the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves
the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it. Most musicians, indeed,
prefer to hear operatic music outside the opera house; that is why
one so often hears such things as "The Ride of the Valkyrie" in the
concert hall. "The Ride of the Valkyrie" has a certain intrinsic value
as pure music; played by a competent orchestra it may give civilized
pleasure. But as it is commonly performed in an opera house, with a
posse of flat bel-dames throwing themselves about the stage, it can
only produce the effect of a dose of ipecacuanha. The sort of person
who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of person who
delights in plush furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority in every
opera house west of the Rhine. They go to the opera, not to hear music,
not even to hear bad music, but merely to see a more or less obscene
circus. A few, perhaps, have a further purpose; they desire to assist
in that circus, to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables,
to enchant the yokelry with their splendor. But the majority must be
content with the more lowly aim. What they get for the outrageous
prices they pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes upon
glittering members of the superior _demi-monde,_ and to abase their
groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of the footlights.
They esteem a performance, not in proportion as true music is on tap,
but in proportion as the display of notorious characters on the stage
is copious, and the exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish. A
soprano who can gargle her way up to G sharp in alto is more to such
simple souls than a whole drove of Johann Sebastian Bachs; her one
real rival, in the entire domain of art, is the contralto who has a
pension from a grand duke and is reported to be _enceinte_ by several
profiteers. Heaven visualizes itself as an opera house with forty-eight
Carusos, each with forty-eight press agents.... On the Continent,
where frankness is unashamed, the opera audience often reveals its
passion for tone very naively. That is to say, it arises on its hind
legs, turns its back upon the stage and gapes at the boxes in charming
innocence.
That such ignobles applaud is usually quite as shoddy as they are
themselves. To write a successful opera a knowledge of harmony and
counterpoint is not enough; one must also be a sort of Barnum. All
the first-rate musicians who have triumphed in the opera house have
been skillful mountebanks as well. I need cite only Richard Wagner and
Richard Strauss. The business, indeed, has almost nothing to do with
music. All the actual music one finds in many a popular opera--for
example, "Thaïs"--mounts up to less than one may find in a pair of
Gung'l waltzes. It is not this mild flavor of tone that fetches the
crowd; it is the tinpot show that goes with it. An opera may have
plenty of good music in it and fail, but if it has a good enough show
it will succeed.
Such a composer as Wagner, of course, could not write even an opera
without getting some music into it. In nearly all of his works,
even including "Parsifal," there are magnificent passages, and some
of them are very long. Here his natural genius overcame him, and he
forgot temporarily what he was about. But these magnificent passages
pass unnoticed by the average opera audience. What it esteems in his
music dramas is precisely what is cheapest and most mountebankish--for
example, the more lascivious parts of "Tristan und Isolde." The sound
music it dismisses as tedious. The Wagner it venerates is not the
musician, but the showman. That he had a king for a backer and was
seduced by Liszt's daughter--these facts, and not the fact of his
stupendous talent, are the foundation stones of his fame in the opera
house.
Greater men, lacking his touch of the quack, have failed where he
succeeded--Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bach, Haydn, Haendel.
Not one of them produced a genuinely successful opera; most of them
didn't even try. Imagine Brahms writing for the diamond horseshoe!
Or Bach! Or Haydn! Beethoven attempted it, but made a mess of it;
"Fidelio" survives to-day chiefly as a set of concert overtures.
Schubert wrote more actual music every morning between 10 o'clock and
lunch time than the average opera composer produces in 250 years, and
yet he always came a cropper in the opera house.
3
_The Music of To-morrow_
Viewing the current musical scene, Carl Van Vechten finds it full of
sadness. Even Debussy bores him; he heard nothing interesting from that
quarter for a long while before the final scene. As for Germany, he
finds it a desert, with Arnold Schoenberg behind the bar of its only
inviting _Gasthaus._ Richard Strauss? Pooh! Strauss is an exploded
torpedo, a Zeppelin brought to earth; "he has nothing more to say."
