The low, graceless humor of names! On my shelf of poetry, arranged by
the alphabet, Coleridge and J. Gordon Cooglar are next-door neighbors!
Mrs. Hemans is beside Laurence Hope! Walt Whitman rubs elbows with Ella
Wheeler Wilcox; Robert Browning with Richard Burton; Rossetti with Cale
Young Rice; Shelly with Clinton Scollard; Wordsworth with George E.
Woodberry; John Keats with Herbert Kaufman!
Ibsen, on the shelf of dramatists, is between Victor Hugo and Jerome K.
Jerome. Sudermann follows Harriet Beecher Stowe. Maeterlinck shoulders
Percy Mackaye. Shakespeare is between Sardou and Shaw. Euripides and
Clyde Fitch! Upton Sinclair and Sophocles! Aeschylus and F. Anstey!
D'Annunzio and Richard Harding Davis! Augustus Thomas and Tolstoi!
More alphabetical humor. Gerhart Hauptmann and Robert Hichens; Voltaire
and Henry Van Dyke; Flaubert and John Fox, Jr.; Balzac and John Kendrick
Bangs; Ostrovsky and E. Phillips Oppenheim; Elinor Glyn and Théophile
Gautier; Joseph Conrad and Robert W. Chambers; Zola and Zangwill!...
Midway on my scant shelf of novels, between George Moore and Frank
Norris, there is just room enough for the two volumes of "Derringforth,"
by Frank A. Munsey.
XXVII
VIRTUOUS VANDALISM
A hearing of Schumann's B flat symphony of late, otherwise a very
caressing experience, was corrupted by the thought that music would be
much the gainer if musicians could get over their superstitious
reverence for the mere text of the musical classics. That reverence,
indeed, is already subject to certain limitations; hands have been laid,
at one time or another, upon most of the immortal oratorios, and even
the awful name of Bach has not dissuaded certain German editors. But it
still swathes the standard symphonies like some vast armor of rubber and
angel food, and so imagination has to come to the aid of the flutes and
fiddles when the band plays Schumann, Mozart, and even parts of
Beethoven. One discerns, often quite clearly, what the reverend Master
was aiming at, but just as often one fails to hear it in precise tones.
This is particularly true of Schumann, whose deficiency in instrumental
cunning has passed into proverb. And in the B flat symphony, his first
venture into the epic form, his failures are most numerous. More than
once, obviously attempting to roll up tone into a moving climax, he
succeeds only in muddling his colors. I remember one place--at the
moment I can't recall where it is--where the strings and the brass storm
at one another in furious figures. The blast of the brass, as the
vaudevillains say, gets across--but the fiddles merely scream absurdly.
The whole passage suggests the bleating of sheep in the midst of a vast
bellowing of bulls. Schumann overestimated the horsepower of fiddle
music so far up the E string--or underestimated the full kick of the
trumpets.... Other such soft spots are well known.
Why, then, go on parroting _gaucheries_ that Schumann himself, were he
alive today, would have long since corrected? Why not call an ecumenical
council, appoint a commission to see to such things, and then forget the
sacrilege? As a self-elected delegate from heathendom, I nominate Dr.
Richard Strauss as chairman. When all is said and done, Strauss probably
knows more about writing for orchestra than any other two men that ever
lived, not excluding Wagner. Surely no living rival, as Dr. Sunday would
say, has anything on him. If, after hearing a new composition by
Strauss, one turns to the music, one is invariably surprised to find how
simple it is. The performance reveals so many purple moments, so
staggering an array of lusciousness, that the ear is bemused into
detecting scales and chords that never were on land or sea. What the
exploratory eye subsequently discovers, perhaps, is no more than our
stout and comfortable old friend, the highly well-born _hausfrau_, Mme.
C Dur--with a vine leaf or two of C sharp minor or F major in her hair.
The trick lies in the tone-color--in the flabbergasting magic of the
orchestration. There are some moments in "Elektra" when sounds come out
of the orchestra that tug at the very roots of the hair, sounds so
unearthly that they suggest a caroling of dragons or _bierfisch_--and
yet they are made by the same old fiddles that play the Kaiser Quartet,
and by the same old trombones that the Valkyrie ride like witch's
broomsticks, and by the same old flutes that sob and snuffle in Tit'l's
Serenade. And in parts of "Feuersnot"--but Roget must be rewritten by
Strauss before "Feuersnot" is described. There is one place where the
harps, taking a running start from the scrolls of the violins, leap
slambang through (or is it into?) the firmament of Heaven. Once, when I
heard this passage played at a concert, a woman sitting beside me rolled
over like a log, and had to be hauled out by the ushers.
