VARIATIONS
_BY JAMES HUNEKER_
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899)
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (1900)
MELOMANIACS (1902)
OVERTONES (1904)
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (1905)
VISIONARIES (1905)
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909)
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (1910)
FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911)
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912)
NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915)
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS (1915)
UNICORNS (1917)
BEDOUINS (1920)
STEEPLEJACK. TWO VOLUMES (1920)
VARIATIONS (1921)
_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
VARIATIONS
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published November, 1921
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1919, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1920, BY THE PRESS PUBLISHING CO.
PRINTED AT
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
NEW YORK, U. S. A.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Mr. Huneker’s literary career was at its flood when ended by his sudden
and unlooked for death. He was perhaps our only, certainly our chief,
literary journalist, and his instructive, penetrating, and, above all,
entertaining criticism in the field of what he liked to call the Seven
Arts was almost always first seen in the periodical press, daily or
weekly. Afterward it was sifted and the residue abridged or expanded,
burnished or simplified, in its assimilation into appropriate permanent
style and stuff. Needless to say it lost none of its brilliance in the
process which was always minimized by having been largely forestalled, as
it were, in the original composition. The result was not so much merely
eminent as literally unique. His books have not only no rivals but no
competitors. Alone among American belletristic writers he followed in
the French journalistic-literary tradition, illustrated and rendered
illustrious by the practice of a long and shining roll of littérateurs.
Such a practice tends of itself to popularize its product by inevitably
keeping the larger public more or less in mind and therefore eschewing
professional pedantries. The element of personality acquires prominence
as in conversation. Style itself becomes conversational. Huneker is as
familiar in address as if he were not often erudite in material. He
establishes first of all, however imperceptibly, his relations with his
reader. Whatever the effect, it is devoid of dulness, and accordingly
the interest of his writing is incontestable even when its value is
indeterminate.
Composed of essays written since the publication of his last
book—Bedouins—though of necessity lacking the advantage of his personal
selection and supervision, Variations is a worthy companion of its
shelf-full of predecessors in its possession of these qualities. Aptly
named, it presents perhaps better than any of them a wide-reaching
diversity of æsthetic material for the consideration, the illumination,
and—pre-eminently—the entertainment of the cultivated. Perhaps, too, it
shows a maturer treatment, a mellower temper without a whit less energy,
and a greater opulence than ever of the author’s stored acquisitions and
spontaneous, even exhilarated, exposition of them. And here and there
amid the wealth of literary and æsthetic miscellany which he displays
and expounds one comes, with greater frequency than ever, upon memorable
crystallizations of experience in the contemplation of these matters.
Such truths, too, he exemplifies as well as formulates. No one ever, for
instance, credited more completely his own maxim: “There is no disputing
tastes—with the tasteless,” or conformed more cordially to his own
injunction: “Write only for the young. The old will not heed you, being
weary of the pother of life and art.” There was nothing, however, of
which _he_ was less weary, as this his last volume copiously attests, and
the explanation, of course, is his unimpaired youthfulness of mind and
spirit.
CONTENTS
PAGE
VARIOUS 1
HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS 11
THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE 20
CRUSHED VIOLETS 30
BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER 37
THE TWO TEMPTATIONS 46
THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY 52
ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES 57
PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING 67
IN PRAISE OF PRINTS 77
NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD 84
CÉZANNE 91
EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? 99
SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY 111
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? 121
ART AND ALCOHOL 130
THE TRAGIC CHOPIN 137
PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN 147
THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I 157
IDLE SPECULATIONS 166
THE MASTER BUILDER 173
VERDI’S OTELLO 181
FAUST AND MEPHISTO 189
BOHEMIAN MUSIC 195
THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? 203
LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA 210
DREAMING OF LISZT 218
A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD 225
CONTEMPORARY BRAN 233
A MOOD REACTIONARY 241
MUSICAL “POTTERISM” 248
MY “CHILDE ROLAND” 255
“OSCAR” AND DVORAK 263
ENRICO CARUSO 273
VARIOUS
Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that: “The greatest
man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who
corrupts it.” It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is
poor because it won’t work both ways. All master reformers, heretics,
and rebels at first were great corrupters. “Corruption,” so-called, is
a prime factor in their propaganda. Buddha, Jesus, and Moses; Arius and
Aristophanes, Mohammed and Napoleon, Paul and Augustine, Luther and
Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner,
Kant and Schopenhauer—here are a few names of men who undermined the
current beliefs and practices of their epoch, whether for good or for
evil. Rousseau has been accused by Pierre Lasserre as being the greatest
corrupter in modern history; yet his name will always be associated with
the Constitution of the United States of America. Tom Paine has been
called a “dirty little atheist,” but he wrote The Rights of Man. In
prose of unequalled force and limpidity Pascal denounced the Jesuits as
corrupters of youth—poor, persecuted Jesuits, who were the “Yellow Peril”
of that time. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an “intellectual” and a
philosophic anarch, wrote to Friedrich Nietzsche: “I, too, love Pascal.
