asked. "I have made friends with an _apache_ and his _gigolette_. We
eat bread and cheese and drink bad wine on the fortifications.... In
the afternoon I walk. Sometimes I go to the Luxembourg gardens to hear
the band bray sad music, or to watch the little boys play _diavolo_,
or sail their tiny boats about the fountain pond; sometimes I walk
quite silently up the Avenue Gabriel, with its _triste_ line of trees,
and dream that I am a Grand Duke; in the evening there are again the
_terrasses_ of the cafes, dinner in Montmartre at the Clou, or the
Cou-Cou, a _revue_ at La Cigale, but it is all governed, my day and my
night, by what happens and by whom I meet.... Have you seen Jacques
Blanche's portrait of Nijinsky?"
"I think it is Picasso that interests me now," Sitgreaves was saying.
"He puts wood and pieces of paper into his composition; architecture,
that's what it is.... I don't go to Blanche's any more. It's too
delightfully perfect, the atmosphere there.... The books are by all
the famous writers, and they are all dedicated to Blanche; the
pictures are all of the great men of today, and they are all painted
by Blanche; the music is played by the best musicians.... Do you know,
I think Blanche is the one man who has made a successful profession of
being an amateur--unless one excepts Robert de la Condamine.... You
can scarcely call a man who does so much a dilettante. Yes, I think he
is an amateur in the best sense."
"I met the Countess of Jena there the other day," I responded. "She
had scarcely left the room before three people volunteered, _sans
rancune_, to tell her story. She is a devout Catholic, and her husband
contrived in some way to substitute a spy for the priest in the
confessional. He acquired an infinite amount of information, but it
didn't do him any good. She is so witty that every one invites her
everywhere in spite of her reputation, and he is left to dine alone at
the Meurice. Dull men simply are not tolerated in Paris.
"It was at Blanche's last year that I met George Moore," I continued.
"You know I have just seen him in London. He is at work on _The
Apostle_, making a novel of it, to be called 'The Brook Kerith.'...
For a time he thought of finishing it up as a play because a novel
meant a visit to Palestine and that was distasteful to him, but it
finally became a novel. He went to Palestine and stayed six weeks,
just long enough to find a monastery and to study the lay of the
country. For he says, truly enough, that one cannot imagine
landscapes; one does not know whether there is a high or low horizon.
There may be a brook which all the characters must cross. It is
necessary to see these things. Besides he had to find a monastery....
He told me of his thrill when he discovered an order of monks living
on a narrow ledge of cliff, with 500 feet sheer rise and descent above
and below it ... and when he had found this his work was done and he
returned to England to write the book, a reaction, for he told me that
he was getting tired of being personal in literature. The book will
exhibit a conflict between two types: Christ, the disappointed mystic,
and Paul; Christ, who sees that there is no good to be served in
saving the world by his death, and Paul, full of hope, idealism, and
illusions. It is the drama of the conflict between the nature which is
affected by externals and that which is not, he told me."
"It's a subject for Anatole France," said Sitgreaves. "Moore, in my
opinion, is not a novelist. His great achievements are his memoirs. I
was interested in 'Evelyn Innes' and 'Esther Waters,' but something
was lacking. There is nothing lacking in the three volumes of 'Hail
and Farewell.' They grow in interest. Moore has found his _metier_."
"But he insists," I explained, before the door of the little hotel,
"that 'Hail and Farewell' is a novel. He is infuriated when some one
suggests that it is a book after the manner of, say, 'The
Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill.'..."
We entered and walked up the little staircase.
"Do you mean that the incidents are untrue?"
We were at the door of the _concierge_ and there stood Marcel, his
apron spread neatly over his ample paunch. It was early in the
afternoon and the room beyond him, sometimes filled with possibilities
for customers, was empty.
"_Ah, monsieur est revenu!_" he exclaimed in his piping voice. "_C'est
pour la petite Polonaise sans doute que monsieur revient?_"
"_Oui_," answered Sitgreaves, "_faut-il attendre longtemps?_"
"_Mais non, monsieur, un petit moment. Elle habite en face. Je vais
envoyer le garcon la chercher tout de suite. Et pour monsieur, votre
ami?_"
"_Je ne desire rien_," I replied.
