that would submerge a Manet. Paris followed. But George is not
a product of the schools. Theories sit lightly on his mercurial
shoulders. He loathes “movements,” and refers to the “new” men,
cubists, lamp-post impressionists, and futurists in words that curdle
the blood. Indeed, his vocabulary is as variegated and picturesque as
his palette. As for the personality of the man--well, it is absolutely
impossible to set down on paper any adequate description of him.
He is Puck. He is Caliban. He is Falstaff. He is a tornado. He is
sentimental. He can sigh like a lover, and curse like a trooper.
Sometimes you wonder over his versatility; a character actor, a low
comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with
human misery, and a human orchestra. The vitality of him!
Perhaps the simile of a man-orchestra is the most fitting. Did you
ever see and hear those curious creatures, less rare in our streets
a quarter of a century ago than now? I remember one in a small
French city, a white-haired fellow who, with fife, cymbals, bells,
concertinas--he wore two strapped under either arm--at times fiddles,
made epileptic music as he quivered and danced, wriggled and shook
his skull. The big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top were
cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion hung with bells that pealed
when he twisted his long skinny neck. He carried a weather-worn
violin with a string or two missing; while a pipe that might have
been a clarinet years before emitted but cackling tones from his thin
lips. By some incomprehensible co-ordination of muscular movements he
contrived simultaneously to sound his armory of instruments; and the
whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming, wheezing, and tinkling
of metal were appalling. But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the
edge of a tune might be discerned sharply cutting through the dense
cloud of vibrations, like the prow of a boat cleaving a fog. And the
reverberating music swelled, multifarious and amazing, as if a military
band, from piccolo to drum, were about to descend upon the town. A
clatter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scraping were heard, as
the old chap alternately limped and danced in the middle of the roadway.
Now, George Luks is not venerable; he is a comparatively young man,
yet he reminds me of that human orchestra. It is an image of lithe
activity that he suggests. What has this to do with his art? Much. It
is rhythmic, many-colored, intensely alive, charged with character and
saturated with humanity, not forgetting humor. Pathos is not absent.
In his latest productions I noted with satisfaction more repose, deeper
feeling, more solicitude for his surfaces, the modulation of tones; and
the same old riotous joy in color for color’s sake. Yes, in his themes
he still belongs to the illustrators. He seldom tells a definite story,
but there is no mistaking his point of view.
I saw portraits of girls in masquerade that were expressed in terms of
beautiful paint. A little red-head, the sheer tonal charm immediate,
made me think of both Henner and Whistler. Then a Hals-like head,
virile and sincere; a sensitively limned portrait of a young girl,
his niece; a large canvas; charming girls under umbrageous trees, a
veritable gamut of greens; an old woman who simply cried to be framed
and exhibited--how many things did I not stare at, wondering over the
inexhaustible fecundity, and groaning over the reckless prodigality, of
this gifted man! With a tithe of his talent and personal quality other
painters have achieved renown. However, he is not lacking in honors. He
has plenty of admirers, plenty of commissions; yet do his friends wish
that he would sometimes apply the brakes to that fiery temperament of
his and steer his bark into less tumultuous waters. His art would gain
thereby in finish, and distinction, and repose. And it might also die.
I once called George Luks “a hand and an eye.” His power of observation
is great. He has the intensity of a Spaniard and the realism of a
Dutchman. He is both exact and rebellious. Wherever he happens to
pitch his tent becomes his studio; preferably in the open. But the
East Side is his happy hunting-ground. In the Yiddish restaurants
where old men with Biblical heads drink coffee and slowly converse;
on Houston Street, when, apparently, the entire population is buying
fish Shabbas-abend; in vile corners where the refuse of humanity
drift, helpless, hopeless--there Luks catches some gleam of humor or
pathos, some touch that Gorky-like brings before us in a dozen strokes
of the brush or pencil a human trait which emerges to the surface of
this vast boiling kettle like a spar thrown up by an angry sea. All
happiness is not lost in those mean streets; a rift of wintry sunlight,
a stray tune from some wheezy barrel-organ, and two children waltz
with an unconscious zest of life that will survive until they are
nonogenarians. Of such contrasts Luks is the master.
