Ah! to see behind me no longer on the Lake of Eternity the
implacable Wake of Time.--EPHRAÏM MIKAËL.
When Cintras was twenty he planned an appeal to eternity. He knew "Émaux
et Camées" as pious folk their Bible; he felt that naught endured but
art. So he became a pagan, and sought for firmness and delicacy in the
texture, while aiming to fill his verse with the fire of Swinburne, the
subtlety of Rossetti and the great, clear day-flame of Gautier. A
well-nigh impossible ideal; yet he cherished it for twice ten years, and
at forty had forsworn poetry for prose....
Then he read the masters of that "other harmony of prose" until he
dreamed of long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody, cadences like
the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen
strands. He knew Sir Thomas Browne, and repeated with unction: "Now
since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of
Methusaleh, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, outworn
all the strong and spacious buildings above it; and quietly rested
under the drums and tramplings of three conquests; what prince can
promise such diuturnity unto his relicks." ... He wondered if Milton, De
Quincey, Walter Pater or even Jeremy Taylor had made such sustained
music. He marvelled at the lofty structures of old seventeenth century
prose-men, and compared them with the chippy staccato of the modern
perky style, its smug smartness, its eternal chattering gallop. He
absorbed the quiet prose of Addison and Steele and swore it tasted like
dry sherry. Swift, he found brilliantly hard, often mannered; and he
loved Dr. Goldsmith, so bland, loquacious, welcoming. In Fielding's
sentences he heard the clatter of oaths; and when bored by the pulpy
magnificence of Pater's harmonies went back to Bunyan with his stern,
straightforward way. For Macaulay and his multitudinous prose, Cintras
conceived a special abhorrence, but could quote for you with unfailing
diction Sir William Temple's "Use of Poetry and Music," and its sweet
coda: "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best, but
like a froward child that must be played with and humored to keep it
quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."
Cintras had become enamoured with the English language, and emptied it
into his eyes from Chaucer to Stevenson. He most affected Charles Lamb
and Laurence Sterne; he also loved the Bible for its canorous prose,
and on hot afternoons as the boys lolled about his room, he thundered
forth bits of Job and the Psalms. Cintras was greatly beloved by the
gang, though it was generally conceded that he had as yet done nothing.
This is the way Berkeley put it, down at Chérierre's, where they often
met to say obvious things in American-French....
"You see boys, if Cintras had the stuff in him he would have turned out
something by this time. He's a bad poet--what, haven't you ever read any
of his verse?--and now he's gone daft on artistic prose. Artistic
rubbish! Who the devil cares for chiselled prose nowadays? In the days
when link-boys and sedan chairs helped home a jag they had the time to
speak good English. But now! Good Lord! With typewriters cutting your
phrases into angular fragments, with the very soil at your heels
saturated with slang, what hope in an age of hurry has a fellow to think
of the cadence? I honestly believe Stevenson was having fun when he
wrote that essay of his on the technical elements of style. It's a
puzzle picture and no more to be deciphered than a Bach fugue."
"When Bill Berkeley gets the flow on, he's worse than Cintras with his
variable vowels. Say, Bill, I think you're jealous of old Pop Cintras."
It was Sammy Hodson, a newspaper man, who spoke, and as he wrote on
space he was usually the cashier of the crowd....
Chérierre's is on University Place, and the spot where the artistic
set--Berkeley, Hodson, Pauch, the sculptor, and Cintras--happened to be
hanging about just then. The musician of the circle was a tall thin
young man named Merville. It was said that he had written a symphony;
and one night they all got drunk when the last movement was finished,
though not a soul had heard a note. Every one believed Merville would do
big things some day.
Cintras entered. He was hopelessly uninteresting looking and wore a
beard. Berkeley swore that if he shaved he would be sent to prison; but
Cintras pleaded economy, a delicate throat, also the fact that his nose
was stubby. But set him to talking about the beauties of English prose,
and his eyes blazed with a green fire. The conversation turned on good
things to drink; wine at twenty-five cents a litre was ordered, and the
chatter began....
"It seems to me, Berkeley," Cintras spoke, "that you modern fellows are
too much devoted to the color scheme. I remember when I was a boy,
Gautier set us crazy in Paris with his color sense. His pages glowed
with all the pigments of the palette; he vied with the jeweller in
introducing precious stones of the most ravishing brilliancy within the
walls of his paragraph; I sickened of all this splendor, this Ruskin
word-painting, and went in for cool grays, took up Baudelaire and
finally reached Verlaine, whose music is the echo of music heard in
misty mediæval parks while the peacock dragging by with its twilight
tail, utters shrill commentary on such moonshine. After that I reached
Chopin and found him too dangerous, too treacherous, too condensed, the
art too filled out; and so I finally landed in the arms of Wagner, and
I've been there ever since."