Marcel bowed humbly.... "_Comme monsieur voudra._" Then a doubt
assailed him. "_Peut-etre que la petite Polonaise vous suffira a tous
les deux?_"
"_Jamais de la vie!_" I shouted, "_Flute, Mercure, allez! Je suis
puceau!_"
Marcel was equal to this. "_Et ta soeur?_" he demanded as he
disappeared down the staircase.
He had put us meanwhile in the very chamber with the red curtains and
the picture of Cupid and Psyche that Sitgreaves had described. Perhaps
all the rooms were similarly decorated. I lounged on the bed while
Sitgreaves sat on a chair and smoked....
I answered his last question, "No, they are true, but there is
selection and form."
"While other memoirs have neither selection nor form and usually are
not altogether accurate in the bargain...."
"Especially Madame Melba's...."
"Especially," agreed Sitgreaves delightedly, "Madame Melba's."
"Moore is really right," I went on. "He says that some people insist
that Balzac was greater than Turgeniev, because the Frenchman took his
characters from imagination, the Russian his from life. You will
remember, however, that Edgar Saltus says, 'The manufacture of fiction
from facts was begun by Balzac.' Moore's point is that all great
writers write from observation. There is no other way. A character may
have more or less resemblance to the original; it may be derived and
bear a different name; still there must have been something.... In a
letter which Moore once wrote me stands the phrase, 'Memory is the
mother of the Muses.' 'Hail and Farewell' is just as much a work of
imagination, according to Moore, as 'A Nest of Noblemen' or 'Les
Illusions Perdues.'"
"Of course," admitted Sitgreaves. "No writer but what has suffered
from the recognition of his characters. Dickens got into trouble.
Oscar Wilde is said to have done himself in 'Dorian Gray,' and
Meredith's models for 'The Tragic Comedians' and 'Diana of the
Crossways' are well known."
"All Moore has done is to call his characters by their real names and
he has reported their conversations as he remembered them, but, mind
you, he has not put into the book all their conversations, or even all
the people he knew at that period. Arthur Symons, for instance, a
great friend of Moore's at that time, is scarcely mentioned, and with
reason: he has no part in the form of the book; its plot is not
concerned with him.
"All artists create only in the image of the things they have seen,
reduced to terms of art through their imagination. The paintings of
Mina Loy seem to the beholder the strange creations of a vagrant
fancy. I remember one picture of hers in which an Indian girl stands
poised before an oriental palace, the most fantastic of palaces, it
would seem. But the artist explained to me that it was simply the
facade of Hagenbeck's menagerie in Hamburg, seen with an imaginative
eye. The girl was a model.... One day on the beach at the Lido she saw
a young man in a bathing suit lying stretched on the sand with his
head in the lap of a beautiful woman. Other women surrounded the two.
The group immediately suggested a composition to her. She went home
and painted. She took the young man's bathing suit off and gave him
wings; the women she dressed in lovely floating robes, and she called
the picture, _l'Amour Dorlote par les Belles Dames_.
"And once I asked Frank Harris to explain to me the origin of his
vivid story, 'Montes the Matador.' 'It's too simple,' he said, 'the
model for Montes was a little Mexican greaser whom I met in Kansas. He
was one of many in charge of cattle shipped up from Mexico and down
from the States. All the white cattle men, the gringos, held him in
great contempt. But,' continued Harris, speaking deliberately with his
beautifully modulated voice, and his eyes twinkling with the memory of
the thing, 'I soon found that the greaser's contempt for the gringos
was immeasureably greater than their's for him. "Bah," he would say,
"they know nothing." And it was so. He could go into a cattle car on a
pitch dark night and make the bulls stand up, a feat that none of the
white men would have attempted. I asked him how he did this and he
told me the answer in three words, "I know them." He could go into a
herd of cattle just let loose together and pick out their leader
immediately, pick him out before the cattle themselves had! There was
the origin of "Montes the Matador." He was named, of course, after
the famous _torero_ described by Gautier in his "Voyage en Espagne."
