presentation of the problems of volition, it falls short of Goethe’s
ethical vision. Faust is a man who wills. “In the beginning was the act.”
Antony is static, not dynamic. Faust is tempted by Mephisto, yet does not
lose his soul. Flaubert’s hermit resists Satan at his subtlest; withal,
we do not feel that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust’s. Man
for man, Faust is the more significant; Antony is narrow-minded; indeed,
almost besotted by superstition. He crystallizes, also symbolizes, a
vanished period of mythology. Faust stands for the man of the present,
and in the second part of the poem the man of the future. Ideas are the
heroes of Flaubert’s epic, though St. Antony’s is a metaphysical history,
not a human one like Faust’s.
But to Faust alone may the Temptation be compared. George Saintsbury has
pronounced this masterpiece to be the most perfect example extant of
dream literature. And precisely because of its precision in details, its
astounding architectonic and its rich-hued waking hallucinations.
THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY
It is a holy and a wholesome act to visit the grave of a genius, for the
memories there aroused may serve as a consolation and an inspiration in
our spiritually arid existence. I often thought of this at Rouen when I
went there to visit the tomb of Gustave Flaubert, so happily described by
François Coppée as The Beethoven of French Prose. A quarter of a century
ago I protested in newspapers and books against the tardy official
recognition accorded one of the great prose masters of France—which
means the world—and one of the most marvellous among novelists. In the
Solferino Gardens at Rouen there is the marble memorial by the sculptor
Chapu, and on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery, in the Flaubert
family plot—Flaubert’s father was a distinguished surgeon—and not far
from the Joan of Arc monument, lie the remains of the author of Madame
Bovary. His celebrated pupil, Guy de Maupassant, is also remembered
in the Solferino Gardens by a statue; another may be seen in the Parc
Monceau. But at the time I began urging some form of a memorial to the
master of masters nothing had been done. Since then the government has
made of the old Flaubert home at Croisset, a half-hour from Rouen, down
the Seine, a worthy memorial. The house in which such masterpieces as
Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St.
Antony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the Three Tales were created is now
a Flaubert museum. Abbé Prevost is said to have written Manon Lescaut
there. The old house still stands, though decaying. Flaubert’s study is,
however, in fair preservation. The paternal home, occupying a part of the
little park, was a dismantled manufactory when last I saw the place.
The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert
household, kept a café in the neighborhood, and was always ready to talk
of his master, of Mme. Flaubert, the mother. In vain I tried to get a
photograph of that lady. Colange would not sell it, would not even have
it reproduced. I have seen the picture of Dr. Achille Flaubert, but I
am more interested in the mothers of men of genius, and I can recall no
edition of the works containing the portrait of Mme. Flaubert. But I
recall her features. A sweet, mild, intelligent face, betraying evidences
of sorrow and resignation. The typical mother. Her son was a celibate,
and, with the exception of Louise Colet, he never gave his mother any
worriment over women. And it was that lady, whose portrait was recently
exhibited at the Courbet retrospective exhibition in the Metropolitan
Museum, who was the disturber, not Flaubert. There had been an affair,
and understanding the honorable nature of the man, the wily humbug Louise
endeavored to make trouble. She wrote Mme. Flaubert, a deeply pious
woman; she harried Gustave, who, like most literary psychologists and
sounders of feminine souls, was naïve in the practical conduct of his
love-affairs. The epitaph of Louise Colet was composed by Maxime Ducamp:
“Here lies the woman who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de
Musset ridiculous, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr; requiescat in
pace.” A mean, spiteful masculine witticism this, though well deserved.
Of Ducamp a like epitaph might be fabricated: Hic jacet the man who
slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving friend Gustave Flaubert, and
who was critically snuffed out of existence by Guy de Maupassant.
