. It recalls richly embroidered altar cloths or Gobelin
tapestry. Weaving similes force themselves upon the hearer when
describing this marvellous and modern polyphonic art. But how tell
of the surge and undertow of his melting, symphonious narrative!
It flashes with all the tints of a Veronese, of a Makart, and then
appear in processional solemnity the great flat spaces and still
figures of some mediæval, low-toned, distemper painter. Painting and
weaving—always these two arts! But there is not the same passionate
excess in decoration, the same tropical splendor, that we find in the
earlier Wagner. Venus wooes Tannhäuser in more heated accents than
does Kundry Parsifal. And Kundry is _the_ depraved woman of all art,
for Kundry’s quiver of temptations is more subtle, more decadent.

The correspondence of King Ludwig and Wagner, of Ludwig and Josef
Kainz, the actor, throws much light on the enigmatic character
of Parsifal. Wagner needed money and encouragement, badly. So it
is not difficult to conceive of him playing up to every romantic
extravagance of the young king—“le seul vrai roi de ce siècle,” as
Paul Verlaine poetically called the monarch, whose madness admirably
matched his own. Read in this sense, the psychology of Kundry’s kiss
and its repelling effect and its arousing of pity for Amfortas in
Parsifal is no longer a mystery. Wagner never erred in his morbid
musical psychology, and he thus symbolized Amfortas—Wagner—as being
rescued from suffering by Parsifal—Ludwig. Wagner had been ever an
ungrateful man, but for the King he entertained the most exalted
sentiment of gratitude. There is a psychiatric literature on this
esoteric subject in German and French beginning with Oskar Panizza,
ending with the remarkable study of Hanns Fuchs, entitled Richard
Wagner.

Parsifal will long remain a rare and stimulating spectacle to those
for whom religious feeling must be dramatized to be endurable.
The stern simplicities of doctrinal truths have no attraction for
such. Wagner, luxuriously Byzantine in his faiths, erected a lordly
pleasure drama in which the mystically inclined, the admirer of
theatrical pomps, and the esoteric worshipper could all find solace,
amusement, and consolation. Yet Parsifal’s pale virtue can never
stir us to higher issues, as do the heroic sacrifices of Tannhäuser
or Senta. Parsifal is the predestinated one, predestined to save the
life of the King. Lacking freedom of will, he is not a human being
that provokes our sympathy—but why demand logic, even dramatic logic,
of Wagner? He was first a musician, then a poet and a philosopher;
and in the last of these three was least. Parsifal is his final
offering to the world. It is the work of a man who had outlived
his genius. Nietzsche quotes with approval the exclamation of a
musician: “I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music.” We
are all Wagnerians whether we rebel at Parsifal or not.




III

NIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST

Tell me, where is justice to be found which is love with seeing
eyes?—_Also sprach Zarathustra._


I

A sane and complete estimate of the life and philosophical writings
of Friedrich Nietzsche has yet to be made in English. Mentally dead
since 1889, his death, in a private retreat at Weimar in 1900,
created little stir; yet we predict that this great, if rhapsodical
thinker, will occupy a place in the pantheon of philosophers. Like
Emerson, he formulated no system; he is a stimulus to thought, an
antiseptic critic of all philosophies, religions, theologies, and
moral systems, an intellectual rebel, a very Lucifer among ancient
and modern thinkers.

His life, barring his friendship with Wagner, and its sad conclusion,
is rather barren of interest or incident. It was a fiery soul
tragedy; outwardly the world saw a quiet, very reserved, almost
timid man of cultivated bearing and disinclined to the pursuits of
the ambitious. He was born at Röcken, near Lützen, October 15,
1844. His father was a clergyman; indeed he descended from a long
line of clerical ancestors, which possibly accounts for the austere
strain in the man. This philosopher with a hammer, this demolisher
of Antichrist, this writer who outraged all religious Europe, was a
man of pure, upright life, a scholar, a gentleman, a poet. Taking up
philology mainly as a makeshift, he occupied the chair of classical
philology at the University of Basle. His weak eyesight—his life
long he was a sufferer from headaches, a weak stomach, and crabbed
nerves—drove him to a retirement, during which he busied himself with
art and philosophy. The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 attracted Richard
Wagner’s attention, for here was a partisan not to be despised. In
1876 Nietzsche published Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and Wagnerism
had found its philosophical exponent. A friendship, ideal in its
quality, grew up between composer and thinker. But the sensitive
nature of Nietzsche could brook no rivals, and he soon fell away from
Wagner and Bayreuth. Many have sought to explain this defection.
Nietzsche’s devoted sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, accused
Richard and Cosima Wagner of treachery, while Wagner, on his part,
found this intense young disciple a trifle irksome. He could not
stir, could not talk sportively—as was his wont—could not make bad
puns, could not associate with others without a sorrowful apparition
warning him that he was not true to himself, not true to his higher
nature. Wagner, being a natural man, sometimes a coarse and worldly
man, resented this spiritual caretaker’s solicitude, and so in the
rush and excitement of Bayreuth in 1876 he was forced to forget his
Nietzsche. Then the usual thing happened: the other one went off in a
sulk, and Wagnerism had lost its most fanatical adherent.

The truth in this affair is not difficult to discern. When Wagner was
still undiscovered—that is, the latter-day Wagner—Nietzsche sailed
his soul abroad for spiritual adventures and found the composer of
Tristan and Isolde full of spiritual irony. Exclusive, haughty,
jealous—a noble sort of jealousy—he published the good news to the
world. Then the mob, _hoi polloi_, began to buy excursion tickets
to Bayreuth, and Nietzsche shudderingly withdrew. Wagner’s music
was no longer unique, no longer to be savored by the intellectually
aristocratic few. So he sailed his bark for newer, rarer, stranger
enterprises and discovered—Nietzsche. After that the madhouse
yawned for him, and the world lost a wonderful man, an ecstatic,
semi-deranged man, a freethinker who out-topped all freethinkers, one
of the greatest individualists since Stirner, and a soul of poetic
richness. In 1888 Der Fall Wagner was published and Nietzsche’s
friends and foes alike noted the decline of a brilliant intellect.
The book is extraordinary. In it are flashes of dazzling fugitive
ideation; but it lacks logic, nobility of design; above all, it
lacks coherency. Wagner is as bitterly arraigned and attacked as the
apostle of degeneration, as before he was hailed as the Dispenser
of the New Evangel of music, poetry, and philosophy. It is a pity
that this violent work should have introduced Nietzsche to the
English-speaking world. It is too fantastic, too ill-balanced, to
serve as a dignified polemic, or yet as a corrective. In Germany
it but strengthened Wagner’s cause. Yet its occasional meteoric
lucidity, its wit, its blows with a hammer, are at times extremely
diverting. The last of his writings, it should be read the last. We
say the last, for his Transvaluation of All Values—the first part
of which is Antichrist, need not concern us here—was begun when the
author was struck down. After Wagner, Bizet; after Parsifal, Carmen;
for he swore that Bizet was the greater, Bizet the creator of La Gaya
Scienza. Nietzsche had to swing to the other extreme musically after
his secession from Wagnerism. But Bizet——!

The Nietzsche philosophical pedigree is not difficult to trace. He
comes intellectually from Max Stirner—especially Stirner—Bakounine,
the anarchist, and Karl Gutzkow. As mad a Schopenhauerian as Richard
Wagner, he threw over his allegiance to the Master Pessimist when
he discovered that there can be no will to live without previous
existence, and existence presupposes will. It is the _Will to Power_
that is Nietzsche’s cardinal doctrine, and this will to power is
neither evil nor good, for our Siegfried among philosophers would
transvalue all moral values. In his divagations with a hammer—he
called himself the Philosopher with a Hammer—smashed all idols,
old, new, and to come. He likewise, in his intellectual fury and
craving after universal knowledge, smashed the exceeding delicate
mechanism of his own brain. Boasting of Polish blood, he, like
Poland, represented a disintegrated individualism. Nietzsky was said
to be the ancestral name, and with it was inherited all the pride of
his nationality. He loathed the common herd more than Horace, more
than Flaubert—to whom life was but a bad smell. Herbert Spencer’s
philosophical moderation, the tepid piety of the middle classes, he
equally scorned. He would have us all aristocrats in mind and body,
and Wagner’s snobbery—so necessary to his worldly advancement—filled
Nietzsche with disgust. No king, no pope, no democracy, could bind
his rebellious intellect. Like Ibsen’s Brand he sought ever the
steepest heights. A lonely soul is Zarathustra—Nietzsche, and one of
the most saddening scenes in Also sprach Zarathustra (begun in 1883,
finished in 1885, but not published until 1892) is his finding of
the animals, the pope and Wagner worshipping the Jackass according
to the ritual of the Roman Catholic church. It was Wagner’s Parsifal
that stung him to madness. The anti-naturalism, the mysticism,
the attempted revival in theatric form of—to him—hierarchical
superstitions and various abnormalities, shocked the soul of
Nietzsche. In his wonderful prose epic, Wagner appears masked as the
Wizard, the prophet of pity, of redemption of all the formulas hated
by this extraordinary thinker.

It is mere childishness, or else bigotry, to point at Nietzsche’s
end as the moral tag of his life. If he had lived during the Middle
Ages, either he would have been burnt alive or else have proved a
formidable rival to some angelic doctor. But living in the nineteenth
century, a century of indifference to men of his ardent temperament,
he erected his own stake and fagots and the mad genius within him
burnt up his mind. While he would not have so astonished the world if
born to work in the dogmatic harness of the Roman Catholic church,
yet its discipline might have quieted his throbbing nerves, and
perhaps given the faith a second Rosmini.

A magnificent dialectician, Nietzsche threw overboard all
metaphysical baggage. He despised the jargon of Schoolman and modern
philosophers. For him Hegel was a verbalistic bat, blind to the
realities of life; and it is just at this point that the influence
of the insurgent has been so provocative of good. He has overturned
the barriers of a repulsive metaphysical terminology and dared to
be naked and natural, though a philosopher. He erected no system,
no vast, polyphonic edifice with winding staircase and darkened
chambers. Nietzsche made no philosophical formula; rather, his
formula is an image, the image of a lithe dancer. The writer of this
résumé pretends to see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s philosophy,
or poetry, in the second part of Faust. When Euphorion, that child
of Helena and Faust, of Beauty and Intellect, the merging of the
Classical and Romantic, sings:—

    Let me be skipping,
    Let me be leaping,
    To soar and circle
    Through ether sweeping,
    Is now the passion
    That me hath won,

he but set the pace for Nietzsche, the Dancing Philosopher. Dancing
blithely over a tight rope stretched between two eternities, the
Past and the Future, Man, gay, and unafraid, views the depths of
Time and Space. It is “Man who is a rope connecting animal and
Beyond Man” (Übermensch). “He is a bridge, not a goal; a transition
and a destruction.” These seemingly startling statements, which may
be found in Thus spake Zarathustra, are, after all, nothing new;
Christianity, with its angels and Darwinism, with its bold hints at
future evolutions and developments, do but say the same things, each
in its own way. But Nietzsche, like his beloved Euphorion, must needs
graze the rim of the sun in his flight, and Icarus-wise come tumbling
to earth—and a Weimar retreat.

The Titanism of Nietzsche, might over right, power over weakness,
impels him to hate all weakness, and Christianity, he declares,
is a weakness, a degenerate sort of Judaism, complicated with the
teachings of Greek mystagogues. He says that the first and only
Christian was nailed to the cross, and this should please the heart
of Tolstoy. Bolder still is Nietzsche’s wish that a Dostoïevsky might
have depicted the Christ in all his childlike innocence and Godlike
love. Nietzsche worships force and hates slave-morality, _i.e._ all
modern religions, in which pity for the weak is basic. To him the
symbol of the crucifix is degrading, a symbol of degenerating races.
A very Spartan, he would have the great blond barbarian once more
trample, Attila-like, the blood-stained soil of Europe and Asia,
sparing none. _Væ Victis!_ “What is best belongeth to my folk and
myself. And if it is not given to us, we take it, the best food, the
purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the most beautiful women.” Thus
spake Zarathustra, and the voice is Nietzsche’s, but the hands are
the hands of Esau—Bismarck: Blood and Iron!

It is in Also sprach Zarathustra that the genius of Nietzsche is
best studied. Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka, it is a book of highly
colored Oriental aphorisms, interrupted by lofty lyric outbursts.
It is an ironic, enigmatic rhetorical rhapsody, the Third Part of a
half-mad Faust. In it may be seen flowing all the currents of modern
cultures and philosophies, and if it teaches anything at all, it
teaches the wisdom and beauty of air, sky, waters, and earth, and
of laughter, not Pantagruelian, but “holy laughter.” The love of
earth is preached in rapturous accents. A Dionysian ecstasy anoints
the lips of this latter-day Sibyl on his tripod, when he speaks of
earth. He is intoxicated with the fulness of its joys. No gloomy
monasticism, no denial of the will to live, no futile thinking about
thinking,—so despised by Goethe,—no denial of grand realities, may be
found in the curriculum of this Bacchantic philosopher. A Pantheist,
he is also a poet and seer like William Blake, and marvels at the
symbol of nature, “the living garment of the Deity”—Nietzsche’s
deity, of course. It is this realistic, working philosophy—if
philosophy it be in the academic sense—that has endeared Nietzsche
to the newer generation, that has set his triumphant standard on the
very threshold of the new century. After the metaphysical cobweb
spinners, the Hegels, Fichtes, Schellings, after the dreary pessimism
of the soured Schopenhauer,—whose pessimism was temperamental,
as is all pessimism, so James Sully has pointed out,—after many
negations and stumblings, the vigorous affirmations of this Nihilist
are stimulating, suggestive, refreshing, especially in Germany, the
stronghold of philosophical and sentimental Philistinism. Not reward,
but the sheer delight of living, of conquering self, of winning
victories in the teeth of defeat,—thus spake the wisdom of Nietzsche.

For English-speaking readers the many attacks on Nietzsche have
placed the philosopher under the cloud of a peculiar misconception.
Viciously arguing that a man in a madhouse could only produce a
mad philosophy, his assailants forgot that it was Nietzsche’s very
intensity of mental vision, his phenomenal faculty of attention, his
hopeless attempt to square the circle of things human, that brought
about his sad plight. If he had not thought so madly, so strenuously,
if he had put to slumber his irritable conscience, his insatiable
curiosity, with current anodynes, Nietzsche might have been alive
to-day.

In Also sprach Zarathustra he consciously or unconsciously vied with
Goethe in Faust; with Wagner’s Ring, with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine,
with Ibsen’s Brand, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with Senancour’s
Oberman, with Browning’s Paracelsus. It is the history of his soul,
as Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s—there are some curious parallelisms
between these two subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at
universality; it contains some of Amiel’s introspection and some of
Baudelaire’s morbidity; half mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet
and John Bunyan.

Nietzsche then is a critical mode of viewing the universe, rather
than creator of a formal philosophy. He has set his imprint on all
European culture, from the dream novels of that Italian of the
Renaissance, the new Cellini, Gabriele d’Annunzio, to the Pole
Przybyszewski, who has transformed Nietzsche into a very Typhoon
of emotion. The musician Heinrich Pudor has imitated the master
in his attacks on modern music; while Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard
Dehmel—all young Germany, young France, has patterned after the great
Immoralist, as he chose to call himself. Among the composers affected
by him we find Richard Strauss, not attempting to set the philosophy
of Nietzsche to music—as many wrongfully suppose—but arranging, as
in a huge phantasmagoria, the emotions excited by the close study of
Thus spake Zarathustra. And a many-colored piece of music it is, full
of frowning mountains, fragrant meads, and barren, ugly, waste places.

Nietzsche met the fate of all rebels from Lucifer to Byron—neglect
and obloquy. With something of Heraclitus, of Democritus, of Bruno
Giordano, of Luther in him, there was allied a sensitivity almost
Chopin’s. The combination is a poor one for practical purposes;
so the brain died before the body,—humanity cannot transcend
itself. Notwithstanding all his contradictions, limitations,
cloudland rhapsodies, aversion from the banal, despite his
futile flights into the Inane, his word-weaving, his impossible
premisses and mad conclusions, the thunder-march of his ideas, the
brilliancy and polish of his style—the greatest German prose since
Schopenhauer’s—have insured Nietzsche immortality; as immortality
goes among world thinkers: fifty years of quotation and then—the
biographical dictionaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche is, as Havelock Ellis declares, “a great
aboriginal force”; perhaps, with Max Stirner, the greatest in the
last half of the nineteenth century. And that same Stirner is the
true stock from which Nietzsche sprang—Stirner who dared to say, “_My
truth is the truth._”

Nietzsche died August 28, 1900, literally the _Morgenröthe_ of the
new century. It was at Weimar, once the home of Goethe and Liszt.
Nietzsche was in an insane asylum from 1888. Dr. Hermann Turck
asserts that his work was done during a comparatively sane interval
between two incarcerations. In 1868 he met Richard Wagner, and under
the spell of his synthetic genius he wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie
aus dem Geist der Musik, and dedicated it to Wagner, his “sublime
forerunner.” Every line of it, he declares in the preface, was
“conceived in close communion with Wagner.” And let those who know
only the later Nietzsche casually read this essay to be convinced of
its sanity, its acuity, its penetrating originality. Here we find
the enthusiastic, impetuous youth, fresh from his Grecian studies,
a valiant champion of Hellenistic culture, an opponent of the
orientalization of modern life and thought. Twelve years later he
discovered in Parsifal this very despised orientalization, and did
not hesitate to say so in The Wagner Case, that fatal illustration of
George Moore’s pithy axiom: When we change our opinions we change our
friends.

The man who marshalled in the most deadly array of attack his
arguments against Wagnerism is also the man who wrote the most
brilliant book of all on Wagner. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is
a masterpiece of critical rhapsody. The sister who nursed the
sick-brained man for twelve years, Frau Friedrich Förster-Nietzsche,
tells the story of the dissensions in this friendship, a friendship
that could have endured only through a miracle. Both men had “nerves”
in a highly irritable condition; and, while Wagner had weathered the
storm and had, perforce, developed a stout integument of disdain,
Nietzsche had always remained the sensitive, morbid, cloistered
student. There is no doubt that Richard Wagner, at the triumphant
culmination of his life-work, was an arrogant, exacting, and jealous
being. Wahnfried was, as it now is, a Star Chamber, where the
_Vehmgericht_ judged swiftly, fiercely. Here is one story told by the
sister and quoted by H. E. Krehbiel in his too brief review of the
episode:—

  My brother and I heard the Triumphlied of Brahms in the Bâle
  Cathedral. It was a splendid performance and pleased Fritz very
  much. When he went to Bayreuth in August, he took the pianoforte
  arrangement with him, apparently in the naïve belief that Wagner
  would like it. I say “apparently,” for upon later reflection it has
  occurred to me that this red-bound Triumphlied was meant as a sort
  of goad, and therefore Wagner’s prodigious wrath seems to have been
  not altogether groundless. So I will leave the continuation of the
  tale to Wagner, who had an exquisite fashion of satirizing himself:—

  “Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went
  into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it
  exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that
  Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can
  turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a
  vengeance.”

  Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my
  brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner.
  “He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest
  dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such
  splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always
  well bred; it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story
  of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875).
  “Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s
  Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz
  looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said,
  beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner was _not_ great.”

Another time Wagner interfered with a walking tour that Nietzsche
had planned to take with the son of Felix Mendelssohn, a professor
at Freiburg. The young philosopher winced, but gave in to the elder
man’s request. His commonplace book reveals his secret irritation.
Here is a specimen of his early revolt from the banner of Bayreuth:—

  How infinitely purer is the soul of a Bach or a Beethoven in
  comparison with the soul of a Wagner. In the same sense as Goethe
  was a painter strayed from his true vocation, and Schiller an
  orator, Wagner is an actor _manqué_....

  Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who
  wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as
  singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of
  voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into
  a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters
  and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves.

Yet earlier he had written in such an eloquent strain as this:—

  Wagner is never more Wagner than when his difficulties increase
  tenfold, and he triumphs over them with all the legislative zeal
  of a victorious ruler, subduing rebellious elements, reducing them
  to simple rhythms, and imprinting the supreme power of his will
  on a vast multitude of contending emotions.... It can be said of
  him that he has endowed everything in nature with a language. He
  believed that nothing need be dumb. He cast his plummet into the
  mystery of sunrise, forest and mountain, mist and night shadows,
  and learned that all these cherished intense longing for a voice.

Houston Chamberlain believes that when the panegyrics and attacks
upon Wagner have been consigned to that eternal limbo, the dust-heap,
Nietzsche’s Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, will still survive. Perhaps
back of the wounded vanity was the usual feeling that in Bayreuth
and Wagner his last illusion had vanished; madness was coming on
apace. Even his sister admits that he held aloof during the rejoicing
and festivities of 1876, and Wagner’s _Gemüthlichkeit_ expressed
in exuberant spirits (probably he stood on his head more than once
in those gay times; it was a trick of his, as Praeger relates,—his
punning, his advice to his shy, shrinking disciple to get him a
wife, useless advice to this ardent upholder of ideal friendship),
and all these things told on his nerves. He went away, and later
in his Menschliches Allzumenschliches appeared the first faint
thread that, in Der Fall Wagner, had become a scarlet skein of
abuse. He depreciated genius as being “a product of atavism, its
glory is cheap, its throne quickly reared, and bending the knee to
it is a mere habit.” Wahnfried, quick to detect heresy, recognized
the allusion; and Wagner, deeply pained at the defection of a
real friend, forbade his name to be mentioned. And Wagner was, as
Nietzsche declared, the _grande passion_ of his life.

M. Schuré thus described the personal appearances of Nietzsche:—

  No one who conversed with him could fail to be struck by the
  powers of his mind, and the singularity of his looks. His closely
  cropped hair and heavy mustache gave him at first sight the air of
  a cavalry officer. There was combination of hauteur and timidity
  in his bearing. His voice, musical and deliberate, betrayed the
  artistic temperament; his meditative almost hesitating gait, the
  philosopher. Nothing was more deceptive than the apparent calm of
  his expression. He had the fixed eye of the thinker, but at the
  same time it was the eye of the searching and keen observer and
  the fanatical visionary. This dual character of the eye was almost
  uncanny, and had a disquieting effect on those who talked with him
  face to face. His expression in moments of enthusiasm could be
  one of dreamy sweetness, but almost instantly relapsed again into
  fierce hostility.... There was a distant, isolated atmosphere about
  the whole Nietzsche personality, a veiled disdain which is often
  characteristic of the aristocrat of thought.

In a brief tribute to the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, “So solltet
ihr Nietzsche verstehen,” in the _Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung_,
Frau Professor Wanda Bartels tells of her and her husband’s chance
acquaintance with the famous thinker during a sojourn in Venice. She
dwells upon the contrast of his own modest reserve and unassuming
ways with those of the blustering youths who flaunt in public as his
followers and believers in his “system”; for he had no system, and
“did not write to teach the immature, but to free his own soul.”
Frau Bartels’s protest calls to mind the more weighty and truly
enlightening utterances of another personal friend of Nietzsche,
Professor Paul Deussen, of Kiel, who, writing in the _Wiener
Rundschau_ on the Truth about Friedrich Nietzsche, discusses with
great clearness the two cardinal points of Nietzsche’s doctrine, viz.
the Übermensch and the ewige Wiederkehr, or eternal repetition of
the world process. The former, Professor Deussen holds, is an ideal
of humanity which, in essential points, coincides with the Christ of
the church; and when Nietzsche insists that the man within us must be
overcome in order that the Übermensch may arise, he preaches what all
great moralists and religious teachers have preached. Nietzsche errs
in his conception of the nature of the “negation of the will,” and in
substituting genius for morality (or the intellect for the will) as
the means of attaining to an ideal humanity.

After many years of guessing in the dark as to Nietzsche’s madness,
Dr. George M. Gould points out in a careful and convincing essay that
the original trouble began with his eyes, with a faulty diagnosis
of his complaint. Dr. Gould writes, after sifting all the evidence
of Nietzsche’s day-books and his sister’s suspicions as to the real
cause, in the _Montreal Medical Journal_:—

  I have spoken of the physiologic cause of this morbidly feverish
  intensity of mental activity. It appears to me the inevitable
  irritation due to severe eye-strain. Nietzsche also thought of
  suicide. Nietzsche produced within twenty years sixteen volumes,
  all written by himself in small, clear handwriting, all the result
  of independent philosophic and original thinking, besides several
  other volumes of technical philologic studies. He was, moreover, a
  busy, conscientious teacher and lecturer.

  The influence of his disease upon his character and writings
  is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an
  enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one.
  With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I
  gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased
  cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that
  “A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his
  professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves
  of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of
  teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal
  unrest, etc.”

  But if so, it is an error which only extends the pathologic to
  the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation
  was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional
  lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge.
  It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness,
  radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the
  Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral
  irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of
  much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner
  in which he was forced to do his literary work, _i.e._ by thinking
  and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head,
  and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him
  to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence
  also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the
  discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying
  sentences.

  In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of
  January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in
  Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him
  home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still
  on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were
  evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud
  and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to
  and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him
  to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist,
  where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later
  corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, was made. His mother had
  him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897,
  after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25,
  1900.

  According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was
  pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an
  examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.

Is it not an unusual coincidence that Bayreuth, the very hub of
Wagner’s musical and of Nietzsche’s intellectual activities, is also
the birthplace of a man who is one of Nietzsche’s forerunners, one is
tempted to say, his real philosophical progenitor? In the thriving
Bavarian village was born, October 25, 1806, Caspar Schmidt, later
known to the world as Max Stirner, the author of The Individual and
his Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipsic, 1845), the
very gospel of modern philosophical anarchy, and a book which, with
Guyau’s system of morals, paved the way for Nietzsche. Stirner, poor,
unknown, died in Berlin, June 26, 1856. There is a sympathetic study
of his life by John Henry Mackay, the German poet with Scotch blood
in his veins.

The best single study in the English language on Nietzsche is by
Havelock Ellis. This writer hazards the just observation that there
was a touch of the “prig” in the philosopher, and that Wagner’s free
and easy manners often made him wince. “Your brother with his air
of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” Wagner said
to Frau Förster-Nietzsche, “one can always see what he is thinking;
sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them
more madly than ever.” And the motley crowd that was attracted to
Bayreuth filled the exclusive Nietzsche with horror. An aristocrat, a
promulgator of an aristocratic philosophy, writers on social science
very properly refuse to class this thinker among the leaders of the
anarchistic movement—Nietzsche loathed the promiscuous, the popular,
in a word, the mob. Wagner was Teutonic (his friend doubted his
Teutonism in a memorable passage); he was no longer Hellenic. And he
seemed to be going Romeward. It was all too much for the idealist
who broke away from his past; in reality, the attempt was made to
break with himself. Impending madness was preceded by distressing
melancholia.

He loved Wagner to the last, and previous to the tragic crisis, Lou
Salomé says that he went to Lucerne, and in Triebschen sat and wept
at his ineluctable fate. He even wrote after The Wagner Case such a
sentiment as this:—

“Here, while I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I lack the
word to express my gratitude for that which formed my deepest and my
heartiest solace. This beyond all doubt was the intimate communion
with Richard Wagner. I would give little for the rest of my human
relations; at no price would I cut out of my life the days of
Triebschen, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime inspirations,
of deep moments. I know not what others have gone through with
Wagner; our heaven was never traversed by a cloud.”

Was Wagner to blame? Wagner, harassed by a thousand importunings—his
gigantic Bayreuth scheme, his money troubles, his uncertain position
despite his first big success! Ellis believes, rightly enough, that
when Wagner realized Nietzsche was no longer his friend, “he dropped
him silently, as a workman drops a useless tool.” This seems cruelly
selfish; but Wagner had no time for unselfish moods, for fine-spun
theories of friendship. He was a realist. Life had made him one;
besides, was there not Ludwig of Bavaria to take the place of the
once gentle dreamer, now doubter and scorner? And Wagner was old
enough to recognize the value of money. No, the great composer is not
to be alone censured. Yet must we exclaim, Alas! poor Nietzsche!


II

What does Nietzsche preach? What is his central doctrine divested of
its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity,
and anti-everything else? Simply, a doctrine as old as the first
invertebrate organism which floated in torrid seas beneath a blazing
moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, selfhood. He is the
apostle of the _ego_, and he refuses to accept the system spinning
of the Teutonic spider philosophers of the day. He is a proclaimer
of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the
soul of theology.

From Heraclitus to Hobbes materialism has flowed, a sturdy
current, parallel with hundreds of more spiritual creeds. I say
“more spiritual creeds,” for the spiritualizing of what was once
contemptuously called dead, inorganic matter is being steadily
prosecuted by every man of science to-day, whether he be electrician,
biologist, or chemist. Nietzsche’s voice is raised against the
mystagogues, occultists, and reactionaries who, in the name of
religion and art, would put science once more under the ban of a
century ago. He is the strong pagan man who hates the weak and
ailing. He therefore hates the religion of the weak and oppressed. He
is an aristocrat in art, believing that there should be an art for
artists, and an art—an inferior art—for inferior intelligences. He
forgot that there is an art for the artist,—his own particular art,
and that into it none but the equally gifted may have an entrance.
And he forgot, too, that all great art is rooted in the soil of earth.

Nietzsche hates the music that is beloved of the world. Yet, after
the twentieth hearing of Carmen, he frantically asserts that Bizet
is a greater man than Wagner, that he is blither, possesses the
divine gayety, sparkle, and indescribable fascination of the Greeks!
From his letters we learn that as a joke he put up Bizet as a man of
straw to fight the Wagner idol. And a joke it is. But what would he
have said to the music of Richard Strauss?

He rejects with contempt pity,—that pity which is akin to love; and
therefore he hates Wagner, for in Wagner’s music is the note of
yearning love and pity sounded by a master hand. To Nietzsche George
Eliot’s

    Oh may I join the choir invisible
    Of those immortal dead who live again
    In minds made better by their presence: live
    In pulses stirred to generosity,
                          ... in scorn
    For miserable aims that end with self

would have been as silly as was the optimism of Leibnitz to
Schopenhauer. This Nietzsche was a terrible fellow, a very Berserker
in his mad rage against existing institutions. He used a battering
ram of rare dialectic skill, and crash go the religious, social, and
artistic fabrics reared ages since! But when the brilliant smoke
of his style clears away, we still see standing the same venerable
institutions. This tornadic philosopher does damage only to the
outlying structures. He lets in light on some dark and dank places.
He is a tonic for malaria, musical and religious; and there is value
even in his own fantastic Transvaluation of all Values. I fancy
that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been a man of physical resources,
he would have been a soldier hero. The late Anton Seidl once told
me that he knew the unlucky man when he was a Wagnerian. He was
slight of stature, evidently of delicate health, but in his eyes
burned the restless fire of genius. If that same energy could have
been transmuted into action, he might have been a sane, healthy
man to-day. In all this he was not unlike Stendhal, of whom Jules
Lemaître wrote:—

“A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his
incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too
strenuous analysis of life.

I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It
is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read
it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also
demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche
saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the
Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with
Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from
his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger
in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music,
divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner
and Wagnerian critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist
he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers.
It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but
its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long
as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself,
undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is
the noblest music of all.

Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself
for nearly a thousand years.”

“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and
Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been
introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of
intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish,
German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and
dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You
may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile
of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier
thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a
German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory
man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than
masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the
Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous.

Nietzsche is _par excellence_ the thinker for the artistic. If Wagner
was a painter, or a symphonist _manqué_, then Nietzsche was an artist
_manqué_. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant,
attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he
says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher.

“Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.”

“Rousseau, or return to nature _in impuris naturalibus_.”

“Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.”

“Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.”

