Act I. The Gardens of Hamilcar’s Palace.

Transcriber’s Note

Italic text displayed as: _italic_

OVERTONES

BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER

OVERTONES: A Book of Temperaments. _With Frontispiece._ $1.25,

_net_.

MELOMANIACS. 12mo. $1.50.

CHOPIN: The Man and His Music. _With Portrait._ $2.00.

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC. 12mo. $1.50.

[Illustration: Richard Strauss. (signature)]

OVERTONES

A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS

RICHARD STRAUSS, PARSIFAL, VERDI, BALZAC,

FLAUBERT, NIETZSCHE, AND TURGÉNIEFF

BY

JAMES HUNEKER

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then, I contradict myself.

WALT WHITMAN

_WITH PORTRAIT_

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1904

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

PUBLISHED MARCH, 1904.

TO

RICHARD STRAUSS

A MUSIC-MAKER OF INDIVIDUAL STYLE

A SUPREME MASTER OF THE ORCHESTRA

AN ANARCH OF ART

THIS SHEAF OF STUDIES

IS ADMIRINGLY INSCRIBED

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. RICHARD STRAUSS 1

II. PARSIFAL—A MYSTIC MELODRAMA 64

The Book 73

The Music 91

III. NIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST 109

IV. LITERARY MEN WHO LOVED MUSIC 142

The Musical Taste of Turgénieff 142

Balzac as Music Critic 161

Alphonse Daudet 179

George Moore 188

Evelyn Innes 188

Sister Teresa 199

V. ANARCHS OF ART 214

VI. THE BEETHOVEN OF FRENCH PROSE 228

Flaubert and his Art 228

The Two Salammbôs 244

VII. VERDI AND BOÏTO 256

Boïto’s Mefistofele 272

VIII. THE ETERNAL FEMININE 277

IX. AFTER WAGNER—WHAT? 307

The Caprice of the Musical Cat 307

Wagner and the French 321

Isolde and Tristan 327

I

RICHARD STRAUSS

We cannot understand what we do not love.

—ELISÉE RECLUS.

I

It is easier to trace the artistic lineage of Richard Strauss

to its fountain-head—Johann Sebastian Bach—than to stamp with a

contemporary stencil its curious ramifications. And this is not

alone because of a similar polyphonic complexity, a complex of

themes and their development without parallel since the days of

the pattern-weaving Flemish contrapuntists; but because, like Bach

Strauss has experimented in the _disassociation_ of harmonies, and,

in company with his contemporary, the master-impressionist, Claude

Monet, has divided his tones—set up, instead of the sober classic

lines or the gorgeous color masses of the romantic painters, an

entirely new scheme of orchestration, the basic principle of which

is individualism of instruments, the pure anarchy—self-government—of

the entire orchestral apparatus. This is but a mode of _technique_

and does not necessarily impinge upon the matter of his musical

discourse; it is a distinctive note, however, of the Strauss

originality, and must be sounded in any adequate discussion of his

very modern art.

Borrowing the word with its original connotations from the erudite

and clairvoyant French critic, Rémy de Gourmont, disassociation in

the practice of Strauss is a species of tone chemistry by which

a stereotyped musical phrase is reduced to its virginal element,

deprived of factitious secondary meaning, and then re-created, as if

in the white heat of a retort, by the overpowering and disdainful

will of the composer. We have also the disassociation of ideas

from their antique succession, that chiefly reveals itself, not

in a feverish, disordered syntax, but in the avoidance of the

classic musical paragraph—that symmetrical paragraph as inexorably

formulated as the laws of the Medes and Persians, resulting in a

Chinese uniformity maddening in its dulness and lifelessness unless

manipulated by a man of intellectual power. Strauss is forever

breaking up his musical sentences. He does this in no arbitrary

fashion, but as the curve of the poem is _ideally_ pictured to his

imagination. A great realist in his tonal quality, he is first the

thinker, the poet, the man of multitudinous ideas; you hear the crack

of the master’s whip, a cruel one at times, as he marshals his themes

into service, bidding them build, as built the Pharaohs’ slaves,

obelisks and pyramids, shapes of grandeur that pierce the sky and

blot out from the vision all but their overwhelming and monumental

beauties of form—the form of Richard Strauss. He is, after his own

manner, as severe a formalist as Josef Haydn.

We are now far away from what is called euphony for euphony’s sake;

though it is, as in Bach’s case, art for art with all the misused

phrase implies. Intent upon realizing in tone his vision,—the

magnitude or validity of which we need not yet discuss,—Strauss

allows no antique rubric of fugue or symphony to block his progress;

even the symphonic poem, an invention of Franz Liszt, proves too

cumbersome for this new man of light and air and earth, whose

imagination is at once sumptuous and barbaric. The picture must

overflow the old frames. It must burn with an intense life. It must

be true. As a man who crept before he walked, walked before he ran,

Richard Strauss has the right to our sympathy. He was a wonder-child;

he is one of the world’s great conductors; he wrote symphonies in

the Brahms style during his studious youth; he composed a little

literature of chamber music, piano pieces, a violin concerto, and

many songs prior to the time when he faced the sun of Wagner and

was undazzled by its rays. He knew the scores of Wagner, Liszt,

and Berlioz, has imitated, and has forgotten them in the swirling

torrential tides of his own strange temperament.

Once music was pure rhythm; once it was howling and gesture. It

moved up the evolutionary scale slowly and reached the kingdom of

the instrumental arabesque with difficulty; on this side was the

ecclesiastical liturgy with its rigorous inclusions and suppressions;

on the other, the naïve young art of opera. Let us acknowledge that

Bach was the crowning glory of the art polyphonic, that Palestrina

closed the door behind him on churchly chants, that Beethoven said

the last significant word in the symphony; let us admit these trite

propositions, and we have still perplexing problems to solve. The

song-writers, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, shall not detain us—they

represent but an exquisite province of music. The neo-symphonists,

beginning with Schubert and Schumann and ending with Brahms, are

not to be weighed here. They said much that was novel, but they

adhered to the classic line; they did not draw in the _mass_, to use

the painter’s term. It is to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner that the

new movement should be credited: Liszt, for his prophetic power—he

remodelled the symphonic form, but like Moses, he was destined to

see, not to enter, the promised land; Berlioz, for adding to the

instrumental palette new hues, bewildering _nuances_ and bizarre

splendor; Wagner, for banishing convention from the operatic stage,

furnishing the myth as the ideal libretto, for his bold annexation

of the symphonic orchestra and the extraordinary uses to which he

put it. Yet only one of the three men has held out the torch to

future composers—Franz Liszt. Berlioz’s talent was largely that of a

perverse fresco painter; Wagner quite closed his epoch—one of rampant

romanticism—in his music-drama, and by his powerful genius almost

swerved music from its normal, absolute currents.

He quite flooded the musical firmament with his radiations. There

was but one god and he reigned at Bayreuth; go hence and worship,

or else be cast with the unbelieving into outer darkness where

there is gnashing of teeth! The music-drama was the synthesis of

the arts. It was the panacea of all social evils, and Parsifal we

beheld as another Paraclete! Such arrogation of omnipotence was

bound to encounter reverses. The Wagnerian mixture of words and

music, of drama ranking before music and music playing the handmaid

rôle of commentator, has stood the tests neither of its creator

nor of time. We know our Wagner now; not as a philosopher—shades

of Schopenhauer!—not as a poet—let us not invoke the spirit of

Goethe!—not as a reformer, dramatist, revolutionist, but as a

composer of genius, with a lot of wrong-headed theories, whose

magnificent music floated his doctrines and blinded the younger

generation to their speciousness. It is music, not drama, that rules

in Wagner’s works.

The evil done was this: Music could no longer speak in her own divine

voice without the aid of words, without the hobbling drawbacks

of singers, stage pictures, plots, all the thrice-familiar _mise

en scène_ of the Wagnerian music-drama. Nevertheless, Wagner did

enhance the value of the suggestion in music. He invented his own

stenographic method of speech and with it literally created a new

musical consciousness. A motive means something, is the symbol of

an idea, or state of soul; yet we know that if this motive has to

be accompanied by dramatic gesture or clothed verbally, then all

the worse for it as pure music; it gains visually, but loses on the

imaginative side. Before Wagner, Liszt discovered the power of the

concise phrase and even labelled it; and before Liszt, came Beethoven

in his C minor symphony; while antedating all was Bach, whose music

is a perfect storehouse of motivation.

II

And again we reach Richard Strauss by way of Bach; in the music of

the modern composer the motive achieves its grand climacteric. His

scheme is the broad narrative form, a narration that for sustained

puissance and intensity has never been equalled. The new melody is no

longer a pattern of instrumentation, nor is it an imitation of the

human voice; it is extra-human, on the thither side of speech. It is

neither a pure ravishment of the ear, nor yet an abstruse geometrical

problem worked out according to the law of some musical Euclid.

Now, music of the highest order must make its first appeal to the

imagination; its first impact must be upon the cortical centres.

It must not alone set the feet rhythmically pattering, it must not

merely stir us to emotional thrilling. Not in the sensuous abandon

of dance rhythms, but by thought,—that is, by musical thought, in a

chain of tonal imagery, is the aim of the new music. Walter Pater

believed, Plato-wise, that music is the archetype of the arts. It

was an amiable heresy. But music must stand solitary—it is often too

theatric, as poetry is often too tonal. It must be intellect suffused

by emotion. Its substance is not the substance of its sister arts.

What music has long needed, what Wagner and the church writers before

him sought to give it, is definiteness. The welding of word and tone

does not produce true musical articulateness. We recognize this in

Tristan and Isolde, where incandescent tone quite submerges the word,

the symbol of the idea. Erotic music has never before so triumphed as

in this Celtic drama. And it is like the fall of some great blazing

visitor from interstellar space; it buries itself beneath the smoking

earth instead of remaining royally afloat in the pure ether of the

idea.

The arts cannot be thus fused. When faith moved nations, the world

witnessed the marriage of word and tone in the ritual of the church;

no music has been so definite since Palestrina’s as Wagner’s—until

the music of Richard Strauss was heard. In it we encounter a

definiteness that is almost plastic, though never baldly literal.

As we noted in our rapid survey, the ethic quality of Beethoven,

the philosophic quality of Brahms, the dramatic quality of Wagner,

are all aside from the purpose of Strauss. He seeks to _express_ in

tone alone. The new melody is but an old name for—characterization.

And now we reach at last the core of Strauss, who is a psychological

realist in symphonic art, withal a master symbolist; back of his

surface eccentricities there is a foundational energy, an epic

largeness of utterance, a versatility of manner, that rank him as

the unique anarchist of music. He taps the tocsin of revolt, and

his velvet sonorities do not disguise either their meagre skein of

spirituality or the veiled ferocities of his aristocratic insurgency.

The present writer put this question to Herr Strauss in London in

the summer of 1903: Has he always subjected himself to the tyranny

of an ideal programme before composing? The notion seemed elementary

to him. “All good music has a poetic idea for a basis,” he replied;

and he instanced the Beethoven piano sonatas, the Bach fugues. But

he admitted that his brain caught fire at poetic figures, such

as Don Juan, Don Quixote, Macbeth; Also sprach Zarathustra, Till

Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben. Even a landscape or a seascape

could provoke from him the charming suite of images we find in

his Italia. With the poem of Death and Apotheosis, affixed to the

score after the music had been composed, we may see that Strauss is

not a man pinioned to a formula. But the effect on his hearers of

his message, on those hearers who have submitted to his magic, is

articulate as has been no anterior music. He moulds his meanings

into a thousand forms—for what is form in the academic sense to

this arch-disintegrator? And these forms resolve themselves into

as many more shapes—shapes of beauty, terror, tragedy, comedy,

morose mysticism, ugly platitude; into grimacing runes, shuddering

madness, lyric exaltation, and enigmatic gropings; yet never the

banal rhetoric of the orchestra, the rhetoric that has seduced so

many composers to write for the sake of the sound, for the joy of the

style. Strauss always means something. All is in the narration of his

story, a story suggested with as much art as the inspiring poem; a

misty cloud, perhaps, to the unsympathetic, a pillar of flame to the

initiated. It is a new speech; notes, phrases, groups, movements,

masses of tone, no longer occupy conventional, relative positions in

his tone-poems. The violent disassociation of the old phraseology—his

scores seem to be heard vertically as well as horizontally—smug

harmonization, melodies that fall gratefully into the languid

channels of our memory—in a word, the mechanical disposition of stale

material is transformed, undergoes permutation to make way for a new

syntax, a nervous, intense method of expression, strange elliptical

flights, erratic foreshortenings, with classic and romantic canons

cast to the winds; yet imposing a new grouping, a new harmonic scale

of values, a new order of melody—the melody of characterization,

the melody that pilots the imagination across uncharted territory

into a land overflowing with feeling, intellect, tenderness, and

sublimity, with irony, ugliness, humor, and humanity; a land not

lacking in milk and honey, the land of Richard Strauss! A delectable

region is discovered by this young man when we believed that the

grim old wizard, Wagner, had locked us up forever in his torrid

zone, where, like a Klingsor, he evoked for our parched souls the

shadows of bayaderes and monstrous flowers and monstrous passions!

Lo, another Richard has guided us to a newer domain, which, if not so

fascinatingly tropical, is one where hallucinating chromaticism does

not rule, where a more intellectual diatonic mode prevails. Strauss

is master of a cold, astringent voluptuousness. His head rules his

heart. Above all, he searches for character, for its every trait.

He himself may be a Merlin,—all great composers are ogres in their

insatiable love of power,—but he has rescued us from the romantic

theatric blight; and a change of dynasty is always welcome to slaves

of the music habit.

His music did not exhibit its first big curve of originality until

the publication of Don Juan, opus 20. His intimate charming songs

are the epitome of his peculiar dramatic faculty for clothing in

tone, or rather emptying into music, the meaning of the poet.

Avoiding the more recondite question of form, it may be said that

as in the songs, so is it in his symphonic works. With no other

indication than a title (he cannot be blamed for the extravagances

of the analytical-programme makers), Strauss pours upon our puzzled

and enchanted ears a billow of music terrifying at times: it is a

veritable tidal wave; you see it cresting the rim of the horizon and

rolling toward you sky high. His Don Juan and Macbeth are romantic

in style, and for that reason are praised by those who fear to

desert old milestones and wander in the tangled, fulminating forests

of his later music. With the story of the mediæval German rogue,

Till Eulenspiegel, Strauss unleashes his fantasy. It is a scherzo

in form—how he burlesques the form and its very idea! The color

scheme is daring, oppressively high, and at times we near the cosmic

screech. All is prankishness, darting fancy, consuming irony. The

humor is both rarefied and Teutonically clumsy. Till lives, Till is

scampish, Till is gibbeted. Tone itself is volatilized into fiery

particles that seem to fall upon the listener from dizzily pitched

passages. Such a picture has never been hung in the august halls of

music. It offends. It blazes in the eyes with its brilliant audacity,

and yet it is new music, music gashed and quivering with rhythmic

life. Rhythmically, Strauss is an adventurer into an absolutely novel

clime. He touches hands with the far East in his weaving interior

rhythms.

Death and Apotheosis is a tone-poem, rather Lisztian in its pompous

and processional picture at the close. Its very title calls up the

Weimar master’s Tasso. But it differs inasmuch as it is better

realized externally, while its psychology, morbid in several

episodes, is more masterful. It is not a Tasso, not a poet enthroned

in deathless immortality, but a soul, _the_ soul, which, lying in its

“necessitous little chamber” of death, reviews its past, its youth,

hope, love, conflict, defeat, despair, and at the end its feverish

ecstasy, its sorrowful dissolution. Strauss with a secret tiny brush

has surprised the human heart in travail. It is pathos breeding. The

added touches of realism, the gasping for breath, and the lenten

_tic-toc_ of the heart, should not disquiet us. Æsthetic propriety is

never violated. And Tod und Verklärung is hardly the greatest that is

in Richard Strauss.

The much-discussed Thus spake Zarathustra is not, as has been

humorously asserted, an attempt to make music a camel that will bear

the burdens of philosophy; it is the outcome of profound study in

the vaticinating leaves of Nietzsche’s bible. Its dancing lyricism

is reflected in the Strauss score, which opens with a pantheistic

evocation of sunrise, uplifting in its elemental grandeur. Seldom

has music displayed a result brought about with such comparative

simplicity—a simplicity in inverse proportion to its subtlety. It

invites to the prayer of the sun worshippers as they salute their

round burning god lifting in the blue. The composition is welded by

a giant will. It contains so many incongruous elements, that their

complete amalgamation seems at first hearing an incredible attempt.

It is the old symphonic-poem form of Liszt, but altered, amplified.

The themes appear, disappear, surge to insanity in their passion,

melt into religious appeal, dance with bacchanalian joy, mock,

blaspheme, exhort, and enchant. There is ugly music and hieratic,

music bitter and sweet, black music and white, music that repels and

music that lures—we are hopelessly snared by the dream tunes of this

enharmonic fowler, who often pipes in No Man’s Land on the other side

of good and evil. The ear is ravished, the eye dazzled; every brain

centre is assaulted, yet responds to a new and formidable engine for

stimulating ideas and emotions. The Old-World riddle is propounded

and left unsolved. And we seem to have grazed an Apocalypse of

scepticism in the conflicting tonalities with their sphinx-like

profiles.

III

The greatest technical master of the orchestra, making of it a

vibrating dynamic machine, a humming mountain of fire, Richard

Strauss, by virtue of his musical imagination, is painter-poet and

psychologist. He describes, comments, and narrates in tones of

jewelled brilliancy; his orchestra flashes like a canvas of Monet—the

divided tones and the theory of complementary colors (overtones) have

their analogues in the manner with which Strauss intricately divides

his various instrumental choirs: setting one group in opposition or

juxtaposition to another; producing the most marvellous, unexpected

effects by acoustical mirroring and transmutation of motives; and

almost blinding the brain when the entire battery of reverberation

and repercussion is invoked. If he can paint sunshine and imitate

the bleating of sheep, he can also draw the full-length portrait

of a man. This he proves with his Don Quixote, wherein the nobler

dreamer and his earthy squire are _heard_ in a series of adventures,

terminating with the death of the rueful knight—one of the most

poignant pages in musical literature. Don Quixote is shown as the

quotidian type of man whose day-dreams are a bridge leading to the

drab and sorrowful cell of madness. He is not mocked, but tenderly

treated, by Strauss. It is upon the broad-backed Sancho Panza that

the composer unlooses his quiver of humorous arrows. The score

is thus far—to my taste—the greatest of its maker, the noblest in

subject-matter, in dignity of theme, complexity of handling, and

synthetic power. To show his independence of all musical form,

Strauss selected the most worn—the theme with variations. Amazing

is the outcome. No other composer before him, not even the master

variationist, Brahms, has so juggled and deployed the entire range

of musical material in serried battalions. Virtuosity there is, but

it is the virtuosity that serves a psychologist; never is there

display for decoration’s idle use. All is realistic fancy. A solo

violoncello and a solo viola represent the half-cracked pair of

Cervantes. The madness of Quixote is indicated by a device musically

and psychologically unique. His theme, his character, goes to pieces

in mid-air, after the mania of romance reading. The muting of the

instruments and general muddling of ideas make the picture of

slow-creeping derangement painfully true. Then follow variations,

close in their fidelity to the story, and never unmindful of the

medium in which it is told. Despite the disquieting verisimilitude

of the wind-machine, of the sheep, Strauss has never put forth his

astoundingly imaginative powers to such purpose. We are stunned,

horrified, piqued, yet always enthralled by this masterful ironist

who has conserved his mental sincerity. The finale is soothing,

its _facture_ is a miracle of tonal values. Don Quixote, until he

surpasses it, will remain a monument to Richard Strauss.

The Hero’s Life is nearer the symphony in a formal sense than any of

his newer works. It is his most robust composition. The conception

is breath-catching, for it is a chant of the _Ego_, the tableau

of Strauss’s soul exposed as objectively as Walt Whitman’s when

he sang of his _Me_. The general outline of the work is colossal;

it has no wavering contours, and is virile with a virility that

shocks. It flouts the critics of the composer and shows a stupendous

battle-piece, Tolstoyian in fury, duration, and breadth. Cacophony

rules; yet is not a battle always cacophonous? The old-fashioned

symbols of trumpet-blasts with ornamental passage-work are here

rudely disclaimed; war is cruel, and this episode is repulsive in

its aural cruelty. The ancient harmonic order will be indeed changed

when such a tonal conflict is accepted by the rear-guard. Often we

cannot hear the music because of the score. For the rest, there are

apposite quotations from the composer’s earlier works, and the _coda_

is beautiful with its supreme peace, supreme absorption in Nirvana.

This, then, has Richard Strauss accomplished: He has restored to

instrumental music its rightful sovereignty; it need fear no longer

the encroachment of music-drama, at best a bastard art. Enlarged,

its eloquence enormously intensified, its capacity for rare, subtle

beauty increased tenfold, the modern orchestra has been literally

enfranchised by Strauss from the house of operatic bondage. He has

revolutionized symphonic music by breaking down its formal barriers,

and he has filled his tone-poems with a new and diverse _content_.

In less than an hour he concentrates, relates, makes us see, feel,

and hear more than could be seen, heard, or felt in a music-drama

enduring six. His musical themes, _quâ_ themes, are not to be matched

with Beethoven’s, his melodic invention deviates from the classic

prettiness; yet because of his incomparable architectonics, of

his majestic grip on the emotional, he keeps us hypnotized as his

stately, fantastic tonal structures slowly uprise and unfold like

many-colored smoke from the incantations of legendary Eastern genii.

He absorbs absolutely our consciousness with a new quintessence of

poetic, pictorial, sculptural, and metaphysical art. Music, unaided

by words or theatric device,—for the compositions of Strauss may

be enjoyed without their titles,—has never been so articulate, so

dangerously definite, so insidiously cerebral. Madness may lie that

way; but the flaming magic of the man is ever restrained by deep

artistic reverence. We catch glimpses of vast vistas where dissonance

is king; slow, iron twilights in which trail the enigmatic figures of

another world; there are often more moons than one in the blood-red

skies of his icy landscapes; yet the sacred boundaries of music are

never overstepped. Little matters the niche awarded this composer by

posterity—Richard Strauss is the musical enchanter of our day.

IV

Richard Strauss was born at Munich, June 11, 1864. He is the son

of Franz S. Strauss, formerly first horn player in the Bavarian

Court Band. His father has written studies and other compositions

for his instrument; and, as his son said, “he could play most of

the instruments in the orchestra.” He sat under Wagner’s stick, but

was not a Wagnerian. Once he played so well that Wagner exclaimed,

“I fancy after all, Strauss, you cannot be such an anti-Wagnerian

as they make out, for you play my music so beautifully.” “What has

that got to do with it?” answered the stubborn artist. The mother of

Richard was born Pschorr, and is a daughter of the wealthy Munich

brewer. The boy received his first piano lessons at the age of four

and a half from his mother. Later he studied with August Tombo, a

harp player, and took up the violin under Benno Walter. At the age

of six he composed a three-part song, a valse, and a polka—Schneider

Polka, he called the dance. Before he went to school he had tried

his hand at songs, piano pieces, and an orchestral overture. Sent

to the elementary schools from 1870 to 1874, the gymnasium from

1874 to 1882, and the university from 1882 to 1884, Strauss laid

the foundation of a comprehensive culture, a catholicity in taste,

a love of _belles lettres_, and a general knowledge of the world’s

literature. He early mastered the technics of the piano and violin,

and in 1875, with Kapellmeister Fr. W. Meyer, theory and composition.

This course lasted five years. The composing went on apace. A chorus

for the Electra of Sophocles and a festival chorus were given a

hearing at a gymnasium concert. Three of his songs were sung in 1880;

and in March, 1881, his string quartet in A, opus 2, the scherzo of

which he wrote in his fifteenth year, was played by Benno Walter’s

quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Four days later his first symphony

was accorded a hearing under Hermann Levi, and the extreme youth of

the composer called forth remonstrances. In 1883 Berlin heard his C

minor overture under Radecke. Both are still in manuscript.

Of this formative period Strauss has told us that, “My father kept

me very strictly to the old masters, in whose compositions I had a

thorough grounding. You cannot appreciate Wagner and the moderns

unless you pass through this grounding in the classics. Young

composers bring me voluminous manuscripts for my opinion on their

productions. In looking at them I find that they generally want to

begin where Wagner left off. I say to all such, ‘My good young man,

go home and study the works of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, of

Mozart, of Beethoven, and when you have mastered these art works come

to me again.’ Without thoroughly understanding the significance of

the development from Haydn, _via_ Mozart and Beethoven, to Wagner,

these youngsters cannot appreciate at their proper worth either the

music of Wagner or of his predecessors. ‘What an extraordinary thing

for Richard Strauss to say,’ these young men remark, but I only give

them the advice gained by my own experience.”

Then came a stroke of luck. Von Bülow’s attention being attracted

by the charmingly written and scored serenade (opus 7) in E flat

for thirteen wind instruments, secured it for the repertory of

the Meiningen orchestra. It is scored for two flutes, two oboes,

two clarinets, four horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon (or

bass tuba). His second symphony in F minor was composed during the

season of 1883-1884. It was first played in New York under Theodore

Thomas, December 15, 1884, and later by Walter Damrosch. It shows

many traces of the young composer’s close study of Brahms. The horn

concerto, opus 11, and the piano quartet, opus 13, were composed at

the same period. The latter won a prize. It shows a straining for

bigger effects, as if the form were too cramped for the strenuous

composer. The andante and scherzo are the more agreeable movements.

The Wanderer’s Sturmlied, after Goethe’s poem, beginning, “Wen du

nicht Verlässest, Genius,” revealed the taste for literary themes

and themes that exalt the individuality. This opus 14 is written

for six-voiced chorus, two soprani, one alto, one tenor, two bassi,

and orchestra. It also shows the serious influence of the Brahms

Schicksalslied. A second suite for wind was first given at Munich,

conducted by the composer.

“Bülow, who was very fond of my father,” says Strauss, “interested

himself in me, and I have much to thank him for. He started me on

my conducting career. My first experience of standing before an

orchestra was in connection with the performance of a suite, in

four movements, for wind instruments, which I had composed at his

request. It is still in manuscript. Bülow made me conduct it without

any rehearsal!” This must be the grand suite in B flat, misleadingly

numbered opus 14—the same opus number as the Sturmlied. It is scored

for thirteen wind instruments, and has been heard in London. The

introduction and entire fourth movement are said to be the best.

It is early Strauss. Strauss became music director in Meiningen,

October, 1885, conducted his own F minor symphony and also made his

début as pianist in Mozart’s C minor concerto. Von Bülow honored him

by conducting the concerto.

Strauss had already come under the influence of Alexander Ritter

(1833-1896), a violinist in the Munich Orchestra who had married

a niece of Wagner’s. Ritter, like von Bülow, was a man of strong

magnetic personality, and both were warm-blooded Wagnerians and

Lisztians. As boys they listened to that wonderful performance of

Beethoven’s Choral Symphony given by Wagner at Dresden in 1849, and

the two young gentlemen schoolfellows used to doff their caps every

time they passed the master’s windows in the Ostra-Allee. “Ritter was

exceptionally well read in all the philosophers, ancient and modern,

and a man of the highest culture. His influence,” says Strauss, “was

in the nature of a storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of

the poetic, the expressive, in music, as exemplified in the works

of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz. My symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien,

is the connecting link with the old and the new methods.” The young

composer went to Rome and Naples in the spring of 1886. Strauss tells

an amusing incident. “A few days ago I was conducting this symphony

at Brunswick, when a policeman appeared on the scene and stopped the

performance because, as he said, some condition had not been complied

with. Soon after, however, another policeman came and said the

concert might proceed. This unwarrantable interruption caused great

uproar, and the audience shouted anathemas against the police. At the

close of the symphony I turned to the audience and said, ‘You see,

ladies and gentlemen, in this Italy there are no anarchists!’”

In 1886 he left Meiningen to become third Kapellmeister under Levi

and Fischer. He wrote his tone-poem Macbeth at this period, though it

bears a later opus number than Don Juan. The former, after a revision

and partial rewriting, was dedicated to Alexander Ritter, and first

performed under von Bülow in Berlin. Strauss remained at Munich

until 1890, when he received a call from Weimar. In the ducal city

he shed his pupil’s skin and developed into a brilliant conductor.

His radical tendencies were now beginning to be recognized, and his

espousal of the music of the extreme Left caused his conducting of

Wagner and Liszt to become notable. At Leipsic his influence was felt

as conductor at the Liszt society. He has always warmly defended the

music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz.

In 1892 his lungs were affected and a protracted journey to Greece,

Egypt, and Sicily was necessary. He was not idle, however, for on

his return his grand opera, Guntram, opus 25, and dedicated to his

parents, was produced at Weimar. He married in 1894 Pauline de Ahna,

the daughter of a well-known Bavarian general, and the soprano who

created the Freihild in Guntram.

From Weimar Strauss returned to Munich as Court Kapellmeister, and

three years later he succeeded Levi as general music director. Not

satisfied with matters, he left Munich to become Kapellmeister at

the Berlin Royal Opera, which position he still occupies. He had

conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin after the death of

von Bülow, but the trip from Munich to Berlin was too exhausting,

and Arthur Nikisch was permanently engaged. Strauss has conducted

at Bayreuth, festivals at Liège, Cologne, Leipsic, Milan, Moscow.

In 1897 he visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, and a

year later Zurich and Madrid. In 1903 he conducted, in conjunction

with Wilhelm Mengelberg, a series of concerts in London, a Strauss

festival organized by Hugo Goerlitz. The Amsterdam Symphony

Orchestra, a remarkable aggregation of artists, played. His Parisian

experiences were most gratifying; he appeared in the dual rôles of

conductor-composer, his wife singing his lieder with exquisite taste.

As a conductor he ranks among the great ones. He is particularly

sympathetic in his readings of modern works, though any one who has

heard him direct a Mozart opera can never forget the impressions

gleaned—the blitheness, sanity, sweetness. He is cool, never

eccentric in his beat, and does not play upon his own personality,

as do some other conductors.

A little critical and polemical literature has grown up about the

Strauss case. In addition to the analytical programmes, some of them

too fantastic to be of value, Hans Merian has written an extended

study of Also sprach Zarathustra; Gustav Brecher, Richard Strauss;

Dr. Erich Urban, Strauss _contra_ Wagner—in which Wagner is proved

to be old-fashioned; Urban has also put forth a pamphlet-essay,

Richard Strauss. In his youth, writes Urban, Wagner cried exultantly,

“I am a musician;” in his age he mumbled, “I am a poet.” And he

really believed he had discovered in the Greek an excuse for his

mutilation of drama and music. Then Urban turns to Liszt. Liszt, he

said, went far, but not far enough. He grew timid when he saw the

logical outcome of his experiments. He still clung to the classic,

to the formal. Strauss appears. Urban thinks he showed absolutely no

individual talent until his opus 14, Wanderer’s Sturmlied. His early

work is Schumann, and Schumann at his worst. The learned critic does

not believe that either von Bülow or Ritter counted in the formation

of Strauss. He looks upon Guntram as an accident, and Heldenleben

as an answer to Zarathustra. He does not believe the latter to have

been inspired by Nietzsche,—Strauss composed it when he discovered

that Nietzsche’s philosophy coincided with his own revolutionary

programme. And as the same ideas are expressed in Heldenleben, the

titles could be exchanged without any harm. Truly a Daniel come

to judgment! It is in Heldenleben that Urban sees Strauss at the

top notch of his ideals. Here is musical drama without the words,

scenery, stage, or singers.

Brecher assigns only six periods to the development of his hero.

Brahms has much to say in the early Strauss music. The critic

outlines the orchestra before Strauss came: Haydn was the first real

instrumental writer, one who dispensed with the vocal character;

Mozart lent the orchestra freedom and beauty; Beethoven endowed it

with individuality; Berlioz was all color; Liszt, patterning after

Berlioz, developed thematic variety; and Wagner employed both the

color of Berlioz and Liszt’s theme-weaving for his profounder and

more poetically dramatic music. Strauss followed all these men,

but returned to pure instrumental forms, avoiding in his later

poems the stringent outlines of the absolute scheme, and being more

eloquent than his predecessors. Macbeth and Don Juan belong, says

Brecher, to the third period of Strauss. Death and Apotheosis is a

reactionary period, as is Guntram—too much Liszt and Wagner, too much

chromaticism. From opus 27 to 34 is the fifth period, nearly all

songs, wonderful songs. Till Eulenspiegel belongs to this arbitrary

grouping, and it closes with Also sprach Zarathustra. The sixth

period opens with Don Quixote and Heldenleben. Beauty is routed by

truth. Even Urban thinks Don Quixote is a colossal joke, written to

astound the Philistines.

But these writers are in sympathy with the composer. The terrible

Hanslick of Vienna is not. He, even at the expense of contradicting

himself, praised Wagner’s melodic gifts as an offset to the more

meagre thematic invention of Strauss. His criticism of Also sprach

Zarathustra is not criticism—it is scarification. He heard the

work in Vienna, on a programme in which figured Weber’s Euryanthe

overture, and the C minor symphony of Beethoven. The good doctor

is a joy to read in these days when politeness has closed critical

mouths. He first drags out the memory of Liszt and stamps on

it—Liszt, who begged from literature his subjects for a symphony, and

“making the alms pass as music.” Strauss goes to philosophy instead

of to poetry. And then he slashes to the right and left of him. It

is capital reading, if not convincing. The tone-poems of Richard

Strauss are a musical refutation of Hanslick’s theories. There is no

“content” in music, he declares; “the egg stands, anyhow,” retorts

Columbus-Strauss!

* * * * *

The Strauss piano music is hardly inviting to any but the most

devoted. Severe in outline, sombre in hue, it leans not to the

sweet intimacies of Chopin or Schumann. Opus 5 is a solo sonata in

B minor, some thirty pages long. I prefer Tschaïkowsky’s effort in

the same form. If it is not as _klaviermässig_, it is more mellow.

Stern, and in the mood Doric, the several movements of the Strauss

sonata are sinewy rather than plastic, though the adagio in E has

some moving moments. The scherzo is light and bright in execution.

The composition will never become popular. In opus 3 there are some

pieces of interest,—five in all,—and here Schumann’s influence is

writ plain. Dense is the pattern, while the ideas are based on a

poetic idea. Two numbers from opus 9, Stimmungsbilder, will please.

They are a tender Träumerei and a delicate lyrical bit called An

Einsamer Quelle. In the latter the harmonic changes recall Wagner.

The most ambitious piano music is the burleske in D minor for piano

and orchestra. This must have been written in 1885, though it bears

no opus number. It is extremely difficult in the solo part, and not

especially grateful. I can recall no one but Eugen d’Albert and

Herr Backhaus as having played it—the latter at the London Strauss

festival of 1903. Here Brahms is to the fore, the very opening bar

of the piano being the theme of Brahms’s first D minor ballade. But

how different the treatment! Bitter, rather airy, more sardonic than

witty, this burleske demonstrates that the Teuton often unbends

as sadly and stiffly as the Briton. Compare the piece with the

incomparable jesting of Scarlatti’s burlesca, that joke which begins

in G minor and ends in D minor! It is the eternal difference between

the Italian and the German. Crabbed I call this burleske. The ’cello

and piano sonata in F is a capital composition, and so is the sonata

in E flat for viola and piano. His concerto for violin and orchestra

in D minor has never received the attention it deserves; and I wish

for the sake of novelty that the beautiful horn concerto, opus 11,

would be given. For the waldhorn Strauss has a natural sympathy.

