national spirit pervades its masterpieces. And that spirit is not in
a special compartment separated from the seven arts, but waters their
roots. With us art is a tender flower, isolated as if in a hothouse. The
artist in America lives in a vacuum, or else creates his own atmosphere.
In Russia, “barbarous” Russia, as we condescendingly refer to her,
an artist is first a patriot. The English critic, John M. Robertson,
wrote in 1891: “In that strange country where brute power seems to be
throttling all the highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be
no cessation in the production of truthful literary art, ... for justice
of perception, soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship,
we in England with all our freedom, can offer no parallel.” Tyranny,
then, may be forcing ground for genius! From Gogol to Artzibachev
Russian literature achieved its spiritual freedom despite the Czar and
Siberia. The reason we speak of these writers and composers is because
to know them is to grasp the psychology of Russian music, which is so
often inspired by the poems, novels, and dramas of Pushkin, Lermontov,
Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgénieff, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Gorky, Andreyev,
Artzibachev, and by the paintings of Repin, Perov, Verestchagin, and, in
the case of Prokofieff, by Boris Anisfeld.
We have elsewhere made a critical comparison of Dostoievsky with
Moussorgsky; no need to refer to it here, except to say that when
Dostoievsky wrote, “The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian
soul is a dark place,” he accurately plotted his nation’s psychic curve.
And let it be said in passing that the author of Crime and Punishment
had developed the mystic idea (your Russian is nothing if not mystical)
that from Russia must come the salvation of the peoples of the earth—from
Russian Christianity. This notion became an obsession of the great-souled
writer, in whose Karamasov Brothers and The Possessed (Besi), may be
found the leading motives of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the superman,
the eternal recurrence, the fantastic idea that eternity may be in a
“boxed-in” bathhouse, an idea that Henri Barbusse, who is saturated with
Dostoievsky, develops in L’Enfer, that infinity is contained within us.
Eternity is Now. Tolstoy, who was best described by Count Melchior de
Vogué in his epigram as having “the mind of an English chemist in the
soul of a Hindoo Buddhist” (“On dirait l’esprit d’un chimiste anglais
dans l’âme d’un buddhiste hindou”) has not played as influential a
rôle among Russian composers because he was essentially tone-deaf. His
Kreutzer Sonata demonstrates how a man ignorant of music, great artist
that he is, may write himself down absurdly. In comparison Dostoievsky
is a spiritual reservoir of musical certitudes; while in Turgénieff,
thanks to a natural sensibility and years of musical cultivation while
sojourning in the household of the Viardot-Garcias at Paris—surely the
happiest as well as the most artistic “ménage à trois” in history—he
wrote of the art with sympathy and understanding.
The further one dives into the Orient the more chromatic become the arts,
especially the tonal art. The chromatic scale was once the shibboleth of
the Neo-Russian composer, and, being the artistic offspring of Liszt and
the Slav, he vainly sought to veil his paternity by painting it over with
local color. It was then a trackless and seldom explored country his,
full of yawning harmonic precipices, melodies that are at once heavenly
and hideous—like the mouth of a pretty woman with missing front teeth;
mountainous ideals, bleak surprises, and rugged vistas. To-day matters
have changed. The younger generation, headed by the astonishing Alexander
Scriabin, has thrown chromaticism to the dogs. The whole-tone scale is
monarch. Arnold Schoenberg declared the scale must escape the House of
Bondage and be free from scholastic shackles. Modulation is to be as Free
Love, which may supersede marriage—according to the recent programme of
the Reds. Rebikov, Stravinsky, Serge Prokofieff, and Leo Ornstein have
long ago nailed their color to the mast. It is unequivocally scarlet.
Notwithstanding the seeming anarchy in all these social and artistic
manifestations, we believe that to the Slav is the future. Out of darkest
Russia may emerge the next world-composer. Scriabin may be only the
Precursor of the new evangel. Dostoievsky is right. There is enough
fire of righteousness in the Russians to burn up the world and all its
wickedness. Russia is the matrix heavy with unborn genius, and who shall
bear down too heavily now on her sorrow and travail? Water seeks its
level. A country is no greater than her great men. And how truly great
are those we have just named! New lamps for old. A new and glorious
Russia for the old. Avos!
CÉZANNE
Cézanne was pre-eminently occupied with the problem of space and
its corollaries, bulk, weight, density, and with the still more
stupendous problem of getting on a flat surface the suggestion of a
third dimension—thickness. To achieve even a suggestion proves him a
genius. And he was a genius. His supreme technical qualities are volume,
ponderability, and a personal color-scheme. What’s the use of asking
whether he is a sound draftsman or not? He is a master of “edges,” a
magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke to me of the defective eyesight
of Cézanne; but disease boasts its discoveries as well as health.
