the circus. No matter which one. All circuses are in an attractive key
to me. Thackeray said the same thing about the play, and said it better.
Any circus will serve as a peg for my sawdust symbolism. Any Garden
will do, so that it has a capitalized initial letter. (No allusion to
Magical Mary.) The circus! What a corrective for the astringent Ibsen or
the morbidezza of Sarmatia’s sweet singer, Chopin! The circus! It is a
revelation. One thing I regretted—that I could not be a boy again, with
dirty hands, a shining brow, and a heart brimming over with joy. Peter
Pan! Oh! to recapture that first careless rapture, as Browning or some
other writing Johnny said; surely he must have meant the circus, which is
the one spot on our muddy planet where rapture rhymes with the sawdust
ring.
“Have you ever seen Hedda Gabler?” I asked of the Finland giantess. We
were wedged in front of the long platform at the Garden, upon which were
the Missing Link, the Snake-Enchantress, the Lion-Faced Boy, the English
Fat Girl—so fat—the Human Skeleton, the Welsh Giant, the Lilliputians,
tattooed men, a man with an iron skull, dancers, jugglers, gun-spinners,
“lady” musicians, and the three-legged boy. Eternal types at the circus.
The noise was terrific, the air dense with the aura of unwashed humanity.
This aura was twin to the aura in a monkey house. But I enjoyed my
“bath of multitude,” as Charles Baudelaire names it, and I should not
have bothered the tall creature with such an inept question. She coldly
regarded me:
“No, I haven’t seen Hedda to-day, but I remember George Tesman always
teased her with one question, ‘What do you know about that, Hed?’ Shoo!
Sardou for mine.” “Do you read George Blarney Shaw?” I persisted. “He
ought to be in a cage here. He would draw some crowds. But I’m told he
lives in Germany now on account of the beer.” I backed away quickly as
an East Side family consisting of a baker’s dozen, would allow. Why had
I asked such a question of a perfect stranger? This giantess, I mused
before the rhinoceros with the double prongs, is Finnish. That’s why
she knew the name of Hedda Gabler. Why didn’t I speak of Rosmersholm?
Rebecca West had Finnish blood in her veins. Careful, careful—this
Ibsen obsession must be surmounted, else I shall be inquiring of the
giraffe if neck or nothing is the symbol of Brand. All or Nothing! of
course. How stupid of me. Among the animals I regained my equilibrium.
Their odors evoked memories. Yes, I recalled the old-time circus, with
its compact pitched canvas tent on North Broad Street, Philadelphia:
the pink lemonade, the hoarse voice of the man who entreated us to buy
tickets—there were no megaphones in those days—the crisp crackling of the
roasting peanuts, the ovens revolved by the man from Ravenna, the man
from Ascoli, and the man from Milan. They followed the circus all the way
from Point Breeze, and I swear they were to me far more human than the
policemen who gently whacked us with their clubs when we crawled under
the tent.
The sense of smell is first aid to memory. As I passed the cages saluting
our pre-Adamic relatives, bidding the time of day to the zebu, nodding
in a debonair fashion to the yak, I could not help longing for my first
circus. Again I saw myself sitting in peaceful agony on a splintery
plank; again I felt the slaps and pinches of my tender-hearted Aunt
Sue—now in Paradise, I hope; again my heart tugged like a balloon at its
moorings as the clowns jumped into the ring, grimacing, chortling, and
fascinating us with their ludicrous inhumanity. Again we sat, a lot of
noisy rapscallions, on the stoop of Edwin Forrest’s home—the old Forrest
mansion is still on the west side of Broad Street—and how we tumbled to
the sidewalk when that terrific tragedian opened the door and transfixed
us with his glittering glance. I can still see his leonine head with
its shock of iron-gray curls, his exposed bull-neck, and hear his angry
roar: “Get to blank out of here, you blankety-blanks!” It was the giant’s
voice of Metamora, Coriolanus, Lear that we heard, an echo from the grand
period in the history of the American theatre; but we didn’t know that.
We were mischievous boys, and made mock of the mighty Edwin, no doubt
adding insult to injury by twiddling derisive thumbs at our noses.