But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal.
Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but
they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with
notes. The best edition is that of the Jesuits.”
Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils
of painting for William Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn’t
much matter whether we consider a great man as either a regenerator
or a corrupter. It all depends on your critical angle of vision.
Taine called Napoleon a bandit, notwithstanding the idolatries of his
contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from that
of his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, although he
borrowed his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the sincerest
friendship of his solitary life—his love for Richard Wagner. We know
that the most “objective”—comical old categories, “objective” and
“subjective”—philosophies are tinged by the temperaments of their makers;
perhaps the chief characteristic of philosophers is their unphilosophic
contempt for fellow-thinkers. This trait Schopenhauer displayed when
he abused Hegel & Co., Berlin, Ltd. Nietzsche attacked Wagner after
writing that lucid and comprehensive study of him, Richard Wagner and
Baireuth. Wagner was a bitter polemist and didn’t spare Meyerbeer and
other operatic trusts. He was an amateur philosopher, his rickety
system adorned with plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and
Schopenhauer. But Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful,
more original intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He “corrupted”
both, though it may be admitted that their intellectual and artistic
soil was primed for just such corruption. And Schopenhauer, gay old
misogynist, was materialist enough to echo an epigram attributed to
Fontenelle: “To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked
heart.” In other words, if your stomach is sound your soul will take
care of itself. All Hobbes, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Helvetius, and
Condillac are in that phrase.
But it is not my intention to stray among the pleasant groves of
speculation, taking an occasional potshot at the strange fauna of
metaphysic or admiring its many-colored flora. Some one wrote asking me
if Manette Salomon, by de Goncourt—the brothers Edmond and Jules,—had
been translated into English; also if it were the only fiction about
art and artists. I can’t say yes or no as to the translation; if it is
not, it should be; but it is safe to say that Manette is the best novel
dealing entirely with paint and painters that I know of. Fiction about
art and artists is rare; that is, good fiction, not the stuff daily
ground out by publishing mills for the gallery gods. A classic example in
American literature is The Marble Faun, by Hawthorne. Romola, by George
Eliot, is atmospheric with Florentine art and the genius of place.
However, it is to the French that we must go for such literature, Manette
being a notable example. It depicts the spiritual and physical decadence
of a splendid painting talent, Coriolis, and contains veracious pictures
of the pre-impressionist days in Paris. Balzac in the Unknown Masterpiece
has left a model. His Frenhofer is the first of the impressionists
withal, a fumbler of genius. In both Daudet and de Maupassant there
are stories clustered about the artistic guild. Strong as Death, by de
Maupassant, is long enough to be called a novel (roman), though it is
but an expanded episode, and a mighty interesting one, even a touching
one, for the usually impassive Guy. Daudet described a Paris Salon on
varnishing day in his accustomed facile, febrile style; but it stems
from Goncourt and Zola. Zola’s His Masterpiece (L’Œuvre) is one of his
best-written books. It was said to be a favorite of his, and it justifies
his taste. The much-belauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription
of the first Salon of Rejected Painters (Salon des refusés) at Paris
in 1863. Napoleon III, after social and political pressure had been
brought to bear on him, had consented to a special Salon within the
official Salon at the Palais de l’Industrie, where the rejected work
of the young lunatics who wished to paint purple turkeys, vermilion
water, and black sunsets would be harbored. Ivory hallucinations and
girls with carmilion-colored eyes were not barred. It is an enormously
clever book, this chiefly deriving from Manette Salomon and Balzac’s
Frenhofer. Claude Lantier is said to be the portrait of Paul Cézanne, a
schoolmate and friend of Zola at Aix-en-Provence. When I made the trip
from Marseilles to Aix Cézanne still lived, but I had been warned not to
mention the name of Zola, who shows Cézanne in this novel as an impotent
groper after impossible ideals. The irritable Paul would go into spasms
of rage when Zola was referred to in his presence. Imbecile, traitor,
charlatan! These were sample expressions. A reading of L’Œuvre at once
convinces you that the artistic procedures of Claude Lantier and Paul
Cézanne are diametrically different. Claude failed and hanged himself.
There are contemporary critics who consider Cézanne the greatest master
of the impressionist group. But the struggle for artistic veracity on
the part of Zola’s sorry hero is not unlike the case of Manet. The
Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and the
subject of a Manet canvas that had scandalized Paris at this period. The
fantastic idea of nude females at an al fresco banquet upon the grass,
while the other figures were clothed and in their right mind—all this
was too much for a purblind public and hostile critics; although there
are many examples in Italian renaissance painting of the same style of
composition. The picture became notorious. Manet, like Richard Wagner,
knew the uses of advertising.