Yes; Strauss is the man to reorchestrate the symphonies of Schumann,
particularly the B flat, the Rhenish and the Fourth. I doubt that he
could do much with Schubert, for Schubert, though he is dead nearly a
hundred years, yet remains curiously modern. The Unfinished symphony is
full of exquisite color effects--consider, for example, the rustling
figure for the strings in the first movement--and as for the C major, it
is so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic beauty that one
scarcely notices the colors at all. In its slow movement mere
loveliness in music probably says all that will ever be said.... But
what of old Ludwig? Har, har; here we begin pulling the whiskers of Baal
Himself. Nevertheless, I am vandal enough to wonder, on sad Sunday
mornings, what Strauss could do with the first movement of the C minor.
More, if Strauss ever does it and lets me hear the result just once,
I'll be glad to serve six months in jail with him.... But in Munich, of
course! And with a daily visitor's pass for Cousin Pschorr!...
The conservatism which shrinks at such barbarities is the same
conservatism which demands that the very typographical errors in the
Bible be swallowed without salt, and that has thus made a puerile
dream-book of parts of Holy Writ. If you want to see how far this last
madness has led Christendom astray, take a look at an article by Abraham
Mitrie Rihbany, an intelligent Syrian, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of a
couple of years ago. The title of the article is "The Oriental Manner of
Speech," and in it Rihbany shows how much of mere Oriental extravagance
of metaphor is to be found in many celebrated passages, and how little
of literal significance. This Oriental extravagance, of course, makes
for beauty, but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surely
doesn't make for understanding. What the Western World needs is a Bible
in which the idioms of the Aramaic of thousands of years ago are
translated into the idioms of today. The man who undertook such a
translation, to be sure, would be uproariously denounced, just as Luther
and Wycliffe were denounced, but he could well afford to face the storm.
The various Revised Versions, including the Modern Speech New Testament
of Richard Francis Weymouth, leave much to be desired. They rectify many
naif blunders and so make the whole narrative more intelligible, but
they still render most of the tropes of the original literally.
These tropes are not the substance of Holy Writ; they are simply its
color. In the same way mere tone-color is not the substance of a musical
composition. Beethoven's Eighth Symphony is just as great a work, in all
its essentials, in a four-hand piano arrangement as in the original
score. Every harmonic and melodic idea of the composer is there; one can
trace just as clearly the subtle processes of his mind; every step in
the working out of the materials is just as plain. True enough, there
are orchestral compositions of which this cannot be reasonably said;
their color is so much more important than their form that when one
takes away the former the latter almost ceases to exist. But I doubt
that many competent critics would argue that they belong to the first
rank. Form, after all, is the important thing. It is design that counts,
not decoration--design and organization. The pillars of a musical
masterpiece are like the pillars of the Parthenon; they are almost as
beautiful bleached white as they were in all their original hues.
XXVIII
A FOOTNOTE ON THE DUEL OF SEX
If I were a woman I should want to be a blonde, with golden, silky hair,
pink cheeks and sky-blue eyes. It would not bother me to think that this
color scheme was mistaken by the world for a flaunting badge of
stupidity; I would have a better arm in my arsenal than mere
intelligence; I would get a husband by easy surrender while the
brunettes attempted it vainly by frontal assault.
Men are not easily taken by frontal assault; it is only strategem that
can quickly knock them down. To be a blonde, pink, soft and delicate, is
to be a strategem. It is to be a ruse, a feint, an ambush. It is to
fight under the Red Cross flag. A man sees nothing alert and designing
in those pale, crystalline eyes; he sees only something helpless,
childish, weak; something that calls to his compassion; something that
appeals powerfully to his conceit in his own strength. And so he is
taken before he knows that there is a war. He lifts his portcullis in
Christian charity--and the enemy is in his citadel.