I have preserved a card sent to me by Mme. Franklin Grout, dated from
Villa Tanit, Antibes, in which she expressed her gratitude for several
things I wrote regarding the necessity of a Flaubert museum at Croisset;
also for the truth in the Ducamp matter. Mme. Grout was the Caroline
Commanville of the Flaubert correspondence, the beloved niece of the
master, for whom he sacrificed his personal fortune, a considerable one
for a man of letters forty years ago (about one million two hundred
thousand francs). Her husband, M. Commanville, had suffered from
reverses, and Flaubert, the supposed egoist, cold-blooded, self-centred,
an epicurean of literature, calmly deprived himself of his last franc
and, nearly sixty years of age, went into harness. His noble act was
accomplished without the flaring of trumpets. There were no publishers’
“blurbs” then; nowadays this transaction in hearts and bonds would be
yawped to the thousand winds of publicity; luckily, the sensitive great
man was spared that vulgar fate. After the death of her husband, Caroline
Commanville remarried; her second husband was the Dr. Grout who attended
Guy de Maupassant during his fatal illness at the famous Maison Blanche.
Think of it! I saw the great Flaubert in the flesh. I may quote Browning:
“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to
you?”... Set me down as hopelessly romantic, as a cultivator of the cult
of great artists in an age when there are only imitators or pigmies. It’s
born in me, this species of artistic snobbery. I can’t help it. Every now
and then some professorial rabbit pokes its pink snout from the academic
hutch and passionately pipes, “Romance is the ruin of the world!” and
retires on gliding paws. After his naughty proclamation I always take
down from the shelf Alice in Wonderland and read with renewed delight
the conversation of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. No romance in
the world? Of that particular professorial rabbit Daisy Ashford might
say: Render unto Cæsar’s wife the things that are suspicious! Even
academic rabbits are romantic; else their breeding propensities have been
enormously exaggerated. Flaubert is my romance.
Above all, Flaubert was a musician, a musical poet. His ear was the final
court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks
the essential richness, the diapasonic undertow of the English, is just
short of the miraculous. Until the time of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo
the French language was less a liquid, plastic collocation of sounds than
a formal pattern, despite the clarity and precision of the eighteenth
century; one must go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
for richer, more pregnant speech. Omnipresent with Flaubert was the
musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that should float because of
its sheer style. Lyric verbal ecstasy quite overpowered him. He was born
December 21, 1821. As Henry James has said, he is one of the glories of
French literature. Doubtless there will be a fitting commemoration of his
one hundredth birth anniversary two years hence, and I hope that America
will be represented at Rouen on that occasion.
ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES
My first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, though brief, will be ever
memorable for me. I was not precisely “summoned” to Oyster Bay on
Election Day early in November, 1915, though I gladly accepted Col.
Roosevelt’s invitation in the light of a “royal command,” and went over
to Long Island in company with John Quinn, who had arranged the meeting,
and Francis J. Heney, once public prosecutor in San Francisco. I had
received several letters from the Colonel of Colonels, of which I recall
two significant sentences. One ended: “What a trump John Quinn is!” The
other begins: “I have just received your New Cosmopolis. My son Kermit,
whose special delight is New York, would probably appreciate it more
than I do, for I am a countryman rather than a man of the pavements.”
Now, I had always thought of Theodore Roosevelt as a “man of the
pavements,” notwithstanding his delight in rough-riding across Western
prairies. Personally I found him the reverse of either: a scholarly
man, fond of music and the fine arts—he showed me a number of canvases
by the late Marcius Simmons, a young American painter, who had been
greatly influenced by Turner. The colonel had an excellent library of
Colonial literature, and was fond of digging out pregnant sentences
for quotation in his speeches from early preachers and statesmen. He
appeared to be interested in my comparison between his prose style and
the prose style of President Woodrow Wilson: the one swift, concise,
full of affirmations, striking sentences, and notable for its absence of
glitter. For the colonel reality was greater than rhetoric; while the
prose of Mr. Wilson is eminently professorial, preserving as it does a
nice balance of sound and sense; above all, “literary” prose, the prose
of the study, never dynamic, seldom brilliant; prose “standardized,”
eighteenth-century, smooth, sinuous, flexible, and ever-illuding prose.