Poe, Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, inter alia, have
dealt with the theme pictorial, and Paul Bourget, in his thrice-charming
story, The Lady Who Lost Her Painter. Henry James has written delightful
tales, such as The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Tragic Muse—this a
full-fledged novel in two volumes—in which artists appear and live their
lives. But it is the particular psychologic problem involved, rather
than theorizing about art, that steers the cunning pen of James. We all
recall the woman in The Liar, who destroyed the portrait of her husband
because it revealed to her, at last, the secret of his moral infirmity.
In this story John Singer Sargent has been accredited as the psychologist
of the brush. There is a nice, fresh young fellow in The Tragic Muse,
who, weak-spined as he is, prefers, at the last, his palette and brush
to the charms and wealth of Julia Dallow and her ambitious plans for
his political career. In The Real Thing we recognize—Henry James would
call it the “emotion of recognition”—one of those unerring strokes that
prove the writer to be master-psychologist among English novelists. Any
discerning painter will tell you that the value of a model who can take
the “pose” far outshines crude naturalism. It is the suggestiveness of
the pose with its pictorial implications that sets moving the imagination
of the artist. Upon this thesis the novelist has built a semi-pathetic,
amusing, and striking fable.
There are painters and sculptors scattered throughout English
fiction—shall we ever forget Thackeray and Clive Newcome? Ouida has
not missed weaving Tyrian purples into the gorgeous patterns of her
romantic painters. And Disraeli. And George Bernard Shaw—there is a
painting creature in his Love Among the Artists. (I contend that an
admirable novelist was killed in Mr. Shaw when he deserted fiction for
the playhouse. He won’t agree with me, but I should willingly part with
all his prefaces for another Byron Cashel’s Profession.) But it is to
George Moore we must go for fiction of this sort. He has devoted more
of his pages to paint and painters than other latter-day novelists.
The reason is that George Moore went to Paris, there to study art,
and he drifted into the Julian atelier just as would any likely young
chap with a well-filled purse and hazy notions concerning art. Those
early experiences were not wasted, they cropped up in his stories and
critical studies. He became the critical pioneer in England of French
impressionist art painters, the champion of Manet, Monet, Degas, and
the rest. He even declared, in an article of rare acumen, that if Jemmy
Whistler had been a heavier man, with more beef and brawn and beer,
as was Rubens, for example, the spider-waisted American painter might
have been as great an artist as Velasquez. To the weighing scales,
fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; nevertheless, the bolt of Mr. Moore
reached the mark. Whistler’s remarks about the Irish critic, especially
after the Eden litigation, were, so it is reported, not “fit to print.”
In Spring Days, the first volume of Mr. Moore’s trilogy—A Modern Lover
and Mike Fletcher are the other two—we are shown a young painter who
thinks more of petticoats than paint. Mike Fletcher, the most virile and,
for some of us, the quintessence of Moore, has its share of paint talk.
In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds in the fashionable
world by painting pretty, artificial portraits, thereby winning wealth,
popular applause, and official approbation. He also makes love in a
fascinating fashion—the secret of his mundane success. This same Lewis
Seymour lives and paints modish London beauties in rose color. He may be
found in Paris and New York. He is a type. The sitter for this portrait
is said to have been Sir Frederick Leighton, a statement I accept on
its face value, and one that Mr. Moore would probably vehemently deny.
But his irony must have entered the souls of a hundred celebrated
humbugs; that is, if they had souls to boast. A Modern Lover, despite the
rewriting and consequent defacement of the original design, is distinctly
a painter’s novel and the best of its kind, were it not that subsequently
the novelist wrote a masterpiece, Mildred Lawson, to be found in the
volume entitled Celibates—a Balzacian title, by the way. Masterly in
analysis and description, this story chiefly deals with art. Mildred,
a selfish English girl without heart, soul, or talent, studies in the
Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer vacation.
Naturally, no one has ever described the Forest better than Flaubert
in Sentimental Education; Flaubert, who wrote better than any one else
save Balzac. In this great canvas of Parisian life there are marvellous
evocations. There is a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who first reads
all the literature of æsthetics before he draws a line, and poses his
sitters à la Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, or Titian; in a word, the
man of precedent. De Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impressions of
the Forest and its painters; in particular, François Millet.
It is only just to Mr. Moore to say that you can’t find Mildred Lawson in
Flaubert or de Goncourt; no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the very
matrix of modern fiction. She is her own cruel, perverse, Moorovian self,
and she lives here or London or in the Philippines. Elsewhere I have
classed her as one of the most disagreeable heroines in fiction, an inky
sister of Hedda Gabler and Undine Spragg (in Edith Wharton’s Custom of
the Country).
All the one-time novel theories of “plein air” impressionism are
discussed in Zola’s His Masterpiece, yet the work as a whole lacks the
fine-fibred style and clairvoyance of Manette Salomon; that breviary for
painters which in 1867 anticipated the experimentings, the discoveries,
and the practice of the naturalistic and impressionist groups, running
the gamut from Manet, Monet, to Cézanne, Maufra, and Paul Gauguin.