The brunette can make no such stealthy and sure attack. No matter how
subtle her art, she can never hope to quite conceal her intent. Her eyes
give her away. They flash and glitter. They have depths. They draw the
male gaze into mysterious and sinister recesses. And so the male behind
the gaze flies to arms. He may be taken in the end--indeed, he usually
is--but he is not taken by surprise; he is not taken without a fight. A
brunette has to battle for every inch of her advance. She is confronted
by an endless succession of Dead Man's Hills, each equipped with
telescopes, semaphores, alarm gongs, wireless. The male sees her clearly
through her densest smoke-clouds.... But the blonde captures him under a
flag of truce. He regards her tenderly, kindly, almost pityingly, until
the moment the gyves are upon his wrists.
It is all an optical matter, a question of color. The pastel shades
deceive him; the louder hues send him to his artillery. God help, I say,
the red-haired girl! She goes into action with warning pennants flying.
The dullest, blindest man can see her a mile away; he can catch the
alarming flash of her hair long before he can see the whites, or even
the terrible red-browns, of her eyes. She has a long field to cross,
heavily under defensive fire, before she can get into rifle range. Her
quarry has a chance to throw up redoubts, to dig himself in, to call for
reinforcements, to elude her by ignominious flight. She must win, if she
is to win at all, by an unparalleled combination of craft and
resolution. She must be swift, daring, merciless. Even the brunette of
black and penetrating eye has great advantages over her. No wonder she
never lets go, once her arms are around her antagonist's neck! No
wonder she is, of all women, the hardest to shake off!
All nature works in circles. Causes become effects; effects develop into
causes. The red-haired girl's dire need of courage and cunning has
augmented her store of those qualities by the law of natural selection.
She is, by long odds, the most intelligent and bemusing of women. She
shows cunning, foresight, technique, variety. She always fails a dozen
times before she succeeds; but she brings to the final business the
abominable expertness of a Ludendorff; she has learnt painfully by the
process of trial and error. Red-haired girls are intellectual
stimulants. They know all the tricks. They are so clever that they have
even cast a false glamour of beauty about their worst defect--their
harsh and gaudy hair. They give it euphemistic and deceitful
names--auburn, bronze, Titian. They overcome by their hellish arts that
deep-seated dread of red which is inborn in all of God's creatures. They
charm men with what would even alarm bulls.
And the blondes, by following the law of least resistance, have gone in
the other direction. The great majority of them--I speak, of course, of
natural blondes; not of the immoral wenches who work their atrocities
under cover of a synthetic blondeness--are quite as shallow and stupid
as they look. One seldom hears a blonde say anything worth hearing; the
most they commonly achieve is a specious, baby-like prattling, an
infantile artlessness. But let us not blame them for nature's work. Why,
after all, be intelligent? It is, at best, no more than a capacity for
unhappiness. The blonde not only doesn't miss it; she is even better off
without it. What imaginable intelligence could compensate her for the
flat blueness of her eyes, the xanthous pallor of her hair, the
doll-like pink of her cheeks? What conceivable cunning could do such
execution as her stupendous appeal to masculine vanity, sentimentality,
egoism?
If I were a woman I should want to be a blonde. My blondeness might be
hideous, but it would get me a husband, and it would make him cherish me
and love me.
XXIX
ALCOHOL
Envy, as I have said, is at the heart of the messianic delusion, the
mania to convert the happy sinner into a "good" man, and so make him
miserable. And at the heart of that envy is fear--the fear to sin, to
take a chance, to monkey with the buzzsaw. This ineradicable fear is the
outstanding mark of the fifth-rate man, at all times and everywhere. It
dominates his politics, his theology, his whole thinking. He is a moral
fellow because he is afraid to venture over the fence--and he hates the
man who is not.
The solemn proofs, so laboriously deduced from life insurance
statistics, that the man who uses alcohol, even moderately, dies
slightly sooner than the teetotaler--these proofs merely show that this
man is one who leads an active and vigorous life, and so faces hazards
and uses himself up--in brief, one who lives at high tempo and with full
joy, what Nietzsche used to call the _ja-sager_, or yes-sayer. He may,
in fact, die slightly sooner than the teetotaler, but he lives
infinitely longer. Moreover, his life, humanly speaking, is much more
worth while, to himself and to the race. He does the hard and dangerous
work of the world, he takes the chances, he makes the experiments. He is
the soldier, the artist, the innovator, the lover. All the great works
of man have been done by men who thus lived joyously, strenuously, and
perhaps a bit dangerously. They have never been concerned about
stretching life for two or three more years; they have been concerned
about making life engrossing and stimulating and a high adventure while
it lasts. Teetotalism is as impossible to such men as any other
manifestation of cowardice, and, if it were possible, it would destroy
their utility and significance just as certainly.
