to understand what imaginative coloring really is, that all color
is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon
them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you
like this peculiar quality of color.” Bernard Berenson goes further.
To him the entire canvas, Venus Rising from the Sea, presents us
with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination
of touch and movement.... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense,
the life-communicating motion is always there. And writing of the
Pallas in the Pitti galleries, he most eloquently declares: “As to
the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line you may
see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all the
plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to its
own desire!” And, after speaking of Botticelli’s stimulating line, he
continues: “Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences
of movement-values and you will have something that holds the same
relation to representation that music holds to speech--and this art
exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts Sandro
Botticelli may have had rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never!... He is the greatest master of lineal design that
Europe ever had.”
Again, painted music; not the sounding symbolism of the emotions, but
the abstract music of design. Nevertheless, the appeal of Botticelli
is auditive. Other painters have spun more intricate, more beautiful
webs; have made more sensuous color-music; but the subtle sarabands
of Botticelli they have not composed. Here is a problem for the
psychiatrist. In paint, manifestations of this order could be set down
to mental lesion; that is how Maurice Spronck classifies the sensation.
He studied it in the writings of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The giant
of Croisset told the Goncourts that to him Salammbo was purple and
L’Education Sentimentale grey, Carthage and Paris. A characteristic
fancy. But why is it that scientific gentlemen, who predicate genius
as eye-strain, do not reprove poets for their sensibility to the sound
of words, to the shape and cadence of the phrase? It would appear that
only prose-men are the culpable ones if they overhear the harping of
invisible harps from Ibsen’s Steeplejacks, or describe the color of the
thoughts of Zarathustra. In reality, not one but thousands of people
listen in the chill galleries of Florence to the sweet, nervous music
of Botticelli. This testimony of the years is for the dissenters to
explain. “Fantastico, Stravagante,” as Vasari nicknamed Botticelli, has
literally created an audience which learned to use its eyes as he did,
fantastically and extravagantly.
He passed through the three stages dear to arbitrary criticism. Serene
in his youthful years; troubled, voluptuous, and visionary during
the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a convert to Savonarola at the
end. He traversed a great crisis not untouched. Certain political
assassinations and the Pazzi conspiracy hurt him to the quick. He noted
the turbulence of Rome and Florence, saw behind the gayly tinted arras
of the Renaissance the sinister figures of supermen and criminals.
He never married. When Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a wife he
responded: “The other night I dreamed I was married. I awoke in such
horror and chagrin that I could not fall asleep again. I arose and
wandered about Florence like one possessed.” Evidently not intended
by nature to be husband or father. Like Watteau, like Baudelaire,
like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the thither side of the
facile joys of life, Botticelli was not tempted by the usual baits of
happiness. His great Calumnia, in the Uffizi, might be construed as an
image of the soul of Botticelli. Truth, naked and scorned--we see again
the matchless silhouette of his Venus--misunderstood and calumniated,
stands in the hall of a vast palace. She points to the heavens. She is
a living interrogation-mark. Pilate’s question? Botticelli was adored.
But understood? An enigmatic malady ravaged his innermost being. He
died poor, solitary, did this composer of luminous chants and pagan
poems, this moulder of exotic dreams, and of angels who long for gods
other than those of Good and Evil. You think of the mystic Joachim of
Flora and his Third Kingdom; the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit which is
to follow the Kingdom of the Father and the Kingdom of the Son; the
same Joachim who declared that the true ascetic counts nothing of his
own, save only his harp. “Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse
suum nisi citharam.” And you also recall St. Anselm, who said that he
would rather go to hell sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single
transgression.
A grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder at the portals of
Paradise, Botticelli had not the courage either to enter or withdraw.
He experienced visions that rapt him into the ninth heaven, but when
he reported them in the language of his design his harassed, divided
spirit chilled the ardors of his art. In sooth, a spiritual dichotomy.
And thus it is that the multitude does not worship at his shrine as at
the shrine of Raphael. Do they unconsciously note the adumbration of a
paganism long dead, but revived for a brief Botticellian hour? Venus or
Madonna! Adonais or Christ! Under which god? The artist never frankly
tells us. Legends are revived of fauns turned monks, of the gods in
exile and at servile labor in a world that has forgotten them, but with
a sublimated ecstasy not Heine’s. When we stand before Botticelli and
hear the pallid, muted music of his canvases we are certain that the
last word concerning him shall not be uttered until his last line has
vanished; even then his archaic harmonies may reverberate in the ears
of mankind. But always music painted.