“Kant, or _cant_, as an intelligent character.”

“Victor Hugo, or Pharos, in a sea of absurdity.”

“Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat.”

“Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.”

“John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.”

“The Goncourts, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer; music by
Offenbach.”

Nietzsche preached of the beauty and pride of the body. Of pride we
cannot have too much. It is the salt of personality. Golden-mouthed
Plato, in De Republica, makes outcry against the dullard who thinks
shame of his body. The human body is truly a tabernacle, and woe to
him that defileth it, says the wise man.

He once made a proposal to found a monastery for freethinkers. What
an abbot he would have been!

Did Nietzsche not declare, in the words of the Apostle Matthew (xvi.
26), slightly altered:—

“For what is a man profited if he shall gain his own soul and lose
the whole world?”

Consider his great opponent, Tolstoy, who preaches the doctrine
of non-resistance, of altruism, of a depressing socialism which
is saturated with the very Orientalism so despised by Nietzsche!
But then, Tolstoy does not play fair in the game. He has reached
the threescore and ten of Scriptures; he has led, by his own
acknowledgment, a life of self-indulgence; he has gambled and drank
deeply. His belly was his god. Then he ran the intellectual gamut of
dissipation. He worshipped at the shrines of false gods, wrote great,
gray, godless novels, won renown, family happiness, riches, love,
admiration, applause, and notoriety. So, having lived too happily,
he forthwith falls to railing at destiny, like the Englishman
Mr. Krehbiel tells us of in his Music and Manners. Quoting Haydn
he writes, “Mr. Brassey once cursed because he enjoyed too much
happiness in this world.” Tolstoy, having tasted of everything, has
damaged his palate. Man pleases him not, nor does woman. In every
book of his later, lonesome years he gives away the secret of life’s
illusion, like the mischievous rival of a conjuror. It is not fair to
the young ones who, with mouth agape, gaze at the cunning pictures
limned by that old arch-hypocrite, Nature. The young man who has not
had the courage to make a fool of himself some time in his career has
not lived. Robert Louis Stevenson said this, and he said it better.
Away with your cynics! Throw pessimism to the dogs! Let Tolstoy swear
that the inverted bowl of the firmament is full of ashes, full of
burnt-out stars; youth will see the bravery of the cosmical circus,
its streamers, its mad coursing through eternity. The only way to
help others is to help yourself!

So, despite his age, which is democratic, the aristocrat Nietzsche
caught its ears; in the teeth of a religious reaction he preached
rank atheism; and he opposed to altruism a selfless egotism. In a
word, all his tendencies were set against those of his time; yet he
has succeeded in attracting the attention of his contemporaries.
Brandes is right in declaring that in some secret way Nietzsche “must
have agreed with much of the tumult of modern thought.”

In his Gay Science,—a mockingly ironic title for such a sad
book,—Nietzsche wrote these sentences; as in a meteoric flare we
realize the sickness of his prophetic soul. He alludes to his idea of
Eternal Recurrence:—

  How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into
  thy most solitary solitude, and said to thee: “This life, as
  thou livest it now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live
  over again, and not once but innumerable times; and there will be
  nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure, and every
  thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the
  unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the
  same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight
  betwixt the trees, and this moment likewise and I myself. The
  eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with
  it, thou atom of dust.” Wouldest thou not cast thyself down, and
  with gnashing of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or hast
  thou ever experienced the tremendous moment in which thou wouldest
  answer him, “Thou art a god, and never heard I anything more
  divine”?

Frau Andreas-Salomé, whose book on the philosopher is interesting,
though disclaimed by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, adds this illuminating
commentary on Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence doctrine:—

  He struggled with it at first as with a fate from which there was
  no escape. Never can I forget the hours in which he first confided
  it to me as a secret, as something of whose verification and
  confirmation he had an unspeakable horror; he spoke of it only in
  a low voice and with every sign of the profoundest horror. And he
  suffered in truth so deeply in life that the certainty of life’s
  eternal recurrence could not but be for him a thing to shudder
  at. The quintessence of the doctrine of recurrence, the radiant
  apotheosis of life which Nietzsche afterwards taught, forms so
  profound a contrast to his own painful experiences of life that it
  impresses us as an uncanny mask.

And she further remarks: “Nietzsche contemplated the possibility
that the theory might be scientifically deduced by physics from the
doctrine of atoms.” And here we are almost back to the orthodox
belief in eternity. All thought moves circle-wise, and Nietzsche’s
ethical teaching is as old as Callicles in the Gorgias.

Nietzsche, then, is not such a revolutionary thinker. He is the
perfect type of the old Greek rhapsodist, the impassioned rhetor, who
with sonorous, beautiful phrases charmed and soothed his listeners as
he pursued his peripatetic way. Sometimes the sound of what he says
remains long after the memory of its sense has vanished. However, a
perfect art or philosophy, or a perfect world itself, might soon grow
monotonous. The ameliorating, if slightly hedonistic, philosophy of
the Cardinal in John Inglesant comes back in pleasing sequence:—

  There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma
  worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding
  on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty
  walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are
  moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the
  meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I
  have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary
  descant upon a thorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each
  performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance
  to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to
  him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true
  upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met,
  now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the
  melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought
  that this is life.

  To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his
  own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play
  is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that
  all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords
  and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so
  attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be
  incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle.




IV

LITERARY MEN WHO LOVED MUSIC

THE MUSICAL TASTE OF TURGÉNIEFF


I

Mr. Henry James, who is exquisitely aware of the presence of others,
has written of Iván Turgénieff with astonishing candor. In his
Partial Portraits a picture of the great, gentle Russian writer
is slowly built up by strokes like smoke. There is much of his
troubled melancholy, some of his humor, and, rare for Mr. James,
distinct allusions to Turgénieff’s attitude in the presence of the
American-born novelist’s work. Turgénieff cared little for criticism.
It pleased him to know that his friends loved him and read his books.
He did not read theirs; Mr. James admits he did not pretend to read
_his_, though the older man confessed to having found one of the
novels written _de main de maitre_. His heedlessness about himself
and his affairs is proverbial. He was robbed of 130,000 francs, “a
fairly large slice of his fortune,” he writes Flaubert, but has
blame for himself, not for the dishonest steward of his estates. Like
Flaubert, he was rich, very rich for a literary man, and like the
author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, he was continually giving, eternally
giving, said his Paris friends, indignant at the spectacle of both
men denuding themselves of more than their surplus income.

There is no one alive who could give us such intimate souvenirs of
Turgénieff as Madame Viardot-Garcia. He was the family friend, the
closest companion, of her husband; it was an undisturbed intimacy for
many years. His letters, the most eloquent, were written to Madame
Viardot-Garcia, and to both he opened his mind about music. He knew
Gounod, who often visited him and rolled about on his bearskin rug
when he was in the travail of composition. It was at Courtavenel,
the country place of the Viardots, that Gounod met Turgénieff. Their
liking was mutual.

Turgénieff knew the piano slightly, for he writes of his having
played duos of Beethoven and Mozart with a sister of Tolstoy. He
counsels, in a letter from Spasskoïé, Madame Viardot to work at her
composition. This gifted woman, singer, and pianist, admired by
Liszt, Heine, and half of Europe, occasionally found time to compose.
“And now set to work!” cries Turgénieff. “I have never admired and
preached work so much as I have since I have been doing nothing
myself; and yet look here, I give you my word of honor, that, if you
will begin to write sonatas, I will take up my literary work again.
‘Hand me the cinnamon and I’ll hand you the senna.’ A novel for a
sonata—does that suit you?”

In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre
countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She
will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze
fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone.
Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour
me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me
in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his
life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter
misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard
and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her
weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an
ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to
his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused
him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet,
the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent
in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr.
James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius,
poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to
revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one,
and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude.
To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his
behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as
unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his
career by certain of his contemporaries.

The friendship of Turgénieff and Flaubert was a beautiful episode
in the history of two literatures. Alphonse Daudet spoke of it:
“It was George Sand who married them. The boastful, rebellious,
quixotic Flaubert, with a voice like a guard’s trumpeter, with his
penetrating, ironical outlook, and the gait of a conquering Norman,
was undoubtedly the masculine half of this marriage of souls; but
who, in that other colossal being, with his flaxen brows, his great
unmodelled face, would have discovered the woman, that woman of
over-accentuated refinement whom Turgénieff has painted in his
books, that nervous, languid, passionate Russian, torpid as an
Oriental, tragic as a blind force in revolt? So true is it in the
tumult of the great human factory, souls often get into the wrong
covering—masculine souls into feminine bodies, feminine souls into
cyclopean frames.”

These were the days of the “Dinners of the Hissed Authors,” when
Taine, Catulle Mendès, de Heredia, Paul Alexis, Leon Hennique,
Philippe Burty, Leon Cladel, Huysmans, Zola, Turgénieff, the de
Goncourts, Flaubert, and de Maupassant gathered monthly and defined
new literary horizons. There was plenty of wit, satire, enthusiasm,
dreams, and theorizing.

Guy de Maupassant relates that “Turgénieff used to bury himself in
an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and
hesitating, yet giving to things he said an extraordinary charm and
interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence,
fixing his wide blue eyes, with their restless pupils, upon his
friend’s fine face, and answering in his sonorous voice, which came
like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul’s mustache of
his. Their conversation rarely touched upon the current affairs of
life, seldom wandered away from literary topics or literary history.
Turgénieff would often come laden with foreign books, and would
translate fluently poems by Goethe, Poushkin, or Swinburne.” He knew
English; he knew Italian, German, and French. He was crazy over
hunting—read his Memoirs of a Sportsman, miniature masterpieces—and
crossed the Channel after good game in England.

“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his
that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear
old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast
theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.”
And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary
performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his
own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle
screaming for _something_,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately
humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he
was always at _déjeuner_—that gout of his was not acquired on wind.
It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that
he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in
the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to
an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing
very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked
by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough
heard much good singing in her _salon_. The mistake is all the more
curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men
in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids
Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer
up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the
Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are
born onlookers.”

Rich as he was, but a charitable spendthrift, Turgénieff was not
sorry to inherit from his brother a legacy of 250,000 francs. It is a
notion of mine that the richer a novelist the better his art. Poverty
does not agree with certain geniuses. With composers who masquerade
in the theatres money is a necessity. Without it their art never
blows to a blossoming. Look at Wagner, at Gluck, for example, and
then on the other hand consider that wretched, grimy Beethoven in
mean Vienna lodgings, yelling as he composed in his deaf estate, the
water he spilt slowly filtering through the crazy seams of a crazy
man’s floor! He lived in an ideal land, where clean napery and the
pliant spine of the time-server were but encumbrances. Not so the
novel maker, the architect of prose philosophies like Schopenhauer’s
and Flaubert’s. Leisure, the leisure that feeds on a competence, is
a necessity for these latter. Schopenhauer knew it, and, practical
man, urged all philosophers to cultivate the wherewithal for
leisure—money; and Goethe in the last book of Wilhelm Meister sets
forth most admirably his idea of an artist’s abode. Dickens and
Thackeray, a great genius, a great artist, were forced to drive their
pens for bread and cheese. Both fell short of the perfection achieved
by Flaubert, Turgénieff, and Tolstoy, all three very wealthy men and
tardy producers. The rule holds good for Balzac. The haste that kills
all art was not thrust upon the other three by hunger, and we are the
richer. Your lyric poet, your symphonist, fattens spiritually on a
lean life, but their brethren should have a bank account.

Turgénieff did not care much for Sarah Bernhardt:—

  I could not know that my opinion on Sarah Bernhardt would become
  public property, and I am very sorry for it. But I am not in the
  habit of withdrawing my opinions, even when I have expressed them
  in a private and friendly conversation, and they are made public
  against my will. Yes, I consider M. A——’s criticism of her quite
  true and just. This woman is clever and skilful; she has her
  business at her fingers’ ends, is gifted with a charming voice and
  educated in a good school; but she has nothing natural about her,
  no artistic temperament whatever, and she tries to make up for
  this by Parisian license. She is eaten through and through with
  _chic_, _réclame_, and pose. She is monotonous, cold, and dry; in
  short, without a single spark of talent in the highest sense of
  the word. Her gait is that of a hen; she has no play of features;
  the movements of her hands are purposely angular in order to be
  piquant; the whole thing reeks of the boulevards, of Figaro, and
  patchouli. You see that, to my mind, M. A—— has been even too
  lenient. You quote Zola as an authority, although you always rebel
  against all authorities, so you must allow me to quote Augier, who
  once said to me: “Cette femme n’a aucun talent; on dit d’elle que
  c’est un paquet de nerfs—c’est un paquet de ficelles.” But, you
  will ask, Why then such a world-wide reputation? What do I care?
  I only speak my own feelings, and I am glad to find somebody who
  supports my view.

But these _ficelles_ are artistic to-day. Doubtless Turgénieff would
have been one of the first to recognize the unassuming realistic
talents of Duse. There is nothing more touching than his adjuration
to Tolstoy to forsake his half-cracked philosophy and return to
literature:—

  VERY DEAR LEON NIKOLAIEVITCH: It is a long time since I wrote
  to you. I was then, and I am now, on my deathbed. I cannot
  recover; there is no longer the least chance of it. I am writing
  to you expressly to tell you how happy I have been to be your
  contemporary, and to make you a last urgent prayer. My friend,
  return to literary work. This gift has come to you from there
  whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could
  know that you would listen to my prayer!... My friend, great writer
  of our Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know if this letter
  reaches you. I clasp you for the last time to my heart—you and all
  yours.... I can write no more.... I am tired.

Tolstoy, on his side, could never understand Turgénieff’s fear of
death. He said:—

  Some people wonder at Socrates who died and did not care to flee
  from prison. But is it not better to die consciously in fulfilment
  of one’s duty than unexpectedly from some stupid bacteria? And I
  have always been surprised that so clever a man as Turgénieff
  should bear himself as he did toward death. He was awfully afraid
  of death. Is it not even incomprehensible that he was not afraid
  to be afraid of death? And that darkness of reason was really
  astonishing in him! He and Prince D. D. Urusoff used to discuss
  religion, and Turgénieff used to dispute and dispute, and all of
  a sudden he would no longer be able to control himself, and would
  cover up his ears, and, pretending that he had forgotten Urusoff’s
  name, would shout, “I won’t listen any longer to that Prince
  Trubetzkoy.”

  And Tolstoy mimicked Turgénieff’s voice until one would have
  thought the man was there in person.

Turgénieff first met de Maupassant in 1876. “A door opened. A
giant came in—a giant with a silver head, as they would say in
a fairy tale.” Thus the younger describes the elder man. M.
Halperine-Kaminsky has set at rest the disquieting rumors of certain
alleged strictures upon his friends, said to have been made by
Turgénieff in letters to Sacher-Masoch. Daudet finally declared that
he did not believe their validity. “Turgénieff was not a hypocrite,”
he wrote to Kaminsky. The Slavic temperament is difficult of
decipherment. Especially difficult was Turgénieff. The shining and
clear surfaces of his art covered depths undreamed of by his Parisian
friends. Mr. James speaks of his reservations and discriminations and
“above all the great back garden of his Slav imagination and his
Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the
grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany
him.” M. Renan voices it better in his speech over the dead body of
the great Russian. “Turgénieff,” Mr. James translates it, “received
by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift
which is noble beyond all others. He was born essentially impersonal.
His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had
been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of
a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years;
infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths
of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a
whole race; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries,
speechless, came through him to life and utterance.” This one, said
to be lacking in the core of patriotism, could write:—

“In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my
native land, thou alone art my support and my staff. Oh, great,
powerful, Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee
how should not man despair at the sight of what is going on at home?
But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to
great people.”

Prince Krapotkin in his Autobiography of a Revolutionist thus
describes Turgénieff:—

  His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head
  covered with soft and thick gray hair, he was certainly beautiful;
  his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid of a touch of humor,
  and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence
  of affectation which are characteristic of all the best Russian
  writers. His fine head revealed a formidable development of brain
  power, and when he died, and Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the
  surgeon), weighed his brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest
  brain then known—that of Cuvier—reaching something over two
  thousand grammes, that they would not trust to their scales, but
  got new ones, to repeat the weighing. His talk was especially
  remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to
  develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a
  master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a
  scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out
  of one of his novels.

  Of all novel writers of our century, Turgénieff has certainly
  attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds
  to the Russian ear like music—music as deep as that of Beethoven.

Touching on the objections raised by the Nihilists as to the truth of
the portrait of Bazaroff, Prince Krapotkin writes:—

  The principal novels—the series of Dmitri Rudin, A Nobleman’s Nest,
  On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil—represent
  the leading “history making” types of the educated classes of
  Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched
  with a fulness of philosophical conception and humanitarian
  understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in
  any other literature. Yet Fathers and Sons—a novel which he
  rightly considered his profoundest work—was received by the young
  people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared that the
  Nihilist Bazaroff was by no means a true representation of his
  class; many described him even as a caricature upon nihilism.
  This misunderstanding deeply affected Turgénieff, and, although
  a reconciliation between him and the young generation took place
  later on, at St. Petersburg, after he had written Virgin Soil, the
  wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.

  He knew from Lavroff that I was a devoted admirer of his writings;
  and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to
  Antokolsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazaroff.
  I frankly replied, “Bazaroff is an admirable painting of the
  nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you
  did your other heroes!” “No, I loved him, intensely loved him,”
  Turgénieff replied, with an unexpected vigor. “Wait; when we get
  home I will show you my diary, in which I noted how I wept when I
  had ended the novel with Bazaroff’s death.” Turgénieff certainly
  loved the intellectual aspect of Bazaroff. He so identified himself
  with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary
  in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazaroff’s point
  of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him.
  In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the
  history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one
  or the other of these characters. “Analysis first of all, and
  egotism, and therefore no faith; an egotist cannot even believe in
  himself;” so he characterized Hamlet. “Therefore he is a sceptic,
  and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote who fights
  against windmills, and takes a barber’s plate for the magic helm of
  Mambrin (who of us has never made the same mistake?) is a leader
  of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking
  no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions,
  march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which
  they alone may see. They search, they fall, but they rise again,
  and find it—and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic,
  and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates
  it; Evil and deceit are his enemies; and his scepticism is not
  indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume
  his will.”

  These thoughts of Turgénieff give, I think, the true key for
  understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several
  of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved
  Hamlet and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazaroff. He
  represented his superiority well, but he could not surround him
  with that tender, poetical love to a sick friend which he bestowed
  on his heroes when they approached the Hamlet type. It would have
  been out of place.

Although suffering from a cancer in the spinal cord, Turgénieff wrote
to Alexander III, begging him to give Russia a constitution—this was
in the autumn of 1881—but of course to no purpose. The man whose
books helped to bring about the emancipation of the serfs died in
exile, not even a prophet in the literature of his own country. Yet,
because of their poets and prose masters Russia will one day be free,
and then Turgénieff’s name will be writ in golden letters as the
artist, the patriot.


II

In 1868 he writes from Baden to Ambroise Thomas about a sketch made
by Viardot for the libretto of an opera. Nothing, however, came of
the matter. But only in the new letters translated by Rosa Newmarch,
do we catch Turgénieff’s opinion of the neo-Russian school of music.
For the most part it is rather a contemptuous opinion and not
pleasant reading for his contemporaries. He hated humbug, and the cry
of young Russia, with its hatred of the sources whence it derived
its inspiration, angered the writer. In correspondence with Vladimir
Vassilievich Stassov we catch glimpses of the tempest brewing in the
Slavic _samovar_.

“Have faith in your nationality,” preaches Stassov, “and you shall
have works also.” “Russian individuality!” cries the contemptuous
voice of Turgénieff. “What humbug, what blindness and crass
ignorance, what willful disregard of all that Europe has done!”

He loved Schumann, naturally enough, this Schumann, himself a
dreamer of dreams. But Balakirew, Glinka, “a rough diamond,” and the
rest he would not have. He believed in the genius of the sculptor
Antokolsky and in Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. I wonder if
Tschaïkowsky and Turgénieff ever met? Probably they did, although
I can find no reference in the correspondence. He listened to
Dargomijsky, to Cui, to Moussorgsky, but could find nothing but
“Slavonic barbarism” and “undisguised Nihilism.” He loved the playing
of Anton Rubinstein, but his operas—! He writes Stassov in 1872:—

  You are quite wrong in fancying that I “dislike” Glinka: _he_ was a
  very great and original man. But come, now, it is quite different
  with the others—with your M. Dargomijsky and his Stone Guest. It
  will always remain one of the greatest mysteries of my life how
  such intelligent people as you and Cui, for example, can possibly
  find in these limp, colorless, feeble,—I beg your pardon,—senile
  recitatives, interwoven now and then with a few howls, to lend
  color and imagination—how you can find in this feeble piping
  not only music, but a new, genial, and epoch-making music. Can
  it be unconscious patriotism, I wonder? I confess that, except
  a sacrilegious attempt on one of Poushkin’s best poems, I find
  nothing in it. And now cut off my head, if you like!

  Of all these young Russian musicians, only two have decided
  talent—Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. All the rest, for what
  they are worth, may be put in a sack and thrown into the water!
  Not, of course, as men—as men they are charming—but as artists. The
  Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses XXIX is not more utterly forgotten than
  these men will be fifteen or twenty years hence. This is my one
  consolation.

This prophecy is accomplished. A new generation has arisen in Russia.

Speaking of some piano pieces of Stcherbatchev he confesses to
Stassov:—

  Stcherbatchev, as a man, produces an unfavorable impression; but
  this need not imply that he is destitute of talent, and I should be
  very much obliged to you if you would send me his compositions as
  soon as they appear. By the way, you have no ground for fancying
  that Rubinstein will treat them with contempt; to me, at least,
  he spoke of Stcherbatchev as a very talented young man.... The
  day before yesterday I received a parcel containing two copies
  of the Zigzags. I have listened with the utmost attention to two
  consecutive performances of them, and the interpretation was
  excellent. To my great regret I have not been able to discover in
  them the merits about which you wrote to me. I cannot say whether
  in time original talent will show itself in Stcherbatchev, but
  at present I can see nothing in him but the “clamor of captive
  thoughts.” All this has been written under the influence of
  Schumann’s Carnaval, with a mixture of Liszt’s bizarreries dragged
  in without motive. It is altogether lacking in ideas; is tedious,
  strained, and wanting in life. The first page pleased me most; the
  theme is commonplace, but the working out is interesting.

  For this you may chop off my head, if you please. I thank you, all
  the same, for your kindness in sending the music....

  In short, pray believe that if I find Mozart’s Don Juan a work of
  genius, and Dargomijsky’s Don Juan formless and absurd, it is not
  because Mozart is an authority and others think so, or because
  Dargomijsky is unknown outside his little circle, but simply
  because Mozart pleases me, and Dargomijsky does not. Neither do the
  Zigzags please me. That is the end of the matter!...

  So not for one moment do I doubt the worthlessness (to my mind) of
  Maximov’s pictures, I at once placed him in the same category as
  your favorites, MM. Dargomijsky, Stcherbatchev, Repin, and _tutti
  quanti_; all those half-baked geniuses filled with spiced stuffing
  in which you keep detecting the real essence.

He also speaks casually of Saint-Saëns and his wife.

Stassov sums up the matter this way: “Turgénieff, a great writer,
was, as might be expected from a Russian, realistic and sincere
in his own novels and tales; but in his tastes and views of art
his cosmopolitanism made him the enemy of realism and sincerity in
others. In such ideas and in such unaccountable prejudices he elected
to spend his whole life.”

Which proves that the Russian critic was ultra-Russian in his
view of Turgénieff. The new Russians are descendants of Chopin
and Schumann and again Chopin. Few have attained to largeness
of utterance, perhaps Tschaïkowsky alone. Men like Borodine
and Glazanouw over-accent their peculiarities, and much of
their music—when it is not sheer imitation—is but rude art.
Rimsky-Korsakoff has fallen into the rut of cosmopolitanism, as did
Rubinstein, indulging in supersubtleties of orchestral painting, and
has never conceived an original idea. Turgénieff was right then,
this man who loved Russia, loved her faults and dared to catalogue
them in his beautiful novels. His art in its finish reminds one of
Chopin’s; there is vaporous melancholy, the vague sighing for days
that have vanished and the dumb resignation,—the resignation of the
Slav peoples. But his idealism was robuster than Chopin’s and his
execution of character hardier. Once at Flaubert’s dinner table
the talk turned on love. De Goncourt, I have forgotten which one,
told Turgénieff that he was “saturated with femininity.” The other
answered:—

  With me, neither books nor anything whatever in the world could
  take the place of woman. How can I make that plain to you? I
  find it is only love which produces a certain expansion of the
  being, that nothing else gives ... eh? Listen! When I was quite
  a young man there was a miller’s girl in the neighborhood of St.
  Petersburg, whom I used to see when out hunting. She was charming,
  very fair, with a flash of the eye rather common among us. She
  would accept nothing from me. But one day she said to me, “You must
  give me a present.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “Bring me some scented soap from St. Petersburg.”

  I brought her the soap. She took it, disappeared, came back
  blushing, and murmured, offering me her hands, delicately scented:—

  “Kiss my hands—as you kiss the hands of ladies in drawing-rooms at
  St. Petersburg.”

  I threw myself on my knees—and you know, _that was the finest
  moment of my life_.

Like Chopin and Tschaïkowsky, Turgénieff was all love.


BALZAC AS MUSIC CRITIC

While I think that George Moore’s comparative estimate of Shakespeare
and Balzac is a trifle more Celtic than critical, yet there can
be no denial made to the assertion that Balzac stands next to
Shakespeare—if not exactly on his level—in his astonishing fecundity
of imagination. “A monstrous debauch of the imagination,” Henley
called the Human Comedy; but surely no more of a debauch than
the Plays. All abnormal productivity of the intellect gives this
impression. Look at Rabelais. There are over two thousand figures in
the Human Comedy, all clearly characterized, no two alike; and every
man and woman in the work you might meet in a day’s stroll about
Paris.

Monstrous, yes; but so is Beethoven, so is Michael Angelo monstrous.
All genius has something monstrous in it—something of what Nietzsche
so happily called the over man.

Balzac’s Gambara and Massimilla Doni—what genius he had for
selecting names which outwardly and inwardly fitted his character!
After reading the former I felt almost tempted into echoing Mr.
Moore’s extravagant assertion. Balzac is indeed a magician and not
a novelist. What puts him apart from other novelists, even from
his technical superior, Flaubert, is his faculty of vision. He is
a _Seer_, not a novelist. Any motive he touched, whether usury
or music-erotics or patriotism, he vivified with his prophetic
imagination. He saw his theme concretely; he saw its origins, its
roots in the dead past; and plunging his eyes into the future he saw
its ghost, its spiritual aura, its ultimate evolution. Such a man as
Balzac might have been a second Bonaparte, a second Spencer. He had
science, and he had imagination; and he preferred to be the social
historian of the nineteenth century, the greatest romancer that ever
lived, and a profound philosopher besides. All modern novelists
nest in his books, draw nourishment from them, suck in their very
souls from his vast fund of spirituality. The difference between
such a giant as Balzac and such a novelist as Thackeray is that the
latter draws delightful and artistic pictures of manners; but never
turns a soul inside out for us. The best way to describe Balzac is
to enumerate the negatives of his contemporaries and successors.
All they lacked and lack he had in such amazing prodigality that
comparison is not only impossible, it is brutal.

Balzac and music! Balzac and women! Balzac and money! Balzac and
politics! Or,—Balzac and any subject! The encyclopædic knowledge,
extraordinary sympathy and powers of expression—do they not all
fairly drench every line the man wrote? He could analyze the art of
painting and forsee its future affinities for impressionism—read The
Unknown Masterpiece—just as in Gambara he divined Berlioz, Wagner,
and Richard Strauss. I am quite sure that Wagner read Balzac. Gambara
was finished June, 1837, and there are things in it that could only
have been written about Berlioz. The key to the book, however, is
passion, not any particular personality. Balzac always searched for
the master passion in men and women’s lives. Given the clew-note, he
developed the theme into symphonic proportions. It is Andrea’s love
of intrigue that leads him to follow the beautiful Marianna, wife
of the composer Gambara,—a fantastic creation worthy of Hoffmann.
He is an Italian in Paris, who wrote a mass for the anniversary of
Beethoven’s death, and also an opera—Mahomet. But that opera! Has
such a score ever been dreamed of by any one except Richard Strauss?
Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an
Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most
delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in
its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science
and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of
music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not
merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has
the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us
defined pleasures. Mahomet is a trilogy, the libretto by Gambara
himself—mark this familiar detail. It contained The Martyrs, Mahomet,
and Jerusalem Delivered,—the God of the West, the God of the East,
and the struggles of religions around a tomb. In this immense frame,
philosophy, patriotism, racial antagonisms, love, the magic of
ancient Sabianism and Oriental poetry of the Jewish—culminating in
the Arabian—are all displayed. As Gambara says, “Ah! to be a great
musician, it is necessary also to be very learned. Without knowledge,
no local color, no ideas in the music.” This irresistibly reminds one
of a phrase from Wagner’s notebook.

The story of the opera—too long to set down here—as told by Gambara,
is wonderful. It has the ring of an analytical programme to some
new-fangled and heretical symphonic poem. Here is the curious medley
of psychology, musical references, history, stage directions,
cries of hysteria, and much clotted egotism. There is the clash
of character, the shock of events; and it is well to note such a
phrase as this: “The dark and gloomy color of this finale [Act I]
is varied by the motives of the three women who predict to Mahomet
his triumph, and whose phrases will be found developed in the third
act, in the scene where Mahomet tastes the delights of his grandeur.”
Does this not forestall Wagner’s Ring? or did Balzac really find the
entire idea in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr? Is not Kapellmeister Kreisler
the first of his line? Now, while there seems to be far too much
praying in this drama of soul and action, it is not such a farrago
as it appears at first reading. I imagine that Balzac knew little
of the technics of music; yet he guessed matters with astonishing
perspicacity. His characterization of the megalomaniacal Mahomet,
and his epileptic grandeurs would do as a portrait of most founders
of new religions. Balzac had Voltaire to draw upon; but he makes the
epilepsy a big motive in Mahomet’s life,—as it is in the lives of
the majority of religious geniuses and fanatics, from Buddha to the
newest faith-curing healer.

And how was this extraordinary music and libretto received by
Gambara’s wife, her admirer, and the Italian cook? “There was
not the appearance of a poetical or musical idea in the stunning
cacophony which smote the ears: the principles of harmony, the
first rules of composition, were totally foreign to this shapeless
creation. Instead of music, learnedly connected, which Gambara
described, his fingers produced a succession of fifths, sevenths,
octaves, major thirds, and steps from fourth without sixth to the
bass, a combination of discordant sounds thrown at hazard which
seemed to combine to torture the least delicate ear.” I am positive,
nevertheless, that it must have been great, wonderful, new music.

As the strange discords “howled beneath his fingers,” Gambara, we
are told, almost fainted with intoxicating joy. Furthermore, he
had a raucous voice,—the true voice of a composer. “He stamped,
panted, yelled; his fingers equalled in rapidity the forked head of
a serpent; finally, at the last howl of the piano, he threw himself
backward, and let his head fall upon the back of his arm-chair.”

Poor Gambara! poor Kapellmeister Kreisler! And how much it all sounds
like the early stories told of Richard Wagner trying to express on
the treble keyboard his gigantic dreams, his tonal epics: and for
such supercilious men and critics as Mendelssohn, Hiller, Meyerbeer,
Berlioz, and Schumann!

