A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS
Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it
has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed
success, though the aesthetic principle at the base of his theory is
eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and
the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very
titles are significant--a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is
the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his
scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye;
truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino
had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young
man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet
from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other
ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at
Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to
Japan--only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent
of armpits--of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New
York audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese
crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Theatre d'art, Paris,
and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made
with all the arts--except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary
Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music,
lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the
stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple.
The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and
greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly
on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet,
Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in
all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black;
E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in
his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch
the ears of credulous ones. Rene de Ghil invented an entirely new
system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet.
I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that
music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands
of an anarch composer like Illowski--or Richard Strauss. And now New
York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine.
It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave
conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while his
brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed
down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a
wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the
truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not
optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since
I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his etude in D sharp minor.
Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it.
I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did
not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either
Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its
composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate
twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled
Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious
premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus,
the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his
electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often
undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously
practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of
cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; principally,
Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if
not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his Light
Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. In
Paris the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows
with perfume symphonies.
A quarter of a century ago I visited the Theatre d'art, in Paris;
that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed
theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't
enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the
nombril button, took my Rig-Veda--a sacred buggy--projected my
astral being, and sailed through space to the French capital, there
to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts,
eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were
deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was
maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my
arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of
violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The
dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid
counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a melange that appealed
to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that
the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge,
yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the
duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly
cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little
rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried (astrally, of
course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by
Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic."
The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into
little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor,
scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo,
sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this
chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was
one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it
was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that
made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The
bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the
hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion)
smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the
lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of
jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours
seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips
glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and
received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin,
though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of
my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I
touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might
hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. So
evidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again
inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously
raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort
of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed
my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was
the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your
pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one
can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to
make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed.
Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a
shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the
orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The
steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the
trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing
something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to
Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the
music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of
art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the
ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away,
but, full of gumbo soup as I was--and you have no idea how soup
discommodes the astral stomach--I was anchored to my seat, and
bravely determined not to leave till I had some clew to the riddle
of the new evangel of the seven--or seventeen--arts. The stage
remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their
hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my
tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish,
dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and,
turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely
asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play,
piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony,
cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I
had appealed looked fearfully about him--I had foolishly forgotten
that I was invisible in my astral shape--then clutched at his
windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still
another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly
vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too
absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a
slow, putrid silence.
Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat
down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of
actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the
orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E
flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets.
Suddenly the lights went out, and we were plunged into a blackness
that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A
smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we
were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were
tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glace, and orchids, and
the soup supply shifted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these
contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced.
Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall
old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandishing
aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the
Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland,
was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the
slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly
the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer
brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives,
and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help
wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My
cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing
young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge
carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must
have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the
Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetrated the air, the
electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to
the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these
composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an
odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse,
making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing
the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock,
with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and
burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the
orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs,
and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac
steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di
bassetto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and
coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical
banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve
was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention!
When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell
simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis
of the arts? Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not too much
time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward,
wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and
nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I landed at the Battery it
was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun
was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky.
New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old
hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my
cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of
ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers
and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.