The lieder literature is important in quality. He has written nearly

a hundred songs, some of them priceless in idea and workmanship. It

is in this form that his friends and enemies have agreed upon his

melodic invention. This refers to the various collections numbered

opus 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, and 34; but I wonder whether

the later collections in opus 39 and opus 41, 43, and 44 are received

with the same enthusiasm. Some of them are harmonically difficult to

grasp, and many are deceptive; when Strauss seems at his simplest, he

is often most irritatingly complex and recondite. But an overflowing

meed of praise must be awarded the opus 15, the lovely serenade in

F sharp from opus 17, several from opus 21 and 27, and all of opus

29. A critic considers O wärst du mein, from opus 26, number 2,

and Sehnsucht, opus 32, as the most beautiful of all. No mood seems

denied Strauss. His exposition of the most exotic is indicative of a

subtle, rather than a sensuous, musical nature. Yet how simply and

naturally he has indicated a primitive emotion in Jungenhexenlied,

opus 39, number 2. The song is a masterpiece. The sturdy power, the

sheer muscularity, of The Workman from the same set, should make

it beloved of manly male singers. Its great, resounding blows in F

minor stir one’s very soul. And its sentiment is that of healthy

anarchy, as befits the text of the poet Richard Dehmel. Death the

Releaser, Leises Lied, and To my Son complete this opus. The last has

a noble ring. The Silent Longing is the capture of an exquisitely

evanescent mood. There are five numbers in opus 41,—a Cradle Song;

In der Campagna; On the Shore,—full of introspective beauty, a

dashing, vagabondish song; Brother Good-for-nothing; and Whisp’ring

Songs. In all the music seeks the emotional curve, in all is there

absolute fidelity to the poetic theme—that is, fidelity as the

composer conceives it. Of mere sensuous or decorative music-making

there is none. Strauss is ever beset by the idea; whether dramatic,

metaphysical, or romantic-lyric, the idea takes precedence of the

sound that clothes it. So there is little pretence of form, little

thought of vocal exigencies, while the piano accompaniments are

the most difficult ever written. If he hammers out epics in his

orchestral compositions, in his lyrics he is the patient, curious

master of miniature, the ivory worker of shapes exotic.

* * * * *

Guntram, for which Strauss wrote his own book, the first opera of

this composer, is not familiar to Americans. It was never a great

success, despite its earnestness and indisputable depth. Modelled

on Wagnerian lines, it has for a subject the doings of The Fighters

for Love, an order of knights, which, Parsifal-like, in the middle

of the thirteenth century wars for the Cross and Brotherly Love; but

with song and not with sword. Guntram, the hero, is a Fighter for

Love, and his adventures and passion for Freihild form the basis of

the book. The preludes to Acts I and II have been played in this

country. The first is a lovely scheme of orchestration, Wagnerian

in texture, and celebrates the yearning desire which the singers

have consecrated to art and to the Cross. The second prelude is a

brilliant, joyous picture of a Festival of Victory. The form and

development are absolutely free. It is interesting to note, on the

last page of the first prelude, an essential-turn that comes straight

from Götterdämmerung. Strauss employs it with skill as a pregnant

motive. While it is too short for concert performance, the prelude

of the last act is the embodiment of yearning and rich in harmonic

life. The great duo of Guntram and Freihild and Guntram’s farewell

are noble specimens of dramatic writing. Nevertheless the work lacks

big wings.

Two later compositions of Strauss, bearing the opus number 42, are

for Männerchor,—Liebe and Altdeutsches Schlachtlied, both after

Herder. Two sixteen-voiced mixed _choruses a capella_ are also

announced. Enoch Arden, opus 38, is a melodrama for piano and

recitative. It is an interesting experiment, being melodious and

effective. Written for von Possart the German tragedian, the weight

of the work falls upon the reader.

At the seventy-seventh Netherrhenish Music Festival in

Aix-la-Chapelle, June, 1900, Strauss produced two Grössere Gesänge,

opus 44, for low voice and orchestra. Decidedly here the bust is in

the orchestra, the pedestal—! The Rückert and Richard Dehmel are the

poets levied upon—the first represented by his Nächtlichtergang, the

other by a Notturno.

Strauss occasionally indulges in flashes of sly humor. Here is a

footnote he appends to his song opus 31, number 2, Wenn:—

Should any singers think of singing this song, while the nineteenth

century is still in existence, the composer would advise them to

transpose it from this point, a half-tone lower (_i.e._ into E

flat), so that the composition may thus end in the key in which it

began.

Fuersnot, a Singgedicht in one act, book by Ernst von Wolzogen, music

by Richard Strauss, was produced at the Royal Opera House, Dresden,

November 21, 1901. The libretto is founded on a Netherland story,

entitled, The Fire Famine at Oudenaerde. Emil Paur introduced several

excerpts, sonorous, brilliant music, at a Philharmonic concert.

* * * * *

When questioned about his future plans Strauss replied: “I have made

a musical setting to Uhland’s Taillefer for chorus, soli, and full

orchestra. I am surprised that musicians have not availed themselves

of this fresh, magnificent poem before—at least I have heard of no

setting. Altogether one admires Uhland too little these days. When

I was younger I neglected reading him very much; but now I find one

beauty after another in his writing. I also have material for two

symphonic poems, but don’t know which one I shall use—if indeed I

finish any—now. It usually takes two years before a composition

begins to assume form with me. At first there comes to me an idea—a

theme. This rests with me for months; I think of other things and

busy myself with everything but it; but the idea is fermenting of

its own accord. Sometimes I bring it to mind, or play the theme on

the piano, just to see how far it has progressed—and finally it is

ready for use. You see, therein lies the real art of creation—to

know exactly when an idea is ripe, when one can use, must use it.

More and more I cling to the belief that we conscious people have

no control over our creative power. For instance, I slave over a

melody and encounter an obstacle which I cannot surmount, however I

try. This during the course of an evening; but the next morning the

difficulty has surrendered itself, just as though my creative forces

had toiled at it over night. Several years ago I told a friend that I

meant to compose a symphonic poem, Spring. He repeated my remark, and

at the making up of the next music festival programme my Spring was

placed and I was asked to conduct it! The work is not even composed

yet, despite the great number of themes and sketches I have for it.

In fact, I don’t know when I will compose it—if at all. Sometimes a

theme occurs first to me, and I find the poetic mate to it later; but

at others the poetic idea begins to take on musical form. I may even

compose an opera soon. A young Vienna poet has suggested a libretto

which appeals to me very much. A libretto of my own is also receiving

some consideration from me.

“The old metre of poetry, the iambic and trochiac rhythms—also the

rhyme—are useless in music, because the latter has an entirely

different rhythm, and this must necessarily destroy that of poetry

when the two are joined. According to my opinion, the most available

forms are the Nibelungen verses or a free prose. Why cannot music

express philosophy? Metaphysics and music are sisters. Even in music

one can express a view point, and if one wishes to approach the World

Riddle, perhaps it can be done with the aid of music. Is not the

third act of Tristan transcendental philosophy purely? Lastly, my

next tone-poem will illustrate ‘a day in my family life.’ It will be

partly lyrical, partly humorous—a triple fugue, the three subjects

representing papa, mamma, and the baby!” This latter is the Sinfonia

Domestica of which the first performance anywhere, was announced for

March 9, 1904, at Carnegie Hall, New York City.

Jean Marnold, the acute critic of the _Mercure de France_, calls

attention to the “melody of Strauss, which is frankly diatonic,

the tonal character definitely determined.” This statement will

be challenged by those who take the composer’s middle period as a

criterion of his chromatic tendencies. But examine the later themes,

and we are forced to agree with M. Marnold. Arthur Symons finds that

Strauss is cerebral. He writes: “Strauss is what the French call _un

cérébral_, which is by no means the same thing as a man of intellect.

_Un cérébral_ is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion

transforms itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transfigured

by emotion. Strauss has written a Don Juan without sensuality, and

it is in his lack of sensuality that I find the reason of his

appeal. All modern music is full of sensuality, since Wagner first

set the fevers of the flesh to music. In the music of Strauss the

Germans have discovered the fever of the soul. And that is indeed

what Strauss has tried to interpret.” W. J. Henderson is open to

conviction. He wrote:—

“It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future.

He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in

orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent

attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more

definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an

advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much

imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which

genius understands genius.”

Edward E. Ziegler discerns that Richard Strauss is “a master of music

mathematics and one who is composing music for the present. It is an

easy evasion,” he adds, “to shift the responsibility for what the

living generation cannot easily or will not willingly grasp and to

proclaim that such intricate writing is for the future. But music has

ever reflected life, and no other composer has so nearly approached

a musical expression of our time as has Strauss. The febrile unrest,

the neurotic striving of the hour, all have their musical equivalent

in his greater compositions. Plying the stress of emphasis as

Strauss does is characteristic of the present as is typical his

use of the enormous orchestra. All life has become agitated by the

exaggeration of the hour. It needed but a master like Strauss to

express this truth in music.”

August Spanuth holds that “Richard Strauss may be a monstrous

phenomenon, yet he embodies the domineering spirit of modern music.

For more than two centuries composers have endeavored to vindicate

the cause of programme-music, which the staunch old champions of

‘absolute music’ have fought from the outset. However, after the

efforts of Berlioz and Liszt, Richard Strauss has succeeded in

reversing the question, making it read thus: Is there a future

left for instrumental music outside of the descriptive, pictorial,

illustrative, suggestive, and philosophizing music of to-day?”

Ernest Newman, in a masterly article, concludes with this telling

passage:—

... This kind of music adds to our knowledge of man and the world

as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoy. Certainly

to any one who knows Strauss’s music to Don Quixote, the story

of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story

itself, indeed, has not one tithe of the humor and the profound

sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in

this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. And

here at last we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived

Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have

previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute

creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody

is now seen to be, not a failing, but a magnificent gift. It is

the prose of music—a grave, flexible, eloquent prose. His style

is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as

it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to

life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment

of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect

compromise of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. “I can

conceive,” says Flaubert, in one of his letters, “a style which

should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days,

in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as

verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations,

modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which

would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on

which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were,

in a boat with a good wind aft.”

No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical

style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and

intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to

the realistic description of character and _milieu_ which is his

mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner

_manqué_ nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new

order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The

only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes

says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings.

Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the one sign of new and

independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us

on to the discussion of fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology,

and of form.

V

Richard Strauss is the most intellectual of musicians. Saint-Saëns

pointed out long ago the master part harmony would play in the

music of the future, and Strauss realized the theory that melody

is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of tone; his master works

are architectural marvels. In structure, in rhythmical complexity,

in striking harmonies, ugly, bold, brilliant, dissonantal, his

symphonic poems are without parallel. Berlioz never dared, Liszt

never invented, such miracles of polyphony, a polyphony beside

which Wagner’s is child’s play and Bach’s is outrivalled. And this

learning, this titanic brushwork on vast and sombre canvases, are

never for formal music’s sake; indeed, one may ask if it is really

music, and not a new art. It is always intended to mean something,

say something, paint some one’s soul; it is an attempt to make

the old absolute music new and articulate. This flies in the face

of Schopenhauer, who declared music to be a presentative, not a

representative, art. In his gallery of psychological portraiture

Strauss becomes a sort of musical Dostoïevsky. He divines,

Maeterlinck-like, the secret tragedy of existence, and paints with

delicacy, with great barbaric masses, in colors that glow, poetic and

legendary figures which yield up their souls to the psychological

genius who questions them. I call the tendency of Strauss _décadent_,

like Wagner’s; both men build up their pictures by a multitude of

infinitesimal touches; both men decompose their themes,—and this is

the highest art of the decadence. Unity is sometimes absent, and also

the power that makes for righteousness, which we find in Beethoven’s

music.

Touching on the moral of this new dispensation in art, I may confess

that I am puzzled by its absolute departure from the ethic of

Christianity. It is not precisely a pagan code that Strauss presents

in his splendid laconic manner; rather is it the ethic of Spinoza

ravished by the rhetoric of Nietzsche. Affirmation of the will, not

its denial, is both preached and practised by this terrible composer.

For him the ineluctable barrier of barriers is the return to

simplicity, the return to the people. He may be simple in his complex

way, and he may sympathize lyrically with the proletarian; yet he

is the aristocrat of aristocrats in art; and his art, specialized,

nervous, and alembicated, may be the call to arms of lonely, proud

souls that refuse to go to the people as did Tolstoy. With Ibsen’s

Brand, not Tolstoy’s, Levin is Strauss in closer communion. And he

may hold the twentieth century in his hand.

During his Italian trip Strauss wrote Aus Italien, opus 16, a

symphonic fantasia that has been heard in America with delight.

It is fresh, vigorous, even somewhat popular, in themes, and

characteristically colored. The orchestration was the envy of the

younger men. Italia was first given in Munich in 1887 under Strauss.

His violin sonata, opus 18, was composed the same year. Then followed

fast the series of daring orchestral frescos that placed the name

of Strauss at the very forefront of living composers. And yet how

un-German his music seems, hatched though it be from the very nest of

the classics! Strauss is not of the same blood as the Vienna dance

composers. He has written a valse; but who could compare the light,

voluptuous Danube music to the ecstatic scarlet dance of the Overman

in Also sprach Zarathustra! Despite the fact that it is preceded only

by Italia, Macbeth, and Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung gives us _in

esse_ all the overpowering qualities of Strauss, chiefest of them

being imagination without the ugliness detected by sensitive natures

in later compositions. Death and Apotheosis is a masterpiece. The

nineteenth century, notwithstanding its devotion to the material,

produced poets and prose masters for whom death had a peculiar

predilection. There is the mystic Maeterlinck, with his sobbing

shadowgraphs of Death the Intruder; Tolstoy, with his poignant

picture of the Death of Iván Illyitch; Arnold Böcklin, that Swiss

master, who sang on elegiac canvas his Toten Insel; and have we not

all read Walt Whitman in his matchless threnody “When lilacs last in

the dooryard bloomed”? It is not strange, then, that Strauss, a lyric

philosopher of the same passionate pattern as Friedrich Nietzsche,

should wrestle with a problem as old as eternity. He does wrestle

with it in his symphonic poem—attacking it in large symbolism, free

from the morbidities of the decadent poets; accomplishes it in a way

that wrings the very heartstrings.

It is the spectacle of a sick man in “a necessitous little chamber”

reviewing his struggles and defeats as the fever cracks his veins and

throttles his life. He has failed as failed Balzac’s Louis Lambert,

as fail all men with lofty ideals. He has reached that “squat tower”

of defeat, death, which Robert Browning chanted in Childe Roland.

To the dark tower he goes, and dauntless at the last, he sets the

slughorn to his lips and blows victory in the very teeth of Death.

Perhaps this most modern of poems gives the key to the Strauss

music better than any other in the English tongue. The dying man

sunken in lethargic slumber, his heart feebly beating in syncopated

rhythms, recalls his childhood, his lusty youth, his mad passion

for life at its thickest. He toils and reaches summits only to hear

the implacable Halt! of destiny. Yet he continues to combat Fate,

but to be laid low. And dying, he triumphs; for his ideal lifts him

to the heights, to “Sun-Smitten Sunium.” He has dared, and daring

conquers. The fable is old—as old as the Prometheus myth. In music

we have it incarnated in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the tonality

of which—C minor, C major—Strauss has adopted. Liszt, too, in his

Tasso, a symphonic setting of Goethe’s tragedy, attempted the same

task, and accomplished it in a brilliant, spectacular fashion.

The thematic grouping of the Strauss poem is simplicity itself

when compared to the towering architectonics of A Hero’s Life and

Thus spake Zarathustra. After a lengthy prologue in which mood,

atmosphere, _Stimmung_ in a word, and echoes of childish babbling are

subtly contrived, the bolt of destruction is let loose, and fever, a

spectre, courses through the allegro. The Ideal motive sounds but in

gasping, broken accents. It is only after the delirium has reached

its climax that a period of repose, an analogy of the lyric period,

is attained. The childhood of the man is lisped naïvely; youth and

its frolicking unconsciousness are aptly portrayed; manly passion

and conflict end the section, for the ominous Halt! is blared out

by the trombones. The development—as in all developments of this

composer—contains miracles of counterpoint buried in passages of

emotional splendor. With cumulative power and pathos we hear a climax

of imposing sonorities; the marchlike motive of the Ideal is given

in all its majesty, and in a C major of rainbow riches the poem

finishes. Strauss has never surpassed the plangency of coloring,

the melting sweetness of this score. He is more philosophic in Also

sprach Zarathustra, more dramatic in Don Juan, more heroic in Ein

Heldenleben; but never has his message been so consoling, never has

he set so vividly over his orchestra the arc of promise. That such

music came forth from his potent youth is a prophecy of an astounding

future. He is the only living issue in music to-day; no other master

has his stride, his stature.

That merry old rogue’s tune, Till Eulenspiegel, is a scherzo-like

rondo picturing the crazy pranks of the historic Tyll Owlglass.

Its grotesque, passionate melancholy, tender violence, its streaks

of broad humor interrupted by mocking pathos, its galloping down a

narrow avenue, at the end of which looms the gibbet, its mockery of

custom, flaunting of the Philistine, and the unrepentant death of

Till,—make it a picture unparalleled in music literature. Scored

brilliantly, the rondo leaves in its trail a whiff of sulphur

and violets. It is fantastic music, fantastically conceived,

fantastically executed.

The score of Also sprach Zarathustra is dated “Begun February 4;

finished August 24, 1896. Munich.” The composer’s words in this

connection must be given:—

“I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s

great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the

development of the human race from its origin, through the various

phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to

Nietzsche’s idea of the Uebermensch.”

Only a musical epitome of the creative processes of the cosmos! The

modesty of Strauss is of a Michelangelo-like magnitude. This new

Faust of music, Nietzsche-Strauss, who would assail the very stars

in their courses, has written some pages in this opus that are of

imposing grandeur. There is an uplifting roar at the opening, an

effect of sunrise—purely imaginary all these musical pictures, yet

none the less startling and credible—as Zarathustra’s trumpets

solemnly intone his motive. These tremendous chords in their naked

simplicity alone proclaim Strauss a man of genius and give him fee

simple to the symphonic heritage of Beethoven and Brahms. The A flat

section is notably melodious and luscious in color. The five-voiced

fugue is ugly yet masterful, and the dance music furious in its

abandonment, corybantic in its revelry. Such laughter has never been

heard in an orchestra. The melodic curve is passional. Strauss is

here tender, dramatic, bizarre, poetic, humorous, ironic, witty,

wicked—simple never. The noble art of simplicity he lacks. This is

the vastest and most difficult score ever penned. It is a cathedral

in tone, sublime and fantastic, with its grotesque gargoyles, hideous

flying abutments, exquisite traceries, prodigious arches, half

gothic, half infernal, huge and resounding spaces, gorgeous façades,

and heaven-splitting spires,—a mighty musical structure! We go to the

rear-world, are in religious transports, are swept on the passional

curves of that fascinating C minor theme “of Joys and Passions” and

repelled by the fugal aspect of Science. There is “holy laughter” and

dancing; the dancing of the midget, man, in the futile, furtive gleam

of sunshine that bridges the Past and the Future with the Present.

Then those twelve bell strokes—“deep eternity” is heard in the

humming of the metal, and the close is of enigmatic tonality. Nothing

as audacious was ever penned by the hand of man—in music.

The Nature theme is ingeniously designed. It is, in the most natural

of tonalities, C major, and consists of C, the fifth, and the

octave above it. The third is missing out of the chord, and this

makes the “tonal sex” of the chord variable. It is, says Merian,

hermaphroditic, as is Nature itself. Major and minor are not yet

divided. And the missing third makes this theme one of the World

Riddle: “It is the sphinx Nature, who is staring at us with empty,

lustreless eyes, inviting confidence, yet awesome.”

In the midst of the dancing orgy of joy sounds the bell of midnight.

This is the final division, The Song of the Night Wanderer.

Nietzsche, in the later editions of his book, gave this chapter the

heading, The Drunken Song; and on the heavy strokes of _Brummglocke_

he wrote:—

ONE!

O man, take heed!

TWO!

What speaks the deep midnight?

THREE!

I have slept, I have slept—

FOUR!

I have awaked out of a deep dream—

FIVE!

The world is deep,

SIX!

And deeper than the day thought.

SEVEN!

Deep in its woe—

EIGHT!

Joy, deeper still than heart sorrow:

NINE!

Woe speaks: Vanish!

TEN!

Yet all joy wants eternity—

ELEVEN!

Wants deep, deep eternity!

TWELVE!

But Strauss chooses this symbol as the time when Zarathustra

begins his journey into eternity. The hour of midnight is the hour

of death, the goal of Zarathustra’s career. This episode is an

emotional parallel to the period when Zarathustra is felled to earth

with conflicting longings. And the Theme of Disgust here stands

forth as the Motif of Death, controlling the scene. Zarathustra’s

earthly death is wonderfully translated into tone. The Theme of

Death struggles with that of earthly strife, and both succumb in a

broken chord of C major. Then without any modulation the Theme of

the Ideal sounds in B major and the transfiguration is achieved.

Again there is a faint reminiscent plea of the conquered themes. The

Theme of the Ideal sways aloft in the higher regions in B major; the

trombones insist on the cryptic unresolved chord of C-E-F sharp; and

in the double basses and celli is repeated C-G-C—the World Riddle.

Emil Paur, ever an ardent Strauss pioneer, produced Also sprach

Zarathustra in New York, December, 1897.

In W. B. Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil, there appears this

characteristic passage: “Have not poetry and music arisen, as

it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their

imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves

and the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of

music or poetry, still cry to us their origin.” The Irish mystic

poet is writing of magic, and I cannot help applying his words to

Richard Strauss, who is the initiator of new art. After hearing

his Till Eulenspiegel conducted by the composer, I was more than

ever impressed by the idea that Strauss is diverting music into

psychologic channels, moulding its plastic forms into shapes that are

really vital, so intense is their personal appeal. Since primitive

man howled his lays to the moon, the art of music has become in

every age more and more definitive; even the classic masters were

not content to play alone with tonal arabesques, but sought to

impress upon their bars a definite mood. In Beethoven the passion

for articulating his meanings literally re-created music. When

Wagner found that he had nothing new to say, he resorted to an old

device—he wedded his music to words. Richard Strauss has now taken

up the chain, the last links of which were so patiently forged by

Franz Liszt. He has at his command all the old enchantments of music;

he can woo and ravish the ear and command the tempests; but this is

not enough. He would have his message still more articulate. He is

a thinker, a philosopher as well as a poet, and deeply religious in

the cosmical sense; he purposes no less a task than the complete

subjugation of men’s imagination. Notes, phrases, groups, movements,

masses of tone are no longer merely sensuous symbols, but the actual

symbols of a language; we must hasten to learn the new speech, which

relates in wonderful tones wonderful things. Tschaïkowsky aimed at

this definiteness, but his passionate, emotional nature clouded the

workings of his intellect. Strauss, too, has had the seven devils of

sensuality in his mansion, but has exorcised them by sheer force of

a great spiritual nature—the man is a spiritualist, a seer in the

broader meanings of these much-worn terms. The vision of approaching

death in his Don Quixote could have been conceived only by one for

whom life and the universe itself were symbols, the living garment by

which we apprehend the Deity.

In our shrewd categories of things intellectual and things emotional,

we partition off too sharply brain and feeling, soul and body.

Life is not a proposition by Euclid; nor is art. It is one of the

functions of music to make us feel, another to make us think; the

greatest masters are ever those who make us both feel and think in

one vivid moment. This Beethoven has done, Wagner has done, and now

Richard Strauss. You cannot call his music frigidly intellectual, as

is often the music of Brahms, nor does it relapse into such debauches

of frenetic passion as Tschaïkowsky’s—the imperial intellect of

Strauss controls his temperament. He is, like Nietzsche, a lyric

philosopher, but never, like Nietzsche, will he allow the problems

of life and art to overthrow his reason. In the thunders of his

scores, I seem to hear the annunciation of a new dispensation, of a

new evangel of art which shall preach the beauty of the soul and the

beauty of body; life on the other side of good and evil.

* * * * *

There are many to whom Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Ein Heldenleben

proved musically baneful. Yet Strauss wears no mask. His own musical

lineaments, convulsed in passion’s grimace, exultant with grandiose

dreams, or distorted by deadly rage, are the naked expression of

his fantastic soul. And to the orthodox his contempt for clear

tonalities, his mockery of the very harmonic foundations of the

art, his juggling with bizarre rhythms—in a word, his avoidance of

the normal, the facile, the smug, and the unoriginal, is as great

a crime against ethics as the lucidly insane proclamations of the

Master Immoralist, Friedrich Nietzsche. Repeated hearings convince

one regarding Strauss’s sincerity. He is working out his own artistic

salvation on his own premeditated lines. He is the solitary soul of

Hauptmann, and he is doomed to mockery until he is understood.

It is impossible to escape the compelling magnetism of the man from

Munich. He is still young, still in his storm and stress period. When

the time for clarification comes, Strauss in this final analysis will

emerge a very big man. His Hero’s Life has its ugly spots—critics

and criticism are objectified in a cruelly sardonic fashion—and that

battlefield will remain for this generation either sheer brutal noise

or else the forefront of the higher æstheticism in music. One way or

the other it matters little; the reputation of Strauss will not stand

or fall by this poem. The main thing to record is the overwhelming

impression of power, anarchistic if you will, that informs Ein

Heldenleben. And all the more disquieting is the discovery that this

Wizard of Dreams wears no antique musical mask—his own is tragic and

significant enough.

And let it be said that for conventional programme music Strauss has

ever manifested a violent aversion. The only clew he gives to his

work is the title. Some commentators do the most mischief, for they

read into this music every imaginable meaning. It is then as absolute

music that Ein Heldenleben may be criticised, though the names of the

various subdivisions give the hearer, if not a key, at least notion

of the emotional trend of this composition. This is the way Richard

Strauss has outlined the scheme of his E flat Symphony, opus 40, his

Eroica:—

I. The Hero. II. The Hero’s Antagonists. III. The Hero’s Consort. IV.

The Hero’s Battlefield. V. The Hero’s Work of Peace. VI. The Hero’s

Retirement from Worldly Life and Strife and Ultimate Perfection. It

must be remembered that this is a purely arbitrary arrangement,

for in the formal sense the ground plan of the symphony would be

thus: The first three sections contain the thematic statements;

the next two—parts four and five—are devoted to the exposition

or free fantasia; the last is a highly elaborate summing up or

coda. Here is the symphonic form in an attenuated shape, the chief

novelty being the introduction in part five—or second division of

the working-out section of new thematic material, modest quotations

from the Strauss earlier symphonic works. There can then be no doubt

as to the identity of the protagonist of this drama-symphony—it is

the glorified image of Richard Strauss. This latter exploitation of

personality need not distress us unnecessarily; Strauss but follows

in the footsteps of Walt Whitman and of his own contemporaries—Rodin,

the sculptor; Gabriel d’Annunzio, in Il Fuoco; Nietzsche, in

Zarathustra; Tolstoy, in all his confessions—despite their inverted

humility; Wagner, in Meistersinger; Franz Stuck, the Munich painter,

whose portrait of his own eccentric self is not the least of his

work. Strauss might appreciatively quote Walt Whitman: “Am I of

mighty Manhattan the son?” as a justification of what paradoxically

could be called his objective egotism. But the composer not only

deifies the normal man, he shadows forth Nietzsche’s supernormal

humanity. He is a very Victor Hugo in his colossal egotism, yet

he names it the ego of mankind. So avoiding all this pother of

philosophy and æsthetics, one is forced to return to the music as

poetic music.

The Hero theme is Beethovian in its diatonic majesty—the

entire section has a Beethoven color, despite its dissonantal

interruptions—while the second section, an amiable picture of the

composer’s adversaries, suggests in a triturated manner the irony,

caricature, and burlesque spirit of Till Eulenspiegel. His critical

adversaries are represented as a snarling, sorry crew, with acrid

and acrimonious souls, duly set forth by the woodwind instruments,

chiefly the oboe; there is also a horrid sounding phrase, empty

fifths for tenor and bass tuba. Then the hero’s wife is pictured

by the solo violin. It is very feminine. It mounts in passion

and interest with the duologue. After that—chaos! It is but the

developing of the foregoing motives. And such an exposition, it

is safe to say, has never been heard since saurians roared in the

steaming marshes of the young planet, or when prehistoric man met in

multitudinous and shrieking combat. Yet the web is polyphonically

spun—spun magnificently. This battle scene is full of unmitigated

horror. One knows that it is the free fantasia, but such a one has

never been conceived before by the mind of man. A battle is not a

peaceful or a pleasant place, especially a modern battlefield. You

can dimly, after several hearings, thread the thematic mazes, but so

discordant are the opposing tonalities, so screaming the harmonies,

and so highly pitched the dynamic scheme, that the normal ear, thus

rudely assaulted, becomes bewildered and finally insensitive. Strauss

has not a normal ear. His is the most marvelous agglomeration of

cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his

powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone

tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of

by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or, rather, overhear,

the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives

us the impression of new overtones, of scales that violate the

well tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones

of Oriental music. And yet there is, besides the barbaric energy

displayed, grandeur in the conception of this extraordinary battle

piece. It evokes the picture of countless and waging hosts; of

forests of waving spears and clashing blades. The din, heat, and

turmoil of conflict are spread over all and the ground piled high

with the slain.

It is all too intricate to grasp at several hearings, though it may

become child’s play for the next generation. Richard Wagner’s case

must not be forgotten at this point. So complex is the counterpoint

of Strauss that one of his commentators recommends the all but

impossible feat of listening to it horizontally and vertically.

In the fifth part we hear themes from the composer’s Don Juan,

Macbeth, Death and Apotheosis, Till Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Don

Quixote, Guntram, and his lovely song, Traum durch die Dämmerung.

With the coda, after some sinister retrospection of an agitated

life, comes peace, pastoral, soul-renewing. And the big E flat chord

that closes the volume is worth the entire composition. It is the

most magnificent and imposing rainbow of tone that ever spanned

the harmonic heavens. Not Wagner’s wonderful C major chord, which

begins the Meistersinger overture, is comparable to the iridescence

of this _Uebermensch’s_ sonorous valedictory. Strauss has not

hesitated to annex some themes from Parsifal and Tristan; there is,

indeed, much Wagner in the score. But do not call this man a madman,

a _décadent_—unless by _décadent_ you mean the expression in its

literary sense as in an undue devotion to the letter at the expense

of the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, and book. He

has great energy, great power of concentration; and his critics—those

he so caustically portrays as snarling and cynical in his very

Till-Eulenspiegel-like second section—those critics, we repeat, must

admit the man’s skill in scoring, in contrapuntal mastery. Whether

all this monumental labor is worth the trouble; whether the very

noticeable disproportion—spiritual and physical—between the themes

and their handling; whether these things are to defy established

canonic conventions and live by virtue of their characteristic

truth and tonal beauty,—are considerations I gratefully relinquish

to the next generation. Naturally there is repellent music in the

score; but then the neo-realists insist on truth, not on the pursuit

of vague and decorative beauty. It is the characteristic _versus_

the ornamental; and who shall dare predict its future success or

extinction? One thing must be insisted upon—the absolute abandonment

of the old musical ideal, else Strauss and his tendencies go by the

board. The well-sounding, the poetic,—in the romantic sense,—are

thrown to the winds in this monstrous orgy; an organized orgy in the

Balzac meaning of the phrase—for Strauss is only mad north-northwest,

and can always tell a harmonic hawk from a hernshaw. In his most

delirious moments he remembers his orchestral palette. And what a

gorgeous, horrible color scheme is his! He has a taste for sour

progressions, and every voice in his orchestral family is forced

to sing impossible and wicked things. He owes much to Beethoven,

Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner,—the Wagner of Tristan and Parsifal,—and

often he compasses both beauty and grandeur.

* * * * *

The Strauss tone-poems are dramas without words. What Tschaïkowsky so

eloquently executed as single figures in the character studies of

Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini, Hamlet, and Manfred, Richard

Strauss expands to the compass of a psychical tonal drama, dispensing

with words, with actions, with the machinery of the stage, just as

the great masters of fiction supplanted the makers of epics and their

supernatural furniture by a synthesis in which action, dialogue,

description, comment, are melted into homogeneous narrative. Every

instrument in the Strauss orchestra is an actor that speaks its lines

solo or during an amazing polyphony. After Don Quixote one need not

be told that Strauss is not a mere Tintoretto of the orchestra; he

is, I am not loath to repeat, both painter and psychologist. As the

greatest narrator in modern prose is Gustave Flaubert, so Richard

Strauss is the greatest of musical narrators. There is no longer any

question of form in the classic sense; every music symbol and device

hitherto known in the art of music is utilized and reënforced by the

invention of numberless methods for driving home to the imagination

the Old-World tale of Don Quixote and his squire. It may be objected

here that the story of Cervantes should suffice without any of the

sonorous exfoliations of this composer. Very true. But Strauss only

uses Don Quixote as he uses Zarathustra or Don Juan, as a type of

something that may be discovered in all humanity. Don Quixote the

perfect dreamer may be the Knight of Cervantes or our next-door

neighbor. More terrible still, he may be our true self masked by the

dull garb of life’s quotidian struggle for bread! And to offset the

fantasy of the knight we have the homely wisdom of Sancho Panza, who,

having barked his shins as well as warmed them at the grate of life,

always speaks by the card. A sensible fool, he is not understood

by the foolish sensitivist, the poet who looks aloft and therefore

misses the prizes beloved of most men.

Why is not this a theme fit for musical development? It has every

element dear to the heart of the poetic composer—fantasy, poetry,

broad, obvious humor, realism, nobility of idea, and an almost

infinite number of surfaces fit for the loving brush of a master

painter. Then there is the psychology. Don Quixote, half-mad,

chivalric withal, must be depicted; as a counterfoil the obese humors

of Sancho Panza are ready for celebration. After subjecting this

pair to the minutest musical scrutiny, their voyages and adventures

must be duly set forth. It is evident that here we are confronted by

many difficulties. It is no longer a question of mere musicianship.

Form is a thing of the grammarians, to be discussed behind closed

doors by persons who believe in musty counterpoint and the rules of

the game. A great vital imagination, defying alike gods and men and

capable of shaping his dreams, a man of humor, malice, irony, above

all else irony, tenderness, pity, and the marrow of life, love,—all

these qualities, plus an infernal (or celestial if you like the word

better) science, must the composer of a Don Quixote possess.

Strauss calls his work “Fantastic variations on a theme, of knightly

character.” For the benefit of the musically pious let me add that

it is in the form—broadly—of a Thema con Variazione and Finale.

Therein Strauss may be said to mock his own idealism, as Heine and

Nietzsche once mocked theirs. The realism is after all a realism of

fantasy; for the narrative deals with what the Knight of the Rueful

Countenance imagined and with what his trusty squire thought of

him. With his characteristic _flair_ for an apt subject, Strauss

recognized in the semi-dream-life of Don Quixote a theme pat for

treatment—and how he has treated it! That magnificent gift of irony,

inherent in every sentence he utters, here expands in a soil worthy

of it. A garden of curious and beautiful flowers—flowers of evil as

well as good—blooms in this score. Its close contains some affecting

and noble pages, as affecting as Tschaïkowsky’s, as dignified and

dramatic as Richard Wagner’s. There is no interruption in the

different sections. Don Quixote is “enacted” by the solo violoncello,

the viola represents Sancho Panza. (Perhaps Strauss indulged in a

sly witticism at the expense of the romantic Berlioz and his viola

solo in Harold in Italy.) We first see—some hear, others see—Don

Quixote reading crack-brained romances of chivalry. There are themes

grandiose, mock heroic and crazy in their gallantry. Queer harmonies

from time to time indicate the profound mental disturbance of the

knight. He envisages the ideal woman; giants attack her; he rushes to

the rescue. The muting of the instruments, tuba included, produces

the idea of slow-creeping madness and a turbulent comminglement of

ideas. Suddenly his reason goes, and with a crazy _glissando_ on the

harps and a mutilated version of the knightly theme the unfortunate

man becomes quite mad. From music to madness is but a step after all.