Other days, other ways. I sighed as I tore myself loose from the
prehensile trunk of a too friendly baby elephant and passed into the huge
auditorium where Gilmore had played. Ah! the sad, bad, glad, dear, dead,
tiresome, poverty-stricken, beautiful days when we were young imbeciles
and held hands with a fresh “ideal” every week (sometimes two). Ah! the
sentimental “jag” induced by peanut eating, and the chaste, odoriferous
apes.
It is time. We seat ourselves. I look about me. Two resplendent gentlemen
wearing evening clothes at high noon, after the daring manner of our
Gallic cousins, toll a bell. I became excited. Why those three and thirty
strokes? What the symbolism! Chopin, or Ibsen; again, I groaned, and
turned my attention to my neighbors, one of whom I could feel, though
did not see. I raised my voice, employing certain vocables hardly fit
to print. The effect was magical. “Johnny, take your feet out of the
gentleman’s collar. That’s a good boy.” It was the soothing voice of a
mother. Bless her clairvoyance! I sat comfortably back in my seat. Johnny
howled at the interference with his pleasure. I felt sorrow for him.
Childhood is ever individualistic, even pragmatic. But I only had one
collar with me, and it was well the matter thus ended.
Hurrah! Here they come! A goodly band. The clowns! the clowns! Some
hieratic owl of wisdom has called the clown the epitome of mankind. He
certainly stands for something, this “full-fledged fool,” as good old
Tody Hamilton used to write, and “surcharged with the Roe of Fun,” which
phrase beats Delaware shad. Odds fish! There was only one Hamilton. What
a Rabelaisian list of names boast these merry clowns! If the years have
passed over the skulls of these lively rascals, jolly boys do not show
them. The same squeaks, the identical yodling, the funny yet sinister
expression of the eyes, the cruel, red-slitted mouths—not a day older
than ten did I seem as they came tumbling in and began their horse-play,
punctuated with yelling, yahoo gestures, ribald ejaculations, and
knockabout diversions. It must all mean something, this hooting, in
the economy of the universe, else “life is a suck and a sell,” as Walt
Whitman puts it. As in a dream-mirror I saw Solness slowly mount the
fatal tower when Hilda Wangel cries to him: “My—my Master-builder!” She
sings The Maiden’s Wish, and he hears the harps of Chopin hum in the air.
I rub my ears. It is not Hilda who is crying, but a pet pig in a baby
carriage, wheeled by a chalk-faced varlet. How difficult it is to escape
the hallucinations of the critical profession. I couldn’t forget Chopin
or Ibsen even at the circus.
It was with relief, after more bellmanship from the man with the shiny
silk hat and spiked coat, as the elephants majestically entered. Followed
the horses. Tumblers and wire-walkers, women who stood on their heads
and smiled—as they do in life. Something like the “inverted pyramid,”
as James Hinton called modern civilization—plastic poseurs, Oriental
jugglers, the show was let loose at last. Human projectiles were launched
through midair to the tap of a drum. My nerves forbade me to look at
them, so I read a programme advertisement of wall-paper for bathrooms.
Some people like such horrible sights. I do not. They dare not precisely
formulate to themselves the wish that “something” would happen, and when
it does they shudder with sadistic joy. I close my eyes when the Whirl of
Death or any other sensational act is staged. “Something” might happen.
The mad dancers delight our rhythmic sense as they make marvellous
arabesques. The chariot races stir the blood. The crash around curves,
the patters of gleaming metal excite so that you stand up, and,
brushing the feet of inevitable Johnny from your neck (notwithstanding
his remonstrances), you shout with woolly mouth and husky voice.
Instinctively you turn down your thumbs: “Pollice verso,” which Bayard
Taylor translated “the perverse police.” You remember the Gérôme painting?
“This beats Ibsen,” I hilariously exclaimed to Johnny’s mother. (She was
a comely matron.) “His name is John, and when he gets home his father
will beat him,” she tartly replied. With the prevoyance of boyhood Johnny
burst into despairing howls. I at once folded up my mind. A million
things were happening in the haze of the many rings. The New Circus is
polyphonic, or nothing.
