_BY JAMES HUNEKER_
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899)
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (1900)
MELOMANIACS (1902)
OVERTONES (1904)
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (1905)
VISIONARIES (1905)
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909)
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (1910)
FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911)
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912)
NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915)
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS (1915)
UNICORNS (1917)
BEDOUINS (1920)
_In Preparation_
STEEPLEJACK. TWO VOLUMES
_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_
BEDOUINS
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by De Meyer_
MARY GARDEN--HERSELF]
BEDOUINS
MARY GARDEN, DEBUSSY,
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS, BOTTICELLI, POE, BRAHMSODY,
ANATOLE FRANCE, MIRBEAU, CARUSO ON WHEELS,
CALICO CATS, THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT;
IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS; WITH THE SUPREME SIN,
GRINDSTONES, A MASQUE OF MUSIC, AND
THE VISION MALEFIC
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
WITH VARIOUS PORTRAITS OF MARY GARDEN IN
OPERATIC COSTUME
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published February, 1920
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE ESS ESS PUBLISHING CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE SUN PRINTING & PUBLISHING ASSN.
THIS BOOK OF BEDOUINS
IS DEDICATED
“À la très-belle, à la très-bonne, à la très-chère.”
“J’aime mieux le désert, je retourne chez les Bédouins qui sont
libres....”
_Gustave Flaubert._
“The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh’s palace walls, and the old war-ship
is given over to the rats.”
_Robert Louis Stevenson._
CONTENTS
_PART I_--MARY GARDEN
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SUPERWOMAN 3
II. INTIMATE 15
III. THE BABY, THE CRITIC, AND THE GUITAR 21
IV. INTERPRETER 30
V. MÉLISANDE AND DEBUSSY 45
VI. THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 53
VII. THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU 64
VIII. ANARCHS AND ECSTASY 73
IX. PAINTED MUSIC 81
X. POE AND HIS POLISH CONTEMPORARY 94
XI. GEORGE LUKS 106
XII. CONCERNING CALICO CATS 118
XIII. CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? 125
XIV. CARUSO ON WHEELS 134
XV. SING AND GROW VOICELESS 144
XVI. ANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST PHASE 154
XVII. A MASQUE OF MUSIC 164
_PART II_--IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS
I. THE SUPREME SIN 177
II. BROTHERS-IN-LAW 201
III. GRINDSTONES 216
IV. VENUS OR VALKYR? 225
V. THE CARDINAL’S FIDDLE 247
VI. RENUNCIATION 256
VII. THE VISION MALEFIC 261
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mary Garden--Herself _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Rosina Galli 24
Mary Garden as Mélisande 34
Mary Garden as Monna Vanna 38
Mary Garden as Salome 78
Rosina Galli as the Princess in “Le Coq d’Or” 140
_PART I_
MARY GARDEN
I
SUPERWOMAN
LA BEAUTÉ
“Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poëte un amour
Éternel et meut, ainsi, que la matière.”
* * * * *
--_Charles Baudelaire._
That little girl down Boston way, who had mastered William James and
Boris Sidis before she was in her teens, behaved badly one afternoon.
Possibly it was the sultry weather, or growing pains--in the psychic
sphere, of course--or, perhaps, it may have been due to the reflexes
from prolonged attention to the Freudian psycho-analysis and the
significance of Twilight Sleep; but whatever the cause, that precocious
child flew off her serene handle and literally “sassed” the entire
household. The tantrum over--she afterward described it as a uric-acid
storm--and order reigning once more in Bach Bay, she was severely
interrogated by her male parent as to the whys and wherefores of her
singular deviation from accustomed glacial intellectual objectivity.
Her answer was in the proper key: “My multiple personalities failed to
co-ordinate. Hence the distressing lack of centripetal functioning.”
She was immediately forgiven. Multiple personalities are to blame for
much in this vale of tears; that is, if you are unlucky or lucky enough
to be possessed of the seven devils of psychology.
Mary Garden was, no doubt, a naughty little girl in her time. That she
climbed trees, fought boys twice her size, stuck out her tongue at
pious folk, scandalized her parents, and tore from the heads of nice
girls handfuls of hair, I am sure. Hedda Gabler thus treated gentle
Thea Elvstad in the play. But was this demon Mary aware of her multiple
personalities? Of her complexes? Her art fusion is such perfect
synthesis. Subconscious is nowadays an excuse for the Original Sin with
which we are saddled by theologians.
Well, one bad turn deserves another, and we may easily picture the wild
Scottish thistle defiantly shrugging shoulders at law and order. She
did not analyze her Will-to-Raise-Merry-Hell. No genius of her order
ever does. There had been signs and omens. Her mother before her birth
had dreamed wonderful dreams; dreamed and prayed that she might become
a singer. But even maternal intuition could not have foreseen such a
swan triumphantly swimming through the troubled waters of life. A swan,
did I say? A condor, an eagle, a peacock, a nightingale, a panther, a
society dame, a gallery of moving-pictures, a siren, an indomitable
fighter, a human woman with a heart as big as a house, a lover of
sport, an electric personality, and a canny Scotch lassie who can
force from an operatic manager wails of anguish because of her close
bargaining over a contract; in a word, a Superwoman.