A man who shrinks from a cocktail before dinner on the ground that it
may flabbergast his hormones, and so make him die at 69 years, ten
months and five days instead of at 69 years, eleven months and seven
days--such a man is as absurd a poltroon as the fellow who shrinks from
kissing a woman on the ground that she may floor him with a chair leg.
Each flees from a purely theoretical risk. Each is a useless encumberer
of the earth, and the sooner dead the better. Each is a discredit to the
human race, already discreditable enough, God knows.
Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull,
idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world,
the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally
incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe
life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a
cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from
shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of
man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is always
scared.
No wonder the Rockefellers and their like are hot for saving the
workingman from John Barleycorn! Imagine the advantage to them of
operating upon a flabby horde of timorous and joyless slaves, afraid of
all fun and kicking up, horribly moral, eager only to live as long as
possible! What mule-like fidelity and efficiency could be got out of
such a rabble! But how many Lincolns would you get out of it, and how
many Jacksons, and how many Grants?
XXX
THOUGHTS ON THE VOLUPTUOUS
Why has no publisher ever thought of perfuming his novels? The final
refinement of publishing, already bedizened by every other art! Barabbas
turned Petronius! For instance, consider the bucolic romances of the
hyphenated Mrs. Porter. They have a subtle flavor of new-mown hay and
daffodils already; why not add the actual essence, or at all events some
safe coal-tar substitute, and so help imagination to spread its wings?
For Hall Caine, musk and synthetic bergamot. For Mrs. Glyn and her
neighbors on the tiger-skin, the fragrant blood of the red, red rose.
For the ruffianish pages of Jack London, the pungent, hospitable smell
of a first-class bar-room--that indescribable mingling of Maryland rye,
cigar smoke, stale malt liquor, radishes, potato salad and _blutwurst_.
For the Dartmoor sagas of the interminable Phillpotts, the warm
ammoniacal bouquet of cows, poultry and yokels. For the "Dodo" school,
violets and Russian cigarettes. For the venerable Howells, lavender and
mignonette. For Zola, Rochefort and wet leather. For Mrs. Humphrey Ward,
lilies of the valley. For Marie Corelli, tuberoses and embalming fluid.
For Chambers, sachet and lip paint. For----
But I leave you to make your own choices. All I offer is the general
idea. It has been tried in the theatre. Well do I remember the first
weeks of "Florodora" at the old Casino, with a mannikin in the lobby
squirting "La Flor de Florodora" upon all us Florodorans.... I was put
on trial for my life when I got home!
XXXI
THE HOLY ESTATE
Marriage is always a man's second choice. It is entered upon, more often
than not, as the safest form of intrigue. The caitiff yields quickest;
the man who loves danger and adventure holds out longest. Behind it one
frequently finds, not that lofty romantic passion which poets hymn, but
a mere yearning for peace and security. The abominable hazards of the
high seas, the rough humors and pestilences of the forecastle--these
drive the timid mariner ashore.... The authentic Cupid, at least in
Christendom, was discovered by the late Albert Ludwig Siegmund Neisser
in 1879.
XXXII
DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT
Deponent, being duly sworn, saith: My taste in poetry is for delicate
and fragile things--to be honest, for artificial things. I like a frail
but perfectly articulated stanza, a sonnet wrought like ivory, a song
full of glowing nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns,
conjunctions, prepositions and participles, but without too much hard
sense to it. Poetry, to me, has but two meanings. On the one hand, it is
a magical escape from the sordidness of metabolism and the class war,
and on the other hand it is a subtle, very difficult and hence very
charming art, like writing fugues or mixing mayonnaise. I do not go to
poets to be taught anything, or to be heated up to indignation, or to
have my conscience blasted out of its torpor, but to be soothed and
caressed, to be lulled with sweet sounds, to be wooed into
forgetfulness, to be tickled under the metaphysical chin. My favorite
poem is Lizette Woodworth Reese's "Tears," which, as a statement of
fact, seems to me to be as idiotic as the Book of Revelation. The poetry
I regard least is such stuff as that of Robert Browning and Matthew
Arnold, which argues and illuminates. I dislike poetry of intellectual
content as much as I dislike women of intellectual content--and for the
same reason.