Signor Giardini, the Italian cook in Gambara, stands for a portrait
of the true musical Philistine; he has a pretty taste in music, but
melody, or what he conceives to be melody, is his shibboleth. Andrea
Marcosini, a nobleman in pursuit of Gambara’s wife, and a musical
dilettante, finds Giardini a gabbling boaster. “Yes, your excellency,
in less than a quarter of an hour you will know what kind of a man I
am. I have introduced into the Italian kitchen refinements that will
surprise you. I am a Neapolitan,—that is to say, a born cook. But
what good is instinct without science? Science? I have passed thirty
years in acquiring it, and see what it has brought me to. My history
is that of all men of talent. My experiments and tests have ruined
three restaurants established successfully at Naples, Parma, and
Rome.”

He keeps a little place where Italian refugees and men who have
failed in the black, weltering symphony of Parisian life gather
and feed at dusk. It is a queer, interesting crew. Here is a poor
composer—not Gambara—of romances. “You see what a florid complexion,
what self-satisfaction, how little there is in his features, so well
disposed for romance. He who accompanies him is Gigelmi.” The latter
is a deaf conductor of orchestra. Then there is Ottoboni, a political
refugee—a nice, clean old gentleman, but considered dangerous by
the Italian government. A journalist is discovered at the table,
the poorest of the lot. He tells the truth about the theatrical
performances, hence writes for an obscure journal and is miserably
paid. Enter Gambara. He is bald, about forty, a man of refinement,
with brains,—a sufferer in a word. Though his dress was free from
oddity, the composer’s appearance was not lacking in nobility. A
conversation follows, merging into a debate, modulating angrily into
a furious discussion about art. It is wonderfully executed.

The composer of romances has written a mass for the anniversary of
Beethoven’s death. He asks the count, with assumed modesty, if he
will not attend the performance. “Thank you,” responds Andrea. “I do
not feel myself endowed with the organs necessary to the appreciation
of French singing; but if you were dead, monsieur, and Beethoven had
written the mass, I should not fail to hear it.” It may be observed
that this epigram has been remembered by several generations since
Balzac. Von Büllow is credited with it. Behold the original in all
its pristine glory! The deaf orchestra conductor also has his say:
“Music exists independently of execution. In opening Beethoven’s
symphony in C minor a musical man is soon translated into the world
of fancy upon the golden wings of the theme in G natural, repeated
in E by the horns. He sees a whole nature by turns illuminated by
dazzling sheafs of light, shadowed by clouds of melancholy, cheered
by divine song.” It is just possible that some one told Balzac of the
indeterminate tonality at the opening of the Fifth Symphony, though
he gets his scoring mixed.

“Beethoven is surpassed by the new school,” said the writer of
romances, disdainfully. “He is not yet understood,” answered
the count; “how can he be surpassed? Beethoven has extended the
boundaries of instrumental music, and no one has followed him in his
flight.” Gambara dissented by a movement of the head. “His works
are especially remarkable for the simplicity of the plan, and for
the manner in which this plan is followed out. With the majority of
composers the orchestral parts, wild and disorderly, combine only for
momentary effect; they do not always coöperate by the regularity of
their progress to the effect of a piece as a whole. With Beethoven
the effects are, so to speak, distributed in advance.” This is not
bad criticism for a writer of fiction. Think of the banalities
perpetrated about the same time by Henri Beyle, Stendhal, otherwise a
master of psychology.

Then the Count Andrea proceeds to demolish the reputation of
Rossini by comparing the “capering, musical chit-chat, gossipy,
perfumed” school of the Italian master to Beethoven. “Long
live German music!—when it can sing,” he adds _sotto voce_. Of
course there is a lively row, the host having much to say. Later
Gambara shows Andrea his Panharmonicon, an instrument which is
to replace an entire orchestra. He plays upon it. They are all
enchanted. Every instrument is represented. The total impression
is overwhelming. Gambara sang to its accompaniment—in which the
magic execution of Paganini and Liszt was revealed—the adieus of
Khadijeh, Mahomet’s first wife. “Who could have dictated to you such
chants?” demanded the count. “The spirit,” replied Gambara; “when
he appears, everything seems to me on fire. I see melodies face
to face, beautiful and fresh, colored like flowers; they radiate,
they resound, and I listen, but an infinite time is required to
reproduce them.” It is a pity this man drank so much. There follows
an admirable exposition of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable too long
for transcription. In the end comes ruin. Gambara’s wife, tiring of
his habits, his slow progress toward fame, leaves him for Andrea.
Abandoned, Gambara falls into disgrace, into dire poverty. The
Panharmonicon is sold by the sheriff and his scores sold for waste
paper. “On the day following the sale the scores had enveloped at
the Halle butter, fish, and fruits. Thus three great operas of which
this poor man spoke, but which a former Neapolitan cook, now a simple
huckster, said were a heap of nonsense, had been disseminated in
Paris, and devoured by the baskets of retailers.” Worse remained.
After years Marianna, the runaway wife, returns, lean, dirty, old,
and withered. Gambara receives her with tired, faithful arms.
Together they sing duets, with guitar accompaniment, on dusty
boulevards after dark. Marianna makes Gambara drink cheap brandy so
that he will play well. He gives bits from his half-forgotten operas.
A duchess asks: “Where do you get this music?” “From the opera of
Mahomet,” replied Marianna; “Rossini has composed a Mahomet II,” and
the other remarks:—

“What a pity that they will not give us at the Italiens the operas
of Rossini with which we are unacquainted! for this certainly is
beautiful music.” Gambara smiled! Thus ends the career of a great
composer. Gambara knew his failings. “We are victims of our own
superiority. My music is fine; but, when music passes from sensation
to thought, it can have for auditors only people of genius, for they
alone have the power to develop it.” Here is consolation for Richard
Strauss!

Massimilla Doni is dedicated to Jacques Strunz, at one time a music
critic in Paris. This dedication, charmingly indited, as are all
of Balzac’s, acknowledges the author’s indebtedness to the critic.
Massimilla Doni is more violent and less credible than Gambara. The
chief character is a musical degenerate, a morbid nobleman whose
solitary pleasure in life is to hear two tones in perfect concord.
This musical Marquis de Sade is described as follows: “This man, who
is 118 years old on the registers of vice and forty-seven according
to the records of the church, has but one last means of enjoyment
on earth that is capable of arousing in him a sense of life. Yes,
all the chords are broken, everything is a ruin or a tattered rag;
the mind, the intelligence, the heart, the nerves, all that produces
an impulse in man, that gives him a glimpse of heaven through desire
or the fire of pleasure, depends not so much upon music as upon one
of the innumerable effects, a perfect harmony between two voices, or
between one voice and the first string of his violin.”

Certainly this evil-minded person would not care for Wagner. He is
attached to a beautiful Venetian singer, Clara Tinti. It is she who
tells of this horrid Duke Cataneo:—

  The old monkey sits on my knee and takes his violin; he plays well
  enough, he produces sounds with it; I try to imitate them, and when
  the longed-for moment arrives, and it is impossible to distinguish
  the note of the violin from the note that issues from my windpipe,
  then the old fellow is in ecstasy; his dead eyes emit their last
  flames, he is deliriously happy, and rolls on the floor like a
  drunken man. That is why he pays Genovese so handsomely. Genovese
  is the only tenor whose voice sometimes coincides exactly with
  mine. Either we do really approach that point once or twice in an
  evening, or the duke imagines it; and for this imaginary pleasure
  he has engaged Genovese; Genovese belongs to him. No operatic
  manager can engage the singer to sing without me, or me without
  him. The duke educated me to gratify this whim, and I owe to him
  my talent, my beauty, my fortune. He will die in some spasm caused
  by a perfect accord. The sense of hearing is the only one that has
  survived in the shipwreck of his faculties—that is the thread by
  which he clings to life.

This is a lovely study of a melomaniac, is it not? A man whose
sole passion mounts to his ears; who when he hears an accord is
vertiginously possessed like a feline over a bunch of catnip. As
a foil to this delirious duke there is a cooler headed fanatic of
music, named Capraja. He is a sort of Diogenes—never looks at women
and lives on a few hundreds a year, though a rich man. “Half Turk,
half Venetian, he was short, coarse looking, and stout. He had the
pointed nose of a doge; the satirical glance of an inquisitor; a
discreet, albeit a smiling mouth.” For him the decorative is the only
element in music worth mentioning. He goes to the opera every night
of his life. Hear him:—

  Genovese will rise very high. I am not sure whether he understands
  the true significance of music, or acts simply by instinct, but he
  is the first singer with whom I have ever been fully satisfied. I
  shall not die without hearing _roulades_ executed as I have often
  heard them in my dreams, when on waking it seemed to me that I
  could see the notes flying through the air. The _roulade_ is the
  highest expression of art. It is the arabesque which adorns the
  most beautiful room in the building—a little less, and there is
  nothing; a little more, and all is confused. Intrusted with the
  mission of awakening in your soul a thousand sleeping ideas,
  it rustles through space, sowing in the air seeds which, being
  gathered up by the ear, germinate in the heart. Believe me;
  Raphael, when painting his Saint Cecilia, gave music precedence
  over poetry. He was right. Music appeals to the heart, while
  written words appeal only to the intelligence. Music communicates
  its ideas instantly, after the manner of perfumes. The singer’s
  voice strikes not the thought, but the elements of thought,
  and sets in motion the very essence of our sensations. It is a
  deplorable fact that the common herd has compelled musicians to
  adapt their measures to words, to artificial interests; but it is
  true that otherwise they would not be understood by the multitude.
  The _roulade_, therefore, is the only point left for the friends
  of pure music, the lovers of art in its nakedness, to cling to.
  To-night as I listened to that last _cavatina_, I imagined that
  I had received an invitation from a lovely girl who, by a single
  glance, restored my youth! The enchantress placed a crown on my
  head and led me to the ivory gate through which we enter the
  mysterious land of Reverie. I owe it to Genovese that I was able
  to lay aside my old envelope for a few moments, brief as measured
  by watches, but very long as measured by sensations. During a
  springtime, balmy with the breath of roses, I was young and beloved!

“You are mistaken, _caro_ Capraja,” said the duke. “There is a power
in music more magical in its effects than that of the _roulade_.”
“What is it?” queried Capraja. “The perfect accord of two voices,
or of one voice and a violin, which is the instrument whose tone
approaches the human voice most nearly.” Then follows a rhapsodic
word duel between the old amateurs, each contending for his favorite
form. And is it not, though purposely exaggerated, the same battle
that is being fought to this very day between the formalists and
sensationalists? Some of us adore absolute music and decry the
sensualities of the music-drama. The war between the _roulade_ and
the accord will never end. “Genovese’s voice seizes the very fibres,”
cries Capraja. “And La Tinti’s attacks the blood,” rejoins the duke.
Then follows a remarkable descriptive analysis of Rossini’s Moses
in Egypt, by the wealthy and beautiful Duchess Cataneo, otherwise
Massimilla Doni. It is cleverly done. The picture of the rising
sun in the score in the key of C proves Balzac a poet as well as
a musician. The prayer, so famous because of Thalberg’s piano
transcription, is also described, and at the end this opera—better
known to us as an oratorio—is pronounced superior to Don Giovanni!!
Balzac, Balzac!

There is a realistic account of a small riot in the opera house
because Genovese, the tenor, sings out of tune. The Duke Cataneo
rages monstrously, Capraja is furious. Both tone-voluptuaries are
deprived of their accords and _roulades_. It turns out that the
tenor is in love with the soprano, and once away from her presence
proves his art by singing the air, Ombra adorata, by Crescentini.
This he does at midnight on the Piazzetta, Venice. The Venetian
scene setting is lovely. Genovese sings his sweetest. His listeners
are rapt to paradise, but are tumbled earthwards when he asks in
injured accents, “Am I a poor singer?” Listen to Balzac’s comments
upon that phenomenon called a tenor singer: “One and all regretted
that the instrument was not a celestial thing. Was that angelic music
attributable solely to a feeling of wounded self-esteem? The singer
felt nothing, he was no more thinking of the religious sentiments,
the divine images which he created in their hearts, than the violin
knows what Paganini makes it say. They had all fancied that they saw
Venice raising her shroud and singing herself, yet it was simply a
matter of a tenor’s _fiasco_.” Most operatic music is.

The theory of the _roulade_ is further explained:—

  Capraja is intimate with a musician from Cremona who lives in
  the Capello palace; this musician believes that sound encounters
  within us a substance analogous to that which is engendered by
  the phenomena of light, and which produces ideas in us. According
  to him man has keys within, which sounds affect, and which
  correspond to our nerve centres from which our sensations and
  ideas spring. Capraja, who looks upon the arts as a collection
  of the means whereby man can bring external nature into harmony
  with a mysterious internal nature, which he calls an inward life,
  has adopted the idea of this instrument maker, who is at this
  moment composing an opera. Imagine a sublime creation in which
  the marvels of visible creation are reproduced with immeasurable
  grandeur, lightness, rapidity, and breadth, in which the sensations
  are infinite, and to which certain privileged natures, endowed
  with a divine power, can penetrate—then you will have an idea
  of the ecstatic delights of which Cataneo and Capraja, poets in
  their own eyes only, discoursed so earnestly. But it is true also
  that as soon as a man, in the sphere of moral nature, oversteps
  the limits within which plastic works are produced by the process
  of imitation, to enter into the kingdom, wholly spiritual, of
  abstractions, where everything is viewed in its essence and in
  the omnipotence of results, that man is no longer understood by
  ordinary intellects.

The foregoing paragraph, rather inflated and tortuous in style, was
thoroughly disliked by the great critic Sainte-Beuve, who never would
recognize the great genius of Balzac, the romantic rather than the
realist in this book. The composer referred to must be Gambara, for
Massimilla Doni, after the death of the Duke of Cataneo, weds young
Varese and assists the unfortunate Gambara in Paris. Massimilla Doni
was finished May 25, 1839. Its concluding paragraph is a masterpiece
of irony. After the love of Varese and Massimilla came the usual
anti-climax. Balzac writes, in a passage of unexampled splendor:
“The peris, nymphs, fairies, sylphs of the olden time, the muses of
Greece, the marble Virgins of the Certosa of Pavia, the Day and
Night of Michael Angelo, the little angels that Bellini first drew at
the foot of church paintings, and to whom Raphael gave such divine
form at the foot of the Vierge au donataire, and of the Madonna
freezing at Dresden; Orcagna’s captivating maidens in the Church
of Or San Michele at Florence, the heavenly choirs on the tomb of
St. Sebald at Nuremberg, several Virgins in the Duomo at Milan, the
hordes of a hundred Gothic cathedrals, the whole nation of figures
who ruin their shapes to come to you, O all-embracing artists—all
these angelic incorporeal maidens rushed to Massimilla’s bed and wept
there.”

Richard Wagner might have been a Gambara; and mark how Balzac treats
the vibratory theory of sound, when it was practically unknown.
Where did he gather his wisdom? Another story of his, hitherto
untranslated, Sarrasin, will not bear recounting. Its psychology is
morbid; yet it is stamped with probability. The great male soprano
Farinelli could have been the hero. Nevertheless, the tale is not a
pleasant one. George Moore eloquently describes how, in chase of the
exotic, he pursued certain books, like a pike after minnows, along
the quays of Paris. And like a pike he rudely knocked his nose one
day against the bottom. The real lover of Balzac, pike-like, accepts
Sarrasin, just as he accepts Seraphita. They are many octaves apart,
yet both sound a distinct note in the scale of this great human
symphony. However, Sarrasin is but semi-musical, so need not be
discussed here.

“O mighty poet! Thy works are not as other men’s, simply and merely
great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like
the sun, the sea, the stars, and the flowers; like frost and snow,
rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with
entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith
that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless
or inert; that the further we press in our discoveries, the more we
shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the
careless eye had seen nothing but accident!”

Thomas De Quincey, master of the sonorous singing word, wrote this—he
meant Shakespeare. It will also fit Balzac. And I know of no other
name except Balzac’s, that I dare bracket with Shakespeare’s except
Beethoven’s.


ALPHONSE DAUDET

“The entire work of Balzac pulsates with a fever of discovery and of
impromptu.” It was Alphonse Daudet, the little David of the south,
with “the head of an Arabian Christ,” who wrote that sentence, a
sentence that might be aptly fitted to his own case. Daudet loved
Balzac, loved Beethoven, and—this may be a surprise for some—loved
Wagner, knew Wagner. Why not? Style for him was a question of
intensity, and what is Wagner if not intense? And Daudet was no mean
critic. He could recognize the unchanging _moi_ of Hugo, and the
miraculous gift of transforming himself that gave to Balzac the power
of multitudinous creation. He could speak of Georges Rodenbach as
“the most exquisite and refined of poets and prose writers, moist
and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a writer whose sentence has the
tender effect of belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of
reliquaries and stained glass windows.” Friedrich Nietzsche was “that
admirable writer with a surprising power for destruction”; while in
Ibsen’s Wild Duck he found “the india-rubber laugh, the laugh of
Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet.” The reading of Dostoïevsky’s
Crime and Punishment was a “crisis of his mind”; and for Tolstoy he
always entertained a warm admiration. After Turgénieff died some
alleged souvenirs of his were published and gave Daudet exquisite
unhappiness, for he had loved the man and extolled the artist. M.
Halperine-Kaminsky cleared up the mystery by proving that Turgénieff
had never written the offensive paragraphs. They were really not
of serious import, consisting of several free criticisms about the
realistic group to which Daudet belonged. As I remember, Turgénieff
is reported to have said that much of the work of Daudet, the de
Goncourts, Zola, and a few others smelt of the lamp. Yet this simple
phrase caused Daudet pain, for he prided himself on his spontaneity
of style, his freedom from use of the file. Possibly, Turgénieff—and
this is pure conjecture on my part—knew of Daudet’s opinions touching
upon what he called “Russian pity, which is limited to criminals and
low women.” He named it a “sentimental monstrosity,” and for that
reason depreciated the “rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations
of the Russian Dickens”—Dostoïevsky.

But Alphonse Daudet and music! His son, Léon, tells us much in his
filial memoirs. “His ear,” says this pious and admirable biographer,
“had a delicacy and correctness most exquisite. Thence came his
passion for music, which was made an aid and assistance to his
labors. He sits at his table in his working room. My mother is at the
piano in the next room, and the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann,
or Schubert follows, one after the other, and excites or calms the
imagination of the writer. ‘Music is another planet.’ ‘I adore all
music, the commonest as well as the loftiest.’ But no man could
analyze and understand better the masters of harmony, no man lauded
the genius of Wagner in more splendid terms or more brilliant images:
‘The conquest by Wagner and the philosophers.’”

Daudet often came home with wet eyes after a concert, and we are
told that his voice was delicate and penetrating when he hummed the
tunes of Provence. His intimate musical friends were Raoul Pugno, the
pianist, Bizet, and Massenet. In later years Hahn, the “little Hahn,”
a composer of songs, often visited him, and he dearly loved the mad
music of the Hungarian gypsy orchestras. We all recall his fondness
for the pastoral pipe, and Valmafour, that thrice unhappy Valmafour
urged in the pursuit of a hopeless fantastic love by an avaricious
sister! I have often wondered who sat for the portrait of De Potter
in Sapho. It was possibly a composite of Gounod, Bizet, and Massenet,
though the figure of the love-stricken composer seems to fit Gounod
better than the others—Gounod at the epoch of Georgiana Weldon.

That Daudet’s ear for verbal harmonies was of the finest there can
be no doubt, after reading this: “It seems that the phrase, as
Châteaubriand uses it, has preserved the rhythm and movement of the
sea; the rush of his crises comes from the farthest line of the
horizon; their return is broad, quiet, majestic. Another example
of sensitiveness to the period in writing, Gustave Flaubert, is
the only one presenting, in the same degree as Châteaubriand, that
verbal wealth which gives a sensuous satisfaction to one’s mind when
reading.”

Of Wagner he said:—

  Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he will be one in
  the time to come, and no one is more fruitful than he in remarks of
  every sort.... He was a man belonging to another age. Nevertheless,
  he found a way to our nerves and our brains far more easily than
  one would have thought. If imagination has representatives, he was
  one of the giants. A Northern imagination, it is true, on which
  all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress.
  He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so
  pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. That language
  of motives which he has imagined, and of which he makes such
  magnificent use, has the fault of leaving us very often with an
  impression of weariness.... Still, it was absolutely necessary
  for him to invent that system of motives.... His characters
  seem clothed in sound.... In Richard Wagner the imagination is
  so representative and violent that it saturates his work to
  overflowing with all the sounds of nature and leaves a limited
  space for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and Isolde
  plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it; then it
  appears on the surface, then it plunges under again. One invincible
  power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement. In the
  poem, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, the
  holy spot become the more powerful characters. In this paganism of
  to-day all nature has become divine.

Wagner’s pantheism has never been sufficiently realized. For me
his dramas deal with the elemental forces, rather than with men and
women. Daudet evidently recognized this fact. Wagner was a pagan. The
romancer says: “Your generation is accustomed to these splendors,
this torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to your
fancy the impression which that music exercised on men of my age....
There is everything in Wagner.... Turning his face toward Gayety
he wrote the Meistersinger; turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the
_Mutter_ of Goethe, he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He made use of the
entire human pianoforte, and the entire superhuman pianoforte. Cries,
tears, the distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks,
the sough of the wind in the trees, frightful remorse, the song of
the shepherd and the trumpets of war—his tremendous imagination is
always at white heat, and always ready.”

Daudet wisely refuses to discuss Wagner’s methods:—

  Let his methods remain in the dark like his orchestra.... That
  imagination of his, feverish and excessive, has not only renovated
  music, but has also overwhelmed poetry and philosophy. Although
  theories disquiet me, still I feel them trembling in Wagner behind
  each one of his heroes. The gods talk of their destiny and of the
  conflict of that destiny with the destiny of men; they talk of
  ancient Fate in a way that is sometimes obscure, but with a rush
  and a go that make one forget to question them. It is the famous
  wall of the Légende des Siècles, crowded with the tubas and the
  trumpets of Sachs, tumultuous and glittering in their mass.

  It is quite possible that Wagner desired to have characters of
  a size suited to their surroundings, and that one would feel
  uncomfortable while considering ordinary men who should be
  victims of the Ocean of Tristan or of the Forest of Siegfried.
  What difference does it make? He succeeds in moving us with these
  superterrestrial passions. In Tristan humanity plays a larger part.
  These are our own wounds which are bleeding in the flesh of the
  lovers, wounds that the sacred spear, which the hero brings back
  with him, shall never heal.

It will be seen that these are the utterances of a man who has
pondered music as well as felt it deeply. He knew Wagner, and was a
welcome visitor at Wahnfried. “Daudet pleases me much,” Wagner once
said. The openly expressed admiration of this cultured Frenchman must
have flattered the composer greatly. Because Daudet admired Wagner,
his perception of Beethoven’s greatness was not blurred. He puts
the case succinctly: “It were better to say that the masterpiece by
Beethoven being more concentrated and closely woven makes a total
impression upon you in a much shorter time than does a drama with its
necessary stops and changes of scenery and delays for explanation.”
This in answer to his son Léon, who had asserted that the emotions
aroused by a Beethoven symphony include “a deeper and rarer quality”
than those evoked by the Ring.

The elder Daudet finds that Wagner is saturated by nature and
nature’s sounds:—

  His orchestral parts cradle and swing me to and fro. His gentleness
  and power cause me to pass within a few hours through the most
  powerful emotions—emotions, in fact, for which no one can fail to
  be grateful forever to the man who has excited them, because they
  reveal our inner depths to ourselves. I love and admire Beethoven
  also for the wide and peaceful landscapes which he knows how to
  open up in the soul of sound. Italian music enchants me, and in
  Rossini I experience that extraordinary impression of melancholy
  anguish which an excess of life gives us. There is too much frenzy,
  too much movement; it is as if one were trying to escape from
  death. I adore Mendelssohn and his delicious pictures of nature in
  the Scotch and Italian symphonies. There are certain hours toward
  nightfall when the soul of Schumann torments me.... But to number
  them all would be to never end. I have lived through the power of
  music; I am a dweller upon its planet.

Now all this is quite satisfying when one realizes that Daudet, in
his love for music, steps out of the French literary tradition.
French writers, even those of this century, have never been fanatics
for music, Stendhal and Baudelaire excepted—Baudelaire who discovered
Wagner to France. I cannot recommend Stendhal as a musical guide.
Châteaubriand, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Alfred de Vigny, de Musset,
Flaubert, Dumas _fils_, Zola, the de Goncourts—the brothers secretly
abominated music—this mixed company was not fond of the heavenly
maid. Catulle Mendès is a Wagnerian, and in his evanescent way Paul
Verlaine was affected by melody. He wrote a magnificent and subtle
sonnet on Parsifal. Perhaps it was what the despiser of Kundry stood
for rather than Wagner’s music that set vibrating the verbal magic of
this Chopin of the Gutter. Villier de l’Isle Adam was another crazy
Wagnerian, played excerpts on the piano, had his music performed at
his own deathbed, and sketched in a book of his the figure of Liszt
as Triboulet Bonhomet. Huysmans, of Flemish descent, has made a close
study of church music and the old ecclesiastical modes in En Route
and in several others of his remarkable books. The younger Parisian
writers are generally music lovers.

How well Daudet understood that elusive quantity, the artistic
temperament, may be seen in this bit of analysis: “Neither sculptor,
nor painter represents anything which did not exist before in the
world. It is somewhat different in regard to music. But, looking
at things a little closer, music is the lofty manifestation of a
harmony, the models for which exist in nature. Nevertheless the
writer, the painter, the poet, the sculptor, and the musician,
whenever their work bears them honestly along, believe honestly that
they are adding to the world something which did not exist before
their time. Sublime illusion!”

On this clear, critical note let us leave the always delightful
writer, the once charming man. “Oh, Daudet, _c’est de la
bouillabaisse_!” cries the author of Evelyn Innes. Yes, but is not
_la bouillabaisse_ a fascinating dish, especially when a master
_chef_ has prepared it?


GEORGE MOORE

I

EVELYN INNES

  There must be a beyond. In Wagner there is none. He is too perfect.
  Never since the world began did an artist realize himself so
  perfectly. He achieved all he desired, therefore something is
  wanting.—GEORGE MOORE.

At last a novel with some intelligent criticism of music—George
Moore’s Evelyn Innes.

For years I have browsed amidst the herbage offered by writers of
musical fiction, and usually have found it bitter and unprofitable.
We all smile now at the inflated sentimentalities of Charles
Auchester, and shudder at the mistakes of the literary person when
dealing with musical themes. Jessie Fothergill’s The First Violin
is very pretty, but it is badly written and reeks of Teutonic
_Schwärmerei_. The characters are the conventional puppets of
fiction armed with a conductor’s stick and violin bow, instead of
sword, cloak, and dagger. A novel dealing with genuine musical
figures has yet to be written, so George Moore’s Evelyn Innes is an
attempt in the right direction. The book is full of faults, but at
least it deals sanely with music, and contains several very acute
criticisms of Wagner’s music, acute without being too literary or too
technical.

Whenever I read a novel by George Moore I feel like dividing the
English-speaking world into three parts: those who read Moore and
like him—a determined and growing class; those who read him and hate
him—a very much larger class; and those who never heard of him—to
this class belong the admirers of Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, and
Sienkiewicz. Yet for certain young men every stroke of his pen has
a hieratic significance. I remember well when the Confessions of a
Young Man appeared. With what eagerness was it not seized upon by
a small section of the community, a section that represented the
vanguard of a new movement and recognized a fellow-decadent. George
Moore may be truthfully called the first of the English decadents—I
mean the Verlaine crop of the early eighties, not the gifted gang
that painted and sonneted under the name of the Pre-Raphaelitic
Brotherhood.

It was George Moore who first brought to England’s shores the
“poisonous honey of France.” In his Confessions were criticisms of
acuity and several positive discoveries. He it was who introduced
Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine, Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn, to a
public that speedily forgot them. To read these Confessions to-day is
like stirring up stale musk. There is an odd comminglement of caviare
and perfume in the book, and its author evidently had more to say.

He said it in A Mummer’s Wife, one of the strongest, most
disagreeable books I ever read. But, while the hands were Moore’s,
the voice was Zola’s. Moore has always been the victim of methods.
He has dissected Tolstoy, Turgénieff, Flaubert, Balzac, and the de
Goncourts to see how they do the trick; and as he possesses in a
rare degree the mocking-bird voice, his various books were at first
echoes of his passionate delvings in the minds of others. A Mummer’s
Wife dealt with the English stage—certain phases of it. It was Zola
Anglicized. Then followed the trilogy of brutal naturalistic novels,
Spring Days, A Modern Lover, and Mike Fletcher, the last being
the biggest. The writer exploited to the full his love for what
he conceived to be the real, and there are certainly many telling
passages in Mike Fletcher. To-day A Modern Lover is recognized as a
very truthful study of artistic London, the London that paints and
goes to picture galleries. The new man—he was very new then to the
younger men—had the gift of gripping your hand with chilly, withal
powerful, fingers. He forced you to look at certain surfaces and
see them the way he saw them. Because nature had imposed upon him
restrictions, he strove earnestly to see more clearly, and by dint of
hard gazing he did see, and saw some extraordinary things.

Having studied Germinie Lacerteux until he had mastered her, George
Moore transposed her into the key of Fielding. His Esther Waters,
by far simpler and healthier than the rest, is the Goncourts’
gutter-martyr, Germinie Lacerteux, done into English. But it is
admirably done, and the paraphrase became known to the novel-reading
world. There was a brief silence, and Celibates appeared. And there
were things performed within its pages that sent shivers to your
stomach. An outrageous theme was fashioned superbly. One story was a
recurrence to Moore’s favorite subject, the Roman Catholic church.
Whether he is a Catholic or not, I cannot say, but the church
literally obsesses him. Her ritual dominates his vision, and, like a
sickly woman, he loves to finger the gorgeous livery of the Lord. He
continually returns to this topic. He is exercised, almost haunted,
by the notion that outside of her pale salvation is impossible. “What
if this be true?” cries George Moore, as he arises from his midnight
bed, fearing the dark and looking for some sign of a dawn! I suppose,
being a product of our times, he enjoys this acrobatic flirting and
balancing on the rope of faith swung over the chasm of doubt and
despair. Religion is one of his leading motives, art the other.

The new story deals with several episodes in the life of a singer.
She is the daughter of a devotee of archaic music and archaic
instruments. She has a voice, but her father is so absorbed in the
revival of Palestrina, of Vittoria, of old English writers, of
the Plain Chant, that he neglects the girl’s vocal possibilities.
She plays the viola da gamba and sings at sight. Her mother was a
celebrated operatic singer, of chaste life and _coloratura_ tastes.
She died before the girl was developed. The dreamy father, the
high-strung, ambitious girl, a dreary home at Dulwich, near London,
and a rich baronet of musical tastes, crazy for notoriety in London
musical life,—and you may imagine the rest.

Evelyn goes to Paris with him—and with a certain Lady Duckle as a
chaperon. The scene at Marchesi’s—for of course Madame Savelli is
Marchesi—is capitally done, and there is a Henry James lightness of
touch and humor in the description of Lady Duckle and her dislike of
Wagner’s music.

“No, my dear Owen,” she cried, “I am not a heretic, for I recognize
the greatness of the music, and I could hear it with pleasure if
it were confined to the orchestra; but I can find no pleasure in
listening to a voice trying to accompany a hundred instruments. I
heard Lohengrin last season. I was in Mrs. Ayre’s box—a charming
woman—her husband is an American, but he never comes to London.
I presented her at the last Drawing Room. She had a supper party
afterward, and when she asked me what I’d have to eat, I said,
‘Nothing with wings!... Oh, that Swan!’”

Now, this is distinctly witty, and it is a pity that we get only a
mere sketch of this chatty body.