The book is crowded with verbal pictures of art students, atelier and
open-air life; painting was still one of the romantic arts when de
Goncourt wrote. No such psychological manual of the painter has appeared,
before or since, Manette Salomon. The celibate bias of the brothers
is revealed in the leading motive—oh, that musty, fusty melodramatic
idea—which is the degradation of a man’s artistic ideals because of the
woman—Manette, his model—he marries. It was Goncourt who introduced
Japanese art to Europe; the brothers were friends of the late M. Bing,
a pioneer collector in Paris. And they foresaw the future of fiction as
well as painting.
HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS
How not to be a genius nowadays is as difficult as it is to believe in
prohibition. Every other man and woman you meet on the sidewalks of life
is a genius; at least they admit it, or their disciples say they are.
People with mere talent are becoming rare. If you happen to write a best
seller you are acclaimed a genius. And when you think it over, a man who
can sell a million copies of a book compounded of sentimental slush and
slimy piety must be a genius. What else is he? An artistic writer? No.
Respectable? Yes. In Carlyle’s times a person was considered respectable
if he owned a gig; he was called a gigman. To-day it is the motor-car
that is the symbol of financial well-being. Carlyle had much fun with
his gigman. What would he write about those egregious humans who starve
themselves and their families in order to sport about the highways in
a mortgaged motor? Popularity may be for dolls, declared Emerson, but
it’s a mighty asset when all the world is a doll. Even the old Carlyle
definition was thrown out of court by Herbert Spencer, himself a prize
specimen of one who possessed an infinite capacity for taking pains in
his work. Nevertheless, industry is not necessarily an indication of
genius, although elbow-grease has been an underrated factor in the case.
The truth is that there are no royal paths to Parnassus.
In 1857 Dr. Morel published his Traité des Dégénérescences, and gave
modern psychiatry its initial spring-board. Then Guerensen pronounced
genius a disease of the nerves, and the floodgates of madcap theories
were wide opened. We learned much from Magnan, Ribot, the brothers Janet,
Maudsley, Esquinol, and Charcot. After their psychological plumber work
genius became a dangerous profession. You were likely to be either a
madman or a criminal, and such piffling busybodies as Lombroso and Nordau
tracked you to your lair, measured your ears, the cut of your nose and a
glance of the eye, Reginald! (Surely Beau Brummel was a clothes maniac.)
Luckily for the world, genius is still a scarce product, and the
charlatan theories were laughed off the map when Nordau wrote his partly
amusing and wholly ridiculous book on Degeneration. The late William
James walloped him into silence. But the vulgar error persists in the
mind of the half-baked of culture. Like Mahomet’s coffin, it hangs
suspended ’twixt earth and heaven. It bobs up in the so-called new
school of Freudian psychoanalysis, which exploits to the reductio ad
absurdum the von Hartmann theory of the subliminal consciousness, with a
little spice of soothsaying and dream-book twaddle thrown in to lend an
air of novelty. We learn from Dr. Freud that dreams are the result of
unfulfilled desires—which may mean anything—that authors unconsciously
reveal themselves in their writings. What an astounding discovery!
Important if true. O la belle histoire! Cut out the erotic element in
this “new” theory and the world would pass it by. Who would read Leaves
of Grass for its “poetry” if such chaste, odoriferous “poems” as The
Woman Who Waits for Me were absent?
Genius is a word that has fallen into disrepute because of its being
bandied about so freely by our makers of fiction. That burlesque of a
raw-head-and-bloody-bones, Strickland, the alleged painter in Somerset
Maugham’s melodramatic “shocker,” The Moon and Sixpence, is a case in
point. The clever author expects his readers to believe that a staid
business man is transformed into a great painter at the age of forty. To
be sure, Strickland was what the French call a “Sunday painter,” one who
potters with color tubes and canvas every seventh day, yet is supposed to
accomplish what such men of genius as Degas, Manet, Millet, couldn’t in
protracted daily toil. And the innocent public swallows such fairy-tales
because it believes in miracles. You may be sure of one thing—no one in
the history of the Seven Arts has mastered his material save in the sweat
of his brow. Works and days. You can’t change your psychology overnight.
Mr. Maugham suggested Paul Gauguin, the painter of South Seas landscapes,
rich in color, decoration and arabesques. But Gauguin was a real genius.
Augustus John too has been dragged in. Ridiculous! We mention Strickland
because he seems to embody the popular notion of genius. A bolt from the
blue, and a stupid Philistine becomes in a trice a scarecrow painter. No,
he won’t do, any more than Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius will serve as a
portrait of one. In Shakespeare you are jostled by genius, but, then, the
poet was a genius of geniuses. He englobed all forms of genius.
But is genius a disease, like the tenor voice, or the pearl in a
mollusk? It is, we know, a gift that seldom brings happiness to its
possessor. Either it is unmercifully flouted, or else unrecognized, and
no two persons agree as to its specific quality. There is in Poland a
poet-novelist-playwright who bears a name that sounds like an unconquered
Polish fortress. He is called Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and when his
story, Homo Sapiens, was translated and published here the unhappy man
was heartily hated by all proofreaders and compositors. Do you wonder?
