platform he was a timid little boy, parading his grandfather’s long
black coat. A melancholy boy, buttoned to the chin in black. Beside
me sat an old man, who at sight of him exclaimed: To think he is
father of twins! Every once in a while, as the concert progressed, he
gave expression to the exclamation.
While his body is graceful, aristocratic, in his head, expression
of face, there is good deal of the peasant. The face is sombre,
gloomy, with touch of the pure Slav, in the modelling. That Slav land
is unique because genius has been pleased to illumine it. No race
have so understood tragedy of the soul, tyranny of material things.
What other literature can show such revealing wisdom as stories of
Potapenko, the short sketches of the two Tolstoy’s? Such tales as
Nemirovitch Dankschenko wrote, in _Under the Earth_! The criminal
pictures of Dostoievsky, the stories Chekov made with the surgeon’s
scalpel, the work of Kuprin, or Garshin!
When Kubelik made his appearance he received tremendous welcome.
No trace of pleasure, sympathetic response, showed upon his face.
Bohemian Paganini is a good name for him, only he is an intellectual
player, not an emotional one. He is great, exact.
I should like to know the history of his violin. It set me dreaming
of rare Cremona’s, for wood of which master-makers roamed forests
of Tuscany, tapping trees, testing resonance, on the south side,
listening subtly to song of sap. A marvelous instrument for depth,
richness!
Music is an independent world, whose diameter no scientist can
measure. A vast world of delight, placed conveniently near.
I do not imagine it was insupportable to Beethoven to be deaf. He
merely lived more fully in that other world. It was superior. He
could not hear other men’s music to be sure. But there were none so
great as he.
As the physical organ which reproduced sound became frailer, more
perfect, because undisturbed, was the inner sound-vision. It was
purified. The world of music is filled with astonishing buildings,
towers of tone, buildings such as Painter Turner, dreamed when
centuries after they vanished, he tried to realize with his brush,
for us of slighter vision, the _Palaces of Caesar_.
The architecture of Handel was religious, of Hebraic sternness;
while Mozart built fairy palaces of delight, gleaming, white-sugar
fantasies of form, palaces of _Zucker und Zauber_. We can not see
these buildings on our own initiative, we of little faith. We are
forced to wait for masters to fling open gates. They alone possess
the key.
Those little sound-arabesques in Beethoven, of superb decorative
beauty, I like to fancy, are the condensed sweetness, in memory,
of days of youth, spent in the merry Rhineland. The happy heart of
harvesters is there, the subdued joy of laughter. The desire for
money, fame, the world’s applause, can never be mainspring of such
rare arabesques.
I know a little old Jewish gentleman. Little indeed! Not larger than
a Brownie, which he resembles. He has pale, grey, colorless eyes, so
crossed they spend their time looking into each other. He has a huge,
bristling, up-standing mustache, which looks as if it were futilely
engaged in pulling his poor, hump-backed figure up to height,
straightness.
After lunch he starts for a walk, wearing a tall hat, coquettishly
tip-tilted over his nose. On one of his home-comings I met him. He
told me he had been to the grave of his wife, that during the twenty
years since her death he had seldom missed a day. He told me this in
such dignified tone, and one withal sad, earnest, that his shriveled
figure took on the importance, the size of a hero.
Who but member of the race, with indelible blood of centuries of
persecution in its veins, would be capable of such devotion! To the
Jew, family, home, mean more than to the Gentile. (But free, easy,
get-rich-quick America is not good for him. It is breeding out,
rapidly, the fine qualities of the race.) The Jew has been helpful,
in various ways, to America. He has helped destroy provincialism. He
makes for enlightened cosmopolitanism, because the cultivation of the
world has touched the race-mind.
This old man regaled me with stories of youth spent in Austria,
Bavaria. He was a beau, he declared, in old Bavarian days. But of all
the women he saw, Viennese are the prettiest, most spirited. They
have figures of sylphs. They are never twice alike.
In childhood, he explained, I lived in sight of Munich. A beautiful
city! I remember when Mad Louis was King. He tried to make it another
Athens, center of art. The dream was delusive. As delusive as the
name he chose for his fairy palace, _Wahnfried_.
