mastiff was worse than his bite; but his victims did not believe
this. He was, in his dynamic prime, the best-hated publicist in
all Paris--and that is saying a lot, for there were also Barbey
d’Aurevilly, Ernst Hello, Louis Veuillot, J. K. Huysmans and several
other virtuosi in the noble art of making foes. Decidedly, Mirbeau was
not a lagger behind those pamphleteers and dealers in corrosive verbal
values.
That he could be human was shown in his vertiginous automobile story
La 628-E8, where, after retelling what Victor Hugo had hinted at in
his Choses vues, Mirbeau made an apology to the daughter--or was it
granddaughter?--of Mme. Hanska Balzac for a certain chapter which
relates the Russian lady’s doings on the heels of her great husband’s
death. Mirbeau was not legally compelled to withdraw this chapter, as
it was a thrice-told tale in Paris, but a friend explained to him the
lady’s distress and he promptly made the only amend he could. This man
had also a prodigious heart.
VIII
ANARCHS AND ECSTASY
Lest we forget. While competition is the life of cocottes, the rival
opera companies that fill the air of Gotham with their lyric cries
offer to the truly musical only the choice between two despairs; with
our accustomed happy indecision we prefer Leopold Godowsky to Puccini.
We frankly confess our love of symphonic music, and would rather listen
to a Beethoven string quartet played by the Flonzaleys than all the
operas ever written; the majority of them depicting soul-states in a
sanatorium. However, there is the charm of aversion, and that piques
the curious. Music in opera is prodigal, never generous. It is the
too-much that appalls. It is as reticent as a female politician and
a hundredfold more attractive. Flying fish, these singing-actors.
They needs must swim and fly. Winged fish, birds with fins. It is an
ambiguous art, the operatic, and it is devised to tickle the ears,
dazzle the eyes, of the unmusical and myopic. It breeds personal
gossip, never thought. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and
tell sad stories of Mary Garden’s celebrated eyebrows! (This modern
instance, for Mary always goes first, as Henry Arthur of the Jones
family would say, does not necessitate Shakespearean quotation marks.)
From Bach to Scriabin, have not all composers been anarchs? At first
blush the plodding John Sebastian Bach of the Ill-Tempered Clavichord
seems a dubious figure with which to drape the red flag of revolt.
He grew a forest of children. He taught early and late. He played
the organ in church of Sundays. Nevertheless, his music proves him
a revolutionist. And, like any good social democrat, he quarrelled
with his surroundings. He even went out for a drink during a prosy
sermon--all sermons are necessarily prosy, else they wouldn’t be
sermons--and was almost discharged by his superiors for returning
late; a perpetual warning to thirsty organists. If Lombroso had been
cognizant of this suspicious fact he would have built a terrific
structure of degeneration theories with all sorts of inferential
subcellars. Stranger still, the music of Bach remains as revolutionary
as the hour it was written. No latter-day composer has gone so far
as some of his fantasies. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on
aristocratic patronage to play the rôles of anarchs; yet tales are
extant of their refusal to lick the boots of the mighty or curve the
spine of the suppliant. Handel! A fighter, a revolutionist born, a
hater of tyrants. And the most virile among musicians except the
peasant Beethoven--since the recent war become a Belgian composer!
His contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies was like a blow
from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was a henpecked
Croatian, and strange stories are related of this merry little blade,
truly a chamber-music husband. Mendelssohn was Bach watered down for
general consumption. Schubert and Schumann were anarchs, but the
supreme anarch of art was Beethoven, who translated into daily practice
the radicalism of his music.
Because of its opportunities for the expansion of the soul, music
has ever attracted the strong free sons of the earth. It is, par
excellence, the art masculine. The profoundest truths, the most
blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony,
and the police none the wiser. Think of Chopin and Tchaikovsky and the
arrant doctrines they preached. It is its freedom from the meddlesome
hand of the censor that has made of music a playground for brave
hearts. In his Siegfried and under the long nose of royalty Richard
Wagner preached anarchy, put into tone, words, gestures, attitudes,
lath, plaster, paint, and canvas, pronouncements so terrible that the
Old Man of the Mountain, as Bernard Shaw calls Government, if it but
knew, would forbid his music, not because it was penned by a German,
but because it is inimical to tyranny, therefore the most democratic
music ever composed.
