most proper average man is always the best scholar. But all that is
above or below the average—this is often the best in a man—decays and
finds no nourishment. We have but to look at the whole state of our
literature in this country, to see what has become of the art of
writing, of authorship, in an age bursting with pride over everybody’s
being able to read and write. All the nameless insipidity and
thoughtlessness written and printed today, all the mendacity and
perversity of feeling, which in novels find their way into hut and salon
alike might be happily spared us did not everybody think he could read,
and especially write! There is no denying it, a serious question stares
at us in the name of the school today. This question is above all
questions of school-reform, which seem so important to us, for the
improved, nay, the best school remains just—school! And something of
schoolmasterism and scholasticism cleaves to school! And therefore
Nietzsche was its so bitter foe because he would have _men_, men who
spoke and thought and felt powerfully and not as the scribes! Nietzsche
was its foe because he would have among men, personalities,
individualities, diversities, not uniformity and identity of spiritual
life.
If, now, we have rightly comprehended the force of this censure against
the school and its master, we are already in the way to overcome and to
heal this school malady. The malady does not inhere in the school as
such, but in the false evaluation which we of today attribute to it, and
in the dominion which the school exercises over human spirits, by virtue
of this false appraisal. We think we can read if we have learned to read
in school. But this learning to read has yet to begin! Whoever does not
begin it his own self, will never truly learn it at all. We call our
schools educational institutions and yet they are altogether
_imitational_ institutions, _after_ which the true human education first
begins. We do not think of this, that this man whose knowledge still
tastes of his school, whose art shows his school, is still stuck in his
school, and has not made proper use of his school—which is to apply it;
especially to overcome it! Or, rather we think still less! We rest on
the laurels of our school, and if we won them we think that we have
carried off the warrior’s prize of life. But it is _our_ fault, not the
school’s, if the school narrows rather than broadens our vision; if it
binds us to its rules instead of releasing us from them. Where are the
men who still learn after school, nay, who first begin then to learn
what after all is the main thing of all learning—how they can become
greater, freer men, independent personalities? How does it come that all
stirring and moving of the modern spirit is at the same time an
insurrection against some kind of school? How does it come that all
creative, path-breaking spirits can begin to create, to live, only when
they have snapped the fetters of some school? And how does it come that
great discoveries of unknown islands of the human have never been made
within, but only without, the schools? Most of all, how does it come
that a Christ can speak with power only when he has learned not to speak
as the scribes and schoolmasters? The answer in every case is that we
are accustomed to expect of the school what, according to its very
nature, it cannot do, namely: to give life, to create life. Therefore,
it is all-important that we keep the path open, wide open, to the
fountain of life in the abyss of the human heart, in the
unfathomableness of the world, so that we too may learn to speak with
power and not as the scribes; so that our schools may not be diseases to
be overcome, for many never overcome during an entire life—but a staff
with which we may learn to walk until we shall need staff no more,
because our feet have grown strong to bear us on our way during the
brief years of our pilgrimage.
My Friend, the Incurable
VI.
CHOLERIC COMMENTS ON CACOPHONIES
_On the G String_
We are sailing in a gondola along exotic shores. Crystal castles, dewy
meadows, weeping cypresses, glowing craters.... We pass through the
dreamy regions of Shelley and Keats, we envisage the gigantic cosmos of
Shakespeare, of Dante, of Milton, of Goethe, we perceive in a haze the
purple-crimson crucifixion of Nietzsche, the cruel gloom of Dostoyevsky,
the dizzy abysses of Poe, the all-human chaos of Whitman....
We sail on—but ah, our picturesque gondolier! He is so excited, so
restless, so loud—we are forced to turn our eyes from the grandiose
landscape and follow bewildered our conscientious cicerone. In his
anxiety lest we fail to notice the passing “places of importance,” our
industrious guide shrieks and yells, wriggles and gesticulates, beats
upon our senses, pricks and tickles, and all this he performs to the
accompaniment of a mellow mandolin, so sweet, so touching, so
exasperating.
We are weary.
* * * * *
With some apprehension I looked forward to Mr. Powys’s book of “Literary
Devotions,”[4] for I had the good luck of listening to his lectures.