But he taught Germans music. He was patron of Wagner.
When summer comes to the plains, air is hot, dry, and I can not
breathe comfortably, nor sleep, I dream of the air I used to smell
in Bavaria, as it blew across snowy Alps, sweet with spruce, with
fir. I like America! It has been good to my people. My old friend is
like March weather; upon the surface snow, chill, while underneath,
unseen, the warmth of spring.
Members of the old man’s race have stood at head of art, letters and
every science. In the Middle Age, at dawn of the Renaissance, it was
Jewish wanderers, traveling from country to country on multifarious
business errands, whose linguistic nimbleness formed links between
Greece and Rome, between Spaniard and Moor, between Occident and
Orient. They had no little to do in dissemination of Greek culture, a
culture which in its essence is antagonistic to them.
They were translators for the ancient world. They were numbered among
scholars of mediæval days. It was they who helped unlock treasures of
Moorish culture for the ungrateful Spaniard.
In the realm of medicine their sway was undisputed. In this
profession they held positions of honor in Italian, in Spanish
Courts.
They carried songs of Italy to France, to Provençe, inspiring the
Troubadours. They had powerful poets, originators of their own, too.
Most talented perhaps of whom, in mediæval days, was Jehuda ben
Halevy, whose mistress and lady of sorrows, (to whom he dedicated
his heart in song), was Jerusalem the Fallen, just as in a later
day, Italy, the discrowned, dismantled Queen, was the mistress of
inspiration of Poggio.
During Moorish rule, in Spain, before the Inquisition, there was no
position of honor, influence, where intellectual worth counted, where
the Jew was not found. He was held in like esteem at Court of Robert
of Naples, at time gay Boccacio was there paying poetical _devoir_,
at the same time, both to Queen Joanna and Fiammetta.
The world’s great wit and lyric poet, Heine, was a Jew. So were the
philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn, Spinoza. Of the same race were the
composers, Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelssohn. And there may have been
Jewish blood in Wagner. No one can prove there was not. Of this
race were Auerbach, Heyse, Marcel Schwob, Daudet, Halevy, Mendes,
Beaconsfield, Nordau, Brandes, Bernhardt, Rachel, and Jorge Isaacs,
who wrote _Maria_, a South American classic, mentioning a few at
random. And once, so the story goes, a Jew was king of Poland for a
night. Perhaps the most remarkable feat, however, recorded of this
race, is that when the Christian religion, like a tidal-wave, swept
over Europe, destroying civilizations, the pagan world, where joy
was king, they were the one race that did not succumb. Every other
race has borne the imprint of its ideals. Who could dream an humble
shepherd band from Judea could set at naught the tides of the world!
The Renaissance does not equal the pagan world in beauty. Its
madonnas, its units of architectural design, its saints of
noble bodies, are but borrowings from the past. They are not
original creation. The old beauty which was poignant because
it was unselfconscious, because it kept the heart of man, its
canary-throated joy, its hours of song, went out of the world then
like a candle that is snuffed by a wind that is chill.
_Ideal beauty can not enter the House of Grief._
Perhaps wisdom of perception is in this line. We who work today, work
crippled, sad, limping, in comparison with them of long ago. Worst of
all, confused! Dust covered, perhaps, but still taking space in the
room of the mind, are too many irrelevant, accumulating objects. Too
many foolish and cheap amusements. The free, yellow, sunlighted clean
space of the whispering winds is not there.
How ancient are words! When we play with them carelessly, we do not
realize how freighted they are with history. They are queer unsteady
little sail boats carrying all kinds of baggage of the soul. They fly
merrily, briskly, down interminable rivers of Time.
They have come from remotest periods. They have come from the night
of history. There is nothing else in the world man has contact with
that is so old, except the red earth beneath his feet, or so much
part of his life. How they originated we know little more than of
the beginning to be of the same red earth. Theories have been put
forward. None have been agreed upon.