(Even the opening of the Alpine symphony, it would appear, is more
stick-candy.) England? Go to! Italy? Back to the barrel-organ! Where,
then, is the tone poetry of to-morrow to come from? According to Van
Vechten, from Russia. It is the steppes that will produce it--or, more
specifically, Prof. Igor Strawinsky, author of "The Nightingale" and
of various revolutionary ballets. In the scores of Strawinsky, says
Van Vechten, music takes a vast leap forward. Here, at last, we are
definitely set free from melody and harmony; the thing becomes an
ineffable complex of rhythms; "all rhythms are beaten into the ears."
New? Of the future? I have not heard all of the powerful shiverings
and tremblings of M. Strawinsky, but I presume to doubt it none the
less. "The ancient Greeks," says Van Vechten, "accorded rhythm a
higher place than either melody or harmony." Well, what of it? So did
the ancient Goths and Huns. So do the modern Zulus and New Yorkers.
The simple truth is that the accentuation of mere rhythm is a proof,
not of progress in music, but of a reversion to barbarism. Rhythm is
the earliest, the underlying element. The African savage, beating his
tom-tom, is content to go no further; the American composer of fox
trots is with him. But music had scarcely any existence as an art-form
until melody came to rhythm's aid, and its fruits were little save
dullness until harmony began to support melody. To argue that mere
rhythm, unsupported by anything save tone-color, may now take their
place is to argue something so absurd that its mere statement is a
sufficient answer to it.
The rise of harmony, true enough, laid open a dangerous field. Its
exploration attracted meticulous minds; it was rigidly mapped in hard,
geometrical forms; in the end, it became almost unnavigable to the
man of ideas. But no melodramatic rejection of all harmony is needed
to work a reform. The business, indeed, is already gloriously under
way. The dullest conservatory pupil has learned how to pull the noses
of the old-time schoolmasters. No one cares a hoot any more about the
ancient laws of preparation and resolution. (The rules grow so loose,
indeed, that I may soon be tempted to write a tone-poem myself). But
out of this chaos new laws will inevitably arise, and though they
will not be as rigid as the old ones, they will still be coherent and
logical and intelligible. Already, in fact, gentlemen of professorial
mind are mapping them out; one needs but a glance at such a book as
René Lenormand's to see that there is a certain order hidden in even
the wildest vagaries of the moment. And when the boiling in the pot
dies down, the truly great musicians will be found to be, not those
who have been most daring, but those who have been most discreet and
intelligent--those who have most skillfully engrafted what is good
in the new upon what was sound in the old. Such a discreet fellow is
Richard Strauss. His music is modern enough--but not too much. One is
thrilled by its experiments and novelties, but at the same time one can
enjoy the thing as music.
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner belonged to the same lodge. They
were by no means the wildest revolutionaries of their days, but they
were the best musicians. They didn't try to improve music by purging
it of any of the elements that made it music; they tried, and with
success, to give each element a new force and a new significance.
Berlioz, I dare say, knew more about the orchestra than Wagner; he
surely went further than Wagner in reaching out for new orchestral
effects. But nothing he ever wrote has a fourth of the stability and
value of "Die Meistersinger." He was so intrigued by his tone-colors
that he forgot his music.
4
_Tempo di Valse_
Those Puritans who snort against the current dances are quite
right when they argue that the tango and the shimmie are violently
aphrodisiacal, but what they overlook is the fact that the abolition
of such provocative wriggles would probably revive something worse, to
wit, the Viennese waltz. The waltz never quite goes out of fashion;
it is always just around the corner; every now and then it comes back
with a bang. And to the sore harassment and corruption, I suspect, of
chemical purity, the ideal of all right-thinkers. The shimmie and the
tango are too gross to be very dangerous to civilized human beings;
they suggest drinking beer out of buckets; the most elemental good
taste is proof enough against them. But the waltz! Ah, the waltz,
indeed! It is sneaking, insidious, disarming, lovely. It does its work,
not like a college-yell or an explosion in a munitions plant, but
like the rustle of the trees, the murmur of the illimitable sea, the
sweet gurgle of a pretty girl. The jazz-band fetches only vulgarians,
barbarians, idiots, pigs. But there is a mystical something in "Weiner
Blut" or "Künstler Leben" that fetches even philosophers.