Don Quixote is now Knight Errant.

Then follows, after a new theme rich in characterization, the theme

of Sancho Panza, for the bass clarinet and bass tuba; later always

on the viola. The fat shoulders, big paunch, the mean, good-natured,

lying, gluttonous, constant fellow are limned with the startling

fidelity that Gustave Doré or Daniel Vièrge attained—for music can

give the sense of motion; it is par excellence the art of narration.

The ten variations which ensue are masterpieces. We no longer ask for

the normal eight-bar euphonious melody, for the equable distribution

of harmonies, for order, rhythm, mass, and logic; but, with suspense

unconcealed, follow the line of the story, amazed, delighted,

perplexed, angered, piqued, interested—always interested by the magic

of the narrator. The adventure with the windmills; the victorious

battle against the host of the great emperor Alifanfaron; dialogues

of Knight and Squire; the meeting with the Penitents and the Knight’s

overthrow; his vigil; the encounter with his Dulcinea; the ride

through the air; the journey in the enchanted boat; the conflict

with the two magicians; the combat with the Knight of the Silver

Moon; and the overthrow of Don Quixote and his death,—are so many

canvases upon which are painted with subtle, broad, ironic, and naïve

colors the memorable history heretofore hinted at. The realistic

effects, notably the use of the wind machine in Variation VII, are

not distasteful. Muted brass in Variation II suggests the plaintive

_m-a-a-h-s_ of a herd of sheep. The grunting of pigs, crowing of

roosters, roaring of lions, and hissing of snakes were crudely

imitated by the classic masters; while in the Wagner music-dramas

may be discovered quite a zoölogical collection. Nor is the wind

machine so formidable as it is said to be. It is an effect utilized

to represent the imaginary flight through the air in a wild gale

of Knight and Squire on a wooden Pegasus. We know that it is pure

imagination, for the growling tremolo of the double basses on one

note tells the listener that the solid earth has really never been

abandoned.

Throughout, there are many ravishing touches of tenderness, of

sincere romance; and the finale is very pathetic. His reason

returns—wonderfully described—and the poor, lovable Knight,

recognizing his aberration, passes gently away. Here Strauss utilizes

a device as old as the hills, and one heard in the B minor symphony

of Tschaïkowsky. It is sort of a _basso ostinato_, the _tympani_

obstinately tapping a tone as the soul of the much-tried man takes

flight. Perhaps the accents of a deep-seated pessimism may be

overheard here—for I believe Richard Strauss too great a nature to

remain content with his successes. He recalls to me in this poem the

little mezzotint of John Martin, where Sadak in search of the waters

of oblivion painfully creeps over the cruel edges of terrifying

abysses to misty heights, upon which still more appalling dangers

await the intrepid soul.

Strauss has only reached the midway of his mortal life. A stylist,

a realist in his treatment of his orchestral hosts, a psychologist

among psychologists, a master of a new and generous culture, a

thinker, above all an interpreter of poetic and heroic types of

humanity, who shall say to him: Dare no further! His audacity is only

equalled by his mental serenity. In all the fury of his fantasy his

intelligence is sovereign over its kingdom.

II

PARSIFAL: A MYSTIC MELODRAMA

I will open my dark saying upon the harp.

—PSALM XLIX.

When a certain famous Wagner conductor was in New York not long

ago, he related to musical friends an astonishing story. He had

seen, he declared, the manuscript autobiography of Richard Wagner

at Wahnfried, in Bayreuth, which is to remain unpublished until the

expiration of a certain period. This conductor did not hesitate

to clear up a mystery that, nevertheless, has been an open secret

in Germany for many years—Wagner’s parentage. The conductor said

that Wagner admitted he was the son of Ludwig Geyer. Ludwig Geyer,

painter, poet, dramatist, composer, actor, stage manager,—a versatile

man in everything,—was of Hebraic ancestry. Wagner, therefore, had

a moiety of the blood, and his son Siegfried more than his father,

for Cosima Liszt (von Bülow) Wagner’s maternal grandparents were

the Jewish bankers Bethmann of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Mr. Henry T.

Finck—whose Wagner biography still remains the standard one in the

language—once remarked upon the fact that at Wahnfried, Bayreuth,

the pictures of Wagner’s mother and Ludwig Geyer may be seen, but

that of his reputed father is not on view. Nietzsche, often a

prejudiced witness when his antipathies are aroused, wrote: “Was

Wagner German at all? We have some reasons for asking this. It is

difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a

great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German—that

is all. His character itself is in opposition to what has been

hitherto regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician!

His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an

Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families.” The above

was written about 1887-1888. Setting aside the statement that Wagner

was un-German as meaningless,—men of genius are generally strangers

to their nation,—the other assertion only shows that Nietzsche was in

possession of the secret. He was an intimate of the Wagner household

and knew its history.

And what does this prove? Only that the genius of Richard Wagner,

tinctured with Oriental blood, betrayed itself in the magnificence

of his pictorial imagination, in the splendor of his music, in its

color, glow, warmth, and rhythmic intensity. It also accounts for his

pertinacity, his dislike of Meyerbeer and Heine and Mendelssohn.

He was essentially a man of the theatre, as was Meyerbeer, though

loftier in his aims, while not so gifted melodically. In sooth, he

owes much to the Meyerbeer opera and the Scribe libretto,—Scribe,

who really constructed one of the first viable dramatic books—withal

old-fashioned—for musical setting.

And nothing is more useless than to pin Wagner down to his every

utterance in poem or speech. As Bernard Shaw has acutely pointed out,

Wagner—versatile, mercurial, wonderful Wagner—was a different being

every hour of the day. He explained matters to suit his mood of the

moment,—a Schopenhauerian one hour, a semi-Christian the next. Liszt,

Glasenapp, Heckel, Feustel, all show different portraits of this

man. A German democrat he was—and a courtier, an atheist, and yet

a mystic. Wagner was all things to all men, like men of his supple

imagination.

He abused conductors for playing excerpts from his music in concert,

and then conducted concerts devoted to his own works. He wrote

pamphlets on every subject, and with the prerogative of genius

contradicted them in other pamphlets. He was not always a Wagnerian,

and at times he differed with himself in the interpretation of his

compositions. He was a genius beset by volatile moods, a very busy

man of affairs, and a much-suffering creature. Wandering about the

world for a half-century did not improve his temper, and yet next

to Nietzsche there is no one whose judgments on Wagner’s music I

would regard with more suspicion than—Richard Wagner’s. He was a

born satirist. He loved to play practical jokes, and it would not be

surprising if some day we should learn that Parsifal was one of his

jokes on an epical scale. Remember how he mocked Mozart and Beethoven

and the symphonic form in his own C major symphony, as if to say,

“I, too, can cover the symphonic canvas!” No, Wagner is a dangerous

authority to quote upon Wagner.

Though Liszt was only two years older than Wagner, he was a musician

of experience when Wagner was still a youth. While at the age of

eighteen Wagner published his first sonata, opus 1, which was written

under the direct influence of Haydn and Mozart, Liszt at the same

age had already sketched a great revolutionary symphony, the slow

movement of which, on Liszt’s own showing, has survived in his eighth

symphonic poem, Héróïde Funèbre. By reference to these two early

works, it is easy to determine which of these two masters was the

first to open up new paths. Similarly we find that, during the Rienzi

period, Liszt had already adopted new forms for his compositions of

that date. In Wagner’s later works there often appear themes which

note for note have been anticipated by Liszt. Compare, for their

thematic formation, musical construction, and general coloring,

Orpheus and Tristan and Isolde, the Faust symphony and Tristan, the

Faust symphony and Die Walküre, Benediction de Dieu dans le Solitude

and Isolde’s Liebestod, Die Ideale and the Ring,—Das Rheingold in

particular,—Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlacht and Kundry-Ritt,

The Legend of Saint Elizabeth and Parsifal, Christus and Parsifal,

Excelsior and Parsifal, not to mention many others.

The principal theme of the Faust symphony is to be found in Die

Walküre, and one of its most characteristic themes appears note

for note as the _Blick_ motive in Tristan and Isolde. The Gretchen

motive in Wagner’s A Faust Overture is also derived from Liszt,

and the opening theme of the Parsifal prelude closely follows the

earlier written Excelsior of Liszt. It was during a rehearsal at

Bayreuth in 1876 that Wagner suddenly seized Liszt by the arm and

exclaimed, “Now, papa, here comes a theme which I got from you!”

“All right,” replied the amiable Liszt, “one will then at least

hear it.” The theme in question is the one in the fifth scene of

the second act, which serves to introduce and accompany Sieglinde’s

dream-words, “Kehrte der Vater nun heim?” This theme—see page 179 of

Kleinmichael’s piano score—appears at the beginning of Liszt’s Faust

symphony, which Wagner had heard at a festival of the Allgemeiner

Deutscher Musik Verein in 1861, and during which he burst forth with

these words, “Music furnishes us with much that is beautiful and

sublime; but _this_ music is divinely beautiful.” Wagner owed much to

Liszt besides money, sympathy, and a wife.

Even in the matter of the Niebelungenlied Wagner was anticipated

by Friedrich Hebbel, whose somewhat prosaic dramatic version was

first given at Weimar, in the Grand Ducal Theatre, May 16, 1861. The

author’s wife, a well-known actress, essayed the principal rôle. A

critic said of this Trilogy, “No one hitherto has collated the whole

dramatic treasure of the Niebelung legends and made it playable upon

the modern stage.” Yet, who to-day remembers Hebbel, and who does not

know Wagner’s Trilogy?

But this indebtedness of one genius to another is often sadly

misinterpreted. Handel helped himself, in his accustomed royal

manner, to what he liked, and the tunes of many composers whose names

are long since forgotten are preserved in his scenes like flies in

amber. Shakespeare did not hesitate to appropriate from Plutarch and

Montaigne, from Bandello and Holinshed,—yet he remains Shakespeare.

Wagner, perhaps, was not cautious; and Liszt is too important a

composer to have been thus treated, too important, and also too much

of a contemporary. Why should we cavil? Wagner made good use of his

borrowings, and it is in their individual handling and development

that he still remains Richard Wagner.

Richard Strauss once said: “How necessary to every composer who

writes for orchestra the contact with that body is, I will show you

in one example. It is well known that when Wagner conducted for the

first time Lohengrin, many years after its completion, he exclaimed,

‘Too much brass!’ In his exile he also wrote Tristan and Isolde, a

tone-poem which makes over-great demands upon the orchestra and the

singers. Parsifal, however, he wrote at Bayreuth. He had regained

intimate feeling again with the orchestra and the stage. Hence I

recognize in Parsifal a model of instrumental reserve.”

This quite bears out Arthur Symons’s contention that the best way

to study a great artist is in the works of his decline, when his

invention is on the wane. Another thing, and this should settle the

controversy over that much discussed phrase, “Bühnenweihfestspiel,”

Hanslick, Wagner’s heartiest opponent, wrote in 1882: “I must say

at once that the ecclesiastic scenes in Parsifal did not at the

performance produce nearly as offensive an effect as they do on

one who merely reads the text-book. The actions we see are of a

religious character, but with all their dignified solemnity they are

nevertheless not in the style of the church, but entirely in the

operatic style. Parsifal is and remains an opera, even though it be

called a Bühnenweihfestspiel.”

Touching on the acrimonious controversy over Parsifal’s blasphemy,

I may only say—to every one their belief. No one is forced to see

the melodrama, for a mystic melodrama it is, with the original

connotations of the phrase. The entire work is such a jumble of

creeds that future Bauers, Harnacks, Delitzsches, and other ethical

archæologists will have a terrible task if the work is taken for a

relic of some tribal form of worship among the barbarians of the then

remote nineteenth century. Here in America, the Land of the Almighty

Hysteria, this artificial medley of faded music and grotesque forms

is sufficiently eclectic in character to set tripping the feet of

them that go forth upon the mountains in search of new, half-baked

religions.

* * * * *

And now to a complete analysis of the work, an analysis, be it said,

first made at Bayreuth in August, 1901. That it may prove unpleasant

reading for some I do not doubt. I only hope that I shall not be

accused of artistic irreverence. The personal equation counts for

something in criticism. I cannot admire Parsifal, and I am giving my

reasons for this dislike. There is no reason why the criticism that

has so royally acclaimed the beauty of Wagner’s other music-dramas

should be suspected in the case of Parsifal. Why should Parsifal be

hedged as if of “sacred character”? If you tell a Parsifalite that

the opera is blasphemous, he proves volubly, ingeniously, that it

is pure symbolism, that Saracenic, Buddhistic, any but Christian,

ceremonial is employed. But if you turn the tables, and assert that

Parsifal is not sacred, that it should be enjoyed and criticised

like Tristan and Isolde, the Parsifalite quickly jumps the track

and exclaims, “Sir, there is sacred atmosphere in Parsifal, and

not in Tristan!” Oh, this sacred atmosphere! It is worse than

Nietzsche’s Holy Laughter! The question may be summed up thus: If

Parsifal is blasphemous, it should not be tolerated; if it is not

a representation of sacred matter, then we have the privilege of

criticising it as we do a Verdi or a Meyerbeer opera; and Meyerbeer

was an inveterate mocker of religious things—witness Les Huguenots,

Robert le Diable, Le Prophète. How about Halévy’s La Juive? Parsifal,

so it appears to me, is more morbid than blasphemous.

Ready-made admiration is dangerous. It behooves us to study Parsifal

for ourselves, and not accept as gospel the uncritical enthusiasms

of the Wagnerite who is without a sense of the eternal fitness of

things. One ounce of humor, of common sense, puts to flight the

sham ethical and the sham æsthetical of the Parsifal worshippers.

And level-headed study should prove of profit. The composition is a

miracle of polyphonic architecture—and it is also the weakest that

its creator ever planned.

PARSIFAL

Parsifal a vaincu les filles, leur gentil

Babil et la luxure amusante et sa pente

Vers la chair de garçon vierge que cela tente

D’aimer les seins légers et ce gentil babil.

Il a vaincu la femme belle au cœur subtil

Étalant ces bras frais et sa gorge excitante;

Il a vaincu l’enfer, et rentre dans sa tente

Avec un lourd trophée à son bras puéril.

Avec la lance qui perça le flanc suprême!

Il a guéri le roi, le voici roi lui-même

Et prêtre du très-saint trésor essentiel;

En robe d’or il adore, gloire et symbole,

Le vase pur où resplendit le sang réel,

—Et, ô ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole.

—PAUL VERLAINE.

I

THE BOOK

Parsifal was published in book form on December 25, 1877. The

first act was completed during the winter of 1877-1878, and the

instrumentation of the prelude finished by December 25, 1878. The

spring and summer of 1878 were devoted to the second act, a sketch

of which was prepared October 11 of the same year. The third act

was finished by April 25, 1879, and from 1878 to 1882 the gigantic

task of orchestration was undertaken. In the copying of this Wagner

was assisted by the late Anton Seidl and Engelbert Humperdinck.

The entire first act was not completed until the spring of 1880.

In a villa near Naples he finished the second act, with its garden

scene; and in Palermo, January 13, 1882, the sacred music-drama

was given its final form. July 28 of the same year Parsifal was

first performed at Bayreuth, with Materna as Kundry, Winklemann as

Parsifal, Reichmann as Amfortas; Kindermann sang the phrases allotted

to Titurel, and Scaria was Gurnemanz. The Klingsor was Karl Hill.

Hermann Levi conducted. Thus much for dry statistics.

“Besides my Siegfried,” Wagner wrote August 9, 1849, to Uhlig, “I

have in my mind two tragic and two comic subjects; but not one of

them seems to me to be suitable for the French stage. I have just

found a fifth one; it is indifferent to me in what language it will

appear first; it is Jesus of Nazareth. I have the intention to offer

it to the French and thus to get rid of the whole affair, for I

foresee the indignation this project will excite in my collaborator.”

Wagner’s plan was to make a play in which Christ would be tempted

by Mary Magdalen. This idea was abandoned. With the conception of

Tristan and Isolde came the scheme for a Parsifal. He wrote of this

to Liszt in 1876, being full of Schopenhauer and Buddhism at the

time. The Victors was the sketch found among his papers, the hero

of which is the Eastern prince Ananda, who rejects the love of the

beautiful Princess Prakriti, and by this act of renunciation achieves

his and the woman’s redemption. Parsifal is not far removed from

this sketch. In 1857 near Zurich Wagner became obsessed by the idea,

and on a Good Friday the genesis of Parsifal occurred. In 1864 this

sketch, at the request of Ludwig II, was carefully developed, and

became the complete music-drama.

Wagner has rooted his story in the old legends and history of Wolfram

von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troies. The latter wrote his poem

in 1175, Perceval the Gaul; or, the Story of the Grail; the former

was composed between 1201 and 1210. But the story was centuries old

before Chrétien handled it, its origin probably being Provençal. And

before that it may have sprung from the Moorish, from the Egyptian,

from the Indian, from the very beginnings of literature, for it is

but the old story of might warring against right, evil attempting

to seduce good. It crops out in a modified form in the Arthurian

cycle, for the Round Table and the Grail are united in one. Whether

Perceval, Parzival, or Parsifal, we find the guileless young hero

fighting against wrong and resisting evil. There is even a Romance

of Peredur to be found in the Mabinogion or Red Book, a collection of

Welsh romances. Some believe this Peredur to be the prototype of the

French Perceval. In all these poems there is a Kundry, or Kondrie,

or Orgeleuse, a sorceress; and a King who has sinned—Le Roi Pécheur.

The Knighthood of the Grail is a consecrated community that worships

the sang-real, the precious blood of Jesus Christ, which some say was

caught up in a goblet after the soldier Longinus pierced the side of

the Saviour on Calvary. This lance also plays an important part in

the poems, and in Wagner’s music-drama. Montsalvat is a beautiful

temple in a far-away land—presumably Spain—where the knights of the

Grail, or Graal, meet to receive spiritual nourishment from the holy

chalice containing God’s blood. Every year a white dove descends

from heaven to lend new powers and strength to the miraculous vase

inclosing the blood. These knights are vowed to chastity, and it was

a sin against chastity committed by Amfortas that caused the monarch

all his suffering. Kundry it was who tempted the King. Klingsor, the

enchanter, a eunuch by his own act, prompts Kundry to all this evil.

Gurnemanz, the aged servitor of the Grail, and Titurel, the dead

King, though miraculously alive, father of Amfortas, make up the rest

of the characters in this strange drama of pity and renunciation.

Wagner saw many opportunities in the legends and poems, and as

was his wont synthesized them in the shape we know as Parsifal.

His Parsifal is a born innocent, a pure fool. Wagner pretended to

derive the word from Parsi-fal or Fal-Parsi—_i.e._ Pure Fool—born

after the death of his father, Gamuret, and living alone with his

mother, Herzeleide, in the woods. Attracted by a cavalcade of shining

knights he follows it and finally enters the domain of the Grail.

Let us leave him there and consider that curious composition of the

poet-musician—Kundry. Wagner found some of her characteristics in the

old poems, but to him belongs the credit of creating the woman we see

in his drama. She is Kundry the enchantress, Herodias, who laughed

at Christ, who had John the Baptist beheaded—“she is said to have

laughed when she bore aloft the head,” and it breathed upon her, thus

condemning her to eternal wandering. Besides this, Kundry is also

Gundryggia of the Northern nymphs, the slaying Valkyr. A type of the

eternal temptress, and yet a Magdalen, Wagner calls her the Rose of

Hell, the She Devil, a tempestuous spirit, a perpetual seducer. She

is under Klingsor’s rule, though she humbly serves the Grail Knights

in their estate when she is not asleep. Asleep, Klingsor can summon

her as he wills, and then, instead of the Beneficent Kundry, she

becomes the Demon Kundry.

Now follows the story of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, which I condense

with the help of Maurice Kufferath’s version and from the epitomes of

von Wolzogen, Albert Heintz, and many others. It is assumed before

the curtain rises that the spectator is acquainted with the tale

of the foolish lad Parsifal and his roaming in the forest, bow and

arrow in hand, in pursuit of the “shining men mounted upon noble

steeds.” He loses his way and enters the region of the Grail. At

this point the curtains part and we see a deep wood in a mountainous

district. The book of the play tells us of the scene of action:

“The domains and Castle Montsalvat of the Guardian of the Grail,

with scenery characteristic of the northern mountains of Gothic

Spain. Later Klingsor’s enchanted castle on a southern slope of the

same mountains, looking toward Moorish Spain.” The scene in Act I

represents a clearing upon the border of a beautiful lake. It is

morning. Stretched in slumber upon the ground are Gurnemanz, a pious,

hale old servant of the Grail, and two squires. Brass music awakens

them, and after prayer they prepare to attend the King Amfortas, who

is at the very moment approaching the lake for his bath—he suffers

cruelly from his wound. Two knights appear and inform the others of

this suffering. The balsam of Gawain is without effect. Suddenly

there appears on the edge of the forest a terrible figure. It is

Kundry. Wagner thus indicates her appearance: “in wild garb fastened

high with a hanging girdle of snakes’ skins; black hair, flowing in

loose tresses; dark brown, reddish complexion, piercing black eyes,

at times flaming wildly, but oftener fixed as in death.” She brings

from Arabia a balsam to soothe the King’s pain. Enter Amfortas. He

seeks the cool of the forest after his night of agony. The lake,

too, will give him some surcease to his pain. But Gurnemanz knows

better: “But One thing helpeth—One the helper,” he mutters. Amfortas

repeats the prophecy that once in letters of fire appeared about the

rim of the Grail vase: “Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Thor, harre

sein, den ich erkor;” that is, “By pity waken’d the blameless Fool,

him await my chosen tool.” The King longs for death. Kundry offers

him the balsam. “Of what use the balm? All is useless; rather a bath

in the waters of the lake.” The litter bearing the royal sufferer

moves sadly and slowly away, while Kundry crouches down like a hunted

wild animal. The squires tease her until Gurnemanz recalls to them

that even beasts are sacred within the territory of the Grail. Then

follows a long recital by the elder man, who, in reply to questions,

relates the story of Amfortas and his sin.

Klingsor, enraged at being denied admission to the Order of the

Grail after his mad act of self-mutilation, raised by his infernal

arts a magic castle and gardens not far from Montsalvat. This he

filled with lovely girls, who tempted the Knights of the Round Table.

Amfortas resolved to destroy this Castle of Perdition. Armed with

the sacred lance which pierced the Saviour’s side he laid siege to

Klingsor’s abode. Unluckily for him a supernaturally beautiful woman,

Kundry, was sent by Klingsor,—whose heart was black with envy,—and

waylaid by her Amfortas succumbed to her fascinations. As he was

clasped in her embrace the spear dropped and was seized by Klingsor,

who gave him a fatal thrust in the side. No alleviation was there

for this pain. Even the mystic bread which he occasionally dared to

dispense to his knights did not bring ease. Klingsor kept the sacred

spear, and by its aid hoped some day to capture Montsalvat itself.

When Gurnemanz finishes this harrowing tale the four squires kneel

and sing the above prediction, “Durch Mitleid wissend.” Cries are

suddenly heard, and knights rush in to inform their horrified hearers

that a blasphemer has dared to enter the sacred park and shoot one

of the swans. The culprit is dragged in. It is Parsifal, with his

bow and arrow. The swan lies in death throes before him. While

vainly endeavoring to discover his name, his identity, Gurnemanz

reproaches him for having shed innocent blood, and points out to him

the heinousness of his offence. Parsifal is overcome with shame—and

pity. Here is first indicated the cardinal trait of his character.

He relates to Gurnemanz the little he knows of his early life—with

which the reader is already acquainted—and tells of his mother

Herzeleide. Kundry sneeringly interrupts. His mother is dead from

sorrow at her boy’s desertion. Parsifal, raging, throws himself upon

the woman, but is dragged away. The truth forcing itself upon him, he

grows faint and is revived by water from a spring. At this juncture

Kundry grows sleepy. Well she knows—though the others do not—that

her master is about to summon her. Filled with despair she staggers

into the bushes and is seen no more. Gurnemanz, his heart revived by

the pure foolishness of the lad, begins to hope anew, and the King’s

litter returning to the palace, he again questions Parsifal. “What

is the Grail?” asks in turn the youth. Then the pair appear to move

slowly, and the scene changes, to the accompaniment of the sombre

“Verwandlungsmusik,” from the forest to rocky galleries, finally to

the Byzantine hall of the Holy Grail. All this is accomplished by

scenery which moves in grooves. Parsifal questions Gurnemanz as to

this phenomenon. “I slowly tread, yet deem myself now far,” he says.

“Thou seest, my son, to space time changeth here,” answers Gurnemanz,

which is a choice metaphysical morsel for the admirers of Kant and

Schopenhauer.

Now begins the most solemn scene of the music-drama. To the pealing

of bells, the intoning of trumpets and trombones, the scene of the

Holy Grail is inaugurated. Into the vast hall files the cortége of

the sick monarch, and the Grail Knights, wearing white coats of

arms, a dove embroidered upon a red mantle, advance in double lines

and group themselves about the table. They chant, and boys’ voices

from the middle part of the dome reply, while children’s voices in

the cupola high above join in a celestial chorus. After a profound

silence the voice of Titurel issues from his tomb behind the throne.

The dead man is revived by the potency of the Grail. He bids his

erring son to perform the sacred office, to uncover the Holy Grail.

Then follows a dramatic episode. Conscious of his unworthiness and

showing his bleeding side, Amfortas long resists the request of his

father. It is a part of his expiation that, sinner as he is, he must

officiate at the solemn sacrifice. His protests are not heeded. The

children’s voices from the cupola recall the prediction, “Durch

Mitleid wissend.” Exhausted, pale, and suffering untold agonies,

Amfortas lifts the crystal vase, the Grail. A ray of piercing pure

light falls from above on the chalice—the hall is now dark—which

becomes luminous and glows with purple splendor. Amfortas sings,

“Take this bread, it is my flesh; take this wine, it is my blood

which love has given thee.” The singing by the various choirs breaks

forth anew, and as daylight returns the holy ceremonies conclude

with the kiss of peace by the brethren. The King is carried away,

the knights withdraw as the voices from the cupola sing, “Happy in

faith, Happy in love.” Parsifal, who has been staring about him all

this time, is interrogated by Gurnemanz. The latter has not noticed

the convulsive start made by the pure fool when he sees Amfortas fall

back upon his couch. Pity has entered his heart, though he is not

able to voice this sentiment to Gurnemanz. The latter, angered by

such seeming stupidity, thrusts him roughly from the hall, bidding

him go seek a goose for his gander. Then, saddened by this fresh

disappointment, the old man stands alone in the hall. Like a gleam of

hope an alto voice from the mysterious height repeats the prediction,

“Durch Mitleid wissend,” and is joined by boys’ voices. To this music

the curtains close.

As in the Rheingold, where Nibelheim follows Walhalla, Wagner

gains a violent contrast by placing the action of the second act

in Klingsor’s dread castle. The scene represents the magician’s

laboratory—a sort of Faust-like chamber at the top of a tower. The

place is in semi-darkness, a well-like abyss to the left evoking a

feeling of anticipation. A narrow staircase ascends to an aperture

in the wall, an azure slit of the sky being revealed. The floor is

strewn with implements of sorcery, and on the steps Klingsor, an

Arabian, and fierce looking man with a black beard, is seated gazing

into a wizard’s metallic mirror. By its aid he perceives Parsifal

approaching the castle, having already forgotten his experiences in

Montsalvat and haled by Klingsor’s spell. With a cry of satisfaction

the magician leaves his vantage post, descends, and approaches the

chasm. Throwing incense into it he begins his cabalistic spells; “Up,

Kundry, ascend from the gulf! Come to me. Thy master calls thee, thou

nameless one, primal fiend, rose of hell! Thou who wert Herodias, and

what more! Once Gundryggia, now Kundry; up, up, to thy master; obey

him who has sole power over thee!”

A lovely woman appears enveloped in a misty veil. It is Kundry. She

screams, a blood-curdling scream which modulates into a feeble,

whimpering moan. The dialogue which ensues is not a pleasing one.

Klingsor berates the woman for serving the knights like a beast of

burden, as reparation for her crime against Amfortas. She sneers at

his lost powers, and absolutely refuses to seduce the approaching

Parsifal. But in vain she resists her master. A sound of battle is

heard. Single-handed, Parsifal, without, routs the feeble, enslaved

knights of Klingsor. From his window in the battlements the wizard

views the strife with satisfaction. He would be pleased to see his

weak servitors killed by this robust, handsome youth. Kundry vanishes

to prepare for her fell work of destruction. The tower sinks to

strange, thunderous noises, and we behold Parsifal in a many-colored

tropical garden, dense with flowers of an unearthly hue and splendor.

Almost immediately he is surrounded by girls, living flowers who

coquet, tease, and lure him to ravishing music. The scene is a gay

one. Parsifal repulses one group after another, when suddenly a voice

sings, “Parsifal, stay.” He is deeply moved. “Parsifal? Thus once my

mother called me.” He remembers his name at last. Thus does Wagner

subtly indicate the growing knowledge that passion reveals. A scene

of temptation follows that has no parallel in art or literature.

Lulling the youth’s chaste suspicions by telling him of his mother

Herzeleide, she at last wins him to her side and imprints upon his

lips his mother’s kiss, her own magic kiss. Instead of succumbing

Parsifal leaps to his feet and presses his heart. He cries in agony,

“Amfortas! the wound—the wound! It burns within me, too.” Kundry’s

kiss shows him what the entire Grail did not know—that she was

the cause of the King’s downfall. He understands all now, and his

one thought is to go to the King and relieve his pain. He is the

poor fool who pities. Mad and desperate, Kundry detains him. She

believes that he can, if he so wills it, release her from Klingsor’s

hideous spell. He is to be her saviour; a second one, not the real

Jesus at whom she laughed and meeting whose reproachful gaze she

forever after wandered. She is the real Woman who laughed. Her

laughter shudderingly resounds throughout hell, whenever a sinner

yields to her seductions. But Parsifal is different. Perhaps, being

a frequenter of the Grail land, and a very Erda for wisdom, Kundry

knows of the prediction. She weaves a web of voluptuous beauty;

Parsifal escapes its blandishments. Then finding that this fails, she

curses him, with furious and hysterical curses. “Renounce desire; to

end thy sufferings thou must destroy their source.” Thus Parsifal

enjoins her. But Kundry will not be convinced. “My kiss it was that

made thee clear-sighted. My embrace would make thee divine.” He asks

for the road to Amfortas. She curses him. “Never, never, shall thou

find that road again. The Saviour’s curse gives me power. Wander!”

She frantically summons Klingsor, who appears upon the terrace with

poised spear. The flower girls rush in, and Klingsor hurls the

weapon at the audacious intruder. But it whizzes over Parsifal’s

head, where floating in the air he seizes it and makes the sign of

the cross. A cataclysm ensues. The castle and garden sink into the

earth, accompanied by volcanic explosions, the flower girls become

withered hags, and all the enchanting vista of flowers is transformed

into an arid waste. Kundry falls to the ground prostrated. Parsifal,

surveying this desolate ruin from the shattered ramparts, utters

to Kundry these prophetic words, “Thou knowest where to find me.”

Immediately the curtains veil this effective scene.

Act III brings us back to the Grail confines, where a tender,

idyllic landscape on the edge of a forest discloses a hermit’s

hut, with a spring hard by. It is a spring morning. Gurnemanz,

now a white-haired, sorrowful old man, has relinquished all hope

of a saviour for the King. He feels that unless death intervenes,

Klingsor will become master of the Grail, for he knows nothing of

the stirring events in the preceding act. A low cry in the bushes

apprises him of Kundry’s presence. She is half dead, but is revived

by the old hermit. She feebly moans, “Service, service,” and then

rises and goes to the hut, where she gets a pitcher. This she carries

to the spring, and fills. Gurnemanz marvels at her altered and

penitential appearance. But she makes signs. One is approaching. A

stranger knight in coal black armor, with visor down and spear in

hand, is seen. He gravely advances. Gurnemanz asks his name. The

stranger shakes his head. Adjured to remove his armor, as it is Good

Friday, and no Christian knight must bear arms on that holy day,

the stranger obeys. He plants his spear in the ground, removes his

shield and sword, unfastens his armor, takes off his helmet, and

kneels in fervent prayer before the lance. At once he is recognized

by Gurnemanz as the youth who killed the swan, and the lance is also

remarked with keen emotion. “Oh, blessed day,” cries the old man, who

knows that his King’s saviour is now at hand. Now follows a series

of pictures. They move before the eyes like some strange dream in

a land where life has resolved itself into processional attitudes.

One dissolves into another. The kneeling knight recalls an Albrecht

Dürer, and his blessing by Gurnemanz, his baptism of the repentant

Kundry,—who utters but two words during the act,—and the washing of

his feet Magdalen-like, are all accompanied by music that is almost

gesture, and with gestures that are almost musical. Gurnemanz informs

Parsifal that Amfortas is in sad extremities, his father, Titurel,

no longer strengthened by the Grail, is really dead, and the King

refuses to perform the sacred office. It is this great hour of need

in which Parsifal appears. Parsifal tells Gurnemanz of his weary

wanderings over the earth in search of Montsalvat. Sorely beset by

foes, yet he dare not use the sacred spear. It has been kept intact

from worldly stain or strife. Then follows the soothing Good Friday

magic music episode, when all nature puts on its sweetest attire

to give thanks to the Saviour who suffered. Bells are heard. It is

noon. As in the first act, but by a different route and accompanied

by other music, the scene slowly changes to the domed Temple of the

Holy Grail. The funeral services of Titurel are being held. The hall

is full of mourning knights. Amfortas, his agony at its apex, refuses

to unveil the Grail, and begs his companions to slay him, for he can

no longer endure his pain and shame. Parsifal enters, accompanied by

Gurnemanz. He witnesses the King’s paroxysm, and then advances to

him. With the point of the lance he heals the wound. Kundry dies on

the altar steps, and Parsifal, now King of Montsalvat, mounts the

step and lifts on high in silent invocation the crystal vase. Mystic

voices in the cupola sing “Wondrous work of mercy. Salvation to the

Saviour.” Thus the mystic melodrama ends.

In the first draft of his poem Wagner ended the play with these

words:—

Great is the charm of desire,

Greater is the power of renunciation.

In all the complicated web of this drama Pity and Renunciation

are the two principal motives. Wagner drew his themes from all

sources,—sagas, legends, poems, and histories. He incorporated

episodes from the Saviour’s life, and boldly utilized the theme

of the Last Supper. The blood of Christ which Joseph of Arimathea

is said to have received in a chalice becomes the comforting and

eucharistic Grail. Then side by side with all these conflicting

stories he places the semi-Saracenic Klingsor, the very embodiment

of a magician of the Dark Ages, and Kundry, the type of the woman of

all times, the wandering Jewess, the Magdalen. Parsifal is a mediæval

Jesus; the knights of the Holy Grail, Apostles transposed to a later

epoch. As it suited him Wagner violently tossed about and made sport

of the poetic ideas of Chrétien de Troies and Wolfram von Eschenbach.