Chopin presents us with a psychic “equivalent of war,” as William James
has put it, in portions of his music, notably the polonaises; while
Richard Strauss has buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin
with his cannon smothered in roses, or Bakounine and his nihilistic
prose. Liszt, midway in his mortal life, was bitten by the socialistic
theories of Saint-Simon, and, though a silken courtier, he was an
innovator in his music. Brahms was a free-thinker and a democrat, but
closely hugged the classic line and seldom strayed from the boundaries
of his Romantic park. Berlioz, Hector of the Flaming Locks, was, his
life long, a fiery individualist. He would have made a picturesque
figure waving a blood-red flag on the barricades. His fantastic
symphony is charged with the tonal commandments of anarchy. Richard
Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising of
1849, yet he was, with Roeckel and Bakounine, one of its inspirers.
Luckily for us he ran away, else Tristan might have remained in the
womb of eternal silence. Wagner may be called the Joseph Proudhon among
composers; his music is anarchy incarnate, passionately deliberate,
like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s
Philosophy of Misery (by the way, a subtitle). His very scheme of
harmonization is the symbol of a soul insurgent in the music of Richard
Strauss. And what shall we say to the exquisite anarchy of Debussy and
Ravel? To the cerebral insurrection of Schoenberg? To the devastating
sirocco blasts of Scriabin, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff?
The Neo-Scythians, who, like their savage forebears, throw across
their saddle-bow the helpless diatonic and chromatic scales and bear
away their prisoners to their ultimate goal; the unknown land of the
sinister duodecuple scale! Ah! we did not heed years ago the wise
words of our critical Nestor, H. E. Krehbiel, when he said, “’Ware the
Muscovite!” (He denies having used this precise phrase. Too late. We
have pinned it to paper and it will go marching down the corridor of
destiny wearing his label.) Ecce Cossakus! Bad Latin, but reality. The
Tartars are coming. Anarchs all.
And ecstasy! It is not an eminently modern quality in the Seven Arts.
Sculpture did for a time resist the universal disintegration, this
imbroglio of all the arts. Before Rodin no sculptor had so greatly
dared to break the line, had dared to shiver the syntax of stone.
Sculpture is a static, not a dynamic, art; therefore, let us observe
the rules, preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery! What Mallarmé
attempted in poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do not
represent, but present emotion, are the evocation of emotion; as in
music, form and substance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarmé,
arouse “the silent thunder afloat in the leaves,” he summons from the
vasty deep the spirits of beauty, love, hate, pain, joy, sin, ecstasy,
above all, ecstasy. The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy is
bestowed upon few. Keats had it, and Shelley; despite his passion,
Byron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth--who had, perhaps,
loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson,
and Browning only in occasional exaltation. Like the “cold devils” of
Félicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming
about them, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine
knew ecstasy, and Liszt too; but Wagner, ill-tempered like all martyrs,
was the master adept of his century. Tchaikovsky closely follows him,
and in the tiny piano pieces of Chopin ecstasy is pinioned in a few
bars, the soul rapt to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has shown
us a variation on the theme: voluptuousness troubled by pain, the soul
tortured by the very ecstasy of ecstasy. Like Yeats, he is “Master of
the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door.” William Blake and his figures
rushing down the secret pathway of the mystic, which zigzags from the
Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of materialism, was a creator of
the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy. A sadistic strain in all this.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyrighted by Matzene_
MARY GARDEN AS SALOME]
Scriabin is of this tormented choir; as Arthur B. Davies, our own
mystic, primitive painter. And Charles Martin Loeffler. It may be
the decadence, as any art is in decadence which stakes the parts
against the whole. That ecstasy may be aroused by pictures of love
and death, as in the cases of Poe and Baudelaire, Wagner and Strauss,
should not, therefore, be adjudged morbid. In the Far East they
hypnotize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror, for in the kingdom of
art, as in heaven, there are many mansions. It was possibly a relic
of his early admiration for the Baudelaire poems that set Wagner to
extorting ecstasy from his orchestra by images of love and death,
though doubtless the temperament which seeks assuagement in such a
comminglement--a temperament more often encountered in mediæval art
than now--was natural to Wagner. He makes his Isolde sing madly and
mournfully over a corpse, and, throwing herself upon the dead Tristan,
she dissolves into the ecstasies of sweet, cruel love; in Salome,
Richard Strauss closely patterns after Wagner; there is the head of a
dead man--though on a charger--and there follows a poignant ecstasy not
to be found in all music. Both men play with similar counters: love and
death, and death and love. In Pisa may be seen (attributed by Vasari)
Orcagna’s fresco, The Triumph of Death. It has been set to grotesque
music by Liszt in his Dance of Death. Let us not forget the great
Italian, Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose magnificent prose, from The Triumph
of Death to Forsé Che Si, Forsé Che No, is a pæan to the tutelar gods
of humanity, love and death. The sting of the flesh and the way of all
flesh are intermingled in Rodin’s astounding fugue, The Gate of Hell.