Enough! Filled to the eyes with the distracting spectacle, ear-drums
fatigued by the blare and bang of the monster brass band, my collar
quite wilted by Johnny’s shoemaker, my temper in rags because of the
panting, struggling army of fellow-beings, I reached the avenue in
safety, perspiring, thirsty, unhappy. Like Stendhal, after his first
and eagerly longed-for battle of love, I exclaimed: “Is that all?” In
sooth, it had been too much. The human sensorium is savagely assaulted
at the twentieth-century circus. I was in pessimistic enough humor
to regret the single ring, the antique japes of a solitary clown, and
the bewitching horsemanship of Mlle. Léonie, with her gauze skirts and
perpetual rictus. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t endure for five
minutes the old-fashioned circus and its tepid lemonade. Where are the
mullygrubs of yesteryear? But the human heart is perverse. It always
longs for the penny and the cake in company, while ineluctable destiny
ever separates them. Perhaps my editor was right. Render unto Chopin the
things that are Chopin’s; send Ibsen back to his Land of the Midnight
Whiskers. Smell the sawdust at the Garden, not forgetting that the
chilly, dry days are at hand when even Panem et Circenses shall be taboo;
when pipe and prog and grog will be banned; when these United States
shall have been renamed Puritania; when a fanatically selfish minority
shall take all the joy from life. Ergo, carpe diem! I thank you.
ART AND ALCOHOL
What will be the reactions among artistic men and women summarily
deprived of wine and malt beverages? I asked this of Manager
Gatti-Casazza the other day at the Metropolitan Opera House. He is not
a drinking man, but the contemptuous shrug of his shoulders showed me
his position in the thrice-vexed controversy. Singers, one and all,
are accustomed to mild alcoholic refreshment. If they go beyond bounds
the effect on their voices is soon made manifest, but usually being
foreign-born, they have been in the habit of drinking light wines at
meal time, perhaps beer after a performance, for good beer relaxes
nerve-tension. People don’t drink beer to become intoxicated; they drink
it because it lets down the pressure of a day’s work better than whiskey
or wine. Beer is not an intoxicant; it is a depressant. The cry that “the
workingman must have his beer” is far too exclusive. The professional
man, the brain-worker, needs beer, and the singer or musician—sometimes
singers are not musicians!—after a nerve-exhausting performance finds in
wine or beer a veritable solace. Matthew Arnold wrote that the American
funny man was a national calamity. What would he have said to the plans
of certain misguided females to found “recreation centres” where,
after eight hours’ exhausting daily grind, the workman could listen
to “instructive reading”—ye gods!—and drink non-alcoholic beverages
(super-taxed?). Little wonder Bolshevism is growing apace in an America
that soon will be a vast Dry Tortugas.
In one of her always interesting novels Gertrude Atherton depicts a poet
whose inspiration dried up when he stopped drinking. Swinburne is said
to have been Mrs. Atherton’s model; when the English poet ceased his
cognac his muse did not fly far afterward. If he had not become temperate
in regard to spirituous liquors the greatest Victorian poet would have
died. Walter Savage Landor, and after him Byron, wrote that brandy is a
drink fit only for heroes. The puny physique of Swinburne could ill brook
alcoholic excesses. His friend and protector, Theodore Watts-Dunton,
literally saved the effervescent Algernon Charles from sudden death.
As a rule lyric poets need no stimulant. Youth is the propulsive force
to their lyricism. If Byron drank heavily at times, Shelley was ever a
water-drinker. No rules can be formulated. There is Bernard Shaw, the
“Uncle Gurnemanz” and venerable busybody of international politics. He is
a fierce teetotaler. He has confessed that family reasons prompted him
to become so, although Archdale Reid in Heredity has shown that acquired
traits are not inherited; that the children of drunkards are seldom
drunkards (prohibitionists declare the opposite, but figures can be made
to lie). By the same token the sons of clergymen are not often pious.
Nature abhors uniformity. If Shaw had taken his ale like the British
workmen he harangues, he would not have been the pestiferous nuisance he
is to-day. But, like all “reformers,” “uplifters,” and public nuisances,
he has a weak stomach. Because he is virtuous!—the motto of all these
Malvolios, these tailless foxes. Mind your own business! Ah! that’s the
true golden rule. There would be no wars if this custom prevailed.