When I was in Madrid sometime later I went to a number of bull-fights
before I put the story together.' 'But,' I asked Harris, 'Is it
possible for an _espada_ to stand in the bull ring with his back to
the bull, during a charge, as you have made him do frequently in the
story?' 'Of course not,' he answered me at once, smiling his frankly
malevolent smile, 'Of course not. That part was put in to show how
much the public will stand for in a work of fiction. I believe one of
the _espadas_ tried it some time after the book appeared and was
immediately killed.'
"Fiction, history, poetry, criticism, at their best, are all the same
thing. When they inflame the imagination and stir the pulse they are
identical: all creative work. It does not matter what a man writes
about. It matters how he writes it. Subject is nothing. Should we
regard Velasquez as less important than Murillo because the former
painted portraits of contemporaries, whom in his fashion he
criticized, while the Spanish Bouguereau disguised his models as the
Virgin? Walter Pater's description of the _Monna Lisa_ would live if
the picture disappeared. Indeed it has created a factitious interest
in da Vinci's masterwork. Even more might be said for Huysmans's
description of Moreau's _Salome_, which actually puts the figures in
the picture in motion! The critic, the historian at their best are
creative artists as the writers of fiction are creative artists.
Should we regard, for example, 'Imperial Purple' less a work of
creative art than 'The Rise of Silas Lapham'?"
"I am getting your meaning more and more," said Sitgreaves. "And it
occurs to me that perhaps I have been unjust in rating Moore low as a
novelist. Perhaps I should have said that he is more successful in
those books which depend more on his memory and less on his
imaginative instinct. He cannot, after all, have known Jesus and
Paul...."
"You are quite wrong," I said. "At least from his point of view. He
says that he knows Paul better than he has ever known any one else. He
even finds hair on Paul's chest. He can describe Paul, I believe, to
the last mole. He knows his favourite colours, and whether he prefers
artichokes to alligator pears. As for Christ, everybody professes to
know Christ these days. Since the world has become distinctly
un-Christian it has become comparatively easy to discuss Christ. He
is regarded as an historical character, and a much more simple one
than Napoleon. I have heard anarchists in bar-rooms talk about him by
the hour, sometimes very graphically and always with a certain amount
of wit. No, it is all the same.... Moore, now that he has been to
Palestine and read the gospels, feels as well acquainted with Christ
and Paul as he does with Edward Martyn and Yeats and Lady Gregory."
"I must fall back on the personal then," said Sitgreaves, now really
at bay, "and say that I am less moved and interested when Moore is
describing Evelyn Innes, than when he tells of his affair with Doris
at Orelay."
"I am glad that you mentioned 'Evelyn Innes' again," I said, "because
it is in this very book that he is said to have painted so many of his
friends. Ulick Dean is undoubtedly Yeats. It has been suggested that
Arnold Dolmetsch posed for the portrait of Evelyn's father.
Dolmetsch's testimony on this point goes farther. He says that he
dictated certain passages in the book...."
"What is it, then? What is the difference? There is some difference,
of that I am sure...."
"The difference is--" I began when the door opened and Marcel entered,
the most amazingly comprehensive smile on his countenance.
"_Mademoiselle vous attend_," he said, and he looked the question.
"Shall I bring her in here?"
Sitgreaves answered it immediately, "_Je viens_." And then to me,
"Wait," as he vanished through the doorway.... I walked to the window,
drew aside the red curtains, and looked out into the fountain-splashed
court below....
* * * * *
"What is the difference?"
"I suppose it is that you prefer the new Moore to the old Moore, the
author of the later and better written books to the author of the
earlier ones. 'Evelyn Innes' was many times rewritten. Moore has said
that he could never get it to suit him, but he has also said,
recently, that he would never rewrite another book (a resolution he
has not kept). 'Memoirs of My Dead Life' and 'Hail and Farewell' do
not need rewriting. They are written to stand. 'The Brook Kerith,'
perhaps, you will find equally to your taste. It will be the newest
Moore...."
