My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the
divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in
order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the
creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic
desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic
form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There
is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff
old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a
man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for
him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old
Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic
girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the
slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus
is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green
plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney,
its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of
an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that
would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and
his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.
The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was
brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to
be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of
his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future.
His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus
himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met
him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school.
The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced
him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he
looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent
their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in
their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an
exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and
he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance
broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted
reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in
the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music
notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.
Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory,
but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled
him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he
produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a
flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music,
somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages
of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a
pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there
was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine
study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not
instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two,
and he could not grasp or control it.
When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was
insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours
of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the
privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I
had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to
offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple
board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest
of his pastoral day for writing music.
Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this
proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left
him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum,
discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him.
Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato
in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked
in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the
pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his
own historic galleries.
When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon
him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with
Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed
persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in
his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his
helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble
world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had
never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather
as one who had been bereft of all these things.
Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard
a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional
violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks
he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic
church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him
to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in
irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with
Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.
He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so
strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra
of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen
dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense
of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the
lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and
he gave the work up.
All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain
economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical
education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His
mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and
had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had
obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater.
Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before
him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or
whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus
himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself
justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He
did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the
successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him,
but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined
to engage him.
After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach,
and that his training had made him a professional musician. His
personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he
saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable
competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he
told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his
lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has
practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was
uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs.
Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life.
His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds
tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I
do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around
him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many
philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and
this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing
him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that
have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated
friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly
to the classics--Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven.
Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in
his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something
haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think
of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and
Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of
her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons
very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness
of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That
impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry
cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes
wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him
an artist.
But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of
noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest
is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy
bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of _otium cum dignitate_,
calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies.
On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is
perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not
demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into
it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think
he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not
important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder
if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like
Fergus, a work of art one’s self.