My distinguished host showed some of the trophies he had acquired in
Europe when on that historic grand tour; and, as I had not visited him
in the guise of a professional interviewer, I did not write at the time
of what I saw; but now I may do so without violating the intimacies of
private hospitality. One thing that interested me was a photograph of
the late Andrew Carnegie, taken in Berlin during the military manœuvres;
both Carnegie and Roosevelt had been guests of William Hohenzollern, then
Kaiser. I told the colonel that I had been present at the formal opening
of the Peace Palace, in September, 1913, at The Hague, and that the day
had been so hot that all Holland, there represented, had fled to the
beach at Scheveningen, adding that I believed the palace eventually would
be turned into the handsomest café in Europe; and I had printed this
prophecy (?) in _The Times Sunday Magazine_, when reporting the solemn
humbuggery of the peaceful house-warming.
War was discussed with all the zest of the wonderful man. One question
I permitted myself: “Colonel, would the Lusitania have been sunk if you
had been in the White House?” Snapping his formidable jaw, he exclaimed:
“There would have been no Lusitania incident if I had been President.”
Among other various topics the colonel descanted on the poetical merits
of George Cabot Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who died in the
very harvest time of his genius. In his introduction to the two volumes
of Poems and Dramas, Theodore Roosevelt has never written with such a
happy mingling of perspicacity and tempered enthusiasm. Among the younger
American poets I find Lodge of importance, not along because of his
potential promise, but because of his actual performance. An authentic
poet, his versatility is marked. In his sonnets and lyrics he paid the
admiring tribute of youth to Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning,
Meredith, and Swinburne. He could mimic Walt Whitman, who is fatally
easy to parody, and he early succumbed to Schopenhauer and Baudelaire.
In at least one of his dramas I found the cosmic ecstasy of Nietzsche;
also the doctrine of the Eternal Return. But young Lodge had assimilated
a half dozen cultures, and passed far out to sea the perilous rocks of
imitation, upon which so many lesser talents have come to grief. When as
an achievement we consider his Herakles we are amazed at its maturity
of thought and technical finish. The poet, the Maker, confronts us, and
in reclothing the antique and tragic myth with his own lovely language
he is, nevertheless, a “modern.” I know few poets of the new school who
may boast this sense of the vital present, added to a divination and an
evocation of “old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.” His
figures are not fashioned by academic black magic, but are vital beings,
loving, trusting, suffering, and in conflict with ineluctable destiny. He
had the lyric art, also the architectural. He was a singer and a builder
of the lofty rhyme. His handling of complex forms and abstruse rhymes
was remarkable. George Cabot Lodge possessed both voice and vision. His
life, by Henry Adams, shows him to have been a young man beloved by his
friends, among whom were Jonathan Stickney Trumbull, Langdon Mitchell,
and the late Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. When I met him in Paris he was a
student at the Sorbonne. It was about 1896. A charming youth. I may only
add now my humble mite of admiration to the manes of this dead genius.
* * * * *
When I saw Dr. Georg Brandes at the Hotel Astor a few months before the
outbreak of the Great War I told him that he resembled the bust made
of him by Klinger. It was the first time I had talked to the celebrated
Danish author, to whom I had dedicated Egoists. Then past seventy, as
active as a young man, I could see no reason why he shouldn’t live to
be a centenarian. An active brain is lodged in his nimble body. I had
made up my mind to ask him no questions about America. I found him in
a rage over the way he was misquoted by some of the interviewers. It
should be remembered that primarily he is a cosmopolitan thinker. He
writes in English, French, German, and Danish with equal ease. As to
the provinciality of our country’s literature and the seven arts he has
definite opinions; but he was polite enough not to rub them in on me.
He was accused of finding his favorite reading in the “works” of Jack
London! That idea amused him. Among our “moderns” it is Frank Norris he
likes; a slight difference, indeed. Emerson, Poe, Whitman interested him,
though not as iconoclasts or pathfinders. The originality of this trinity
he didn’t dwell upon; made-over Europeans, he called them; Emerson and
German transcendental philosophy; Poe and E. T. W. Hoffmann; Whitman and
Ossian—Walt’s rugged speech is a windy parody of MacPherson’s, and Ossian
himself is a windy parody of the Old Testament style.