"Look here, Cintras, you're prose-mad and you've landed nowhere."
Berkeley lighted one of Hodson's cigarettes. "When a new, big fellow
comes along you follow him until you find out how he does the trick and
then you get bored. Don't you remember the day you rushed into my studio
and yelled, 'Newman is the only man who wrote prose in the nineteenth
century,' and then persisted in spouting long sentences from the
'Apologia'? First it was Arnold, then it was Edmund Burke." "It will
always be Burke," interrupted Cintras. "Then it was Maurice de Guérin,
and I suppose it will be Flaubert forever and ever." They all laughed.
"Yes, Billy, it will always be Gustave Flaubert, and I worship him more
and more every day. It took him forty years to write four books and
three stories, and, as Henry James says, he deliberately planned
masterpieces."
Hodson broke in: "You literary men make me tired. Why, if I turned out
copy at the rate of Slobsbert--what's his name?--I'd starve. What's all
the fuss about, anyhow? Write natural English and any one will
understand you"--"Ah, natural English, that's what one man writes in a
generation," sighed Cintras. "And when you want something great,"
continued the young man, "why, read a good 'thriller' about the great
Cemetery Syndicate, and how it robbed the dead for gold fillings in
teeth. The author just slings it out--and such words!"
"Yes, with a whitewash brush." Berkeley scowled.
"Why," pursued Hodson, unmoved, "why don't you get married, Cintras, and
work for your living? Then you'll have to write syndicate stuff and that
will knock the nonsense out of you. Or, fall in love and be miserable
like me." Hodson paused to drink.
"O triste, triste était mon âme,
À cause, à cause d'une femme."
"That's Verlaine; Hoddy, my boy, when you grow up, quit newspapering and
become cultured, you may appreciate its meaning and beauty."
"When I am cultured I'll be a night city editor; that's my ideal," said
the youth, stoutly.
"Let's go over to Merville's room and make him play Chopin," suggested
Pauch, the sculptor, who seldom spoke, but could eat more than four
men.... They drank their coffee and went across into Twelfth street,
and at the top of the house they found the musician's room. It was
large, but poorly fitted out. An old square-piano, a stove, a bed, three
chairs, a big lounge and a washstand completed the catalogue. Merville
made them comfortable and sat down to the piano. Its tone, as his
fingers crept over the keys, was of faded richness and there were
reverberations of lost splendors in the bass. Merville started with a
Chopin nocturne, but Hodson hurt the cat as it brushed against him, and
the noise displeased the pianist. He stopped.
"I don't feel like Chopin, it's too early in the day. Chopin should be
heard only in the early evening or after midnight. I'll give you some
Brahms instead. Brahms suits the afternoon, this gray, dull day." All
were too lazy to reply and the pianist began, with hesitating touch, an
Intermezzo in A minor. It sounded like music heard in a dream, a dream
anterior to this existence. It seemed as if life, tired of the external
blaze of the sun, sought for the secret of hidden spaces; searched for
the message in the sinuous murmuring shell. It was an art of an art, the
penumbra of an art. Its faint outlines melted into one's soul and
refused to be turned away. The recollection of other music seemed gross
after this curiously introspective, this almost whorl-like, music. It
was the return to the invertebrate, the shadow of a shadow, and the
hearts of Merville's guests were downcast and purified....
When he had finished, Cintras asked: "If that is Brahms, why then he has
solved the secret of the age's end. He has written the song of humanity
absorbed in the slime of a dying planet."
"Very morbid, very perverse in rhythms, I should say," broke in
Berkeley; they all shivered. Merville arose, his face glum and drawn,
and brought whiskey and glasses.
Cintras was the first to speak:
"Hodson, you are a very young fellow and I wish to give you good advice.
Yours to me was better than you supposed. Now don't you ever bother with
art, music or artistic prose. Just marry a nice girl who goes to comic
operas. You stick to her and avoid Balzac. He is too strong meat for
you--" "Yes, but he's great; I read him!" "And no more understand him
than you do Chopin. Because he is great he is readable, but his secret
is the secret of the sphinx; it may only be unravelled by a few strong
souls. So go your road and be happy in your plush way, read your
historical hog-wash, and believe me when I swear that the most miserable
men are those who have caught a glimpse of the eternal beauty of art,
who pursue her ideal face, who have the vision but not the voice. I once
wrote a little prose poem about this desire of beauty; I will see if I
can remember it for you."
"Go ahead, old man; I'll stand anything to-day," sang out Hodson.
"Here it is:" and Cintras recited his legend of