They are unforgettable, those bewitched moments in the darkened Little
Theater, where we sat hypnotized by “the galvanized demi-god vibrating
in the green light of the stage,” invoking the spirits of the Great. How
will those invocations appear, I worried, when congealed in the static
book-form, minus the catacomb-atmosphere, minus the serpent-like,
mesmerizing cant of the meteoric sorcerer, minus Raymond Johnson’s
light-effects? “And, ah! sweet, tender reader,” to use Mr. Powys’s
style, my fears came true: the book is a libretto, sans orchestra, sans
singer. I know that many of the lecturer’s devotees, especially the
worshipping young ladies, will find little difficulty in mentally
supplying the libretto with the dynamic personality of the performer;
but my imagination is dewinged at the sight of the motionless symmetric
lines, and I fail to vocalize the legions of exclamation-marks, the
innumerable capital-letters, the profuse superlatives. With a
kaleidoscopic velocity the author displays his personal reflections upon
the greatest minds of the world; he bends them, he liquifies them, he
moulds them, recreates them according to his whim—good, bravissimo! I am
the last person to depreciate subjective criticism; I am tolerant enough
to digest even such a statement as that Goethe was typically and
intrinsically German, or that Nietzsche was thoroughly Christian. It is
not Mr. Powys’s What that nauseates me, but his How, his butaforial
Grand Style, his monotonous tremolo, his constant air of discovering new
planets, his Pateresque worship of beauty which lacks Pater’s
aristocratic calm and reservedness, his Oscaresque paradoxicalness
deprived of Wilde’s chiselled wit, his continuous ruminating of a
limited stock of long, high words, of dizzying adjectives, of saccharine
adverbs.
Pray, “sweet, tender reader,” how long could you endure Mischa Elman
playing the Minuet in G?
[4] _Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold
Shaw, New York_]
_And Pippa Dances_
Yet there are some who complain about the lack of musical devotion among
Americans. Nay, music is getting absolutely too popular—witness the
crowded concert-halls, especially the ten-cent-Sunday-concerts arranged
by philanthropists for the uplift of the masses. It is significant to
observe that the so-called Submerged have learned not only to applaud,
but also to hiss, not only to accept with gratitude any sort of “divine”
music, but to demand a certain kind of music. And, surely, they well
know what they want.
Hauptmann’s Huhn, the personification of the mob, wants the fragile
Pippa, the symbol of beauty, to dance for him. She is forced to obey,
and is of course crushed to death. And Pippa dances. That omnipotent
Huhn who can call down all the muses to come and entertain him, to amuse
him, to serve him, to degenerate or to perish! Watch that wonderful
creature, the amalgamated American Huhn, making love to music, hugging
and caressing her; I shudder at the thought of what will become of
gentle Pippa in the choking embrace of her boorish suitor.
Yes, Huhn knows what he wants. He expects of music the same service that
he gets from illustrations in popular magazine novels. He comes into an
ice-cream parlor and orders Banana-Split plus _William Tell_ on the
victrola—so digestible and understandable. Last Sunday I observed a
crowd at a ten-cent concert enjoying the _Meditation_, good-humoredly
assisting the soloist by humming and whistling the familiar tune, their
faces expressing the satisfaction of victors. And the night before I
witnessed the thousands at Orchestra Hall, the Huhns in sweaters and in
décolleté-gowns and in dress-suits, going mad over that vulgarity, Mr.
Carpenter’s precise reproduction of barking dogs and of a policeman’s
heavy walk. Huhn demands music which he is capable of interpreting in
every-day terms, which transparently reflects his little emotions, his
petty joys, his sirupy sorrows, his after-meal dreams. Is it to be
wondered that Huhn hisses and grumbles when the conductor hesitatingly
smuggles in such a risky novelty as Scriabin’s _Prometheus_? What is to
Huhn the Poem in Fire, the emerging of a dazed humanity out of Chaos,
the collision of gloom and light, the birth of the Winged Man? What is
Hecuba to him! And since Pippa must dance, the obliging conductor
hastens to appease the growling Huhn by the taffy of Bruch’s concerto.
In recent years some inspired rebels among painters and sculptors have
striven towards the elevating of their arts to the highest level, that
of music, the noblest medium for the expression of aesthetic emotions,
nobler than words or brush or chisel. Recall Kandinsky’s
color-symphonies. Alas, music is not any longer a daughter of Olympus;
she has been dragged by Huhn from the pure atmosphere of the mountain
summit down into the damp valley. Wagner began the prostitution of music
by making it subservient to words; he has won the sanction and
acclamation of the crowd. Then followed the orgy of Program-music, those
wood-cut illustrations, those rich gravies that were invented to sweeten
Mr. Huhn’s meals. Now an enterprising Chicago merchant, Mr. Carpenter,
has presented us with an apotheosis of vulgarity to the hilarious
triumph of the appreciative crowd, to the delight of our “independent”
music-critics—“that strange creature, the American music-critic,” to
quote a naive English journal.