His Spielers is like a quivering page from--from whom? The East Side is
yet to boast its Dickens. And Dickens would have enjoyed the picture
of the little tousled Irish girl, with her red locks, who dances with
the pretty flaxen-haired German child, surely a baker’s daughter from
Avenue B. Now, you might suppose that this vivid art, this painting
which has caught and retained the primal jolt and rhythm of the sketch,
must be necessarily rude and unscientific in technique. It is the
reverse. This particular picture is full of delicious tonalities. The
head of the blonde girl might be from an English eighteenth-century
master, and the air--it fills the spaces with a fluid caress.
And his Little Gray Girl, a poor wisp of flesh wearing a grotesque
shawl and hat, shivering in the chill of a gloomy evening, sounds
touching music. The note of sentiment is not forced; indeed, the
passages of paint first catch the eye, modulations of grays and blacks
that tell of the artist’s sensitive touch. He has wanton humors. He
paints a French coachman, life-size, seated at a café table about to
swill brandy. It is so real that you look another way. Or you are
shown a collection of beggars who were famous a few years ago on
Sixth Avenue, Broadway, the east side, Fulton Market: Matches Mary,
the Duchess, the tottering Musician, the old Italian, “Gooda nighta,
Boss!” and a host of nocturnal creatures since dead or in the hospital,
perhaps in jail. Luks is their interpreter. Nor does he lean to the
pessimistic; he is a believer in life and its characteristic beauty.
The pretty he abhors.
There is the Duchess. In life she was an elderly hag with a
distinguished bearing, a depraved woman of rank, who wore five or
six dresses at once, on her head a shapeless yet attractive gear,
and in her pocket she carried a fat roll of bills for purposes of
dissipation, or bribery, or for bailing out some Tenderloin wreck. She
is maleficence incarnate. Just fancy this bird of the night set forth
by a sympathetic brush, endowed with a life that overflows the canvas,
and you see this grande dame strut by, the embodiment of evil, yet a
duchess à la Sir Johsua, though à rebours. It is a sinister art which
recalls the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec. With Lautrec the work of Luks
has certain affinities. He may never have studied that painter; rather
is it a temperamental resemblance, a certain tolerant way of seeing men
and things. But Luks is not so cynical as the Frenchman.
And that striking embodiment of Whisky Bill, a once well-known
personage in the American Parisian colony! Several judges have praised
the Fraser portrait, which we greatly admire for its excellent
qualities, but personally we plump for the head of Whisky Bill, the
head of a great violinist and also a profound alcoholist. In Gorky’s
Nachtasyl there is an old actor who runs about the play exclaiming:
“I have poisoned my organism with alcohol.” We have never seen Whisky
Bill, but we are sure from the canvas that he has poisoned his organism
with alcohol. Nevertheless, a man who thinks, one who has suffered
from the mirage of thirst, not one of the Hals or the Steen jovial
drinkers. The spleen of life has killed the ideals of Bill. They are
submerged in his melancholy eyes. As for his hair, we might almost
compare it to Masson’s engraving of the gray-haired man, Guillaume de
Brisacier, after Mignard; but with a difference--the hair is treated
more luminously in mass than detail.
There are the usual number of studies from life, of Old Mary Curling
Her Hair, a companion piece to the Goose Girl. The most characteristic
picture in the Luks collection is an ideal head of Bobbie Burns’s Suter
Johnnie. Therein is the synthesis of all the more admirable qualities
of Luks: humor, technical audacity, solid modelling, vital color, sweet
sentiment, and a searching humanity, all of which combined make a
vigorous appeal to the spectator. Luks sometimes plays to the gallery,
but at the core he is sincere. His feet are set upon the mountain. He
is not pausing to grasp at the flowers or the applause. But do not
imagine because he is the smiling George Luks with the Napoleonic brow,
round cherubic cheeks, and nimble wit, that he is easy to decipher.
As for The Pawnbroker’s Daughter--she might have stepped out from
some old Holland master’s studio. The Dutch strain in Luks and his
shrewd Yankee humor are here blended in the happiest manner. The girl
is carrying a carafe on a tray. The rich comminglement of tones, the
tribal “awareness” of the girl’s glance, her tangled hair, and the
smouldering splendor of her garb are indicated without a suspicion
of bravura; yet one is conscious of virtuosity, clairvoyance, and
sympathetic observation.
