If, as her friends asserted, Ellenora Vibert's ugliness had softened I
did not notice it. She was one of those few women in the world that
marriage had not improved. Her eyes were colder, more secret; her jaw
crueller, her lips wider and harder at the edges. She welcomed me with
distinguished loftiness, and I soon felt the unpleasant key in which the
household tune was being played. It was amiable enough, this flat near
Mount Morris Park in Harlem. The Viberts had taste, and their music-room
was charming in its reticent scheme of decoration--a Steinway grand
piano, a low crowded book-case with a Rodin cast, a superb mezzotint of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa after Calmatta, revealing the admirable poise of
sweetly folded hands--surely the most wonderful hands ever
painted--while the polished floor, comforting couches and open fireplace
proclaimed this apartment as the composition of refined people.
I am alive to the harmonies of domestic interiors, and I sensed the
dissonance in the lives of these two.
Soon we three warmed the cold air of restraint and fell to discussing
life, art, literature, friends, and even ourselves. I could not withhold
my admiration for Ellenora's cleverness. She was transposed to a coarser
key, and there was a suggestion of the overblown in her figure; but her
tongue was sharp, and she wore the air of a woman who was mistress of
her mansion. Presently Arthur relapsed into silence, lounged and smoked
in the corner, while Mrs. Vibert expounded her ideas of literary form,
and finally confessed that she had given up the notion of a novel.
"You see, the novel is overdone to-day. The short story ended with de
Maupassant. The only hope we have, we few who take our art seriously, is
to compress the short story within a page and distil into it the vivid
impression of a moment, a lifetime, an eternity." She looked
intellectually triumphant. I interposed a mild objection.
"This form, my dear lady, is it a fitting vehicle for so much weight of
expression? I admire, as do you, the sonnet, but I can never be brought
to believe that Milton could have compressed 'Paradise Lost' within a
sonnet."
"Then all the worse for Milton," she tartly replied. "Look at the Chopin
prelude. Will you contradict me if I say that in one prelude this
composer crowds the experience of a lifetime? When he expands his idea
into the sonata form how diffuse, how garrulous he becomes!"
I ventured to remark that Chopin had no special talent for the sonata
form.
"The sonata form is dead," the lady asserted. "Am I not right, Arthur?"
"Yes, my dear," came from Arthur. I fully understood his depression.
"No," she continued, magnificently, "it is this blind adherence to older
forms that crushes all originality to-day. There is Arthur with his
sonata form--as if Wagner did not create his own form!"
"But I am no Wagner," interrupted her husband.
"Indeed, you are not," said Mrs. Vibert rather viciously. "If you were
we wouldn't be in Harlem. You men to-day lack the initiative. The way
must be shown you by woman; yes, by poor, crushed woman--woman who has
no originality according to your Schopenhauer; woman whose sensations,
not being of coarse enough fibre to be measured by the rude
emotion-weighing machine of Lombroso, are therefore adjudged of less
delicacy than man's. What fools your scientific men be!"
Mrs. Vibert was a bit pedantic, but she could talk to the point when
aroused.
"You discredit the idea of compressing an epic into a sonnet, a sonata
into a prelude; well, I've attempted something of the sort, and even if
you laugh I'll stick to my argument. I've attempted to tell the
biological history of the cosmos in a single page.... I begin with the
unicellular protozoa and finally reach humanity; and to give it dramatic
interest I trace a germ-cell from eternity until the now, and you shall
hear its history this moment." She stopped for breath, and I wondered if
Mrs. Somerville or George Eliot had ever talked in this astounding
fashion. I was certain that she must have read Iamblichus and Porphyry.
Arthur on his couch groaned.
"Mock if you please," Ellenora's strong face flushed, "but women will
yet touch the rim of finer issues. Paul Goddard, who is a critic I
respect, told me I had struck the right note of modernity in my prose
poem." I winced at the "note of modernity," and could not help seeing
the color mount to Arthur's brow when the man's name was mentioned.
"And pray who is Mr. Paul Goddard?" I asked while Mrs. Vibert was absent
in search of her manuscript. Arthur replied indifferently, "Oh, a rich
young man who went to Bayreuth last summer and poses as a Wagnerite ever
since! He also plays the piano!"
Arthur's tone was sarcastic; he did not like Paul Goddard and his
critical attentions to his wife. The poor lad looked so disheartened, so
crushed by the rigid intellectual atmosphere about him, that I put no
further question and was glad when Mrs. Vibert returned with her prose
poem.