The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper--the art of tone turned
bawdy. I venture to say that the compositions of one man alone,
Johann Strauss II, have lured more fair young creatures to lamentable
complaisance than all the hyperdermic syringes of all the white slave
scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something
about a waltz that is simply irresistible. Try it on the fattest and
sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and
she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy kiss behind the
door--nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her
husband misunderstands her, and drinks too much, and cannot appreciate
Maeterlinck, and is going to Cleveland, O., on business to-morrow....
I often wonder that the Comstocks have not undertaken a crusade against
the waltz. If they suppress "The 'Genius'" and "Jurgen," then why do
they overlook "Rosen aus dem Süden"? If they are so hot against "Madame
Bovary" and the Decameron, then why the immunity of "Wein, Weib und
Gesang"? I throw out the suggestion and pass on. Nearly all the
great waltzes of the world, incidently, were written by Germans--or
Austrians. A waltz-pogrom would thus enlist the American Legion and
the Daughters of the Revolution. Moreover, there is the Public Health
Service: it is already engaged upon a campaign to enforce virginity in
both sexes by statute and artillery. Imagine such an enterprise with
every band free to play "Wiener Mäd'l"!
5
_The Puritan as Artist_
The saddest thing that I have ever heard in the concert hall is Herbert
K. Hadley's overture, "In Bohemia." The title is a magnificent piece of
profound, if unconscious irony. One looks, at least, for a leg flung
in the air, a girl kissed, a cork popped, a flash of drawer-ruffles.
What one encounters is a meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Such
prosy correctness and hollowness, in music, is almost inconceivable.
It is as if the most voluptuous of the arts were suddenly converted
into an abstract and austere science, like comparative grammar or
astro-physics. "Who's Who in America" says that Hadley was born in
Somerville, Mass., and "studied violin and other branches in Vienna." A
prodigy thus unfolds itself: here is a man who lived in Vienna, and yet
never heard a Strauss waltz! This, indeed, is an even greater feat than
being born an artist in Somerville.
6
_The Human Face_
Probably the best portrait that I have ever seen in America is one of
Theodore Dreiser by Bror Nordfeldt. Who this Bror Nordfeldt may be I
haven't the slightest notion--a Scandinavian, perhaps. Maybe I have got
his name wrong; I can't find any Nordfeldt in "Who's Who in America."
But whatever his name, he has painted Dreiser in a capital manner. The
portrait not only shows the outward shell of the man; it also conveys
something of his inner spirit--his simple-minded wonder at the mystery
of existence, his constant effort to argue himself out of a despairing
pessimism, his genuine amazement before life as a spectacle. The thing
is worth a hundred Sargents, with their slick lying, their childish
facility, their general hollowness and tackiness. Sargent should have
been a designer of candy-box tops. The notion that he is a great artist
is one of the astounding delusions of Anglo-Saxondom. What keeps it
going is the patent fact that he is a very dexterous craftsman--one
who understands thoroughly how to paint, just as a good plumber knows
how to plumb. But of genuine æsthetic feeling the man is almost as
destitute as the plumber. His portrait of the four Johns Hopkins
professors is probably the worst botch ever palmed off on a helpless
committee of intellectual hay and feed dealers. But Nordfeldt, in his
view of Dreiser, somehow gets the right effect. It is rough painting,
but real painting. There is a knock-kneed vase in the foreground, and a
bunch of flowers apparently painted with a shaving-brush--but Dreiser
himself is genuine. More, he is made interesting. One sees at once
that he is no common man.