First things and Last things, love and life, bitterness and death,
have ever ruled the arts; and all great art is anarchic, cosmos and
chaos cunningly proportioned.
But between the sublime and the silly there is only a hair’s
breadth. If not guided by tact and vision, the ecstatic in art and
literature may degenerate into the erotic, and from the erotic to the
tommyrotic is only a step. All this tumultuous imagery, this rhapsody
Hunekeresque, is prompted by a photograph of Mary Garden, whose
enigmatic eyes collide with my gaze across the Time and Space of my
writing-desk. Your memory is wooed by the golden trumpets of Byzance,
and when Mary speaks she wears the sacred Zaïmph of Salammbo. Voltaire,
in Candide, was wise when he advised us: “Il faut cultiver notre
Jardin.”
IX
PAINTED MUSIC
Painted music. The common identity of the Seven Arts was a master
theory of Richard Wagner and a theory he endeavored his life long
to put into practice. Walter Pater, in his essay on The School of
Giorgione, has dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music the archetype
of the arts. In his Essays Speculative, John Addington Symonds has
said some pertinent things on the subject. Camille Mauclair, in Idées
Vivantes, seriously proposed a scheme for the fusion of the arts.
The fusion would be cerebral, as the actual mingling of sculpture,
architecture, music, drama, acting, painting, and dancing could never
evoke the sensation of unity. Not thus is synthesis to be attained. It
must be the “idea” of the arts rather than their material blending.
A pretty chimera! Yet one that has piqued the attention of artists
for centuries. It was the half-crazy E. T. W. Hoffmann, composer,
dramatist, painter, poet, stage manager, and a dozen other professions,
including those of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of
fireworks that dazzled the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the later
symbolists.
Persons who hear painting, see music, touch poems, taste symphonies,
and write perfumes are now classed by the psychical police as
decadent, though such notions are as old as art and literature. In his
L’Audition Colorée, Suarez de Mendoza has said that the sensation of
color-hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colors, is often
a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth. The
colored vowels of Arthur Rimbaud, which should be taken as a poet’s
crazy prank; the elaborate treatises by René Ghil, which are terribly
earnest; the casual remarks that one hears, such as “scarlet is like a
trumpet blast”--it was scarlet to the young Mozart; certain pages of
Huysmans and Mallarmé, all furnish examples of the curious muddling
of the five senses and the mixing of artistic genres. Naturally, this
confusion has invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery, sometimes
seeks to transpose the technical terms of one art to another.
Whistler, with his Nocturnes, Color-Notes, Symphonies in Rose and
Silver, his Color-Sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical phrases
that, in their new estate, took on fresher meanings, while remaining
knee-deep in the swamp of the nebulous. Modern composers have
retaliated. Musical Impressionism is enjoying its vogue and the New
Poetry is desperately pictorial. Soul-landscapes and etched sonnets
are titles not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much!
There was a time when to say “she had a sweet voice” aroused a smile.
What has sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this
mélange of terminologies, yet, occasionally, it strikes sparks. There
is a deeply rooted feeling that the arts have a common matrix, that,
emotionally, they are akin. “Her slow smile” in fiction has had marked
success, but when I wrote of the “slow Holland landscape,” the phrase
was suspiciously regarded. (I probably found it in Verlaine or Rodin.)
The bravest critic of the arts was Huysmans, who pitched pell-mell into
the hell-broth of his critiques any image that assaulted his fecund
brain. He forces us to see his picture; for he was primarily concerned
with the eye, not the ear. Flaubert represents in its highest estate
a fusion of sound and sense and seeing; he was both an auditive and a
visualist. His prose sings, while its imagery sharply impinges upon the
optic nerve. Nor are taste and smell neglected--recall the very flavor
of arsenic that killed Emma Bovary or the scents of the woodland where
that adorable girl lingered with her lover. Joined to those evocations
of the five senses there is a classic balance of sentence, phrase,
paragraph, page; the syntactic architecture is magnificent, though
not excelling the eloquent Bossuet or the pictorial Châteaubriand as
to complex, harmonious structure. These three great French writers
had polyphonic minds, and their books and the orations of the superb
Bossuet englobe a world of ideas and sensations, music and painting.
And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a “comprehensive,” as those with the
sixth, or synthetic, sense have been named by Lombroso-Levi? Beginning
as a goldsmith’s apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), Botticelli
as a painter became the most original in all Italy. His canvases
possess powers of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi,
pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and of the Brothers Poliajuolo,
and his vision must have been something more than paint and pattern.