X
POE AND HIS POLISH CONTEMPORARY
In the City of Boston, January 19, 1809, a son was born to David and
Elizabeth Poe. On March 1, 1809, in the village of Zelazowa-Wola,
twenty-eight English miles from Warsaw, in Poland, a son was born to
Nicholas and Justina Chopin (Chopena or Szop). The American is known to
the world as Edgar Allan Poe, the poet; the Pole as Frédéric François
Chopin, the composer. On October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died, poor and
neglected, in Washington Hospital at Baltimore, and on October 17,
1849, Frédéric Chopin expired at Paris surrounded by loving friends,
among whom were titled ladies. Turgenev has said there were at least
one hundred princesses and countesses in whose arms the most wonderful
among modern composers yielded up his soul. Poe and Chopin were
contemporaries, and, curious coincidence, two supremely melancholy
artists of the Beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.
My most enduring artistic passions are for the music of Chopin and
the prose of Flaubert. In company with the cool, clear magic of a Jan
Vermeer canvas, that of the Pole and Frenchman grazes perfection. But
as a lad Chopin quite flooded my emotional horizon. I had conceived
a fantastic comparison between Poe and Chopin, and I confess I was
slightly piqued when Ignace Jan Paderewski, not then Premier of Poland,
assured me that Chopin was born in the year 1810, and not the year
earlier. The date chiselled on Chopin’s Paris tomb in Père Lachaise--a
sad tribute to the mediocre art of Clésinger, who married Solange
Sand--is, after all, the correct one, and this new date, which is
also the old, is inscribed on the Chopin Memorial at Warsaw, Poland.
I shall not attempt to dispute the claim; even the most painstaking
of Chopin biographers, Prof. Frederick Niecks, admits his error. The
latest biography, said to be definitive, by the Polish musicograph,
Ferdinand Hoesick, I have not seen; the war impeded the translation.
Yet I am fain to believe that too many parish registers were in
existence, and perhaps the next one that is unearthed may give as new
dates either 1808 or 1811. I prefer 1809, while apologizing for my
obstinacy. Unhappily for future investigators, Russian Cossacks in 1915
ravaged with torch and sword the birthplace, not only destroying the
Chopin monument, but burning his house and the parish church. These
once highly esteemed vandals, pogrom heroes, and butchers of thousands
of helpless Jewish women, children, and old men, only repeated at
Zelazowa-Wola the actions of their forebears at Warsaw during the
sanguinary uprising of 1831. The correspondence of Chopin, treasured
by his sister, Louise Jedrzejewicza, and the piano of his youth were
completely destroyed. (Louise died in 1855, and the other sister,
Isabella Barcinska, in 1881.)
The love of Poe began early with me. My father had been a friend of
the poet’s in Philadelphia, and a member of the Poe circle during the
forties of the last century; “roaring forties”, indeed. That prime old
comedian, Billy Burton, the ideal Falstaff of his day; John Sartain,
the engraver, and father of William Sartain, the painter; Judge
Conrad, who could move his listeners to tears when he recited the
Lord’s Prayer; the elder Booth, a noble tragedian much given to drink;
Graham, the publisher, and several others whose names have escaped my
memory, composed this interesting group. In his memoirs John Sartain
has written of Poe and of a certain wild midnight walk in Fairmount
Park. I remember the elder Sartain as an infrequent visitor at our
house, and I also remember how I hung on his words when he spoke of
Poe. My father told me that Poe would become a raving maniac after a
thimbleful of brandy, so sensitive was his cerebral mechanism. But
other authorities contradict this theory. Poe had been often seen
to toss off a tumblerful of cognac neat. Last year at Atlantic City
I met Mr. Hutzler, a well-known merchant of Baltimore, a spry young
octogenarian and a seasoned raconteur. He told me, and in a vivid
manner, of seeing Edgar Poe and Junius Brutus Booth hanging on to the
same lamp-post, both helplessly drunk at midday. This happened about
1845, as the boys, Mr. Hutzler among the rest, trooped out to dinner
from the public school on Holliday Street. Mr. Hutzler’s memory has a
mirror-like clearness, and he described the occurrence as if it had
happened yesterday. Like irreverent school-boys, they surrounded the
greatest living Shakespearean actor and the greatest American poet and
mocked at them.