My dear friend and master, the late Remy de Gourmont, wrote that man
differs from his fellow animals--he didn’t say “lower”--because of
the diversity of his aptitudes. Man is not the only organism that
shows multiple personalities; even in plant life pigmentation and the
power of developing new species prove that our vaunted superiorities
are only relative. I may refer you to the experiments of Hugo de
Vriès at the Botanical Gardens, Amsterdam, where the grand old Dutch
scientist presented me with sixteen-leaf clover naturally developed,
and grown between sunset and dawn; also an evening primrose--Æonthera
Lamarckiana--which shoots into new flowers. Multiple personalities
again. In the case of Mary Garden we call her artistic aptitudes
“the gift of versatility.” All distinguished actresses have this
serpent-like facility of shedding their skin and taking on a fresh
one at will. She is Cleopatra--with “serpent and scarab for sign”--or
Mélisande, Phryne, or Monna Vanna; as Thaïs she is both saint and
courtesan, her Salome breeds horror; and in the simplicities of Jean
the Juggler of Notre Dame a Mary Garden, hitherto submerged, appears:
tender, boyish, sweet, fantastic; a ray of moonshine has entered his
head and made of him an irresponsible yet irresistibly charming youth.
Not without warrant is Karma believed in by people whose imagination
cannot be penned behind the bars of Now. Before to-day was
yesterday, and to traverse that Eternal Corridor of Time has been
the fate of mankind. The Eternal Return--rather say, the Eternal
Recommencement--mad as it seems, is not to be made mock of. It is
always the same pair of eyes that peer through windows opening on
infinity. What the Karmas of Mary Garden? In spirit-land what avatars!
Is she the reincarnation of that Phryne of the “splendid scarlet sins,”
or the Faustine who crowded into a moment the madness of joy and crime;
or the recrudescence of a Sapho who turned her back on the Leucadian
promontory, turned from the too masculine Phaon and sought her
Anactoria, sought and wooed her with lyric sighs; has she recaptured,
this extraordinary Mary of Aberdeen, the soul of Aspasia, who beguiled
Pericles and artistic Athens with the sinuous irony of the serpent; and
Gismonda, Louise, and Violetta, all those subtle sonorous sinners--was
she in her anterior existence any or all of them? Did she know the
glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome? Henry James has
warned us not to ask of an author why he selects a particular subject
for treatment. It is a dangerous question to put; the answer might
prove disconcerting. And with Miss Garden the same argument holds.
Her preference for certain characters is probably dictated by reasons
obscure even to herself. With her the play-instinct is imperious; it
dominates her daylight hours, it overflows into her dream-life. Again
the sounding motive of multiple personalities, Karma, subconsciousness,
the profound core of human nature. And on the palette of her art there
is the entire gamut of tones, from passionate purple to the iridescent
delicacies of iris-grey.
That Mary Garden interprets a number of widely differentiated
characters is a critical platitude. Chapter and verse might be given
for her excellences as well as her defects. Nor does she depend
upon any technical formula or formulas. Versatility is her brevet
of distinction. An astounding versatility. Now, the ways and means
of the acting-singer are different from actors in the theatre.
Dramatic values are altered. The optique of the opera shifts the
stock attitudes, gestures, poses, and movements into another and more
magnified dimension. Victor Maurel, master of all singing-actors,
employed a sliding scale of values in his delineation of De Nevers, Don
Giovanni, Iago, and Falstaff. His power of characterization enabled
him to portray a Valentine true to type, nevertheless individual; and
if there is a more banal figure on the operatic boards than Valentine,
we do not know his name (perhaps Faust...!). But every year the
space that separates the lyric from the dramatic stage is shrinking.
Richard Wagner was not the first composer to stress action; he is the
latest, however, whose influence has been tremendously far-reaching. He
insisted that the action should suit the singing word. To-day acting
and singing are inextricably blended, and I can conceive of nothing
more old-fashioned and outmoded than the Wagnerian music-drama as
interpreted in the dramatic terms of the old Wagnerian singers. They
walked, rather waddled, through the mystic mazes of the score, shouted
or screamed the music, and generally were prodigious bores--except
when Lilli Lehmann sang. After all, Wagner must be sung. When Jean de
Reszke pictured a Tristan--a trifle of the carpet-knight--he both sang
and acted. It was the beginning of the New Wagner, a totally changed
Wagner, else his music-drama will remain in dusty pigeonholes. Debussy
has sounded the modern key.
There is born, or reborn--nothing is new since the early Florentines--a
New Opera, and in its train new methods of interpretation. Merely to
sing well is as futile as attempting to act though voiceless. The
modern trend is away from melodrama, whether Italian, French, or
German; away from its antique, creaking machinery. Debussy patterned
after Wagner for a time and then blazed new paths. As Serge Prokofieff
so acutely observed to me: “In Pelléas and Mélisande Debussy rewrote
Tristan and Isolde.” The emotional scale is transposed to fewer
dynamic values and rhythms made more subtle; the action is shown as
in a dream. The play’s the thing, and reality is muffled. Elsewhere
we have studied the Mélisande of Mary Garden. Like her Monna Vanna,
it reveals the virtues and shortcomings of the New Opera. Too static
for popular taste, it is nevertheless an escape from the tyranny of
operatic convention. Like the rich we shall always have “grand opera”
with us. It is the pabulum of the unmusical, the unthinking, the
tasteless. Its theatricalisms are more depressing than Sardou’s. The
quintessence of art, or the arts, which the modern Frenchmen, above
all, the new Russian composers (from the mighty Slavic races may come
the artistic, perhaps the religious salvation of the world--for I am a
believer in Dostoievsky’s, not Tolstoy’s, Christianity), are distilling
into their work is for more auditors than the “ten superior persons
scattered throughout the universe” of whom Huysmans wrote. There is
a growing public that craves, demands, something different from the
huge paraphernalia of crudely colored music, scenery, costume, lath
and plaster, and vociferous singing. Oh, the dulness, the staleness,
the brutal obviousness of it all! Every cadence with its semaphoric
signalling, every phrase and its accompanying gesture. Poetry is slain
at a stroke, the ear promise-crammed, but imagination goes hungry. The
New Art--an art of precious essences, an evocation, an enchantment of
the senses, a sixth sense--is our planetary ideal.