Brandes is an iconoclast, a radical, a non-conformist born, and more
often a No-Sayer than a Yes-Sayer. The many-headed monster has no
message for him. As he was the first European critic to give us
true pictures of Ibsen and Nietzsche, I led him to speak of the
poet-philosopher. At Baireuth, where I had gone to hear the Wagner
music-drama at its fountainhead—and very muddy was the music-making, I am
sorry to say—I was shown the house where was born Max Stirner. My friend
said: “When the very name of Richard Wagner is forgotten, Stirner’s
will be in the mouth of the world.” Of course, this sounded improbable.
I know Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own, knew his real name, Johann
Kaspar Schmidt, and that he had been a poor, half-starved school-master
in Berlin, and, in 1845, imprisoned by the Prussian Government. This
intellectual anarch—rather call him nihilist, for, compared with his
nihilism, Bakunin’s is only revolutionary resistance—was to become later
the most powerful disrupting force in Europe! I couldn’t believe it.
But now I recall my friend’s prophecy when I read of the doings of the
Russian Bolsheviki. Not Nietzsche, but Stirner, has been the real motor
force in the contemporary revolution. No half-way house of socialism for
the Reds! And that is the lesson of Artzibachev’s Sanine, the import of
which the majority of critics missed, partially because of the imperfect
English translation—many suppressions—and also because they missed
the significance of the new man, who, while continuing the realistic
tradition of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, was diametrically opposed to their
sentimental Brotherhood of Man—toujours that old fallacy of Rousseau!—and
preached the fiercest individualism, violently repudiating Nietzsche and
his aristocratic individualism. It may be said in passing that a reaction
to individualism is bound to come; the lesson of the war will not be
lost. Nor the teaching of Emerson. After the present overt suppression of
the individual, the pendulum will surely swing from tyrannical socialism
to the greater freedom of the individual. And it can’t come quickly
enough here in America.
Dr. Brandes sets more store by Nietzsche than Stirner; he was the first
to call Nietzsche a “radical aristocrat.” We switched to the theme of
Strindberg. Brandes said: “Yes, he was mad. Once he visited me and
told me of a call he had made at a lunatic asylum near Stockholm. He
rang the bell and asked the physician if he—Strindberg, the greatest
of dramatists—was crazy; to which the doctor replied: ‘My dear Mr.
Strindberg, if you will only consent to stay with me six weeks and talk
with me every day, I promise to answer your question.’” After that
Brandes had no doubts on the question. Brandes is not only the discoverer
of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, but he himself is a revaluer of
old valuations. Therein lies his significance for this generation. In
1888 he wrote to Nietzsche: “I have been the best hated man in the north
for the last four years. The newspapers rave against me every day,
especially since my long feud with Bjornson, in which all the ‘moral’
German newspapers take sides against me.”... To-day he is regarded
as a reactionary by the Reds. The affections of Brandes have always
been bestowed upon the literatures of England and France. Of his Main
Currents, Maurice Bigeon has said that Brandes did for the nineteenth
century what Sainte-Beuve did for the seventeenth century in his History
of Port Royal. What is vital, what makes for progress, what has lasting
influence in social life? asks the Dane in his Main Currents. He will
remain the archetype of cosmopolitan critics for future generations. A
humanist, the mind of Brandes is steel-colored. Ductile, when white-hot,
it flows like lava from a volcano in eruption; but always is it steel,
whether liquefied or rigid. Pre-eminently it is the fighting mind.
He objects to being described as “brilliant.” The model of Brandes
as a portrait-painter of ideas and individuals is Velasquez, because
“Velasquez is not brilliant, but true.”