We lived on North Seventh Street, and twice a day, on my trip to and
from school, I passed the house where Poe had lived during his sojourn
in Philadelphia, from 1838 to 1844. That house I should not have been
able to locate to-day if my friend, Christopher Morley (charming
writer, with a name that recalls spacious Elizabethan times: Kit
Morley!), hadn’t described it. This house, in which Poe wrote The Raven
and The Gold Bug, is at the northwest corner of Seventh and Brandywine
Streets. Another critic friend, Albert Mordell, assures me that the old
pear-tree in the back yard still bears fruit for the present resident,
Mrs. Owens. The house is the rear building of another numbered 530
North Seventh Street. Mr. Mordell sent me a photograph which shows a
typical Philadelphia red brick structure with white shutters and marble
steps. I have heard of many spots where Poe wrote The Raven, Fordham
among the rest, but as boys we told ourselves when we stared at the old
building: “Poe wrote his Raven and Gold Bug there!” It is something to
remember in these piping times of hypocrisy and universal hatred of
art, music, and literature.
It would be a strained parallel to compare Poe with Chopin at all
points; nevertheless, chronological coincidences are not the only
comparisons that might be instituted without exaggeration. True, the
roots of Chopin’s culture were more cosmopolitan, more richly nurtured
than Poe’s; the poet, like an air-plant, found his spiritual sustenance
from sources unknown to the America of his day. Of Poe’s intellectual
ancestry, however, we may form some conception, though his learning was
not profound, despite his copious quotations from half-forgotten and
recondite authors, Glanvil, for example. Nevertheless, the matchless
lines, “Helen, thy beauty is to me like those Nicéan barks of yore,” ...
were struck off in the fire of a boyhood passion. Chopin had a careful
training under the eye of his Polish teacher, Elsner; but who could
have taught him how to compose his Opus 2, the Variations on Mozart’s
La ci darem la mano? Both Poe and Chopin were full-fledged artists
from the beginning, their individualities and limitations sharply
defined. Perhaps the most exquisite music penned by Poe is this same
Helen, while the first mazourka of Chopin stamps him as an original
poet. In the later productions of these men there is more than a
savor of morbidity. Consider the Fantaisie-Polonaise, Opus 61, with
its most musical, most melancholy cadences; or the F minor Mazourka,
composed during the last illness of Chopin; a sick brain betrays itself
in the rhythmic insistence of the theme, a soul-weary Wherefore? In
the haunting repetitions and harmonies of Ulalume there is a poetic
analogue. This poem, in which sense swoons into sound, possesses a
richness of color and rhythmic accent that betoken the mentality
of a poet whose brain is perilously unhinged. If alcohol produced
this condition, then might a grateful world erect altars to such a
wondrous god of evocation. Prohibition has not thus far produced a
Poe. But he wasn’t the creation of either alcohol or drugs, though
they were contributory causes; they prodded his cortical cells into
abnormal activity, made leap the neuronic filaments with surprising
consequences. No, a profound cerebral lesion was the real reason why
Poe resorted to brandy to soothe his exacerbated nerves, and not
because he drank did he go to wrack and ruin. His “case” is like
Baudelaire’s and E. T. W. Hoffmann’s; not to mention the names of James
Clarence Mangan and Monticelli, one the singer of Dark Rosaleen, the
other that master of gorgeous hues, fantasies of enchanted lands and
crumbling linear designs.