Possibly his “abnormal” vision gave him glimpses of a reality denied
to other painters. He advised students to look for the contrasts and
correspondences of tone. He practised what he preached. No painter was
so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament
dear to the professional artist. Did Cézanne possess the temperament he
was always talking about? If he did, his temperament was not precisely
decorative or flamboyant.
An unwearying experimenter, he seldom “finished” a picture. His morose
landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I
saw the spot. The pictures do not closely resemble it—that is, in the
photographic sense—which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I
had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations filled his simple life;
art was submerged by its apparatus. His was the centripetal, not the
centrifugal, temperament. In the domain of his rigid, intense ignorance
there was little space for climate, charm, hardly for sunshine. Recall
the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence, the tropical riot of its
vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and then search for this
mellow richness and misty, golden air in the pictures of the master.
You won’t find them in his dim, muffled surfaces, though a mystic light
permeates his landscapes. It is the sallow-sublime in its apotheosis.
He did not paint portraits of Provence as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan,
or Bizet in L’Arlésienne. Cézanne sought for profounder meanings. The
superficial, the facile, the staccato, the merely brilliant repelled
him. Not that he was an “abstract” painter—as the self-contradictory
atelier jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate
“trompe-l’œil” on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of
Provence, but the slow, cruel delineation of a certain hill on old Mother
Earth which exposes her bare torso, her bald, rocky pate and gravelled
feet. The hallucination is inescapable.
As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, as austere in linear economy and
as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, the art of Cézanne never becomes
truly lyric except in his still life. Upon an apple he lavishes his
palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion
to him may be as beautiful as a naked woman. Taste is not one of his
marked traits. The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the
theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him chief of a school, which
he is, but declare him to be the greatest painter since the Byzantines.
This assertion I have read in cold type. There is a lot of inutile talk
about “significant form” by propagandists—usually rotten bad painters. As
if form had not always been “significant.” When the impressionists as a
school, now outmoded as the Barbizons, began to issue their prospectuses,
the emphasis was laid upon form; form having served its purpose must
go—at least become subordinate to color and its decomposition. The
suave line of Raphael had degenerated into the insipid arabesques of
Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Cabanel. No denying these truths, since become
platitudes. Form is again in the ascendant, impressionism having in
its turn become deliquescence. No one denies Cézanne’s preoccupation
with form, nor Courbet’s, either. Consider the Ornan’s landscapes, with
their sombre flux of forest, painted by the crassest realist among
French artists, though he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper,
more petulant mode of envisaging the world; yet what better example
of “significant form” and solid structural sense than Courbet’s?
Nevertheless, Cézanne quite o’ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the
massive—sometimes you can’t see the ribs of his landscapes because of the
skeleton.
Cézanne’s was a twilight soul. And a humorless one. His early painting
was quasi-structural, well-nigh modelling. Always the architectural
sense. His rhythms are often elliptical. He has a predilection for the
asymmetrical. Yet he is a man who lent to an art of two dimensions, the
illusion of a third. His tactile values are raised to the nth degree. His
color is personal. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, a half century ago, he
wrote of Cézanne’s work as containing the prodromes of a new art. The
handling of his material alone absorbed him, and not its lyric, dramatic,
anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. He despised “literary” painting. His
portraits are charged with character. But he sometimes profoundly ponders
unimportant matters—loses himself in a desert of sandy theorizing.
The tang of the town is not in his portraits of places. His leaden,
metallic landscapes seldom spontaneously arouse to activity the jaded
retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. In his groups of bathing
women there is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt, as
heavy flanked as Percheron mares. They are as ugly as the females of
Degas, and twice as truthful. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had
no traffic. If you don’t care for his graceless nudes, you may console
yourself with the axiom that there is no disputing tastes—with the
tasteless. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal
quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by
a stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a pantomime
score by Stravinsky. But what thrice subtle sonorities, what opulent
color-chords may be found in his compositions. His fruits savor of the
earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he
paints an onion it reveals a certain grace. Vollon dramatizes it, or
embroiders its homely shape with luxuriant decorations. When Cézanne
paints an onion you smell it. His apples are—seemingly—falling off the
table. How despairing are the efforts of his imitators to get those
slanting surfaces covered with fruit and vegetables that have just been
brought in by the cook. You say, Miraculous! and make a gesture to
prevent the ripe stuff from sliding to the floor. The “representation”
abhorred of the Cubists in its most pregnant shapes is there.