"You have explained to me," said Sitgreaves, "the difference: it is
one of development. Now that I think of it I don't believe that
Anatole France could write 'The Brook Kerith.'... It would be too
symbolical, too cynical, in his hands. Moore will perhaps make it
more human, by knowing the characters. I wonder," he continued
musingly, as we left the room, and descended the stairs, "if he told
you whether that hair on Paul's chest was red or black...."
_February 1, 1915._
The Authoritative Work on
American Music
The Authoritative Work on American Music
H. L. Mencken pointed out to me recently, in his most earnest and
persuasive manner, that it was my duty to write a book about the
American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing
their flaccid _opera_, stave by stave. It was in vain that I urged
that this would be but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not
fight men of straw, that these our composers had no real standing in
the concert halls, and that pushing them over would be an easy
exercise for a child of ten. On the contrary, he retorted, they
belonged to the academies; certain people believed that they were
important; it was necessary to dislodge this belief. I suggested, with
a not too heavily assumed humility, that I had already done something
of the sort in an essay entitled "The Great American Composer." "A
good beginning," asserted Col. Mencken, "but not long enough. I won't
be satisfied with anything less than a book." "But if I wrote a book
about Professors Parker, Chadwick, Hadley, and the others I could find
nothing different to say about them; they are all alike. Neither
their lives nor their music offer opportunities for variations." "An
excellent idea!" cried Major Mencken, enthusiastically, "Write one
chapter and then repeat it verbatim throughout the book, changing only
the name of the principal character. Then clap on a preface,
explaining your reason for this procedure." My last protest was the
feeblest of all: "I can't spend a year or a month or a week poring
over the scores of these fellows; I can't go to concerts to hear their
music. I might as well go to work in a coal mine." "I'll do it for
you!" triumphantly checkmated General Mencken. "I'll read the scores
and you shall write the book!" And so he left me, as on a similar
occasion the fiend, having exhibited his prospectus, vanished from the
eyes of our Lord. And I returned to my home sorely troubled, finding
that the words of the man were running about in my head like so many
little Japanese waltzing mice.
And, after much cogitation, I went to such and such a book case and
took down a certain volume written by Louis Charles Elson (a very
large red tome) and another by Rupert Hughes, to see if their words of
praise for our weak musical brothers would stir me to action. I found
that they did not. My heart action remained normal; no film covered
my eyes; foam did not issue from my mouth. Indeed I read, quite
calmly, in Mr. Hughes's "American Composers" that A. J. Goodrich is
"recognized among scholars abroad as one of the leading spirits of our
time"; that "(Henry Holden) Huss has ransacked the piano and pillaged
almost every imaginable fabric of high colour.... The result is
gorgeous and purple"; that "The thing we are all waiting for is that
American grand opera, _The Woman of Marblehead_ (by Louis Adolphe
Coerne). It is predicted that it will not receive the marble heart";
that "I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting
the fires that burn in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes (than
Arthur Foote). His two gavottes are to me away the best since Bach";
that "the song (_Israfel_ by Edgar Stillman-Kelley) is in my fervent
belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the very greatest
lyrics in the world's music"; and in "The History of American Music"
by Louis C. Elson that "Music has made even more rapid strides than
literature among us," and that "he (George W. Chadwick) has reconciled
the symmetrical (sonata) form with modern passion." But it was in the
fourth volume of "The Art of Music," published by the National Society
of Music, that I found the supreme examples of this kind of writing.
The volume was edited by Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby. Therein I
read with a sort of awed astonishment that one of the songs of
Frederick Ayres "reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception
and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer." I learned
that T. Carl Whitmer has a "spiritual kinship" with Arthur Shepherd,
Hans Pfitzner, and Vincent d'Indy. His music is "psychologically
subtle and spiritually rarefied: in colour it corresponds to the
violet end of the spectrum." I turned the pages until I came to the
name of Miss Gena Branscombe: "Inexhaustible buoyancy, a superlative
emotional wealth, and wholly singular gift of musical intuition are
the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical personality
(without much effort of the imagination we might say that they are the
qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality).... Her
impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her
accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes." Before he
became acquainted with the later French idiom Harvey W. Loomis
"spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now
recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel."