And in the New Opera Mary Garden is the supreme exemplar. She
sounds the complex modern note. She does not represent, she evokes.
She sings and she acts, and the densely woven web is impossible
to disentangle. Her Gaelic temperament is of an intensity; she is
white-hot, a human dynamo with sudden little retorsions that betray
a tender, sensitive soul, through the brilliant, hard shell of an
emerald personality; she is also the opal, with it chameleonic hues.
Her rhythms are individual. Her artistic evolution may be traced. She
stems from the Gallic theatre. She has studied Sarah Bernhardt and
Yvette Guilbert--the perfect flowering of the “diseuse”--but she pins
her faith to the effortless art of Eleonora Duse. The old contention
that stirred Coquelin and Henry Irving does not interest her so much
as does Duse. We have discussed the Coquelin-Irving crux: should an
actor leave nothing to chance or should he improvise on the spur
of high emotions?--that is what the question comes to. Miss Garden
denied her adherence either to Coquelin or Irving. I asked her to give
us a peep into her artistic cuisine while she prepared her sauces.
Notwithstanding her refusal to let us participate in the brewing of
her magic broth, I still believe that she sided with Coquelin. She is
eminently cerebral. And yet her chief appeal is to the imagination. Not
a stroke of her camel’s-hair brush, not the boldest massing of colors,
are left to chance. She knows the flaming way she came, she knows the
misty return. Not a tone of her naturally rich, dark voice but takes on
the tinting of the situation. This doesn’t forbid a certain latitude
for temperamental variations, which are plentiful at each of her
performances. She knows tempo rubato and its value in moods. She has
mastered, too, the difficult quality described by William Gillette as
the First-time Illusion in Acting. Various are the Mary Gardens in her
map of art.
And she is ours. Despite her Scottish birth she has remained invincibly
Yankee. Despite long residence in her beloved Paris, enough American
has rubbed off on her, and the resilient, dynamic, overflowing, and
proud spirit that informs her art and character are American or
nothing. Race counts. Can any good come out of our Nazareth of art? The
answer is inevitable: Yes, Mary Garden. She is Our Mary. Lyrically,
dramatically ours, yet an orchid. Dear old Flaubert forcibly objected
to Sarah Bernhardt being called “a social expression.” But she was, and
this despite her Dutch ancestry and the exotic strain in her blood.
Miss Garden may not emphasize her American side, but it is the very
skeleton of her artistic organism. Would that an Aubrey Beardsley
lived to note in evanescent traceries her potent personality, a rare
something that arouses the “emotion of recognition,” but which we
cannot define. “Come,” said Berlioz to Legouvé in the early years
of the third decade of the last century. “I am going to let you see
something which you have never seen, and some one whom you shall never
forget.” Berlioz meant the playing and personality of Frédéric Chopin.
Garden is leagues asunder from Chopin--who was the rarest apparition
of his age; but as an interpretative artist she is rare enough for
sympathetic writers to embalm in the amber of their pagan prose;
definitely to pin to their pages this gorgeous dragon-fly.
Another bribe to her audience is the beauty of Mary Garden. But I do
not wish here to dwell upon its value in her unforgettable portrayals
of the dear dead grand ladies, the stately courtesans of the dim past.
Stéphane Mallarmé wrote a poem, though not in verse, depicting a crowd
assembled in the canvas house of the Interpreter of Past Things.
George Moore thus Englished “The Future Phenomenon.” A showman tells
the despairing, ugly men and women of his wonderful prize. “No sign
regales you of the spectacle within, for there is not now a painter
capable of presenting any sad shadow of it. I bring alive (and
preserved through the years by sovereign science) a woman of old time.
Some folly, original and simple, in ecstasy of gold, I know not what
she names it, her hair falls with the grace of rich stuffs about her
face and contrasts with the blood-like nudity of her lips. In place of
her vain gown she has a body; and her eyes, though like rare stones,
are not worth the look that leaps from the happy flesh; the breasts,
raised as if filled with an eternal milk, are pointed to the sky, and
the smooth limbs still keep the salt of the primal sea....” You think
of fair-haired Mélisande as she exquisitely murmurs her pathetic “Je ne
suis pas heureuse ici.”
Some years ago in Paris I saw and heard the Garden Traviata. The
singing was superlative; she then boasted a coloratura style that would
surprise those who now only know her vocalization. It was, however,
the conception and acting that intrigued me. Originality stamped both.
The death scene was of unusual poignancy; evidently the young American
had been spying upon Bernhardt and Duse. This episode adumbrated the
marvellous death of Mélisande, the most touching that I can recall in
either the lyric or dramatic theatre. It is a pity that she cannot find
sterner stuff than Massenet, Leroux, Fevrier, and the rest of that
puff-paste decorative school. There are composers, too, of more vital
calibre than Camille Erlanger. Debussy is a master; but there must be
newer men who could view Mary Garden as the ideal exponent of their
music. Meanwhile, she has discovered a rôle in which she would pique
the curiosity of the most uncritical mossbacks. She has added Isolde
to her long list. Mary Garden and Isolde! Incredible! Nevertheless,
an interesting experiment this if she could be persuaded to voice
the sorrows of the Irish Princess. It would be no longer Wagner. It
would suffer a rich sea-change. Wagner muted, perhaps Wagner undone;
certainly unsung if we remember glorious Olive Fremstad. But a magical
Isolde, with more than a hint of the perversely exotic we feel in
Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of Isolde and Tristan. The modern note
again. Beardsley paraphrasing Botticelli; Watteau plucking at the robe
of Rubens; Debussy smiting the chords of Wagner. Such an Isolde would
be too bewildering to be true.