There is the reverse of the medal. No man is made all of a piece, and
the art of Luks has its seamy side. He displays an infernal impatience,
that chief sin of heresiarchs, according to Cardinal Newman. He
sometimes takes criticism in no amiable way. And the corollary of
impatience is haste in execution. Luks seldom finishes a canvas.
He must have five hundred stowed away in his studio. Many are not
half-begun. Nevertheless, this rough handling of his material--neither
irreverent nor careless--bears special fruits. Some subjects respond
instantly to this treatment. Swift, brutal, seldom subtle, though
suggestive, his portraits leap from the bare canvas into vital being.
In the fury of his execution, when the fit is upon him he could
cover miles of walls with figures. This itching of the nerves, this
tugging of the muscles, which impels a pianist to play until Jericho
falls or his listeners die, is but the special artistic organ of any
artist keyed up to the pitch of intensity. Luks is the most normal
man imaginable. Full of the kindly sap of life, he too often boasts
his powers when he should be making lines and color patches. That is
his very human side; “human--all too human”--as Nietzsche would say.
Slightly inhuman is his capacity for sustained work--mind you, we
don’t say sustained in the sense of sticking at one picture until he
has exhausted its possibilities, but a capacity for toil, prolonged,
laborious.
This exuberance, this boiling over of energy, these dashes at reality,
these slices of life, bold portraits of men and women who dare to
live, though only painted, this Human Comedy merely hinted at, are
testimonies to the creative and tumultuous powers of a man who is of
Rabelaisian energies. The saving fact is that Luks is not old, and
knows what he most lacks. To advise him to paint like some one else, to
make slim silk purses when he so superbly paints sows’ ears, would be
futile. He is not academic. He has a grim vein of irony that spells at
a glance the tragi-comedy of life--his Parisian sketch-books would have
attracted Daumier--and also a superabounding confidence that sometimes
leads its owner into dubious, as well as devious, places.
But he is one of our native, commanding talents, and with study and
experience must come the purging of the dross; with his mellowing Luks
will take his proper place among his contemporaries, and it will be in
the seats of the mighty--or nowhere. The only possible schooling that
will hasten this result will be the stern self-schooling of George
Luks. But he is just the style of man who may bid criticism go hang and
nevertheless win out at the end. Like the turbulent and fleshly Bard of
Camden, he can “sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,”
and make of this “yawp” an art extremely personal and arresting.
As a portraitist he has his good days and bad. When he is deeply
gripped by his subject he is usually successful. The head of Senator
Root was criticised because of a certain hardness and rigidity
in texture and pose, but there were critics who declared that the
painter’s psychology had revealed the essential Root--austere,
profound, Machiavellian statesman and scholar. The self-portrait, like
the Smoker of Brouwer, is the record of a passing mood. It is a swift
sketch, and is Luks in the heydey of a happy, devil-may-care humor.
Truly a ‘human document.’ I admire his landscape, Round Houses at High
Bridge. The atmosphere is finely evoked; Luks knows his values. Steam,
and again steam, is painted in a delicate scale of pearl-greys.
But even Lux pinxit becomes a long-drawn-out line of light. I bade
my hosts good day. “I’ll see you as far as the subway,” said Luks.
He accompanied me to the station, where you go down to the train in
a lofty elevator, as you do in the gloomy London Underground. I had
passed an admirable afternoon with a human painter. Some painters are
not human.
XII
CONCERNING CALICO CATS
This is to be a sober Sunday sermon, even though it largely concerns
Calico Cats. What is a calico cat? you will ask. The first we ever
heard of the strange beast, after the Eugene Field poem, was at a
concert of the Philharmonic Society, when Mortimer Wilson conducted a
clever orchestral suite in which figured the Funeral of the Calico Cat;
that is, a specific cat, one, let it be said in passing, that was quite
tiny at the beginning of the music, but grew to monstrous proportions
before its interment; a cat that would have put to blush the “Cheshire
Puss” of Alice’s in the fable. Cats in calico may be seen on the
streets any Gotham summer day, but a calico cat--what in the world may
that be? The simulacrum of a feline, an eidolon, such as Mr. Howell
once described? We can’t ask Mr. Wilson, because he might refer us to
his charming score, which speaks for itself. Verhaeren, the Belgian
poet, the greatest living poet at the time of his death at Rouen,
with the solitary exception of Gabriele d’Annunzio, Emile Verhaeren
has written about “Cats of ebony, Cats of flame,” but, manifestly, a
cat can’t be both flaming and calico. We must turn to that lover of
cats, Charles Baudelaire, who wrote sonnets to his cats as others have
penned praises of their mistresses’ eyebrows. He discovered to France
the genius of Richard Wagner and the genius of Edouard Manet, not to
mention Poe’s. Jules Claretie relates that Baudelaire said to him, with
a grimace: “I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung
by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of
glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find
at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious.”