He Wagnerized everything he touched. The result is Parsifal.

If the poem is charged to the full with Semitic, Buddhistic,

Patristic, Christian, and Schopenhauerian philosophies, the play

affords the great master fresco painter superb opportunities for

scenic display. The son of Geyer, himself a scene painter, dramatist,

poet, and composer, did not fail to take advantage of the chance to

indulge his taste for luxuriant, glowing colors, for sensational

contrasts, lofty spaces, and all the moving magnificence of panoramic

display. There are many tableaux in this drama, genuinely a static

drama. In Act I we see Gurnemanz surrounded by the tender squires,

while Kundry cowers in the foreground. “Doch Vater sag, und lehr’

uns fein; du kanntest Klingsor, wie mag das sein?” The tableau of

the killed swan, with Parsifal admonished by Gurnemanz, is another

noteworthy grouping. Nothing is so impressive, however, as the

spectacle of the sick King being raised, as he elevates the Grail.

Klingsor’s tower is as sinister as an etching by Salvator Rosa. The

flower garden, first with the damsels and then desolate, gives two

striking pictures. Parsifal stands spear in hand. “Du weisst: we

einzig du mich wiedersiehst!” The praying knight in Act III; Parsifal

in white baptismal robe, recalling Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Christ,

and last of all the noble harmonies of the last scene, the descending

dove and the mystic chant:—

Höchsten Heiles Wunder,

Erlösung dem Erlöser.

TO A KINGLY FRIEND

O König! holder Schirmherr meines Lebens!

Du höchster güte wonnereichster Hort!

* * * * *

Was du mir bist, Kann staunend ich nur fassen,

Wenn mir sich zeigt, was ohne dich ich war.

* * * * *

Du bist der holde Lenz, der neu mich schmückte,

Der mir verjüngt der Zweig und Aeste Saft:

—RICHARD WAGNER.

II

THE MUSIC

One is filled with admiration at Wagner’s deft use of thematic

material in the score of Parsifal. Despite the exegetical enthusiasm

of von Wolzogen, Heintz, and Kufferath, a very few motives suffice

the master for his polyphonic skill in development. And they are

principally in the prelude—now unhappily a familiar concert room

number. I say unhappily because no composer’s music is less adapted

to concert than Wagner’s. Divorced from the context of gesture,

speech, scenic display, his music becomes all profile. One misses the

full, rich, significant glance of the eye. Wagner is a weaver, not a

form-maker. He can follow a dramatic situation, or burrow deeply into

the core of morbid psychology; but let him attempt to stand alone, to

write music without programme or the fever of the footlights—then he

is the inferior of several men, the inferior of Liszt, Tschaïkowsky,

and Richard Strauss; not to mention Beethoven, Schubert, or Chopin.

I know that this opinion ill accords with the belief of many, yet

I do not think it can be disputed. His preludes and overtures,

containing as they do the leading motives of his dramas, are of

interest only for that reason. Considered as absolute music they are

not noteworthy, notwithstanding their coloring and grandiose themes.

So is it with Parsifal—even more so. The work preëminently smells of

the lamp. It lacks spontaneity. Its subject is extremely undramatic.

Nothing happens for several hours,—nothing but discourses,

philosophical and retrospective. Never has Wagner so laboriously

built a book. It is a farrago of odds and ends, the very dust-bin of

his philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other

fads. You see unfold before you a nightmare of characters and events.

Without simplicity, without lucidity, without naturalness—Wagner is

the great anti-naturalist among composers—this book, through which

has been sieved Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Schopenhauerism,

astounds one by its puerility, its vapidity. Yet because of his

musical genius, Wagner is able to float this inorganic medley, and at

times makes it almost credible. It is an astounding feat of the old

hypnotist—for hypnotist he is in Parsifal as in no other composition.

By sheer force of his musical will, this Klingsor of Bayreuth

hypnotizes his hearers with two or three themes not of themselves

remarkable, as Charcot controls his patients with a shining mirror.

Wagner always selected librettos that threw up a lot of dust for the

erudite. His Tristan demands much delving, and with the Ring and

its complementary literature we shall never finish. The plain fact

in the case is this: Parsifal, despite all its wealth of legend,

its misty, poetic allusiveness, its manufactured mysticism, is

simple old-fashioned opera. And its verse _quâ_ verse is very bad.

The Wagnerites reject this statement as does the devil holy water.

Supposing you enter the Wagner theatre, your brain cells unencumbered

with the memories of Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal, Fal-Parsi, and

the rest of the philological mystification, what do you see?—and

remember that the ideal drama should set forth without previous

knowledge or explanation its dramatic content.

You see an old-fashioned and very tedious opera—setting aside some

of the music; and there is throughout an abuse of the _tremolo_ that

sounds suspiciously Italian. You see a lot of women-hating men,

deceiving themselves with spears, drugs, old goblets, all manners

of juggling formulas, and yet being waited upon by a woman—a poor,

miserable witch. You see a silly youth treated as if he had murdered

a human being because he shot a swan. You see this same dead bird

borne away on a litter of twigs, to noble, impressive music like

a feathered Siegfried. Surely Wagner was without a sense of the

humorous; or was he parodying his own Death of Siegfried, as Ibsen

parodied Ibsen in A Wild Duck? You see a theatrically imposing

temple, modelled after the Duomo of Siena, wherein a maniacal King

raves over an impossible wound, and performs ceremonies recalling the

Roman Catholic communion service. In Act II you are transported to

the familiar land of Christmas pantomime. There a bad magician seeks

to destroy the castle of the noble knights, and evokes a beautiful

phantom to serve his purpose. There are spells, incantations, blue

lights, screaming that makes the blood run cold, and the whole

bagful of tricks that Weber, Marschner, and even Mozart delighted

in. Follows fast the magic garden, and the sirens with rose petals

on head. The foolish boy still eludes temptation. Even the beautiful

witch cannot lure him. All is fairy play, pantomimic transformations,

castles that crumble, thunder-riven gardens, and the whizzing of a

malignant lance. Even that old Gounod ruse, the sign of the cross,

is employed, and with overpowering effect. Now what possesses

a generation which knows Darwin, has read Herbert Spencer, and

can follow with delight the unerring logic of events that unroll

themselves in the Ibsen plays—what possesses this generation of ours

to sit enthralled before all this nebulosity?

The third act is but a faint _replica_ of the first—without its

vigor or novelty. Here the librettist is in sore straits. So he

drags in Magdalen washing the feet of Parsifal which is offensively

puerile. We again see the scenery acting, pantomimic scenery, and

once more we are transported to the Hall of the Holy Grail, where

the music of Allegri, Palestrina, and Vittoria is marvellously

mimicked. Wagner, not being a strikingly original theme-maker,

always borrowed,—borrowed even from Berlioz,—and the results of

his borrowings are often greater than the originals. In a beatific

blaze of glory—after Parsifal has healed the King—this sacred

melodrama ends, and the spectator, drugged by the music, confused

by the bells chanting the tortuous story, and his eyes intoxicated

by feasts of color, staggers away believing that he has witnessed

a great work of art. So he has,—the art of debauch in color, tone,

and gesture. “The highest perfection of an art,” says Ehlert, “is

not always and necessarily the greatest massing together of forces.

It depends upon entirely different conditions. The flower of an art

arises only when a positively artistic individuality creates that

particular work for which it possesses the most marked and exclusive

vocation.” Now Wagner heaps up one art, one idea, upon another. He

little cared for the dramatic proprieties or the feelings of his

audience when he composed Kundry, a ridiculous hag, an Astarte,

a Herodias, a Meg Merrilies, and a Mary Magdalen in one. She is

Azucena when she reveals to Parsifal his parentage—perhaps Wagner

had heard of Il Trovatore!—and she plays Potiphar’s wife to this

effeminate lad. She is of the opera operatic. And Klingsor—is he a

creation, this hater of men and women?—why, he is nothing else but

any giant or any enchanter in any fairy tale. Parsifal, when he is

not a simulacrum of Christ in white baptismal robes, is a peculiarly

foolish bore. Without Siegfried’s buoyancy, Wagner tried hard to

dower him with Siegfried’s youth. But he is only an emasculate

Siegfried. The corpse of Titurel is a horrible idea—yet it fits in

this bogie-man’s play. Wagner, after all, was the creature of his

century, an incurable Romantic, with all the love of the Romantics

for knights, mediæval mysteries, maidens in distress,—in this case a

callow boy,—magicians, and dead men who tell tales. The scenery, too,

never comes up to one’s realization, and as usual Wagner oversteps

the mark by surrounding his hero with too many women. The duo with

Kundry is much more effective. The eye and the ear can grasp the

situation—a stirringly dramatic one, despite the morbid imagination

of the poet who could in his search for voluptuous depravity mingle a

mother’s with a courtesan’s kiss. Here Paris itself is surpassed in

the piquant and decadent. Wagner’s admiration for Baudelaire’s poetry

shows itself in this incident. By the magic of his mother’s name,

Kundry evokes a maudlin filial passion, and with his mother’s name

on her lips she kisses the youth into the first consciousness of his

virility—or a semblance of it, for at no time is Parsifal a normal

young man. His act of renunciation, in his particular case, denies

life.

Again I ask, What is the lure that gathers multitudes to witness this

most nonsensical, immoral of operas? The answer is, The Music, always

The Music. Not Wagner at the flood-tide of his musical passion, nor

the composer of Tristan and Isolde, or the Ring or Die Meistersinger;

yet an aged wizard who had retained his old arts of enchantment, and

so great are they that at times he not only makes one forget his

book, but even the poverty of his themes—Parsifal is not musically

original; rather it is an extraordinary synthesis of styles, an

unique specimen of the arts of combination, adaptation, and lofty

architectonics. Let us glance at the score.

Never has Wagner been so bald in his exposition as in the prelude.

But its simplicity is deceptive. The Love theme,—in A flat, by von

Wolzogen named the Love Feast motive,—the Grail Hope theme, the

Dresden Amen, and the Faith theme,—these and a subsidiary theme, the

Saviour’s Lament, about comprise this overture. And the figure of

the Saviour’s agony contains a few of the most poignant bars Wagner

ever penned. This short episode is infinitely more sincere than

the Faith motive—“What expression would a man like Wagner find for

such an experience?” asks Ehlert. The Speech of Promise, _i.e._ the

prediction “Durch Mitleid wissend,” is charmingly prophetic, but

the first section of Act I drags both dramatically and musically.

I am never disappointed in the Kundry music, for I have long known

it in Liszt’s B minor sonata, and before Liszt it may be found in

the opening bars of Chopin’s B minor sonata. There is much Liszt

in this score. The trick of the twice repeated modulation into the

upper diminished third, as in the case of the Faith theme, is an

old Lisztian device. Kundry’s chief motive is to be found in the B

minor sonata. It is not very characteristic, nor is the evocation of

Arabia. Kundry enters on Valkyrie pinions, and the best thing she

does is her shuddering screech—that same cry of distress so cleverly

utilized by Massenet in Le Cid. Wagner draws heavily upon the second

act of Die Walküre. Indeed Parsifal is full of Wagner quotations:

Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger—there is much in

Gurnemanz’s bars—and even Götterdämmerung—the Rhine daughters’ music

is heard in the garden scene. Amfortas’s suffering motive is not

very convincing, nor are we impressed by the Forest Murmur with

its canonic _appoggiaturas_. Ever this essential turn! As in the

Good Friday magic spell—written years before the opera—the composer

echoes Siegfried and Die Meistersinger,—the first fine, careless

rapture of his wood-music he never recaptured. And this is quite

natural. An old man, Wagner had reached the end of his ammunition.

Many blank cartridges are fired in Parsifal. The Sorcery motive

with its Chopin-like chromaticism has meaning; but I confess I do

not care for Parsifal’s motive, beautifully as it is developed. It

lacks the bold, lusty, clean-cut vigor of his young Siegfried’s horn

call. Wagner musically was always true to himself. He unconsciously

divined the effeminacy of Parsifal’s nature, and his music is a truer

psychological barometer than all the learned pundits who write reams

about the purity of Parsifal. Kundry’s Service theme—in “helpful”

thirds—is by no means so exquisitely musical as the Mitleid motive

in Die Walküre. And what could be more absurd than the use of the

Saviour’s Lament motive as the dead swan is reverently carried away.

The Herzeleide motive is lovely music, especially when it is thrown

into high relief during the next act by Kundry’s blandishments. The

fleeting appearance of the Lohengrin Swan motive is a very happy idea.

We have now reached the last part of the first act with its

_Glockenthema_, its laments of Amfortas,—the accents of woe are

genuine,—and the magnificent tonal panorama of boys’ voices,

bells, choral music. Here, not without reverence, the composer has

successfully emulated the service of Rome. The tripartite choral

divisions recall both Goethe’s Faust and the spherical order of

voices, and the antiphonal choirs of mediæval cathedrals. The effect

is indescribable, especially when the pure, sexless boys’ voices

are heard _a capella_. The consummation of this mystical ecstasy is

reached when the Grail vase is slowly waved aloft. One realizes that

Wagner’s genius, which so often gravitates pendulum-wise between the

sublime and the ridiculous, here approaches the former.

Act II, in which the ruling key seems to be B minor,—as A flat

predominates the preceding act,—naturally introduces fewer new

motives. The Klingsor theme, first heard in Gurnemanz’s slightly

tedious recital, and the Kundry theme are most in evidence in

the stormy prelude. To be quite frank I always find the Flower

Girls’ music a disappointment. The Caress valse theme is a trifle

commonplace, and only Wagner’s polyphonic skill lends the music some

dignity. The evocation of Kundry by Klingsor in the opening scene

is full of demoniacal grandeur. Wagner is nothing if not operatic,

and here he shows that his old Weber skin has not been completely

shed. Kundry’s galloping motive, also employed for Parsifal, is the

familiar Valkyrie figure modified. I heard the Erl-King storm through

several bars, and the triplet figuration of the Flower Girls is from

a trio in one of Schumann’s symphonies—the B flat, if I remember

aright.

The crowning scene of this act—one is tempted to say of the entire

work, for Wagner spreads his music thin over a wide surface—is the

duo of Parsifal and Kundry. Herein the entire gamut of passion,

maternal, exquisite, voluptuous, is traversed by a master hand.

And never has Wagner’s touch been so sure. Intellectually nothing

could be more complete than this delineation, morbid and morose

as it occasionally is. In a dramatic sense it saves the opera.

We hear the Parsifal, the Herzeleide motives—and a supplementary

Herzeleide theme. The outburst of Parsifal after the kiss with

its memories of Amfortas’s suffering is wonderful. The Saviour’s

theme, Kundry’s Yearning theme and Self-Abandonment motive, are

all made up of familiar material. Here the spinning of the web

into something strange and touching is the principal virtue, not

the themes themselves. Klingsor’s sudden appearance and the hurled

lance which is carried out in the score by harps _glissando_

through two octaves, the mourning cries of the pretty girls, and

Parsifal’s final words—all these kaleidoscopic effects impress one

considerably; action is paramount. Parsifal’s music in Es startt der

Blick dumpff auf das Heil’sgefäss may arouse the indignation of the

purist with its direct succession of the G flat major and D minor

triads (page 187 of the vocal score); but to modern ears his scheme

of harmonization is as normal as the book is abnormal. In a Wagner

opera, or, if you will, a music-drama, everything must be accepted,

dissonantal harmonies as well. This composer follows every curve of

his poem, and when a situation demands jarring ugliness, he freely

offers it. Who to-day shall say what is or what is not ugly music?

The music of the last act presents little novel thematic material.

In the gloomy prelude we find epitomized the wandering of Parsifal

in search of the Grail domain, in conjunction with the funeral music

of Titurel. Again the static and contemplative forms a contrast

to the rapid action of the preceding scene. The very pauses seem

pregnant with music. And I must halt here a moment to lay my tribute

of admiration at the feet of Milka Ternina, whose Kundry is a

dramatic and musical creation of rare imagination and technical

skill. She presents three different women—we are perplexed to say

whether Kundry defiant, or Kundry seductive, or Kundry repentant

is the most wonderful. But Ternina is always wonderful! It is in

this scene, with its sun-smitten meadows, its worshipping knight

and mournful penitent, that I agree with those commentators who

perceive the profound influence exerted upon Wagner by early German

and Flemish religious pictorial art. Parsifal’s attitudes here would

suit a Gothic triptych—as M. Charles Tardieu so happily expresses

it. There is little movement, all gesture has been transferred to

the orchestra, and the spectator seems to be participating in one

of those miracle plays or viewing the stiff pictures of a Cimabue

or a woodcut after Dürer. The moving forest and the final scene

lose because of repetition. But what was the poet to do? Only in

Act II does he escape the lack of variety. For instance, in Act

I Parsifal stands for a long time immobile, with his back to the

audience, while Kundry, in the last act, utters but two words.

She is a pantomimic lay figure kept on the stage to emphasize the

resemblance between Jesus and Parsifal. And the feet washing episode

is absolutely unnecessary. It does not help the story. Nowhere but

in Wagner would all this mish-mash of gospel narrative, mediæval

romance, and Teutonic philosophy be tolerated. Yet the Wagnerites sit

through it all as if listening to a new evangel of art, philosophy,

and religion. Perhaps they are. In America, where new religions

sprout daily as do potatoes in a dark cellar, slighter causes have

led to the foundation of a religion—witness the rise and growth

of Mormonism. If religion could ever become moribund, perhaps in

Wagner’s Parsifal would be found the crystallization of many old

faiths, presented in a concrete, though Wagnerized, form. “I know of

but one thing more beautiful than Parsifal,” wrote Alfred Ernest, and

approvingly quoted by M. Kufferath, “and that is any low mass in any

church.” And in this sentence the French author puts his finger on

the weak spot of Parsifal—its lack of absolute sincerity. No matter

how great an art work it may be, it yet lacks the truthful note that

is to be found at any low mass in a Roman Catholic church—about the

most unadorned service I can remember. With all its grandeur, its

pathos, its conjuring of churchly and philosophical motives, its

ravishing pictures and marmoreal attitudes, Parsifal falls short of

the one thing—faith, a faith you may find in any roadside Bavarian

cabin. We have seen that it is weakest musically in the Faith motive

of the prelude, and ethically it suffers from the same sterility.

All the scholarly efforts to make the work an ethical, philosophical,

and an artistic message are futile. Parsifal, even if it will “enjoy

a small immortality,” must remain an opera, a cunning spectacle

devised by a man of genius in the twilight of his powers. It is

Wagner’s own Götterdämmerung, the sunset music of his singular career.

But if this Parsifal music lacks the virile glow and imaginative

power of his earlier music, it is none the less fascinating. Over all

hovers, like the dove in the temple, a rich mellowness, a soothing

quality that is the reverse of his stormy, disquieting, youthful

art. It really seems as if Pity, pity for the tragedy of existence,

for the misery of all animated beings, had filled parts of the

score with a soothing balm. The muted pauses, the golden stream of

tone, and the almost miraculous musicianship fill the listener with

awe. Never before has Wagner’s technical mastery come to such a

triumphant blossoming. And the partition is covered with miniatures

that excite admiration both for their workmanship and their musical

meanings. It was Nietzsche who first called critical attention to

the Lilliputian delicacy of Wagner’s music. A fresco painter, he yet

finds time to execute the most minute and tender jewel-like bits,

that are lost sight and sound of at the first hearing. Never has

Wagner’s instrumentation been so smoothly sonorous, so well mixed,

so synthetic. It recalls richly embroidered altar cloths or Gobelin

tapestry. Weaving similes force themselves upon the hearer when

describing this marvellous and modern polyphonic art. But how tell

of the surge and undertow of his melting, symphonious narrative!

It flashes with all the tints of a Veronese, of a Makart, and then

appear in processional solemnity the great flat spaces and still

figures of some mediæval, low-toned, distemper painter. Painting and

weaving—always these two arts! But there is not the same passionate

excess in decoration, the same tropical splendor, that we find in the

earlier Wagner. Venus wooes Tannhäuser in more heated accents than

does Kundry Parsifal. And Kundry is _the_ depraved woman of all art,

for Kundry’s quiver of temptations is more subtle, more decadent.

The correspondence of King Ludwig and Wagner, of Ludwig and Josef

Kainz, the actor, throws much light on the enigmatic character

of Parsifal. Wagner needed money and encouragement, badly. So it

is not difficult to conceive of him playing up to every romantic

extravagance of the young king—“le seul vrai roi de ce siècle,” as

Paul Verlaine poetically called the monarch, whose madness admirably

matched his own. Read in this sense, the psychology of Kundry’s kiss

and its repelling effect and its arousing of pity for Amfortas in

Parsifal is no longer a mystery. Wagner never erred in his morbid

musical psychology, and he thus symbolized Amfortas—Wagner—as being

rescued from suffering by Parsifal—Ludwig. Wagner had been ever an

ungrateful man, but for the King he entertained the most exalted

sentiment of gratitude. There is a psychiatric literature on this

esoteric subject in German and French beginning with Oskar Panizza,

ending with the remarkable study of Hanns Fuchs, entitled Richard

Wagner.

Parsifal will long remain a rare and stimulating spectacle to those

for whom religious feeling must be dramatized to be endurable.

The stern simplicities of doctrinal truths have no attraction for

such. Wagner, luxuriously Byzantine in his faiths, erected a lordly

pleasure drama in which the mystically inclined, the admirer of

theatrical pomps, and the esoteric worshipper could all find solace,

amusement, and consolation. Yet Parsifal’s pale virtue can never

stir us to higher issues, as do the heroic sacrifices of Tannhäuser

or Senta. Parsifal is the predestinated one, predestined to save the

life of the King. Lacking freedom of will, he is not a human being

that provokes our sympathy—but why demand logic, even dramatic logic,

of Wagner? He was first a musician, then a poet and a philosopher;

and in the last of these three was least. Parsifal is his final

offering to the world. It is the work of a man who had outlived

his genius. Nietzsche quotes with approval the exclamation of a

musician: “I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music.” We

are all Wagnerians whether we rebel at Parsifal or not.

III

NIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST

Tell me, where is justice to be found which is love with seeing

eyes?—_Also sprach Zarathustra._

I

A sane and complete estimate of the life and philosophical writings

of Friedrich Nietzsche has yet to be made in English. Mentally dead

since 1889, his death, in a private retreat at Weimar in 1900,

created little stir; yet we predict that this great, if rhapsodical

thinker, will occupy a place in the pantheon of philosophers. Like

Emerson, he formulated no system; he is a stimulus to thought, an

antiseptic critic of all philosophies, religions, theologies, and

moral systems, an intellectual rebel, a very Lucifer among ancient

and modern thinkers.

His life, barring his friendship with Wagner, and its sad conclusion,

is rather barren of interest or incident. It was a fiery soul

tragedy; outwardly the world saw a quiet, very reserved, almost

timid man of cultivated bearing and disinclined to the pursuits of

the ambitious. He was born at Röcken, near Lützen, October 15,

1844. His father was a clergyman; indeed he descended from a long

line of clerical ancestors, which possibly accounts for the austere

strain in the man. This philosopher with a hammer, this demolisher

of Antichrist, this writer who outraged all religious Europe, was a

man of pure, upright life, a scholar, a gentleman, a poet. Taking up

philology mainly as a makeshift, he occupied the chair of classical

philology at the University of Basle. His weak eyesight—his life

long he was a sufferer from headaches, a weak stomach, and crabbed

nerves—drove him to a retirement, during which he busied himself with

art and philosophy. The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 attracted Richard

Wagner’s attention, for here was a partisan not to be despised. In

1876 Nietzsche published Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and Wagnerism

had found its philosophical exponent. A friendship, ideal in its

quality, grew up between composer and thinker. But the sensitive

nature of Nietzsche could brook no rivals, and he soon fell away from

Wagner and Bayreuth. Many have sought to explain this defection.

Nietzsche’s devoted sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, accused

Richard and Cosima Wagner of treachery, while Wagner, on his part,

found this intense young disciple a trifle irksome. He could not

stir, could not talk sportively—as was his wont—could not make bad

puns, could not associate with others without a sorrowful apparition

warning him that he was not true to himself, not true to his higher

nature. Wagner, being a natural man, sometimes a coarse and worldly

man, resented this spiritual caretaker’s solicitude, and so in the

rush and excitement of Bayreuth in 1876 he was forced to forget his

Nietzsche. Then the usual thing happened: the other one went off in a

sulk, and Wagnerism had lost its most fanatical adherent.

The truth in this affair is not difficult to discern. When Wagner was

still undiscovered—that is, the latter-day Wagner—Nietzsche sailed

his soul abroad for spiritual adventures and found the composer of

Tristan and Isolde full of spiritual irony. Exclusive, haughty,

jealous—a noble sort of jealousy—he published the good news to the

world. Then the mob, _hoi polloi_, began to buy excursion tickets

to Bayreuth, and Nietzsche shudderingly withdrew. Wagner’s music

was no longer unique, no longer to be savored by the intellectually

aristocratic few. So he sailed his bark for newer, rarer, stranger

enterprises and discovered—Nietzsche. After that the madhouse

yawned for him, and the world lost a wonderful man, an ecstatic,

semi-deranged man, a freethinker who out-topped all freethinkers, one

of the greatest individualists since Stirner, and a soul of poetic

richness. In 1888 Der Fall Wagner was published and Nietzsche’s

friends and foes alike noted the decline of a brilliant intellect.

The book is extraordinary. In it are flashes of dazzling fugitive

ideation; but it lacks logic, nobility of design; above all, it

lacks coherency. Wagner is as bitterly arraigned and attacked as the

apostle of degeneration, as before he was hailed as the Dispenser

of the New Evangel of music, poetry, and philosophy. It is a pity

that this violent work should have introduced Nietzsche to the

English-speaking world. It is too fantastic, too ill-balanced, to

serve as a dignified polemic, or yet as a corrective. In Germany

it but strengthened Wagner’s cause. Yet its occasional meteoric

lucidity, its wit, its blows with a hammer, are at times extremely

diverting. The last of his writings, it should be read the last. We

say the last, for his Transvaluation of All Values—the first part

of which is Antichrist, need not concern us here—was begun when the

author was struck down. After Wagner, Bizet; after Parsifal, Carmen;

for he swore that Bizet was the greater, Bizet the creator of La Gaya

Scienza. Nietzsche had to swing to the other extreme musically after

his secession from Wagnerism. But Bizet——!

The Nietzsche philosophical pedigree is not difficult to trace. He

comes intellectually from Max Stirner—especially Stirner—Bakounine,

the anarchist, and Karl Gutzkow. As mad a Schopenhauerian as Richard

Wagner, he threw over his allegiance to the Master Pessimist when

he discovered that there can be no will to live without previous

existence, and existence presupposes will. It is the _Will to Power_

that is Nietzsche’s cardinal doctrine, and this will to power is

neither evil nor good, for our Siegfried among philosophers would

transvalue all moral values. In his divagations with a hammer—he

called himself the Philosopher with a Hammer—smashed all idols,

old, new, and to come. He likewise, in his intellectual fury and

craving after universal knowledge, smashed the exceeding delicate

mechanism of his own brain. Boasting of Polish blood, he, like

Poland, represented a disintegrated individualism. Nietzsky was said

to be the ancestral name, and with it was inherited all the pride of

his nationality. He loathed the common herd more than Horace, more

than Flaubert—to whom life was but a bad smell. Herbert Spencer’s

philosophical moderation, the tepid piety of the middle classes, he

equally scorned. He would have us all aristocrats in mind and body,

and Wagner’s snobbery—so necessary to his worldly advancement—filled

Nietzsche with disgust. No king, no pope, no democracy, could bind

his rebellious intellect. Like Ibsen’s Brand he sought ever the

steepest heights. A lonely soul is Zarathustra—Nietzsche, and one of

the most saddening scenes in Also sprach Zarathustra (begun in 1883,

finished in 1885, but not published until 1892) is his finding of

the animals, the pope and Wagner worshipping the Jackass according

to the ritual of the Roman Catholic church. It was Wagner’s Parsifal

that stung him to madness. The anti-naturalism, the mysticism,

the attempted revival in theatric form of—to him—hierarchical

superstitions and various abnormalities, shocked the soul of

Nietzsche. In his wonderful prose epic, Wagner appears masked as the

Wizard, the prophet of pity, of redemption of all the formulas hated

by this extraordinary thinker.

It is mere childishness, or else bigotry, to point at Nietzsche’s

end as the moral tag of his life. If he had lived during the Middle

Ages, either he would have been burnt alive or else have proved a

formidable rival to some angelic doctor. But living in the nineteenth

century, a century of indifference to men of his ardent temperament,

he erected his own stake and fagots and the mad genius within him

burnt up his mind. While he would not have so astonished the world if

born to work in the dogmatic harness of the Roman Catholic church,

yet its discipline might have quieted his throbbing nerves, and

perhaps given the faith a second Rosmini.

A magnificent dialectician, Nietzsche threw overboard all

metaphysical baggage. He despised the jargon of Schoolman and modern

philosophers. For him Hegel was a verbalistic bat, blind to the

realities of life; and it is just at this point that the influence

of the insurgent has been so provocative of good. He has overturned

the barriers of a repulsive metaphysical terminology and dared to

be naked and natural, though a philosopher. He erected no system,

no vast, polyphonic edifice with winding staircase and darkened

chambers. Nietzsche made no philosophical formula; rather, his

formula is an image, the image of a lithe dancer. The writer of this

résumé pretends to see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s philosophy,

or poetry, in the second part of Faust. When Euphorion, that child

of Helena and Faust, of Beauty and Intellect, the merging of the

Classical and Romantic, sings:—

Let me be skipping,

Let me be leaping,

To soar and circle

Through ether sweeping,

Is now the passion

That me hath won,

he but set the pace for Nietzsche, the Dancing Philosopher. Dancing

blithely over a tight rope stretched between two eternities, the

Past and the Future, Man, gay, and unafraid, views the depths of

Time and Space. It is “Man who is a rope connecting animal and

Beyond Man” (Übermensch). “He is a bridge, not a goal; a transition

and a destruction.” These seemingly startling statements, which may

be found in Thus spake Zarathustra, are, after all, nothing new;

Christianity, with its angels and Darwinism, with its bold hints at

future evolutions and developments, do but say the same things, each

in its own way. But Nietzsche, like his beloved Euphorion, must needs

graze the rim of the sun in his flight, and Icarus-wise come tumbling

to earth—and a Weimar retreat.

The Titanism of Nietzsche, might over right, power over weakness,

impels him to hate all weakness, and Christianity, he declares,

is a weakness, a degenerate sort of Judaism, complicated with the

teachings of Greek mystagogues. He says that the first and only

Christian was nailed to the cross, and this should please the heart

of Tolstoy. Bolder still is Nietzsche’s wish that a Dostoïevsky might

have depicted the Christ in all his childlike innocence and Godlike

love. Nietzsche worships force and hates slave-morality, _i.e._ all

modern religions, in which pity for the weak is basic. To him the

symbol of the crucifix is degrading, a symbol of degenerating races.

A very Spartan, he would have the great blond barbarian once more

trample, Attila-like, the blood-stained soil of Europe and Asia,

sparing none. _Væ Victis!_ “What is best belongeth to my folk and

myself. And if it is not given to us, we take it, the best food, the

purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the most beautiful women.” Thus

spake Zarathustra, and the voice is Nietzsche’s, but the hands are

the hands of Esau—Bismarck: Blood and Iron!

It is in Also sprach Zarathustra that the genius of Nietzsche is

best studied. Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka, it is a book of highly

colored Oriental aphorisms, interrupted by lofty lyric outbursts.

It is an ironic, enigmatic rhetorical rhapsody, the Third Part of a

half-mad Faust. In it may be seen flowing all the currents of modern

cultures and philosophies, and if it teaches anything at all, it

teaches the wisdom and beauty of air, sky, waters, and earth, and

of laughter, not Pantagruelian, but “holy laughter.” The love of

earth is preached in rapturous accents. A Dionysian ecstasy anoints

the lips of this latter-day Sibyl on his tripod, when he speaks of

earth. He is intoxicated with the fulness of its joys. No gloomy

monasticism, no denial of the will to live, no futile thinking about

thinking,—so despised by Goethe,—no denial of grand realities, may be

found in the curriculum of this Bacchantic philosopher. A Pantheist,

he is also a poet and seer like William Blake, and marvels at the

symbol of nature, “the living garment of the Deity”—Nietzsche’s

deity, of course. It is this realistic, working philosophy—if

philosophy it be in the academic sense—that has endeared Nietzsche

to the newer generation, that has set his triumphant standard on the

very threshold of the new century. After the metaphysical cobweb

spinners, the Hegels, Fichtes, Schellings, after the dreary pessimism

of the soured Schopenhauer,—whose pessimism was temperamental,

as is all pessimism, so James Sully has pointed out,—after many

negations and stumblings, the vigorous affirmations of this Nihilist

are stimulating, suggestive, refreshing, especially in Germany, the

stronghold of philosophical and sentimental Philistinism. Not reward,

but the sheer delight of living, of conquering self, of winning

victories in the teeth of defeat,—thus spake the wisdom of Nietzsche.

For English-speaking readers the many attacks on Nietzsche have

placed the philosopher under the cloud of a peculiar misconception.

Viciously arguing that a man in a madhouse could only produce a

mad philosophy, his assailants forgot that it was Nietzsche’s very

intensity of mental vision, his phenomenal faculty of attention, his

hopeless attempt to square the circle of things human, that brought

about his sad plight. If he had not thought so madly, so strenuously,

if he had put to slumber his irritable conscience, his insatiable

curiosity, with current anodynes, Nietzsche might have been alive

to-day.

In Also sprach Zarathustra he consciously or unconsciously vied with

Goethe in Faust; with Wagner’s Ring, with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine,

with Ibsen’s Brand, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with Senancour’s

Oberman, with Browning’s Paracelsus. It is the history of his soul,

as Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s—there are some curious parallelisms

between these two subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at

universality; it contains some of Amiel’s introspection and some of

Baudelaire’s morbidity; half mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet

and John Bunyan.

Nietzsche then is a critical mode of viewing the universe, rather

than creator of a formal philosophy. He has set his imprint on all

European culture, from the dream novels of that Italian of the

Renaissance, the new Cellini, Gabriele d’Annunzio, to the Pole

Przybyszewski, who has transformed Nietzsche into a very Typhoon

of emotion. The musician Heinrich Pudor has imitated the master

in his attacks on modern music; while Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard

Dehmel—all young Germany, young France, has patterned after the great

Immoralist, as he chose to call himself. Among the composers affected

by him we find Richard Strauss, not attempting to set the philosophy

of Nietzsche to music—as many wrongfully suppose—but arranging, as

in a huge phantasmagoria, the emotions excited by the close study of

Thus spake Zarathustra. And a many-colored piece of music it is, full

of frowning mountains, fragrant meads, and barren, ugly, waste places.

Nietzsche met the fate of all rebels from Lucifer to Byron—neglect

and obloquy. With something of Heraclitus, of Democritus, of Bruno

Giordano, of Luther in him, there was allied a sensitivity almost

Chopin’s. The combination is a poor one for practical purposes;

so the brain died before the body,—humanity cannot transcend

itself. Notwithstanding all his contradictions, limitations,

cloudland rhapsodies, aversion from the banal, despite his

futile flights into the Inane, his word-weaving, his impossible

premisses and mad conclusions, the thunder-march of his ideas, the

brilliancy and polish of his style—the greatest German prose since

Schopenhauer’s—have insured Nietzsche immortality; as immortality

goes among world thinkers: fifty years of quotation and then—the

biographical dictionaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche is, as Havelock Ellis declares, “a great

aboriginal force”; perhaps, with Max Stirner, the greatest in the

last half of the nineteenth century. And that same Stirner is the

true stock from which Nietzsche sprang—Stirner who dared to say, “_My

truth is the truth._”

Nietzsche died August 28, 1900, literally the _Morgenröthe_ of the

new century. It was at Weimar, once the home of Goethe and Liszt.