We know primitive tongues were monolithic. They were built in
gigantic squares, like the stone buildings of primitive peoples, the
temples upon the Andes, in Peru, in Honduras for example, Yucatan,
the pre-historic buildings of Guatamala, India, Egypt. Primitive
men hurled at each other blocks of unhewn thought. The change that
was in progress from that day to this was one of _making little_,
disintegration. The rocks were wearing slowly away to sand. Now
speech is broken. It is filled with tiny paste-like particles,
inconsequential connectives, the worn, floating, detritus of years.
In everyday speech we make use of sounds which our Aryan ancestors
used at foot of the Himalayan Mountains in the childhood of man.
Sanskrit _vritta_ (turn); Latin _vertire_; English _verse_. Sanskrit
_Deva_ (God); Latin _deus_; English _divine_.
These are very near the forms we use. As I explained before, I, of
course, have no right to the word linguist. I read too few tongues.
It has been used merely to explain interest in foreign literature,
and because we have no intermediate word for exchange.
Sir John Bowring boasted he could speak one hundred tongues and read
fluently still another hundred. With it all he was a poor translator.
To translate well there must be generous admixture of artist and
native writer in the scholar.
John Gregory in the English Seventeenth Century, read easily almost
all the languages of the Orient in which a literature has been
written; and Ethiopean, too, for good measure. There was a period
in England of something resembling encyclopedic mind—like the
Russian Eighteenth Century, to which there seemed to be no limit of
acquirement. After that (to me) there came another and a seemingly
different England, both in mind and nature. Its rare moment of
creative power passed. Very likely I have no right to the following
opinion. My guess, however, would be that languages had a common
origin. Then came migration of peoples, life in widely separated
localities, under different areas of pressure of changing climates,
bringing new demands upon the body. This modified speech. This caused
the word to be spoken differently. In this way, in long periods of
time, regularly appearing, cumulative differences arose.
In the first place, word was uttered to give imitation in sound of
emotion. It was gesture made through another bodily medium. It was
mind gesture through the throat.
In almost all languages the word for mother expresses the same
gesture. Arabic, _oom_. Russian _matushka_. Latin _mater_. English
_mother_, and so forth.
This is true likewise of the word for water, and others I might
mention, and certain emotions such as joy, fear. I have traced
words with interest and pleasure through many languages, I usually
come back with increased belief in basic oneness, far away, but
findable. Words that express suffering, fear, grow grim and gaunt
in any tongue. Their surfaces are shriveled with emotion. Those on
the contrary that express love, call with singing softness of vowel
liquids.
Words are the patient camels of the grey, lonely deserts of the mind,
bearing carefully for increased knowledge, increased welfare, the
treasured burdens of intellect.
You can feel the atmosphere in which a word was born, brought up, so
to speak, no matter in what tongue it happens to be incorporated.
Words have personality. They keep securely the aroma of the past.
Many years ago when I was learning Spanish a word in that tongue
puzzled me. My Spanish teacher was not a scholar; he knew nothing
about it. I felt sensitively fluttering over its surface the
atmosphere of another race, the thinking of a different people. Later
I found it came from the East, from Persia. It meant _master_. Then I
understood. It had been brought to Spain by the Moors. It had pride,
dignity, patriarchal sternness, a peculiar harsh browed aloofness to
my ear that Spanish words did not have. It was a memory incorporated
in daily speech of Spain of the four hundred years of Moorish rule.
It belongs in the Court of the Lions of the Alhambra. It is draped,
turban-crowned. It has nothing in common with the pale, long-faced,
ascetic, Spaniard who created the Inquisition.
I think it was an Arab poet who declared words are the thin,
embroidered veil in which we wrap thoughts. Races have loved them.
In their structure, after the crumbling of ages, may still be felt
the stress of composite emotions, ancient, semi-cosmic loves. Words
are as near reality as anything life possesses. There are words that
for me keep peculiar qualities. The word _Delhi_, for instance, is a
carved pendant made of amethyst. It is richly hued, lovely. It could
not be any kind of jewel save pendant. Nor made of anything save
amethyst. The word _Agra_, on the contrary, is a stone-white cameo,
hard, sharp, cold of line.