Now, obviously, this is an invention. Perverse as Baudelaire
undoubtedly was, he loved cats too much to torture them. Without
knowing it, the late director of the Théâtre Français has described,
“avant la lettre,” as the etchers say, the music of the future:
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff. But calico cats!
Not a spoor of them in all this, so we are forced to fall back upon
symbolism, which seems to be the art of saying the reverse of what
you think. (I nearly meant this.) In his Hunting of the Snark Lewis
Carroll finds that it is a Boojum. Perhaps our calico cat is not a cat
at all, but a critic. But then a cat may look at a critic, as a critic
is privileged to stare a composer out of countenance. A calico cat may,
for all we know, house the soul of a real cat. Therefore, children,
do not treat it rudely! It may be watching you with its malignant,
beady eyes, ready to spring, ready to scratch when you least expect
it! And we should not forget Baudelaire, who would lower his voice
when showing his friends some Polynesian idol of wood, bidding them
not mock, because once upon a time a deity may have inhabited the
rude carving. The remote ancestor of a calico doll may have been that
scourge of a vanished geological epoch, the sabre-toothed tiger, just
as the iridescent dragon-fly that flashes winged sunshine as it skims
is the pitiful reduction of the dread Pterodactyl, the flying saurian,
which also reappears as the Jabberwock (furnished with a monocle by Sir
John Tenniel, ever a stickler for etiquette). The calico cat might be
a prowling version of the Frumious Bandersnatch, with the claws that
scratch.
But a truce to paleontology! Let us of the nonce assume that the cat
in question stands for the tutelar totem of criticism. A mere figure
of speech, “Hypocrite lecteur--mon semblable--mon frère!” I can see
my surprised colleagues: He has called us musical lounge lizards, now
we are calico cats! What the next recrudescence? In Hindu-land what
Avatar? I remember the sage advice of Vance Thompson: When all trumps
fail, write about your liver! He was speaking of criticism. Musical
trumps are, as a rule, mesugah, in the classic parlance of pinochle;
hence I fall back on a hypothetical hepatic condition, i. e., calico
cats and criticism; criticism of music, art, literature, or mixed.
Swinburne’s theory that “I have never been able to see what should
attract a man to the profession of criticism but the noble art of
praising” was vitiated in practice by the poet himself, who wrote
scurrilously of any one who disagreed with him. “After all, what are
critics?” asked Balzac, and later Disraeli-Beaconsfield. “Men who have
failed in literature and art.” Mascagni, the Single-Speech Hamilton of
Italian composers, cried aloud in resentment that a critic was only a
“compositore mancato.” (Probably some fellow musician had wounded him
with a pen.)
But every one is a critic, a calico cat, your gallery god, as well
as the most stately practitioner of the gentlest art. The difference
between your criticism and mine, as I have remarked elsewhere, is that
I am paid for mine, and you must pay for your privilege to criticise.
As some Paris wit said of a certain actress: “She is not beautiful,
she is worse.” A critic is never unjust--he is worse. Nevertheless,
I prefer the plain critic’s opinions rather than the professional
pronouncement of a composer. He always knows more than the critic,
yet I doubt his attitude, which is seldom disinterested. How could it
be? Why should it be? Schumann, who “discovered” Chopin and Brahms,
missed Wagner. In Wagner he met his critical Waterloo, and as George
Moore wrote of Ruskin vs. Whistler: “It is the lot of critics to be
remembered by what they have failed to understand.” Berlioz also
missed Wagner--Wagner who had helped himself so generously to the
ideas on instrumentation of the Frenchman. But Balzac did not miss
Stendhal, whose generation refused to recognize his genius. The
“creative” critics are few. Montaigne, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Taine,
Baudelaire, Georg Brandes, Nietzsche, Pater, Benedetto Croce, Havelock
Ellis, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Symons, Anatole France, De Gourmont,
Edgar Saltus, Brownell--the list might be spun out, but these names
suffice. Yet my idol among them, Sainte-Beuve, missed Balzac, Stendhal,
Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was inconsiderate--possibly on account of
his affair with Adèle Hugo. Consider the Osrics of literature eternally
embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve’s style, a fatal immortality for
so many futile butterflies, and you will admit that he still lives when
many a mighty reputation has withered.