A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative--rather let us say
fanciful, since Coleridge set forth the categories--whose secrets
are not to be easily deciphered, and are something more than those
portrayed on the flat surfaces of his pictures. Like most artists of
his period he painted the usual number of Madonnas; nevertheless, he
did not convince his world, or succeeding generations, that his piety
was orthodox. During his lifetime suspected of strange heresies, this
annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, is
now definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and yet
a mystic. Does not the perverse clash in such a temperament produce
exotic dissonances?
All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli
paced its narrow streets and lived its splendid colored life. His
sensitive nature absorbed, as does a sponge water, the impulses
and motives of his contemporaries. The secrets lurking in the “new
learning”--doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence
of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for
heaven nor hell, not on the side of Lucifer, nor yet with the starry
hosts--were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is
in Città di Vita, in the heresies of the Albigenses, and it may well
go back to Origen. Those who could read his paintings--and there were
clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence--might make of them what
they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy.
Matteo Palmieri is reported to have dragged Botticelli into dark
corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of
intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals
of the young. A nature like Botticelli’s, which frankly surrendered
to new ideas if they but wore the mask of subtlety, was swept, no
doubt, away in the eddying cross currents of Florentine intellectual
movements. Mere instinct never moved him from his moral anchorage, for
he was a sexless sort of man. Always the vision. He did not palter with
the voluptuous frivolities of his fellow artists, yet his canvases
are feverishly disquieting. The sting of the flesh is remote. Love
is transfigured, though not spiritually, and not served to us as a
barren parable, but made more intense by the breaking down of the
thin partition between the sexes; a consuming emotion, not quite of
this world nor of the next. However, the rebellion that stirred in
the bosom of Botticelli never took on concrete aspects. His religious
subjects are Hellenized, not after the sterner, more inflexible method
of Mantegna, but resembling those of a philosophic Athenian who has
read and comprehended Dante. His illustrations show us a different
Dante, one who might not have altogether pleased that gloomy exile. The
transpositions of the Divine Comedy by William Blake seem to sound the
depths; Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his “baby Centaurs”
and the wreathed car of Beatrice, is the profounder man of the pair.
His life, veiled toward the last, was not happy, although he was
recognized as a great painter. Watteau concealed a cankering secret;
so Botticelli. Melancholy is the base of the Florentine’s work. As a
young man he created in joy and freedom; but the wings of Dürer’s Bat
were outstretched over his brooding head. Melencolia! He could ask
if there is anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of
sadness. There is more poignant music in his Primavera, in the weary,
indifferent countenances of his lean, neuropathic Madonnas--Pater calls
them “peevish”--in his Venus at the Uffizi, than in the paintings of
any other Renaissance artist. The veils are there, the consoling veils
of an exquisite art, which are missing in the lacerated and realistic
holy folk of the Flemish Primitives. Joyfulness cannot be denied
Botticelli; but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione; “Big George
of Castelfranco.” An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that
sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of sense and
spirit. Music? Yes, there is the “colored-hearing” of Mendoza. The
canvases of Botticelli sound the opalescent overtones of an unearthly
composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin, whose right
hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor from invisible
orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh,
plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces
tread the measures of a dance we but overhear. Garlanded in blossoms,
a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her
gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the
richly embroidered floor of the earth. The light filters through the
thick trees, its rifts as rigid as a candle. The nymph in the brake is
threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his
bolt in mid-air. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene? What the fable? Music
plucked down from vibrating skies, music made visible. A mere masque,
laden with the prim, sweet allegories of the day, it is not. That blunt
soul, Vasari, saw at best its surfaces. The poet Politian got closer
to the core. Centuries later our perceptions sharpened by the stations
traversed of sorrow and experience, lend to this immortal canvas a
more sympathetic, less literal interpretation.
There is music, too, in the Anadyomene of the Uffizi. Still stranger
music. Those sudden little waves that lap an immemorial strand; that
shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging to the parted feet of
the goddess; her hieratic pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that
serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into
delicious arms; the Japanese group blowing tiny gem-like buds with
their puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her
mantle to Venus; and enveloping all are vernal breezes, the wind
that weeps in little corners, unseen, yet sensed, on every inch of
the picture--what are these mundane things but the music of an art,
original at its birth, and since never reborn? The larger, simpler,
curved rhythms of the greater men, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Shakespeare,
Beethoven, are not in Botticelli. Nevertheless, his voice is
irresistible.
Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau, Chopin, or Shelley, he
is no less ethereal; ethereal and also realistic. We can trace his
artistic ancestry; but what he became no man could have predicted.
Technically, as one critic has written, “he was the first to understand
the charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in expressing the joining
of the arm and body, the flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the
shoulder, the elegance of the leg, the little shadow that marks the
springing of the neck, and, above all, the carving of the hand; but
even more, he understood “le prestige insolent des grands yeux”.”