Without explaining the processes, Evelyn becomes a great singer, a
great interpreter of Wagner; and it is precisely this hiatus that
deprives me of much pleasure. I dislike these persons in fiction who
have become full-fledged artists at the turning of a page. Mr. Moore
was treading upon dangerous ground, and he knew it; so he wisely
omitted the study years. Evelyn, whose character shows little growth,
conquers London, and at last goes to her father to ask his pardon.
This episode is the strongest and most original in the book. Indeed,
I cannot recollect anything in English fiction like it. She falls
at his feet and is Brünnhilde kneeling to Wotan. As she phrases her
petition for pardon she acts, consciously or unconsciously, the third
act of Die Walküre: “War es so schmählich?” she mentally implores,
and the simple instrument-maker is vanquished. It is very subtle,
and the dual nature of the lyric artist is clearly indicated.

But such a father, such a daughter! If you were to ask me frankly if
a girl could sacrifice everything for art I would as frankly reply,
Yes; lots of them have. I have met a dozen myself. Moore does not
believe that the moral sense can flourish in an artistic atmosphere.
Perhaps he is right. Evelyn is dissatisfied with success. Her nature
is too complex to find gratification in the society of Sir Owen
Asher. A new man looms up. He is dark, has teeth, is a mystic, a
Roscicrucian, perhaps a diabolist. He is a Celt and is composing to
a Celtic legend a great music-drama; his musical forms are antique,
and he wins Evelyn, after the first performance of Isolde. This scene
caused all the bellboys of literature to cry “horrors!” I confess,
however, that the second love is incomprehensible. It is entered into
in too cold-blooded a manner. She becomes still more dissatisfied,
and after a week of insomnia her early religious beliefs get the
uppermost, and she goes to confession. But you feel that she has
only met a third will stronger than her own. A Monsignor Mostyn,
the best male portrait of the book, forces her to bend her knee to
God, and she goes into conventual retreat. We get a few closing
chapters—dreary ones—devoted to convent life, and then Evelyn goes
forth once more into the world.

Her character is exceedingly well drawn, although I must protest
against the overloading of page after page with elaborate
psychologizing. Moore has deserted the brutal simplicities of his
earlier manner for a Bourget-like shovelling of arid psychical
details upon your wearied brain. The story becomes hazy, the main
figure nebulous. At every step in the latter half of the book I
detect Joris Karel Huysmans and his En Route. Evelyn Innes becomes
a feminine Durtal, sick of life, afraid of God. There is too much
padding in the shape of discussions about early church music—more
Huysmans! Huysmans’s practice of cataloguing is very monotonous. Yet
it is the best thing in the way of a literary performance that George
Moore has accomplished. The style is decomposed, but it is melodious,
flexible, smooth, and felicitous. One can see that he knows his Pater.

Mr. Moore had used to advantage his knowledge of the London musical
set. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch may have sat for a portrait of Evelyn’s
father. Mr. Dolmetsch is a player on the harpsichord and spinet. But
who is Evelyn Innes? That is a dangerous question. Possibly she is
a composite of Melba, Calvé, Eames, and Nordica. Oddly enough, she
gets a tiara, presented to her by the subscribers of the opera at
New York! Of course this points to Nordica, but Nordica could never
read music at sight,—you remember the one thousand piano rehearsals
for Tristan,—and so that clew is misleading. Perhaps the author may
enlighten the musical world some day. Lady Grimalkin is certainly
intended for Lady de Grey.

Sir Owen Asher—he may be one side of George Moore himself—is well
painted in the beginning, but the colors soon fade. He is a bore,
with his agnosticism, his vanity, and his lack of backbone. He
treated Evelyn too delicately. A lusty reproof is what the young
woman most needed. Her churchly, sentimental vaporings would then
have been dissipated, and she might have thrown a clock at her
admirer’s head. Such things have been known to happen in the life
of a prima donna. Sir Owen starts a Wagnerian Review. Could Mr.
Moore have meant the Earl of Dysart? Ulick Dean is said to be
drawn partially from Yeats, the mystic; but the music criticism
sounds to me very like the doughty Runciman’s. There is a manager
with a toothache, who is almost funny, and there is a rehearsal of
Tannhäuser, in which the question of cuts is discussed. Here is a
sentence that reveals the depth of Mr. Moore’s knowledge of music:—

“According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had
distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of
Wagner’s music is the identification of the two notes.” Why? In the
name of the Chromatic Fantasia, why?

I confess I am rather tired of convent scenes. The best I ever read
in latter-day novels is in Mathilde Serao’s Fantasy. Mrs. Craigie,
in The Schools for Saints, “does” a convent, and now Moore. The
Roman Catholic problem, too, is overdone. Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her
polemical pamphlet which she calls a novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale,
indulges in numerous speculations of the sort. George Moore loves
the rich trappings and the pomp of ceremonial in the church. But its
iteration is an artistic mistake. Indeed, his book goes off into
mid-air in the latter half. The first is fascinating. The discussion
of the various schools of singing is valuable, and while at no place
does he exhibit the marvellous virtuosity displayed by d’Annunzio in
his exposition of Tristan and Isolde, there are many jewelled pages
of descriptive writing. The book is permeated with all manners of
pessimism from Omar to Schopenhauer, and life is discussed from the
viewpoints of the ascetic and the epicurean.

Mr. Moore is an artist. His vision is just, and he is a better
workman than he was; his sense of form is matured, although his
faults of construction are easily detected. He has caught the right
atmosphere; he is still master of moods, and he has attempted and
nearly succeeded in spilling out the soul of a singer for our
inspection,—the soul of the selfish, ambitious prima donna, for
there is no denying that Evelyn, despite her tender conscience,
was selfish and a fascinating creature, mastered by every passing
whim, and a woman utterly incapable of developing mentally without
masculine assistance. Mr. Moore, then, has given us the type of the
opera singer, and I forgive him pages of solemn-gaited writing. Alas!
that it should be as he writes. But it is. He says some things that
go very deep, and there are many exquisite touches.

This novelist’s attitude towards Wagner’s music is well expressed in
John Norton, the second of the three tales in that uncommonly strong
book called Celibates. Here is another self-revelation:—

  Wagner reminds me of a Turk lying amid the houris promised by the
  Prophet to the Faithful—eyes incensed by kohl, lips and almond
  nails incarnadine, the languor of falling hair and the languor
  of scent burning in silver dishes, and all around subdued color,
  embroidered stuffs, bronze lamps traced with inscrutable designs.
  Never a breath of pure air, not even when the scene changes to
  the terrace overlooking the dark river, ... minarets and the dome
  reflected in the tide and in a sullen sky, reaching almost to
  the earth, the dome and behind the dome a yellow moon—a carven
  moon, without faintest aureole, a voluptuous moon, mysteriously
  marked, a moon like a creole, her hand upon the circle of her
  breast; and through the torrid twilight of the garden the sound of
  fountains, like flutes far away, breathing to the sky the sorrow
  of the water-lilies. And in the dusky foliage, in which a blue and
  orange evening dies, gleams the color of fruit—dun-colored bananas,
  purple and yellow grapes, the desert scent of dates, the motley
  morbidity of figs, the passion of red pomegranates, shining like
  stars, through a flutter of leaves, where the light makes a secret
  way. And through all the color and perfume of twilight, of fruit,
  of flowers, cometh the maddening murmur of fountains. At last
  the silence is broken by the thud of an over-ripe fruit that has
  suddenly broken from its stalk.... Now I am alive to the music, all
  has ceased but it; I am conscious of nothing else. Now it has got
  me; I am in its power; I am as a trembling prey held in the teeth
  and claws of a wild animal. The music creeps and catches, and with
  cruel claws and amorous tongue it feeds upon my flesh; my blood is
  drunken, and, losing grasp upon my suborned soul, ... I tremble, I
  expire.


II

SISTER TERESA

  Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brainstuff of fiction is
  internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of
  errors.—GEORGE MEREDITH.

What makes Moore’s case so peculiarly his own is his unlikeness to
our preconceived notion of an Irishman. No man of genius resembles
his countrymen; so we find Burke, Swift, George Moore, with few of
the characteristics ascribed to Irishmen and wits. They were and are
not jolly world lovers, rollicking sports of the sort Lever loved to
paint. Tom Moore and his rose-water poetry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
and his glossy smartness, hit the popular notion of what an Irish
poet, playwright, and man of letters should be.

Now George Moore is far from being an Irishman in that sense—this
prose poet who is at once mystical and gross. Yet he is a Celt,
and lately he has developed a restless spirit, a desire to flee
the Anglo-Saxon and his haunts. It is the “homing” instinct of the
Celt—after forty years of age men of talent return to their tribe.
And Mr. Moore is fast becoming an Irishman among Irishmen. Here is
the newest incarnation of this feminine soul—perverse and feminine,
he admits he is—which, waxlike, takes and retains the most subtle
and powerful impressions. The readers of his early books knew him as
a Shelley worshipper, then a digger among the romantic literature
of 1830, finally a follower of Zola. So after Flowers of Passion
(1877) we got Pagan Poems (1881), and with A Modern Lover (1883)
began his prose trilogy, devoted to the young man. This was followed
in 1884 by A Mummer’s Wife, Literature at Nurse (1885), A Drama in
Muslin (1886), Parnell and His Island (1887), A Mere Accident (1887),
Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher
(1889), Impressions and Opinions (1890), Vain Fortune (1890), Modern
Painting (1893), The Strike at Arlingford, a play (1893), Esther
Waters (1894), Celibates (1895), Evelyn Innes (1898), The Bending
of the Bough, a play (1900). He also collaborated in 1894 with Mrs.
Craigie in a little comedy called Journeys End in Lovers’ Meeting,
which was written for Ellen Terry, and Untilled Fields (1903).

Mr. Moore was born in 1857, the son of the late George Henry Moore,
M.P., of Moore Hall, County Mayo, Ireland. He was educated at
Oscott College, near Birmingham, and studied art in Paris, so his
expatriation was practical and complete. He once hated his native
land and hated its religion. Yet I know of few writers whose books,
whose mind, are so tormented by Catholicism. He may insult the
church in A Drama in Muslin—one of the most veracious documents
of Irish social history in the eighties—and through the mouth of
Alice Barton. But, like the moth and the flame, he ever circles
about the Roman Catholic religion. It would be unfair to hold a man
responsible for the utterances of his characters, nevertheless there
is a peculiarly personal cadence in all that Mr. Moore writes, which
makes his problem, like that of Huysmans, a fascinating one. The
George Moore of Mike Fletcher and the George Moore of Sister Teresa
are very different men. Mike Fletcher, for me the first virile man
in English fiction since Tom Jones, may please some critics more
than Evelyn Innes turned nun, for of Mike you could not say in
Meredith’s words: “Men may have rounded Seraglio Point; they have
not yet doubled Cape Turk.” Mike never rounded Seraglio Point; while
of Evelyn, you dimly feel that she is always “fiddling harmonics on
the strings of sensualism.” Yes, George Moore is returning to the
tribe; he is Irish; he is almost Roman Catholic—and the man is often
more interesting than his books. Not to know them all is to miss the
history of artistic London during the last quarter of a century.

In the preface of the English edition of Sister Teresa Mr. Moore
writes:—

  I found I had completed a great pile of Ms., and one day it
  occurred to me to consider the length of this Ms. To my surprise
  I found I had written about 150,000 words, and had only finished
  the first half of my story. I explained my difficulties to my
  publisher, suggesting that I should end the chapter I was then
  writing on what musicians would call ‘a full close,’ and that half
  the story should be published under the title of Evelyn Innes and
  half under the title of Sister Teresa. My publisher consented,
  frightened at the thought of a novel of a thousand pages—300,000
  words. The story has not been altered, but the text is almost
  entirely new. No one, perhaps, has rewritten a book so completely.
  I am aware that the alteration of a published text is deprecated
  in the press, but it is difficult to understand why, for have
  not Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Wagner and Fitzgerald
  rewritten their works? Among my contemporaries, George Meredith
  and W. B. Yeats have followed the example of their illustrious
  predecessors.

The latter half of the book is by no means so brilliant, or even so
convincing, as the first. But then its psychology is much finer,
and it was infinitely harder to handle. Evelyn was bound to taste
convent life. Morbid, fatigued by Wagner singing, triumphs, social
and operatic, by her two lovers, her stomach deranged by dyspepsia,
her nerves worn to an irritable thread by insomnia—is it any wonder
the golden-haired girl, with the freckled face, regarded convent
life as a green-blooming oasis in a wilderness of lust, vanity, and
artificial worldliness! You can see that her mother’s spirit grows
stronger in her every day, that mother with the cold eyes and thin
lips who lost her voice so early in a great career. “The portrait
of our father or our mother is a sort of crystal ball, into which
we look in the hope of discovering our destiny.” Evelyn was tired
of love, above all of animal love which dragged her soul from God.
Ulick, for that reason, was more grateful to her. He was a mystic,
with the dog-cold nose of mystics, and he soothed Evelyn when Sir
Owen had ruffled her with his importunities, with his materialism.
But these two men soon fade after the first hundred pages of the new
story; indeed, they are lightly etched in at the best. “We have only
to change our ideas to change our friends. Our friends are only a
more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas,” says Mr. Moore. The
feigned friendship of the two is a truly Flaubertian note. It recalls
a trait of Charles Bovary. The convent of the Passionist Sisters at
Wimbledon, however, is the glowing core of this remarkable tale. For
nuns, for convents and monasteries, the life contemplative, this
Irish novelist has always had a deep liking. There is John Norton
in Celibates and there is Lily Young, who left a convent for Mike
Fletcher, and then we have Agnes Lahens, whose only happiness was in
a claustral life. At one time I believe that this writer would have
indorsed Nietzsche’s idea of a monastery for freethinkers. Didn’t
H. G. Wells suggest a retreat for a Huysmans sect? Evelyn Innes,
like John Norton, dilly-dallied with her innermost convictions. It
was long before she realized that faith is a gift, is a special
talent, which must be cultivated to a perfect flowering. And when
she left her lovers, when she left the stage, after her father died
in Rome,—here the long arm of coincidence is rather unpleasantly
visible,—when she had professed, taken the veil, and became Sister
Teresa, her former life fell away from her like water, and she was
happy, a happy bride of Christ—until the honeymoon was over; for
divine nuptials have their honeymoons, their chilly repulsions, their
hours and days of indifference and despair. And this brings us to M.
Huysmans.

Mr. Peck, in his admirable estimate of George Moore,—in The Personal
Equation,—writes that Moore is frankly a decadent, frankly a
sensualist of the type of Huysmans, whom he intensely admires. “A
page of Huysmans,” exclaims Moore, “is as a dose of opium, a glass
of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.... Huysmans goes to my soul
like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style
the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the
mural, of the window.” And Mr. Peck adds: “Mr. Moore’s affinity with
Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He
could never follow him....” But he has followed him, followed En
Route; Huysmans has not only gone to his soul, but to his pen. He
once wittily wrote: “Henry James went to France and read Turgénieff.
W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.” This might be
paraphrased thus: Joris Karel Huysmans, that unique disciple of
Baudelaire, went to La Trappe and studied religion. George Moore,
that most plastic-souled Irishman, stayed at home and studied
Huysmans. This is the precise statement of a truth. Mr. Moore
owes as much to Huysmans for his Sister Teresa. To no one does he
owe Mildred Lawson. She is as much George Moore’s as L’Education
Sentimentale is truly Flaubert’s. I do not know of her counterpart in
fiction; like Frédéric Moreau, that unheroic hero, she is a heroine
who failed from sheer lack of temperament. And her story is one of
the best stories in the language.

But with Sister Teresa the case is different. She is Huysmansized.
Yet Mr. Moore has only used Huysmans as a spring-board—to employ a
favorite expression of the French writer—for his narration of Sister
Teresa’s doings in conventual seclusion. He knew, of course, that he
could never hope to rival Huysmans’s matchless, if somewhat florid
and machicolated, style, and it may be confessed at once that Sister
Teresa is not so intense or so sincere a book as En Route. Nowhere,
despite the exquisite resignation and Mozartean sweetness of Mr.
Moore’s thirty-eighth chapter, is there anything that approaches the
power of the wonderful first chapter in En Route, with its thundering
symphonic description of the singing of the De Profundis. Nor are
Teresa’s raptures and agonies to be compared to Durtal’s in that
awful first night at La Trappe, though the Irish writer follows the
French one closely enough. But Moore is tenderer, more poetic, than
Huysmans. He has so highly individualized, so completely transposed,
his character, that to him must only praise be awarded. As Russell
Jacobus writes, in The Blessedness of Egoism, the secret of Goethe’s
self-culture is “the faculty of drawing from everything—experience,
books, and art—just the element required at that stage of one’s
growth, and the faculty of obtaining, by a clairvoyant instinct, the
experience, the book, the work of art which contains that needed
element.” This Mr. Moore has always done—he confesses to it, to the
“echo auguries” of his young manhood. The color of his mind is ever
changing. It often displays the reverberating tints of a flying-fish
in full flight.

And his art has benefited by his defection from Zola. It has grown
purer, more intense. As Huysmans says himself in La Bas, “We must,
in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola, but
it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another
road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve
thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism.” Huysmans believes
Dostoïevsky comes nearest to this achievement—as Havelock Ellis
remarks—Dostoïevsky, who was once described by Mr. Moore as a
Gaboriau with psychological sauce. But at that time he had not read
The Idiot, The Gambler, or L’Adolescence. I find traces of the
Russian novelists and their flawless art throughout Sister Teresa,
just as the externals of the book—of Evelyn Innes also—recall
Flaubert in L’Education Sentimentale. There are many half-cadences,
chapters closing on unresolved harmonies, many ellipses, and all
bathed in a penetrating yet hazy atmosphere. Yet his style is clear
and rhythmic. Mr. Moore tells of subtle things in a simple manner—the
reverse of Henry James’s method. The character drawing is no longer
so contrapuntal as in Evelyn Innes. But the convent sisters are
delightful—the Prioress, Mother Hilda, and Sister Mary Saint John.
It would not be George Moore, however, to miss a tiny suggestion of
the morbid—though I confess he has treated the episode discreetly.
But here again has Huysmans anticipated him, and also anticipated him
in Durtal’s revolt against the faith, with his almost uncontrollable
desire to utter blasphemies in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
With a master hand—but always the hand of a master miniaturist—does
Mr. Moore paint cloistered life, its futile gossiping, little
failings, heroic sacrifices, and humming air of sanctity. There
are pages in the book that I could almost swear were written by a
nun—so real, so intimate, so saturated, are they with the religious
atmosphere. And the garden, that nuns’ garden! Whosoever has walked
in the sequestered garden of a convent can never quite lose the
faint sense of sweetness, goodness, spirituality, and a certain soft
communion with nature which modulate into the very speech and rhythm
of the sisters. All this atmosphere Mr. Moore, whose receptivity is
most feminine, brings into his perfumed pages. After the fleshly
passion, the unrest, of Evelyn Innes, this book has a consoling music
of its own.

It was after the convent doors closed that the real struggles of the
singer began. Some of them have considerable vraisemblance, some of
them are very trivial. The letters sent to Monsignor Mostyn, for
example, are not credible; nor are Teresa’s revolt and subsequent
spiritual rebirth made quite clear. Perhaps Mr. Moore is not yet so
strong a believer as Huysmans. His words do not carry the intense
conviction of the Fleming-Frenchman, who from his retreat in a
Benedictine monastery has given the world a vivid and edifying
account of St. Lydwine de Schiedam, that blessed Dutch saint he
speaks of in En Route, first attacked at the time of the plague in
Holland. “Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the
heart. ‘Two boils, it is well,’ she said to the Lord, ‘but three
would be better in honor of the Holy Trinity,’ and immediately a
third pustule broke out on her face.” This extraordinary mystic
considered herself as an expiatory victim for all the sins of the
earth. Her sufferings were finally rewarded. Like John Bunyan, she
died a “comfortable and triumphant death.” A writer of Huysmans’s
magnificent artistry, who can thus transform himself into an
humble hagiographer, must indeed have forsworn his ways and become
impregnated by faith.

Mr. Moore does not succeed in arousing any such poignant and
unpleasant impressions. Notwithstanding his array of mystical
learning, his familiarity with the writings of Rüysbroeck, John
of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Catharine Emmerich, Saint Angela, and
the rest, one cannot escape the conviction that it is not all
deeply felt. Count S. C. de Soissons writes: “He who praises the
lasciviousness of Alcibiades does not enjoy the pleasure that he had;
neither do they experience the mystic ecstasies of the anchorites of
the Thebaid who try to parody their saintly lives.” Even the striking
account of the Carmelite’s profession in Sister Teresa is paralleled
in En Route. There is not so much music talk as in Evelyn Innes, for
she leaves its world of vain and empty sonorities. This much I found
in an early chapter. “In Handel there are beautiful proportions; it
is beautiful like eighteenth-century architecture, but here I can
discover neither proportion nor design.” Moore referred to a Brahms
score, which is manifestly absurd. Whatever else there may be in
Brahms, we are sure to discover proportion, design. Again, “She
remembered that César Franck’s music affected her in much the same
way.” Shrugging her shoulders, she said, “When I listen I always hear
something beautiful, only I don’t listen.” I fear Mr. Moore has
succumbed again to the blandishing voice of Ulick Dean Runciman!

And how does it all end, the psychic adventures of this Wagner singer
turned nun, this woman who “discovered two instincts in herself—an
inveterate sensuality and a sincere aspiration for a spiritual life”?
She loses her voice, like her mother, and after relinquishing all
idea of escaping from the convent—not a well-developed motive—she
settles down to teaching voice and piano. Sir Owen Asher no longer
troubles her; Ulick Dean has evaporated, or perhaps crumbled to
dust, like an unheeding Brann if he had touched the early shores
of real life. No one from the outside world visits her but Louise,
Mlle. Helbrun, the Brangaene of her Tristan and Isolde days. To the
evanescent bell booming of their distant past goes the conversation
of the friends. It is not so depressingly real, not so moving, as
the last words of Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers in the coda to
L’Education Sentimentale,—that most perfect of fictions,—but is
melancholy enough. “Our fate is more like ourselves than we are
aware,” and in the last analysis Evelyn’s fate suits her. As a singer
she talked too much like a music critic; as Sister Teresa, too much
like a sophist in a nun’s habit. She was from the start a female
theologian. Her conscience was more to her than her lovers. She was
never quite in earnest, always a little inhuman, and I for one can
contemplate with equanimity her immurement until her final “packing
up” for death and its dusty hypnotism. After reading the story I was
tempted to repeat Renan’s remarks on Amiel,—quoted by Ernest Newman
in his Wagner,—“He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and
conversion, as if these things were realities.” I wonder if Mr. Moore
did not feel that way sometimes!

But the book is full of brainstuff. It is also a book with a soul.
In it George Moore’s art is come to a spiritual and consummate
blossoming. After reading such a passage of sustained music as the
following I am almost inclined to make an expiatory pilgrimage to the
drab city on the Liffey, to make of Dublin a critic’s Canossa; and in
the heated, mean streets, and in sable habiliments of sorrow, beat
my breast without Mr. Moore’s abode, crying aloud, “Peccavi.” But
would I be forgiven for all that I have said about the noble, morbid,
disquieting, and fascinating art of George Moore, the Irish Huysmans?
Here is a passage executed with incomparable bravura. Ulick Dean
speaks:—

  To keep her soul he said she must fly from the city, where men
  lose their souls in the rituals of materialism. He must go with
  her to the pure country, to the woods and to the places where the
  invisible ones whom the Druids knew ceaselessly ascend and descend
  from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, in flame-colored
  spirals. He told her he knew of a house by a lake shore, and there
  they might live in communion with nature, and in the fading lights,
  and in the quiet hollows of the woods she would learn more of God
  than she could in the convent. In that house they would live; and
  their child, if the gods gave them one, would unfold among the
  influences of music and love and song traditions.

It was writing of a similar order in Mildred Lawson that evoked from
Harry Thurston Peck the declaration: “George Moore is the greatest
literary artist who has struck the chords of English since the death
of Thackeray.” George Moore always had the voice. He has now both
voice and vision.




V

ANARCHS OF ART

A SONNET BY CAMPANELLA

    The people is a beast of muddy brain
      That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands
      Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
    Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;
    One kick would be enough to break the chain.
      But the beast fears, and what the child demands
      It does; nor its own terror understands,
    Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
    Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties
      And gags itself—gives itself death and war
      For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
        Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
    But this it knows not; and if one arise
      To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
         —_Translated by_ JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.


Have not all great composers been anarchs—from Bach to Strauss? At
first blush the hard-plodding Johann Sebastian of the Well-tempered
Clavichord seems a doubtful figure to drape with the black flag of
revolt. He grew a forest of children, he worked early and late,
and he played the organ in church of Sundays; but he was a musical
revolutionist nevertheless. His music proves it. And he quarrelled
with his surroundings like any good social democrat. He even went out
for a drink during a prosy sermon, and came near being discharged
for returning late. If Lombroso were cognizant of this suspicious
fact, he might build a terrifying structure of theories, with all
sorts of inferential subcellars. However, it is Bach’s music that
still remains revolutionary. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on
aristocratic patronage to play the rôle of Solitaries. But many tales
are related of their refusal to lick the boots of the rich, to curve
the spine of the suppliant. Both were by nature gentle men, and
both occasionally arose to the situation and snubbed their patrons
outrageously. Handel! A fighter, a born revolutionist, a hater of
rulers. John Runciman—himself an anarchistic critic—calls Handel
the most magnificent man that ever lived. He was certainly the most
virile among musicians.

I recall the story of Beethoven refusing to uncover in the
presence of royalty, though his companion, Goethe, doffed his hat.
Theoretically I admire Beethoven’s independence, yet there is no
denying that the great poet was the politer of the two, and doubtless
a pleasanter man to consort with. The mythic William Tell and his
contempt for Gessler’s hat were translated into action by the
composer.

Handel, despite the fact that he could not boast Beethoven’s peasant
ancestry, had a contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies,
that was remarkable. And his music is like a blow from a muscular
fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was henpecked, and for the
same reason as was Socrates. The Croatian composer’s wife told
some strange stories of that merry little blade, her chamber-music
husband. As I do not class Mendelssohn among the great composers,
he need not be discussed. His music was Bach watered for general
consumption. Schubert was an anarch all his short life. He is
said to have loved an Esterhazy girl, and being snubbed he turned
sour-souled. He drank “far more than was good for him,” and he placed
on paper the loveliest melodies the world has ever heard. Beethoven
was the supreme anarch of art, and put into daily practice the
radicalism of his music.

Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever
attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most profound truths,
the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be
incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be
none the wiser. Suppose that some Russian professional supervisor
of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaïkowsky
preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor
that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard
Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty, preaches
anarchy, puts into tone, words, gestures, lath, plaster, paint,
and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated from the convention
of authority, from what Bernard Shaw would call the Old Man of the
Mountain, the Government.

I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another revolutionist
like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt, bitten by the Socialistic
theories of Saint-Simon, a rank hater of conventions in art, though
in life a silken courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker;
and Tschaïkowsky, who buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin
with his cannon among roses or Bakounine with his terrible prose of a
nihilist. Years ago I read and doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis’s interesting
“1849,” with its fallacious denial of Wagner’s revolutionary
behavior. Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden
uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime inspirer.
His very ringing of the church bells during the row is a symbol of
his attitude. And then he ran away, luckily enough for the world of
music, while his companions, Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured
and imprisoned. Wagner might be called the Joseph Proudhon of
composers—his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate like the
sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of
Misery (a subtitle, by the way).

And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors, prosateurs,
journalists, and musicians might not be included under the roof
of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium, whose powerful bass
hurls imprecations at the present order; Georges Eckhoud, Maurice
Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier, whose eloquent bronzes are a protest
against the misery of the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin,
William Blake, William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrès, the late
Stéphane Mallarmé, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Félicien Rops,
the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose men and
women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to discern across
the frame of his pictures febrile visions of terror; and the great
Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon,
Huysmans, Heine, Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,—is not
the art of these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal
expression of anarchic revolt?

Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves with
history; if they did, they would know that decadence has always
existed; that it is not decadence at all, but merely a phase of
development as important as normality: Normality is stupidity,
decadence is genius! Is there, he asks, a more notable case of the
abnormal than the prophet of Protestantism, Martin Luther?

They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones who for
the sake of the idea sacrifice the peace of thousands, as Alexander
and Napoleon; or those who spoil the dreams of youth, Socrates and
Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths and love sin
because only sin has depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain
for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and
Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first anarchist; and
pain is at the bottom of all art, and with Satan, the father of
illusions! It is wise to stop here, else might we become entangled
in a Miltonic genealogy of the angels. I give the foregoing list to
show how easy it is to twist a theory to one’s own point of view. The
decadence theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski’s idea
that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but normal
or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg style; formerly he
lectured on Chopin, and played the F sharp minor polonaise—he was
possessed by the key of F sharp minor, and saw “soul-states” whenever
a composer wrote in that tonality! _Audition colorée_, this?

Nor is there cause for alarm in the word anarchy, which means in its
ideal state unfettered self-government. If we all were self-governed
governments would be sinecures. Anarchy often expresses itself in
rebellion against conventional art forms—the only kind of anarchy
that interests me. A most signal example is Henry James. Surprising
it is to find this fastidious artist classed among the anarchs
of art, is it not? He is one, as surely as was Turgénieff, the de
Goncourts, or Flaubert. The novels of his later period,—What Maisie
Knew, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Better Sort, The
Sacred Fount, The Awkward Age, and the rest,—do they not all betray
the revolution of Henry James from the army of the conventional?
He will be no dull realist or flamboyant romantic or desiccated
idealist. Every book he has written, from The Lesson of the Master
and The Pattern in the Carpet, is at once a personal confession and
a declaration of artistic independence. Subtle Henry James among
the revolutionists! Yes, it is even so. He has seceded forever from
the army of English tradition, from Bronté, Eliot, Dickens, and
Thackeray. He may be the discoverer of the fiction of the future.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds itself after
reading The Wings of the Dove. Here at last is companion work to the
modern movement in music, sculpture, painting. Why prose should lag
behind its sister arts I do not know; possibly because every drayman
and pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has
dipped into that well of English undefiled, the seventeenth-century
literature, must realize that to-day we write parlous and bastard
prose. It is not, however, splendid, stately, rhythmic prose that
Mr. James essays or ever has essayed. For him the “steam-dried style”
of Pater, as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered
attractions. The son of a metaphysician and moralist,—I once fed
full on Henry James, senior,—the brother of that most brilliant
psychologist, William James, of Harvard, it need hardly be said that
character problems are of more interest to this novelist than are the
external qualities of rhetorical sonority, the glow and fascination
of surfaces. Reared upon the minor moralities of Hawthorne, and ever
an interested, curious observer of manners, the youthful James wrote
books which pictured in his own exquisite orchestra of discreet tints
and delicate grays the gestures, movements, and thoughts of many
persons, principally those of travelled Americans. He pinned to the
printed page a pronounced type in his Daisy Miller, and shall we ever
forget his Portrait of a Lady, the Princess Cassimassima,—the latter
not without a touch of one of Turgénieff’s bewilderingly capricious
heroines. It is from the great, effortless art of the Russian master
that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turgénieff represented only one
form of influence, and not a continuing one. Hawthorne it was in whom
Mr. James first planted his faith; the feeling that Hawthorne’s love
of the moral problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed
in his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a Puritan
tempered by culture, by a humanism only possible in this age. Mr.
James has made the odious word, and still more odious quality of
cosmopolitanism, a thing of rare delight. In his newer manner, be
it never so cryptic, his Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change,
and from Daisy Miller to Milly Theale is the chasm of many years
of temperamental culture. We wonder if the American girl has so
changed, or whether the difference lies with the author; whether he
has readjusted his point of vantage with the flight of time; or if
Daisy Miller was but a bit of literary illusion, the _pia fraus_ of
an artist’s brain. Perhaps it is her latest sister, Milly, whose
dovelike wings hover about the selfish souls of her circle, that is
the purer embodiment of an artistic dream.