Cézanne did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the ideas, manners and
aspects of his generation. With the classic retort of Manet, he could
have replied to those who taunted him with not “finishing” his pictures,
“Sir, I am not a historical painter.” Nor need we be disconcerted in any
estimate of him by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don’t know
B from bull’s foot but go off at half-trigger in their enthusiasm when
a hint is dropped as to the possibilities of a painter appreciating in
a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the present crowd,
as were Manet and Monet a few decades ago. These æsthetic fluctuations
should not distract us. Henner, Cabanel, Bourguereau too, were idolized
once upon a time and served to make a millionaire’s holiday by hanging
in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has, in
the eyes of the younger generation, become a tower of strength which
intrigues critical fancy. Cézanne is sincere to the core, yet even
stark sincerity does not, of necessity, imply the putting forth of
masterpieces. Before he attained his synthetic power he patiently studied
Delacroix, Courbet, and the early Italians. At times he achieved the
foundational structure of Courbet, though I don’t think he had either
the brains or the painting temperament of his elder contemporary, whose
portée was at times tremendous. Hostile critics declare that the canvases
of St. Paul of Provence are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans
personal charm. However, “popularity is for dolls,” says Emerson.
I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon of 1901 a large picture by Maurice
Denis, entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly
inspired by Manet’s Hommage à Fantin-Latour, or Fantin’s Batignolle
School. The Maurice Denis canvas depicts a still-life by Cézanne
on a chevalet, which is surrounded by the figures of certain
painters—Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellério,
and Vollard. Cézanne is posed standing and is apparently embarrassed,
which was his natural condition. There was a special Cézanne Salle, as
there was one devoted to Eugène Carrière, but Cézanne held the place
of honor. With all his naïve vanity he was dazzled by the uproarious
championship of “les jeunes,” and, to give him credit for a peasant
astuteness, he was rather suspicious of the demonstration. But he
stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, all the while
looking like a bourgeois Buddha. To-day a Cézanne of quality is costly.
Why not? When juxtaposed with many modern painters his vital art makes
other pictures seem linoleum or papier maché. The nervous, shrinking
man I saw at Aix and later at Paris would have been astounded at the
praise printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of
the official Salon—as did his school-friend Zola for a seat in the
Academy—none the less, he disliked notoriety. He loved hard work. He
loved his solitude. With a fresh batch of canvases he trudged every
morning to his pet landscape, the Motive, he called it, and it was there
that he daily slaved with genuine technical heroism. When I first saw him
he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the
shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary. Like John La Farge, he
hated shaking hands. A rare impersonality.
Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognize
a master. The limitations of Cézanne are patent. An investigator,
experimenter, even fumbler, he did not deem it wise to stray from his
chosen, if narrow, field. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine
reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following
Richard Strauss. The very notion is monstrous. Yet, figuratively
speaking, this order constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived on
the pictorial scene after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, and
symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made like Puvis de Chavannes,
but one born with an unaffected crabbed simplicity. Paul Cézanne will be
remembered as a painter who respected his material, also as a painter,
pure, without preoccupation in schools or ideas. No man who wields a
brush need ask for a more enduring epitaph.
EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI?
“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I couldn’t help
recalling these words of the Psalmist, these and the opening, “By the
rivers of Babylon,” in which is compressed the immemorial melancholy of
an enslaved race, when I heard Sophie Braslau intone with her luscious
contralto, a touching Hebrew lament, “Eili Eili Lomo Asovtoni?” at a
concert last winter. Naturally I believed the melody to be the echo of
some tribal chant sung in the days of the Babylonian captivity, and
perhaps before that in the days of the prehistoric Sumerians and the epic
of Gilgamesh. Others have made the same error. Judge of my surprise when
in a copy of _The American Jewish News_ I read that the composer of Eili
Eili is living, that his name is Jacob Kopel Sandler, that he wrote the
music for a historical drama, Die B’ne Moishe (The Sons of Moses), which
deals with the Chinese Jews. Mr. Sandler had written the song for Sophie
Carp, a Yiddish actress and singer. The Sons of Moses was a failure,
and a new piece, Brocha, the Jewish King of Poland, was prepared. (Not
alluding to Pan Dmowski.) It was produced at the Windsor Theatre in the
Bowery. The song, not the play, was a success. Then the music drifted
into queer company, for music is a living organism and wanders when it is
not controlled. Finally Sophie Braslau got hold of it, and the composer,
who was directing a choir in a Bronx synagogue, was astounded to hear of
the acclamations of a Metropolitan Opera House Sunday night audience.
His daughter has listened to Eili Eili and brought home the good news.
After troublesome preliminaries “Meyer Beer,” the pen name of the
musical editor of _The American Jewish News_, was able to prove beyond
peradventure of a doubt the artistic parentage of the song, and Jacob
Sandler is in a fair way of being idolized in his community, as he should
be.