Nietzsche was in an insane asylum from 1888. Dr. Hermann Turck

asserts that his work was done during a comparatively sane interval

between two incarcerations. In 1868 he met Richard Wagner, and under

the spell of his synthetic genius he wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie

aus dem Geist der Musik, and dedicated it to Wagner, his “sublime

forerunner.” Every line of it, he declares in the preface, was

“conceived in close communion with Wagner.” And let those who know

only the later Nietzsche casually read this essay to be convinced of

its sanity, its acuity, its penetrating originality. Here we find

the enthusiastic, impetuous youth, fresh from his Grecian studies,

a valiant champion of Hellenistic culture, an opponent of the

orientalization of modern life and thought. Twelve years later he

discovered in Parsifal this very despised orientalization, and did

not hesitate to say so in The Wagner Case, that fatal illustration of

George Moore’s pithy axiom: When we change our opinions we change our

friends.

The man who marshalled in the most deadly array of attack his

arguments against Wagnerism is also the man who wrote the most

brilliant book of all on Wagner. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is

a masterpiece of critical rhapsody. The sister who nursed the

sick-brained man for twelve years, Frau Friedrich Förster-Nietzsche,

tells the story of the dissensions in this friendship, a friendship

that could have endured only through a miracle. Both men had “nerves”

in a highly irritable condition; and, while Wagner had weathered the

storm and had, perforce, developed a stout integument of disdain,

Nietzsche had always remained the sensitive, morbid, cloistered

student. There is no doubt that Richard Wagner, at the triumphant

culmination of his life-work, was an arrogant, exacting, and jealous

being. Wahnfried was, as it now is, a Star Chamber, where the

_Vehmgericht_ judged swiftly, fiercely. Here is one story told by the

sister and quoted by H. E. Krehbiel in his too brief review of the

episode:—

My brother and I heard the Triumphlied of Brahms in the Bâle

Cathedral. It was a splendid performance and pleased Fritz very

much. When he went to Bayreuth in August, he took the pianoforte

arrangement with him, apparently in the naïve belief that Wagner

would like it. I say “apparently,” for upon later reflection it has

occurred to me that this red-bound Triumphlied was meant as a sort

of goad, and therefore Wagner’s prodigious wrath seems to have been

not altogether groundless. So I will leave the continuation of the

tale to Wagner, who had an exquisite fashion of satirizing himself:—

“Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went

into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it

exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that

Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can

turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a

vengeance.”

Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my

brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner.

“He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest

dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such

splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always

well bred; it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story

of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875).

“Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s

Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz

looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said,

beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner was _not_ great.”

Another time Wagner interfered with a walking tour that Nietzsche

had planned to take with the son of Felix Mendelssohn, a professor

at Freiburg. The young philosopher winced, but gave in to the elder

man’s request. His commonplace book reveals his secret irritation.

Here is a specimen of his early revolt from the banner of Bayreuth:—

How infinitely purer is the soul of a Bach or a Beethoven in

comparison with the soul of a Wagner. In the same sense as Goethe

was a painter strayed from his true vocation, and Schiller an

orator, Wagner is an actor _manqué_....

Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who

wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as

singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of

voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into

a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters

and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves.

Yet earlier he had written in such an eloquent strain as this:—

Wagner is never more Wagner than when his difficulties increase

tenfold, and he triumphs over them with all the legislative zeal

of a victorious ruler, subduing rebellious elements, reducing them

to simple rhythms, and imprinting the supreme power of his will

on a vast multitude of contending emotions.... It can be said of

him that he has endowed everything in nature with a language. He

believed that nothing need be dumb. He cast his plummet into the

mystery of sunrise, forest and mountain, mist and night shadows,

and learned that all these cherished intense longing for a voice.

Houston Chamberlain believes that when the panegyrics and attacks

upon Wagner have been consigned to that eternal limbo, the dust-heap,

Nietzsche’s Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, will still survive. Perhaps

back of the wounded vanity was the usual feeling that in Bayreuth

and Wagner his last illusion had vanished; madness was coming on

apace. Even his sister admits that he held aloof during the rejoicing

and festivities of 1876, and Wagner’s _Gemüthlichkeit_ expressed

in exuberant spirits (probably he stood on his head more than once

in those gay times; it was a trick of his, as Praeger relates,—his

punning, his advice to his shy, shrinking disciple to get him a

wife, useless advice to this ardent upholder of ideal friendship),

and all these things told on his nerves. He went away, and later

in his Menschliches Allzumenschliches appeared the first faint

thread that, in Der Fall Wagner, had become a scarlet skein of

abuse. He depreciated genius as being “a product of atavism, its

glory is cheap, its throne quickly reared, and bending the knee to

it is a mere habit.” Wahnfried, quick to detect heresy, recognized

the allusion; and Wagner, deeply pained at the defection of a

real friend, forbade his name to be mentioned. And Wagner was, as

Nietzsche declared, the _grande passion_ of his life.

M. Schuré thus described the personal appearances of Nietzsche:—

No one who conversed with him could fail to be struck by the

powers of his mind, and the singularity of his looks. His closely

cropped hair and heavy mustache gave him at first sight the air of

a cavalry officer. There was combination of hauteur and timidity

in his bearing. His voice, musical and deliberate, betrayed the

artistic temperament; his meditative almost hesitating gait, the

philosopher. Nothing was more deceptive than the apparent calm of

his expression. He had the fixed eye of the thinker, but at the

same time it was the eye of the searching and keen observer and

the fanatical visionary. This dual character of the eye was almost

uncanny, and had a disquieting effect on those who talked with him

face to face. His expression in moments of enthusiasm could be

one of dreamy sweetness, but almost instantly relapsed again into

fierce hostility.... There was a distant, isolated atmosphere about

the whole Nietzsche personality, a veiled disdain which is often

characteristic of the aristocrat of thought.

In a brief tribute to the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, “So solltet

ihr Nietzsche verstehen,” in the _Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung_,

Frau Professor Wanda Bartels tells of her and her husband’s chance

acquaintance with the famous thinker during a sojourn in Venice. She

dwells upon the contrast of his own modest reserve and unassuming

ways with those of the blustering youths who flaunt in public as his

followers and believers in his “system”; for he had no system, and

“did not write to teach the immature, but to free his own soul.”

Frau Bartels’s protest calls to mind the more weighty and truly

enlightening utterances of another personal friend of Nietzsche,

Professor Paul Deussen, of Kiel, who, writing in the _Wiener

Rundschau_ on the Truth about Friedrich Nietzsche, discusses with

great clearness the two cardinal points of Nietzsche’s doctrine, viz.

the Übermensch and the ewige Wiederkehr, or eternal repetition of

the world process. The former, Professor Deussen holds, is an ideal

of humanity which, in essential points, coincides with the Christ of

the church; and when Nietzsche insists that the man within us must be

overcome in order that the Übermensch may arise, he preaches what all

great moralists and religious teachers have preached. Nietzsche errs

in his conception of the nature of the “negation of the will,” and in

substituting genius for morality (or the intellect for the will) as

the means of attaining to an ideal humanity.

After many years of guessing in the dark as to Nietzsche’s madness,

Dr. George M. Gould points out in a careful and convincing essay that

the original trouble began with his eyes, with a faulty diagnosis

of his complaint. Dr. Gould writes, after sifting all the evidence

of Nietzsche’s day-books and his sister’s suspicions as to the real

cause, in the _Montreal Medical Journal_:—

I have spoken of the physiologic cause of this morbidly feverish

intensity of mental activity. It appears to me the inevitable

irritation due to severe eye-strain. Nietzsche also thought of

suicide. Nietzsche produced within twenty years sixteen volumes,

all written by himself in small, clear handwriting, all the result

of independent philosophic and original thinking, besides several

other volumes of technical philologic studies. He was, moreover, a

busy, conscientious teacher and lecturer.

The influence of his disease upon his character and writings

is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an

enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one.

With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I

gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased

cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that

“A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his

professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves

of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of

teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal

unrest, etc.”

But if so, it is an error which only extends the pathologic to

the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation

was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional

lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge.

It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness,

radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the

Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral

irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of

much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner

in which he was forced to do his literary work, _i.e._ by thinking

and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head,

and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him

to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence

also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the

discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying

sentences.

In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of

January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in

Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him

home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still

on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were

evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud

and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to

and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him

to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist,

where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later

corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, was made. His mother had

him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897,

after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25,

1900.

According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was

pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an

examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.

Is it not an unusual coincidence that Bayreuth, the very hub of

Wagner’s musical and of Nietzsche’s intellectual activities, is also

the birthplace of a man who is one of Nietzsche’s forerunners, one is

tempted to say, his real philosophical progenitor? In the thriving

Bavarian village was born, October 25, 1806, Caspar Schmidt, later

known to the world as Max Stirner, the author of The Individual and

his Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipsic, 1845), the

very gospel of modern philosophical anarchy, and a book which, with

Guyau’s system of morals, paved the way for Nietzsche. Stirner, poor,

unknown, died in Berlin, June 26, 1856. There is a sympathetic study

of his life by John Henry Mackay, the German poet with Scotch blood

in his veins.

The best single study in the English language on Nietzsche is by

Havelock Ellis. This writer hazards the just observation that there

was a touch of the “prig” in the philosopher, and that Wagner’s free

and easy manners often made him wince. “Your brother with his air

of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” Wagner said

to Frau Förster-Nietzsche, “one can always see what he is thinking;

sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them

more madly than ever.” And the motley crowd that was attracted to

Bayreuth filled the exclusive Nietzsche with horror. An aristocrat, a

promulgator of an aristocratic philosophy, writers on social science

very properly refuse to class this thinker among the leaders of the

anarchistic movement—Nietzsche loathed the promiscuous, the popular,

in a word, the mob. Wagner was Teutonic (his friend doubted his

Teutonism in a memorable passage); he was no longer Hellenic. And he

seemed to be going Romeward. It was all too much for the idealist

who broke away from his past; in reality, the attempt was made to

break with himself. Impending madness was preceded by distressing

melancholia.

He loved Wagner to the last, and previous to the tragic crisis, Lou

Salomé says that he went to Lucerne, and in Triebschen sat and wept

at his ineluctable fate. He even wrote after The Wagner Case such a

sentiment as this:—

“Here, while I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I lack the

word to express my gratitude for that which formed my deepest and my

heartiest solace. This beyond all doubt was the intimate communion

with Richard Wagner. I would give little for the rest of my human

relations; at no price would I cut out of my life the days of

Triebschen, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime inspirations,

of deep moments. I know not what others have gone through with

Wagner; our heaven was never traversed by a cloud.”

Was Wagner to blame? Wagner, harassed by a thousand importunings—his

gigantic Bayreuth scheme, his money troubles, his uncertain position

despite his first big success! Ellis believes, rightly enough, that

when Wagner realized Nietzsche was no longer his friend, “he dropped

him silently, as a workman drops a useless tool.” This seems cruelly

selfish; but Wagner had no time for unselfish moods, for fine-spun

theories of friendship. He was a realist. Life had made him one;

besides, was there not Ludwig of Bavaria to take the place of the

once gentle dreamer, now doubter and scorner? And Wagner was old

enough to recognize the value of money. No, the great composer is not

to be alone censured. Yet must we exclaim, Alas! poor Nietzsche!

II

What does Nietzsche preach? What is his central doctrine divested of

its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity,

and anti-everything else? Simply, a doctrine as old as the first

invertebrate organism which floated in torrid seas beneath a blazing

moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, selfhood. He is the

apostle of the _ego_, and he refuses to accept the system spinning

of the Teutonic spider philosophers of the day. He is a proclaimer

of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the

soul of theology.

From Heraclitus to Hobbes materialism has flowed, a sturdy

current, parallel with hundreds of more spiritual creeds. I say

“more spiritual creeds,” for the spiritualizing of what was once

contemptuously called dead, inorganic matter is being steadily

prosecuted by every man of science to-day, whether he be electrician,

biologist, or chemist. Nietzsche’s voice is raised against the

mystagogues, occultists, and reactionaries who, in the name of

religion and art, would put science once more under the ban of a

century ago. He is the strong pagan man who hates the weak and

ailing. He therefore hates the religion of the weak and oppressed. He

is an aristocrat in art, believing that there should be an art for

artists, and an art—an inferior art—for inferior intelligences. He

forgot that there is an art for the artist,—his own particular art,

and that into it none but the equally gifted may have an entrance.

And he forgot, too, that all great art is rooted in the soil of earth.

Nietzsche hates the music that is beloved of the world. Yet, after

the twentieth hearing of Carmen, he frantically asserts that Bizet

is a greater man than Wagner, that he is blither, possesses the

divine gayety, sparkle, and indescribable fascination of the Greeks!

From his letters we learn that as a joke he put up Bizet as a man of

straw to fight the Wagner idol. And a joke it is. But what would he

have said to the music of Richard Strauss?

He rejects with contempt pity,—that pity which is akin to love; and

therefore he hates Wagner, for in Wagner’s music is the note of

yearning love and pity sounded by a master hand. To Nietzsche George

Eliot’s

Oh may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence: live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

... in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self

would have been as silly as was the optimism of Leibnitz to

Schopenhauer. This Nietzsche was a terrible fellow, a very Berserker

in his mad rage against existing institutions. He used a battering

ram of rare dialectic skill, and crash go the religious, social, and

artistic fabrics reared ages since! But when the brilliant smoke

of his style clears away, we still see standing the same venerable

institutions. This tornadic philosopher does damage only to the

outlying structures. He lets in light on some dark and dank places.

He is a tonic for malaria, musical and religious; and there is value

even in his own fantastic Transvaluation of all Values. I fancy

that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been a man of physical resources,

he would have been a soldier hero. The late Anton Seidl once told

me that he knew the unlucky man when he was a Wagnerian. He was

slight of stature, evidently of delicate health, but in his eyes

burned the restless fire of genius. If that same energy could have

been transmuted into action, he might have been a sane, healthy

man to-day. In all this he was not unlike Stendhal, of whom Jules

Lemaître wrote:—

“A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his

incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too

strenuous analysis of life.

I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It

is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read

it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also

demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche

saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the

Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with

Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from

his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger

in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music,

divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner

and Wagnerian critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist

he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers.

It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but

its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long

as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself,

undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is

the noblest music of all.

Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself

for nearly a thousand years.”

“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and

Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been

introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of

intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish,

German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and

dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You

may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile

of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier

thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a

German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory

man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than

masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the

Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous.

Nietzsche is _par excellence_ the thinker for the artistic. If Wagner

was a painter, or a symphonist _manqué_, then Nietzsche was an artist

_manqué_. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant,

attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he

says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher.

“Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.”

“Rousseau, or return to nature _in impuris naturalibus_.”

“Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.”

“Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.”

“Kant, or _cant_, as an intelligent character.”

“Victor Hugo, or Pharos, in a sea of absurdity.”

“Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat.”

“Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.”

“John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.”

“The Goncourts, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer; music by

Offenbach.”

Nietzsche preached of the beauty and pride of the body. Of pride we

cannot have too much. It is the salt of personality. Golden-mouthed

Plato, in De Republica, makes outcry against the dullard who thinks

shame of his body. The human body is truly a tabernacle, and woe to

him that defileth it, says the wise man.

He once made a proposal to found a monastery for freethinkers. What

an abbot he would have been!

Did Nietzsche not declare, in the words of the Apostle Matthew (xvi.

26), slightly altered:—

“For what is a man profited if he shall gain his own soul and lose

the whole world?”

Consider his great opponent, Tolstoy, who preaches the doctrine

of non-resistance, of altruism, of a depressing socialism which

is saturated with the very Orientalism so despised by Nietzsche!

But then, Tolstoy does not play fair in the game. He has reached

the threescore and ten of Scriptures; he has led, by his own

acknowledgment, a life of self-indulgence; he has gambled and drank

deeply. His belly was his god. Then he ran the intellectual gamut of

dissipation. He worshipped at the shrines of false gods, wrote great,

gray, godless novels, won renown, family happiness, riches, love,

admiration, applause, and notoriety. So, having lived too happily,

he forthwith falls to railing at destiny, like the Englishman

Mr. Krehbiel tells us of in his Music and Manners. Quoting Haydn

he writes, “Mr. Brassey once cursed because he enjoyed too much

happiness in this world.” Tolstoy, having tasted of everything, has

damaged his palate. Man pleases him not, nor does woman. In every

book of his later, lonesome years he gives away the secret of life’s

illusion, like the mischievous rival of a conjuror. It is not fair to

the young ones who, with mouth agape, gaze at the cunning pictures

limned by that old arch-hypocrite, Nature. The young man who has not

had the courage to make a fool of himself some time in his career has

not lived. Robert Louis Stevenson said this, and he said it better.

Away with your cynics! Throw pessimism to the dogs! Let Tolstoy swear

that the inverted bowl of the firmament is full of ashes, full of

burnt-out stars; youth will see the bravery of the cosmical circus,

its streamers, its mad coursing through eternity. The only way to

help others is to help yourself!

So, despite his age, which is democratic, the aristocrat Nietzsche

caught its ears; in the teeth of a religious reaction he preached

rank atheism; and he opposed to altruism a selfless egotism. In a

word, all his tendencies were set against those of his time; yet he

has succeeded in attracting the attention of his contemporaries.

Brandes is right in declaring that in some secret way Nietzsche “must

have agreed with much of the tumult of modern thought.”

In his Gay Science,—a mockingly ironic title for such a sad

book,—Nietzsche wrote these sentences; as in a meteoric flare we

realize the sickness of his prophetic soul. He alludes to his idea of

Eternal Recurrence:—

How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into

thy most solitary solitude, and said to thee: “This life, as

thou livest it now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live

over again, and not once but innumerable times; and there will be

nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure, and every

thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the

unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the

same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight

betwixt the trees, and this moment likewise and I myself. The

eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with

it, thou atom of dust.” Wouldest thou not cast thyself down, and

with gnashing of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or hast

thou ever experienced the tremendous moment in which thou wouldest

answer him, “Thou art a god, and never heard I anything more

divine”?

Frau Andreas-Salomé, whose book on the philosopher is interesting,

though disclaimed by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, adds this illuminating

commentary on Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence doctrine:—

He struggled with it at first as with a fate from which there was

no escape. Never can I forget the hours in which he first confided

it to me as a secret, as something of whose verification and

confirmation he had an unspeakable horror; he spoke of it only in

a low voice and with every sign of the profoundest horror. And he

suffered in truth so deeply in life that the certainty of life’s

eternal recurrence could not but be for him a thing to shudder

at. The quintessence of the doctrine of recurrence, the radiant

apotheosis of life which Nietzsche afterwards taught, forms so

profound a contrast to his own painful experiences of life that it

impresses us as an uncanny mask.

And she further remarks: “Nietzsche contemplated the possibility

that the theory might be scientifically deduced by physics from the

doctrine of atoms.” And here we are almost back to the orthodox

belief in eternity. All thought moves circle-wise, and Nietzsche’s

ethical teaching is as old as Callicles in the Gorgias.

Nietzsche, then, is not such a revolutionary thinker. He is the

perfect type of the old Greek rhapsodist, the impassioned rhetor, who

with sonorous, beautiful phrases charmed and soothed his listeners as

he pursued his peripatetic way. Sometimes the sound of what he says

remains long after the memory of its sense has vanished. However, a

perfect art or philosophy, or a perfect world itself, might soon grow

monotonous. The ameliorating, if slightly hedonistic, philosophy of

the Cardinal in John Inglesant comes back in pleasing sequence:—

There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma

worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding

on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty

walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are

moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the

meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I

have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary

descant upon a thorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each

performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance

to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to

him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true

upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met,

now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the

melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought

that this is life.

To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his

own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play

is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that

all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords

and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so

attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be

incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle.

IV

LITERARY MEN WHO LOVED MUSIC

THE MUSICAL TASTE OF TURGÉNIEFF

I

Mr. Henry James, who is exquisitely aware of the presence of others,

has written of Iván Turgénieff with astonishing candor. In his

Partial Portraits a picture of the great, gentle Russian writer

is slowly built up by strokes like smoke. There is much of his

troubled melancholy, some of his humor, and, rare for Mr. James,

distinct allusions to Turgénieff’s attitude in the presence of the

American-born novelist’s work. Turgénieff cared little for criticism.

It pleased him to know that his friends loved him and read his books.

He did not read theirs; Mr. James admits he did not pretend to read

_his_, though the older man confessed to having found one of the

novels written _de main de maitre_. His heedlessness about himself

and his affairs is proverbial. He was robbed of 130,000 francs, “a

fairly large slice of his fortune,” he writes Flaubert, but has

blame for himself, not for the dishonest steward of his estates. Like

Flaubert, he was rich, very rich for a literary man, and like the

author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, he was continually giving, eternally

giving, said his Paris friends, indignant at the spectacle of both

men denuding themselves of more than their surplus income.

There is no one alive who could give us such intimate souvenirs of

Turgénieff as Madame Viardot-Garcia. He was the family friend, the

closest companion, of her husband; it was an undisturbed intimacy for

many years. His letters, the most eloquent, were written to Madame

Viardot-Garcia, and to both he opened his mind about music. He knew

Gounod, who often visited him and rolled about on his bearskin rug

when he was in the travail of composition. It was at Courtavenel,

the country place of the Viardots, that Gounod met Turgénieff. Their

liking was mutual.

Turgénieff knew the piano slightly, for he writes of his having

played duos of Beethoven and Mozart with a sister of Tolstoy. He

counsels, in a letter from Spasskoïé, Madame Viardot to work at her

composition. This gifted woman, singer, and pianist, admired by

Liszt, Heine, and half of Europe, occasionally found time to compose.

“And now set to work!” cries Turgénieff. “I have never admired and

preached work so much as I have since I have been doing nothing

myself; and yet look here, I give you my word of honor, that, if you

will begin to write sonatas, I will take up my literary work again.

‘Hand me the cinnamon and I’ll hand you the senna.’ A novel for a

sonata—does that suit you?”

In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre

countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She

will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze

fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone.

Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour

me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me

in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his

life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter

misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard

and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her

weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an

ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to

his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused

him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet,

the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent

in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr.

James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius,

poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to

revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one,

and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude.

To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his

behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as

unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his

career by certain of his contemporaries.

The friendship of Turgénieff and Flaubert was a beautiful episode

in the history of two literatures. Alphonse Daudet spoke of it:

“It was George Sand who married them. The boastful, rebellious,

quixotic Flaubert, with a voice like a guard’s trumpeter, with his

penetrating, ironical outlook, and the gait of a conquering Norman,

was undoubtedly the masculine half of this marriage of souls; but

who, in that other colossal being, with his flaxen brows, his great

unmodelled face, would have discovered the woman, that woman of

over-accentuated refinement whom Turgénieff has painted in his

books, that nervous, languid, passionate Russian, torpid as an

Oriental, tragic as a blind force in revolt? So true is it in the

tumult of the great human factory, souls often get into the wrong

covering—masculine souls into feminine bodies, feminine souls into

cyclopean frames.”

These were the days of the “Dinners of the Hissed Authors,” when

Taine, Catulle Mendès, de Heredia, Paul Alexis, Leon Hennique,

Philippe Burty, Leon Cladel, Huysmans, Zola, Turgénieff, the de

Goncourts, Flaubert, and de Maupassant gathered monthly and defined

new literary horizons. There was plenty of wit, satire, enthusiasm,

dreams, and theorizing.

Guy de Maupassant relates that “Turgénieff used to bury himself in

an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and

hesitating, yet giving to things he said an extraordinary charm and

interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence,

fixing his wide blue eyes, with their restless pupils, upon his

friend’s fine face, and answering in his sonorous voice, which came

like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul’s mustache of

his. Their conversation rarely touched upon the current affairs of

life, seldom wandered away from literary topics or literary history.

Turgénieff would often come laden with foreign books, and would

translate fluently poems by Goethe, Poushkin, or Swinburne.” He knew

English; he knew Italian, German, and French. He was crazy over

hunting—read his Memoirs of a Sportsman, miniature masterpieces—and

crossed the Channel after good game in England.

“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his

that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear

old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast

theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.”

And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary

performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his

own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle

screaming for _something_,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately

humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he

was always at _déjeuner_—that gout of his was not acquired on wind.

It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that

he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in

the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to

an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing

very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked

by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough

heard much good singing in her _salon_. The mistake is all the more

curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men

in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids

Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer

up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the

Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are

born onlookers.”

Rich as he was, but a charitable spendthrift, Turgénieff was not

sorry to inherit from his brother a legacy of 250,000 francs. It is a

notion of mine that the richer a novelist the better his art. Poverty

does not agree with certain geniuses. With composers who masquerade

in the theatres money is a necessity. Without it their art never

blows to a blossoming. Look at Wagner, at Gluck, for example, and

then on the other hand consider that wretched, grimy Beethoven in

mean Vienna lodgings, yelling as he composed in his deaf estate, the

water he spilt slowly filtering through the crazy seams of a crazy

man’s floor! He lived in an ideal land, where clean napery and the

pliant spine of the time-server were but encumbrances. Not so the

novel maker, the architect of prose philosophies like Schopenhauer’s

and Flaubert’s. Leisure, the leisure that feeds on a competence, is

a necessity for these latter. Schopenhauer knew it, and, practical

man, urged all philosophers to cultivate the wherewithal for

leisure—money; and Goethe in the last book of Wilhelm Meister sets

forth most admirably his idea of an artist’s abode. Dickens and

Thackeray, a great genius, a great artist, were forced to drive their

pens for bread and cheese. Both fell short of the perfection achieved

by Flaubert, Turgénieff, and Tolstoy, all three very wealthy men and

tardy producers. The rule holds good for Balzac. The haste that kills

all art was not thrust upon the other three by hunger, and we are the

richer. Your lyric poet, your symphonist, fattens spiritually on a

lean life, but their brethren should have a bank account.

Turgénieff did not care much for Sarah Bernhardt:—

I could not know that my opinion on Sarah Bernhardt would become

public property, and I am very sorry for it. But I am not in the

habit of withdrawing my opinions, even when I have expressed them

in a private and friendly conversation, and they are made public

against my will. Yes, I consider M. A——’s criticism of her quite

true and just. This woman is clever and skilful; she has her

business at her fingers’ ends, is gifted with a charming voice and

educated in a good school; but she has nothing natural about her,

no artistic temperament whatever, and she tries to make up for

this by Parisian license. She is eaten through and through with

_chic_, _réclame_, and pose. She is monotonous, cold, and dry; in

short, without a single spark of talent in the highest sense of

the word. Her gait is that of a hen; she has no play of features;

the movements of her hands are purposely angular in order to be

piquant; the whole thing reeks of the boulevards, of Figaro, and

patchouli. You see that, to my mind, M. A—— has been even too

lenient. You quote Zola as an authority, although you always rebel

against all authorities, so you must allow me to quote Augier, who

once said to me: “Cette femme n’a aucun talent; on dit d’elle que

c’est un paquet de nerfs—c’est un paquet de ficelles.” But, you

will ask, Why then such a world-wide reputation? What do I care?

I only speak my own feelings, and I am glad to find somebody who

supports my view.

But these _ficelles_ are artistic to-day. Doubtless Turgénieff would

have been one of the first to recognize the unassuming realistic

talents of Duse. There is nothing more touching than his adjuration

to Tolstoy to forsake his half-cracked philosophy and return to

literature:—

VERY DEAR LEON NIKOLAIEVITCH: It is a long time since I wrote

to you. I was then, and I am now, on my deathbed. I cannot

recover; there is no longer the least chance of it. I am writing

to you expressly to tell you how happy I have been to be your

contemporary, and to make you a last urgent prayer. My friend,

return to literary work. This gift has come to you from there

whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could

know that you would listen to my prayer!... My friend, great writer

of our Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know if this letter

reaches you. I clasp you for the last time to my heart—you and all

yours.... I can write no more.... I am tired.

Tolstoy, on his side, could never understand Turgénieff’s fear of

death. He said:—

Some people wonder at Socrates who died and did not care to flee

from prison. But is it not better to die consciously in fulfilment

of one’s duty than unexpectedly from some stupid bacteria? And I

have always been surprised that so clever a man as Turgénieff

should bear himself as he did toward death. He was awfully afraid

of death. Is it not even incomprehensible that he was not afraid

to be afraid of death? And that darkness of reason was really

astonishing in him! He and Prince D. D. Urusoff used to discuss

religion, and Turgénieff used to dispute and dispute, and all of

a sudden he would no longer be able to control himself, and would

cover up his ears, and, pretending that he had forgotten Urusoff’s

name, would shout, “I won’t listen any longer to that Prince

Trubetzkoy.”

And Tolstoy mimicked Turgénieff’s voice until one would have

thought the man was there in person.

Turgénieff first met de Maupassant in 1876. “A door opened. A

giant came in—a giant with a silver head, as they would say in

a fairy tale.” Thus the younger describes the elder man. M.

Halperine-Kaminsky has set at rest the disquieting rumors of certain

alleged strictures upon his friends, said to have been made by

Turgénieff in letters to Sacher-Masoch. Daudet finally declared that

he did not believe their validity. “Turgénieff was not a hypocrite,”

he wrote to Kaminsky. The Slavic temperament is difficult of

decipherment. Especially difficult was Turgénieff. The shining and

clear surfaces of his art covered depths undreamed of by his Parisian

friends. Mr. James speaks of his reservations and discriminations and

“above all the great back garden of his Slav imagination and his

Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the

grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany

him.” M. Renan voices it better in his speech over the dead body of

the great Russian. “Turgénieff,” Mr. James translates it, “received

by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift

which is noble beyond all others. He was born essentially impersonal.

His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had

been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of

a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years;

infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths

of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a

whole race; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries,

speechless, came through him to life and utterance.” This one, said

to be lacking in the core of patriotism, could write:—

“In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my

native land, thou alone art my support and my staff. Oh, great,

powerful, Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee

how should not man despair at the sight of what is going on at home?

But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to

great people.”

Prince Krapotkin in his Autobiography of a Revolutionist thus

describes Turgénieff:—

His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head

covered with soft and thick gray hair, he was certainly beautiful;

his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid of a touch of humor,

and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence

of affectation which are characteristic of all the best Russian

writers. His fine head revealed a formidable development of brain

power, and when he died, and Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the

surgeon), weighed his brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest

brain then known—that of Cuvier—reaching something over two

thousand grammes, that they would not trust to their scales, but

got new ones, to repeat the weighing. His talk was especially

remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to

develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a

master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a

scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out

of one of his novels.

Of all novel writers of our century, Turgénieff has certainly

attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds

to the Russian ear like music—music as deep as that of Beethoven.

Touching on the objections raised by the Nihilists as to the truth of

the portrait of Bazaroff, Prince Krapotkin writes:—

The principal novels—the series of Dmitri Rudin, A Nobleman’s Nest,

On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil—represent

the leading “history making” types of the educated classes of

Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched

with a fulness of philosophical conception and humanitarian

understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in

any other literature. Yet Fathers and Sons—a novel which he

rightly considered his profoundest work—was received by the young

people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared that the

Nihilist Bazaroff was by no means a true representation of his

class; many described him even as a caricature upon nihilism.

This misunderstanding deeply affected Turgénieff, and, although

a reconciliation between him and the young generation took place

later on, at St. Petersburg, after he had written Virgin Soil, the

wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.

He knew from Lavroff that I was a devoted admirer of his writings;

and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to

Antokolsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazaroff.

I frankly replied, “Bazaroff is an admirable painting of the

nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you

did your other heroes!” “No, I loved him, intensely loved him,”

Turgénieff replied, with an unexpected vigor. “Wait; when we get

home I will show you my diary, in which I noted how I wept when I

had ended the novel with Bazaroff’s death.” Turgénieff certainly

loved the intellectual aspect of Bazaroff. He so identified himself

with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary

in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazaroff’s point

of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him.

In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the

history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one

or the other of these characters. “Analysis first of all, and

egotism, and therefore no faith; an egotist cannot even believe in

himself;” so he characterized Hamlet. “Therefore he is a sceptic,

and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote who fights

against windmills, and takes a barber’s plate for the magic helm of

Mambrin (who of us has never made the same mistake?) is a leader

of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking

no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions,

march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which

they alone may see. They search, they fall, but they rise again,

and find it—and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic,

and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates

it; Evil and deceit are his enemies; and his scepticism is not

indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume

his will.”

These thoughts of Turgénieff give, I think, the true key for

understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several

of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved

Hamlet and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazaroff. He

represented his superiority well, but he could not surround him

with that tender, poetical love to a sick friend which he bestowed

on his heroes when they approached the Hamlet type. It would have

been out of place.

Although suffering from a cancer in the spinal cord, Turgénieff wrote

to Alexander III, begging him to give Russia a constitution—this was

in the autumn of 1881—but of course to no purpose. The man whose

books helped to bring about the emancipation of the serfs died in

exile, not even a prophet in the literature of his own country. Yet,

because of their poets and prose masters Russia will one day be free,

and then Turgénieff’s name will be writ in golden letters as the

artist, the patriot.

II

In 1868 he writes from Baden to Ambroise Thomas about a sketch made

by Viardot for the libretto of an opera. Nothing, however, came of

the matter. But only in the new letters translated by Rosa Newmarch,

do we catch Turgénieff’s opinion of the neo-Russian school of music.

For the most part it is rather a contemptuous opinion and not

pleasant reading for his contemporaries. He hated humbug, and the cry

of young Russia, with its hatred of the sources whence it derived

its inspiration, angered the writer. In correspondence with Vladimir

Vassilievich Stassov we catch glimpses of the tempest brewing in the

Slavic _samovar_.

“Have faith in your nationality,” preaches Stassov, “and you shall

have works also.” “Russian individuality!” cries the contemptuous

voice of Turgénieff. “What humbug, what blindness and crass

ignorance, what willful disregard of all that Europe has done!”

He loved Schumann, naturally enough, this Schumann, himself a

dreamer of dreams. But Balakirew, Glinka, “a rough diamond,” and the

rest he would not have. He believed in the genius of the sculptor

Antokolsky and in Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. I wonder if

Tschaïkowsky and Turgénieff ever met? Probably they did, although

I can find no reference in the correspondence. He listened to

Dargomijsky, to Cui, to Moussorgsky, but could find nothing but

“Slavonic barbarism” and “undisguised Nihilism.” He loved the playing

of Anton Rubinstein, but his operas—! He writes Stassov in 1872:—

You are quite wrong in fancying that I “dislike” Glinka: _he_ was a

very great and original man. But come, now, it is quite different

with the others—with your M. Dargomijsky and his Stone Guest. It

will always remain one of the greatest mysteries of my life how

such intelligent people as you and Cui, for example, can possibly

find in these limp, colorless, feeble,—I beg your pardon,—senile

recitatives, interwoven now and then with a few howls, to lend

color and imagination—how you can find in this feeble piping

not only music, but a new, genial, and epoch-making music. Can

it be unconscious patriotism, I wonder? I confess that, except

a sacrilegious attempt on one of Poushkin’s best poems, I find

nothing in it. And now cut off my head, if you like!