It is not impossible that words, in effort to catch plastic beauty,
may possess extentions not readily catalogueable; that they may build
(for sensation) with vowels, with consonants interwoven like a fugue,
with guarded emphasis of recurrent letters, similar _sound-pictures_
that echo the sensation of objects of art, rebuild them, in short, in
the mind, in a different medium.
We have not explored all the properties of words any more than of
matter. There are shores waiting for Columbus. We can not determine
exactly their _psycho-plasm_, so to speak. We do not know all the
phosphoric, ancient visions that enveloped them, and still cling
to them. Their boundaries are always changing. They can not be
definitely measured. They possess _degrees_ of being potently
visible. For incalculable time the souls of races have wrapped them
with love. They have borne intact, to today, the dreams of the world.
In England, in days of Shakespeare, words were fat, red-blooded,
unctuous. In America they have been growing leaner and leaner. We
lack greatly the rich variety of the older country. Our speech
has lost a kind of vigor, sweetness, substantiality. As late as
Stevenson, this quality remained in English prose. It has never been
transplanted, successfully, to America.
We are losing, too, some of our fine, former pride in Saxon strength,
which is our heritage. We are less faithful to ideals. We are
falling away from its precepts. We are losing sight of belief in
the desirability of its future power over our race. We are turning
rather briskly toward foreign gods, toward false standards.
We are losing, too, the homely faith and friendliness of English
social life, which is something whose strength we can not estimate;
its merriment, uncomplaining courage, in the heart. We have nothing
to substitute, or worse, things not our own.
They who loved words best, and perhaps understood best their varying
values, were decadent Greek and Roman writers, who looked upon them
as gems, who knew all their tints, their shades, and certain French
writers, a little later (roughly estimating) than 1830. Callimichus
loved them in the ancient world. He spoke of them as the Arab loved
and spoke of _Saïf_, the sword. Something clean, cruel, powerful,
decisive, uncompromising. Mallarmé, of the moderns, I think has loved
them best. Hokusai, the Japanese print-maker, cried with sincerity:
_Write me down as the old man who is mad about line._ With equal
sincerity I exclaim: Write me down as the woman who is mad about
words.
Cubism, so-called, does not necessarily belong to plastic art,
nor verse. A new mind which may be termed _cubism of the spirit_
has come; a spirit of destruction largely, brought about by the
increasing passion of the individual for _self_, expression of self,
assertion of self. The three points of time, that led to this,
widely separated, different as they are, were (first) Christ and
his teachings; (second) the Eighteenth Century in revolt against
government forms and established standards; and the present, its
equally great revolt against reverence of all kinds, its deification
of _the ego_, its passion for destruction and the dawning scientific
mind. This has brought a condition which might be termed _the golden
age of the commonplace_, when people who can neither write nor think,
paint nor carve, dance nor make music, insist upon the sacredness,
the necessity of expression. The _ego_ of the individual is enlarged.
This is one cause of the increase in crime. It is inflamed. Everyone
is convinced he has rights that bear no relation to his ability.
Moral fiber is breaking. Ambition and talent are not the same.
This may be herald of a cycle of time, a new, a different world
civilization. When such change has come, history tells us, art begins
to die first, before morals or manners. The spirit of destruction is
directed toward ideals.
In the plastic arts the careless, blithe, fine laughter is gone. The
moment’s creative joy. There is less real beauty, but more _nerve_,
daring. When the sculptor boasts either of _modernism_, or primitive
vision, he harks back to things Assyrian, not Greek. The last touch
in the world of that serenity we found in Greek marbles, is in the
figures of Clodion. Afterward, it comes no more. When art and letters
feel breath of decay, nations have gone a long way toward that
decay. As proof, review the history of antiquity. Is that what is
setting in? Is that what is going to result in remaking the world,
in creating a new order of mind? Transition is startling. Everything
is changing. Art and letters are changing rapidly; music too, the
political outlook, morals, religions. Nothing is left untouched.
A period of rebellion is here. Love, sincerity, friendliness, are
disappearing. Another civilization is heaving to sight with the wild,
brawling winds, the harsh atmospheric disturbance of birth of a star.