The question that most interests me is the one I posed at the
outset: Is this to be the fiction of the future, are The Wings of
a Dove or The Ambassadors—the latter is a marvellous illusion—and
studies of the like to be considered as prose equivalents of
such moderns as Whistler, Monet, Munch, Debussy, Rodin, Richard
Strauss, and the rest? In latter-day art the tendency to throw
overboard superfluous baggage is a marked one. The James novel is
one of grand simplifications. As the symphony has been modified
by Berlioz and Liszt until it assumed the shape of the symphonic
poem, and was finally made over into the guise of the tone-poem
by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners of the future must
stem from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or else remain an
academic imitation, a replica of Thackeray or of George Eliot’s
inelastic moulds. Despite its length—“heavenly,” as Schumann would
say—Sentimental Education contains in solution all that the newer
novelists have since accomplished. Zola has clumsily patterned
after it, Daudet found there his impressionism anticipated. All
the new men, Maupassant, Huysmans, Loti, Barrès, Mirbeau, and
others, discovered in this cyclopædic man what they needed; for if
Flaubert is the father of realism he is also a parent of symbolism.
His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric
significance to his words sound the note of symbolism. Mr. James
dislikes Sentimental Education, yet he has not failed to benefit
by the radical formal changes Flaubert introduced in his novel,
changes more revolutionary than Wagner’s in the music-drama. I call
the James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter
endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. All barren
modulations from event to event are swept away—unprepared dissonances
are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that
bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech
of a character’s name. The elliptical method James has absorbed
from Flaubert; his oblique psychology is his own. All this makes
difficult reading for the reader accustomed to the cheap hypnotic
passes of fiction mediums. Nothing is forestalled, nothing is
obvious, and one is forever turning the curve of the unexpected;
yet while the story is trying in its bareness, the situations are
not abnormal. You rub your eyes when you finish, for with all your
attention, painful in its intensity, you have witnessed a pictorial
evocation; both picture and evocation wear magic in their misty
attenuations. And there is always the triumph of poetic feeling over
mere sentiment. Surely Milly Theale is the most exquisite portrait
in his gallery of exquisite portraiture. Her life is a miracle,
and her ending supreme art. The entire book is filled with the
faintly audible patter of destiny’s tread behind the arras of life,
of microphonic reverberations, of a crescendo that sets your soul
shivering long before the climax. It is all art in the superlative,
the art of Jane Austen raised to the _n_th degree, superadded to Mr.
James’s implacable curiosity about causes final. The question whether
his story is worth telling is a critical impertinence too often
uttered: what most concerns us is his manner in the telling.

The style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions,
repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms,
in which the heads of young adjectives gaze despairingly and from
afar at verbs that come thundering in Teutonic fashion at the close
of sentences leagues long. It is all very bewildering, but more
bewildering is the result when you draft out in smooth, journalistic
style this peculiarly individual style. Nothing remains; Mr. James
has not spoken; his dissonances cannot be resolved except by his own
matchless art. In a word, his meanings evaporate when phrased in our
vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things and it may not.
Either way it is not to the point. And yet the James novels may be
the fiction of the future; a precursor of the book our children and
grandchildren will enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure,
of cheap historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings
shall have vanished. A deeper notation, a wider synthesis will, I
hope, be practised. In an illuminating essay Arthur Symons places
Meredith among the decadents, the dissolvers of their mother speech,
the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic purposes. Henry
James has belonged to this group for a longer time than any of his
critics have suspected; French influences, purely formal, however,
have modified his work into what it now is, what the critical men
call his “third manner.” In his ruthless disregard for the niceties
and conventionalities of sentence structure I see, or seem to see,
the effect of the Goncourts, notably in Madame Gervaisais. No matter
how involved and crabbed appears his page, a character emerges from
the smoke of muttered enchantments. The chiefest fault is that his
characters always speak in purest Jamesian. So do Balzac’s people.
So do Dickens’s and Meredith’s. It is the fault, or virtue, of all
subjective genius. Yet in his obliteration of self James recalls
Flaubert; like the wind upon the troubled waters, his power is sensed
rather than seen.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have left Berlioz and Strauss for the last. The former all his
life long was a flaming individualist. His books, his utterances,
his conduct, prove it. Hector of the Flaming Locks, fiery speech,
and crimson scores, would have made a picturesque figure on the
barricades waving a red flag or casting bombs. His Fantastic Symphony
is full of the tonal commandments of anarchic revolt. As Strauss is
a living issue, the only one,—Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Goldmark,
and the neo-Russians are only rewriting musical history,—it is best
that his theme is separately considered. But I have written so much
of Strauss that it is beginning to be a fascination, as is the parrot
in Flaubert’s Un Cœur Simple—and this is not well. Sufficient to
add that as in politics he is a Social Democrat, so in his vast and
memorial art he is the anarch of anarchs. Not as big a fellow in
theme-making as Beethoven, he far transcends Beethoven in harmonic
originality. His very scheme of harmonization is the sign of a soul
insurgent.

In The Anarchists, with its just motto, “A hundred fanatics are
found to support a theological or metaphysical statement, but not
one for a geometric theorem,” it cannot be denied that Lombroso has
worked in futile veins. His conclusions are rash; indeed, his whole
philosophy of Degeneration and Madness has a literary color rather
than a sound scientific basis. But he has contrived to throw up many
fertile ideas; and secretly the reading world likes to believe that
its writers, artists, composers, are more or less crazy. Hence the
neat little formula of artistic Mattoids, gifted men whose brains are
tinged with insanity. Hazlitt, in one of his clear, strongly fibred
essays, disposed of the very idea a century back, and with words of
stinging scorn. Yet it is fanaticism that has given the world its
artistic beauty, given it those dreams that overflow into our life,
as Arthur Symons so finely said of Gérard de Nerval. And the most
incomplete and unconvincing chapter of the Lombroso book is that
devoted to sane men of genius. At the risk of inconsistency I feel
like asserting that there are no sane men of genius.




VI

THE BEETHOVEN OF FRENCH PROSE


I

FLAUBERT AND HIS ART

The maker of a great style, a lyric poet, who selected as an
instrument the “other harmony of prose,” a master of characterization
and the creator of imperishable volumes, Gustave Flaubert is indeed
the Beethoven of French prose. Never was the life of a genius so
barren of content, never had there been seemingly such a waste of
force. In forty years only four completed books, three tales, and an
unfinished volume; a sort of satyricon and lexicon of stupidity—what
else is Bouvard et Pécuchet? The outlay of power was just short
of the phenomenal, and this Colossus of Croisset,—one falls into
superlatives when dealing with him,—this man tormented by an ideal
of style, a man who formed a whole generation of writers, is only
coming into his kingdom. In his correspondence he is the most facile,
the most personal, the least impassable of artists; in his work the
most concentrated, objective, and reticent. There never has been in
French prose such a densely spun style,—the web fairly glistening
with the idea. Yet of opacity there is none. Like one of those
marvellous tapestries woven in the hidden East, the clear woof of
Flaubert’s motive is never obscured or tangled. George Moore declares
L’Education Sentimentale to be as great a work as Tristan und
Isolde. It is the polyphony, the magical crossings, recrossings, the
interweaving of the subject and the long, elliptical thematic loops
made with such consummate ease that command admiration. Flaubert was
above all a musician, a musical poet. The ear was his final court
of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks
essential richness—it is without the great diapasonic undertow of the
Anglo-Saxon—was just short of the miraculous. Until Chateaubriand’s
and Victor Hugo’s time the French tongue was rather a formal pattern
than a plastic, liquid collocation of sounds. They blazed the path
for Flaubert, and he, with almost Spartan restraint and logical mind,
made the language richer, more flexible, more musical, polished,
and precise. The word and the idea were indissolubly associated,
a perfect welding of matter and manner. Omnipresent with him was
the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that would float
by sheer style, a masterpiece unhampered by an idea. The lyric
ecstasy of his written speech quite overmastered him. He was a
poet as were De Quincey, Pater, and Poe. The modulation of his
style to his themes caused him inconceivable agony. A man of equal
gifts, and less exacting conscience, would have calmly written at
length, letting style go free in his pursuit of theme; but Flaubert
strove ceaselessly to overcome the antinomianism of his material.
He wrote La Tentation de Saint Antoine, and its pages sing with
golden throats; transpose this style to the lower key of L’Education
Sentimentale, and we find the artist maddened by the incongruity
of surface and subject. In Madame Bovary, with its symphonic
descriptions, Flaubert’s style was happily mated; while in the three
short tales he is almost flawless. Then came Bouvard et Pécuchet, and
here his most ardent lover recognizes the superb stylistic curve.
The book is a mound of pitiless irony, yet a mound, not a living
organism. Despite its epical breadth, there is something inhuman,
too, in the Homeric harmonies of Salammbô.

With the young wind of the twentieth century blowing in our faces
it is hardly necessary to pose Flaubert academically. His greatness
consists in his not being speared by any literary camp. The
romanticists claimed him; they were right. The realists declared that
he was their leader, and the extreme naturalists cried up to him,
“O Master!” They too were wise. Something of the idealist, of the
realist, is in Flaubert; he is never the doctrinaire. Temperamentally
he was a poet; masked epilepsy made him a pessimist. In a less
cramped milieu he might have accomplished more, but he would have
lost as a writer. It was his fanatical worship of form that ranks
him as the greatest artist in fiction the world has ever read.
Without Balzac’s invention, without Turgénieff’s tenderness, without
Tolstoy’s broad humanity, he nevertheless outstrips them all as an
artist. It is his music that will live when his themes are rusty with
the years; it is his glorious vision of the possibilities of formal
beauty that has made his work classic. You may detect the heart-beat
in Flaubert if your ear is finely attuned to his harmonies. A
despiser of the facile triumph, of the appeal sentimental, he reminds
me more of Landor than De Quincey,—a Landor informed by a passion
for fiction. There are pages of Flaubert that one lingers over for
the melody, for the evocation of dim landscapes, for the burning
hush of noon. In the presence of passion he showed his ancestry; he
became the surgeon, not the sympathetic nurse, as was the case with
many of his contemporaries. He studied the amorous malady with great
cold eyes, for his passions were all intellectual. He had no patience
with conventional sentimentality. And how clearly he saw through the
hypocrisy of patriotism, the false mouthing of politicians! A small
literature has been modelled after his portrait of the discontented
demagogues in L’Education Sentimentale. The grim humor of that famous
meeting at the Club of Intellect set Turgénieff off into huge peals
of laughter. It is incredibly lifelike. A student of detail, Flaubert
gave the imaginative lift to all he wrote: his was a winged realism,
and in Madame Bovary we are continually confronted with evidences of
his idealistic power. Content to create a small gallery of portraits,
he wreaked himself in giving them adequate expression, in investing
them with vitality, characteristic coloring, with everything but
charm. Flaubert has not the sympathetic charm of his brother-at-arms,
Iván Turgénieff. In private life a man of extraordinary magnetism,
his bonze-like suppression of personal traits in his books tells us
of martyrdom to a lofty theory of style. He sacrificed his life to
art, and an unheeding, ungrateful generation first persecuted and
then passed him by. It is the very tragedy of literature that a man
of robust individuality, handsome, flattered, and wealthy, should
retire for life to a room overlooking the Seine, near Rouen, and
there wrestle with the seven devils of rhetoric. He subdued them—made
them bond-slaves; but he wore himself out in the struggle. He sought
to extort from his instrument music that was not in it. What he might
have done with the organ-toned English language after so triumphantly
mastering the _technique_ of the French keyboard—a genuine piano
keyboard—we may only hazard. His name is one of the glories of French
literature, and in these times of scamped workmanship, when the cap
and bells of cheap historical romance and the evil-smelling weed
of the dialect novel are ruling fiction, the figure of the great
Frenchman is at once a refuge and an evocation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Many years have passed since Gustave Flaubert published his third
novel, L’Education Sentimentale; and whether it was the unhappy title
or the political condition of France at the time,—Turgénieff declared
that it was the former,—the big book of five hundred pages failed
to attract much attention. There was no public prosecution, as with
Madame Bovary, nor did the subject-matter invite the controversy of
archæologists; so to the chagrin of the great pupil of Châteaubriand
and Balzac this masterpiece of “pitiless observation” hardly aroused
a protest. To be sure, M. René Taillandier saw in its pages a
covert attack on the idea of young manhood, but then M. Taillandier
was given to the discovery of literary mare’s nests, and the
Franco-Prussian war intervening, one of the greatest of descriptive
novels was allowed to repose in dusty peace.

As George Moore, in one of the most luminous of his criticisms, so
truthfully says, “Since then it has been read by novelists in search
of material, and they held their tongues, partly because it was
easier to steal than to appreciate, partly because they did not wish
to draw attention to their thefts.” Yet L’Education Sentimentale
was not altogether missed by the critics. Paul Bourget won his way
to critical fame with his exhaustive study of its creator; Henri
Taine wrote sympathetically of him; Henry James, who will yield to
no one in his admiration of the dead master, frankly confesses that
the novel is dead, is as sawdust and ashes, while George Saintsbury
cannot sufficiently praise it. It is for him “a whole _Comédie
Humaine_ of failure in two volumes,” and Flaubert “can do with a
couple of epithets what Balzac takes a page of laborious analysis
to do less perfectly.” It remained for Mr. Moore to cry the work
to heaven and to point out that while Balzac might have written
Madame Bovary, no one but Flaubert could have produced L’Education
Sentimentale.

Mr. Moore is right; the novel is stupendous, is appalling in its
magnitude and handling of the unpromising material of life, in
its piercing analysis, power of concrete characterization, and
overwhelming mastery of style. “The ignoble pleases me,” Flaubert
said once; “it is the sublime of the lower slopes.” L’Education
Sentimentale is the very lowest slope of the ignobly sublime.

“The great artists are those who impose on humanity their particular
illusions,” cries Guy de Maupassant, after serving seven long years
of apprenticeship to Flaubert and literature, with what results
we all know. Flaubert’s particular illusion was so completely
magnificent that but few of his intimates absolutely realized it.
Life, he confessed, was to him a bad odor; “it was like an odor of
unpleasant cooking escaping by a vent-hole.” Yet despite his love of
the exotic, of the barbarous, of the Orient, he forced himself to see
it, handle it, estimate it, and write of it. When he wished to roam
in the East or in old Carthaginian times, he took up the history of
the daughter of Farmer Roualt, and we got Emma Bovary. When Egypt and
the Thebaid tempted him with its ascetic gloom and dream splendors,
he resolutely tied himself to his monkish desk at Croisset and worked
for six years at L’Education Sentimentale.

Picture to yourself this green-eyed Norman giant, stalking up and
down his terrace spouting aloud Châteaubriand, whose sonorous,
cadenced lines were implacably engraved on his memory. Flaubert’s
favorite passage was this from Atala: “Elle répand dans le bois ce
grand secret de mélancholie qu’elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes
et aux rivages antiques des mers.” One recalls Matthew Arnold’s love
for Maurice de Guerin’s Centaur, and his eternal quotation of that
marmoreal phrase, “But upon the shores of what ocean have they
rolled the stone that hides them, O Macareus?” Little wonder that the
passengers on the steamboat bound for Rouen enjoyed the spectacle
of the inspired martyr to style as he paced his garden in an old
dressing-gown, chanting the swelling phrases of Châteaubriand!

Relentlessly pursued by the demon of perfection, a victim to
epilepsy, a despiser of the second-hand art of his day, is it not
strange that Flaubert ever wrote a line? Execution was for him a
painful parturition; he was delivered of his phrases in agony, and
yet his first book, born after ten years of herculean effort, was a
masterpiece. Did not a great critic say, “Madame Bovary is one of
the glories of French literature?” But it almost sent its author to
jail. Without the toleration, the adaptability of his dear comrade,
Turgénieff, Flaubert took life symphonically. It was a sad, serious
thing, and to escape its rigors he surrounded himself in the magic
cloud of an ironic art,—an art addressed to the elect. He felt the
immedicable pity of existence, yet never resorted to the cheap
religious nostrums and political prophylactics of his contemporaries.
He despised the bourgeois; this lifelong rancor was at once his
deliverance and his downfall; it gave us L’Education Sentimentale,
but it also produced Bouvard et Pécuchet. Judged by toilsome
standards of criticism, Flaubert was a failure, but a failure
monstrous, outrageous, and almost cosmical; there is something
elemental in this failure. As satirical as Swift, he was devoured by
a lyrism as passionate as Victor Hugo’s. This colossus of ennui set
out to conquer material life, to crush it with superb, indifferent
hands and was himself vanquished by it; and in the smoke and dust
of defeat his noble figure went down as if some strange meteor had
shot from the dark blue to the very bowels of the globe. After forty
years of toil in his hermitage, he left only six volumes, nearly all
masterpieces, but not masterpieces for the million.

Flaubert, as Saintsbury justly points out, occupied “a very singular
middle position between romanticism and naturalism, between the
theory of literary art, which places the idealizing of merely
observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about
the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and
is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealizing whatsoever.”
His was a realism of a vastly superior sort to that of his disciples.
The profound philosophic bias of his mind enabled him to pierce
behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in
finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of things and persons is
never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not
even by Balzac,—a stroke or two and a man or woman peers out from
behind the types. He ambushed himself in the impersonal, and thus
his criticism of life seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers
who look for the occasional amiable fillip of Gautier, Fielding,
Thackeray, and Dickens. This frigid withdrawal of self behind the
screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his
puppets; it is this quality that caused him to be the only naturalist
to receive mercy from Brunetière’s remorseless pen. Those who mortise
the cracks in their imagination with current romanticism, Flaubert
will never captivate. He seems too remote; he regards his characters
too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths
in Sentimental Education, for the book is minor in tone, without
much exciting incident—exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense—and
is inordinately long. Five hundred pages seem too much by half to be
devoted to a young man who does not know his own mind. Yet Frédéric
Moreau is a man you are sure to meet on your way home. He is born in
great numbers and in every land, and his middle name is Mediocrity.
Only the golden mean of his gifts has not brought him happiness.
He has some money, and was born of middle-class parents in the
provinces. His mother’s hope, he is sent to Paris to the schools,
and has just taken his bachelor degree when the book begins. On the
steamboat bound for Nogent-sur-Seine, Frédéric meets Arnoux, the
art dealer,—an admirably drawn personality,—and falls in love with
Madame Arnoux. That love—the leading motive of the work—proves his
ruin, and it is his one pure love; a sample of Flaubert’s irony,
who refuses to be satisfied with the conventional minor moralities
and our conventional disposition of events. Frédéric goes home,
but cannot forget Madame Arnoux. He is romantic, rather silly,
good-hearted, and hopelessly weak. Like the sound of a firm, clanging
chord his character is indicated at the outset and there is little
later development. As the flow of some sluggish river through flat
lands, oozing banks, and neat embankments, Frédéric’s life canalizes
in leisurely fashion. He loses his fortune, he inherits another, he
goes back to Paris, he lives in Bohemia—such a real Bohemia—and he
frequents the salons of the wealthy. He encounters fraud, meanness,
hypocrisy, rapacity, on every side, and like Rastignac is a bit of
a snob. He is fond of women, but a constitutional timidity prevents
him from reaping any sort of success with them, for he is always
afraid of some one “coming in.” When he does assert himself, he fears
the sound of his own voice, yet in the duel with Cisy—one of the
most superbly satirical set pieces in any literature—he is seemingly
brave. His relations with La Maréchale are wonderfully set forth; he
is her dupe, yet a dupe with eyes wide open and without the power of
retaliation. Infirmity of will allied to a charming person, this
young man is a memorable portrait. He is not the hero, for the book
is without one, just as it is plotless and apparently motiveless.
Elimination is practised unceasingly, yet the broadest effects are
secured; the apparent looseness of construction vanishes on a second
reading. Almost fugal in treatment is the development of episodes,
and while the rhythms are elliptical, large, irregular—rhythm there
always is—the unrelated, unfinished, unrounded, decomposed semblance
to life is all the while cunningly preserved. What Mr. James would
call the “figure in the carpet,” the decorative, the thematic
pattern, is never lost, the assonant web being exquisitely spun. The
whole book floats in the air; it is a miracle work. It is full of the
clangor and buzz of Time’s loom.

For me Rosalie Arnoux is the unique attraction. Henry James calls
her a failure—spiritually. She is one of the most charming portraits
in French fiction, and yet a perfectly virtuous woman. The aroma of
her character pervades the pages of this wonderful “encyclopædia of
life.” What shall I tell you of the magical descriptions of the ball
at the Alhambra and other masked balls at La Maréchale’s; of the
duel; of the street fighting during the revolution of ’48; of the
cynical journalist, Hussonet, a type for all times; of the greedy
Des Lauriers; of peevish Senecal; of good-hearted Dussardier; of
Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics extant so as to
paint beautifully; of Mlle. Vatnaz, skinny, slender, amorous, and
enigmatic? What shall I say of M. Roque, of Louise, of the actor
Delmar, who turns his profile to his audiences; of Madame Dambreuse
and her sleek infidelities; of her avaricious husband; of Frédéric’s
foolish mother, so like himself; of Regimbart, formidable, thirsty
Regimbart, with his oaths, his daily café-route, and his magnificent
air of bravado? The list is not large, but every figure is painted
by a master. And the vanity, the futility, the barrenness of it all!
It is the philosophy of disenchantment, and about the book hangs
the inevitable atmosphere of defeat, of mortification, of unheroic
resignation. It is life, commonplace, quotidian life, and truth
is stamped on its portals. All is vanity and vexation of spirit.
The tragedy of the petty has never before been so mockingly, so
menacingly, so absolutely displayed. An unhappy book, you say! Yes;
and proves nothing except that life is but a rope of sand. Read it if
you care for art in its most quintessentialized form, but if you are
better pleased with the bravery and show of things external, avoid
this novel, I beseech you, for it is as bitter in the mouth as a page
torn from Ecclesiastes.

“And thus it is that Flaubert ... became a sort of monk of
literature, shut away from the world, solitary and morose, beholding
humanity with horror, with repulsion, with irony, with sarcasm, with
an evil laugh sadder than tears, and casting upon mankind what are
called glances of pity—in other words, pitiless glances, ... just
as a friar passes a life of contemplation and meditation, saying
to himself that God is great and that men are small, so he spent
almost the whole of a fairly long life saying to himself again and
again that men are small and that art is great, scorning the one
and serving the other with an equal fervor and an equal ardor of
uncompromising devotion.”

Émile Faguet in his excellent monograph on Flaubert—in Les Grands
Ecrivains Français—thus summed up his life. Paul Bourget called his
works “a manual of nihilism,” and declared that in each sentence
of Flaubert’s “inheres a hidden force.” More significant still is
Bourget’s anecdote illustrating Flaubert’s almost insane devotion to
style.

“He was very proud,” relates Bourget, “of furnishing his story of
Herodias with the adverb _alternativement_,—alternately. This word
whose two accents on _ter_ and _ti_ give it a loose swing, seemed to
him to render concrete and almost perceptible the march of the two
slaves who in turn carried the head of St. John the Baptist.” And in
the preface by Flaubert to Dernières Chansons de Louis Bouilhet may
be found his startling yet rational theory that good prose alone can
stand the test of being read aloud, for “a well-constructed phrase
adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration.”

“While remaining itself obscure,” writes George Moore of L’Education
Sentimentale, “this novel has given birth to a numerous literature.
The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L’Education Sentimentale
rewritten into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist—twenty huge
balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the
housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless walking sticks; Goncourt
took the descriptive passages and turned them into Passy rhapsodies.
The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence
all have found riches and fame. The original spirit has proved too
strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had
the largest sale ever known.”

Some one in Henry Labouchere’s London Truth wrote this of the author
of Boule de Suif: “Guy de Maupassant’s death has revived an interest
in his works. He was admittedly the son of Flaubert, from whom he
inherited his sanguine temperament, ruddy complexion, the full
starting veins in his temples, the bull neck, and the flaw in his
nervous system. Flaubert was subject to epileptic fits, and Guy de
Maupassant died of general paralysis, preceded by madness, before he
had reached middle age. As a writer he was with ease what Flaubert
tried to be by great efforts, and something more, he having a deeper
insight into what seem the ordinary circumstances of life.”

The Beethoven of French prose was, every one knows, whimsical and
fastidious to a degree with his style. Be it true or not, one of his
friends relates that he found him one day standing in front of a high
music desk, on which stood a paragraph written in large letters.
“What are you doing there?” said his friend. “Scanning these words
because they don’t sound well.” Flaubert would spend a day over a
sentence because it did not sound well, and every sentence he sent to
press was equally closely analyzed. Well, why not! If modern prose
were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it
would be more sonorous, more rhythmic, in a word, more artistic. I
believe the story, although it does not appear in Tarvers’s book on
Flaubert. It is glorious, true or false; it fixes an ideal for young
writers.


II

THE TWO SALAMMBÔS

After doggedly working like a galley slave for six years Gustave
Flaubert published Salammbô in Paris near the close of 1862. He
was then forty-one years old, in the prime of his laborious and
picturesque life, recluse, man of the world, traveller, and one of
the most devoted of sons. In 1849, with Maxime du Camp—who later
imprudently lifted the curtain on the sad secret of his friend’s
life—Flaubert made a journey up the Nile, through Egypt, Nubia, by
the Red Sea, through Palestine and Syria, into Cyprus, Rhodes, Asia
Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Before Dr. Schliemann, the great
Flaubert dug in Mycenæ, and from the “trenches of Herculaneum, on
to the rocks of Cape Misenum,” he explored, furiously obsessed by a
fantastic idea. In 1850 we find him in Phœnicia, a wanderer and an
excavator of buried pasts. During 1858 he went to Tunis, and to the
ruins of Carthage. From these delvings was born the epical romance of
Salammbô, a book full of sonorous lines like the sweeping harmonies
of Wagner, a book of mad dreams, blood, lust, cruelty, and love
faithful unto death.

Following the publication of this story Flaubert, a lion in
literary Paris since his artistic and legal victories with Madame
Bovary, found himself the centre of many attacks by historians,
archæologists, pedants, and the critical small fry of the town. To
one adversary the blond giant of Croisset deigned a reply. It was M.
Froehner, then editor of the _Revue Contemporaine_, and an expert in
archæology—that is, an expert until Flaubert answered his arguments
and literally blew them off the globe. He admitted having created
Salammbô; that the aqueduct which Mathô and Spendius traversed the
night Salammbô first saw the Zäimph was also an invention; that Hanno
was really crucified in Sardinia; and a few other minor changes.
Then to Froehner’s animadversions he gave text for text, authority
for authority, and when a question of topography arose, Flaubert
clinched his answer with: “Is it to shine by trying to make the
dunces believe that I do not distinguish between Cappadocia and Asia
Minor? But I know it, sir; I have seen it, I have taken walks in it.”

If the question was consecrating apes to the moon, or whether beards
covered in bags in sign of mourning are in Cahen [Ezekiel xxiv. 17]
and on the chins of Egyptian colossi—any doubtful fact, be it ethnic,
archæologic, ethic, æsthetic, or historic, was met by a volley of
answers, a flood of learning, a wealth of reading, that simply
overwhelmed his antagonist. The affair was tremendously diverting for
the lookers-on, but it is to be doubted if art was benefited. For two
dusty German professors such a controversy might have proved useful;
in it Flaubert simply wasted his glorious powers.

Salammbô, despite its erudition, is a love story, original in design,
set in a strange environment, a love story withal. The accusations
of a too impersonal style and of a lack of human interest do not
altogether hold when the wonderfully vital portrait of Salammbô is
studied; and the fiery Mathô, the leper Hanno, Hamilcar, stern, but
loving his little son Hannibal like the apple of his eye; the wily
Spendius, the fanatical high priest—here is a group of living humans,
animated by the same passions as ours, a delineation almost cruel
in its clearness, and all surrounded by an atmosphere of realistic
beauty that bespeaks the art of its creator. The style, the superb
cadenced prose which passes us in processional splendor or else
penetrates the soul like a strange perfume, this style so sharp
in outline, so canorous to the ear, a style at once pictorial and
musical,—to this unique verbal presentation I cannot accord justice.
Flaubert is first the musician and then the psychologist.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ernest Reyer was born in 1823. His family name was Rey, and he hails
from Marseilles. A very old but active man, Reyer is librarian of the
Opéra, and is, or was, critic of the _Journal des Débats_, a position
formerly held by Berlioz. In 1876 he succeeded Félicien David as
a member of the Institute. These two composers exerted the major
influence upon the work of Reyer. He imitated David in his choice of
Eastern subjects and Berlioz in his modern instrumentation. Beginning
as a reformer, writing music that was classed as too advanced, Reyer
lived to hear himself called a reactionary—and with justice, for
in his setting to Salammbô he harks back to Meyerbeer, Halévy, and
Félicien David. The mighty wave of Wagner had no attraction for this
Frenchman until he heard the Tristan Prelude in 1884. From that time
he became an ardent preacher of the faith Wagnerian. He modelled
his orchestration after Wagner, wrote of his music in his critical
journal, and became known as one of the men in Paris who could be
counted upon for the Bayreuth propaganda.

Yet in practice Reyer seems timid. Not possessing much musical
individuality, he attempted what most unoriginal men attempt, he
temporized, became a composer of compromises and an eclectic. So
in his music, even in his best work, Sigurd, the want of a strong,
individual style is noticeable. As early as 1876 selections from
Sigurd had been given in concert by Pasdeloup. The theme of the opera
is almost identical with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the book of which
was finished in 1853. Is it any wonder that Reyer speaks of his early
music as coming too late after David and his later music too soon
after Wagner? Berlioz produced his Erostrate at Baden-Baden, and
Bizet said that La Statue was one of the most remarkable operas given
in France for two decades. With all his half successes—for Sigurd is
in the repertory of the Paris Opéra—Reyer cannot be considered as
a strong man in any way. He has imitated Gluck and Wagner, Berlioz
and Wagner. Years ago, after hearing Sigurd, I called him “le petit
Berlioz,” but I now consider the phrase a pleasing exaggeration.
Berlioz was a master of orchestration. Reyer is not. And he has
nothing new to say. We all recognize those impotent phrases, hollow
and sonorous as the wind in a tall chimney, that are plastered over
his scores. Those cries “O Ciel!” “Je t’aime!” and “Horreur!” are
they not idiotic in librettos and music! Here is the musical phrase
_cliché_ in all its banal perfection, and the thunderous choruses _à
la_ Meyerbeer which punctuate Reyer’s scenes weary the nerves, beat
down our sympathies, and stun our ears.

Sigurd is the one opera that betrays fancy, science, and a feeling
for characterization. I have enjoyed parts of it at the Paris Opéra,
but wondered why the composer had selected the subject. Brunhild lies
asleep on the fiery mountain, situated in Iceland. Sigurd, Gunther,
and Hagen swear friendship, and Sigurd puts on the tarn-cap, winning
Hilda, as she is called, for Gunther. There is the episode of the
naked sword, and later Sigurd is slain by Gunther. The ballet is
very pretty, and Wagner’s influence is in evidence. Sigurd, though
produced in 1884, was really composed before Götterdämmerung. Again
Reyer came too late.