Of all these young Russian musicians, only two have decided

talent—Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. All the rest, for what

they are worth, may be put in a sack and thrown into the water!

Not, of course, as men—as men they are charming—but as artists. The

Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses XXIX is not more utterly forgotten than

these men will be fifteen or twenty years hence. This is my one

consolation.

This prophecy is accomplished. A new generation has arisen in Russia.

Speaking of some piano pieces of Stcherbatchev he confesses to

Stassov:—

Stcherbatchev, as a man, produces an unfavorable impression; but

this need not imply that he is destitute of talent, and I should be

very much obliged to you if you would send me his compositions as

soon as they appear. By the way, you have no ground for fancying

that Rubinstein will treat them with contempt; to me, at least,

he spoke of Stcherbatchev as a very talented young man.... The

day before yesterday I received a parcel containing two copies

of the Zigzags. I have listened with the utmost attention to two

consecutive performances of them, and the interpretation was

excellent. To my great regret I have not been able to discover in

them the merits about which you wrote to me. I cannot say whether

in time original talent will show itself in Stcherbatchev, but

at present I can see nothing in him but the “clamor of captive

thoughts.” All this has been written under the influence of

Schumann’s Carnaval, with a mixture of Liszt’s bizarreries dragged

in without motive. It is altogether lacking in ideas; is tedious,

strained, and wanting in life. The first page pleased me most; the

theme is commonplace, but the working out is interesting.

For this you may chop off my head, if you please. I thank you, all

the same, for your kindness in sending the music....

In short, pray believe that if I find Mozart’s Don Juan a work of

genius, and Dargomijsky’s Don Juan formless and absurd, it is not

because Mozart is an authority and others think so, or because

Dargomijsky is unknown outside his little circle, but simply

because Mozart pleases me, and Dargomijsky does not. Neither do the

Zigzags please me. That is the end of the matter!...

So not for one moment do I doubt the worthlessness (to my mind) of

Maximov’s pictures, I at once placed him in the same category as

your favorites, MM. Dargomijsky, Stcherbatchev, Repin, and _tutti

quanti_; all those half-baked geniuses filled with spiced stuffing

in which you keep detecting the real essence.

He also speaks casually of Saint-Saëns and his wife.

Stassov sums up the matter this way: “Turgénieff, a great writer,

was, as might be expected from a Russian, realistic and sincere

in his own novels and tales; but in his tastes and views of art

his cosmopolitanism made him the enemy of realism and sincerity in

others. In such ideas and in such unaccountable prejudices he elected

to spend his whole life.”

Which proves that the Russian critic was ultra-Russian in his

view of Turgénieff. The new Russians are descendants of Chopin

and Schumann and again Chopin. Few have attained to largeness

of utterance, perhaps Tschaïkowsky alone. Men like Borodine

and Glazanouw over-accent their peculiarities, and much of

their music—when it is not sheer imitation—is but rude art.

Rimsky-Korsakoff has fallen into the rut of cosmopolitanism, as did

Rubinstein, indulging in supersubtleties of orchestral painting, and

has never conceived an original idea. Turgénieff was right then,

this man who loved Russia, loved her faults and dared to catalogue

them in his beautiful novels. His art in its finish reminds one of

Chopin’s; there is vaporous melancholy, the vague sighing for days

that have vanished and the dumb resignation,—the resignation of the

Slav peoples. But his idealism was robuster than Chopin’s and his

execution of character hardier. Once at Flaubert’s dinner table

the talk turned on love. De Goncourt, I have forgotten which one,

told Turgénieff that he was “saturated with femininity.” The other

answered:—

With me, neither books nor anything whatever in the world could

take the place of woman. How can I make that plain to you? I

find it is only love which produces a certain expansion of the

being, that nothing else gives ... eh? Listen! When I was quite

a young man there was a miller’s girl in the neighborhood of St.

Petersburg, whom I used to see when out hunting. She was charming,

very fair, with a flash of the eye rather common among us. She

would accept nothing from me. But one day she said to me, “You must

give me a present.”

“What is it you want?”

“Bring me some scented soap from St. Petersburg.”

I brought her the soap. She took it, disappeared, came back

blushing, and murmured, offering me her hands, delicately scented:—

“Kiss my hands—as you kiss the hands of ladies in drawing-rooms at

St. Petersburg.”

I threw myself on my knees—and you know, _that was the finest

moment of my life_.

Like Chopin and Tschaïkowsky, Turgénieff was all love.

BALZAC AS MUSIC CRITIC

While I think that George Moore’s comparative estimate of Shakespeare

and Balzac is a trifle more Celtic than critical, yet there can

be no denial made to the assertion that Balzac stands next to

Shakespeare—if not exactly on his level—in his astonishing fecundity

of imagination. “A monstrous debauch of the imagination,” Henley

called the Human Comedy; but surely no more of a debauch than

the Plays. All abnormal productivity of the intellect gives this

impression. Look at Rabelais. There are over two thousand figures in

the Human Comedy, all clearly characterized, no two alike; and every

man and woman in the work you might meet in a day’s stroll about

Paris.

Monstrous, yes; but so is Beethoven, so is Michael Angelo monstrous.

All genius has something monstrous in it—something of what Nietzsche

so happily called the over man.

Balzac’s Gambara and Massimilla Doni—what genius he had for

selecting names which outwardly and inwardly fitted his character!

After reading the former I felt almost tempted into echoing Mr.

Moore’s extravagant assertion. Balzac is indeed a magician and not

a novelist. What puts him apart from other novelists, even from

his technical superior, Flaubert, is his faculty of vision. He is

a _Seer_, not a novelist. Any motive he touched, whether usury

or music-erotics or patriotism, he vivified with his prophetic

imagination. He saw his theme concretely; he saw its origins, its

roots in the dead past; and plunging his eyes into the future he saw

its ghost, its spiritual aura, its ultimate evolution. Such a man as

Balzac might have been a second Bonaparte, a second Spencer. He had

science, and he had imagination; and he preferred to be the social

historian of the nineteenth century, the greatest romancer that ever

lived, and a profound philosopher besides. All modern novelists

nest in his books, draw nourishment from them, suck in their very

souls from his vast fund of spirituality. The difference between

such a giant as Balzac and such a novelist as Thackeray is that the

latter draws delightful and artistic pictures of manners; but never

turns a soul inside out for us. The best way to describe Balzac is

to enumerate the negatives of his contemporaries and successors.

All they lacked and lack he had in such amazing prodigality that

comparison is not only impossible, it is brutal.

Balzac and music! Balzac and women! Balzac and money! Balzac and

politics! Or,—Balzac and any subject! The encyclopædic knowledge,

extraordinary sympathy and powers of expression—do they not all

fairly drench every line the man wrote? He could analyze the art of

painting and forsee its future affinities for impressionism—read The

Unknown Masterpiece—just as in Gambara he divined Berlioz, Wagner,

and Richard Strauss. I am quite sure that Wagner read Balzac. Gambara

was finished June, 1837, and there are things in it that could only

have been written about Berlioz. The key to the book, however, is

passion, not any particular personality. Balzac always searched for

the master passion in men and women’s lives. Given the clew-note, he

developed the theme into symphonic proportions. It is Andrea’s love

of intrigue that leads him to follow the beautiful Marianna, wife

of the composer Gambara,—a fantastic creation worthy of Hoffmann.

He is an Italian in Paris, who wrote a mass for the anniversary of

Beethoven’s death, and also an opera—Mahomet. But that opera! Has

such a score ever been dreamed of by any one except Richard Strauss?

Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an

Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most

delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in

its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science

and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of

music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not

merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has

the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us

defined pleasures. Mahomet is a trilogy, the libretto by Gambara

himself—mark this familiar detail. It contained The Martyrs, Mahomet,

and Jerusalem Delivered,—the God of the West, the God of the East,

and the struggles of religions around a tomb. In this immense frame,

philosophy, patriotism, racial antagonisms, love, the magic of

ancient Sabianism and Oriental poetry of the Jewish—culminating in

the Arabian—are all displayed. As Gambara says, “Ah! to be a great

musician, it is necessary also to be very learned. Without knowledge,

no local color, no ideas in the music.” This irresistibly reminds one

of a phrase from Wagner’s notebook.

The story of the opera—too long to set down here—as told by Gambara,

is wonderful. It has the ring of an analytical programme to some

new-fangled and heretical symphonic poem. Here is the curious medley

of psychology, musical references, history, stage directions,

cries of hysteria, and much clotted egotism. There is the clash

of character, the shock of events; and it is well to note such a

phrase as this: “The dark and gloomy color of this finale [Act I]

is varied by the motives of the three women who predict to Mahomet

his triumph, and whose phrases will be found developed in the third

act, in the scene where Mahomet tastes the delights of his grandeur.”

Does this not forestall Wagner’s Ring? or did Balzac really find the

entire idea in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr? Is not Kapellmeister Kreisler

the first of his line? Now, while there seems to be far too much

praying in this drama of soul and action, it is not such a farrago

as it appears at first reading. I imagine that Balzac knew little

of the technics of music; yet he guessed matters with astonishing

perspicacity. His characterization of the megalomaniacal Mahomet,

and his epileptic grandeurs would do as a portrait of most founders

of new religions. Balzac had Voltaire to draw upon; but he makes the

epilepsy a big motive in Mahomet’s life,—as it is in the lives of

the majority of religious geniuses and fanatics, from Buddha to the

newest faith-curing healer.

And how was this extraordinary music and libretto received by

Gambara’s wife, her admirer, and the Italian cook? “There was

not the appearance of a poetical or musical idea in the stunning

cacophony which smote the ears: the principles of harmony, the

first rules of composition, were totally foreign to this shapeless

creation. Instead of music, learnedly connected, which Gambara

described, his fingers produced a succession of fifths, sevenths,

octaves, major thirds, and steps from fourth without sixth to the

bass, a combination of discordant sounds thrown at hazard which

seemed to combine to torture the least delicate ear.” I am positive,

nevertheless, that it must have been great, wonderful, new music.

As the strange discords “howled beneath his fingers,” Gambara, we

are told, almost fainted with intoxicating joy. Furthermore, he

had a raucous voice,—the true voice of a composer. “He stamped,

panted, yelled; his fingers equalled in rapidity the forked head of

a serpent; finally, at the last howl of the piano, he threw himself

backward, and let his head fall upon the back of his arm-chair.”

Poor Gambara! poor Kapellmeister Kreisler! And how much it all sounds

like the early stories told of Richard Wagner trying to express on

the treble keyboard his gigantic dreams, his tonal epics: and for

such supercilious men and critics as Mendelssohn, Hiller, Meyerbeer,

Berlioz, and Schumann!

Signor Giardini, the Italian cook in Gambara, stands for a portrait

of the true musical Philistine; he has a pretty taste in music, but

melody, or what he conceives to be melody, is his shibboleth. Andrea

Marcosini, a nobleman in pursuit of Gambara’s wife, and a musical

dilettante, finds Giardini a gabbling boaster. “Yes, your excellency,

in less than a quarter of an hour you will know what kind of a man I

am. I have introduced into the Italian kitchen refinements that will

surprise you. I am a Neapolitan,—that is to say, a born cook. But

what good is instinct without science? Science? I have passed thirty

years in acquiring it, and see what it has brought me to. My history

is that of all men of talent. My experiments and tests have ruined

three restaurants established successfully at Naples, Parma, and

Rome.”

He keeps a little place where Italian refugees and men who have

failed in the black, weltering symphony of Parisian life gather

and feed at dusk. It is a queer, interesting crew. Here is a poor

composer—not Gambara—of romances. “You see what a florid complexion,

what self-satisfaction, how little there is in his features, so well

disposed for romance. He who accompanies him is Gigelmi.” The latter

is a deaf conductor of orchestra. Then there is Ottoboni, a political

refugee—a nice, clean old gentleman, but considered dangerous by

the Italian government. A journalist is discovered at the table,

the poorest of the lot. He tells the truth about the theatrical

performances, hence writes for an obscure journal and is miserably

paid. Enter Gambara. He is bald, about forty, a man of refinement,

with brains,—a sufferer in a word. Though his dress was free from

oddity, the composer’s appearance was not lacking in nobility. A

conversation follows, merging into a debate, modulating angrily into

a furious discussion about art. It is wonderfully executed.

The composer of romances has written a mass for the anniversary of

Beethoven’s death. He asks the count, with assumed modesty, if he

will not attend the performance. “Thank you,” responds Andrea. “I do

not feel myself endowed with the organs necessary to the appreciation

of French singing; but if you were dead, monsieur, and Beethoven had

written the mass, I should not fail to hear it.” It may be observed

that this epigram has been remembered by several generations since

Balzac. Von Büllow is credited with it. Behold the original in all

its pristine glory! The deaf orchestra conductor also has his say:

“Music exists independently of execution. In opening Beethoven’s

symphony in C minor a musical man is soon translated into the world

of fancy upon the golden wings of the theme in G natural, repeated

in E by the horns. He sees a whole nature by turns illuminated by

dazzling sheafs of light, shadowed by clouds of melancholy, cheered

by divine song.” It is just possible that some one told Balzac of the

indeterminate tonality at the opening of the Fifth Symphony, though

he gets his scoring mixed.

“Beethoven is surpassed by the new school,” said the writer of

romances, disdainfully. “He is not yet understood,” answered

the count; “how can he be surpassed? Beethoven has extended the

boundaries of instrumental music, and no one has followed him in his

flight.” Gambara dissented by a movement of the head. “His works

are especially remarkable for the simplicity of the plan, and for

the manner in which this plan is followed out. With the majority of

composers the orchestral parts, wild and disorderly, combine only for

momentary effect; they do not always coöperate by the regularity of

their progress to the effect of a piece as a whole. With Beethoven

the effects are, so to speak, distributed in advance.” This is not

bad criticism for a writer of fiction. Think of the banalities

perpetrated about the same time by Henri Beyle, Stendhal, otherwise a

master of psychology.

Then the Count Andrea proceeds to demolish the reputation of

Rossini by comparing the “capering, musical chit-chat, gossipy,

perfumed” school of the Italian master to Beethoven. “Long

live German music!—when it can sing,” he adds _sotto voce_. Of

course there is a lively row, the host having much to say. Later

Gambara shows Andrea his Panharmonicon, an instrument which is

to replace an entire orchestra. He plays upon it. They are all

enchanted. Every instrument is represented. The total impression

is overwhelming. Gambara sang to its accompaniment—in which the

magic execution of Paganini and Liszt was revealed—the adieus of

Khadijeh, Mahomet’s first wife. “Who could have dictated to you such

chants?” demanded the count. “The spirit,” replied Gambara; “when

he appears, everything seems to me on fire. I see melodies face

to face, beautiful and fresh, colored like flowers; they radiate,

they resound, and I listen, but an infinite time is required to

reproduce them.” It is a pity this man drank so much. There follows

an admirable exposition of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable too long

for transcription. In the end comes ruin. Gambara’s wife, tiring of

his habits, his slow progress toward fame, leaves him for Andrea.

Abandoned, Gambara falls into disgrace, into dire poverty. The

Panharmonicon is sold by the sheriff and his scores sold for waste

paper. “On the day following the sale the scores had enveloped at

the Halle butter, fish, and fruits. Thus three great operas of which

this poor man spoke, but which a former Neapolitan cook, now a simple

huckster, said were a heap of nonsense, had been disseminated in

Paris, and devoured by the baskets of retailers.” Worse remained.

After years Marianna, the runaway wife, returns, lean, dirty, old,

and withered. Gambara receives her with tired, faithful arms.

Together they sing duets, with guitar accompaniment, on dusty

boulevards after dark. Marianna makes Gambara drink cheap brandy so

that he will play well. He gives bits from his half-forgotten operas.

A duchess asks: “Where do you get this music?” “From the opera of

Mahomet,” replied Marianna; “Rossini has composed a Mahomet II,” and

the other remarks:—

“What a pity that they will not give us at the Italiens the operas

of Rossini with which we are unacquainted! for this certainly is

beautiful music.” Gambara smiled! Thus ends the career of a great

composer. Gambara knew his failings. “We are victims of our own

superiority. My music is fine; but, when music passes from sensation

to thought, it can have for auditors only people of genius, for they

alone have the power to develop it.” Here is consolation for Richard

Strauss!

Massimilla Doni is dedicated to Jacques Strunz, at one time a music

critic in Paris. This dedication, charmingly indited, as are all

of Balzac’s, acknowledges the author’s indebtedness to the critic.

Massimilla Doni is more violent and less credible than Gambara. The

chief character is a musical degenerate, a morbid nobleman whose

solitary pleasure in life is to hear two tones in perfect concord.

This musical Marquis de Sade is described as follows: “This man, who

is 118 years old on the registers of vice and forty-seven according

to the records of the church, has but one last means of enjoyment

on earth that is capable of arousing in him a sense of life. Yes,

all the chords are broken, everything is a ruin or a tattered rag;

the mind, the intelligence, the heart, the nerves, all that produces

an impulse in man, that gives him a glimpse of heaven through desire

or the fire of pleasure, depends not so much upon music as upon one

of the innumerable effects, a perfect harmony between two voices, or

between one voice and the first string of his violin.”

Certainly this evil-minded person would not care for Wagner. He is

attached to a beautiful Venetian singer, Clara Tinti. It is she who

tells of this horrid Duke Cataneo:—

The old monkey sits on my knee and takes his violin; he plays well

enough, he produces sounds with it; I try to imitate them, and when

the longed-for moment arrives, and it is impossible to distinguish

the note of the violin from the note that issues from my windpipe,

then the old fellow is in ecstasy; his dead eyes emit their last

flames, he is deliriously happy, and rolls on the floor like a

drunken man. That is why he pays Genovese so handsomely. Genovese

is the only tenor whose voice sometimes coincides exactly with

mine. Either we do really approach that point once or twice in an

evening, or the duke imagines it; and for this imaginary pleasure

he has engaged Genovese; Genovese belongs to him. No operatic

manager can engage the singer to sing without me, or me without

him. The duke educated me to gratify this whim, and I owe to him

my talent, my beauty, my fortune. He will die in some spasm caused

by a perfect accord. The sense of hearing is the only one that has

survived in the shipwreck of his faculties—that is the thread by

which he clings to life.

This is a lovely study of a melomaniac, is it not? A man whose

sole passion mounts to his ears; who when he hears an accord is

vertiginously possessed like a feline over a bunch of catnip. As

a foil to this delirious duke there is a cooler headed fanatic of

music, named Capraja. He is a sort of Diogenes—never looks at women

and lives on a few hundreds a year, though a rich man. “Half Turk,

half Venetian, he was short, coarse looking, and stout. He had the

pointed nose of a doge; the satirical glance of an inquisitor; a

discreet, albeit a smiling mouth.” For him the decorative is the only

element in music worth mentioning. He goes to the opera every night

of his life. Hear him:—

Genovese will rise very high. I am not sure whether he understands

the true significance of music, or acts simply by instinct, but he

is the first singer with whom I have ever been fully satisfied. I

shall not die without hearing _roulades_ executed as I have often

heard them in my dreams, when on waking it seemed to me that I

could see the notes flying through the air. The _roulade_ is the

highest expression of art. It is the arabesque which adorns the

most beautiful room in the building—a little less, and there is

nothing; a little more, and all is confused. Intrusted with the

mission of awakening in your soul a thousand sleeping ideas,

it rustles through space, sowing in the air seeds which, being

gathered up by the ear, germinate in the heart. Believe me;

Raphael, when painting his Saint Cecilia, gave music precedence

over poetry. He was right. Music appeals to the heart, while

written words appeal only to the intelligence. Music communicates

its ideas instantly, after the manner of perfumes. The singer’s

voice strikes not the thought, but the elements of thought,

and sets in motion the very essence of our sensations. It is a

deplorable fact that the common herd has compelled musicians to

adapt their measures to words, to artificial interests; but it is

true that otherwise they would not be understood by the multitude.

The _roulade_, therefore, is the only point left for the friends

of pure music, the lovers of art in its nakedness, to cling to.

To-night as I listened to that last _cavatina_, I imagined that

I had received an invitation from a lovely girl who, by a single

glance, restored my youth! The enchantress placed a crown on my

head and led me to the ivory gate through which we enter the

mysterious land of Reverie. I owe it to Genovese that I was able

to lay aside my old envelope for a few moments, brief as measured

by watches, but very long as measured by sensations. During a

springtime, balmy with the breath of roses, I was young and beloved!

“You are mistaken, _caro_ Capraja,” said the duke. “There is a power

in music more magical in its effects than that of the _roulade_.”

“What is it?” queried Capraja. “The perfect accord of two voices,

or of one voice and a violin, which is the instrument whose tone

approaches the human voice most nearly.” Then follows a rhapsodic

word duel between the old amateurs, each contending for his favorite

form. And is it not, though purposely exaggerated, the same battle

that is being fought to this very day between the formalists and

sensationalists? Some of us adore absolute music and decry the

sensualities of the music-drama. The war between the _roulade_ and

the accord will never end. “Genovese’s voice seizes the very fibres,”

cries Capraja. “And La Tinti’s attacks the blood,” rejoins the duke.

Then follows a remarkable descriptive analysis of Rossini’s Moses

in Egypt, by the wealthy and beautiful Duchess Cataneo, otherwise

Massimilla Doni. It is cleverly done. The picture of the rising

sun in the score in the key of C proves Balzac a poet as well as

a musician. The prayer, so famous because of Thalberg’s piano

transcription, is also described, and at the end this opera—better

known to us as an oratorio—is pronounced superior to Don Giovanni!!

Balzac, Balzac!

There is a realistic account of a small riot in the opera house

because Genovese, the tenor, sings out of tune. The Duke Cataneo

rages monstrously, Capraja is furious. Both tone-voluptuaries are

deprived of their accords and _roulades_. It turns out that the

tenor is in love with the soprano, and once away from her presence

proves his art by singing the air, Ombra adorata, by Crescentini.

This he does at midnight on the Piazzetta, Venice. The Venetian

scene setting is lovely. Genovese sings his sweetest. His listeners

are rapt to paradise, but are tumbled earthwards when he asks in

injured accents, “Am I a poor singer?” Listen to Balzac’s comments

upon that phenomenon called a tenor singer: “One and all regretted

that the instrument was not a celestial thing. Was that angelic music

attributable solely to a feeling of wounded self-esteem? The singer

felt nothing, he was no more thinking of the religious sentiments,

the divine images which he created in their hearts, than the violin

knows what Paganini makes it say. They had all fancied that they saw

Venice raising her shroud and singing herself, yet it was simply a

matter of a tenor’s _fiasco_.” Most operatic music is.

The theory of the _roulade_ is further explained:—

Capraja is intimate with a musician from Cremona who lives in

the Capello palace; this musician believes that sound encounters

within us a substance analogous to that which is engendered by

the phenomena of light, and which produces ideas in us. According

to him man has keys within, which sounds affect, and which

correspond to our nerve centres from which our sensations and

ideas spring. Capraja, who looks upon the arts as a collection

of the means whereby man can bring external nature into harmony

with a mysterious internal nature, which he calls an inward life,

has adopted the idea of this instrument maker, who is at this

moment composing an opera. Imagine a sublime creation in which

the marvels of visible creation are reproduced with immeasurable

grandeur, lightness, rapidity, and breadth, in which the sensations

are infinite, and to which certain privileged natures, endowed

with a divine power, can penetrate—then you will have an idea

of the ecstatic delights of which Cataneo and Capraja, poets in

their own eyes only, discoursed so earnestly. But it is true also

that as soon as a man, in the sphere of moral nature, oversteps

the limits within which plastic works are produced by the process

of imitation, to enter into the kingdom, wholly spiritual, of

abstractions, where everything is viewed in its essence and in

the omnipotence of results, that man is no longer understood by

ordinary intellects.

The foregoing paragraph, rather inflated and tortuous in style, was

thoroughly disliked by the great critic Sainte-Beuve, who never would

recognize the great genius of Balzac, the romantic rather than the

realist in this book. The composer referred to must be Gambara, for

Massimilla Doni, after the death of the Duke of Cataneo, weds young

Varese and assists the unfortunate Gambara in Paris. Massimilla Doni

was finished May 25, 1839. Its concluding paragraph is a masterpiece

of irony. After the love of Varese and Massimilla came the usual

anti-climax. Balzac writes, in a passage of unexampled splendor:

“The peris, nymphs, fairies, sylphs of the olden time, the muses of

Greece, the marble Virgins of the Certosa of Pavia, the Day and

Night of Michael Angelo, the little angels that Bellini first drew at

the foot of church paintings, and to whom Raphael gave such divine

form at the foot of the Vierge au donataire, and of the Madonna

freezing at Dresden; Orcagna’s captivating maidens in the Church

of Or San Michele at Florence, the heavenly choirs on the tomb of

St. Sebald at Nuremberg, several Virgins in the Duomo at Milan, the

hordes of a hundred Gothic cathedrals, the whole nation of figures

who ruin their shapes to come to you, O all-embracing artists—all

these angelic incorporeal maidens rushed to Massimilla’s bed and wept

there.”

Richard Wagner might have been a Gambara; and mark how Balzac treats

the vibratory theory of sound, when it was practically unknown.

Where did he gather his wisdom? Another story of his, hitherto

untranslated, Sarrasin, will not bear recounting. Its psychology is

morbid; yet it is stamped with probability. The great male soprano

Farinelli could have been the hero. Nevertheless, the tale is not a

pleasant one. George Moore eloquently describes how, in chase of the

exotic, he pursued certain books, like a pike after minnows, along

the quays of Paris. And like a pike he rudely knocked his nose one

day against the bottom. The real lover of Balzac, pike-like, accepts

Sarrasin, just as he accepts Seraphita. They are many octaves apart,

yet both sound a distinct note in the scale of this great human

symphony. However, Sarrasin is but semi-musical, so need not be

discussed here.

“O mighty poet! Thy works are not as other men’s, simply and merely

great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like

the sun, the sea, the stars, and the flowers; like frost and snow,

rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with

entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith

that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless

or inert; that the further we press in our discoveries, the more we

shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the

careless eye had seen nothing but accident!”

Thomas De Quincey, master of the sonorous singing word, wrote this—he

meant Shakespeare. It will also fit Balzac. And I know of no other

name except Balzac’s, that I dare bracket with Shakespeare’s except

Beethoven’s.

ALPHONSE DAUDET

“The entire work of Balzac pulsates with a fever of discovery and of

impromptu.” It was Alphonse Daudet, the little David of the south,

with “the head of an Arabian Christ,” who wrote that sentence, a

sentence that might be aptly fitted to his own case. Daudet loved

Balzac, loved Beethoven, and—this may be a surprise for some—loved

Wagner, knew Wagner. Why not? Style for him was a question of

intensity, and what is Wagner if not intense? And Daudet was no mean

critic. He could recognize the unchanging _moi_ of Hugo, and the

miraculous gift of transforming himself that gave to Balzac the power

of multitudinous creation. He could speak of Georges Rodenbach as

“the most exquisite and refined of poets and prose writers, moist

and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a writer whose sentence has the

tender effect of belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of

reliquaries and stained glass windows.” Friedrich Nietzsche was “that

admirable writer with a surprising power for destruction”; while in

Ibsen’s Wild Duck he found “the india-rubber laugh, the laugh of

Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet.” The reading of Dostoïevsky’s

Crime and Punishment was a “crisis of his mind”; and for Tolstoy he

always entertained a warm admiration. After Turgénieff died some

alleged souvenirs of his were published and gave Daudet exquisite

unhappiness, for he had loved the man and extolled the artist. M.

Halperine-Kaminsky cleared up the mystery by proving that Turgénieff

had never written the offensive paragraphs. They were really not

of serious import, consisting of several free criticisms about the

realistic group to which Daudet belonged. As I remember, Turgénieff

is reported to have said that much of the work of Daudet, the de

Goncourts, Zola, and a few others smelt of the lamp. Yet this simple

phrase caused Daudet pain, for he prided himself on his spontaneity

of style, his freedom from use of the file. Possibly, Turgénieff—and

this is pure conjecture on my part—knew of Daudet’s opinions touching

upon what he called “Russian pity, which is limited to criminals and

low women.” He named it a “sentimental monstrosity,” and for that

reason depreciated the “rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations

of the Russian Dickens”—Dostoïevsky.

But Alphonse Daudet and music! His son, Léon, tells us much in his

filial memoirs. “His ear,” says this pious and admirable biographer,

“had a delicacy and correctness most exquisite. Thence came his

passion for music, which was made an aid and assistance to his

labors. He sits at his table in his working room. My mother is at the

piano in the next room, and the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann,

or Schubert follows, one after the other, and excites or calms the

imagination of the writer. ‘Music is another planet.’ ‘I adore all

music, the commonest as well as the loftiest.’ But no man could

analyze and understand better the masters of harmony, no man lauded

the genius of Wagner in more splendid terms or more brilliant images:

‘The conquest by Wagner and the philosophers.’”

Daudet often came home with wet eyes after a concert, and we are

told that his voice was delicate and penetrating when he hummed the

tunes of Provence. His intimate musical friends were Raoul Pugno, the

pianist, Bizet, and Massenet. In later years Hahn, the “little Hahn,”

a composer of songs, often visited him, and he dearly loved the mad

music of the Hungarian gypsy orchestras. We all recall his fondness

for the pastoral pipe, and Valmafour, that thrice unhappy Valmafour

urged in the pursuit of a hopeless fantastic love by an avaricious

sister! I have often wondered who sat for the portrait of De Potter

in Sapho. It was possibly a composite of Gounod, Bizet, and Massenet,

though the figure of the love-stricken composer seems to fit Gounod

better than the others—Gounod at the epoch of Georgiana Weldon.

That Daudet’s ear for verbal harmonies was of the finest there can

be no doubt, after reading this: “It seems that the phrase, as

Châteaubriand uses it, has preserved the rhythm and movement of the

sea; the rush of his crises comes from the farthest line of the

horizon; their return is broad, quiet, majestic. Another example

of sensitiveness to the period in writing, Gustave Flaubert, is

the only one presenting, in the same degree as Châteaubriand, that

verbal wealth which gives a sensuous satisfaction to one’s mind when

reading.”

Of Wagner he said:—

Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he will be one in

the time to come, and no one is more fruitful than he in remarks of

every sort.... He was a man belonging to another age. Nevertheless,

he found a way to our nerves and our brains far more easily than

one would have thought. If imagination has representatives, he was

one of the giants. A Northern imagination, it is true, on which

all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress.

He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so

pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. That language

of motives which he has imagined, and of which he makes such

magnificent use, has the fault of leaving us very often with an

impression of weariness.... Still, it was absolutely necessary

for him to invent that system of motives.... His characters

seem clothed in sound.... In Richard Wagner the imagination is

so representative and violent that it saturates his work to

overflowing with all the sounds of nature and leaves a limited

space for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and Isolde

plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it; then it

appears on the surface, then it plunges under again. One invincible

power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement. In the

poem, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, the

holy spot become the more powerful characters. In this paganism of

to-day all nature has become divine.

Wagner’s pantheism has never been sufficiently realized. For me

his dramas deal with the elemental forces, rather than with men and

women. Daudet evidently recognized this fact. Wagner was a pagan. The

romancer says: “Your generation is accustomed to these splendors,

this torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to your

fancy the impression which that music exercised on men of my age....

There is everything in Wagner.... Turning his face toward Gayety

he wrote the Meistersinger; turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the

_Mutter_ of Goethe, he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He made use of the

entire human pianoforte, and the entire superhuman pianoforte. Cries,

tears, the distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks,

the sough of the wind in the trees, frightful remorse, the song of

the shepherd and the trumpets of war—his tremendous imagination is

always at white heat, and always ready.”

Daudet wisely refuses to discuss Wagner’s methods:—

Let his methods remain in the dark like his orchestra.... That

imagination of his, feverish and excessive, has not only renovated

music, but has also overwhelmed poetry and philosophy. Although

theories disquiet me, still I feel them trembling in Wagner behind

each one of his heroes. The gods talk of their destiny and of the

conflict of that destiny with the destiny of men; they talk of

ancient Fate in a way that is sometimes obscure, but with a rush

and a go that make one forget to question them. It is the famous

wall of the Légende des Siècles, crowded with the tubas and the

trumpets of Sachs, tumultuous and glittering in their mass.

It is quite possible that Wagner desired to have characters of

a size suited to their surroundings, and that one would feel

uncomfortable while considering ordinary men who should be

victims of the Ocean of Tristan or of the Forest of Siegfried.

What difference does it make? He succeeds in moving us with these

superterrestrial passions. In Tristan humanity plays a larger part.

These are our own wounds which are bleeding in the flesh of the

lovers, wounds that the sacred spear, which the hero brings back

with him, shall never heal.

It will be seen that these are the utterances of a man who has

pondered music as well as felt it deeply. He knew Wagner, and was a

welcome visitor at Wahnfried. “Daudet pleases me much,” Wagner once

said. The openly expressed admiration of this cultured Frenchman must

have flattered the composer greatly. Because Daudet admired Wagner,

his perception of Beethoven’s greatness was not blurred. He puts

the case succinctly: “It were better to say that the masterpiece by

Beethoven being more concentrated and closely woven makes a total

impression upon you in a much shorter time than does a drama with its

necessary stops and changes of scenery and delays for explanation.”

This in answer to his son Léon, who had asserted that the emotions

aroused by a Beethoven symphony include “a deeper and rarer quality”

than those evoked by the Ring.

The elder Daudet finds that Wagner is saturated by nature and

nature’s sounds:—

His orchestral parts cradle and swing me to and fro. His gentleness

and power cause me to pass within a few hours through the most

powerful emotions—emotions, in fact, for which no one can fail to

be grateful forever to the man who has excited them, because they

reveal our inner depths to ourselves. I love and admire Beethoven

also for the wide and peaceful landscapes which he knows how to

open up in the soul of sound. Italian music enchants me, and in

Rossini I experience that extraordinary impression of melancholy

anguish which an excess of life gives us. There is too much frenzy,

too much movement; it is as if one were trying to escape from

death. I adore Mendelssohn and his delicious pictures of nature in

the Scotch and Italian symphonies. There are certain hours toward

nightfall when the soul of Schumann torments me.... But to number

them all would be to never end. I have lived through the power of

music; I am a dweller upon its planet.

Now all this is quite satisfying when one realizes that Daudet, in

his love for music, steps out of the French literary tradition.

French writers, even those of this century, have never been fanatics

for music, Stendhal and Baudelaire excepted—Baudelaire who discovered

Wagner to France. I cannot recommend Stendhal as a musical guide.

Châteaubriand, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Alfred de Vigny, de Musset,

Flaubert, Dumas _fils_, Zola, the de Goncourts—the brothers secretly

abominated music—this mixed company was not fond of the heavenly

maid. Catulle Mendès is a Wagnerian, and in his evanescent way Paul

Verlaine was affected by melody. He wrote a magnificent and subtle

sonnet on Parsifal. Perhaps it was what the despiser of Kundry stood

for rather than Wagner’s music that set vibrating the verbal magic of

this Chopin of the Gutter. Villier de l’Isle Adam was another crazy

Wagnerian, played excerpts on the piano, had his music performed at

his own deathbed, and sketched in a book of his the figure of Liszt

as Triboulet Bonhomet. Huysmans, of Flemish descent, has made a close

study of church music and the old ecclesiastical modes in En Route

and in several others of his remarkable books. The younger Parisian

writers are generally music lovers.