II
INTIMATE
“Et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches, des drapeaus,
des hanches d’or....”
--_Tentation de Saint Antoine (slightly altered)._
The penalty of publicity is one which singers seldom evade. Little need
to give the reason, nevertheless, for sensitive souls it is a trial to
see one’s personality put in the wash, squeezed, and hung up to dry
with other linen in the pitiless laundry of the press. Some singers are
born advertisers, some achieve advertising, but few have advertising
thrust upon them. That sort usually fade into shadow-land rather than
face the fierce white light which beats about the operatic throne.
Really, it must be disconcerting for a woman singer to hear herself
discussed as if she were a race-horse. Every point in her make-up
is put on a platter ready to serve hot in the newspapers. You fancy
yourself overhearing the conversation of jockeys and trainers. “Oi sye,
Bill, that there filly is goin’ queer. Jest look at her fetlocks, and
her crupper is gettin’ too heavy. Take her out for an hour’s spin on
the downs. Breathe her a bit and then give her a hard sweatin’ run and
a rub down. No water, Bill, mind ye, or I’ll knock yer block off.”
The private life of a prima donna is not unlike that of a racing
mare’s. Flesh reduction, with all the succulent food--and
champagne--are banished; indulgence spells decadence, and decadence
is eagerly noted by the psychic detectives known as music-critics.
We are not in the game to find fault as simple souls imagine, but
to register values, vocal and personal. It’s a pity, but this is a
condition and not a theory. We have heard of a Mary Garden cult.
Now, as has been said by Dr. Wicksteed, a cult is always annoying
to those who do not join in it, and generally hurtful to those who
do. But is there such a Garden cult? We doubt it. She has a certain
elect following, and for those admirers she can do no wrong. She has
aroused the critical antagonism of some who, rightly enough, point
out her obvious limitations. To these the gruff reply of Brahms is
appropriate. A presuming youth called his attention to a theme in a
work of his which was evidently borrowed from Mendelssohn. “That any
fool can see,” said the crusty Johannes. The voice of Miss Garden is
sometimes a voice in the wilderness: sandy, harsh, yet expressive. The
same may be said of Geraldine Farrar, who every year is gravitating
toward the zone, not of silence, but of the singing-actress. A Gallic,
not an Italian zone. Voice does not play the major rôle; acting, that
is, dramatic characterization, does. Not to recognize in Miss Garden
the quintessence of this art--not altogether a new one, and its most
perfect flowering is the art of Yvette Guilbert--is to miss the real
Mary Garden. Voilà tout! We saw a like misunderstanding of Eleonora
Duse. Immediately she was compared, and unfavorably, with Sarah
Bernhardt, when she was achieving something vastly different, and, I
think, vastly finer. Sarah was more brilliant, Duse more human; the one
an orchestra, the other an exquisitely balanced string quartet. Mary
Garden is the nearest approach to Duse on the lyric stage.
Mary Garden, too, is “different,” in the sense Stendhal meant that
banal word. Her cadenced speech is not singing in the Italian manner.
To begin with, her tonal texture is not luscious. But there are
compensations. Every phrase is charged with significance. She paints
with her voice, and if her palette is composed of the cooler tones, if
the silver-greys and sombre greens of a Velasquez predominate, it is
because she needs just such a gamut with which to load her brush. She
is a consummate manipulator of values. To be sure, we do not expect
the torrential outbursts of Margaret Matzenauer. Why confuse two
antithetical propositions? I don’t look at one of the Paul Cézannes in
the rare collection of Miss Lillie Bliss expecting the gorgeous hues
of a Monticelli. Cézanne is a master of values. And if these similes
seem far-fetched--which they are not; music and color are twins in the
Seven Arts--then let us pitch upon a more homely illustration: Mary
Garden is an opal, Margaret Matzenauer a full-blown rose. Voltaire
said that the first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet; the
second, an ass. I hope Mme. Matzenauer will accept the simile in the
poetic sense.
Nuance, which alone makes art or life endurable, becomes an evocation
with Miss Garden. I lament that she is not in a more intimate setting,
as the misted fire and rhythmic modulations of her opaline art and
personality are lost in such a huge auditorium as the Lexington
Theatre. I saw her, a slip of a girl, at Paris, early in this century,
and framed by the Opéra Comique, of whose traditions she is now the
most distinguished exponent. She was then something precious: a line
of Pater’s prose, the glance of one of Da Vinci’s strange ladies; a
chord by Debussy; honey, tiger’s blood, and absinthe; or like the
enigmatic pallor we see in Renaissance portraits; cruel, voluptuous,
and suggesting the ennui of Watteau’s L’Indifférent.
She is all things to all critics.