Curiously enough, however, these statements did not annoy me. I found
no desire arising in me to deny them and doubtless, though mayhap with
a guilty conscience, I should have ditched the undertaking, consigned
it to that heap of undone duties, where already lie notes on a
comparison of Andalusian mules with the mules of Liane de Pougy, a few
scribbled memoranda for a treatise on the love habits of the mole, and
a half-finished biography of the talented gentleman who signed his
works, "Nick Carter," if my by this time quite roving eye had not
alighted, entirely fortuitously, on one of the forgotten glories of my
library, a slender volume entitled "Popular American Composers."
I recalled how I had bought this book. Happening into a modest
second-hand bookshop on lower Third Avenue, maintained chiefly for the
laudable purpose of redistributing paper novels of the Seaside and
kindred libraries, of which, alas, we hear very little nowadays, I
asked the proprietor if by chance he possessed any literature relating
to the art of music. By way of answer, he retired to the very back of
his little room, searched for a space in a litter on the floor, and
then returned with a pile of nine volumes or so in his arms. The
titles, such as "Great Violinists," "Harmony in Thirteen Lessons,"
and "How to Sing," did not intrigue me, but in idly turning the pages
of this "Popular American Composers" I came across a half-tone
reproduction of a photograph of Paul Dresser, the only less celebrated
brother of Theodore Dreiser, with a short biography of the composer of
_On the Banks of the Wabash_. As Sir George Grove in his excellent
dictionary neglected to mention this portentous name in American Art
and Letters (although he devoted sixty-seven pages, printed in double
columns, to Mendelssohn) I saw the advantage of adding the little book
to my collection. The bookseller, when questioned, offered to
relinquish the volume for a total of fifteen cents, and I carried it
away with me. Once I had become more thoroughly acquainted with its
pages I realized that I would willingly have paid fifteen dollars for
it.
This book, indeed, cannot fail to delight General Mencken. There is no
reference in its pages to Edgar Stillman-Kelley, Miss Gena Branscombe,
Louis Adolphe Coerne, Henry Holden Huss, T. Carl Whitmer, Arthur
Farwell, Arthur Foote, or A. J. Goodrich. In fact, if we overlook
brief notices of John Philip Sousa, Harry von Tilzer, Paul Dresser,
Charles K. Harris, and Hattie Starr (whom you will immediately recall
as the composer of _Little Alabama Coon_), the author, Frank L.
Boyden, has not hesitated to go to the roots of his subject, pushing
aside the college professors and their dictums, and has turned his
attention to figures in the art life of America, from whom, Mencken
himself, I feel sure, would not take a single paragraph of praise, so
richly is it deserved. I am unfamiliar with the causes contributing to
this book's comparative obscurity; perhaps, indeed, they are similar
to those responsible for the early failure of "Sister Carrie." May not
we even suspect that the odium cast by the Doubledays on the author of
that romance might have been actively transferred in some degree to a
work which contained a biographical notice and a picture of his
brother? At any rate, "Popular American Composers," published in 1902,
fell into undeserved oblivion and so I make no apology for inviting my
readers to peruse its pages with me.
Opening the book, then, at random, I discover on page 96 a biography
of Lottie A. Kellow (her photograph graces the reverse of this page).
In a few well-chosen words (almost indeed in "gipsy phrases") Mr.
Boyden gives us the salient details of her career. Mrs. Kellow is a
resident of Cresco, Iowa, a church singer of note, and the possessor
of a contralto voice of great volume. As a composer she has to her
credit "marches, cakewalks, schottisches, and other styles of
instrumental music." We are given a picture of Mrs. Kellow at work:
"Mrs. Kellow's best efforts are made in the evening, and in darkness,
save the light of the moonbeams on the keys of her piano." We are also
told that "she is happy in her inspirations and a sincere lover of
music. All of her compositions show a decided talent and possess
musical elements which are only to be found in the works of an artist.
Mrs. Kellow's musical friends are confident of her success as a
composer and predict for her a brilliant future."