How well Daudet understood that elusive quantity, the artistic

temperament, may be seen in this bit of analysis: “Neither sculptor,

nor painter represents anything which did not exist before in the

world. It is somewhat different in regard to music. But, looking

at things a little closer, music is the lofty manifestation of a

harmony, the models for which exist in nature. Nevertheless the

writer, the painter, the poet, the sculptor, and the musician,

whenever their work bears them honestly along, believe honestly that

they are adding to the world something which did not exist before

their time. Sublime illusion!”

On this clear, critical note let us leave the always delightful

writer, the once charming man. “Oh, Daudet, _c’est de la

bouillabaisse_!” cries the author of Evelyn Innes. Yes, but is not

_la bouillabaisse_ a fascinating dish, especially when a master

_chef_ has prepared it?

GEORGE MOORE

I

EVELYN INNES

There must be a beyond. In Wagner there is none. He is too perfect.

Never since the world began did an artist realize himself so

perfectly. He achieved all he desired, therefore something is

wanting.—GEORGE MOORE.

At last a novel with some intelligent criticism of music—George

Moore’s Evelyn Innes.

For years I have browsed amidst the herbage offered by writers of

musical fiction, and usually have found it bitter and unprofitable.

We all smile now at the inflated sentimentalities of Charles

Auchester, and shudder at the mistakes of the literary person when

dealing with musical themes. Jessie Fothergill’s The First Violin

is very pretty, but it is badly written and reeks of Teutonic

_Schwärmerei_. The characters are the conventional puppets of

fiction armed with a conductor’s stick and violin bow, instead of

sword, cloak, and dagger. A novel dealing with genuine musical

figures has yet to be written, so George Moore’s Evelyn Innes is an

attempt in the right direction. The book is full of faults, but at

least it deals sanely with music, and contains several very acute

criticisms of Wagner’s music, acute without being too literary or too

technical.

Whenever I read a novel by George Moore I feel like dividing the

English-speaking world into three parts: those who read Moore and

like him—a determined and growing class; those who read him and hate

him—a very much larger class; and those who never heard of him—to

this class belong the admirers of Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, and

Sienkiewicz. Yet for certain young men every stroke of his pen has

a hieratic significance. I remember well when the Confessions of a

Young Man appeared. With what eagerness was it not seized upon by

a small section of the community, a section that represented the

vanguard of a new movement and recognized a fellow-decadent. George

Moore may be truthfully called the first of the English decadents—I

mean the Verlaine crop of the early eighties, not the gifted gang

that painted and sonneted under the name of the Pre-Raphaelitic

Brotherhood.

It was George Moore who first brought to England’s shores the

“poisonous honey of France.” In his Confessions were criticisms of

acuity and several positive discoveries. He it was who introduced

Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine, Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn, to a

public that speedily forgot them. To read these Confessions to-day is

like stirring up stale musk. There is an odd comminglement of caviare

and perfume in the book, and its author evidently had more to say.

He said it in A Mummer’s Wife, one of the strongest, most

disagreeable books I ever read. But, while the hands were Moore’s,

the voice was Zola’s. Moore has always been the victim of methods.

He has dissected Tolstoy, Turgénieff, Flaubert, Balzac, and the de

Goncourts to see how they do the trick; and as he possesses in a

rare degree the mocking-bird voice, his various books were at first

echoes of his passionate delvings in the minds of others. A Mummer’s

Wife dealt with the English stage—certain phases of it. It was Zola

Anglicized. Then followed the trilogy of brutal naturalistic novels,

Spring Days, A Modern Lover, and Mike Fletcher, the last being

the biggest. The writer exploited to the full his love for what

he conceived to be the real, and there are certainly many telling

passages in Mike Fletcher. To-day A Modern Lover is recognized as a

very truthful study of artistic London, the London that paints and

goes to picture galleries. The new man—he was very new then to the

younger men—had the gift of gripping your hand with chilly, withal

powerful, fingers. He forced you to look at certain surfaces and

see them the way he saw them. Because nature had imposed upon him

restrictions, he strove earnestly to see more clearly, and by dint of

hard gazing he did see, and saw some extraordinary things.

Having studied Germinie Lacerteux until he had mastered her, George

Moore transposed her into the key of Fielding. His Esther Waters,

by far simpler and healthier than the rest, is the Goncourts’

gutter-martyr, Germinie Lacerteux, done into English. But it is

admirably done, and the paraphrase became known to the novel-reading

world. There was a brief silence, and Celibates appeared. And there

were things performed within its pages that sent shivers to your

stomach. An outrageous theme was fashioned superbly. One story was a

recurrence to Moore’s favorite subject, the Roman Catholic church.

Whether he is a Catholic or not, I cannot say, but the church

literally obsesses him. Her ritual dominates his vision, and, like a

sickly woman, he loves to finger the gorgeous livery of the Lord. He

continually returns to this topic. He is exercised, almost haunted,

by the notion that outside of her pale salvation is impossible. “What

if this be true?” cries George Moore, as he arises from his midnight

bed, fearing the dark and looking for some sign of a dawn! I suppose,

being a product of our times, he enjoys this acrobatic flirting and

balancing on the rope of faith swung over the chasm of doubt and

despair. Religion is one of his leading motives, art the other.

The new story deals with several episodes in the life of a singer.

She is the daughter of a devotee of archaic music and archaic

instruments. She has a voice, but her father is so absorbed in the

revival of Palestrina, of Vittoria, of old English writers, of

the Plain Chant, that he neglects the girl’s vocal possibilities.

She plays the viola da gamba and sings at sight. Her mother was a

celebrated operatic singer, of chaste life and _coloratura_ tastes.

She died before the girl was developed. The dreamy father, the

high-strung, ambitious girl, a dreary home at Dulwich, near London,

and a rich baronet of musical tastes, crazy for notoriety in London

musical life,—and you may imagine the rest.

Evelyn goes to Paris with him—and with a certain Lady Duckle as a

chaperon. The scene at Marchesi’s—for of course Madame Savelli is

Marchesi—is capitally done, and there is a Henry James lightness of

touch and humor in the description of Lady Duckle and her dislike of

Wagner’s music.

“No, my dear Owen,” she cried, “I am not a heretic, for I recognize

the greatness of the music, and I could hear it with pleasure if

it were confined to the orchestra; but I can find no pleasure in

listening to a voice trying to accompany a hundred instruments. I

heard Lohengrin last season. I was in Mrs. Ayre’s box—a charming

woman—her husband is an American, but he never comes to London.

I presented her at the last Drawing Room. She had a supper party

afterward, and when she asked me what I’d have to eat, I said,

‘Nothing with wings!... Oh, that Swan!’”

Now, this is distinctly witty, and it is a pity that we get only a

mere sketch of this chatty body.

Without explaining the processes, Evelyn becomes a great singer, a

great interpreter of Wagner; and it is precisely this hiatus that

deprives me of much pleasure. I dislike these persons in fiction who

have become full-fledged artists at the turning of a page. Mr. Moore

was treading upon dangerous ground, and he knew it; so he wisely

omitted the study years. Evelyn, whose character shows little growth,

conquers London, and at last goes to her father to ask his pardon.

This episode is the strongest and most original in the book. Indeed,

I cannot recollect anything in English fiction like it. She falls

at his feet and is Brünnhilde kneeling to Wotan. As she phrases her

petition for pardon she acts, consciously or unconsciously, the third

act of Die Walküre: “War es so schmählich?” she mentally implores,

and the simple instrument-maker is vanquished. It is very subtle,

and the dual nature of the lyric artist is clearly indicated.

But such a father, such a daughter! If you were to ask me frankly if

a girl could sacrifice everything for art I would as frankly reply,

Yes; lots of them have. I have met a dozen myself. Moore does not

believe that the moral sense can flourish in an artistic atmosphere.

Perhaps he is right. Evelyn is dissatisfied with success. Her nature

is too complex to find gratification in the society of Sir Owen

Asher. A new man looms up. He is dark, has teeth, is a mystic, a

Roscicrucian, perhaps a diabolist. He is a Celt and is composing to

a Celtic legend a great music-drama; his musical forms are antique,

and he wins Evelyn, after the first performance of Isolde. This scene

caused all the bellboys of literature to cry “horrors!” I confess,

however, that the second love is incomprehensible. It is entered into

in too cold-blooded a manner. She becomes still more dissatisfied,

and after a week of insomnia her early religious beliefs get the

uppermost, and she goes to confession. But you feel that she has

only met a third will stronger than her own. A Monsignor Mostyn,

the best male portrait of the book, forces her to bend her knee to

God, and she goes into conventual retreat. We get a few closing

chapters—dreary ones—devoted to convent life, and then Evelyn goes

forth once more into the world.

Her character is exceedingly well drawn, although I must protest

against the overloading of page after page with elaborate

psychologizing. Moore has deserted the brutal simplicities of his

earlier manner for a Bourget-like shovelling of arid psychical

details upon your wearied brain. The story becomes hazy, the main

figure nebulous. At every step in the latter half of the book I

detect Joris Karel Huysmans and his En Route. Evelyn Innes becomes

a feminine Durtal, sick of life, afraid of God. There is too much

padding in the shape of discussions about early church music—more

Huysmans! Huysmans’s practice of cataloguing is very monotonous. Yet

it is the best thing in the way of a literary performance that George

Moore has accomplished. The style is decomposed, but it is melodious,

flexible, smooth, and felicitous. One can see that he knows his Pater.

Mr. Moore had used to advantage his knowledge of the London musical

set. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch may have sat for a portrait of Evelyn’s

father. Mr. Dolmetsch is a player on the harpsichord and spinet. But

who is Evelyn Innes? That is a dangerous question. Possibly she is

a composite of Melba, Calvé, Eames, and Nordica. Oddly enough, she

gets a tiara, presented to her by the subscribers of the opera at

New York! Of course this points to Nordica, but Nordica could never

read music at sight,—you remember the one thousand piano rehearsals

for Tristan,—and so that clew is misleading. Perhaps the author may

enlighten the musical world some day. Lady Grimalkin is certainly

intended for Lady de Grey.

Sir Owen Asher—he may be one side of George Moore himself—is well

painted in the beginning, but the colors soon fade. He is a bore,

with his agnosticism, his vanity, and his lack of backbone. He

treated Evelyn too delicately. A lusty reproof is what the young

woman most needed. Her churchly, sentimental vaporings would then

have been dissipated, and she might have thrown a clock at her

admirer’s head. Such things have been known to happen in the life

of a prima donna. Sir Owen starts a Wagnerian Review. Could Mr.

Moore have meant the Earl of Dysart? Ulick Dean is said to be

drawn partially from Yeats, the mystic; but the music criticism

sounds to me very like the doughty Runciman’s. There is a manager

with a toothache, who is almost funny, and there is a rehearsal of

Tannhäuser, in which the question of cuts is discussed. Here is a

sentence that reveals the depth of Mr. Moore’s knowledge of music:—

“According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had

distinguished between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of

Wagner’s music is the identification of the two notes.” Why? In the

name of the Chromatic Fantasia, why?

I confess I am rather tired of convent scenes. The best I ever read

in latter-day novels is in Mathilde Serao’s Fantasy. Mrs. Craigie,

in The Schools for Saints, “does” a convent, and now Moore. The

Roman Catholic problem, too, is overdone. Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her

polemical pamphlet which she calls a novel, Helbeck of Bannisdale,

indulges in numerous speculations of the sort. George Moore loves

the rich trappings and the pomp of ceremonial in the church. But its

iteration is an artistic mistake. Indeed, his book goes off into

mid-air in the latter half. The first is fascinating. The discussion

of the various schools of singing is valuable, and while at no place

does he exhibit the marvellous virtuosity displayed by d’Annunzio in

his exposition of Tristan and Isolde, there are many jewelled pages

of descriptive writing. The book is permeated with all manners of

pessimism from Omar to Schopenhauer, and life is discussed from the

viewpoints of the ascetic and the epicurean.

Mr. Moore is an artist. His vision is just, and he is a better

workman than he was; his sense of form is matured, although his

faults of construction are easily detected. He has caught the right

atmosphere; he is still master of moods, and he has attempted and

nearly succeeded in spilling out the soul of a singer for our

inspection,—the soul of the selfish, ambitious prima donna, for

there is no denying that Evelyn, despite her tender conscience,

was selfish and a fascinating creature, mastered by every passing

whim, and a woman utterly incapable of developing mentally without

masculine assistance. Mr. Moore, then, has given us the type of the

opera singer, and I forgive him pages of solemn-gaited writing. Alas!

that it should be as he writes. But it is. He says some things that

go very deep, and there are many exquisite touches.

This novelist’s attitude towards Wagner’s music is well expressed in

John Norton, the second of the three tales in that uncommonly strong

book called Celibates. Here is another self-revelation:—

Wagner reminds me of a Turk lying amid the houris promised by the

Prophet to the Faithful—eyes incensed by kohl, lips and almond

nails incarnadine, the languor of falling hair and the languor

of scent burning in silver dishes, and all around subdued color,

embroidered stuffs, bronze lamps traced with inscrutable designs.

Never a breath of pure air, not even when the scene changes to

the terrace overlooking the dark river, ... minarets and the dome

reflected in the tide and in a sullen sky, reaching almost to

the earth, the dome and behind the dome a yellow moon—a carven

moon, without faintest aureole, a voluptuous moon, mysteriously

marked, a moon like a creole, her hand upon the circle of her

breast; and through the torrid twilight of the garden the sound of

fountains, like flutes far away, breathing to the sky the sorrow

of the water-lilies. And in the dusky foliage, in which a blue and

orange evening dies, gleams the color of fruit—dun-colored bananas,

purple and yellow grapes, the desert scent of dates, the motley

morbidity of figs, the passion of red pomegranates, shining like

stars, through a flutter of leaves, where the light makes a secret

way. And through all the color and perfume of twilight, of fruit,

of flowers, cometh the maddening murmur of fountains. At last

the silence is broken by the thud of an over-ripe fruit that has

suddenly broken from its stalk.... Now I am alive to the music, all

has ceased but it; I am conscious of nothing else. Now it has got

me; I am in its power; I am as a trembling prey held in the teeth

and claws of a wild animal. The music creeps and catches, and with

cruel claws and amorous tongue it feeds upon my flesh; my blood is

drunken, and, losing grasp upon my suborned soul, ... I tremble, I

expire.

II

SISTER TERESA

Brainstuff is not lean stuff; the brainstuff of fiction is

internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of

errors.—GEORGE MEREDITH.

What makes Moore’s case so peculiarly his own is his unlikeness to

our preconceived notion of an Irishman. No man of genius resembles

his countrymen; so we find Burke, Swift, George Moore, with few of

the characteristics ascribed to Irishmen and wits. They were and are

not jolly world lovers, rollicking sports of the sort Lever loved to

paint. Tom Moore and his rose-water poetry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan

and his glossy smartness, hit the popular notion of what an Irish

poet, playwright, and man of letters should be.

Now George Moore is far from being an Irishman in that sense—this

prose poet who is at once mystical and gross. Yet he is a Celt,

and lately he has developed a restless spirit, a desire to flee

the Anglo-Saxon and his haunts. It is the “homing” instinct of the

Celt—after forty years of age men of talent return to their tribe.

And Mr. Moore is fast becoming an Irishman among Irishmen. Here is

the newest incarnation of this feminine soul—perverse and feminine,

he admits he is—which, waxlike, takes and retains the most subtle

and powerful impressions. The readers of his early books knew him as

a Shelley worshipper, then a digger among the romantic literature

of 1830, finally a follower of Zola. So after Flowers of Passion

(1877) we got Pagan Poems (1881), and with A Modern Lover (1883)

began his prose trilogy, devoted to the young man. This was followed

in 1884 by A Mummer’s Wife, Literature at Nurse (1885), A Drama in

Muslin (1886), Parnell and His Island (1887), A Mere Accident (1887),

Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher

(1889), Impressions and Opinions (1890), Vain Fortune (1890), Modern

Painting (1893), The Strike at Arlingford, a play (1893), Esther

Waters (1894), Celibates (1895), Evelyn Innes (1898), The Bending

of the Bough, a play (1900). He also collaborated in 1894 with Mrs.

Craigie in a little comedy called Journeys End in Lovers’ Meeting,

which was written for Ellen Terry, and Untilled Fields (1903).

Mr. Moore was born in 1857, the son of the late George Henry Moore,

M.P., of Moore Hall, County Mayo, Ireland. He was educated at

Oscott College, near Birmingham, and studied art in Paris, so his

expatriation was practical and complete. He once hated his native

land and hated its religion. Yet I know of few writers whose books,

whose mind, are so tormented by Catholicism. He may insult the

church in A Drama in Muslin—one of the most veracious documents

of Irish social history in the eighties—and through the mouth of

Alice Barton. But, like the moth and the flame, he ever circles

about the Roman Catholic religion. It would be unfair to hold a man

responsible for the utterances of his characters, nevertheless there

is a peculiarly personal cadence in all that Mr. Moore writes, which

makes his problem, like that of Huysmans, a fascinating one. The

George Moore of Mike Fletcher and the George Moore of Sister Teresa

are very different men. Mike Fletcher, for me the first virile man

in English fiction since Tom Jones, may please some critics more

than Evelyn Innes turned nun, for of Mike you could not say in

Meredith’s words: “Men may have rounded Seraglio Point; they have

not yet doubled Cape Turk.” Mike never rounded Seraglio Point; while

of Evelyn, you dimly feel that she is always “fiddling harmonics on

the strings of sensualism.” Yes, George Moore is returning to the

tribe; he is Irish; he is almost Roman Catholic—and the man is often

more interesting than his books. Not to know them all is to miss the

history of artistic London during the last quarter of a century.

In the preface of the English edition of Sister Teresa Mr. Moore

writes:—

I found I had completed a great pile of Ms., and one day it

occurred to me to consider the length of this Ms. To my surprise

I found I had written about 150,000 words, and had only finished

the first half of my story. I explained my difficulties to my

publisher, suggesting that I should end the chapter I was then

writing on what musicians would call ‘a full close,’ and that half

the story should be published under the title of Evelyn Innes and

half under the title of Sister Teresa. My publisher consented,

frightened at the thought of a novel of a thousand pages—300,000

words. The story has not been altered, but the text is almost

entirely new. No one, perhaps, has rewritten a book so completely.

I am aware that the alteration of a published text is deprecated

in the press, but it is difficult to understand why, for have

not Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Wagner and Fitzgerald

rewritten their works? Among my contemporaries, George Meredith

and W. B. Yeats have followed the example of their illustrious

predecessors.

The latter half of the book is by no means so brilliant, or even so

convincing, as the first. But then its psychology is much finer,

and it was infinitely harder to handle. Evelyn was bound to taste

convent life. Morbid, fatigued by Wagner singing, triumphs, social

and operatic, by her two lovers, her stomach deranged by dyspepsia,

her nerves worn to an irritable thread by insomnia—is it any wonder

the golden-haired girl, with the freckled face, regarded convent

life as a green-blooming oasis in a wilderness of lust, vanity, and

artificial worldliness! You can see that her mother’s spirit grows

stronger in her every day, that mother with the cold eyes and thin

lips who lost her voice so early in a great career. “The portrait

of our father or our mother is a sort of crystal ball, into which

we look in the hope of discovering our destiny.” Evelyn was tired

of love, above all of animal love which dragged her soul from God.

Ulick, for that reason, was more grateful to her. He was a mystic,

with the dog-cold nose of mystics, and he soothed Evelyn when Sir

Owen had ruffled her with his importunities, with his materialism.

But these two men soon fade after the first hundred pages of the new

story; indeed, they are lightly etched in at the best. “We have only

to change our ideas to change our friends. Our friends are only a

more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas,” says Mr. Moore. The

feigned friendship of the two is a truly Flaubertian note. It recalls

a trait of Charles Bovary. The convent of the Passionist Sisters at

Wimbledon, however, is the glowing core of this remarkable tale. For

nuns, for convents and monasteries, the life contemplative, this

Irish novelist has always had a deep liking. There is John Norton

in Celibates and there is Lily Young, who left a convent for Mike

Fletcher, and then we have Agnes Lahens, whose only happiness was in

a claustral life. At one time I believe that this writer would have

indorsed Nietzsche’s idea of a monastery for freethinkers. Didn’t

H. G. Wells suggest a retreat for a Huysmans sect? Evelyn Innes,

like John Norton, dilly-dallied with her innermost convictions. It

was long before she realized that faith is a gift, is a special

talent, which must be cultivated to a perfect flowering. And when

she left her lovers, when she left the stage, after her father died

in Rome,—here the long arm of coincidence is rather unpleasantly

visible,—when she had professed, taken the veil, and became Sister

Teresa, her former life fell away from her like water, and she was

happy, a happy bride of Christ—until the honeymoon was over; for

divine nuptials have their honeymoons, their chilly repulsions, their

hours and days of indifference and despair. And this brings us to M.

Huysmans.

Mr. Peck, in his admirable estimate of George Moore,—in The Personal

Equation,—writes that Moore is frankly a decadent, frankly a

sensualist of the type of Huysmans, whom he intensely admires. “A

page of Huysmans,” exclaims Moore, “is as a dose of opium, a glass

of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.... Huysmans goes to my soul

like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship. There is in his style

the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual, the passion of the

mural, of the window.” And Mr. Peck adds: “Mr. Moore’s affinity with

Huysmans does not go further than a certain sensuous sympathy. He

could never follow him....” But he has followed him, followed En

Route; Huysmans has not only gone to his soul, but to his pen. He

once wittily wrote: “Henry James went to France and read Turgénieff.

W. D. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James.” This might be

paraphrased thus: Joris Karel Huysmans, that unique disciple of

Baudelaire, went to La Trappe and studied religion. George Moore,

that most plastic-souled Irishman, stayed at home and studied

Huysmans. This is the precise statement of a truth. Mr. Moore

owes as much to Huysmans for his Sister Teresa. To no one does he

owe Mildred Lawson. She is as much George Moore’s as L’Education

Sentimentale is truly Flaubert’s. I do not know of her counterpart in

fiction; like Frédéric Moreau, that unheroic hero, she is a heroine

who failed from sheer lack of temperament. And her story is one of

the best stories in the language.

But with Sister Teresa the case is different. She is Huysmansized.

Yet Mr. Moore has only used Huysmans as a spring-board—to employ a

favorite expression of the French writer—for his narration of Sister

Teresa’s doings in conventual seclusion. He knew, of course, that he

could never hope to rival Huysmans’s matchless, if somewhat florid

and machicolated, style, and it may be confessed at once that Sister

Teresa is not so intense or so sincere a book as En Route. Nowhere,

despite the exquisite resignation and Mozartean sweetness of Mr.

Moore’s thirty-eighth chapter, is there anything that approaches the

power of the wonderful first chapter in En Route, with its thundering

symphonic description of the singing of the De Profundis. Nor are

Teresa’s raptures and agonies to be compared to Durtal’s in that

awful first night at La Trappe, though the Irish writer follows the

French one closely enough. But Moore is tenderer, more poetic, than

Huysmans. He has so highly individualized, so completely transposed,

his character, that to him must only praise be awarded. As Russell

Jacobus writes, in The Blessedness of Egoism, the secret of Goethe’s

self-culture is “the faculty of drawing from everything—experience,

books, and art—just the element required at that stage of one’s

growth, and the faculty of obtaining, by a clairvoyant instinct, the

experience, the book, the work of art which contains that needed

element.” This Mr. Moore has always done—he confesses to it, to the

“echo auguries” of his young manhood. The color of his mind is ever

changing. It often displays the reverberating tints of a flying-fish

in full flight.

And his art has benefited by his defection from Zola. It has grown

purer, more intense. As Huysmans says himself in La Bas, “We must,

in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola, but

it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another

road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve

thus, in one word, a spiritualistic naturalism.” Huysmans believes

Dostoïevsky comes nearest to this achievement—as Havelock Ellis

remarks—Dostoïevsky, who was once described by Mr. Moore as a

Gaboriau with psychological sauce. But at that time he had not read

The Idiot, The Gambler, or L’Adolescence. I find traces of the

Russian novelists and their flawless art throughout Sister Teresa,

just as the externals of the book—of Evelyn Innes also—recall

Flaubert in L’Education Sentimentale. There are many half-cadences,

chapters closing on unresolved harmonies, many ellipses, and all

bathed in a penetrating yet hazy atmosphere. Yet his style is clear

and rhythmic. Mr. Moore tells of subtle things in a simple manner—the

reverse of Henry James’s method. The character drawing is no longer

so contrapuntal as in Evelyn Innes. But the convent sisters are

delightful—the Prioress, Mother Hilda, and Sister Mary Saint John.

It would not be George Moore, however, to miss a tiny suggestion of

the morbid—though I confess he has treated the episode discreetly.

But here again has Huysmans anticipated him, and also anticipated him

in Durtal’s revolt against the faith, with his almost uncontrollable

desire to utter blasphemies in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

With a master hand—but always the hand of a master miniaturist—does

Mr. Moore paint cloistered life, its futile gossiping, little

failings, heroic sacrifices, and humming air of sanctity. There

are pages in the book that I could almost swear were written by a

nun—so real, so intimate, so saturated, are they with the religious

atmosphere. And the garden, that nuns’ garden! Whosoever has walked

in the sequestered garden of a convent can never quite lose the

faint sense of sweetness, goodness, spirituality, and a certain soft

communion with nature which modulate into the very speech and rhythm

of the sisters. All this atmosphere Mr. Moore, whose receptivity is

most feminine, brings into his perfumed pages. After the fleshly

passion, the unrest, of Evelyn Innes, this book has a consoling music

of its own.

It was after the convent doors closed that the real struggles of the

singer began. Some of them have considerable vraisemblance, some of

them are very trivial. The letters sent to Monsignor Mostyn, for

example, are not credible; nor are Teresa’s revolt and subsequent

spiritual rebirth made quite clear. Perhaps Mr. Moore is not yet so

strong a believer as Huysmans. His words do not carry the intense

conviction of the Fleming-Frenchman, who from his retreat in a

Benedictine monastery has given the world a vivid and edifying

account of St. Lydwine de Schiedam, that blessed Dutch saint he

speaks of in En Route, first attacked at the time of the plague in

Holland. “Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the

heart. ‘Two boils, it is well,’ she said to the Lord, ‘but three

would be better in honor of the Holy Trinity,’ and immediately a

third pustule broke out on her face.” This extraordinary mystic

considered herself as an expiatory victim for all the sins of the

earth. Her sufferings were finally rewarded. Like John Bunyan, she

died a “comfortable and triumphant death.” A writer of Huysmans’s

magnificent artistry, who can thus transform himself into an

humble hagiographer, must indeed have forsworn his ways and become

impregnated by faith.

Mr. Moore does not succeed in arousing any such poignant and

unpleasant impressions. Notwithstanding his array of mystical

learning, his familiarity with the writings of Rüysbroeck, John

of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Catharine Emmerich, Saint Angela, and

the rest, one cannot escape the conviction that it is not all

deeply felt. Count S. C. de Soissons writes: “He who praises the

lasciviousness of Alcibiades does not enjoy the pleasure that he had;

neither do they experience the mystic ecstasies of the anchorites of

the Thebaid who try to parody their saintly lives.” Even the striking

account of the Carmelite’s profession in Sister Teresa is paralleled

in En Route. There is not so much music talk as in Evelyn Innes, for

she leaves its world of vain and empty sonorities. This much I found

in an early chapter. “In Handel there are beautiful proportions; it

is beautiful like eighteenth-century architecture, but here I can

discover neither proportion nor design.” Moore referred to a Brahms

score, which is manifestly absurd. Whatever else there may be in

Brahms, we are sure to discover proportion, design. Again, “She

remembered that César Franck’s music affected her in much the same

way.” Shrugging her shoulders, she said, “When I listen I always hear

something beautiful, only I don’t listen.” I fear Mr. Moore has

succumbed again to the blandishing voice of Ulick Dean Runciman!

And how does it all end, the psychic adventures of this Wagner singer

turned nun, this woman who “discovered two instincts in herself—an

inveterate sensuality and a sincere aspiration for a spiritual life”?

She loses her voice, like her mother, and after relinquishing all

idea of escaping from the convent—not a well-developed motive—she

settles down to teaching voice and piano. Sir Owen Asher no longer

troubles her; Ulick Dean has evaporated, or perhaps crumbled to

dust, like an unheeding Brann if he had touched the early shores

of real life. No one from the outside world visits her but Louise,

Mlle. Helbrun, the Brangaene of her Tristan and Isolde days. To the

evanescent bell booming of their distant past goes the conversation

of the friends. It is not so depressingly real, not so moving, as

the last words of Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers in the coda to

L’Education Sentimentale,—that most perfect of fictions,—but is

melancholy enough. “Our fate is more like ourselves than we are

aware,” and in the last analysis Evelyn’s fate suits her. As a singer

she talked too much like a music critic; as Sister Teresa, too much

like a sophist in a nun’s habit. She was from the start a female

theologian. Her conscience was more to her than her lovers. She was

never quite in earnest, always a little inhuman, and I for one can

contemplate with equanimity her immurement until her final “packing

up” for death and its dusty hypnotism. After reading the story I was

tempted to repeat Renan’s remarks on Amiel,—quoted by Ernest Newman

in his Wagner,—“He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and

conversion, as if these things were realities.” I wonder if Mr. Moore

did not feel that way sometimes!

But the book is full of brainstuff. It is also a book with a soul.

In it George Moore’s art is come to a spiritual and consummate

blossoming. After reading such a passage of sustained music as the

following I am almost inclined to make an expiatory pilgrimage to the

drab city on the Liffey, to make of Dublin a critic’s Canossa; and in

the heated, mean streets, and in sable habiliments of sorrow, beat

my breast without Mr. Moore’s abode, crying aloud, “Peccavi.” But

would I be forgiven for all that I have said about the noble, morbid,

disquieting, and fascinating art of George Moore, the Irish Huysmans?

Here is a passage executed with incomparable bravura. Ulick Dean

speaks:—

To keep her soul he said she must fly from the city, where men

lose their souls in the rituals of materialism. He must go with

her to the pure country, to the woods and to the places where the

invisible ones whom the Druids knew ceaselessly ascend and descend

from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, in flame-colored

spirals. He told her he knew of a house by a lake shore, and there

they might live in communion with nature, and in the fading lights,

and in the quiet hollows of the woods she would learn more of God

than she could in the convent. In that house they would live; and

their child, if the gods gave them one, would unfold among the

influences of music and love and song traditions.

It was writing of a similar order in Mildred Lawson that evoked from

Harry Thurston Peck the declaration: “George Moore is the greatest

literary artist who has struck the chords of English since the death

of Thackeray.” George Moore always had the voice. He has now both

voice and vision.

V

ANARCHS OF ART

A SONNET BY CAMPANELLA

The people is a beast of muddy brain

That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands

Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands

Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;

One kick would be enough to break the chain.

But the beast fears, and what the child demands

It does; nor its own terror understands,

Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.

Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties

And gags itself—gives itself death and war

For pence doled out by kings from its own store.

Its own are all things between earth and heaven;

But this it knows not; and if one arise

To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.

—_Translated by_ JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

Have not all great composers been anarchs—from Bach to Strauss? At

first blush the hard-plodding Johann Sebastian of the Well-tempered

Clavichord seems a doubtful figure to drape with the black flag of

revolt. He grew a forest of children, he worked early and late,

and he played the organ in church of Sundays; but he was a musical

revolutionist nevertheless. His music proves it. And he quarrelled

with his surroundings like any good social democrat. He even went out

for a drink during a prosy sermon, and came near being discharged

for returning late. If Lombroso were cognizant of this suspicious

fact, he might build a terrifying structure of theories, with all

sorts of inferential subcellars. However, it is Bach’s music that

still remains revolutionary. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on

aristocratic patronage to play the rôle of Solitaries. But many tales

are related of their refusal to lick the boots of the rich, to curve

the spine of the suppliant. Both were by nature gentle men, and

both occasionally arose to the situation and snubbed their patrons

outrageously. Handel! A fighter, a born revolutionist, a hater of

rulers. John Runciman—himself an anarchistic critic—calls Handel

the most magnificent man that ever lived. He was certainly the most

virile among musicians.

I recall the story of Beethoven refusing to uncover in the

presence of royalty, though his companion, Goethe, doffed his hat.

Theoretically I admire Beethoven’s independence, yet there is no

denying that the great poet was the politer of the two, and doubtless

a pleasanter man to consort with. The mythic William Tell and his

contempt for Gessler’s hat were translated into action by the

composer.

Handel, despite the fact that he could not boast Beethoven’s peasant

ancestry, had a contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies,

that was remarkable. And his music is like a blow from a muscular

fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was henpecked, and for the

same reason as was Socrates. The Croatian composer’s wife told

some strange stories of that merry little blade, her chamber-music

husband. As I do not class Mendelssohn among the great composers,

he need not be discussed. His music was Bach watered for general

consumption. Schubert was an anarch all his short life. He is

said to have loved an Esterhazy girl, and being snubbed he turned

sour-souled. He drank “far more than was good for him,” and he placed

on paper the loveliest melodies the world has ever heard. Beethoven

was the supreme anarch of art, and put into daily practice the

radicalism of his music.

Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever

attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most profound truths,

the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be

incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be

none the wiser. Suppose that some Russian professional supervisor

of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaïkowsky

preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor

that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard

Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty, preaches

anarchy, puts into tone, words, gestures, lath, plaster, paint,

and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated from the convention

of authority, from what Bernard Shaw would call the Old Man of the

Mountain, the Government.

I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another revolutionist

like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt, bitten by the Socialistic

theories of Saint-Simon, a rank hater of conventions in art, though

in life a silken courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker;

and Tschaïkowsky, who buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin

with his cannon among roses or Bakounine with his terrible prose of a

nihilist. Years ago I read and doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis’s interesting

“1849,” with its fallacious denial of Wagner’s revolutionary

behavior. Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden

uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime inspirer.

His very ringing of the church bells during the row is a symbol of

his attitude. And then he ran away, luckily enough for the world of

music, while his companions, Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured

and imprisoned. Wagner might be called the Joseph Proudhon of

composers—his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate like the

sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of

Misery (a subtitle, by the way).

And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors, prosateurs,

journalists, and musicians might not be included under the roof

of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium, whose powerful bass

hurls imprecations at the present order; Georges Eckhoud, Maurice

Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier, whose eloquent bronzes are a protest

against the misery of the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin,

William Blake, William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrès, the late

Stéphane Mallarmé, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Félicien Rops,

the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose men and

women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to discern across

the frame of his pictures febrile visions of terror; and the great

Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon,

Huysmans, Heine, Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,—is not

the art of these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal

expression of anarchic revolt?

Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves with

history; if they did, they would know that decadence has always

existed; that it is not decadence at all, but merely a phase of

development as important as normality: Normality is stupidity,

decadence is genius! Is there, he asks, a more notable case of the

abnormal than the prophet of Protestantism, Martin Luther?

They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones who for

the sake of the idea sacrifice the peace of thousands, as Alexander

and Napoleon; or those who spoil the dreams of youth, Socrates and

Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths and love sin

because only sin has depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain

for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and

Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first anarchist; and

pain is at the bottom of all art, and with Satan, the father of

illusions! It is wise to stop here, else might we become entangled

in a Miltonic genealogy of the angels. I give the foregoing list to

show how easy it is to twist a theory to one’s own point of view. The

decadence theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski’s idea

that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but normal

or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg style; formerly he

lectured on Chopin, and played the F sharp minor polonaise—he was

possessed by the key of F sharp minor, and saw “soul-states” whenever

a composer wrote in that tonality! _Audition colorée_, this?