There are those who see in her the fascinating woman. And they are
justified in their belief. There are those who discover in her
something disquieting, ambiguous; one of Baudelaire’s “femmes damnées”
from whom he fashioned his Beethovenian harmonies, fulgurating,
profound: “Descendez le chemin de l’enfer éternel! ... flagellés par
un vent qui ne vient pas du ciel.” ... And there is still another
group to which I adhere, one that envisages Mary in the more lucid
light of an admirable artist, who has fashioned of her body and soul a
rare instrument, giving forth the lovely music of attitude, gesture,
pose, and rhythm. There are moments when she evokes the image of the
shadow of a humming-bird on a star; and often she sounds the shuddering
semitones of sex, as in Thaïs. The Mélisande moods are hers, the dim,
remote poesy of antique sonorous tapestries; and the “modern” note
of Louise, grazing the vulgar, though purified by passion. But the
dissenters no doubt believe in the Cambodian proverb when estimating
the singing of both Geraldine Farrar and Mary Garden. It runs thus:
When in Hades it is bad form to speak of the heat.
Do you remember the night when Mary Garden came from the refectory
of the monastery in Le Jongleur, and--oh, the winsome little
devil!--paused on the stairway to remark to her audience: “La cuisine
est très bonne”?
The accent was indescribable. At Paris they admired her individual
French streaked with exotic intonations. That night it revealed
the universal accent of a half-starved lad who had just filled his
tummy; a real “tuck-out.” The joy of life! How human she was! It is
the sartorial technique of Miss Garden that is supreme. Her taste in
costumes is impeccable. In the eternal game of making masculine eyes
misbehave, she is quite irresistible. But this orchidaceous Circe,
this uncommon or garden variety, does not with her fatal philtres
transform men into the unmentionable animal; rather does she cause
them to scurry after their vocabulary and lift up their voices in
rhetorical praise. And that is something to have accomplished. Did you
ever read Casuals of the Sea, by William McFee, a fiction I had the
honor to introduce to the American reading public? On page 443 there
occurs at the chapter end the following dialogue: “Mother!” “Yes,
Minnie.” “Mother, I was just thinking what fools men are! What utter
fools! But oh, mother, dear mother, what fools we are, not to find it
out--sooner!” Minnie had seen a bit of life on the Continent; she was
then snug in the land-locked harbor of stagnant matrimonial waters. But
she understood men. Miss Garden is a profounder philosopher than Minnie
Briscoe. She knew her public “sooner,” and the result is--Mary Garden.
Qui a bu, boira!
I have been asked whether Miss Garden believes that she is the
wonderful artiste I believe her to be. I really don’t know. But I
feel assured that if she discovers she does not measure up to all the
qualities ascribed to her she will promptly develop them; such is the
plastic, involutionary force of this extraordinary woman.
III
THE BABY, THE CRITIC, AND THE GUITAR
George Saintsbury, that blunt literary critic who always called a cat
a cat, wrote a study of Charles Baudelaire in an English magazine at
least forty years ago. It practically introduced the poet to English
readers, although Swinburne had imported no little of the “poisonous
honey from France” in Laus Veneris. Prof. Saintsbury told of a friend
to whom he had shown the etching of François Flameng after Herrera’s
The Baby and the Guitar. “So,” said the friend, “you like this picture.
I always thought you hated babies!” The remark is a classic example
of that sin against the holy ghost of criticism, the confusion of two
widely varying intellectual substances; a mixing up of the babies with
a vengeance. The anecdote may serve to point a moral if not to adorn my
sermon.
The operatic undertow of the past season cast up strange flotsam
and jetsam and derelicts, usually in the shape of letters. Letters
signed and unsigned. Two I select as illustrating the Baby and the
Guitar crux. I stand for the Baby and two celebrated singing girls
represent the Guitar. Both letters are unsigned, both reveal a woman’s
handwriting, though different women. The first roundly accuses the
dignified author of being madly in love with Mary Garden; the second
wonders why I worship Margaret Matzenauer. Now, the venerable age of
the present alleged and versatile “great lover”--Leo Ditrichstein
should look to his laurels!--might serve as an implicit denial of these
charges, were it not the fact that there are hoary-headed sinners
abroad seeking whom they may devour. If I were a young chap I should
pay no attention, but being as old as I am I proudly confess my crimes,
merely pausing to ask, who isn’t in love with Mary Garden and Margaret
Matzenauer? Their audiences, to an unprejudiced eye, seem to be very
much so, men, women, and children alike. Why not that worm-of-all-work,
the music-critic? We, too, have feelings like any other humans. But
worse follows. A sympathetic singer sent me a telegram which read
thus: “Why doesn’t your wife put you behind bars?” to which I promptly
replied, Celtic fashion, by asking another question: “Which one?”
meaning, of course, which bar. Here is a concrete case of the Baby and
the Guitar muddle. One can’t praise the art of Mary Garden without
loving the woman! One can’t admire the opulent voice of Margaret
Matzenauer without being dragged a hopeless slave at her triumphant
chariot wheels; a critic butchered to make a prima donna’s holiday!
Absurd!
And there are others. What of radiant Geraldine with the starry eyes?
What of Frieda Hempel, exquisite Violetta, delicious Countess in
the Rose-Cavalier? And what of Olive Fremstad, always beautiful, an
Isolde whose tenderness is without peer, a Sieglinde who plucks at
your heartstrings because of her pity-breeding loveliness, or as that
dazzling witch, Kundry; and to whose beauty the years have lent a
tragic, expressive mask? There were queens, too, before Agamemnon’s.
Lilli Lehmann, Emma Eames, Lillian Nordica, Emma Calvé--did we not burn
incense under the nostrils of those beautiful women and great artists?
Go to! Nor was our praise accorded only to the girls of yesteryear. The
De Reszkes, Victor Maurel, Max Alvary--as perfect a type of the matinée
idol as Harry Montague or Charles Coghlan--the stately, if slightly
frigid, Pol Plançon--upon them we showered our warmest enthusiasms. And
Ignace Jan Paderewski, once Premier Opus I of Poland--was he neglected?