And Pippa dances.
IBN GABIROL.
Music
GABRILOWITSCH AND THE NEW STANDARD
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
Ideas make their impressions very slowly, but they travel very fast.
That is why Gabrilowitsch’s playing of the piano on March 21 was two
different kinds of revelation to two different kinds of people. To a
great many it was a rich fulfillment of promise; to a few it was the end
of something that had had a great beginning.
The trouble is that there’s a new standard to reckon with. We used to
argue that what a man had to say was more important than the way he said
it. Then we reversed that, claiming that a man may say anything provided
he say it well. Then the socialistic school tried to go back to the
first premise, but what they were really groping for was the new
standard—which is simply this: A man may still say anything he wishes
and if he says it well it will be art—_provided he really has something
to say_. Tennyson knew how to say things well, but he missed being an
artist because he had nothing to say. On what basis do we establish such
a criterion? Not merely on that of “ideas,” because you may have no
ideas at all and yet have profound reactions; and not merely on that of
“socialism” or sincerity or ideals; and not—oh well, I mean to get
through this discussion without dragging in the artist’s alleged
monopoly of the eternal verities. B. Russell Herts got very close to
what I mean when he said that Arnold Bennett missed real bigness because
he had only a great and mighty skill without having a great and mighty
soul.
Well—you can’t make Art, we think now, unless you belong in the
great-and-mighty-soul class. And what does that mean, exactly? Perhaps
the whole thing can be explained under the term “enlarged
consciousness.” I wish Dora Marsden would discuss it in one of those
clear-headed articles she writes for _The Egoist_. The confusion in all
our discussions of matter and manner, of subject and form, of what
determines genius, has come about in two main ways: first, because we
have made Taste a synonym for Art—so that if we like Beethoven or Mozart
we don’t accept Wagner or Max Reger, or if we like classic rules we call
romanticism “bad art”; and second, because we have decided who had great
and mighty souls on an ethical basis. We said that Browning and Tennyson
had them—chiefly because they talked a great deal about God, I suppose;
which only shows how confusing it is to judge that way; it leaves no
room for the distinction that Browning had and Tennyson hadn’t. It’s all
as silly as insisting that the cubists ought to be considered great if
they are sincere. Grant that they are. To be sincere is easy; to say
what you believe is simple; but to believe something worth saying is the
test of an art. Sincere stupid people are as bad as any other stupid
ones—and more boring.
I don’t know what else to say about it; but I know you can recognize
that “enlarged consciousness” in the first bars of a pianist’s playing,
or in a singer’s beginning of a song. Paderewski has it to such a degree
that he can play wrong notes and it doesn’t matter; and Duse has it, and
Kreisler, and Isadora Duncan, and Ludwig Wüllner, who breaks your heart
with his songs though he hasn’t even a singing voice. And the
disappointment in Gabrilowitsch is that he hasn’t.
I went to hear him play Chopin and Schumann with positive excitement.
Godowsky, with all his perfectly worked-out theories, always leaves me
with the feeling that he would be an artist if he weren’t an empty
shell; and Bauer, with all his beautiful work, leaves me with a sense of
how he _might_ play if a fire could be started inside him. I expected
that fire in Gabrilowitsch—partly because I heard him play ten years ago
and partly, I suppose, because he is Russian. But the ten years have
left him unstirred. It’s as though the man in him had stood curiously
still; as though life had passed him. He is like a poet who has somehow
escaped unhurt; or a technician who perfects his expression and then
wonders what he shall express. As for his form, he does many exquisite
things; for instance, his _Des Abends_, which was extremely poetic and
which seems to be the type of thing he likes to play most. And he played
the D Flat Prelude with an exquisite perspective—and then a Chopin Waltz
without any perspective at all. Technically his worst feature is his
chord-work—Bauer’s chords sound like an organ in comparison. But Bauer
knows how to touch the piano for deep, “dark” effects, and Gabrilowitsch
appears to like “bright” sounds. He takes his chords with a high, tight
wrist and brings them out by pounding. These things are not done any
more; the piano has shown new tone-capacities since a few of the moderns
abandoned, or modified, what is supposed to be the “straight”
Letschitizky method.