In 1889 he finished the score of Salammbô. It was first sung at the
Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, February 10, 1890, with Rose Caron,
Sellier, Bouvet, Vergnet, and Renaud in the cast. Two years later,
May 23, 1892, Paris listened to the opera with Rose Caron, Albert
Saléza, Vaquet, Delmas, and Renaud in the production. Wednesday
night, March 20, 1901, in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York
viewed its spectacle, for spectacle Salammbô is, spectacle and naught
else. The cast is given as a matter of record: Lucienne Bréval,
Salammbô; Saléza, Mathô; Salignac, High Priest; Journet, Narr’ Havas;
Gilibert, Giscon; Scotti, Hamilcar; Sizes, Spendius; Dufriche,
Autharite, and Carrie Bridewell, Taanach. Luigi Mancinelli conducted.
The production was an elaborate and costly one.

Camille du Locle, who butchered Flaubert’s book to make a holiday for
the Parisians, accomplished his task successfully according to his
lights—theatrical lights. He altered the story, suppressed much of
its humanity, and eliminated the magnificent picturesqueness of the
romance. Du Locle divides his scene plots thus:—

Act I. The Gardens of Hamilcar’s Palace.

Act II. The Temple of Tanit.

Act III. First Scene. The Temple of Moloch. Second Scene. The Terrace
of Salammbô.

Act IV. First Scene. The Camp of the Mercenaries. Second Scene. The
Tent of Mathô. Third Scene. The Field of Battle.

Act V. The Forum.

I need hardly tell you the original story—how Mathô, the fierce
Libyan warrior, first saw the lovely daughter of Hamilcar; how he
resolved to win her; the rape of the sacred veil of Tanit, called
the Zäimph, and Salammbô’s terror at seeing it shroud the person
of a Barbarian in her sleeping chamber; the pursuit, the escape,
the return of Hamilcar and the resolve of Salammbô to win back for
Carthage its holy veil. Who can describe after Flaubert the massed
shock of armies, the pillage of cities and the crucifixion of the
lions! To the march of his sonorous sentences we move through strange
scenes, scenes of repulsive horror, slaughtered men and beasts, and
the odor of sun-baked carcasses, over which hover obscene winged
creatures seeking carrion.

Salammbô, after a hieratic ceremonial with the huge sacred serpent
of the temple—Rodin alone might execute this episode in shivering
marble—visits the tent of Mathô, recovers the Zäimph, but meets with
an accident. She discovers her love for the Mercenary chief, who
justly besieges Carthage for the pay of his soldiers, and she snaps
the gold anklet-chain that daughters of patricians wore in those
times. Mathô is captured, tortured by having to run the gantlet of
Carthage’s enraged populace, and finally drops before the terraced
throne upon which sits Salammbô beside her affianced husband, Narr’
Havas, the Numidian. The poor hunted wretch, over whose red flesh the
skin hangs in bloody strips, dies, and his heart is cut out before
the eyes of Salammbô. She takes poison from a goblet handed her by
the expectant bridegroom. All who touch the veil of Tanit must
perish. So is it decreed by the law and the prophets!

M. du Locle has altered this significant ending by making Salammbô
stab herself, and then Mathô—by the usual “frenzied and superhuman
effort”—breaks his bonds and carves himself into eternity. It is
sweetly gory and melodramatic, this ending. Of course, the trip
through the aqueduct is omitted and the theft of the Zäimph takes
place before Salammbô’s eyes. This is in the second act. The
librettist, with memories of Faust, causes Mathô to make an imaginary
circle through which it would be impious to penetrate. Incidentally
he wooes the young lady with true Gallic ardor. Yet this act, far
removed as it is from the book, is the best of the five.

What follows is of no consequence; the council chamber is lugged in
for its picture, and the spectacle of Salammbô dressing on a terrace
under the rays of a Carthaginian moon, as round as a silver buckler,
does not advance the action materially. The camp and battle scenes do
credit to the taste of the decorator, though they are meaningless.
But in Mathô’s tent, where Salammbô presently arrives, Reyer strikes
fire for the first time. His hero and heroine have thus far been
smothered by processions of chanting priests, by mobs of soldiery,
by ballets and by monster choruses. Here the man and the woman,
face to face, bare their souls, and the music, not so passionate
or so desperate as Valentine and Raoul’s duo in the fourth act of
Les Huguenots, is yet sincere and touching. After that the opera
oozes away in mere pantomime. There is a fall down a series of lofty
staircases, which is not high art.

I could only distinguish two well-defined leading-motives in the
_partition_. One came from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, fourth act,
the other is a slight deviation from Tristan’s cry in Act III: “O
Isolde.” For the rest, I have a vague remembrance of _cantilena_
without melody, finales without climax, a thin, noisy, shallow, and
irritating stream of orchestration and a vocal score that either
screamed or roared. The harmonic scheme is dull and there is little
rhythmic variety. Reyer, as I said before, has few musical ideas,
and he does not conceal this deficiency by the graceful externals
of a brilliant instrumentation. As well meant as was Reyer’s
admiration for the immortal story, a story that will outlive the mock
antiquities of Bulwer, Ebers, and Sienkiewicz, the French critic and
composer was not the man to give it a musical setting. Wagner or
Verdi—none other—could have made of his glowing Oriental prose-poem a
music-drama of vital power and exquisite coloring.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is a holy and wholesome thing to visit the graves of genius, for
the memories aroused may serve as an inspiration and a consolation
in the spiritually arid tracts of daily and doleful existence. But as
the emotions aroused at the sight of great men’s relics are profound
only to the individual—they seldom make interesting reading—so more
than a record of the fact that I have visited Rouen several times to
view the tomb of Gustave Flaubert is not of burning importance. I
cannot help protesting, however, at the tardy official recognition
accorded one of the greatest prose masters France can boast, and
one of the great world novelists. In the Solferino Gardens there is
the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and up on the heights
of the Monumental Cemetery lie his remains in the Flaubert family
plot, not very far from the Joan of Arc monument. The Government has
done nothing, though it has erected marble quarries to mediocrities
not worthy to unlatch the shoes of Flaubert. Guy de Maupassant is
remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue _vis-à-vis_ to the
master whom he loved and to whom he owed so much. At Paris another
loving memorial stands in the Parc Monceau; yet for Flaubert, a
giant when compared to the unhappy writer of the Contes, there is
nothing—not even a commemorative tablet.

The least reparation for this neglect that the French Government
can offer is the purchase and preservation of the little house in
which Madame Bovary was composed with such painful travail. It
still stands, though fast crumbling into decay, on the bank of the
Seine at Croisset about half an hour below Rouen. The paternal house
has vanished, and occupying part of the little park is a dismantled
manufactory. Abbé Prévost is said to have written Manon Lescaut in
the old house—at least, Flaubert believed the story.

The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert
household, keeps a small café near his former home, and is always
ready to talk of the master and of his mother, Madame Flaubert. For
two seasons I vainly tried to get from Colange a photograph of this
mother. To me the mothers of great men are of extraordinary interest.
No money could tempt the old man, though he might have had the
picture reproduced and sold the copies.

With his phrase uttered at Flaubert’s grave, M. François Coppée
fastened more firmly to history the name of that noble artist, “The
Beethoven of French Prose.”




VII

VERDI AND BOÏTO


Drama is relentlessly encroaching upon the domain of music. In
Falstaff, the most noteworthy achievement since Die Meistersinger,
we get something which for want of a better title one may call
lyric comedy. But in form it is novel. It is not opera buffa; nor
yet is it opèra comique in the French sense; in fact it shows a
marked deviation from its prototypes; even the elaborate system of
Wagnerian leading motives is not employed. It is a new Verdi we hear;
not the Verdi of Il Trovatore, La Traviata, or Aïda, but a Verdi
brimful of the joy of life, sophisticated, yet naïve. A marvellous
compound is this musical comedy, in which the music follows the text,
and no concessions are made to the singers or to the time-honored
conventions of the operatic stage. Verdi has thrown overboard old
forms and planted his victorious standard in the country discovered
by Mozart and conquered by Wagner. A marvellous old man indeed!

The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the composer to-day.
The action in Falstaff is almost as rapid as if the text were
spoken; and the orchestra, the wittiest and most sparkling _riant_
orchestra I ever heard,—comments upon the monologue and dialogue of
the book. When the speech becomes rhetorical, so does the orchestra.
It is heightened speech, and instead of melody of the antique, formal
pattern we hear the endless melody which Wagner employs. But Verdi’s
speech is his own and does not savor of Wagner. If the ideas are
not developed or do not assume vaster proportions, it is because of
their character. They could not be so treated without doing violence
to the sense of proportion. Classic purity in expression, Latin
exuberance, joyfulness, and an inexpressibly delightful atmosphere of
irresponsible youthfulness and gayety are all in this charming score.

We get a touch of the older style in the concerted numbers, but the
handling is very free and the content Verdian and modern. Here are
variety, color, freshness, earnestness, insouciance, and numberless
quaint conceits. The tempo is like an arrow-shot from the bow of
a classic-featured archer, whose arrows have been steeped in the
burning lake of romanticism. There is melodic repetition of phrases,
but it is more in the manner of Grétry than Wagner. I have called
Falstaff a pendant to Die Meistersinger, and the two works, directly
antithetical, are both supreme products of the Gallic and Teutonic
lyric genius. And how Verdi escaped the current of his younger
years! What wonderful adaptability, what receptivity, what powers of
assimilation! Some future biographer will write of The Three Styles
of Verdi as did de Lenz of Beethoven’s styles; perhaps he will even
increase the number.

Wagner did not shed his musical skin as absolutely as this Italian.
Compare the young and the old Verdi. In style to-day Falstaff is
younger than Il Trovatore half a century ago. Think of La donna è
mobile and then of the fugued finale to Falstaff. And remember, it
is not a fugato with imitative passages, nor the fugal treatment
of an ensemble finale, but a well-constructed fugue in eight real
parts, with episodes, inversions of the subject, stretti, and even
a pedal point. It is not so pleasing in effect as the magnificent
polyphonic close of Die Meistersinger, because of its severely
formal construction. It sounds as if Verdi had said, “Go to; after
all this mumming and masking I will show ye that I, too, can be
serious.” So he fugues the words “Tutto nel mondo è burlo,” of all
words in the world for such a form! What a gay old dog he must have
been! And heaven knows what jokes he had in store for us, hidden in
the capacious sleeves of his genius. I am sorry that an important
engagement in the Lethean fields prevented von Bülow from being
present at this Falstaff performance. He had to recant his opinion
of the Manzoni Requiem; but after this fugue he would have surely
bent the stubborn knee of pride and prostrated himself before the
Italian god of music.

No one can reproach Verdi with lack of ideas in Falstaff. They
are never ending. The orchestra flows furiously, like a stream of
quicksilver, tossing up repartee, argument, facts, amplifying,
developing, and strengthening the text. No melody? Why, the opera is
one long, merry tune—jocund, blithe, sweet, dulcet, and sunny. Few
moods of melancholy, no moods of madness, but all gracious folly and
fantasy.

The Honor soliloquy from Henry IV, with its pizzicati accompaniment
and its No! punctuated by a drum tap, is changed into strength and
sarcastic humor. When I Was a Page is another gem, and so is the
chattering quartet. But why enumerate details? It is a work of which
one cannot say “this and this,” it is so rich, so exuberant, so
novel, and yet so learned; little wonder then that we marvel. Verdi’s
musical scholarship is enormous. He paints delicate, fairylike
pictures, using the most delicate pigments and with the daintiest
touch imaginable; and then he pens a severe and truthful canon in the
second which excites the admiration of the scholar. The minuet is
an echo of old time, but how superlatives pale before the wealth of
rhythms, modes, subtle tonalities, simple diatonic effects contrasted
with gorgeous, sonorous orchestral bursts! And it must not be
forgotten that both composer and librettist have caught the true
Shakespearean note. The corpulent knight, despite his braggadocio
humor, lechery, and gluttony, is a gentleman born, although sadly
run to seed because of sack and petticoats. The glamour of the
revel at Herne’s Oak, the street scene at dusk, with the gossiping
of the women, and the clear, fresh air,—and there is no attempt at
Purcell madrigals, English local color,—all these prove Verdi’s
sympathy; also that music is a universal language and that an Italian
poet-composer may faithfully frame the story of an English dramatist.

And with what a light hand and vivacity of speech Verdi has done it!
Miracles of construction there are, but the grim bones of theory
are never exposed. Even the fugue is jaunty. The love element
peeps archly out behind the puffed mask of humor; the note is
never deep, just a sigh, and it has departed before you can fairly
grasp its beauty. The duos are all charming, and—but what boots
idle cataloguing? Its beauties should have become patent to our
opera-going public and the work a favorite long ago. “Après moi, le
deluge,” said the Wagnerites of the great Richard. “After Wagner,
Verdi!” some may explain. Falstaff suggests, of course, Victor
Maurel, and our debt of gratitude for his vital and sympathetic
interpretations is great. Is there an actor on any stage to-day who
can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of Iago?
I doubt it. Making all due allowances for the different art medium
the singing actor must work in, despite the slight exaggeration
of pose and gesture, Maurel had no superior, if indeed an equal,
in these two rôles. And then the man’s astonishing versatility!
What method, what manner of training has he had? Of what school or
schools is he the crystallized product? His voice, worn and siccant,
seemed to take on any hue he desired. In Falstaff, you may remember,
it was bullying, blandishing, defiant, tender, and gross; full of
impure suggestiveness, as jolly as a boon companion. And when he
sang “Quando ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk,” how his vocal horizon
lighted up!

The brainlessness of Verdi’s music previous to the time when Aïda
was composed should not close our eyes to the promise and potency
of that same early music. It is the music of a passionate Italian
temperament—music hastily conceived, still more speedily jotted
down, and tumbled anyhow on the stage. Musical Italy before 1880 was
devoted to the voice. Give it a plank, a dramatic situation, an aria,
and success pursued the composer. As for the dramatic unities, the
orchestral commentary, the welding of action, story, and music—why,
they could all go hang. Melody, irrelevant, fatuous, trivial melody,
and again melody, was the shibboleth. The wonder is that an orchestra
was ever employed—except that it made more noise than a piano player;
that costumes were ever worn—only because they looked braver, gayer,
in the flare of the footlights than street attire. And most wonderful
of all was the expense of a theatre, for to those melomaniacs
anything but a tune was a deterrent factor. The singer and the song
sung composed an opera. All the rest was sheer waste of material—or
Teutonic madness.

Verdi’s acquaintance with Arrigo Boïto was the turning-point in his
career. He knew Boïto’s far better than he knew Wagner’s scores. If
he was affected at all by Wagnerism, it was by way of Boïto and not
at first hand. I am not prepared to deny that Verdi ever listened
to the Ring, to Tristan, or to Die Meistersinger in its entirety
sung by competent throats; yet I sincerely doubt it. The Italian’s
early music is full of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Meyerbeer.
He could not, being of a receptive nature, have escaped Wagner had
he known him thoroughly. He was a very suspicious, proud old man,—as
proud of I Due Foscari as of Aïda,—and almost to the day of his death
deprecated Wagner’s influence on modern opera. To see, then, as do
many wise men of music, Wagner peering sardonically from behind the
lively and exciting bars of Verdi’s later scores, is to claim a
clairvoyance to which I dare not pretend.

Take any of Verdi’s operas previous to those of 1850, and what do
we get? A string of passionate tunes bracketed in the conventional
_cavatina-cabaletta_ style; little attempt at following the book—such
awful books!—and the orchestra, a huge strumming machine, strumming
without color, appositeness, rhyme, or reason. And then the febrile,
simian-like restlessness of the music. It was written for people
of little musical intelligence, people who must hum a tune or ever
after view it with contempt. Verdi could furnish tunes by the
hundred—real, vital, dramatic ones. Think of the waste, the saddening
waste, of material made by the young maestro in Oberto, Nabucco, I
Lombardi, Ernani, I Due Foscari, Attila, Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and I
Masnadieri! If he could have but saved them for his latter days—for
his so-called third period! I know that your early Verdian refuses to
consider the later music. He even listens to Aïda under protest. In
it lurks the Wagnerian _Wurm_ that in Otello and Falstaff stings to
death the melodic genius of the venerable master. Now, I quarrel with
no man’s artistic tastes. It were a futile proceeding. If you love
Rigoletto better than Otello, I have no objection to make. I cannot
bring any argument to bear upon you, for I am not a special pleader
in matters musical. As well try to convince a man who asserts that
Dumas père is a greater novelist than Flaubert. Yet I enjoy certain
moments in Rigoletto, just as I think The Three Guardsmen rattling
good reading. But to call either the opera or the romance great art
is to mix your critical values.

Verdi was not by nature a reformer. A man of sensual gifts in the way
of music-making, a born dramatizer of anything from an antique ruin
to a murder, he took up the operatic form as he found it and did not
seek to develop it. But he poured into its ancient, honorable, and
somewhat shaky mould stuff of a stirring nature—and also an amazing
amount of it. Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before
he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance
between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always
the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with
its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and
its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the
inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love,
fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than
Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical
pot-boilers. I have always admired Rossini’s musical laziness. Once
rich, he refused to compose any more. As his facility was on a par
with his lack of artistic conscience, the thought of the amount he
might have left makes one shudder. But luckily he was content to
give us—not to mention any of the others—The Barber of Seville, a
masterpiece pure and undefiled.

Verdi, also lacking an artistic conscience, and without high artistic
ideals, produced operas as indefatigably as incubators chickens.
Naturally such music perished early, and his failures more than
balance his successes. He made money, an enormous amount; he was
probably the richest composer that ever drove a pen. The usual fate
has overtaken the early music, while even Rigoletto, Il Trovatore,
and La Traviata no longer draw unless sung by an “all star” cast.
I pass over the Manzoni Requiem of 1874. It was too near the Aïda
epoch to make a great forward step. Otello, in 1887, set the musical
world mad with surprise, curiosity, delight. It reveals little or
none of the narrow, noisy, vulgar, and violent Verdi of 1850. The
character-drawing is done by a man who is master of his material.
The plot moves in majestical splendor, and the musical psychology is
often subtle. At last Verdi has flowered. His other music, smelling
ranker of the soil, showing more thematic invention, was but the
effort of a hot-headed man of the footlights, a seeker after applause
and money. In Otello all musical provincialisms have vanished; the
writing is clear, the passion more controlled, the effects aimed at
easily compassed. The master craft of Iago is set over against the
fiery, nerve-shaking passion of Otello, and Shakespeare is suggested,
withal a very Italian one.

Falstaff was a second surprise. How an old graybeard of eighty could
have conceived such music is only to be explained by the young heart
of the man, by his sweetly healthy nature, his Latin frugality in
living. He was ever a taciturn man, a stoic, not an epicurean. As an
index to his character his music is often misleading. Add to these
qualities the beautiful friendship of Arrigo Boïto, from which came
a libretto, and the sum total is a setting of Shakespeare’s comedy
such as the world has never seen. Here again Wagner had less to do
with the matter than is supposed. In the musical dialogue Verdi
patterned after Die Meistersinger, for the emotion ever follows
the text. From Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of
Seville he absorbed no little of gay sunshine and effervescence.
But his form is his own; it grew out of the situations of the play,
and was not a procrustean bed of theory upon which the composer
stretched his characters. It is laughing and joyous, this comedy of
an octogenarian. It fairly ripples with the humor of the Fat Knight.
There are no leading motives in the Wagnerian sense, though every
character is outlined with precision.

Now, I assert that Arrigo Boïto helped all this, stimulated a
young-old man to conquer new and more fruitful provinces. And Boïto,
who built two of the best librettos we know, certainly influenced
Verdi in his study of instrumentation. Compare Rigoletto and Otello
orchestrally! The advance is remarkable, all things being considered.
And at Verdi’s years! I suspect that Verdi made the sketches, which
Boïto transformed into painted pictures; just as I discern, as can
any one with ears, the intellectual characteristics in common between
Mefistofele and Iago’s monologues. Yet Verdi is true Verdi to the
last.

Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata have one cardinal merit,
in addition to their miracles of mellifluousness—they prefigure
the later Verdi, the thinking Verdi, the truer musical dramatist.
In regarding these we again encounter critical superciliousness of
the most pronounced type. The neo-Verdians will have none of the
middle-century Verdi—forgetting that no man may lift himself to the
stars by his own bootstraps. Verdi offers a fine picture of crawling,
creeping evolution. I confess that I believe the man would have stuck
at Don Carlos, Sicilian Vespers, Araldo, Un Ballo in Maschera, La
Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and the rest of the reactionary
stuff, had it not been for the masterful influence of Boïto, himself
a composer. Boïto helped Verdi to scramble upon the shoulders of
Verdi, compelled the Verdi of 1887 to forget the Verdi of 1871.

Aïda is pointed out as the great turn in the style of the composer.
It is fuller of Meyerbeerisms than any opera composed since
L’Africaine, as full as is Rienzi. Indeed, I doubt if Aïda would
have been born had not L’Africaine preceded it. The resemblance
to Meyerbeer does not stop at the libretto; there is the same
flamboyancy in color, the same barbaric taste for full-blown harmony
and exotic tunes—not to mention the similarities in the stories.
Wagner had far less to do with Aïda than Meyerbeer, though many
believe the contrary. To Rigoletto, in 1851, must we go in the search
for the roots of the mature Verdi. In the declamatory monologues
of the hunchback jester are the germs of the more intellectual and
subtle monologues of Iago and of Falstaff. Il Trovatore contains
strong dramatic situations, and if the tower scene is become
hackneyed, yet how well devised! In this much-admired, much-sung
composition are to be found harmonic straws which indicate to the
keen observer the way the musical wind was bound to blow nearly a
half-century later. With Traviata Verdi made his first attempt at
musical psychologizing. Banal as is the book, there is no denying
the power of some of its situations. No, decidedly it will not do
to overlook the Verdi of 1850. It would be building musical history
without straw.

As among modern German music-dramas Tristan and Isolde is the
greatest, so is Otello among the lyric dramas of Italy—one might
as well include France. Falstaff is their comic pendant as Die
Meistersinger is to Tristan. Verdi composed Otello when he was past
threescore and ten. The fact seems incredible; in its score seethes
the passion of middle manhood, the fervors of a flowering maturity.
No one ever dreamed of setting Shakespeare in this royally tragic
fashion. Rossini fluted with the theme; in Verdi jealousy, love,
envy, hatred, are handled by a master. It is a wonderful opera, and
a Shakespearean Verdi began at a time when most men are preparing
for death. Reversing natural processes, this phenomenal being wrote
younger music the older he grew. After Aïda—Otello! After grim
tragedy, joyous comedy—Falstaff! If he had survived ninety years, he
might have written a comic opera that would have outpointed in wit
and humor Johann Strauss!

Otello is a true music-drama; its composer seldom halts to symphonize
his events as does Wagner. Boïto, the greatest of librettists, has
skeletonized the story; Verdi’s music gives it vitality, grace,
contour, brilliancy. And yet the Italian poet has not gravely
disturbed the old original. It is but a compliment to his gift of
absorbing the Shakespearean spirit to say that Iago’s Credo, that
terrific explosion of nihilism and hatred, does not seem out of
perspective in the picture. It is Boïto’s intercalation, as are the
Cypriote choruses in Act II. All the rest is pure Shakespeare,
barring a few happy transpositions from the Senate speech to the duo
at the close of Act I.

Verdi’s character-drawing is masterly. Do not let us balk at
comparisons, or for that matter at superlatives. No composer ever
lived—Mozart and Wagner are alone excepted—who could have so
drawn the hot-blooded Moor and the cynical cannikin clinker, set
them facing each other in the score, and allowed them to work out
their own musical fates, as has Verdi. The key to Otello is its
characterization—in a musical sense, of course. But the medium in
which Verdi bids them move, their fluidity, their humanity—these
are the things that almost defy critical analysis. Whether he is
listening to his crafty Ancient, or caressing Desdemona, or raging
like the hardy Numean lion, it is always Otello, the Moor of Venice,
a living, suffering, loving man—Shakespeare’s Otello.

The character does not suggest the flashy operatic, the ranter of
the footlights. Nor does Iago, whether as the bluff hero of battles
and battles, or the loathsome serpent stinging the other’s soul,
ever lag dramatically, ever sink into the conventional attitudes
of a transpontine melodrama. It is Iago, “the spirit that denies,”
underlined perhaps, as music must emphasize ever the current emotions
of a character. Desdemona is drawn in relief to her furious lover and
warrior, and in relief to her cold-blooded maligner.

Verdi has assigned her gentle music, the Ave Maria, the Willow Song.
She is a pure white cloud against which as a background are etched
the powerful masculine motives of the play. Delicacy and vivacity
reveal, bit by bit, the interior of a sweet, troubled soul. The other
figures, Cassio, Emilia, are sketches that add to the density of
the background without detracting from the chief motives. It is a
remarkable libretto.

From the opening storm to the strangling scene the music flows
swiftly, as swiftly as the drama. Rich, varied, and eloquent, the
orchestra seldom tarries in its vivid and acute commentary. There
is scant employment of typical motives—the “kiss” theme in Act
I is sounded with psychologic fidelity when Otello dies. In the
Handkerchief Trio is there pause for instrumental elaboration; but,
in the main, old set forms are avoided, and while there is melodic
flow, it does not often crystallize. The duo at the end of Act I, the
Credo of unfaith, and Otello’s exhortation to the high heavens in Act
II; the tremendous outburst in the next act with Iago’s sardonically
triumphant exclamation, “Behold the lion!” as he plants his scornful
heel on the recumbent man—then the final catastrophe! Throughout
there are picturesque strokes, effects of massed splendor; and about
the tempest-stirred souls is an atmosphere of gloom, of doom, of
guilt and melancholy foreboding.

Verdi has felt the moods of his poet and made them his own. The
moods, the character-painting, are progressive; Otello, Iago, grow
from act to act. The simple-hearted, trusting general with his
agonized cry, “Miseria mia,” develops into a savage thirsting for
blood; “Sangue, sangue!” he howls; he sees blood; the multitudinous
music is incarnadine with it. And it is all vocal, it is written
for the human voice; the voice, not the orchestra, is the centre
of gravity in this astounding drama. Another such Iago, subtle,
sinister, evil incarnate, withal a dangerously graceful fellow,—such
an impersonation as Maurel’s may never be duplicated. And this
singing actor had the advantage of Verdi and Boïto’s “coaching” in
1887, when the music-drama was produced at Milan. This to show that
the music play demands as excellent an Iago as an Otello—indeed,
Verdi’s first idea of a title was the former—and while there have
been several Otellos, only one great Iago has appeared thus far on
the contemporary operatic stage.


BOÏTO’S MEFISTOFELE

Mefistofele by Arrigo Boïto to was revived at the Metropolitan Opera
House, January 14, 1901, where it was originally heard in December,
1883, and later, January 15, 1896. There is a record that Marie Roze
was the first Marguerite of Boïto at the Academy of Music. This was
as early as November 24, 1880. Mefistofele was first heard in Milan,
Italy, in 1868: its _première_ was a scene of rioting, and a duel
in which Boïto participated occurred later. Public feeling ran very
high, for they take their art seriously in Italy. The performance
lasted six hours, and was a hopeless failure. Not until the work,
pruned, revised, and greatly curtailed, was repeated in Bologna, did
Boïto receive a fair hearing. He had composed little previous to this
music-drama, preferring journalism and literary work. But Mefistofele
was such a challenge to older operatic forms that the work was soon
sung in London and elsewhere. Boïto, who is chiefly known as the
librettist of the later Verdi, is a man of the highest artistic
ideals. His mother was Polish, which may account for his versatility,
his poetic gifts. He worked over, re-orchestrated, and polished
Mefistofele, and changed Faust from a tenor to a barytone part. And
it all smells of the lamp, despite some beautiful pages.

Mefistofele was once music of the future; now it reminds one of
some strange, amorphous survival from a remote period. It is such
a tremendous attempt to embrace all of Goethe’s profound world
philosophy, poetry, dramatic symbolism, that it is a failure—a
remarkable failure. There is little melodic invention, the prison
scene being the top notch of its dramatic passion; while the tenor
solo, From the Meadows, From the Valleys, is strangely reminiscent
of the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata.
It is mostly music of the head, not of the heart. Boïto has admirably
characterized Mefistofele. His sinister solo, I am the Spirit that
Denies, is very striking; the orchestra with its shrill, diabolical
whistling suggests Berlioz. And it also suggests in feeling the Honor
solo in Verdi’s Falstaff and Iago’s Credo in Otello. Boïto and Verdi
have collaborated so much that they must have absorbed each other’s
ideas. In the garden scene—a quartet and nothing more—Rigoletto is
recalled in the echoing laughter. It seems trifling though trickily
difficult. Goethe’s Marguerite is not realized. She is hardly
ingénue, this flirting girl who so calmly gives a sleeping potion to
her mother. And the loving side of her nature is barely outlined.

The Prologue in Heaven reveals Boïto’s fine skill in choral writing.
Mascagni did not fail to note this when writing the prayer in
Cavalleria Rusticana. The scene on the Brocken, the Witches’ Sabbath,
is very difficult to realize scenically. It contains a big fugue.
The dying scene is very strong, dramatically stronger than Gounod’s.
Gounod set out to write a very effective operatic scena. His trio
has in it the fire of the footlights. Boïto is possessed with the
tragic beauty of the situation, and so presents a more affecting and
dramatically truthful picture. Calvé has made this scene familiar to
New York.

Boïto attempts Part II of Faust. The classical Sabbath leaves us
dull, although the composer with his unrhymed dactylic and choriambic
verse, and the accompanying music, with its old-fashioned harmonic
flavor, endeavors to symbolize the embrace of German and Greek ideals.

The public sees only Faust consoling himself with the dark-haired
Elena, and the symbolism falls flat. There is some effort at unity
in the welding of the prologue and epilogue by using the opening
theme as a chorale finale. The one well-known duo of this second
part is La Luna Immobile for soprano and alto. But it is all too
episodic to rivet the attention; indeed, Mefistofele is a series of
loosely connected episodes. One is constantly reminded of Mascagni’s
obligations to Boïto. The spoor of Verdi’s later style is also
here. Boïto seems to have been the pivotal point of the neo-Italian
school—himself remaining in the background—while the youngsters
profited by his many experimentings. Mefistofele strikes one as an
experiment, with Wagner as a model. The most admirable thing in the
work is the free treatment of the declamatory passages. In this Boïto
set the pace for Verdi.

Boïto’s devil is greater than Gounod’s. The French devil is not a
terrible fellow; he is too fond of high living, and has a pretty
taste in wine. The sardonic, mocking arch fiend of Boïto is more
like the popular notion of mankind’s enemy. He is familiar with the
Powers, and is contemptuous of earthworms. His defiant and evil song
of Triumph is the best thing in the work. The solo in the Brocken
scene, Here is the World Empty and Round, does not make the same
impression as the Denial song. Faust in this version is rather
colorless, and more philosopher than lover. Marguerite’s most musical
episode is when she recalls her lost happiness in the mad scene. And
there is much music that is ugly and dreary, for Boïto, no matter
what he has accomplished in his unpublished music-drama, is in
Mefistofele rather the poet than the composer. Of rich, red, musical
blood, of vital figures, we are offered but little. This composition
is a product for the closet. It lacks that quality possessed by
musicians of meaner attainments than Boïto—the quality of humanity.
There are dramatic moments, but the story halts, the symbolism is not
appreciable, and the mystic element not quite realized. To give the
world a Faust in tone one must be a musical Goethe. Neither Gounod
nor Boïto was strong enough to cope with the grandeur and beauty
of Goethe’s masterpiece among masterpieces. Gounod was a musical
sensualist, lacking lofty imagination; Boïto fails in the sensuous
temperament and is ever cerebral.




VIII

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

I

    A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,
    A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and Thou
    Trying to sing an Anthem off the Key—
    Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!
                              —WALLACE IRWIN.