Poe, then, like Chopin, did not die too soon. Neurotic natures, they
lived their lives with the intensity which Walter Pater has declared
is the true existence. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,
to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form
habits.” Alas! that way madness lies for the majority of mankind,
notwithstanding the æsthetic exhortation of Pater. Poe and Chopin
fulfilled the Pater conditions during their brief sojourn on our parent
planet. They ever burned with the flame of genius, and that flame
devoured them. They were not citizens of moral repute. Nor did they
accumulate “mortal pelf.” They failed to form habits, and while the
psychic delicacy of Chopin proved a barrier against self-indulgence of
the grosser sort, he contrived to outrage social and ethical canons
even in tolerant Paris. The influence of George Sand, her ascendancy
over his volition, worked evil and unhappiness. The delicate porcelain
of his genius could not float down-stream in company with her brassy
ware without ensuing disaster for the finer of the twain. Alcoholic
neurosis did not trouble him, but he was tubercular, and that malady is
more fatal than alcoholism. Poe was not precisely a drunkard; probably
masked epilepsy accounts for his vagaries; such victims are periodical
dipsomaniacs, “circulaires” is the term of the psychiatrists. His
personality was winning, his speech electric, his eye alight with
genius; but, then, the obverse of the medal! A sad, slouching creature,
with a cynic’s sneer, a bitter tongue which lashed friend and foe
alike, a gambler, a libertine--what has this unhappy poet not been
called? Baudelaire asked whether the critical hyenas could not have
been prevented from defacing the tomb of Poe. (He used Rabelaisian
language in the original French.) Charles Baudelaire, a spiritual
double of Poe, was another unhappy wraith of genius, and of the same
choir of self-lacerated and damned souls.
Fancy Poe and Chopin in New York during the prosaic atmosphere of
those days! If Chopin had not achieved artistic success at the Soirée
of Prince Radziwill in Paris, 1831, he would probably have gone to
America, where he might have met Poe. He had declared his intention
to leave Paris for New York, and his passport was viséd “passing
through.” Poe and Chopin conversing! The idea is rather disquieting.
Stendhal, not hoodwinked by Châteaubriand, with his purple phrases
and poetic visions of virgin forests and sweet Indian girls in an
impossible Louisiana, declared that America was materialistic beyond
hope of redemption. Talleyrand knew better. However, it was better for
the artistic development of the Polish composer that he remained in
the Old World. Think of Chopin giving piano lessons to the daughters
of the New-Rich at the fashionable Battery, and Poe encountering him
at some conversazione--they had conversaziones then--and propounding
to him Heine-like questions: Are the roses at home still in their
flame-hued pride? Do the trees sing as beautifully as ever in the
moonlight? Are humming-birds and star-dust--Francesca Astra--still as
rare as ambergris? At a glance Poe and Chopin would have sympathized.
In sensibility the American was not inferior to the Pole. Poe would
have felt the “drummed tears” in the playing of Chopin, and in turn
Chopin would not have failed to divine the vibrations of Poe’s
high-strung nature. Both men were mystics, were seers. What a meeting
that would have been; yet inevitable misery might have come to the
Pole in unsympathetic New York. A different tale if Poe had gone to
Paris and enjoyed a meed of artistic success. Baudelaire, who was born
in April, 1821, therefore a young chap in 1845, would have known him
and, congenial souls, they would surely have gone to the devil quicker
than apart. Baudelaire and Poe! There’s a marvellous combination for
you of fantasy, moonlight, rotten nerves, hasheesh, and alcohol! The
fine flower of the genius of Poe might have bloomed more fragrantly
on French soil; perhaps with the added note of depravity not in his
sexless creations, and so corroding a note in Les Fleurs du Mal. Who
may dare say! But then we might not have had the sinister melancholia,
so sweetly despairing, so despairingly sweet, that we enjoy in the real
Poe.
The culture of Chopin was not of a finer stamp than Poe’s, nor was
his range so wide. In their intellectual sympathies both were rather
narrow, though intense to an emotional poignancy, and both were
remarkable in mood-versatility. Born aristocrats, purple raiment became
them well. Both were sadly deficient in planturous humor and the Attic
salt that conserves the self-mockery of Heine. Irony they possessed to
a superlative degree. Both created rhythmic beauty, evoked the charm
of evanescence. A crepuscular art; the notations of twilit souls and
the “October of the sensations.” Both were at their best in smaller
artistic forms. When either one spreads his pinions for symphonic
flight we think of Matthew Arnold’s interpretation of Shelley: “beating
in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Which phrase truly is of
Mat’s own making, yet somehow misses the essential Shelley. Poe and
Chopin supremely mastered their intellectual instruments. Artificers
in precious cameos, they are of an artistic consanguinity because of
their extraordinary absorption in the Beautiful. Poe wrote in English,
but was he really as American as Hawthorne and Emerson were American?
His verse and prose depict characters and landscapes that belong to No
Man’s Land, in that mystic region east of the sun, west of the moon.