In sheer wonderment George III asked how the apples got inside
the dumpling. How can a critic criticise a creator! Oscar Wilde,
shrewd enough when he so willed, has a middle term; critics who are
“creative.” But isn’t he the man who looks on while the other fellow
does things! He should be artist as to temperament, and he should
have a credo. And like most prima donnas, he is “catty.” He need not
be a painter to write of painting, a composer to speak of music.
His primary appeal is to the public. He is the interpreter. The
psycho-physiological processes need not concern us. There are the
inevitable limitations. Describing music in terms of prose is hopeless.
The only true criticism of music is the playing thereof. We are again
confronted by the Vance Thompson crux: write about your liver, or the
weather, or calico cats, as I am now doing. All the rest is technical
camouflage. Of course, a catholic critic doesn’t mean an unprejudiced
one. A critic without prejudices would be a faultless monster, and like
Aristides the Just, should be stoned.
Carl Van Vechten has told us of Erich Satie, the eccentric French
composer, who sets snails and oysters to music, and, no doubt, has
composed a Cooties Serenade for wind instruments with a fine-tooth
comb obbligato, and we are amazed at the critical exposition of such a
perplexing “case.” To let his music speak for itself, would be unwise,
as it is not sufficiently explicative. Rhizopods can’t converse. Just
here is where your music-critic, your calico cat, intervenes. After Van
Vechten has polished off his man, we feel that we know all about Satie,
so much so that we never wish to hear a bar of his crustacean music.
The difference between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee is infinitesimal,
but that very difference may contain great art.
Professor, now Sir Walter Raleigh, has said that “Criticism, after
all, is not to legislate but to raise the dead.” Sometimes it raises
hades. Millet declared that “there is no isolated truth”; Constable
denied that a good thing is ever done twice, and Alfred Stevens--the
Belgian painter, not the English sculptor--defined art as “nature seen
through the prism of an emotion,” thus forestalling the more pompous
pronouncement of Zola in The Experimental Novel. These are not merely
epigrams, but truths. On the other hand, recall what Velasquez is
reported to have said to Salvator Rosa, according to Boschini and Carl
Justi. Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he did
not believe Raphael to be the best of all the painters he had seen in
Italy. Velasquez answered: “Raphael, to be plain with you, for I like
to be candid and outspoken, does not please me at all.” There were the
mountains criticising, deep calling unto deep. All said and done, a
question of temperament, this opinion of one great man about the work
of another.
Therefore, brethren, it behooves us to be humble, as pride goeth before
a fall. Like the industrious crow, the critic, or, as you will, the
calico cat, should hop after the sowers of beauty, content to pick up
in the furrowed field the grains dropped by genius. At best the critic
sits down to a Barmecide’s feast, to see, to smell, but not to taste
the celestial manna vouchsafed by the gods. We are only contemporaries
of genius, all of us, and the calico cat is the badge of our tribe. But
who dares confess this shocking truth? And who shall bell the calico
cat?
XIII
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?
Rather hotly I argued the question with my editor: “After all,
music-critics are men and brethren,” I said. “Except when they are
sisters,” he ironically interposed. I sternly resisted a temptation
to blush and continued: “Because I love Chopin must I forever write
of his music--toujours perdrix! It’s an indigestion of strawberries,
clotted cream, and green eyes. I’m suffering from spring-fever. Let me
write a story about the circus.” “Why not Ibsen?” interposed my editor,
who is subtle or nothing. “He was a grand man,” I assented, “but in
the present case he is only red-herring across the trail. Suppose I
mix up Chopin with sawdust merely for the sake of the mélange?” My
chief assented, wearily. There are more important problems on the
carpet than Chopin. Jim Beck vs. Pop Hylan in a catch-as-catch-can
for the welter-weight championship. Or the celebrated Mrs. J. and the
Beethoven-Hamburger steak controversy. Why not Chopin and sawdust? I
retired with a thoughtful mien.