The late Lombroso-Levi, formulator of many ingenious and amusing theories
concerning the stigmata of genius, has collected some names of men who
drank, nevertheless who contrived to leave the world in their debt for
their art. Max Nordau followed his “master” with his absurd tome on
Degeneration, and then the system, chiefly framed for imbeciles, quite
collapsed. Professor William James sent the cardboard structure into
thin air when he revealed its numerous inconsistencies. Any stigma
applicable to genius or talent may be found in your shoemaker, butcher,
or policeman, from megalomania to alcoholism, from faun-like ears
with attached lobes to an unholy greed for other people’s money. Let
us look at Lombroso’s list of alcoholic men of genius. He writes that
Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules
(some thirst!). Julius Cæsar was often carried home on the shoulders
of his friends—so was a certain highest dignitary in the United States
during the last century, and a mediocrity he was. Socrates, Seneca,
Alcibiades, Cato, Peter the Great, the Czarina Catherine were notorious
boozers. Tiberius Nero was nicknamed Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and
Mahomet II died in delirium tremens. Jan Steen and Frans Hals were heavy
imbibers. Hals, who lived to an advanced age and painted masterpieces to
the last, was drunk every night. So was Monticelli, absinthe proving his
ruin. George Morland drank, and Turner, too; both drank to excess. As
for the poets and literary men, the litany is long. Henry Murger, Gerard
de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele,
Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Hartley Coleridge,
James Clarence Mangan, Ernest Dowson, Swinburne—Rossetti, who drugged—and
Coleridge, De Quincey and Mme. de Staël abused opium.
In the domain of music examples are as thick as bombs were at Verdun.
Handel swallowed a mighty amount of firewater, for he was a mighty man.
Gluck drank far more than was good for him. It was a pleasing habit of
his to have a harpsichord placed in some pretty rural spot, where, with
a regiment of bottles, he played and composed. He died, so it is said,
of brandy. Tasso drank, Baudelaire drugged and drank, and Lenau, poet,
died from alcohol. Mozart and Beethoven abused wine. Beethoven was often
“a little how come ye so!” Modern instances multiply. Singers, players,
actors, authors, composers—how many there are about whose heads is the
aura of alcoholism! Alcohol has been the nursing bottle of genius, and of
many commonplace citizens may not the same be said? Woe to him who abuses
the priceless gift. He is doomed. And doomed, too, is the prohibitionist
who overindulges in flapjacks and fried steak. Native cookery has slain
more than the rum mills of the universe. And notwithstanding our vaunted
cosmopolitanism, a natural outcome of the great war, the village pump is
to be our national Totem. Butchered to make a prohibitionist holiday;
that prohibition which has elevated “legislation” to the dignity of a
sport.
Richard Wagner possessed an irritable stomach, but was comforted by a
glass of good wine (as apparently was St. Paul). Walt Whitman neither
smoked nor drank. Poor Guy de Maupassant began with wine, and, in the
wake of erotic excesses, he resorted to opium, even to ether, which he
would put on his handkerchief and apply to his nostrils. Such a hatred of
reality was his! He well deserved the appellation of “Taureau triste,” as
he was surly toward the end of a brilliant career. Flaubert, like Zola,
was chary of excess, except in literary work. Be chaste in your life that
you may be violent in your art! he enjoined de Maupassant. Turgénieff,
Daudet, Huysmans, Gounod, Goncourt, were not alcoholic. Bizet, it is
said, died of absinthe, not of disappointment over the failure of Carmen;
which didn’t fail, as Philip Hale has shown us. Goethe was wild in his
youth, drank wine, pursued the golden girl, yet he cannot by any stretch
of imagination be placed in the ranks of the drunkards. The alcoholic
neurosis exists in the individual, who drinks because he is neurotic,
and is not necessarily neurotic because he is a drunkard. As usual, the
prohibitionists have put the cart before the horse, being ignorant, or
pretending to be, of facts disclosed by modern biological research. These
fanatics suffer from what might be called psychical dandruff.
What am I trying to prove? Nothing. Alcohol inspired or spurred on
these men, and we are the inheritors of their visions. Naturally, to
the boneheads who engineer reforms, all art is dangerous, is immoral.
Art, like religion, is also an opiate. God made the dawn, but the devil
invented the evening. The Seven Arts are the invention of men in revolt
against the tedium of life. Killing time is only killing one’s self,
for we are crucified at the crossroads of Time and Space (with the
Button-Moulder lurking around the corner). To escape the eternal ennui
man created the arts, and music, the most soothing of the seven, has
drugged his dreams and made fantastic the rude angles of concrete life.