XXXIII
WILD SHOTS
If I had the time, and there were no sweeter follies offering, I should
like to write an essay on the books that have quite failed of achieving
their original purposes, and are yet of respectable use and potency for
other purposes. For example, the Book of Revelation. The obvious aim of
the learned author of this work was to bring the early Christians into
accord by telling them authoritatively what to expect and hope for; its
actual effect during eighteen hundred years has been to split them into
a multitude of camps, and so set them to denouncing, damning, jailing
and murdering one another. Again, consider the autobiography of
Benvenuto Cellini. Ben wrote it to prove that he was an honest man, a
mirror of all the virtues, an injured innocent; the world, reading it,
hails him respectfully as the noblest, the boldest, the gaudiest liar
that ever lived. Again, turn to "Gulliver's Travels." The thing was
planned by its rev. author as a devastating satire, a terrible piece of
cynicism; it survives as a story-book for sucklings. Yet again, there is
"Hamlet." Shakespeare wrote it frankly to make money for a theatrical
manager; it has lost money for theatrical managers ever since. Yet
again, there is Caesar's "De Bello Gallico." Julius composed it to
thrill and arouse the Romans; its sole use today is to stupefy and
sicken schoolboys. Finally, there is the celebrated book of General F.
von Bernhardi. He wrote it to inflame Germany; its effect was to inflame
England....
The list might be lengthened almost _ad infinitum_. When a man writes a
book he fires a machine gun into a wood. The game he brings down often
astonishes him, and sometimes horrifies him. Consider the case of
Ibsen.... After my book on Nietzsche I was actually invited to lecture
at Princeton.
XXXIV
BEETHOVEN
Romain Rolland's "Beethoven," one of the cornerstones of his celebrity
as a critic, is based upon a thesis that is of almost inconceivable
inaccuracy, to wit, the thesis that old Ludwig was an apostle of joy,
and that his music reveals his determination to experience and utter it
in spite of all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nothing
could be more absurd. Joy, in truth, was precisely the emotion that
Beethoven could never conjure up; it simply was not in him. Turn to the
_scherzo_ of any of his trios, quartets, sonatas or symphonies. A
sardonic waggishness is there, and sometimes even a wistful sort of
merriment, but joy in the real sense--a kicking up of legs, a
light-heartedness, a complete freedom from care--is not to be found. It
is in Haydn, it is in Schubert and it is often in Mozart, but it is no
more in Beethoven than it is in Tschaikovsky. Even the hymn to joy at
the end of the Ninth symphony narrowly escapes being a gruesome parody
on the thing itself; a conscious effort is in every note of it; it is
almost as lacking in spontaneity as (if it were imaginable at all) a
piece of _vers libre_ by Augustus Montague Toplady.
Nay; Ludwig was no leaping buck. Nor was it his deafness, nor poverty,
nor the crimes of his rascally nephew that pumped joy out of him. The
truth is that he lacked it from birth; he was born a Puritan--and
though a Puritan may also become a great man (as witness Herbert Spencer
and Beelzebub), he can never throw off being a Puritan. Beethoven
stemmed from the Low Countries, and the Low Countries, in those days,
were full of Puritan refugees; the very name, in its first incarnation,
may have been Barebones. If you want to comprehend the authentic man,
don't linger over Rolland's fancies but go to his own philosophizings,
as garnered in "Beethoven, the Man and the Artist," by Friedrich Kerst,
Englished by Krehbiel. Here you will find a collection of moral
banalities that would have delighted Jonathan Edwards--a collection that
might well be emblazoned on gilt cards and hung in Sunday schools. He
begins with a naif anthropomorphism that is now almost perished from the
world; he ends with a solemn repudiation of adultery.... But a great
man, my masters, a great man! We have enough biographies of him, and
talmuds upon his works. Who will do a full-length psychological study of
him?
XXXV
THE TONE ART