Possibly that dislike was a factor in the suppression of the book, which
wasn’t a whit less moral in its implications than the Re-creation of
William J. Bryan Kent. Stanislaw—we mercifully omit the full name—has
wisely written of genius and has illustrated it in his exceedingly
vivid personal career. Readers of Strindberg’s Inferno, which contains
in compression more tortures than Dante’s epic, a sort of pemmican
hell, need hardly be reminded that the rival to the Swedish dramatist’s
affections is Stanislaw P. in the guise of a pianist who plays with
overwhelming power and pathos the F sharp minor polonaise of Chopin. That
is the way the super-subtle Pole courted one of Strindberg’s lady-loves;
it may have been a matrimonial rib, but that is a mere detail.
Stanislaw asserts in his brochure, Chopin and Nietzsche, that physicians
do not busy themselves enough with history; if they did they would
recognize that “decadence” has always existed; that it is not decadence
at all, but only a phase of development quite as important as normality;
normality is stupidity, decadence is genius. Is there, he demands, a more
notable case of the abnormal than the apostle of Protestantism, Martin
Luther? We are all children of Satan, he cries. Those rare men who for
the sake of their ideals sacrifice the lives and happiness of thousands,
such as Alexander or Napoleon—there are more modern instances, if we
cared to mention them; or those who dispel the dreams of youth, Socrates
and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths of sin—because sin
has depth—Poe, Baudelaire, Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of
pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin, Schumann, Nietzsche—of
such material is genius compounded. Satan is the first philosopher, the
first Anarchist, and pain is the foundation of all art and, with Satan,
the father of illusions. I quote these luminous reflections to prove how
easy it is to twist a theory so as to suit one’s own point of view. The
decadence theory is nonsense. I may only refer you to Havelock Ellis’s
masterly volume of critical essays, entitled Affirmations, for a concise
refutation of the heresy; and equally fallacious is the contention of the
Polish writer that the normal always spells stupidity. The reverse is
often the case. Coleridge, you may remember, disputed, in his Biographia
Literaria, that antique sarcasm of Horace, the “genus irritabile vatum.”
He wrote: “The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from
their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appeared to
have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.”
Coleridge gives examples to uphold this belief. Taine has written in his
history of English literature of the sane genius among such old chaps
as Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Goethe, all of whom performed
prodigies of labor. No neurasthenia hampered their literary invention.
Yet Shakespeare created Hamlet, the incarnation of a disordered will and
a poetic soul astray.
Schopenhauer has adequately dealt with the theme and with more
conviction-breeding results than many of the later explorers in this
field, at his time a field outside of the biological laboratory. He finds
that “talent is versatile and betrays more acuteness of discursive than
intuitive knowledge.” The genius beholds another world because he has a
profounder conception of the world which lies before us all, inasmuch as
it presents itself with more objectivity and distinctness than it does
to less favored mortals. Myriad-minded Goethe summed up the question in
a memorable phrase. “Genius is incommensurable,” he told Eckermann when
discussing Faust. Mozart confessed that music came to him without his
volition. So-called secondary selves exist in the subliminal mind, and in
certain circumstances may usurp the reign of the primary self for varying
periods of time, just as a saint and sinner may inhabit one soul. The old
theologians spoke of guardian angels and angels of evil. Some see God
in an ecstatic vision and others peer into the fiery pit of hell with
morose delectation. Don’t worry about this moral dichotomy. It’s only
your various selves at war. When the dissociation becomes a half-dozen
split-up personalities struggling for mastery then it is time to consult
a psychiatrist. That way lies the madhouse. But we are all of us the
victims of our cells.
A genius is a superman—a man, according to Dr. Jacobson (see his Possible
Clues to the Nature of Genius), plus a secondary personality, his genius
not residing in the primary self but in his secondary personality. In the
one case we have the spiritualistic medium—low mentality, irresponsible
secondary personality; in the other case we have genius—high mentality,
super-rational secondary personality. It might be well to remember this
fact just now when a wave of debasing superstition is rising everywhere,
of which the mildest symptom is the Ouija-board and other clotted
nonsense; the gravest symptoms, devil-worship and alleged communication
with spirits; after all cataclysmic events, war, pestilence, earthquake,
the prolonged nerve-tension causes “new” religions, witchcraft, healers,
and prophets of evil to flourish like toadstools in a damp, dank cellar.
Mock-turtle mysticism and ineffable silliness. It is not the denial of
such so-called “phenomena” that concerns us, for there are numberless
unexplained mysteries in nature; all occult research is not hocus-pocus;
but it is the interpretation, divine or diabolic, of these happenings
to which sensible thinkers object. Bateson, quoted by Dr. Jacobson,
“conceives of evolution and life as an unpacking of an original complex.”
Here we are knocking at the transcendental gates of the Fourth Spatial
Dimension. Life is an uncoiling. Humanity is a watch-spring of the
infinite. Our existence is the progress of a spiritual tapeworm. Death
is the grand vermifuge. Nevertheless, genius is a shy bird. Spear him
and put him under the microscope. But first catch your fish. And that is
always difficult.