Well, all this wouldn’t matter so much if Gabrilowitsch had the ultimate
inspiration.... Somehow I keep feeling that the world is waiting for its
next great pianist.
BAUER AND CASALS
Two sorts of listeners heard the second Bauer-Casals recital at
Orchestra Hall: Those who love great music and those who love to babble
about great music. Intermediate classes of the mildly interested, the
botching amateurs, the self-adoring students, et al., stayed away, for
Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Cesar Franck, in sonata form, have nothing
for them. Would that the critics and the exuberant school-girls might
forever remain away on such occasions, and choose for their frothing
something less than the best.
Beethoven was not “dry” for a moment. One suspects that this composer is
perpetually slandered by the “traditional” handling of zealous
academics; for Bauer and Casals, with their wonted beauty of piano- and
violoncello-playing, made his music warm and pleasantly expansive, with
no sacrifice of dignity. He sounded almost romantic in the best sense of
the word. This was an experience. And Mendelssohn—what is more truly
elegant than his musical grace, or more delightful than his delicate
humour—a playfulness so seldom discovered by performers! Humour that
becomes subtler than a horse-laugh is beyond the ken of “professional”
musicians, although first-rank composers never lack a refined sense of
fun, a keen relish for jollity, for all that it may be in ethereal
realms. In Cesar Franck there is perhaps the very sublimate of humour,
the mystic smile of faith. One cannot escape a feeling of the deeply
religious in this French master. A new word should be coined to
designate his music; it might be formed by transposing the “passionate”
of passionate love and the “fervent” of fervent piety, and by some such
amalgamation of cool, impersonal, austere love with deepest faith become
sensuous, impassioned, and lovely, the characterizing word is secured.
Franck’s music, surcharged with intense experience, renders unnecessary
any apology for this left-handed use of English. It is but poorly spoken
of in orthodox terms, since it embodies strange blendings of emotion,
both common and uncommon—emotions unified and crystallized into the
expression of a genius. Cesar Franck’s love, apparently, flowed as
readily and as warmly toward God as toward ravishing, although possibly
abstract, woman.
This is doubtless a considerable, if not impossible, reach for the
imagination of the patiently-groping reader, but it would have been less
difficult with Bauer and Casals for interpreters. The ’cellist’s playing
was at once sane and poetic, clean-cut and well-rounded; it was chaste
without chill, voluptuous without a debauch. And Bauer, master-pianist
indeed, as his press-agent styles him, brought from the piano more than
enough kinds of tone to shame the monochromatic theory about the
restricted nature of the piano. The most individual feature of his art
is the production of solemn, organ-like chords in the lower
register—chords wonderfully sonorous and rich, powerful enough to
obliterate the memory of bedlam. Who cares if he smudges a “run?” This
god can sound chords. He redeems a host of piano-jolters.
HERMAN SCHUCHERT.
Book Discussion
AUTUMNAL GORKY
_Tales of Two Countries, by Maxim Gorky._ [_B. W. Huebsch, New
York._]
Gorky’s genius was meteoric. It flashed in the nineties for a brief
period with an extraordinary brilliance, illuminating a theretofore
unknown world of “has beens,” of Nietzschean _Bosyaki_. Gorky’s genius,
we may say, was elemental and local; it revealed a great spontaneous
force on the part of the writer in a peculiar atmosphere, on “the
bottom” of life, in the realm of care-free vagabonds. As soon as Gorky
trespassed his circle he fell into the pit of mediocrity and began to
produce second rate plays, sermon-novels, political sketches, and
similar writings that may serve as excellent material for the
propaganda-lecturer. The present volume may be looked upon as Gorky’s
swan-song, if we consider his ill health; in fact he outlived himself
long ago as an artist, and in these _Tales_ we witness the hectic flush
of the autumn of his career. The exotic beauty of Italy appears under
the pen of the Capri invalid in a morbid, consumptive aspect; the author
is too self-conscious, too much aware of the fact of his moribund
existence to see the intrinsic in life. The tendency to preach socialism
further augments his artistic daltonism, which is particularly evident
in the _Russian Tales_. The doomed man casts a weary glance over his
distant native land, and he sees there nothing but dismal black,
hopeless pettiness and retrogression. The satire is blunt and fails the
mark; the allegories are of the vulgar, wood-cut variety. Gorky has been
dead for many years.