To the girl who plays Chopin! This sounds like a toast, and a cynic
would certainly add: “May her pretty fingers ne’er touch ivory
again!” But it is not a health that I wish to propose, nor yet an
exhortation. My notion is to put the question boldly: Can women play
Chopin? Before the rigor of such a query the hardiest-souled male
must retire abashed, or write with the usual masculine brutality and
lack of finesse. Chopin is the favorite composer of women; Chopin
rules the soul of the girl, and to Chopin is addressed a particular
form of worship. This consists of inarticulate gasps, irregular
sighs, and the glance which is called psychic. To girls of eighteen
or thereabouts Chopin is a religion—a sentimental one. Sympathetic
medical men diagnose the symptoms and declare them Chopinitis.
We have, many of us, suffered severely from it; most musical and
unmusical people do. Chopin is in the emotional curriculum of every
woman who plays the piano; therefore it shocks one if this question
be posed: Can women play Chopin?

Let us be scientific, let us be profound, and let us quote rows of
horrid, forbidding figures. I am now proposing a little journey
into the misty mid-region of Womanology, for the need of proving my
somewhat oblique case. It is crab-wise, this progression, but it may
serve. The Nineteenth Century some years ago contained an article
on woman’s brain by Alexander Sutherland. Written in fullest accord
with the aims and ideals of the new woman, the author is yet forced
to confess that “the male brain has an advantage of about 10 per cent
in weight,” and adds that “it is a difference which certainly affords
some little foundation for a very ancient belief,” said belief being
the inferiority of the female intellect to the male intellect. But
he proves that 90 per cent of women are the equals of 90 per cent of
men. And in the very beginning of his short study he demonstrates
that the neurons on the cortex of the brain are quite as numerous
in women as in men, and that these neurons “are the instruments of
mental energy.”

Mere brain weight, then, seems to prove nothing. It is the activity
of the neurons which determines the quality of brain power. Music
is denied a place among the more intellectual arts by many great
thinkers. Whether this is just or not, considering the vast claims
of Bach and Beethoven, I will not say, but one thing is certain: in
Chopin emotional sensibility predominates, and as women are supposed
to be more emotional than their mates, _ergo_ they should play Chopin
better. But are they more emotional? Lombroso, who has measured the
sighs of sentimental girls, and weighed her tears, says no. In an
extraordinary series of public experiments, conducted at Turin, the
learned Italian found that woman as compared with man was deficient
in tactile sensibility; that she did not record impressions, whether
optical, aural, or sensory, as rapidly or with such clear definition
as did man. I admit this sounds discouraging, and is enough to give
pause to the upward flight of the sex, if that flight is to be tested
by scientific analysis. But what is all this testing, weighing, and
measuring when faced by the spectacle of a glorious winged creature
which sails away on victorious pinions with plumage unruffled by
Lombroso and his laboratory logic?

A genuine _féministe_, one who gently felt the female pulse of his
century and suavely waved the patient aside, was the late Ernest
Renan. If ever a man should have had exalted ideals of womanhood,
he was that man. His sister Henriette was his life companion, a
veritable staff to him in his erudite studies, and when she died,
he withered, or, rather, grew fat and spiritually flabby. Yet this
most subtly feminine of men had the ingratitude to write: “There
is no doubt whatever that at the present time feminine instincts
occupy more space in the general physiognomy of the world than they
did formerly. The world is more exclusively preoccupied just now
with frivolities that formerly were looked upon as the exclusive
property of women. Instead of asking men for great achievements,
bold enterprises, and heroic labors, the women ask them for riches
only, to satisfy a vulgar taste. The general movement of the world
has put itself at the service of the instincts of woman, not those
splendid instincts through which they display more clearly than men
can, perhaps, the divine ideal of our nature, but the lower instincts
which form the least noble portion of her vocation.” This was written
in 1855. What would Renan have written in the twentieth century?

We have now laboriously collated the opinions of three men—Sutherland
on the brain, Lombroso on the sensibility, and Renan on the moral
nature of woman. The general tenor of these three messages is hardly
as hopeful as the new woman could desire. Let us leave the chill
topic in all its frozen splendor and turn to the latter part of my
question—Chopin. What is Chopin playing?

That Chopin was a Pole who went from Warsaw to Paris, there won
fame, the love of George Sand, misery, and a sad death are facts that
even schoolgirls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock
figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim,
long fingers, played vaporous moon-haunted music, and after his
desertion by Sand coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the
most genteel and romantic manner. I like to recall George Moore’s
description of Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr. Stevenson,” he
wrote in his Confessions, “as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of
sad flowers with pale weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass
window and scratching thereon certain exquisite profiles with a
diamond pencil.” The piano was Chopin’s window, and upon it he
traced arabesques, tender and heroic, sorrowful and capricious. All
this is Chopin romantically conventionalized by artist-biographers
and associates. The real man, as nearly as we dare describe a real
man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature,
who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and
a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared
with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We
can see him giving a few piano lessons to prim, chaperoned misses
of the Boulevard Saint-Germain before each noon; in the afternoons
making calls or studying; in the evening at the opera for an hour,
later in the enchanted circle of countesses who listened to his
weaving music, and afterward a space for breathing at a fashionable
café before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat
loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a
temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he
reveal the richness of his inner life. That he suffered intensely
from petty annoyances before which the ordinary man would hunch his
shoulders was but the result of a hyperæsthetic delicacy. An æolian
harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has
ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.

And then there is the national element, perhaps the most fascinating
of all the fibres of his many-colored soul. Chopin was Polish, he
loved Poland madly, yet Chopin never laid down his music to take up
arms for his native land, fight or die for, as did his countrywoman
Emilia Plater. Being infinitely more feminine than any woman,
Chopin sang his dreams, his disillusions, into his music, and put
his fiery patriotism into his polonaises. His range is not so wide
as Beethoven’s; but it is quite as intense. His mazurkas, valses,
nocturnes, studies, preludes, impromptus, scherzos, ballades,
polonaises, fantaisies, variations, concertos, cradle-song,
barcarolle, sonatas, and various dances are the most intimate music
written for any instrument. A lyric poet, he touched us to the core,
and with exquisite tentacles drew our soul to his. He is dead, yet
a vital musical force to-day. To play Chopin one must have acute
sensibilities, a versatility of mood, a perfect mechanism, the heart
of a woman and the brain of a man. He is not all elegant languors
and melancholy simperings. A capricious, even morbid, temperament
is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power
that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of
excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an
infinity of colorings; supreme musicianship—Chopin was a musician
first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey;
and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and
love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin, sensitive edge
and the soul is aflame with the joy of death. Does this sound like
mocking at the impossible? All this and much more that is subtle and
indescribable are needed to interpret Chopin. And now do you see that
I am right when I declare that most women play his music mechanically?

Who has played Chopin in a remarkable manner? The list is not large.
Chopin himself must have been the greatest of all, though Liszt
declared that his physical strength was not able to cope with the
more heroic of his works. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Essipoff,
Joseffy, Karl Heymann, Pachmann, and Paderewski—a somewhat
attenuated number of names. Of course there were many others; but
these represent supreme mastery in various phases of the master’s
music. The real pupils all claimed to have inherited the magic
formula, the tradition. To-day the best-known Chopin players are
Joseffy, Rosenthal, Pachmann, Paderewski, and others. Each has
his virtues, and to define their limitations, enunciate their
excellences, would be critical hair-splitting. Nearly all the younger
professional men and women play Chopin after approved academic
models. He is expounded by æstheticians and taught throughout the
land. He is mauled, maimed, thumped, and otherwise maltreated at
conservatories, and the soul of him is seldom invoked, but floats, a
wraith with melancholy eyes, over nearly every piano in Christendom.
There have been and are charming interpreters of his music among
women pianists. Paderewski told me that he never heard the mazurkas
better played than by Marcelline, Princess Czartoryska, a beloved
pupil of Chopin’s. We have never had the mazurkas so charmingly
played here as by the wilful Vladimir de Pachmann; yet not even his
dearest foe would dower that artist with great mental ability. But he
is more feminine than any woman in his tactile sensibilities. Joseffy
has far more intellectuality; Paderewski is more poetic. All three
are, as all musical artists should be, feminine in their delicacy of
temperament.

Where, then, does woman enter this race, a race in which sex
traditions are topsy-turvied? If women are deficient in brain weight,
in nervous and spiritual powers, how is it that they dare attempt
Chopin at all?

Because, patient reader—and now I begin to draw in the very large
loop I have made—men of science deal with the palpable, and
the time for measuring and weighing the impalpable has not yet
arrived. Because there is no sex in music, and because you may not
be very moral or very intellectual, and yet play Chopin like “a
little god”—as Pachmann would say. And now for my most triumphant
contention: if the majority of women play Chopin abominably—so do the
majority of men!


II

“It may indeed,” answered Amelia; “and I am so sensible of it that
unless you have a mind to see me faint before your face, I beg you
will order me something—a glass of water if you please.” And then
that most fascinating chronicler, Henry Fielding, Esq., proceeds
to relate the further history of Captain Booth’s good lady, but
not until Mrs. Bennet infuses some “hartshorn drops” into a glass
of water for her. All this was about 1750. Since then Miss Austen
and her troop of youthful creatures, swooning to order, have stolen
with charming graces across the canvas of fiction; the young woman
of 1750, with her needles and her scruples, has quite vanished; and
passed away is the girl who played the piano in the stiff Victorian
drawing-rooms of our mothers. It has always seemed to me that
slippery haircloth sofas and the Battle of Prague dwelt in mutual
harmony. And now at the beginning of the century the girls who devote
time to the keyboard merely for the purpose of social display are
almost as rare as the lavender water ladies of morbid sensibilities
in the Richardson and Fielding novels. It was one of the new English
essayists who wrote of The Decay of Sensibility. He meant the Jane
Austen girl; but I wonder if the musical girl of the old sort may
not be also set down for study—the study we accord to rare and
disappearing types. Yet never has America been so musical, never so
crowded the recitals of popular pianists, while piano manufacturers
bewail the day’s brevity, so eager for their instruments is the
public. Here is a pretty paradox: the piano is passing and with it
the piano girl,—there really was a piano girl,—and more music was
never made before in the land!

Women and music have been inseparable in the male imagination since
the days when the morning stars sang cosmic chorals in the vasty
blue. The Old Testament tells of dancing and lyrics that accompanied
many sacred offices, and we all recall those music-mad maids who
slew Bacchus for a mere song. Women played upon shawm and psaltery,
and to her fate went dancing with measured tones the daughter of
Jephthah. I am not sure but Judith crooned a melody for the ravished
ears of Holofernes. An early keyed instrument was named in honor
of woman—the virginal—and the first printed piece of English music
was called Parthenia. On the title-page is represented a simpering
and rather blowzy young woman of Rubens-like physique, playing
upon a virginal, her fingers in delightfully impossible curlicues.
This piece was engraved in 1611. A variety of pictures, some as
early as 1440, show the inevitable girl seated at the spinet, or
clavichord. There is a painting by Jan Steen in the London National
Gallery, depicting an awkward Dutch miss fingering the keys, and
a Gérard Ter Borch at the Royal Museum, Berlin, reveals a woman
of generous breadth playing upon a violoncello. She appears to be
handling her bow like a professional; and she is, strange to say,
left-handed. Ample are the facts relating to the important rôle
enacted by woman as interpretative artist. To no less an authority
has been ascribed—wrongly, I suspect—a certain aphorism which
places in curious sequence wine, woman, and song. It was the woman
who entertained that then was considered. She pleased the rude
warrior, fatigued by the chase or war, and with her dainty tinklings
soothed his sottish brain. Like music, woman was a handmaiden. With
the emancipation of the art from churchly rubric came its worldly
victories. In the brilliant spaces of the concert room the piano was
king, and not seldom a king subdued by queenly fingers. The male
virtuoso, surely a thing of gorgeous vanities, soon had his feminine
complement. The woman who played the piano appeared in Europe; and
there were those that predicted the millennium. In the eighteenth
century pianos had sconces in which burned candles, while charming
women, hair powdered and patch on face, played Haydn, attempted
Scarlatti, and greatly wondered at the famously difficult music of
Mozart. Beethoven, a loutish young man of unbearable habits, wrote
music that was not to be thought of—it was simply not playable. To
be sure, a few grand ladies who gave themselves superior airs of
culture—as do Ibsen girls to-day—attempted the Beethoven sonatas in
the presence of the composer, who, quite deaf, lolled complacently
in their drawing-rooms and betimes picked his teeth with the candle
snuffers. But there was sterner stuff in the next generation. After
Camilla Pleyel came Madame de Belleville-Oury, admired of Chopin, and
the transition to the modern piano-playing women, Clara Schumann,
Annette Essipoff, Sophie Menter, Teresa Carreño, was an easy one.

The latter half of this century has witnessed an intense devotion to
a barren ideal. Years previous to the advent of the sewing-machine
there burst upon the civilized globe a musical storm of great
magnitude. Every girl whose parents respected themselves was led
almost manacled to the keyboard, and there made to play at least
one hour out of the twenty-four. This was before the age of eight;
after that crumby and pinafore period an hour was added, and O, the
tortures of her generation and the generation that succeeded her!
Veritable slaves of the ivory, they worked like the Niebelungs for a
stern Alberich, who pocketed the hoard of their fathers and rapped
their cold, thin, and despairing fingers with a lead pencil—one
usually “made in Germany.” With what infantile malignancy was
regarded the lead pencil of the German music-master! Why, even as
I write, my very sentence assumes an Ollendorffian cast because
of the harrowing atmosphere conjured up by that same irritable
Teutonic pencil-wielder. Piano music of those days was a thing of
horror. Innumerable variations and the sonatina that stupefied were
supplemented by diabolical finger studies without end. One hour after
breakfast, one hour after luncheon, and in the evening a little music
to soothe digestion and drive away dull drink—something of this sort
was the daily musical scheme of our natural rulers. Every girl played
the piano. Not to play the instrument was a stigma of poverty. The
harp went out with the Byronic pose, though harp-playing was deemed
“a fine, ladylike accomplishment” until the Civil War. But a harp
is a troublesome instrument “to keep in order”; it needs skilled
attention—above all, careful tuning. Now the piano is cheaper than
the harp—I mean some pianos—and it is the only instrument I know of
that is played upon with evident delight when out of tune. Even the
banjo is tuned at times; the average piano so rarely that it resents
the operation and speedily relapses below pitch. Because of its
unmusical nature, a very uncomplaining beast of burden, the piano
was bound to drive out the harp; it is more easily “worked,” and,
by reason of its shape, a more useful piece of furniture. Atop of a
piano may be placed anything, from a bonnet to an ice-cream freezer;
indeed, stories are told of heartless persons using it for a couch;
and once a party of French explorers discovered on the coast of
Africa an individual, oily but royal, who had removed the action and
wires of a grand piano and used the interior for his permanent abode.
The unfortunate instrument had drifted ashore from a wreck.

Other reasons, too, there are for the supplanting of the harp by its
more stolid half-brother, the piano—bigger brother, a noisier, more
assertive one, and a magnificent stop-gap for the creaking pauses of
the drawing-room machinery. And how nobly it covers thin talk with
a dense mantle of crackling tones! A provoker of speech, an urger to
after-dinner eloquence, the piano will be remembered in the hereafter
as the greatest social implement of last century’s latter half.

Liszts in petticoats have been so numerous during the past
twenty-five years as to escape classification. It was the girl
who did not play that was singled out as an oddity. For one Sonia
Kovalesky and her rare mastery of mathematics there were a million
slaves of the ivory. Not even the sewing-machine routed the piano,
though it dealt it a dangerous body blow. Treadles and pedals are
not so far asunder, and a neat piano technique has been found quite
useful by the ardent typewriter. What this present generation of
children has to be especially thankful for is its immunity from
useless piano practice. Unless there is discovered a sharply
defined aptitude, a girl is kept away from the stool and pedals.
Instead of the crooked back—in Germany known as the piano back—and
relentless technical studies, our young woman golfs, cycles, rows,
runs, fences, dances, and pianolas! While she once wearied her heart
playing Gottschalk, she now plays tennis, and she freely admits that
tennis is greater than Thalberg. Recall the names of all the great
women’s colleges, recall their wonderful curriculums, and note with
unprejudiced eyes their scope and the comparatively humble position
occupied by music. In a word, I wish to point out that piano-playing
as an accomplishment is passing. Girls play the piano as a matter of
course when they have nimble fingers and care for it. Life has become
too crowded, too variously beautiful, for a woman without marked
musical gifts to waste it at the piano.

Begun as a pastime, a mere social adjunct of the overfed, music,
the heavenly maid, was pressed into unwilling service at the piano,
and at times escorted timid youths to the proposing point, or eked
out the deadly lethargy of evenings in respectable homes. Girls had
to pull the teeth of this artistic monster, the pianoforte, else be
accounted frumps without artistic or social ambitions. Unlike that
elephant which refused to play a Bach fugue on the piano, because, as
the showman tearfully explained, the animal shudderingly recognized
the ivory of the tusks of its mother, the girl of the middle century
went about her task muddled in wits, but with matrimony as her
ultimate goal. To-day she has forsaken the “lilies and languors” of
Chopin, and the “roses and raptures” of Schumann, and if she must
have music, she goes to a piano recital and hears a great artist
interpret her favorite composer, thus unconsciously imitating the
Eastern potentate who boasted that he had his dancing done for him.
The new girl is too busy to play the piano unless she has the gift;
then she plays it with consuming earnestness. We listen to her, for
we know that this is an age of specialization, an age when woman
is coming into her own, be it nursing, electoral suffrage, or the
writing of plays; so poets no longer make sonnets to our Ladies of
Ivories, nor are budding girls chained to the keyboard. Never has the
piano been so carefully studied as it is to-day, and, paradoxical
as it may sound, never has the tendency of music been diverted to
currents so contrary to the genius of the instrument. All this is
better for woman—and for the development of her art along broader,
nobler lines. The tone-poem and music-drama are now our ideals, and I
dare publish my belief that in this year of grace there has been born
one who will live to see the decay of the piano recital. He may be a
centenarian before this change is wrought, but witness it he will,
for music, of all arts, changes most its vesture.


III

Balzac, master of souls, knower of the heart feminine, made his
lovely Princesse de Cadignan say to the enamored Daniel d’Arthez: “I
have often heard miserable specimens regret that they were women,
wish that they were men; I have always looked upon them with pity....
If I had to choose I would still prefer to be a woman. A fine
pleasure it is to have to owe one’s triumph to strength, to all the
powers that are given you by the laws made by you! But when we see
you at our feet, uttering and doing sillinesses, is it not then an
intoxicating happiness to feel one’s self the weakness that triumphs?
When we succeed we are obliged to keep silent under pain of losing
our empire. Beaten women are still obliged to keep silent through
pride. The silence of the slave frightens the master.”

This was written in 1839. If Balzac had lived a half-century, he
would have painted full-length portraits of women who keep quiet
neither in triumph nor in defeat; and at whose feet pedals, not
men, register new emotional experiences—for the pedals of the piano
are the soul of it. To be ashamed of one’s sex nowadays would be
an insane confession wrung from some poor overworked creature, one
to whom the French novelist might refuse even the name of woman.
Females may deny the beauty of being born to wear petticoats; women,
never. Indeed, the boot is now on the masculine leg. As the current
phraseology runs, Woman has found herself. She has also found a
panacea for irritated vanity and indigestion, at one time called in
romances a broken heart. This prophylactic is art; and when it is
used intelligently, misery flies forth from the window as music opens
the door.

Once, for the sheer fun of it, I made an imaginary classification
of music which various heroines of fiction preferred, or, rather,
might prefer—for many of them are, as you know, tone-deaf. Mr.
Howells remarked this years ago. But consider Clarissa Harlowe, or
any of the immortal Jane’s brood—do they not all suggest musical
possibilities? What a paper that would be to read before a mothers’
meeting on a sultry day in September!—The Musical Tastes of Fiction’s
Heroines. And with what facile logic, the logic of numbers, a clever
girl could unhorse her ruder opponents. The theme fascinates me; I
am loath to leave it. Think of the year 1800! Beethoven had written
some piano sonatas, but was not very well known abroad. In London
town there were still harpsichords, and Scarlatti and Mozart. The
modern grand piano was a dream that nestled in the later sonatas of
Beethoven—and in the brain of their maker. Tone was not thought of;
while a pearly touch, smooth scales, and crisp little rhythms were
affected by such women as spared the time to practise from their
social duties. The piano music of the eighteenth century was written
for women, is woman’s music. All these virginals, spinets, clavecins,
clavichords, harpsichords, are they not feminine? Are they not the
musical rib plucked by an amiable fate from the side of the masculine
church organ? Historical retrospects gall the mind at all times,
but it may not be amiss to consider the century’s piano music which
preceded ours. Out of the old dance suites burgeoned latter-day
piano music. Those graceful writers of old Italy and old France made
gay melodies, full of the artificial life of their time, of their
surroundings. You catch glimpses of delicate faces, with patches,
powdered heads, courtly struttings, and the sounds of courtly wooing.
The stately minuetto, lively courantes, decorous allemandes, smooth
sarabands, tripping gavottes and gigues,—all these, and many more
with high-colored titles, enchanted our great-great-grandmothers. The
more tragic note was not missing, either. They had L’Homicide and the
Fair Murderess, and any number of pieces named after tears, anger,
caprice, sorrow, revenge and desire. Animals and the gods of Greece
and Rome were quoted; flanked by wax candles, with suitors smirking
at the side of them, and peering in front of them, fair women played
music, played it with genteel gravity or bewitching coquetry; played
Scarlatti and Emanuel Bach, and all for the love of art—and perhaps
a matrimonial future. Let it be remarked, _en passant_, that the
keyboard, vastly modified, developed and improved as it is, is still
a favorite weapon of feminine offence. Just here get down your
Browning from the shelf and consider A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Of Bach, the giant, we do not read in the diaries, letters, and books
of this fashionable epoch. That grim old forge-master of fugues would
hardly have appealed to the dreams of fair women, even had they been
cognizant of his existence. Handel’s piano music was more to their
taste; his suites, classical and solid in character, are full of
brightly said things, and lie well for the instrument. Joseph Haydn,
owing much to Bach’s son Emanuel, wrote pleasing music, light music,
for the piano. His sonatas are not difficult, were not difficult for
those ladies who could fluently finger Scarlatti. This Italian, with
his witty skippings, rapid hand-crossings, and implacable vivacity,
is still rainbow gold for most feminine wrists. Mozart, the sweetly
lyric, the mellifluous and ever gay Mozart, made sonatas as gods
carve the cosmos. Every form he touched he beautified. The piano
sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written
with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart
more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns
prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender
fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth
sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded
the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music
that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of
Beethoven and his mighty thunderings.

Behold the conqueror approaches, the Bonaparte, the Buonarroti, the
Balzac of music—Ludwig van Beethoven. In the track of his growling
tempests followed women, nobly nurtured, charming women of fashion,
Nanette Streicher, Baroness Ertmann, Julia Guicciardi, Thérèse,
Bettina, and many more besides. They played for him, and he, great
genius and despiser of idle conventions, stretched his stout short
body out upon drawing-room couches.

It is not a pretty picture this, but is a characteristic. It must
please latter-day pagans who flout the niceties of society. Not all
the Beethoven sonatas were admired to the studying point. The early
ones—mere exercises of a young athlete juggling with the weapons of
his grandsire—alone called for commendation. Dedicated to Haydn,
the first three did not excite the ire of critics or teachers. But
as the man grew, as he felt, suffered, and knew, then his canvases
began to excite fear and repulsion. “Why these gloomy tints, Herr
van Beethoven?” they cried, and listened eagerly to his rivals, the
Wölffls, the Gelineks, the Hummels. There is a modishness even in
the art of writing for the piano, and Beethoven despised modishness,
as would have Diana of the Ephesians the millinery of Lutetia. So he
was neglected for a half-century, and the long-fingered, long-haired
virtuosi overran Europe, with their variations, their fantasias,
their trills, and their trickeries. From Hummel to Thalberg effect
was their god, and before the shrine of the titillating, the
ornamental and the suave, womankind prostrated herself, pouring out
homage and gold—the latter provided by patient fathers and husbands.
It was a carnage, a musical rout, and a superior warrior like Liszt
trailed thousands of scalps after his chariots during triumphal
tours. The mediæval dancing manias were as nothing when compared with
the hysteria evoked by the new Pied Piper of Hungary. Chopin never
had the physique, and Mendelssohn was too moral, to copy Liszt. These
two men wrote lovely music, feminine music; while down in Vienna
a young man named Schubert died, after writing incomparable songs
and much beautiful piano music. His sonatas are not so feminine in
texture as his musical Moments, impromptus and dances. This music
is made for woman, with its intimate, tender feeling, its loose and
variegated structure. Von Weber composed chivalric sonatas and that
marvellous epitome of the dance, The Invitation. Schumann, broken in
fingers through too curious experimentings, dreamed twilight music,
which his gifted wife Clara interpreted to an incredulous world.

Since then the rest is history. Women virtuosi are as plentiful as
the shining sands, beginning with Clara Schumann and ending with the
prodigy of yesterday. Such thunderers as Sophie Menter and Teresa
Carreño, women of iron will and great muscular power, and a subtle
interpreter like Annette Essipoff, challenge men in their own sphere,
and relatively hold their own. I say relatively; and now comes
into view a serious question. It is this: Should women essay the
music of all composers? The answer is in the affirmative, for who
shall assert that a severe course of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms may
result in aught else but good. But do women interpret all composers
with equal success? The answer is here decidedly a negative one.
Though I have heard Menter play Liszt’s rhapsodies with overwhelming
brilliancy, though I have listened to Carreño in amazement as she
crashed out Chopin’s F sharp minor polonaise on her Steinway, yet
I know that the brawn and brain of this pair are exceptional. Half
a dozen such do not appear during a century. Therefore big tonal
effects, called orchestral by the critics, are usually not to be
found in the performances of women. For that reason I enjoy the
playing of women who are genuinely feminine in their style—Essipoff
or Madame Zeisler. Smoothness, neatness, delicacy, brilliancy, and a
certain grace are common enough. The average woman pianist is a hard
student, and strives to achieve that which men easily accomplish.
As a rule she has finger facility, a plentiful lack of rhythm, and
no particular interpretative power—exactly the qualities of the
average male pianist. When Maud Powell plays Bach or Beethoven on
her violin we are amazed and say, “Why, this is virile!” When Fanny
Bloomfield-Zeisler delivers the scherzo from the Litolff concerto,
we are surprised—not at her swiftness, ease, or delicacy, but at her
nervous force and bravura—these latter being selfishly annexed by men
as eminently masculine attributes. Are they? Certain feminine Wagner
singers possess them, and in opera they are accepted as a matter of
course. A genuine paradox, is it not?

The muscular conformation of a woman’s arm militates against her
throwing a stone as far as a man; it also operates adversely in
modern piano-playing, where the triceps muscles are a necessity
for a broad, sonorous tone. I have considered the pros and cons of
emotional intensity in writing of woman as a Chopin player, and
shall not again traverse that barren and ungrateful region. The
intellect remains to be discussed. Are women intellectual in the
interpretative sense? Yes. Without hesitation I answer this question,
for music, apart from the creative side, is a feminine art, and one
in which woman’s intuitions lead her many leagues toward success.
That women have as yet—you mark my use of a future contingency!—that
women have as yet exhibited powers of interpretation as keen, as
original, or even on a par with men, I am not prepared to say.
Illuminative in Bach or Beethoven they are not, though delightfully
poetic in Schumann and Chopin. I have never heard a woman play the
Hammer-Klavier Sonata, opus 106, of Beethoven with force, lucidity,
or imaginative lift.

_Enfin_: The lesson of the years seems to be that women can play
anything written for the piano, and play it well. In all the music
of the eighteenth century, in the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and the
early Beethoven, in Hummel, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, some of
Schumann, some of Chopin, a goodly portion of Liszt, all of Field,
Heller, Hiller, Moszkowski, Grieg, Scharwenka, and a moiety of
Brahms,—all these composers have been essayed with success. Bach’s
Well-tempered Clavichord should be the bread and butter of a woman’s
musical _menu_; it should begin and end her day. One may quote Balzac
again—that dear Princesse de Cadignan, sometimes called Madame la
Duchesse Maufrigneuse, “Women know how to give to their words a
peculiar saintliness; they communicate to them I know not what of
vibration, which extends the sense of their ideas and lends them
profundity; if later, their charmed auditor no longer recalls what
they have said, the object has been completely attained, which is
the proper quality of eloquence.” And of this species of eloquence
is a woman’s playing of Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. It is often
charming; but is it ever great, spiritual, moving art?

The woman question—is it not one to be shunned? I mean the question,
not the theme itself, though one may recommend Laura Marholm’s
volumes. Frau Marholm is a Scandinavian, and Northern women must
have been bound with iron social gyves, to judge by the quality of
their protestant literature. Ibsen, Björnson, even Strindberg—whose
erratic pendulum swings to the other extreme—are full of the heady
polemics of sex. Sex—why, one sickens of the subject after reading
problem plays and novels. To all American women between the ages
of eighteen and eighty I say study Laura Marholm’s Studies in the
Psychology of Woman. The dissatisfied ones, those who really believe
all they read, may perhaps realize how much better off is The Unquiet
Sex—this capital phrase is of Helen Watterson Moody’s coining—in
America. Little wonder that there is a woman movement in Europe. For
its psychology read Marholm. Best of all, here is a woman telling us
secrets, secrets not to be captured by men watchful of the Sphinx
that Defies. And it is a sad corrective for masculine presumption,
masculine vanity. _We_ are only tolerated. Some of us have known that
for years; here it is elevated to the dignity of a psychological
system. These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant
described them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that
are mortifyingly candid, excusing us if they love us, but after all
only _tolerating us_, allowing the lords of creation to kneel in
humble attitudes at the shrine and rewarded at the end by—toleration.
And if this is the case on the Continent, where the equality of
women is as yet a half-hatched idea, how is it in America, where she
is queen, queen from kitchen to palace? I think Mrs. Marholm herself
would be amazed, and mayhap after five years’ residence here would
write a book about the Wrongs of Man. Her Six Famous Women betrays
the writer’s keenness of vision, the Studies reveal breadth of idea
and judgments. She does not belong to the “Shrieking Sisterhood.” She
is a woman, a defender of home and family. I assure you I enjoyed
her book far better than Zola’s Fecondité—that most miraculously
dull and moral tract. Tolstoy is the remote parent of both books,
though Marholm has her own feminine point of attack. No man may hope
to understand women as does a woman. It was Zangwill, I think, who
said that all women writers are of value—do they not tell us the
secrets of their sex? This is hardly polite, but it is true. When
the “messages” of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté have grown stale
from usage—all truths breed rust after a time—their unconscious
self-portraitures will preserve them from those giant moths, the
critics.

The Marholm knows better than any envious male the limitations of
woman as artist, politician, and writer. In the admirable study of
Mrs. Besant she writes: “She has always possessed the wholly feminine
capacity of assimilating the most varied and incompatible mental
food, without disturbance or indigestion, and of giving it forth
with a certain accuracy; her brain was like a photographic plate
upon which the exposed picture is clearly and mechanically printed.
These characteristics, the quick perception and exact repetition,
are frequently praised by professors who examine feminine students,
and many have declared that in eagerness for knowledge and ability
to acquire it, women excel men. It is undeniable that in these
characteristics they excel most men; it would be a pity if most men
excelled them, for these characteristics rest upon the lesser power
and capacity for original thought, independent selection, and deeper
affinity to the appropriate idea; they depend upon a mechanical
instead of an organic process.”

This is not a pleasing paragraph, but it shows the writer’s style
of argument. She girds with something approaching violence at the
milk-and-water men of the day, declaring that Woman’s Emancipation
is the result of some deficiency in modern manhood. However, read
Marholm and draw your own pictures of what women should or should not
be. A charming woman told me that she had asked Jean de Reszké if he
cared to sing Romeo or Tristan with any particular singer.