Man has chartered the globe, but, probably by reason of an almost
ineradicable superstitious timidity, has left the human soul an
undiscovered country, or, at least, but partially explored. Genius,
whether manifesting its power in the arts or in the sciences, is the
worthiest theme for the philosopher; not reactionary metaphysicians like
Bergson, weavers of verbal dreams, spinners of futile cobweb systems;
but the biologist, psychiatrist, the practical scientist, for whom the
visible as well as the invisible worlds exist. “I breathe, therefore I
live,” said, in effect, William James. (Essays in Radical Empiricism.)
The mind of man has ever been a house divided in itself. Yet it is a
consolation to know that our several subliminal personalities may be the
cause of our conflicting thoughts. (The late Prof. Muensterburg declared
that such a thing as subconsciousness did not exist.) In Faust we read
of two spirits that abide in our breast, also the spirit that denied.
Mephisto then may be only our second personality. However, we haven’t
answered the question posed at the beginning of this Sunday morning
ramble through the tangled forest of minor speculation—how not to be a
genius. The answer is as easy as lying—never work!
THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE
I had intended writing of the tragic Chopin to-day, but George Moore
supervened; he and Atlantic City—an odd combination. Man cannot live
in music alone, and when Maurice Speiser met me on the boardwalk and
lent me his copy of Avowals (numbered eighty and privately printed
for subscribers), I shooed Chopin to the backyard of my consciousness
and proceeded to reread Mr. Moore. I say reread because much of the
subject-matter in this new, bulky volume saw the light of publication
years ago in various English and at least one American periodical:
Lippincotts’, the Fortnightly, et al. Still, it is, all of it,
worthwhile, notwithstanding the fact the old nurse of the County Mayo
author wouldn’t have blushed at a line therein. Why the book was
published as “wicked” by implication is difficult to discover. It should
be given to the world at large, after several minor excisions. The
one gay anecdote is related in France, and it is so mildly diverting
that it will bear repeating here. An eccentric nobleman adorns himself
with peacock’s feathers for the edification of his peahens! Yet people
subscribe for the pleasure of such innocent foolery. By all means, let us
have Avowals naked and unashamed. Only good Moorovians will endure its
leagues of technical literary criticism. The Story Teller’s Holiday of
last year was another kind of a book. Rather blistering than elevating.
But amusing always.
There was a time when Mr. Moore was content to be called the Irish
Flaubert; nowadays he is evidently after the title of the Celtic
Casanova, though hardly in these new avowals. They will never rank in
interest with Memoirs of My Dead Life; or, indeed, with his Hail and
Farewell Trilogy. For one thing, printed dialogue makes slow reading,
even when the prose is the incomparable prose of Walter Savage Landor.
The opening chapters are devoted to discussions, purely academic, between
Edmund Gosse and George Moore. English prose narrative is the weakest
part of English literature—a paradoxical contention. Mr. Gosse puts up a
good fight, but is pulverized by his opponent, who leaves him gasping on
a balcony wrapped in a shawl, feebly expostulating. The Moore dialectic
is fairly familiar to his admirers. It is one-third lack of logic and
two-thirds persuasion and browbeating. Need I add that the persuasiveness
is not wholly divested of a certain veiled Donnybrookishness? Mr. Moore
goes for the hated Sassenach, and only those Englishmen who seem to
resemble him are treated with consideration; the Rev. Laurence Sterne,
whose wheedling prose style is admirably wedded to his prurient themes
(“Are you Jewish or ticklish?” he was asked by a critic long ago), is
praiseworthy in the eyes of our critic.
I should have preferred to pose as an adversary to Mr. Moore the
redoubtable Prof. George Saintsbury, who with a Sam Johnson bluffness
would have smashed the Irishman’s arguments at the very first throw out
of the box. No doubt about that. Mr. Moore admits the genius of Landor,
Pater, Lamb, De Quincey, in the essay form; but it is fiction narrative
he centres upon, and despite De Foe, Fielding, Jane Austen, not to speak
of Dickens, Thackeray and Meredith, he finds no good has come forth from
that British Nazareth. Of the exquisite prose patterns which Cardinal
Newman has woven for us he speaks no word; elsewhere, years past, he has
expressed his dislike of Newman’s flowing style; the “style coulant”
abhorred of Charles Baudelaire, especially when it issued from the pen of
George Sand. Yet Mr. Moore’s Keltic prose (spell it with a K, Samivel!)
is like Newman’s in so far as both are subtle, sensitive, and rippling;
both avoid dynamic contrasts, both persuade rather than assault. And
there is a suspicion of the serpentine in the writings of both men. The
spiral prose of The Brook Kerith is a case in point. Can’t you see that
minotaur of English literary criticism—or should I say Torquemada?—George
Saintsbury frowning and thundering on Mr. Moore, and quoting from his
History of English Prose-Rhythms! A battle of the bookmen, indeed.