Nor is there cause for alarm in the word anarchy, which means in its

ideal state unfettered self-government. If we all were self-governed

governments would be sinecures. Anarchy often expresses itself in

rebellion against conventional art forms—the only kind of anarchy

that interests me. A most signal example is Henry James. Surprising

it is to find this fastidious artist classed among the anarchs

of art, is it not? He is one, as surely as was Turgénieff, the de

Goncourts, or Flaubert. The novels of his later period,—What Maisie

Knew, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Better Sort, The

Sacred Fount, The Awkward Age, and the rest,—do they not all betray

the revolution of Henry James from the army of the conventional?

He will be no dull realist or flamboyant romantic or desiccated

idealist. Every book he has written, from The Lesson of the Master

and The Pattern in the Carpet, is at once a personal confession and

a declaration of artistic independence. Subtle Henry James among

the revolutionists! Yes, it is even so. He has seceded forever from

the army of English tradition, from Bronté, Eliot, Dickens, and

Thackeray. He may be the discoverer of the fiction of the future.

* * * * *

The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds itself after

reading The Wings of the Dove. Here at last is companion work to the

modern movement in music, sculpture, painting. Why prose should lag

behind its sister arts I do not know; possibly because every drayman

and pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has

dipped into that well of English undefiled, the seventeenth-century

literature, must realize that to-day we write parlous and bastard

prose. It is not, however, splendid, stately, rhythmic prose that

Mr. James essays or ever has essayed. For him the “steam-dried style”

of Pater, as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered

attractions. The son of a metaphysician and moralist,—I once fed

full on Henry James, senior,—the brother of that most brilliant

psychologist, William James, of Harvard, it need hardly be said that

character problems are of more interest to this novelist than are the

external qualities of rhetorical sonority, the glow and fascination

of surfaces. Reared upon the minor moralities of Hawthorne, and ever

an interested, curious observer of manners, the youthful James wrote

books which pictured in his own exquisite orchestra of discreet tints

and delicate grays the gestures, movements, and thoughts of many

persons, principally those of travelled Americans. He pinned to the

printed page a pronounced type in his Daisy Miller, and shall we ever

forget his Portrait of a Lady, the Princess Cassimassima,—the latter

not without a touch of one of Turgénieff’s bewilderingly capricious

heroines. It is from the great, effortless art of the Russian master

that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turgénieff represented only one

form of influence, and not a continuing one. Hawthorne it was in whom

Mr. James first planted his faith; the feeling that Hawthorne’s love

of the moral problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed

in his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a Puritan

tempered by culture, by a humanism only possible in this age. Mr.

James has made the odious word, and still more odious quality of

cosmopolitanism, a thing of rare delight. In his newer manner, be

it never so cryptic, his Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change,

and from Daisy Miller to Milly Theale is the chasm of many years

of temperamental culture. We wonder if the American girl has so

changed, or whether the difference lies with the author; whether he

has readjusted his point of vantage with the flight of time; or if

Daisy Miller was but a bit of literary illusion, the _pia fraus_ of

an artist’s brain. Perhaps it is her latest sister, Milly, whose

dovelike wings hover about the selfish souls of her circle, that is

the purer embodiment of an artistic dream.

The question that most interests me is the one I posed at the

outset: Is this to be the fiction of the future, are The Wings of

a Dove or The Ambassadors—the latter is a marvellous illusion—and

studies of the like to be considered as prose equivalents of

such moderns as Whistler, Monet, Munch, Debussy, Rodin, Richard

Strauss, and the rest? In latter-day art the tendency to throw

overboard superfluous baggage is a marked one. The James novel is

one of grand simplifications. As the symphony has been modified

by Berlioz and Liszt until it assumed the shape of the symphonic

poem, and was finally made over into the guise of the tone-poem

by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners of the future must

stem from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or else remain an

academic imitation, a replica of Thackeray or of George Eliot’s

inelastic moulds. Despite its length—“heavenly,” as Schumann would

say—Sentimental Education contains in solution all that the newer

novelists have since accomplished. Zola has clumsily patterned

after it, Daudet found there his impressionism anticipated. All

the new men, Maupassant, Huysmans, Loti, Barrès, Mirbeau, and

others, discovered in this cyclopædic man what they needed; for if

Flaubert is the father of realism he is also a parent of symbolism.

His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric

significance to his words sound the note of symbolism. Mr. James

dislikes Sentimental Education, yet he has not failed to benefit

by the radical formal changes Flaubert introduced in his novel,

changes more revolutionary than Wagner’s in the music-drama. I call

the James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter

endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. All barren

modulations from event to event are swept away—unprepared dissonances

are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that

bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech

of a character’s name. The elliptical method James has absorbed

from Flaubert; his oblique psychology is his own. All this makes

difficult reading for the reader accustomed to the cheap hypnotic

passes of fiction mediums. Nothing is forestalled, nothing is

obvious, and one is forever turning the curve of the unexpected;

yet while the story is trying in its bareness, the situations are

not abnormal. You rub your eyes when you finish, for with all your

attention, painful in its intensity, you have witnessed a pictorial

evocation; both picture and evocation wear magic in their misty

attenuations. And there is always the triumph of poetic feeling over

mere sentiment. Surely Milly Theale is the most exquisite portrait

in his gallery of exquisite portraiture. Her life is a miracle,

and her ending supreme art. The entire book is filled with the

faintly audible patter of destiny’s tread behind the arras of life,

of microphonic reverberations, of a crescendo that sets your soul

shivering long before the climax. It is all art in the superlative,

the art of Jane Austen raised to the _n_th degree, superadded to Mr.

James’s implacable curiosity about causes final. The question whether

his story is worth telling is a critical impertinence too often

uttered: what most concerns us is his manner in the telling.

The style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions,

repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms,

in which the heads of young adjectives gaze despairingly and from

afar at verbs that come thundering in Teutonic fashion at the close

of sentences leagues long. It is all very bewildering, but more

bewildering is the result when you draft out in smooth, journalistic

style this peculiarly individual style. Nothing remains; Mr. James

has not spoken; his dissonances cannot be resolved except by his own

matchless art. In a word, his meanings evaporate when phrased in our

vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things and it may not.

Either way it is not to the point. And yet the James novels may be

the fiction of the future; a precursor of the book our children and

grandchildren will enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure,

of cheap historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings

shall have vanished. A deeper notation, a wider synthesis will, I

hope, be practised. In an illuminating essay Arthur Symons places

Meredith among the decadents, the dissolvers of their mother speech,

the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic purposes. Henry

James has belonged to this group for a longer time than any of his

critics have suspected; French influences, purely formal, however,

have modified his work into what it now is, what the critical men

call his “third manner.” In his ruthless disregard for the niceties

and conventionalities of sentence structure I see, or seem to see,

the effect of the Goncourts, notably in Madame Gervaisais. No matter

how involved and crabbed appears his page, a character emerges from

the smoke of muttered enchantments. The chiefest fault is that his

characters always speak in purest Jamesian. So do Balzac’s people.

So do Dickens’s and Meredith’s. It is the fault, or virtue, of all

subjective genius. Yet in his obliteration of self James recalls

Flaubert; like the wind upon the troubled waters, his power is sensed

rather than seen.

* * * * *

I have left Berlioz and Strauss for the last. The former all his

life long was a flaming individualist. His books, his utterances,

his conduct, prove it. Hector of the Flaming Locks, fiery speech,

and crimson scores, would have made a picturesque figure on the

barricades waving a red flag or casting bombs. His Fantastic Symphony

is full of the tonal commandments of anarchic revolt. As Strauss is

a living issue, the only one,—Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Goldmark,

and the neo-Russians are only rewriting musical history,—it is best

that his theme is separately considered. But I have written so much

of Strauss that it is beginning to be a fascination, as is the parrot

in Flaubert’s Un Cœur Simple—and this is not well. Sufficient to

add that as in politics he is a Social Democrat, so in his vast and

memorial art he is the anarch of anarchs. Not as big a fellow in

theme-making as Beethoven, he far transcends Beethoven in harmonic

originality. His very scheme of harmonization is the sign of a soul

insurgent.

In The Anarchists, with its just motto, “A hundred fanatics are

found to support a theological or metaphysical statement, but not

one for a geometric theorem,” it cannot be denied that Lombroso has

worked in futile veins. His conclusions are rash; indeed, his whole

philosophy of Degeneration and Madness has a literary color rather

than a sound scientific basis. But he has contrived to throw up many

fertile ideas; and secretly the reading world likes to believe that

its writers, artists, composers, are more or less crazy. Hence the

neat little formula of artistic Mattoids, gifted men whose brains are

tinged with insanity. Hazlitt, in one of his clear, strongly fibred

essays, disposed of the very idea a century back, and with words of

stinging scorn. Yet it is fanaticism that has given the world its

artistic beauty, given it those dreams that overflow into our life,

as Arthur Symons so finely said of Gérard de Nerval. And the most

incomplete and unconvincing chapter of the Lombroso book is that

devoted to sane men of genius. At the risk of inconsistency I feel

like asserting that there are no sane men of genius.

VI

THE BEETHOVEN OF FRENCH PROSE

I

FLAUBERT AND HIS ART

The maker of a great style, a lyric poet, who selected as an

instrument the “other harmony of prose,” a master of characterization

and the creator of imperishable volumes, Gustave Flaubert is indeed

the Beethoven of French prose. Never was the life of a genius so

barren of content, never had there been seemingly such a waste of

force. In forty years only four completed books, three tales, and an

unfinished volume; a sort of satyricon and lexicon of stupidity—what

else is Bouvard et Pécuchet? The outlay of power was just short

of the phenomenal, and this Colossus of Croisset,—one falls into

superlatives when dealing with him,—this man tormented by an ideal

of style, a man who formed a whole generation of writers, is only

coming into his kingdom. In his correspondence he is the most facile,

the most personal, the least impassable of artists; in his work the

most concentrated, objective, and reticent. There never has been in

French prose such a densely spun style,—the web fairly glistening

with the idea. Yet of opacity there is none. Like one of those

marvellous tapestries woven in the hidden East, the clear woof of

Flaubert’s motive is never obscured or tangled. George Moore declares

L’Education Sentimentale to be as great a work as Tristan und

Isolde. It is the polyphony, the magical crossings, recrossings, the

interweaving of the subject and the long, elliptical thematic loops

made with such consummate ease that command admiration. Flaubert was

above all a musician, a musical poet. The ear was his final court

of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks

essential richness—it is without the great diapasonic undertow of the

Anglo-Saxon—was just short of the miraculous. Until Chateaubriand’s

and Victor Hugo’s time the French tongue was rather a formal pattern

than a plastic, liquid collocation of sounds. They blazed the path

for Flaubert, and he, with almost Spartan restraint and logical mind,

made the language richer, more flexible, more musical, polished,

and precise. The word and the idea were indissolubly associated,

a perfect welding of matter and manner. Omnipresent with him was

the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that would float

by sheer style, a masterpiece unhampered by an idea. The lyric

ecstasy of his written speech quite overmastered him. He was a

poet as were De Quincey, Pater, and Poe. The modulation of his

style to his themes caused him inconceivable agony. A man of equal

gifts, and less exacting conscience, would have calmly written at

length, letting style go free in his pursuit of theme; but Flaubert

strove ceaselessly to overcome the antinomianism of his material.

He wrote La Tentation de Saint Antoine, and its pages sing with

golden throats; transpose this style to the lower key of L’Education

Sentimentale, and we find the artist maddened by the incongruity

of surface and subject. In Madame Bovary, with its symphonic

descriptions, Flaubert’s style was happily mated; while in the three

short tales he is almost flawless. Then came Bouvard et Pécuchet, and

here his most ardent lover recognizes the superb stylistic curve.

The book is a mound of pitiless irony, yet a mound, not a living

organism. Despite its epical breadth, there is something inhuman,

too, in the Homeric harmonies of Salammbô.

With the young wind of the twentieth century blowing in our faces

it is hardly necessary to pose Flaubert academically. His greatness

consists in his not being speared by any literary camp. The

romanticists claimed him; they were right. The realists declared that

he was their leader, and the extreme naturalists cried up to him,

“O Master!” They too were wise. Something of the idealist, of the

realist, is in Flaubert; he is never the doctrinaire. Temperamentally

he was a poet; masked epilepsy made him a pessimist. In a less

cramped milieu he might have accomplished more, but he would have

lost as a writer. It was his fanatical worship of form that ranks

him as the greatest artist in fiction the world has ever read.

Without Balzac’s invention, without Turgénieff’s tenderness, without

Tolstoy’s broad humanity, he nevertheless outstrips them all as an

artist. It is his music that will live when his themes are rusty with

the years; it is his glorious vision of the possibilities of formal

beauty that has made his work classic. You may detect the heart-beat

in Flaubert if your ear is finely attuned to his harmonies. A

despiser of the facile triumph, of the appeal sentimental, he reminds

me more of Landor than De Quincey,—a Landor informed by a passion

for fiction. There are pages of Flaubert that one lingers over for

the melody, for the evocation of dim landscapes, for the burning

hush of noon. In the presence of passion he showed his ancestry; he

became the surgeon, not the sympathetic nurse, as was the case with

many of his contemporaries. He studied the amorous malady with great

cold eyes, for his passions were all intellectual. He had no patience

with conventional sentimentality. And how clearly he saw through the

hypocrisy of patriotism, the false mouthing of politicians! A small

literature has been modelled after his portrait of the discontented

demagogues in L’Education Sentimentale. The grim humor of that famous

meeting at the Club of Intellect set Turgénieff off into huge peals

of laughter. It is incredibly lifelike. A student of detail, Flaubert

gave the imaginative lift to all he wrote: his was a winged realism,

and in Madame Bovary we are continually confronted with evidences of

his idealistic power. Content to create a small gallery of portraits,

he wreaked himself in giving them adequate expression, in investing

them with vitality, characteristic coloring, with everything but

charm. Flaubert has not the sympathetic charm of his brother-at-arms,

Iván Turgénieff. In private life a man of extraordinary magnetism,

his bonze-like suppression of personal traits in his books tells us

of martyrdom to a lofty theory of style. He sacrificed his life to

art, and an unheeding, ungrateful generation first persecuted and

then passed him by. It is the very tragedy of literature that a man

of robust individuality, handsome, flattered, and wealthy, should

retire for life to a room overlooking the Seine, near Rouen, and

there wrestle with the seven devils of rhetoric. He subdued them—made

them bond-slaves; but he wore himself out in the struggle. He sought

to extort from his instrument music that was not in it. What he might

have done with the organ-toned English language after so triumphantly

mastering the _technique_ of the French keyboard—a genuine piano

keyboard—we may only hazard. His name is one of the glories of French

literature, and in these times of scamped workmanship, when the cap

and bells of cheap historical romance and the evil-smelling weed

of the dialect novel are ruling fiction, the figure of the great

Frenchman is at once a refuge and an evocation.

* * * * *

Many years have passed since Gustave Flaubert published his third

novel, L’Education Sentimentale; and whether it was the unhappy title

or the political condition of France at the time,—Turgénieff declared

that it was the former,—the big book of five hundred pages failed

to attract much attention. There was no public prosecution, as with

Madame Bovary, nor did the subject-matter invite the controversy of

archæologists; so to the chagrin of the great pupil of Châteaubriand

and Balzac this masterpiece of “pitiless observation” hardly aroused

a protest. To be sure, M. René Taillandier saw in its pages a

covert attack on the idea of young manhood, but then M. Taillandier

was given to the discovery of literary mare’s nests, and the

Franco-Prussian war intervening, one of the greatest of descriptive

novels was allowed to repose in dusty peace.

As George Moore, in one of the most luminous of his criticisms, so

truthfully says, “Since then it has been read by novelists in search

of material, and they held their tongues, partly because it was

easier to steal than to appreciate, partly because they did not wish

to draw attention to their thefts.” Yet L’Education Sentimentale

was not altogether missed by the critics. Paul Bourget won his way

to critical fame with his exhaustive study of its creator; Henri

Taine wrote sympathetically of him; Henry James, who will yield to

no one in his admiration of the dead master, frankly confesses that

the novel is dead, is as sawdust and ashes, while George Saintsbury

cannot sufficiently praise it. It is for him “a whole _Comédie

Humaine_ of failure in two volumes,” and Flaubert “can do with a

couple of epithets what Balzac takes a page of laborious analysis

to do less perfectly.” It remained for Mr. Moore to cry the work

to heaven and to point out that while Balzac might have written

Madame Bovary, no one but Flaubert could have produced L’Education

Sentimentale.

Mr. Moore is right; the novel is stupendous, is appalling in its

magnitude and handling of the unpromising material of life, in

its piercing analysis, power of concrete characterization, and

overwhelming mastery of style. “The ignoble pleases me,” Flaubert

said once; “it is the sublime of the lower slopes.” L’Education

Sentimentale is the very lowest slope of the ignobly sublime.

“The great artists are those who impose on humanity their particular

illusions,” cries Guy de Maupassant, after serving seven long years

of apprenticeship to Flaubert and literature, with what results

we all know. Flaubert’s particular illusion was so completely

magnificent that but few of his intimates absolutely realized it.

Life, he confessed, was to him a bad odor; “it was like an odor of

unpleasant cooking escaping by a vent-hole.” Yet despite his love of

the exotic, of the barbarous, of the Orient, he forced himself to see

it, handle it, estimate it, and write of it. When he wished to roam

in the East or in old Carthaginian times, he took up the history of

the daughter of Farmer Roualt, and we got Emma Bovary. When Egypt and

the Thebaid tempted him with its ascetic gloom and dream splendors,

he resolutely tied himself to his monkish desk at Croisset and worked

for six years at L’Education Sentimentale.

Picture to yourself this green-eyed Norman giant, stalking up and

down his terrace spouting aloud Châteaubriand, whose sonorous,

cadenced lines were implacably engraved on his memory. Flaubert’s

favorite passage was this from Atala: “Elle répand dans le bois ce

grand secret de mélancholie qu’elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes

et aux rivages antiques des mers.” One recalls Matthew Arnold’s love

for Maurice de Guerin’s Centaur, and his eternal quotation of that

marmoreal phrase, “But upon the shores of what ocean have they

rolled the stone that hides them, O Macareus?” Little wonder that the

passengers on the steamboat bound for Rouen enjoyed the spectacle

of the inspired martyr to style as he paced his garden in an old

dressing-gown, chanting the swelling phrases of Châteaubriand!

Relentlessly pursued by the demon of perfection, a victim to

epilepsy, a despiser of the second-hand art of his day, is it not

strange that Flaubert ever wrote a line? Execution was for him a

painful parturition; he was delivered of his phrases in agony, and

yet his first book, born after ten years of herculean effort, was a

masterpiece. Did not a great critic say, “Madame Bovary is one of

the glories of French literature?” But it almost sent its author to

jail. Without the toleration, the adaptability of his dear comrade,

Turgénieff, Flaubert took life symphonically. It was a sad, serious

thing, and to escape its rigors he surrounded himself in the magic

cloud of an ironic art,—an art addressed to the elect. He felt the

immedicable pity of existence, yet never resorted to the cheap

religious nostrums and political prophylactics of his contemporaries.

He despised the bourgeois; this lifelong rancor was at once his

deliverance and his downfall; it gave us L’Education Sentimentale,

but it also produced Bouvard et Pécuchet. Judged by toilsome

standards of criticism, Flaubert was a failure, but a failure

monstrous, outrageous, and almost cosmical; there is something

elemental in this failure. As satirical as Swift, he was devoured by

a lyrism as passionate as Victor Hugo’s. This colossus of ennui set

out to conquer material life, to crush it with superb, indifferent

hands and was himself vanquished by it; and in the smoke and dust

of defeat his noble figure went down as if some strange meteor had

shot from the dark blue to the very bowels of the globe. After forty

years of toil in his hermitage, he left only six volumes, nearly all

masterpieces, but not masterpieces for the million.

Flaubert, as Saintsbury justly points out, occupied “a very singular

middle position between romanticism and naturalism, between the

theory of literary art, which places the idealizing of merely

observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about

the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and

is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealizing whatsoever.”

His was a realism of a vastly superior sort to that of his disciples.

The profound philosophic bias of his mind enabled him to pierce

behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in

finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of things and persons is

never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not

even by Balzac,—a stroke or two and a man or woman peers out from

behind the types. He ambushed himself in the impersonal, and thus

his criticism of life seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers

who look for the occasional amiable fillip of Gautier, Fielding,

Thackeray, and Dickens. This frigid withdrawal of self behind the

screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his

puppets; it is this quality that caused him to be the only naturalist

to receive mercy from Brunetière’s remorseless pen. Those who mortise

the cracks in their imagination with current romanticism, Flaubert

will never captivate. He seems too remote; he regards his characters

too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths

in Sentimental Education, for the book is minor in tone, without

much exciting incident—exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense—and

is inordinately long. Five hundred pages seem too much by half to be

devoted to a young man who does not know his own mind. Yet Frédéric

Moreau is a man you are sure to meet on your way home. He is born in

great numbers and in every land, and his middle name is Mediocrity.

Only the golden mean of his gifts has not brought him happiness.

He has some money, and was born of middle-class parents in the

provinces. His mother’s hope, he is sent to Paris to the schools,

and has just taken his bachelor degree when the book begins. On the

steamboat bound for Nogent-sur-Seine, Frédéric meets Arnoux, the

art dealer,—an admirably drawn personality,—and falls in love with

Madame Arnoux. That love—the leading motive of the work—proves his

ruin, and it is his one pure love; a sample of Flaubert’s irony,

who refuses to be satisfied with the conventional minor moralities

and our conventional disposition of events. Frédéric goes home,

but cannot forget Madame Arnoux. He is romantic, rather silly,

good-hearted, and hopelessly weak. Like the sound of a firm, clanging

chord his character is indicated at the outset and there is little

later development. As the flow of some sluggish river through flat

lands, oozing banks, and neat embankments, Frédéric’s life canalizes

in leisurely fashion. He loses his fortune, he inherits another, he

goes back to Paris, he lives in Bohemia—such a real Bohemia—and he

frequents the salons of the wealthy. He encounters fraud, meanness,

hypocrisy, rapacity, on every side, and like Rastignac is a bit of

a snob. He is fond of women, but a constitutional timidity prevents

him from reaping any sort of success with them, for he is always

afraid of some one “coming in.” When he does assert himself, he fears

the sound of his own voice, yet in the duel with Cisy—one of the

most superbly satirical set pieces in any literature—he is seemingly

brave. His relations with La Maréchale are wonderfully set forth; he

is her dupe, yet a dupe with eyes wide open and without the power of

retaliation. Infirmity of will allied to a charming person, this

young man is a memorable portrait. He is not the hero, for the book

is without one, just as it is plotless and apparently motiveless.

Elimination is practised unceasingly, yet the broadest effects are

secured; the apparent looseness of construction vanishes on a second

reading. Almost fugal in treatment is the development of episodes,

and while the rhythms are elliptical, large, irregular—rhythm there

always is—the unrelated, unfinished, unrounded, decomposed semblance

to life is all the while cunningly preserved. What Mr. James would

call the “figure in the carpet,” the decorative, the thematic

pattern, is never lost, the assonant web being exquisitely spun. The

whole book floats in the air; it is a miracle work. It is full of the

clangor and buzz of Time’s loom.

For me Rosalie Arnoux is the unique attraction. Henry James calls

her a failure—spiritually. She is one of the most charming portraits

in French fiction, and yet a perfectly virtuous woman. The aroma of

her character pervades the pages of this wonderful “encyclopædia of

life.” What shall I tell you of the magical descriptions of the ball

at the Alhambra and other masked balls at La Maréchale’s; of the

duel; of the street fighting during the revolution of ’48; of the

cynical journalist, Hussonet, a type for all times; of the greedy

Des Lauriers; of peevish Senecal; of good-hearted Dussardier; of

Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics extant so as to

paint beautifully; of Mlle. Vatnaz, skinny, slender, amorous, and

enigmatic? What shall I say of M. Roque, of Louise, of the actor

Delmar, who turns his profile to his audiences; of Madame Dambreuse

and her sleek infidelities; of her avaricious husband; of Frédéric’s

foolish mother, so like himself; of Regimbart, formidable, thirsty

Regimbart, with his oaths, his daily café-route, and his magnificent

air of bravado? The list is not large, but every figure is painted

by a master. And the vanity, the futility, the barrenness of it all!

It is the philosophy of disenchantment, and about the book hangs

the inevitable atmosphere of defeat, of mortification, of unheroic

resignation. It is life, commonplace, quotidian life, and truth

is stamped on its portals. All is vanity and vexation of spirit.

The tragedy of the petty has never before been so mockingly, so

menacingly, so absolutely displayed. An unhappy book, you say! Yes;

and proves nothing except that life is but a rope of sand. Read it if

you care for art in its most quintessentialized form, but if you are

better pleased with the bravery and show of things external, avoid

this novel, I beseech you, for it is as bitter in the mouth as a page

torn from Ecclesiastes.

“And thus it is that Flaubert ... became a sort of monk of

literature, shut away from the world, solitary and morose, beholding

humanity with horror, with repulsion, with irony, with sarcasm, with

an evil laugh sadder than tears, and casting upon mankind what are

called glances of pity—in other words, pitiless glances, ... just

as a friar passes a life of contemplation and meditation, saying

to himself that God is great and that men are small, so he spent

almost the whole of a fairly long life saying to himself again and

again that men are small and that art is great, scorning the one

and serving the other with an equal fervor and an equal ardor of

uncompromising devotion.”

Émile Faguet in his excellent monograph on Flaubert—in Les Grands

Ecrivains Français—thus summed up his life. Paul Bourget called his

works “a manual of nihilism,” and declared that in each sentence

of Flaubert’s “inheres a hidden force.” More significant still is

Bourget’s anecdote illustrating Flaubert’s almost insane devotion to

style.

“He was very proud,” relates Bourget, “of furnishing his story of

Herodias with the adverb _alternativement_,—alternately. This word

whose two accents on _ter_ and _ti_ give it a loose swing, seemed to

him to render concrete and almost perceptible the march of the two

slaves who in turn carried the head of St. John the Baptist.” And in

the preface by Flaubert to Dernières Chansons de Louis Bouilhet may

be found his startling yet rational theory that good prose alone can

stand the test of being read aloud, for “a well-constructed phrase

adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration.”

“While remaining itself obscure,” writes George Moore of L’Education

Sentimentale, “this novel has given birth to a numerous literature.

The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L’Education Sentimentale

rewritten into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist—twenty huge

balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the

housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless walking sticks; Goncourt

took the descriptive passages and turned them into Passy rhapsodies.

The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence

all have found riches and fame. The original spirit has proved too

strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had

the largest sale ever known.”

Some one in Henry Labouchere’s London Truth wrote this of the author

of Boule de Suif: “Guy de Maupassant’s death has revived an interest

in his works. He was admittedly the son of Flaubert, from whom he

inherited his sanguine temperament, ruddy complexion, the full

starting veins in his temples, the bull neck, and the flaw in his

nervous system. Flaubert was subject to epileptic fits, and Guy de

Maupassant died of general paralysis, preceded by madness, before he

had reached middle age. As a writer he was with ease what Flaubert

tried to be by great efforts, and something more, he having a deeper

insight into what seem the ordinary circumstances of life.”

The Beethoven of French prose was, every one knows, whimsical and

fastidious to a degree with his style. Be it true or not, one of his

friends relates that he found him one day standing in front of a high

music desk, on which stood a paragraph written in large letters.

“What are you doing there?” said his friend. “Scanning these words

because they don’t sound well.” Flaubert would spend a day over a

sentence because it did not sound well, and every sentence he sent to

press was equally closely analyzed. Well, why not! If modern prose

were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it

would be more sonorous, more rhythmic, in a word, more artistic. I

believe the story, although it does not appear in Tarvers’s book on

Flaubert. It is glorious, true or false; it fixes an ideal for young

writers.

II

THE TWO SALAMMBÔS

After doggedly working like a galley slave for six years Gustave

Flaubert published Salammbô in Paris near the close of 1862. He

was then forty-one years old, in the prime of his laborious and

picturesque life, recluse, man of the world, traveller, and one of

the most devoted of sons. In 1849, with Maxime du Camp—who later

imprudently lifted the curtain on the sad secret of his friend’s

life—Flaubert made a journey up the Nile, through Egypt, Nubia, by

the Red Sea, through Palestine and Syria, into Cyprus, Rhodes, Asia

Minor, Turkey in Europe, and Greece. Before Dr. Schliemann, the great

Flaubert dug in Mycenæ, and from the “trenches of Herculaneum, on

to the rocks of Cape Misenum,” he explored, furiously obsessed by a

fantastic idea. In 1850 we find him in Phœnicia, a wanderer and an

excavator of buried pasts. During 1858 he went to Tunis, and to the

ruins of Carthage. From these delvings was born the epical romance of

Salammbô, a book full of sonorous lines like the sweeping harmonies

of Wagner, a book of mad dreams, blood, lust, cruelty, and love

faithful unto death.

Following the publication of this story Flaubert, a lion in

literary Paris since his artistic and legal victories with Madame

Bovary, found himself the centre of many attacks by historians,

archæologists, pedants, and the critical small fry of the town. To

one adversary the blond giant of Croisset deigned a reply. It was M.

Froehner, then editor of the _Revue Contemporaine_, and an expert in

archæology—that is, an expert until Flaubert answered his arguments

and literally blew them off the globe. He admitted having created

Salammbô; that the aqueduct which Mathô and Spendius traversed the

night Salammbô first saw the Zäimph was also an invention; that Hanno

was really crucified in Sardinia; and a few other minor changes.

Then to Froehner’s animadversions he gave text for text, authority

for authority, and when a question of topography arose, Flaubert

clinched his answer with: “Is it to shine by trying to make the

dunces believe that I do not distinguish between Cappadocia and Asia

Minor? But I know it, sir; I have seen it, I have taken walks in it.”

If the question was consecrating apes to the moon, or whether beards

covered in bags in sign of mourning are in Cahen [Ezekiel xxiv. 17]

and on the chins of Egyptian colossi—any doubtful fact, be it ethnic,

archæologic, ethic, æsthetic, or historic, was met by a volley of

answers, a flood of learning, a wealth of reading, that simply

overwhelmed his antagonist. The affair was tremendously diverting for

the lookers-on, but it is to be doubted if art was benefited. For two

dusty German professors such a controversy might have proved useful;

in it Flaubert simply wasted his glorious powers.

Salammbô, despite its erudition, is a love story, original in design,

set in a strange environment, a love story withal. The accusations

of a too impersonal style and of a lack of human interest do not

altogether hold when the wonderfully vital portrait of Salammbô is

studied; and the fiery Mathô, the leper Hanno, Hamilcar, stern, but

loving his little son Hannibal like the apple of his eye; the wily

Spendius, the fanatical high priest—here is a group of living humans,

animated by the same passions as ours, a delineation almost cruel

in its clearness, and all surrounded by an atmosphere of realistic

beauty that bespeaks the art of its creator. The style, the superb

cadenced prose which passes us in processional splendor or else

penetrates the soul like a strange perfume, this style so sharp

in outline, so canorous to the ear, a style at once pictorial and

musical,—to this unique verbal presentation I cannot accord justice.

Flaubert is first the musician and then the psychologist.

* * * * *

Ernest Reyer was born in 1823. His family name was Rey, and he hails

from Marseilles. A very old but active man, Reyer is librarian of the

Opéra, and is, or was, critic of the _Journal des Débats_, a position

formerly held by Berlioz. In 1876 he succeeded Félicien David as

a member of the Institute. These two composers exerted the major

influence upon the work of Reyer. He imitated David in his choice of

Eastern subjects and Berlioz in his modern instrumentation. Beginning

as a reformer, writing music that was classed as too advanced, Reyer

lived to hear himself called a reactionary—and with justice, for

in his setting to Salammbô he harks back to Meyerbeer, Halévy, and

Félicien David. The mighty wave of Wagner had no attraction for this

Frenchman until he heard the Tristan Prelude in 1884. From that time

he became an ardent preacher of the faith Wagnerian. He modelled

his orchestration after Wagner, wrote of his music in his critical

journal, and became known as one of the men in Paris who could be

counted upon for the Bayreuth propaganda.

Yet in practice Reyer seems timid. Not possessing much musical

individuality, he attempted what most unoriginal men attempt, he

temporized, became a composer of compromises and an eclectic. So

in his music, even in his best work, Sigurd, the want of a strong,

individual style is noticeable. As early as 1876 selections from

Sigurd had been given in concert by Pasdeloup. The theme of the opera

is almost identical with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the book of which

was finished in 1853. Is it any wonder that Reyer speaks of his early

music as coming too late after David and his later music too soon

after Wagner? Berlioz produced his Erostrate at Baden-Baden, and

Bizet said that La Statue was one of the most remarkable operas given

in France for two decades. With all his half successes—for Sigurd is

in the repertory of the Paris Opéra—Reyer cannot be considered as

a strong man in any way. He has imitated Gluck and Wagner, Berlioz

and Wagner. Years ago, after hearing Sigurd, I called him “le petit

Berlioz,” but I now consider the phrase a pleasing exaggeration.

Berlioz was a master of orchestration. Reyer is not. And he has

nothing new to say. We all recognize those impotent phrases, hollow

and sonorous as the wind in a tall chimney, that are plastered over

his scores. Those cries “O Ciel!” “Je t’aime!” and “Horreur!” are

they not idiotic in librettos and music! Here is the musical phrase

_cliché_ in all its banal perfection, and the thunderous choruses _à

la_ Meyerbeer which punctuate Reyer’s scenes weary the nerves, beat

down our sympathies, and stun our ears.

Sigurd is the one opera that betrays fancy, science, and a feeling

for characterization. I have enjoyed parts of it at the Paris Opéra,

but wondered why the composer had selected the subject. Brunhild lies

asleep on the fiery mountain, situated in Iceland. Sigurd, Gunther,

and Hagen swear friendship, and Sigurd puts on the tarn-cap, winning

Hilda, as she is called, for Gunther. There is the episode of the

naked sword, and later Sigurd is slain by Gunther. The ballet is

very pretty, and Wagner’s influence is in evidence. Sigurd, though

produced in 1884, was really composed before Götterdämmerung. Again

Reyer came too late.

In 1889 he finished the score of Salammbô. It was first sung at the

Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, February 10, 1890, with Rose Caron,

Sellier, Bouvet, Vergnet, and Renaud in the cast. Two years later,

May 23, 1892, Paris listened to the opera with Rose Caron, Albert

Saléza, Vaquet, Delmas, and Renaud in the production. Wednesday

night, March 20, 1901, in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York

viewed its spectacle, for spectacle Salammbô is, spectacle and naught

else. The cast is given as a matter of record: Lucienne Bréval,

Salammbô; Saléza, Mathô; Salignac, High Priest; Journet, Narr’ Havas;

Gilibert, Giscon; Scotti, Hamilcar; Sizes, Spendius; Dufriche,

Autharite, and Carrie Bridewell, Taanach. Luigi Mancinelli conducted.

The production was an elaborate and costly one.

Camille du Locle, who butchered Flaubert’s book to make a holiday for

the Parisians, accomplished his task successfully according to his

lights—theatrical lights. He altered the story, suppressed much of

its humanity, and eliminated the magnificent picturesqueness of the

romance. Du Locle divides his scene plots thus:—

Act I. The Gardens of Hamilcar’s Palace.