Some quality, usually in solution in life of our planet, and to us
indispensable, disappeared. Since this has been evident.
It was after the Peloponnesian war, we must remember, that
disintegration began in Greece. Consider, too, the slow dissolving
of the Roman Empire, beginning in the West, then progressing,
like political paralysis, toward the East. Consider the ruin,
annihilation, of the powerful, the richly cultivated Han Dynasty, the
change, decay, brought by war. Wars are to established civilizations
what cancers are to the healthy body. They destroy tissue that can
not be rebuilt. Sometime a law can be stated between war and decay.
In _Cubism of the Spirit_, as I have named it, revolts are many.
This tragic, asserting of self is revolting now against death. When
you divide the forces of the enemy you lessen his strength. Carrel
divided the forces of Death, into general and elemental. That is a
beginning. Who knows what the end will be?
It is a period of shattering of ideals, when all things, even of
the spirit, are being bent to forms of material gain, of foolish,
self-flattering assertion, shorthand, incompetent stating. Christian
Science is product of the age because it is an age of self-delusion.
The power is lost to distinguish between things that are and things
as we wish they were. Man is breaking trammels, and in the triumphant
emergence, he sees himself greater than he is. The prophets have
been many who heralded reaction against restraints of the past.
There was the Christ. Before the coming of Christianity there was
Greek philosophy. In the early Nineteenth Century there was German
philosophy. There were Kant, Wagner. Wagner was an eloquent preacher
of revolt. Like the warring angels of Milton who were cast out of
Heaven, Wagner in rebellion, scaled again the battlements. This found
its way to the brain of man in preachment more dangerous than words.
It heralded gloriously the era whose disconcerting, unsuspected
changes are upon us, making us shiver with presage of unmeasured
things. No longer shall the golden, fluent splendor, _life_, be
expressed in stale formulas. For new day a new robe. Who can guess
what the result will be? While we live, while change progresses, what
will be our attitude toward things we loved? Books, art, music, the
world of the spirit?
_Cubism_ was brought about in some degree, too, by focussing for
purpose of quick, personal vision, of the art, the science, of the
world. Some of them who were great in the past were great because
of limitations. Dante was one whose nature possessed depth not
breadth. Will art resolve itself into expression of untrammeled
personality? In throwing away form are leaders nearer essence? Are we
peeling to the skin, like wrestlers, for the Games, leaving nothing
proud, superfluous? Surely there must be luxurious languor, foolish
recreation, the fine, idle space for the unexpected, in addition to
defiant assertion.
The lower class, peculiarly enough, under pressure of new ways of
living, is disappearing, just as in the Eighteenth Century there was
no effective middle-class. A social chasm results with disappearing
at top of the aristocrat. Fromentin wrote some time ago: “_Vers 1828
on vit du nouveau_” and “_le dixhuitième siècle brisa beaucoup de
formules_.” It was the sensitive artists, not thinkers, who felt it
first. In serious consideration of facts of living, the artist is not
to be despised. The decay of the great age of Louis XIV was heralded
by great artists beginning to lessen in number or lose their luster.
In this general destruction, excesses must be expected. In the
on-rushing tidal-wave of mediocrity against the Lords, wrong will
be done. Sometimes _Cubism of the Spirit_ will insist pearls are
the best food for hogs. It will not be easy to find that absolute,
that prepared outspread level of mind, suitable for pearls to roll
on. Some of the pearls may melt, become invisible forever, such as
pity, sympathy, old-fashioned kindliness. I suppose it is significant
that Marquis de Sade was writing, in prison, his book _Le Roman
Philosophique_, which shows a cruel mind, just one year before the
outbreak of the French Revolution.
Changes that come so stealthily they could not be chronicled,
preceded this. The human skull, the physical eye, have been gradually
formed differently.
The old, carefully drawn, punctiliously painted figure, with details
insisted upon, hurts the modern eye trained to stenographic seeing.
It does not wish to be pelted with fact that way. Seeing is not to be
done alone by the painter but partly by the looker on! Increasingly
insistent _self_ demands share. The picture is to be a _starting
point_, instead of an end. It is to be something for the seer to help
make.