“I always sing to my ideal woman,” replied the artist. And I fancy
that we all pursue that illuding composite. It is Woman who composes
all the great music, paints all the great pictures, writes all
the great poems—Woman the inspirer of all art! Is _She_, after
all, our coast of Bohemia? Then mankind, from the torrid time of
undifferentiated protozoa, has been frantically striving to acquire a
footing upon that fascinating territory.




IX

AFTER WAGNER—WHAT?


I

THE CAPRICE OF THE MUSICAL CAT

Few critics are prophets honored in their own musical country, and
but one or two in a generation possess _prévoyance_ enough to predict
the way the musical cat will jump. The antics of that exotic feline
since the day Richard Wagner pinched its tail and bade it leap
through the large and rather gaudy hoop of the music-drama, have been
mystifying and extraordinary. It coquetted with Brahms, it visited
Italy, and for a time took up its abode in the house of Grieg.

In a word, caprice of a deep-seated order has marked the progress
of music during the past half-century. I am not speaking now of
America, but of the world at large. Chopin died in 1849, Schumann
in 1856; with them were buried the ideals that lit the lantern of
the romantic school. It has flickered on, this sweet, phosphorescent
signal of revolt, but chiefly in the music of imitators. The strong
light of the torch first firmly held by Bach and passed on by men
like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms was not the sort desired of the
dreamers. For them the twilight and the strange-winged creatures
bred in the twilight; the classical composers—who were romantics in
their time—loved too much the luminary of day, and had few favors for
melancholy and moonshine.

Then came Richard Wagner, revolutionist, genius by the grace of God,
and a marvellous moulder of other men’s ideas. We are no longer
alarmed by the senile warnings of the extreme right camp; as for the
crazy boasts and affirmations of the musical romantics, we who know
our Wagner smile at the godlike things claimed for him. He had genius
and his music is genuine; but it is music for the theatre, for the
glow of the footlights; rhetorical music is it, and it ever strives
for effect. That this cannot be music to touch the tall stars of Bach
and Beethoven we know; yet why compare the two methods when they
strive for such other and various things? Wagner arrogated everything
to his music-dramas; this he had to do or else be left lonely,
bawling his wares to unsympathetic listeners in the market-place of
art. But he did not hesitate to invade its most sacrosanct precincts
to vend his musical merchandise. And we must not criticise him for
this—such auctioneering in his case was absolutely necessary.

Wagner caught up into a mighty synthesis all the loose threads of
romanticism, all the widely-severed strands of opera. He studied
Bach and Beethoven, and utilized the polyphony of the one, the
symphonic orchestra of the other; then, knowing that opera as opera
on Rossinian lines had reached its apogee, and that Mozart and Gluck
contained in solution the very combinations he needed, he, like the
audacious alchemist, the cunning Cagliostro that he was, made a
composite that at first smacked of German and then of Italian. He
ran through his Rienzi, Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser days,
strenuously testing his originality the meanwhile; and when the time
had arrived—in his case late in life—he calmly threw overboard old
formulas and served us the Ring and the rest of his masterpieces.
It was the most deliberate chase after and assumption of genius the
world had ever witnessed; and, strange as it seems, the wings that
carried Wagner, Icarus-wise, to the vistas of the sun showed no
weaknesses, no threatened and precipitous meltings. To change the
figure: We know that this conscious composer perfected his style with
other men’s ideas; he beat, bruised, battered into shape a method of
his own, strong, individual, and all-sufficing for his purpose. He
knew that certain subjects could stand operatic treatment, and that
your opera orchestra must not be a big guitar, nor yet as symphonic
as Beethoven’s. With the prescience of genius he helped himself to
precisely the material he wanted. How well he knew his needs we all
realize when we listen to Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde.

George Bernard Shaw, in a long since vanished and brilliant essay,
held that “Wagner, like most artists who have great intellectual
power, was dominated in the technical work of his gigantic scores by
so strong a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, and syntax
that, when in the course of time his melody and harmony become
perfectly familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel as a composer
whose extreme regularity of procedure must make his work appear dry
to those who cannot catch his dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having
no sense of that inspiration, had said: ‘This fellow, whom you all
imagine to be the creator of a new heaven and a new earth in music
out of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an arrant pedant and
formalist,’ I should have pricked up my ears and listened to him
with some curiosity, knowing how good a case a really keen technical
critic could make out for that view.”

Wagner was the last of the great romantics; he closed a period,
did not begin one. It is the behavior of the musical cat—to resume
our illustration—since Wagner’s death that is so puzzling to
the prophets. The sword and the cloak, the midnight alarums and
excursions sentimental, occupied for long the foreground; but
music discarded adventure when adventure was reëntering the land
of letters in the person of Robert Louis Stevenson,—Stevenson who
wore his panache so bravely in the very presence of Émile Zola
and other evangelists of the drab in fiction. A curious return to
soberer ideals of form was led by Johannes Brahms. I may add that
this leadership was unsought, indeed was hardly apprehended, by the
composer. A more unpromising figure for a musical Messiah would
have been difficult to find. Wagner, a brilliant, disputatious,
magnetic man, waged a personal propaganda; Brahms, far from being the
sympathetic, cultured man of the world that Wagner was, lived quietly
and thought highly. His were Wordsworthian ideals; he abhorred the
world, the flesh, and the devil,—this last person being incarnate for
him in the marriage of music with the drama. Yet his music is alive
to-day; alive with a promise and a potency that well-nigh urge me to
fatidical utterance, so sane is it, so noble in contrast, so richly
fruitful in treatment. A sympathetic writer he is, and also a man
who deals largely in the humanities of his art. Learned beyond the
dreams of Wagner, Brahms buried his counterpoint in roses, set it to
blooming in the Old-World gardens of Germany; decked his science with
the sweet, mad tunes of Hungary, withal remaining a Teuton, and one
in the direct line of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.

And yet Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the
infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind at times, and you
hear the rustling of wings,—wings of great, terrifying monsters,
hippogriffs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony
stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass
of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a
magician, often spectral; yet his songs have the homely lyric fervor
and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, I have
been amazed at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata, and was
stirred by the moonlight tranquillity in the slow movement of the F
minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly
slow. Then lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted,
and cry, “Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious chrism our
thirsty eyelids!”

Brahms is an inexorable form maker. His four symphonies, his three
piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music—are they not all
living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a
great colorist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile
Gautier are unsought. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive.
Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon an
enormous rhythmic versatility and a strenuousness of ideation.
Ideas—noble, profundity-embracing ideas—he has. They are not in the
smart, epigrammatic, flashing style of your little man. He disdains
racial allusions. He is a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the
geographical hints that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms’s
melodies are world typical, not cabined and confined to his native
soil. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard
for the politeness of his art do not endear him to the unthinking.
Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his
intermezzi! There he catches the tender sigh of childhood, or the
faint intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine
he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the
mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how
they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age!

He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed
humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not
theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate
lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his
grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and
it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven.
Brahms takes us to subterrene depths; Beethoven is for the heights.
Strong lungs are needed in the company of these giants.

Now comes another enigmatic tangent of music, the heavenly maid.
The seed planted by Berlioz and carefully husbanded by Liszt has
come to a pretty and a considerable harvest. Of Liszt, whose
revolutionary music the world has not yet recognized, this is not
the time to write. Only volumes can do justice to his rare genius
as a man, artist, and composer. I spoke of the death of Chopin and
Schumann stifling the aspirations of the romantics; nothing ever
dies, and by an elliptical route there has returned to us something
of the fire and fury-signifying passion of these same romantics.
All this we find in the music of Peter Tschaïkowsky, all this and
more. Tschaïkowsky, artistically, is another descendant of Liszt
and Berlioz, with a superadded Slavic color—or, shall I say flavor?
Tschaïkowsky deliberately, though without malice, abandoned the old
symphonic form. Ravished by what Henry James calls the “scenic idea,”
though without compelling talent for the theatre, he poured into the
elastic and anonymous mould of the symphonic poem passion and poetry.
A poetic dramatist, he selected as typical motives Hamlet, Francesca
da Rimini, Romeo and Juliet, Don Juan, Jeanne d’Arc, and Manfred;
his six symphonies are romantic suites, resplendent with the pomp
and color of an imagination saturated in romanticism. His fierce
Cossack temperament and mingling of realistic, sensuous savagery and
Malo-Russian mysticism set him apart among composers. As musical
as Wagner or Brahms, he lacks the great central, intellectual grip
of these two masters. He never tested his genius with fundamental
brainwork. But if we wish a picture of musical psychological life of
the latter half of this century, it is to Tschaïkowsky that we must
go.

Rubinstein I do not consider a factor in the musical strife. He was
an ardent upholder of both camps, and, being a German-Russian and a
Russian-German Jew and Lutheran, his eclecticism proved his undoing.
Something of the same sort may be said of Saint-Saëns, the clever
Frenchman. Grieg built his nest overlooking Norwegian fjords, and
built it of bright colored bits of Schumann and Chopin. He is the
bird with the one sweet, albeit monotonous note. He does not count
seriously. Neither does Dvořák, of Bohemia, who, despite his intimate
mastery of orchestral color, has never said anything particularly
novel or profound. Smetana is his superior at every point. Eugen
d’Albert treads with care the larger footprints of Brahms; and
Goldmark, a very Makart in his prodigal amazements of color, has
contributed a few canvases to the gallery. But Germany and Austria,
with one exception, are dead. I do not count Bruckner; he patterned
after Wagner too closely. Italy, with the exception of Boïto, is as
bare of big young talent as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. France has
Massenet, Bruneau, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Vincent d’Indy, Fauré,
Charpentier, Lalo—!

We have heard little except a string quartet of Claude Debussy’s in
New York. The music to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande is so
absolutely wedded to the play, so incidental in the true sense of a
much-abused word, that as absolute music it is unthinkable. Hearing
it you set the composer down as lacking ear. But Richard Strauss
_via_ the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz has set the pace
for the cacophonists. Debussy, notwithstanding his unquestionable
musicianship, is obviously a “literary” composer. That is to say,
his brain must first be excited by the contemplation of a dramatic
situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, a picture, a stirring
episode in a novel. But why cavil whether the initial impulse for his
music be the need of money or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa! A composer who
can set Mallarmé’s difficult L’Après Midi, and the more recondite
poems of Baudelaire, need not be daunted by criticism as to his
methods of work. Take this Pelléas music for example; it is a perfect
specimen of decomposition. The musical phrase is dislocated; the
rhythms are decomposed, the harmonic structure is pulled to pieces,
melts before our eyes—or ears; is resolved into its constituent
parts. And his themes are often developed in opposition to all laws
of musical syntax. In Debussy’s peculiar idiom there seems to be
no normal sequence—I say seems, for it is simply because our ears
are not accustomed to the novel progressions and apparent forced
conjunctions of harmonies and thematic fragments. Tonalities are
vague, even violently unnatural. The introduction to the forest
scene, where Golaud discovers Mélisande is of a singular sweetness.
The composer has caught, without anxious preoccupation, the exact
note of Maeterlinck, and he never misses the note throughout the
opera. As it is impossible to divorce music and text,—Debussy
seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self,—so it is a useless
task to point out the beauties, the ugliness, the characteristic
qualities of the score. In the piano partition nothing may be
gleaned of its poetic fervor, its bold landscape painting, its
psychologic penetration. There are some isolated spots where the
orchestra soliloquizes, though few. It is the complete enveloping of
Maeterlinck’s strangely beautiful play with a musical atmosphere that
wins the attention. It is easy to conceive of the play apart from the
music, but not of the music as a separate entity.

Debussy, then, has a musical idiom of his own. He is a stylist and
an impressionist. There are purples on his palette—no blacks. If
the Western world ever adopted Eastern tonalities, Claude Debussy
would be the one composer who would manage its system, with its
quarter-tones and split quarters. The man seems a wraith from the
East; his music was heard long ago in the hill temples of Borneo, was
made as a symphony to welcome the head-hunters with their ghastly
spoils of war! Debussy’s future should be viewed with suspicion from
all the critical watch-towers.

In Belgium there are major talents such as Peter Benoit, Gilson,
Edgar Tinel, Jan Blockx, Lekeu, Van der Stucken—the last named was
one of the first among the young Belgians to compose tone-poems.

Charles Martin Loeffler is an Alsatian with French blood in his
artistic veins. He belongs by affinity to the Belgian group. His
symphonic poem is called The Death of Tintagiles after the mysterious
and horrible drama of Maurice Maeterlinck—whose plays, despite their
exquisite literary quality, act better than they read. Mr. Loeffler’s
poem was first produced in Boston under Emil Paur’s direction,
January 8, 1898. Then there were two violas d’amore employed in the
obligato, perhaps symbolizing the sobbing voices of Tintagiles and
Ygraine. Since that performance—when Messrs. Kneisel and Loeffler
played the violas—the composer has dispensed with one of these quaint
instruments, has remodelled the score and has also re-orchestrated it.

Thoroughly subjective as must ever be the highest type of the
symphonic poem, The Death of Tintagiles is rather a series of
shifting mood-pictures than an attempt to portray the drama too
objectively. One feels the horrid suspense of the storm—it is a
sinister night!—and what went on behind closed doors in that gloomy
castle not far from the sonorous breakers on the beach. There is soul
strife, but it is muted. Life here is a tragedy too deep for blood or
tears, and the silence—the Loeffler orchestra can suggest hideous and
profound silence when playing fortissimo—has the true Maeterlinckian
quality.

And then Ygraine’s agony, as she searches for her murdered brother,
Tintagiles,—“I have come up, come up high, countless steps between
high, pitiless walls,”—can be poignantly felt. Those four harsh
knocks, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, must surely
indicate the tragedy embouched in hidden spaces.

The music, considered as music, is very beautiful. It easily ranks
its composer among the stronger of the modern men. Loeffler is
primarily a painter, and then a poet. He seldom sounds the big heroic
note; he is too subtle, and a despiser of the easily compassed. His
orchestral prose is rather the prose of Walter Pater than the prose
of—say, Macaulay or Meyerbeer. Despising the cheap and grandiose, he
has formulated a style that is sometimes “precious” in its intensity
and avoidance of the phrase banal. A colorist, his tints begin where
other men’s leave off; and his palette is richer than the rainbow’s.
In general “tone” he hovers between the modern Russians and Richard
Strauss.

In theme he is Loeffler. The Death of Tintagiles has enclosed within
it much lacerating emotion, many new color perspectives, many
harmonic devices, and withal a human, though somewhat sublimated
human, quality which endears the music at the first hearing.

Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is
formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing
use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares,
recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective;
and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric”
music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic.

Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music
dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes
of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic; Brahms leisurely
breasting the turbid billows of this maelstrom and speaking in golden
tones the doctrine of art for art’s sake; and, finally, Richard
Strauss, a _Übermensch_ himself, seeking with furious and rhythmic
gestures to divert from the theatre the art he loves—who shall say
whither all this will lead? After Wagner—music for music’s own
symphonic sake, and not for impossible librettos, acting-singers, and
scene-painters.


II

WAGNER AND THE FRENCH

Stendhal—Henry Beyle—once wrote:—

“Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works
which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable
of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the
contrary, is the art of presenting them with that which gave the
greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.”

That the reaction from a brutal realism, a minute photography of
nasty details, would come in Parisian art was a foregone conclusion
to any acute observer of the history of literature, art, and music
since Goethe’s imperial mind set the fashion of things in the early
years of the last century. The splendor of Théophile Gautier’s famous
“gilet rouge,”—he declared that it was a pink doublet,—which graced
the memorable days of the first violent representations of Ernani,
was naught but a scarlet protest against the frozen classicism of
Cherubini the composer, the painters Ingres and David, and the
worship of writers like Boileau, Racine, and Malherbe. A wild rush
toward romanticism was inevitable after the colorless elegiacs
of Lamartine. And the grand old man at Weimar, in the twilight
of his glorious career, summed up the whole movement of 1830 by
saying:—“They all come from Châteaubriand.”

But Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Delacroix, Chopin, Alfred
de Musset, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Heinrich Heine, and later,
Charles Baudelaire, in fact all that brilliant coterie which was the
nucleus of the artistic rebellion, strove at first independently,
with little knowledge of the others’ doings. They possibly came
from Châteaubriand, whose Genius of Christianity was but a return
to Middle Age ideals: but Walter Scott, with his great romantic
historical novels, and Lord Byron, with his glowing, passionate
verse, were the true progenitors of the reaction against stiff
scholasticism; and their influence even stirred phlegmatic Germany,
with its Gallic lacquer, to new and bolder utterances. Heinrich
Heine, an exile who spoke of himself as a “German swallow who had
built a nest in the periwig of M. Voltaire,” threw himself into the
fray with pen dipped in sparkling vitriol and did doughty deeds for
the cause.

Frédéric Chopin, despite the limited field of a piano keyboard, was
the unconscious centre of all the hazy, purple dreams, drifting
ideals, and perfumed sprays of thought that to-day we call
romanticism. As the hub of that vast wheel of poesy and gorgeous
imaginings, he absorbed the spirit of the time and shot out radiant
spokes, which lived after the whole romantic school became a faded
flower, a pallid ghost of the yesteryear. Hugo flamed across the
historical canvas like a painted scarlet meteor; Berlioz’s mad
talent, expressed by his symbolical coloring in orchestration—color
carried to insanity pitch—was a lesser musical Hugo. Delacroix, with
his brush dipped in the burning sun, painted vertigoes of color and
audacities of conception. All was turbulent exaggeration, all was
keyed above the normal pitch of life, and in the midst the still,
small voice of Chopin could be heard.

The end had come to all monstrous growths of the romantic epoch in
French art—be it remembered that earlier the movement was equally as
strong in Germany, beginning with Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Schubert,
Schumann, and Jean Paul Richter; the revolution of 1848 shattered the
dream of the mad republicans of art. That sphinx-like nonentity, the
third Napoleon, mounted the imperial tribune, and the Cerberus of
Realism barked its first hoarse bark. For a time this phantasmagoria
dominated Parisian art and letters.

All this was typical of cynicism, unbelief; technical perfection
was carried to heights undreamed of, and the outcome of it all was
Émile Zola. French painting was realized in the miniature manner of
Meissonier, or later in the marvellous brutalities of Degas. Two
geniuses who attempted to stem the tide that ran so swiftly died
untimely deaths: Georges Bizet, the creator of Carmen, and Henri
Regnault, who painted the Moorish Execution in the Luxembourg. The
last-named perished before Bougival in 1871, done to death by a
spent Prussian bullet. These two remarkable men, with possibly the
addition of Fortuny, the Spanish virtuoso of arabesques in color,
might have changed history if they had lived. But the fates willed it
otherwise, and realism became the shibboleth.

Even that ardent young group, the Parnassians, as they called
themselves, were beguiled into this quagmire of folly and
half-truths. La Terre marked the lowest depths of the bog, and again
a reaction began. Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, the graceful
Banville (a belated romanticist), Coppée, Puvis de Chavannes; the
impressionists, Monet, Manet, Rodin, the sculptor; the poets, René
Ghil, Catulle Mendès, Verlaine, ill-fated Albert Glatigny, Anatole
France, unhappy de Maupassant, and our own countrymen, Stuart Merrill
and Vielé-Griffin began steering for other waters. Symbolism,
Buddhism, every _ism_ imaginable, have been at the rudder since
then. Synthetic subtlety in art was the watchword of the party of
new ideas, and a renaissance of the arts seemed to be at hand. For
this movement, which agitated artistic Paris, the younger and fierier
spirits, musicians, painters, actors, poets, and sculptors, banded,
and, emulative of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuthian ideal, began the
fabrication of a new art, or rather the synthesis of all arts, which
seemed the wildest and most extravagant dream ever conceived by a
half-dozen frenzied brains.

The history of art moves in cycles, and each cycle carries with it a
residuum of the last. Richard Wagner attempted on a gigantic scale a
synthesis of the arts. He wished to condense, concentrate, epitomize
in his music-drama the arts of mimicry or pantomime, elocution,
singing, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and instrumental
music. He literally levied tribute on two of the senses and welded
them into an ensemble, in which every shade of emotion, particularly
the heroic and the tender, was depicted. But Wagner’s genius is,
after all, Teutonic in its diffusiveness. He could not escape his
national environment.

“Fifteen years ago,” said Paul Bourget, “poetry’s ambition was in
picturesqueness and execution to rival painting. To-day it models
itself on music. It is preoccupied with effects of mystery, of
shadow, of the intangible. This is strikingly illustrated in the
verse of Verlaine, whose poetic creed I have given you before in the
‘O la nuance, seule fiance, Le rêve au rêve et la flute au cor.’”
These new men are musicians in words. They follow Wagner; above all
are they descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, who has literally deflected
the mighty wave of French literature into his neglected channel.
Ah, if we but appreciated Poe as do our Gallic brethren! Mallarmé
and Gustav Kahn produce verbal effects akin to music, with its
melancholy mystery.

It is Richard Wagner who has done much of all this, preceded by Poe.
Symbolism, a soft green star, is but a pin-prick in the inverted bowl
of the night, but it sings like flame in thin glass. Its song is as
beautiful as the twilights of Chopin’s garden, or as the wavings
of the trees in Wagner’s luminous forest. Slowly but resistlessly,
and despite himself,—for Wagner never bridled his tongue where the
French were concerned,—this positive force conquered France, and
penetrated, not alone the musical world, but to the world of letters,
of moral ideas. It is nothing short of a miracle. The revolt all
along the line, as manifested by the impressionists in painting,
who preferred to use their eyes and see an infinity of tintings in
nature, undreamed of by the painters of a generation ago; the poets
and littérateurs who formed the new group called The Companions
of the New Life, whose aspirations are for the ideal of morality,
justice; sculptors like Marc Antokolsky and Auguste Rodin, who
sought to hew great ideas from the rude rock, instead of carving
lascivious prettiness,—all these new spirits, I say, but fell in with
the vast revolution instituted by Richard Wagner. In the region of
moral ideas Melchior de Vogüé, Ernest Lavisse, and Paul Desjardins
are combating the artistic indifferentism and black despair of the
school of materialists, realists, and the rest. A new idea in France
germinates as in no other country on the globe, because it finds
congenial soil somewhere. From an idea to a school is but a short
step, hence the rapidity of the Wagner worship after it once took
root.


III

ISOLDE AND TRISTAN

You notice the inversion! Wagner’s music-drama primarily concerns
the woman; she is the protagonist, not Tristan. Even in Act III,
where this lover of lovers lies awaiting Isolde and death, it is her
psychology which most concerns the composer. So I call it Isolde and
Tristan—the subjugation of man by woman.

It was Wagner himself who confessed that he had thrown overboard
his theories while penning this marvellous score. In it the music
stifles the action. It is the very flowering of the Wagnerian genius;
his best self, his fantasy, his wonderful power of making music
articulate, are there. And from the tiny acorn in the prelude grows
the mighty oak of the symphonic drama.

There is something primal, something of the rankness of nature, of
life’s odor and hum, and life’s fierce passions in this music—music
before which all other pictures of love made by poet, painter, and
composer pale. It is one of the most complex scores in existence;
yet it is built upon but one musical motive. Because of its epical
quality Tristan and Isolde may be compared to the works of the Greek
dramatists, to the Divine Comedy, to Hamlet, and to Faust.

Its weltering symphonic mass is as the surge and thunder of tropical
seas. It seems almost incomprehensible for a single human brain
to have conceived and carried to fruition such a magnificent
composition. In it are the pains, pleasures, and consoling
philosophies of life. Hamlet and Faust are its spiritual brethren.
The doubting, brooding spirit of these two dreamers are united to the
pessimistic, knightly nature of Tristan. He is human, all too human;
as Nietzsche phrased it—but he is also the human glorified.

He has grafted upon his mediæval soul the modern spirit, which we
are pleased to believe Schopenhauer typified in his profoundly
pessimistic philosophy. But this spirit is as old as Himalaya’s
hills. Saka-Munyi sang of the pains of love centuries ago; and the
bliss-stricken pair, Tristan and Isolde, dive down to death, groping
as they sink, for the problems of life, love, and mortality. Death
and Love is the eternal dualism chanted by Wagner in this drama. And
has the theme ever been chanted so enthrallingly?

No one of Wagner’s works enchains the imagination as does this
glowing picture of love and despair. From the first beautiful prelude
to Isolde’s exquisite death-song—one of those songs the world will
not willingly let perish—we are as in a hypnotic trance. The action
is psychologic rather than theatric. We are permitted to view two
burning souls; we analyze, rejoice and suffer in their psychical
adventures. This is not the drama of romantic wooing and the clash of
swords; all conventions of music and drama are set aside, are denied.
There is a love philter, but it is not the philter which arouses the
fatal love; the love is implicit in the lovers before the curtain
lifts.

We are given a night scene of magical beauty—yet how different from
the usual banal operatic assignation. In an old-time, Old-World
forest a man and a woman have revealed their souls; sobbing in the
distance is the soft horn music of the kingly hunt. Now it is love
against the world, the relentless instinct that mocks at conventional
gyves. Was ever such an enchanting romance sung? The very moonlight
seems melodious. After the storm and stress of the first act this
scene recalls Heine’s This is the Fairy Wood of Old. Wagner’s
philosophy should concern us but little; his music is his metaphysic;
its beauty and dramatic significance are worth tomes of his theories.
There is the superb web and woof of this tonal tapestry, the most
eloquent orchestra that ever stormed or sighed; there is every accent
and nuance of human speech, faithfully reproduced; and above all
there hovers the imagination of the poet-composer. These thematic
nuggets, these motives of love and death, which paint the lives of
his men and women—are they not wonderfully conceived, wonderfully
developed? Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this
music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of
intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a
master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing
thralls.

And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the
background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned
by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted
realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness
of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. It is music that would have been loved
by that “fierce and splendid old man,” Walter Savage Landor, by
Shelley, by Byron and Walt Whitman—the latter once confessed to me
his love for Wagner; “it makes my old bones sweeter,” he said—but
it would not have been admired by Wordsworth or Tennyson. Swinburne
adores Wagner almost as much as he adores the sea, and he sings the
praise of both with an absence of reserve that recalls the _mot_ of
Vauvenargues: “To praise moderately is always a sign of mediocrity.”

Yet in Tristan and Isolde are the seeds of the morbid, the
hysterical, and the sublimely erotic—hall marks of most great modern
works of art. And there is, too, the _Katharsis_ of Aristotle, the
purification by pity and terror. This dominating tragic principle
places the drama within the category of the classic.

Ernest Newman, in his Study of Wagner, an epoch-making work in
musical criticism, puts the question in its exact bearings. Wagner
is a great _musical_-dramatist—his dramas alone could not stand
on their legs, so otiose are they. His poetry, _quâ_ poetry, is
second-rate; but as “words for music,” words that fly well in the
wind of his inspiration, they are unique. This composer was harassed
all his life long by the word “drama.” He believed that a perfect
union of music and drama could be effected—vain dream—and wasted much
valuable time and good white paper trying to prove his thesis. To
the end his musical ruled his dramatic instincts; he was always the
composer. Tristan and Isolde is the most signal instance of this. Its
Greek-like severity of form in the book, its paucity of incident,
were so many barriers removed for the poet-composer who, hampered by
the awful weight of material in the Ring, had to write ineffectual
music at times.

Newman thinks that the last scene of Act II of Isolde and Tristan is
an anti-climax. From a theatric viewpoint, yes; but not so if Wagner
the composer be considered. If he had dropped the curtain on the
infatuated pair—as he does in Act I of Die Walküre—a whole skein of
the moving story would have been missing. The action is pulled up
with a jerk by Melot’s entrance; yet what follows is worth a volume
of plays with the conventional thrilling “curtain.” Think of the
drama without Marke’s speech, without that compassion and love which
Isolde and Tristan exhibit, oblivious to all about them! Besides, the
scene needs a quieter, withal more tragic, note than the endings of
Acts I and III. Suppose that the King, Tristan’s uncle, had been like
that other monarch sung of by Heinrich Heine:—

    Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.
    The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.
    And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,
    The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.
    How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?
    “So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”

There has been so much discussion over the so-called slow _tempi_
of Bayreuth that it is time to shatter the little legend with
stern facts. A well-known conductor who has presided at Bayreuth
relates that when an old man Richard Wagner would occasionally take
up the baton and conduct Parsifal or Tristan at a rehearsal. His
admiration for his own music—an admiration that was starved during
his exile—manifested itself in a tendency to dragging _tempi_. The
venerable composer retarded each bar as if to squeeze from it the
last lingering drop of sweetness. This trait was noticed and copied
by the younger generation of conductors. The elder group, Richter,
Levi, and Seidl had and have the true tradition. The later one simply
means that Wagner’s pulse beat was older and slower. To slavishly
imitate this is but a sign of the humor-breeding snobbery now so rife
at Wahnfried. The music itself is the best refutation of such folly.

Wagner lets Love beckon Death to its side, and together Love and
Death, inseparable companions from time’s infancy, close the drama,
the king sadly gazing at the meeting of the great clear sky and sea,
while Brangaene, near by, is bruised and bent with immitigable grief.

What a picture, what a tale, what music!

“The world will find a wholesome reaction in the study of music from
its spiritual side, its inner life. In the laws of tonality the most
musical and the least musical will have a common ground of interest.
By study of tone, character, or mental effects, we are led to realize
that the marvellous intuition of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle was
correct, that music is the basis of all human development.” This,
by an author unknown to me, is a prophecy of the track that music
must take if it is to ascend. Intellectual music, music that does
not appeal merely to the feverish nerves of this generation, is what
we need; and by intellectual music I do not mean too complex or
abstract music, abstract in the sense of lacking human interest. Is
there no mean between the brawls and lusts of Mascagni’s peasant folk
and the often abstruse delving of Brahms? Surely to think high means
to hear plainly—or else Wordsworth is mistaken. We fret, fumble,
and analyze too much in our arts. Why cannot we have the Athenian
gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard
Strauss? Must knowledge ever bring with it pain and weariness of
life? Is there no fruit in this Armida garden that is without
ashes? Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from
it metaphysical meanings? There is Mozart’s G minor symphony—in its
sunny measures is sanity. To perdition with preachers and pedagogues!
Open the casements of your soul; flood it with music, and sing with
Shelley:—

    Music when soft voices die
    Vibrates in the memory.




NOTE


Several of the foregoing essays have appeared in Scribner’s Magazine,
the Musical Courier, Criterion, Harper’s Bazar, Metropolitan, New
York Sun, and elsewhere. They have been greatly altered and amplified
for republication. The study of Parsifal, the major part of which was
first printed in the Musical Courier, has been rigorously revised and
much enlarged. A few anecdotes of Richard Strauss must be credited to
the London Musical Times.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 12 Changed: at the end its feverish esctasy
             to: at the end its feverish ecstasy

  pg 20 Changed: significance of the development from Hadyn
             to: significance of the development from Haydn

  pg 21 Changed: serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalied
             to: serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalslied

  pg 29 Changed: A critic considers O warst du mein
             to: A critic considers O wärst du mein

  pg 51 Changed: his juggling with bizzare rhythms
             to: his juggling with bizarre rhythms

  pg 68 Changed: Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlact
             to: Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlacht

  pg 97 Changed: Romantics for knights, mediæval myssteries
             to: Romantics for knights, mediæval mysteries

  pg 100 Changed: which so often gravitates pedulum-wise
              to: which so often gravitates pendulum-wise

  pg 117 Changed: Like the Buddhistic Tripatka
              to: Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka

  pg 178 Changed: at the foot of the Vierge au donitaire
              to: at the foot of the Vierge au donataire

  pg 191 Changed: he loves to finger the georgeous
              to: he loves to finger the gorgeous

  pg 217 Changed: social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsy
              to: social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky



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