Perhaps music is only a majestic noise. Sometimes it bruises the soul
as do bells the air. It can retire majestically into the recesses of the
imagination, like the faint roar of surf withdrawn on the beach of Time.
It may be a ballet for triphammers or as splendidly sonorous as the color
chords of Picasso or the tortured mechanisms of Marcel Duchamps. But
always an opiate, a consoler.
The truth is that our existence without some buffer between our naked
souls and the chill wind of empty spiritual space would be inconceivable.
Man devised Time and Space—symbols of his terrifying ignorance in the
presence of eternity—and religion and the arts wherewith he might cloak
his nakedness. All the rest is vanity. Prohibition is only a symptom of
the everlasting propensity of intolerant minds to fashion others after
their own mean image. There is no need to worry over it. Like other
tyrannical devices to enslave the will of mankind, it will be tested,
found wanting, and dropped. And the best way to hasten the decease is
to enforce rigidly the law. But come what may, art and alcohol are
inseparably wedded, as in the Greek myth Apollo and Dionysos imaged
beauty and ecstasy.
THE TRAGIC CHOPIN
Chopin has bequeathed to us six scherzos. The four that comprise a group
are opus 20, in B minor; opus 31, B flat minor; opus 39, C sharp minor,
and opus 54, E major. The two remaining scherzos are in the second
sonata, opus 35, and in the third sonata, opus 58. They are in the
respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions
are evidences of the power, originality, variety, and delicacy of Chopin.
The scherzo is formally not his invention. Beethoven and Mendelssohn
anticipated him. But he remodelled the form and filled it with a
surprisingly novel content, though not altering its three-four measure.
With the Beethoven scherzo we realize the swing, the robustiousness and,
at times, the rude jollity. In the Mendelssohn scherzo we enjoy the
velocity and finish. Light without heat, true scherzando moods; indeed,
more scherzo-like than Chopin’s, Mendelssohn’s sense of elfin joy stemmed
from the early Italian masters of the pianoforte. Rossini voiced this
belief after hearing the scherzo a capriccio from the nimble fingers of
Felix himself, and said to the composer: “That smells of Scarlatti.”
And it does recall Domenico Scarlatti, whose compositions, slight as to
structure, are replete with gracious vitality and a surface skimming of
sentiment like the curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.
* * * * *
A terrible though beautiful domain is the Chopin scherzo. Only two have
the lightness of touch, clarity in atmosphere and bustling gaiety of the
conventional scherzo: the other four are fierce, grave, ironic, sardonic,
fiery, passionate, even hysterical, and most melancholy. In several the
moods are pathologic; in all, magical. The scherzo in E, opus 54, may be
best described by the thrice commonplace word, delightful. It is sunny
music, and its sweep and swiftness are compelling. The five preluding
bars of half-notes, unison, strike the keynote of optimism. What follows
is like the ruffling of tree-tops by warm southern winds. The little
upward flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar, in major thirds
and fourths, has been cleverly utilized by Saint-Saëns in the scherzo
of his G minor piano concerto, opus 22. The fanciful embroidery of the
single finger passages is never opaque; a sparkling, bubbling freedom and
freshness characterize this Chopin scherzo, a composition not heard too
often in public, possibly because there are few pianists, like Joseffy
or De Pachmann, to play it. Its emotional content is not deep; it lies
well within the category of the elegant, the capricious. Its fourth page
contains an episode which at first blush suggests the theme of the A flat
valse, opus 42, with its comminglement of duplex and triple rhythms.
Although the piu lento is in C sharp minor, it betrays little sadness; it
is but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges the
wind-swept moorland.
This scherzo in E is a mood of joyousness; as joyous as the witty,
sensitive, umbrageous composer ever allowed himself to become. Its coda
is not so forcible as the usual Chopin coda. There is a dazzling flutter
of silvery scale at the close. Altogether a charming work. Closely
allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo from the B minor
sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation is genial though
not surprisingly ingenious. It somewhat savors of Weber. It might go
on forever. The resolution is not intellectual; it is purely one of
tonality. The thought is tenuous. But it is highly embroidered relief
after the first movement of the sonata. Nor is the trio in B particularly
noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo, which challenges Mendelssohn on his
native heath. It may be considered as an intermezzo, also as a prelude to
the lyric measures.