The recantations of George Moore become increasingly numerous with the
passage of the years. I had expected the inclusion in Avowals of his
top-notch in criticism, not dealing with the plastic arts—naturally
his stronghold—a criticism that appeared about twenty years ago in
_Cosmopolis_, an international magazine edited, if I remember aright,
by Lady Randolph Churchill. Far finer than his study of Zola is this
study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, entitled A Tragic Novel, the
tragedy of drab, commonplace living, not that of high heroics or tragic
and romantic gestures. But Mr. Moore violently repudiates his Flaubert
worship and explains why he doesn’t reprint the splendid pages of that
particular criticism. Flaubert, it seems, is not a novelist, only a
satirist—he says something of the same sort earlier concerning George
Meredith—and he places him far below Balzac as a creator of character,
below Turgénieff as a teller of tales; he even decries his style—the
sanity, simplicity, which, allied to its sonorous harmonies, is one of
the most fascinating in French literature. I fancy Mr. Moore suffered
from the revulsion which often attacks critical pioneers; as soon as the
public, wooed or banged into submission by the critic, begins to admire
them the critic moves on; his object accomplished, newer idols must be
sought, fresher victories achieved; the old idol is again become a block
of wood. Mr. Saintsbury fought for Baudelaire and Flaubert before George
Moore; nevertheless, Mr. Moore was the first English-writing novelist who
adopted Flaubert’s methods; recall Untilled Fields and Evelyn Inness—the
manner, of course, not the matter. And there is Swinburne, who after
extravagantly praising Walt Whitman violently repudiated the Camden
“bard,” later inventing the word “Whitmaniac” to signify his contempt
for Walt’s comical yawping. In humbler fashion I may give as an example
of this critical dog-in-the-manger attitude my own case. In 1877 I went
as a lad to visit Walt across the Delaware River from my home, and from
him received the kiss of peace and went away with the glowing brow of the
neophyte. I became an ardent Whitmaniac in my teens, and for two decades
or more I wrote of W. W. as if he were really a great poet. I can’t read
him now, nor can I read the effusions of his followers. He has been a
disruptive force, still is one; to imitate his “poetry” is so easy that
an entire new school of lads and lassies are murdering English prosody
and filling the urn with their lascivious caterwaulings. Walt is to
blame. He did it first in his Children of Adam.
Flaubert is not the only writer from whom Mr. Moore has seceded. Being a
peculiarly susceptible Celt, he is always changing his opinions, which
is a legitimate function of the male as well as the female intellect.
At one epoch Dublin never knew when beginning a fresh day whether her
favorite son was a Catholic or a Protestant. It was like a barometrical
puzzle. He recanted his Catholicism—decanted might be a better word—and
he changed his mind every morning about his best friend, the poet,
William Yeats. The New Irish movement was to be George Moore or it was
to be nothing. Finally John Millington Synge appeared, and the movement,
luckily enough, became Synge. Being dead, this master is spared from the
scarifications to which Moore subjected Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady
Gregory. Ireland is no longer Erin go bragh! and the Lord knows what he
thinks of Sinn Fein. In fact, since Ireland did not appreciate the genius
of George Moore, he abandons Ireland—as he abandoned England during
the Boer Rebellion. We hear no more of Douglas Hyde or the revival of
Erse—says the Shan Van Vocht!
He sharply criticised Jane Austen and women writers generally in articles
published in the _North American Review_, but in Avowals Jane is given
her just dues, which is well. George Eliot and the Brontës he won’t
have. He rightfully rates Tolstoy and his absence of true spirituality.
The great Russian writer is not a prober of the human soul, despite the
accepted belief to the contrary; that is, he doesn’t deeply probe. His
rendering of reality borders on hallucination. Simply prodigious is
his mastery of realism. Yet Dostoievsky is the profounder man of the
pen. He lived and suffered the life that Tolstoy only wrote about but
never experienced. His novels, tedious, explosive, tumultuous, may be
the “psychological mole-runs” of Turgénieff’s dictum; nevertheless they
are aglow with vitality, palpitating with pity for the downtrodden and
humiliated, and pullulating with humanity. Dostoievsky, an essentially
morbid man, as was Nietzsche, by reason of this very deviation from
normality, was enabled to sink his plummet into the darkest recesses
of the soul. His self-cruelty had a sadistic tinge. But he is the real
psychologist, not Tolstoy. Deploring Tolstoy’s dodging of psychological
issues—for his religion was of the old intolerant order and he was
suffering from an excess of moralic acid in the blood, which finally
killed his art—Mr. Moore yet refuses to give Dostoievsky a truly exalted
position. He better likes Turgénieff, nor need we quarrel with him on
this score. Turgénieff represents the almost perfect artist, blithe,
Greek, charming, while his rival, a Prometheus of the inkpot, groans in
travail as he shows us his wounded soul. In the Confessions of a Young
Man the author speaks of Dostoievsky as “Gaboriau with psychological
sauce.” When he wrote an introduction to a translation of Poor Folk
he had evidently seen a great light. But in Avowals he is back in the
Gaboriau trenches.