The American scene was unsympathetic to him, and he refused to become
even morally acclimated. His Eldorado is “over the mountains of the
moon, down the valley of the shadow.” His creations are bodiless;
shadow of shadows, the incarnation of Silence, set forth in spectral
speech. Unlike any other native-born writer, he sounds better in
a French garb; the Baudelaire translations improve his style, and
Stéphane Mallarmé has accomplished an almost miraculous transposition
of Ulalume. (The Raven--Le Corbeau--by the same master I do not care
for as much, and with its refrain, “Jamais plus!” is not so musically
sonorous as “Nevermore!”)
Henry Beyle-Stendhal wrote in his witty, malicious manner that
“Romanticism is the art of presenting to the people literary works
which in the actual state of their habitudes and beliefs are capable
of giving the greatest possible pleasure; Classicism, on the contrary,
is the art of presenting literature which gave the greatest possible
pleasure to their great-grandfathers.” Stendhal is half right. A
Classic is sometimes a dead Romantic. But Poe and Chopin remain
invincibly Romantic, yet are Classics. Chopin is more human than Poe,
inasmuch as he is patriotic. His polonaises are “cannons buried in
flowers,” his psychic bravery overflows in the Revolutionary Etude.
He is Chopin. And he is also Poland. Like the national poet, Adam
Mickiewicz, he struck many human chords, though some of his melodies
could dwell in Poe’s “misty mid-region of Weir,” where Beauty boasts
an icy reign. There is a disturbing dissonance in the Poe-Chopin case:
Poe was a man without a country; Chopin had the priceless possession
of Poland. On his heart was engraved “Poland.” The love of Frédéric
Chopin for his native land dowered him with a profounder nature than
the Lucifer of American poetry, Edgar Allan Poe. But what enigmatic,
beautiful souls!
XI
GEORGE LUKS
Of course, I knew in a vague way where Edgecombe Road and Jumel Place
spotted the map, for I am a seasoned Manhattan cockney. But, after all,
I mixed up the Jumel Mansion and the house of George Luks, and so I
asked that painter for some travel indications. He sent me a map that
was clarity itself. All I had to do was to sit in the Broadway subway
till I reached One Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street; then take the
elevator--as deep down in the bowels of the earth as if in the London
Underground; on reaching the sidewalk proceed northward to One Hundred
and Seventieth Street--the little arrows on the chart are marked; then
eastward (another arrow) and behold! Amsterdam Avenue. There you enter
a delicatessen bureau and tactfully inquire after Edgecombe Road.
I did all these things, and was recently told on a fine, breezy
afternoon by a foreign youth that the road was in front of my face,
as was Highbridge Park; around the corner was Jumel Place. Enfin!
I said to the polite guide, and nosed my way till I saw an ideal
cottage--though rather large for a cottage--with a big studio window
facing the north. Recalling what Luks had often said--“To hades with a
north light; a man ought to be able to paint in a cellar!”--I wondered.
Then I traversed a garden and broke into the house, a burglar, armed
with a pen and a bagful of question-marks. It was the home of the
only George Luks, who, happy boy, has a painting temperament with an
“angel in the house” to protect him from the contact of a world of
cruel critics, and is also the possessor of the disposition described
as “bubbling.” His favorite exclamation is: “Yours for happiness.” He
means it. It is the leading-motive of his life.
Here are domestic comfort, a north light, and plenty of models across
the road in the open air, splashed by sunshine or shadowed by trees;
babies, goats, nurse-girls, park loafers, policemen, lazy pedestrians,
noisy boys, nice little girls with hoops, and the inevitable sparrows.
Rocks are in abundance. The landscape “composes” itself. And you
are not surprised, when ushered into the great studio on the second
floor, to be confronted by canvases registering various phases of the
vibrating world hard-by. Since he moved from down-town the painter is
becoming more of a plein-airiste.
Luks doesn’t wander afar for subjects. He still loves the familiar,
the homely, the simple. It had been several years since I saw his
work. Occasionally in Holland I would rim across a canvas by Jan
Steen, Adrien Brouwer, or even Hals, that recalled Luks. His
artistic affinities are Dutch rather than French; above all, he is an
American painter to his blunt finger-tips. Beginning in the field of
illustration, he was plunged up to his eyes in New York life. I believe
it was Arthur Brisbane who first suggested to him that he should go in
for painting in oils.