Yet he is brilliant and lucid, and steel-like, whether writing of
Shakespeare or Lassalle. An ardent upholder of Taine and the psychology
of race, he contends that in the individual, not in the people, lies
the only hope for progress. He is altogether for the psychology of
the individual. Like Carlyle, he has the cult of the great man. The
fundamental question is—can the well-being of the race, which is the
end of all effort, be attained without great men? “I say no, and again,
no!” he cries. He is a firm believer in the axiom that every tub should
stand on its own bottom; and in our earthly pasture, where the sheep
think, act, or vote to order, the lesson of Brandes is “writ clear”: To
myself be true! that truth set forth with double facets by Ibsen in Peer
Gynt and Brand. Also by Emerson. Beware of the Bogy—the cowardly spirit
of compromise, with its sneaking prudent advice; Go around! For mobs and
mob-made laws Georg Brandes has a mighty hatred. He, too, is a radical
aristocrat whose motto might be: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for
they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth! With his Hebraic irony he stung
to the quick the spiritual sloth of Denmark. His life was made unpleasant
at the Copenhagen University; but he had behind him the younger
generation. He knew that to write for the intrenched and prejudiced
class would be a waste of ink. He exploded his verbal bombs beneath
the national ark and blew sky-high stale and false ideals. He became a
national figure after he had been recognized as a world critic. Not the
polished writer that was Sainte-Beuve, not the possessor of a synthetic
intellect like Hippolyte Taine’s, Brandes is the broadest-minded man of
the three, and upon his shoulders their critical mantles have fallen.
Agitated as he was by the war—his letters to me were full of references
to it—he was philosopher enough to plunge into the profoundest work. He
has finished two studies on such divergent themes as Goethe and Voltaire.
Let us hope both books be given an English garb and speedy publication.
PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING
When an etcher of Joseph Pennell’s caliber talks about his art it
behooves both critic and public to sit up and listen. Mr. Pennell
is endowed with a special gift for making people sit up. He loves
to startle. He is occasionally choleric, he indulges in righteous
indignation over the blindness of critics and fumes betimes because of
the indifference of the world at large concerning the finer shades of
art. Nevertheless, he always says something pertinent, even when it
runs contrary to popular opinion, or sneers at critical canons. He is
well within his rights as an artist to attack professional critics, for
critics and their criticism are a perpetual nuisance—an incontrovertible
statement that will, we are sure, be smilingly indorsed by the majority
of the pesky critters. In his newly published and magnificently
illustrated Etchers and Etching, Mr. Pennell has rendered a genuine
service to students and amateurs, for not only does he reveal the
secrets of his prison house, but he also reveals with a frankness that
is fascinating his opinions of other etchers as compared with his god,
Whistler, and incidentally tells his readers that if they do not agree
with him they are unvarnished damphools!
Bully old Joe! He is the joy of honest reviewers and the terror of them
that are not firmly grounded in their artistic technique. Herein he puts
himself through all his familiar paces. Of all the graphic arts, etching
is the most superior! Of all etchers, living or dead, James McNeill
Whistler is the greatest! From this supreme judgment there is no appeal.
And the curious part is that Mr. Pennell gives you chapter and verse to
back up his argument. In all that pertained to the delicate and difficult
art of etching, Whistler was the master. Not Rembrandt, who was careless
as to the printing of his plates, careless as to finesse, and not given
to slicking up his work; not Méryon, who was, according to Pennell, an
indifferent etcher, and no artist—should be mentioned in company with the
peerless Whistler. There is but one Allah in etching, and Pennell is his
prophet. Salaam alaiekum! Rembrandt and Whistler? The Apocalypse and the
Butterfly!
There is no denying the enthusiasm of an expert. And there is no denial
of the proposition that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in
etching as in criticism. Yet there is something to be said for the
much-abused critics. Artists who discuss their art are sometimes biassed,
to put it mildly. The principal critical pronouncements that have
endured were not made by professionals; on the contrary, such writers
as Winckelmann, Goethe, Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire—especially
Baudelaire—Zola (rather negligible), Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geoffroy,
Huysmans, Mauclair, Charles Morice, Octave Mirbeau, R. A. M. Stevenson,
George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Sturge Moore,
Bernhard Berenson, John Van Dyke, W. C. Brownell, Royal Cortissoz, and
others, have contributed more to the right understanding of the plastic
arts than any opposing list of painters, sculptors and engravers you may
assemble. Sift names and opinions, and for one Fromentin, one Whistler,
one Reynolds, you will find a hundred writers who, non-professional
as they were and are, have considerably added to our enlightenment in
matters artistic.