The piano god par excellence. No, such generalizations are unfair. The
average music-critic or dramatic critic is nothing if not versatile in
his tastes. Remember that either one has opportunities to see and hear
the most comely faces and sweetest voices. Nevertheless I know of none
who ever lost his head. We play no favorites. I also admit that this
apologetic tone is the kind of excuse that is accusatory. But----!
But there is another name which slipped the memory of my faultfinders.
What of Rosina Galli, whose pedal technique is as perfect as the vocal
technique of Miss Hempel; whose mimique is as wonderful in its way
as are the hieratic attitudes and patibulary gestures of Mary, the
celebrated serpent of Old Nile? Don’t we, to a man, adore Rosina?
Thunderous affirmations assail the welkin! And then there is the
“poet’s secret,” as Bernard Shaw, the “Uncle Gurnemanz” of British
politics, has it. The secret in question is as simple as Polchinelle’s.
Do you realize that to a writer interested in his art such women as
Mary Garden or Margaret Matzenauer serve as a peg for his polyphonic
prose or as models upon which to drape his cloth-of-silver when
writing of Geraldine Farrar? A susceptible critic may perforce sigh
like a symphonic furnace, but apart from such fatuities he can’t
keep up the excitement without a lot of emotional stoking. And coal
is so costly this year. That alone negates the assertion of undue
sentimentality. Pooh! I shouldn’t give a hang for a critic so cold that
he couldn’t write overheated prose, Byzantine prose, purple-patched
and swaggeringly rhythmed, when facing these golden girls. “Passionate
press agents,” indeed, but in the strict sense intended when Philip
Hale struck off that memorial phrase. There is Pitts Sanborn with his
“lithe moon-blonde wonderful Mary,” which I envy him; after my spilth
of adjectives he limns in five words the garden-goddess, Themes, those
singers, for gorgeous vocables; nothing more. Footlight-prose
quickly forgotten if you take from the shelf in your library the
beloved essays of Cardinal Newman and swim in the cool currents of his
silvery style. A panacea for the strained, morbid, fantastic atmosphere
of grand opera.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by De Strelecki_
ROSINA GALLI]
A character in one of Goethe’s novels--Wilhelm Meister?--exclaims:
“Five minutes more of this and I confess everything!” Another such
season of overwrought reportage and my bag of highly colored phrases,
all my trick adjectives, would be exhausted, else gone stale, and the
same gang of girls ever expecting new and more miraculous homage in
four languages with a brass band around the corner. Oh! la! la!
There was one critic that did fall in love with an actress. His name
is Hector Berlioz, and he celebrated the charms of Henrietta Smithson,
English born, a “guest” at a Parisian theatre, by passionately pounding
the kettle-drums in the orchestra. His amatory tattoo, coupled with
his flaming locks, finally attracted the lady’s attention, and after
she broke her leg and was forced to abandon the stage she had her
revenge--she married the kettle-drum critic and composer, and lived
unhappily ever afterward. Yet the feeling against critics persists,
probably prompted by envy. In a Dublin theatre gallery a fight broke
out, and one chap was getting the worst of it. His more powerful
adversary was pushing him over the rail into the orchestra, when a wag
called out: “Don’t waste him. Kill a fiddler with him!” Nowadays he
would say, “Kill a critic.” But sufferance is the badge of our tribe.
There are times when I long for the unaffected charm of Heller rather
than Chopin; when I prefer to gaze at Wagner’s Grane rather than hear
Brunhilde sing.
Mary Garden makes herself beautiful, if only by thinking “beautiful.”
“Whatever happens, I must be an emerald,” said Antoninus of the
emerald’s morality. Havelock Ellis asserts, “the exquisite things of
life are to-day as rare and as precious as ever they were.” She is
rare and precious in Mélisande, Monna Vanna, Jean, and other rôles.
And what imaginative intensity is hers! But I don’t care a fig for the
depraved creatures of the Lower Empire she so marvellously portrays.
It is Mary with the strain of mysticism, the woodland fay she shows
us, its nascent soul modulating into the supreme suffering and sorrow
of motherhood. Her bed of death in Mélisande is one of the high
consolations in the memory of a critic whose existence has been spent
in the quagmire of mediocrity. In the kingdom of the mystics there are
many mansions, and Garden lives in one--at times.
But the détraqué lemans she pictures are often repugnant. The decadent
art of Byzance. The Infernal Feminine. A vase exquisitely carved
containing corruption. Sculptured slime. You close your eyes--but open
your fingers; the temptation to peep is irresistible.
In his illuminative studies of Fremstad, Farrar, Garden, Mazarin,
Interpreters and Interpretations, Carl Van Vechten says that to Miss
Garden a wig is the all-important thing. “Once I have donned the wig
of a character, I am that character. It would be difficult for me
to go on the stage in my own hair.” However, she did so in Louise,
adds the critic. Felix Orman reports that when he asked her if she
would be content to give up singing and become a dramatic artist, she
replied: “No. I need the music. I depend on it. Music is my medium of
expression.” An art amphibian, hybrid, hers. The flying fish. The bird
that swims. The dubious trail of the epicene is not a modern note. Rome
and Alexandria knew it. It is vile, soulless, yet fascinating. Miss
Garden incarnates it as no other modern since the divine Sarah. She
is “cérébrale,” and a cerebral is defined by Arthur Symons as one who
feels with the head and thinks with the heart. Richard Strauss is a
prime exemplar. The image suggests both apoplexy and angina pectoris,
yet it serves. She is as hard as steel in Louise or Cléopâtre, yet how
melting as Monna and Mélisande. She may be heartless for all I know,
and that is in her favor, artistically considered, for Steeplejack hath
enjoined: A cool head and a wicked heart will conquer the world; also,
what shall it profit a woman if she saves her soul but loseth love?