The artist himself seems to hold the portrait in low esteem. Having
finished it, he reversed the canvas and used the back for painting a
vapid snow scenes--a thing almost bad enough to go into a Fifth Avenue
show-window. Then he abandoned both pictures. I discovered the portrait
by accidentally knocking the snow scene off a wall. It has never been
framed. Drieser himself has probably forgotten it. ... No, I do _not_
predict that it will be sold to some Pittsburgh nail manufacturer, in
1950, for $100,000. If it lasts two or three more years, unframed and
disesteemed, it will be running in luck. When Dreiser is hanged, I
suppose, relic-hunters will make a search for it. But by that time it
will have died as a door-mat.
7
_The Cerebral Mime_
Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is
the one who pretends to intellectuality. His alleged intelligence,
of course, is always purely imaginary: no man of genuinely superior
intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of
appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers
are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably
and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from
his mouth every night. That nonsense enters into the very fiber of the
actor. He becomes a grotesque boiling down of all the preposterous
characters that he has ever impersonated. Their characteristics are
seen in his manner, in his reactions to stimuli, in his point of view.
He becomes a walking artificiality, a strutting dummy, a thematic
catalogue of imbecilities.
There are, of course, plays that are not wholly nonsense, and now
and then one encounters an actor who aspires to appear in them. This
aspiration almost always overtakes the so-called actor-manager--that
is to say, the actor who has got rich and is thus ambitious to appear
as a gentleman. Such aspirants commonly tackle Shakespeare, and if
not Shakespeare, then Shaw, or Hauptmann, or Rostand, or some other
apparently intellectual dramatist. But this is seldom more than a
passing madness. The actor-manager may do that sort of thing once in a
while, but in the main he sticks to his garbage. Consider, for example,
the late Henry Irving. He posed as an intellectual and was forever
gabbling about his high services to the stage, and yet he appeared
constantly in such puerile things as "The Bells," beside which the
average newspaper editorial or college yell was literature. So with
the late Mansfield. His pretension, deftly circulated by press-agents,
was that he was a man of brilliant and polished mind. Nevertheless,
he spent two-thirds of his life in the theater playing such abominable
drival as "A Parisian Romance" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
It is commonly urged in defense of certain actors that they are forced
to appear in that sort of stuff by the public demand for it--that
appearing in it painfully violates their secret pruderies. This defense
is unsound and dishonest. An actor never disdains anything that gets
him applause and money; he is almost completely devoid of that æsthetic
conscience which is the chief mark of the genuine artist. If there
were a large public willing to pay handsomely to hear him recite
limericks, or to blow a cornet, or to strip off his underwear and
dance a polonaise stark naked, he would do it without hesitation--and
then convince himself that such buffooning constituted a difficult and
elevated art, fully comparable to Wagner's or Dante's. In brief, the
one essential, in his sight, is the chance to shine, the fat part,
the applause. Who ever heard of an actor declining a fat part on the
ground that it invaded his intellectual integrity? The thing is simply
unimaginable.
VIII. THE CULT OF HOPE
Of all the sentimental errors which reign and rage in this incomparable
republic, the worst, I often suspect, is that which confuses the
function of criticism, whether æsthetic, political or social, with the
function of reform. Almost invariably it takes the form of a protest:
"The fellow condems without offering anything better. Why tear down
without building up?" So coo and snivel the sweet ones: so wags the
national tongue. The messianic delusion becomes a sort of universal
murrain. It is impossible to get an audience for an idea that is not
"constructive"--_i. e.,_ that is not glib, and uplifting, and full
of hope, and hence capable of tickling the emotions by leaping the
intermediate barrier of the intelligence.
In this protest and demand, of course, there is nothing but a hollow
sound of words--the empty babbling of men who constantly mistake their
mere feelings for thoughts. The truth is that criticism, if it were
thus confined to the proposing of alternative schemes, would quickly
cease to have any force or utility at all, for in the overwhelming
majority of instances no alternative scheme of any intelligibility
is imaginable, and the whole object of the critical process is to
demonstrate it. The poet, if the victim is a poet, is simply one as
bare of gifts as a herring is of fur: no conceivable suggestion will
ever make him write actual poetry. The cancer cure, if one turns to
popular swindles, is wholly and absolutely without merit--and the fact
that medicine offers us no better cure does not dilute its bogusness
in the slightest. And the plan of reform, in politics, sociology or
what not, is simply beyond the pale of reason; no change in it or
improvement of it will ever make it achieve the downright impossible.