BREAKING INTO AN OPEN DOOR
_Plaster Saints, by Israel Zangwill._ [_The Macmillan Company,
New York._]
The old situation: A revered priest, saint abroad, sinner at home; the
old sin—adultery; the old moral about casting the first stone. What is
new is the clergyman’s point of view that a “plaster saint” has no right
to preach righteousness, that only one who has gone through temptation,
sin, and contrition may be fit for the post of God’s shepherd.
A sea captain who has never made a voyage—the perfection of
ignorance—and you trust him with the ship. You take a youth—the
fool of the family for choice—keep him in cotton-wool under a
glass case, cram him with Greek and Latin, constrict his neck
with a white choker, clap a shovel hat on his sconce, and lo! he
is God’s minister!
... When I look at my old sermons, I blush at the impudence and
ignorance with which I, an innocent at home, dared to speak of
sin to my superiors in sinfulness.
It is all very well, if we grant that society is still in need of
sermons on chastity, if the Hebraic ideal of monogamy is still the most
important problem in the life of a community, to be discussed and
advocated from the pulpit, while ignoring the economic and social
complexities of the present age. But can we grant this anachronism? Is
it not high time to follow the policy of _laisser faire_ in regard to
individual morals? Mr. Zangwill appears in the unenvious position of one
quixotically breaking into an open door; yet he has been accused of
possessing a sense of humor.
MAGAZINE VERSE
_Anthology of Magazine Verse, 1914; selected and published by
William S. Braithwaite._
The proper way to review this collection of verse would be, no doubt, to
quote some of the best and some of the worst, make a learned and
perfectly empty comment upon so-and-so, and say that the book was better
or worse than last year’s compilation. But Mr. Braithwaite has sifted
and re-sifted the entire crop of poems until there is in his book
nothing but the best, such as it is. And the general trend of the volume
is scarcely a matter for enthusiasm. A fair conclusion must be that
magazine editors were frequently hard pressed for copy. As a faithful
and stupidly patriotic American, one should ponder long over certain
attempts to found new “American” verse-forms; but it is to be regretted,
possibly, that the most enjoyable poems in the collection are written
upon foreign or mediaeval topics. As a true aesthete, one ought to reek
with admiration for nameless or badly-labelled sonnets that, for some
reason, fail to delight. And, as an exponent of politico-poetic
modernity, there should be wild raving over the “radical” art of
formless form; but this also is shamefully wanting in one’s reaction to
this anthology. A number of intelligent humans have been observed in
their expectant approach to this collection; they closed the book with
neither smiles nor frowns. It is difficult to forget that good poetry
will bear re-reading, or prove its worth by clinging to the memory; and
it is still more difficult to remember that art has only to be new,
rude, or extreme to be called wonderful. Why is this?
John Cowper Powys on Henry James
(_Some more jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s lectures._)
Henry James is a revealer of secrets, but never does he entirely draw
the veil. He has the most reluctance, the most reverence of all the
great novelists. He is always reluctant to draw the last veil. This
great, plump-handed moribund figure, waits—afraid. All of his work is a
mirror—never a softening or blurring of outlines, but a medium through
which one sees the world as he sees it. In reading his works one never
forgets the author. All his people speak in his character. All is
attuned to his tone from beginning to end.
He uses slang with a curious kind of condescension,—all kinds of
slang,—with a tacit implicit apology to the reader. So fine a spirit—he
is not at home with slang.
His work divides itself into three periods—best between 1900 and 1903.
In reading him approximate 1900 as the climacteric period.
His character delineation is superb. Ralph in _The Portrait of a Lady_,
is the type of those who have difficulty in asserting themselves and are
in a peculiar way hurt by contact with the world. Osborne—in the same
book—is one of those peculiarly hard, selfish, artistic, super-refined
people who turn into ice whatever they touch. He personifies the cruelty
of a certain type of egoism—the immorality of laying a dead hand upon
life. Poe has that tendency to lay a dead hand upon what he cares for
and stop it from changing. Who of us with artistic sensibilities is not
afflicted with this immorality? This is the unpardonable sin—more than
lust—more than passion—a “necrophilism,” to lay the dead hand of eternal
possession upon a young head.