A more definite recantation is his present view of Tolstoy. The first
avowals, in periodical form, saw him a worshipper at the shrine. I
well remember his essay, Since the Elizabethans, and its contemptuous
comparison of Tolstoy and Thackeray. English fiction, he said, in effect,
never dives below the surface; it is an affair of decoration, never of
depth. Well and good. Tolstoy, like Balzac, has no counterpart in English
literature, Mr. Moore says, and maintains his argument with admirable
examples. Musical analogies are employed. Verdi or Donizetti, never the
passionately profound harmonies of Wagner, are overheard in English
fiction. With a sense of relief I find that Mr. Moore is still faithful
to Walter Pater. The best pages in the volume are those in which he
describes the art and personality of the shy, complex author of Marius.
It may be remembered, his eulogy of Marius in the early confessions.
From this faith he has never swerved. Of Henry James he was not an
admirer. He seems not to have gone further than The Portrait of a Lady.
He encountered Mr. James at the home of the Robinson girls, Mary and
Mabel. Here is a portrait of our famous countryman: “And these thoughts
drew my eyes to the round head, already going bald, to the small, dark
eyes, closely set, and to the great expanse of closely shaven face. His
legs were short, and his hands and feet large, and he sat portentously
in his chair, speaking with some hesitation and great care, anxious
that every sentence, or if not all, at least every third or fourth,
should send forth a beam of humor.” Apart from the fact that the eyes of
Henry James were not small, but large and heavy lidded, eyes in which
were pictured an entire social world, his description is not without a
certain malicious verisimilitude. The two men were, naturally enough,
antipathetic to each other. Mr. James failed to recognize the greatness
of Esther Waters, and Mr. Moore hated humor. He objurgates humor in a
writer. Yet he is, consciously or unconsciously, humorous. And what a bon
mot was his summing up of Bernard Shaw as being only the “funny man in a
boarding house.” Perhaps. But at the time that boarding house comprised
Europe and America.
Moore and Whistler were always clawing and scratching. Both feline, both
tenors, and possessing the tenor temperament, how could they be expected
to sing in amiable ensemble? Moore relates that James the Butterfly
presented him with a copy of his Ten o’Clock, inscribed: “To George
Moore—for furtive reading,” which is the epitome of irony. But George
never began to repeat the epigrams of “Jemmy,” as did Jemmy those of
Oscar Wilde. Whistler, according to friends who knew, would sit up half
the night manufacturing witticisms. It was to himself, not to Oscar,
that he should have applied the remark: “But you will, Oscar, you will.”
The Irishman was as spontaneous in his wit as the American constipated.
However, “furtive reading” is distinctly good. George Moore paid off his
score in his Modern Painting when he wrote of Whistler that if he had
been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted as well as Velasquez.
And weight and substance are precisely the qualities lacking in the
Whistlerian canvases, which are becoming more attenuated, more ghostly as
the years wear on. If it were not for the etchings the next generation
would have cause for wonderment over the exaggerated praise bestowed upon
a painter whose originality principally derives from his Paris friend,
Fantin-Latour, and from the Japanese.
But Avowals is good fun. It should be placed on the general market. It’s
too decent to be locked away in the “enfer” of a bibliophile. Apropos
of nothing, did you hear George Moore on the League of Nations? He is
convinced enough on that score to exclaim: “There’s only one way of
bringing about the League. Leave off talking about the President and hang
the Kaiser.”
CRUSHED VIOLETS
“Good God! I forgot the violets!” exclaimed Walter Savage Landor, after
he had thrown his cook out of the window. This happened at Fiesole, near
Florence, and within one year of a century ago. The great prose master
had a rather excitable temperament, as Charles Dickens has testified.
(The novelist put him in Bleak House as Boythorn—“with the genius and
much else left out,” as Havelock Ellis says.) Landor dearly loved his
flowers, and in his dismay he gave birth to a classic phrase. Nowadays we
would gladly put a chef on the throne, so debased has become the world’s
cuisine. But Landor was an aristocrat masquerading as a fierce democrat
and his gesture was a typical one, and in the gentlemanly interest; we
might say a gentleman’s prerogative, one that has gone quite out of
fashion.
I am minded of his despairing cry when I think of Walter Pater. A member
of the delicious Hermione’s family, indelibly recorded by Don Marquis,
asked me once upon a time if the prose of Pater didn’t remind me of
crushed violets. I related then and there the adventure of Landor’s
cook and the flowerbed. Her answer threw much light on her mentality:
“I wonder what the cook said?” she asked. But Pater prose and crushed
violets! For the life of me I can’t bridge this gulf of the dissimilar.
Some of Whistler is an indigestion of strawberries and cream; but Pater
and violets! Walter Pater wasn’t as “precious,” as insipid, as his
imitators.