Here, precisely, is what is the matter with most of the notions that go
floating about the country, particularly in the field of governmental
reform. The trouble with them is not only that they won't and don't
work; the trouble with them, more importantly, is that the thing they
propose to accomplish is intrinsically, or at all events most probably,
beyond accomplishment. That is to say, the problem they are ostensibly
designed to solve is a problem that is insoluble. To tackle them with
a proof of that insolubility, or even with a colorable argument of it,
is sound criticism; to tackle them with another solution that is quite
as bad, or even worse, is to pick the pocket of one knocked down by an
automobile.
Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the
concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to
square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual
motion. The number of persons so afflicted is far greater than the
records of the Patent Office show, for beyond the circle of frankly
insane enterprise there lie circles of more and more plausible
enterprise, and finally we come to a circle which embraces the great
majority of human beings. These are the optimists and chronic hopers
of the world, the believers in men, ideas and things. These are the
advocates of leagues of nations, wars to make the world safe for
democracy, political mountebanks, "clean-up" campaigns, laws, raids,
Men and Religion Forward Movements, eugenics, sex hygiene, education,
newspapers. It is the settled habit of such credulous folk to give ear
to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever
is desirable will come to pass. A caressing confidence--but one,
unfortunately, that is not borne out by human experience. The fact is
that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently
for thousands of years are not nearer realization to-day than they were
in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for
believing that they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow.
Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning; plans
for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation
to-day; and yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the
chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us until
the angels get tired of the show, and the whole earth is set off like a
gigantic bomb, or drowned, like a sick cat, between two buckets.
But let us avoid the grand and chronic dreams of the race and get
down to some of the concrete problems of life under the Christian
enlightenment. Let us take a look, say, at the so-called drink problem,
a small sub-division of the larger problem of saving men from their
inherent and incurable hoggishness. What is the salient feature of the
discussion of the drink problem, as one observes it going on eternally
in These States? The salient feature of it is that very few honest and
intelligent men ever take a hand in the business--that the best men of
the nation, distinguished for their sound sense in other fields, seldom
show any interest in it. On the one hand it is labored by a horde of
obvious jackasses, each confident that he can dispose of it overnight.
And on the other hand it is sophisticated and obscured by a crowd of
oblique fellows, hired by interested parties, whose secret desire is
that it be kept unsolved. To one side, the professional gladiators
of Prohibition; to the other side, the agents of the brewers and
distillers. But why do all neutral and clear-headed men avoid it? Why
does one hear so little about it from those who have no personal stake
in it, and can thus view it fairly and accurately? Is it because they
are afraid? Is it because they are not intrigued by it? I doubt that
it would be just to accuse them in either way. The real reason why they
steer clear of the gabble is simpler and more creditable. It is this:
that none of them--that no genuinely thoughtful and prudent man--can
imagine any solution which meets the tests of his own criticism--that
no genuinely intelligent man believes the thing is soluble at all.
Here, of course, I generalize a bit heavily. Honest and intelligent
men, though surely not many of them, occasionally come forward with
suggestions. In the midst of so much debate it is inevitable that
even a man of critical mind should sometimes lean to one side or the
other--that some salient imbecility should make him react toward its
rough opposite. But the fact still remains that not a single complete
and comprehensive scheme has ever come from such a man, that no such
man has ever said, in so many words, that he thought the problem could
be solved, simply and effectively. All such schemes come from idiots
or from sharpers disguised as idiots to win the public confidence. The
whole discussion is based upon assumptions that even the most casual
reflection must reject as empty balderdash.