Cynical Steeplejack? Yet, a half-truth--though not the upper half of
that shy goddess, Truth.
As for Margaret Matzenauer, her art and personality transport the
imagination to more exotic climes. That sombre and magnificent woman,
who seems to have stepped from a fresco of Hans Makart, himself
a follower of Paolo Veronese, is a singing Caterina Cornaro. She
brought back an element of lyric grandeur to our pale operatic life; a
Judith, a Deborah, Boadicea, Belkis, Clytemnestra, Dalila, Amneris, or
Aholibah, all those splendid tragic shapes of the antique world, she
evokes, and in her singing there is a largeness of dramatic utterance
that proclaims her of the line royal: Lehmann, Brandt, Ternina,
Fremstad, Schumann-Heink. Is it at all remarkable that I admire
Matzenauer?
And now that we have cleared away some cobwebs of misapprehension
with the aid of the Baby and the Guitar, let me relate a story of
Châteaubriand, that Eternal Philanderer, as I once named him, who met
at Rome gay Hortense Allart, afterward Madame Meritens. The supreme
master of French prose regretfully exclaimed to her: “Ah, if I had back
my fifty years.” Thereupon the sprightly lady replied: “Why not wish
for twenty-five?” “No,” moodily returned the Ambassador, “fifty will
do.” Which recalls the witty design of Forain, representing a very old
man apostrophizing the shadow of his past: “Oh, if I only had again
my sixty-five years!” I should be glad to have my threescore and ten
if only to tell those great ladies of opera how much I admire them.
“Barkis is willin’.”
Another picture and I shall have done. Listen. I, many years ago,
visited the Fondation Ste. Perine at Auteuil, an institution endowed
by the Empress Eugénie, one in which the benevolence is so cloaked as
not to hurt the sensibilities of the resident superannuated ladies and
gentlemen. The company boasted noble origins. Among the ladies I met
was a Polish-born Marquise, with brilliant eyes and wonderful white
hair, her own. She had studied with Chopin. She said he was fickle and
that George Sand was often jealous of his pupils. For me she sang in a
sweet, true, but quavering voice Chopin’s Maiden’s Wish, and compelled
tears. The Marquise then tinkled with a still small tone a Nocturne
by Field upon a pianoforte whose ivory keys looked as if they exhaled
pearly sighs. She gently coquetted with a touch of exquisite Sarmatian
evasiveness. For me she was adorable, although if she had laughed her
face would have cracked its artistic plastering. What a new Diana of
Poitiers! What wit, fire, malice, were in the glance of her soft, faded
blue eyes! What a magically youthful heart! She must have been more
than fourscore.
But yet a woman.
IV
INTERPRETER
TO MARY GARDEN AS CLEOPATRA
“_C’est Affreux Mourir_”
“And now this scorchèd terrace is your sole domain,
Your only subject Roman, dying Anthony;
The outer vastnesses they held, the soldiery
Of Cæsar; their stout captain will not here refrain.
You lived, O Queen, but not to countenance that pain
Which is surrender of the body’s sovereignty;
You take your part; is it the frightful thing to die
And see in dying just the realm you must regain?
You have not let the game play you, my Queen, but fed
The aspic at a famished breast--the rascal fresh
From gluttony a glutton still!--Why, the hot land
Is dim, alone lies Anthony save for the dead--
One more ambition, Queen, for your expiring hand.
The last adventure, woman of imperious flesh!”
--_Pitts Sanborn._
CLEOPATRA
Though the first hearing of the work in New York was during the winter
of 1919 at the Lexington Theatre, and sung by the Chicago Opera
Association, Cleofonte Campanini, director, it had been presented
before Chicago audiences when the impersonation of the supersubtle
serpent of Old Nile by Mary Garden caused much comment, critical
and otherwise. The libretto states that the conception of M. Payen
radically differs from Shakespeare’s tragedy--a rather superfluous
remark. It does considerably differ, the principal difference being
that Shakespeare wrote great poetry as well as great drama.
Payen’s attempt resolves itself into a series of tableaux, the
characterization generalized, his verse respectably tepid. In a word,
not the Queen that Shakespeare drew. Of this Cléopâtre you dare not
say: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
She is more germane to that Queen shown us in the sumptuous prose of
Theophile Gautier’s Une Nuit de Cléopâtre than the imperial courtesan
who turned the head of Anthony and stirred the pulse of Julius Cæsar to
the supreme tune of Shakespeare’s music.
There is plenty of action, some picturesque episodes, and at least one
brutal scene. Of love and the talk of love there is no end. Yet it is
not all convincing. Moving pictures. You think of Gérôme, of Le Nouy,
of the hundred and one painters who have celebrated on canvas this
seductive creature of old Egypt. “For her own person, it beggar’d all
description; she did lie in her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
o’er-picturing that Venus where we see the fancy out-work nature.”
Cléopâtre is Massenet and the modiste. Brackish-sweet, it is the
ultimate expression of musical impotence. Clever craftsman Massenet
could turn out martial music and amorous, the clangor of trumpets
and voluptuous, dizzy dance measures. But here it is generally bosh.
Languid, enervating, it attained a feeble climax in the ballet of the
penultimate act. Ambiguous shapes and attitudes crowded the scene.