Eili Eili lomo asovtoni? may be found in Psalm 22, the first line of the
second verse in Hebrew. In the English version the words of David are
in the first verse: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And in
the St. Mark’s Gospel we read: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with
a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is, being
interpreted: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Chapter 15,
verse 34.) The exegetists and apologists, as well as sciolists, have made
of this immortal phrase a bone of theological contention. Schmiedel, who
with Harnack believes the words to have been uttered by our Saviour,
nevertheless points out various details which prefigure the same things
in the crucifix—the just man hanging on the stake, the perforated hands
and feet, the mocking crowd, the soldiers gambling for the clothes,
everything takes place as described in the Psalm. Lublinski (in Dogma,
p. 93) and Arthur Drews (in The Historicity of Jesus, p. 150) demur to
the orthodox Christian conclusions of Harnack and Schmiedel. A beloved
master, the late Solomon Schechter, disposed of the question in his
usual open style. “The world is big enough,” he has said to me, for both
Jehovah and Jesus, “for two such grand faiths as the Hebrew and the
Christian.” But he saw Christianity only in its historical sequence, and
not as a continuator of Judaism; rather, a branching away from the main
trunk. If it had not been for Constantine, the world might be worshipping
Mithra to-day, was the erudite and worthy man’s belief. Enveloped in the
mists of the first two centuries Christianity seems to have had a narrow
escape from the doctrines of Mithraism. That Salomon Reinach practically
admits in his Orpheus, a most significant study of comparative religions
from the pen of this French savant.
Once upon a time I played the organ in a “shool,” a reformed, not an
orthodox, synagogue; played indifferently well. But my acquaintance with
the Jewish liturgy dates back to my boyhood in Philadelphia, where I
studied Hebrew, in company with Latin. The reason? My mother fondly hoped
that I might become a priest—the very thought of which makes me shudder
now. The religious in me found vent in music, and my love of change
was gratified by playing the Hebrew service on Shabbas (Saturday) and
the Roman Catholic on our Sabbath. Probably that is why I was affected
by Sophie Braslau’s singing of Eili Eili. Rosa Raisa has put the song
in her repertory, and only on Easter Sunday last did Sarah Borni sing
it, although it appeared on the programme as a composition of Kurt
Schindler’s, an error quickly rectified by Miss Borni, who did not know
the authorship till too late. “Such songs,” commented this soprano,
“come but once in a man’s lifetime.” Dorothy Jardon will no doubt sing
Eili Eili, as she sang for the first time a Jahrzeit, a Kaddish by Rhea
Silberta, at the Hippodrome last Sunday. Mr. Sandler has come into his
own, and it is gratifying to record that the credit is largely due to
Meyer Beer and _The American Jewish News_.
I have always entertained a peculiar admiration for the Jews and Judaism.
It began with the study of Semitic literature of the Talmud, above all
of Hebrew poetry, the most sublime in our language, as Matthew Arnold
asserts in his comparative estimate of Greek and Hebraic cultures. My
dearest friends have been, still are, of that race. Prejudice, social
or political, against the Jew, I not only detest, but I have never been
able to comprehend. My early playmates were Jewish boys and girls. I
have stood under the “Choopah” (marriage canopy), and have seen many a
Bar-Mitzvah; even sat “Shivah” for the dead father of intimate friends.
From Rafael Joseffy to Georg Brandes; from the brilliant Hungarian
virtuoso that was Joseffy—whose father, a learned rabbi, I visited at
Budapest—in Pest-Ofen—in 1903, when he was eighty-four, an Orientalist,
a linguist with twenty-six languages, ancient and modern, at the tip of
his tongue—to Professor Brandes, the Danish scholar, an intellectual
giant, and a critic in the direct line of Sainte-Beuve and Taine—both men
I knew and loved. Whether the Jew has attained the summits as a creator
in the seven arts I cannot speak authoritatively, although the Old
Testament furnishes abundant evidences that he has in poetry. Disraeli
(Beaconsfield), who liked to tease Gladstone by calling him “Frohstein”
and pointing to his rugged Jewish prophet’s features, has written of his
race most eloquently. I should like to quote a passage in its entirety,
but time and space forbid. But an excerpt I permit myself the luxury of
reproduction: “The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations,
the inspiration fervid with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus,
and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the
exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which
the ancients recognized as most divine and deified in the person of
their most beautiful creation....” He goes on: “There is not a company
of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded
with our children under feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the
dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and
disgust....”
Lord Beaconsfield mentions Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn as Jewish
composers, and Pasta and Grisi among the singers. Probably he had not
heard Rossini’s witticism uttered on his deathbed: “For heaven’s sake,
don’t bury me in the Jewish cemetery!” Nor did Beaconsfield look far
enough ahead when he wrote “dark aversion”—which is wonderful. To-day
the boot is on the other leg. It may be Gentiles who will be forced
to change their names to Jewish. I could easily sign myself “Shamus
Hanuchah”—leaving out the “lichts”—or pattern after the name Paderewski
jokingly wrote on his photograph: “For Jacob Hunekerstein.”