Two dancers slipped and fell, but the recovery was so swift that
the tumbled ensemble seemed a veritable climax. Cléopâtre cynically
regarded this daring symbolism, though Marc-Antoine seemed rather
shocked. And he should have been. Musically speaking, nothing happened
in Act I; less followed in Act II, while Act III was a glittering
triumph of vacuity. In the last act the asp played protagonist. As its
name did not figure on the programme, it probably died from envy, or
else inanition, doubtless humming Will Shakespeare’s mournful lay: “I
am dying, Egypt, dying.” You also recall Swinburne’s: “Under those low,
large lids of hers She hath the histories of all times....”
But the Cléopâtre! A youthful Sphinx, her entrance on the great
burnished barge was an evocation. As she faced Antoine so must have
looked Sheba’s Queen before the majesty of Solomon. It would have
been trying on the nerves of the most pudic potentate from Herod
down. A saucy lad, in a later scene, Cléopâtre got in a mix-up at an
early-Egyptian boozing-ken. An extraordinary apparition, a fantastic
faun of Aubrey Beardsley caught the roving riggish eye of the disguised
Queen. She encouraged the advances of the anonymous animal. An Adonis
à rebours. Pavley was this delicate monster and his subtle rhythms made
Cléopâtre shiver. Here the music was too prudish.
Stravinsky or Richard Strauss would have given the screw an enharmonic
wrench. Act III saw the Queen attired at once so sonorously and
exquisitely that the vast audience gasped with admiration. It is,
however, the tavern scene that will save the tawdry work. The
anatomical wigwagging of the two golden lads set the lobby buzzing.
Cléopâtre is doomed to packed houses in the future. Nothing succeeds
like true spirituality.
Mary Garden is Cléopâtre, as she is Mélisande and Thaïs. It is not a
rôle that taxes her dramatic resources or her personal pulchritude.
All she did was to look beautiful and turn on the full voltage of her
blandishments. Men went to the ground before that dynamic yet veiled
glance, like soldiers facing a machine-gun. It is uncanny, the emotion
she projects across the footlights and with such simple but cerebral
means.
That she would have been burned at the stake a few centuries ago, this
lovely witch, is no conjecture. Her nose is not “tip-tilted like the
petal of a flower,” as Cléopâtre’s is said to have been; nevertheless,
she is the tawny Egyptian. And she has never spoken so eloquently as in
this parlando part. Perhaps the most poignant criticism was carelessly
uttered by a big policeman who had strayed in during the garden scene.
“Some Queen!” he said. And the definitive words had been spoken. Fie on
naughty professional opinion after that memorial phrase!
MÉLISANDE
Once upon a time we called this “precious” lyric work Wagner and
Absinthe, for there are many rumors of Tristan and Isolde in it, and
the opalescent music, drugged with dreams, has the numbing effect of
that “green fairy” no longer permitted in la belle France. Like all
epigrams, this is only a half-truth. In the Belgian poet’s The Death
of Tintagiles--so wonderfully interpreted in tone by Charles Martin
Loeffler--his marionettes are beginning to modulate into flesh and
blood, and, like the mermaid of the fairy story, the transformation is
a painful one. We note the achievement of a new manner in Pelléas and
Mélisande. Played in English first by Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Patrick
Campbell, the piece created a mixed impression in London, though it may
be confessed that, despite the scenic splendor, the acting transposed
to a lower realistic key this lovely drama of souls. No play of
Maeterlinck’s is so saturated with poesy, replete with romance. There
are episodes almost as intense as the second act of Tristan. We listen
for King Mark’s distant, tremulous hunting-horns in the forest scene
when Pelléas and Mélisande uncover their hearts.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyrighted by Davis and Eickemeyer_
MARY GARDEN AS MELISANDE]
The second act begins at an immemorial fountain in the royal park. Here
the young Prince sits with the wife of his brother. Mélisande is the
most convincing full-length portrait of the poet. Exquisitely girlish,
she charms with her strange Undine airs. Mélisande is enveloped in
the haze of the romantically remote. At times she seems to melt into
the green tapestry of the forest. She is a woodland creature. More
melancholy than Miranda, she is not without traces of her high-bred
temperament; less real than Juliet, she is also passion-smitten. You
recall Melusina and Rautendelein. Not altogether comprehensible,
Mélisande piques us by her waywardness, her fascinating if infantile
change of moods. At the spring the two converse of the water and its
healing powers. “You would say that my hands were sick to-day,” she
murmurs as she dips her fingers into the pool. The dialogue is as
elliptical as if written by Browning or Henry James. But the symbol
floats like a flag.
The mad apostrophe to the hair of Mélisande is in key with this moving
tableau. Perhaps Maeterlinck took a hint from the mournful tale of his
friend, the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-la-Morte), with its
reincarnation of a dead woman in the form and features of a live one.
The beautiful hair of the new love serves but to strangle her. Pelléas
is more tender.
“I have never, never seen such hair as thine, Mélisande. I see the
sky no longer through thy locks.... They are alive like birds in my
hands.” The last scene, as Mélisande dies of a broken heart, even when
read on the printed page, is pity-breeding. It is the tragedy of souls
distraught. “She must not be disturbed,” urges the venerable Arkel.
“The human soul is very silent.... The human soul likes to depart
alone.... It suffers so timorously.... But the sadness, Golaud, the
sadness of all we see.... ’Twas a little being so quiet, so fearful,
and so silent. ’Twas a poor little mysterious being like everybody.”
Pascal comes to the mind here. No matter the splendor of human lives,
we must die alone.