chance of meeting many powerful masters by proxy and through his happy
facility for taking and using whatever creativeness these have to
offer. Genius has been short-sightedly defined as "an infinite
capacity for taking pains." Galton more truthfully holds that the
triune factors of genius are industry, enthusiasm, and ability. Now if
we were to insist, as so many do, on making a definition out of a
single one of these factors to the neglect of the others, we should
come perhaps nearer the mark by saying that genius is an infinite
capacity for taking others' pains. But all such definings are absurd.
For the genius absorbs and alchemizes not only the industry of his
silent partners, but also their ability and enthusiasm. Their
enthusiasm is fortunately contained in a receptacle as generous as
Philemon's famous pitcher. And the harder the genius tries to pour it
empty, the more the sparkling liquid bubbles up inside. The
transaction is like "the quality of mercy"--
"It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."
The ability to receive as well as give this sort of help varies widely
with the individual. Some geniuses of large psychic power are able
instantly to seize out of any crowd whatever creativeness there is in
it. These persons are spiritual giants. Their strength is as the
strength of ten because their grasp is sure. They are such stuff as
Shakespeares are made of.
Others are not psychically gifted. They can absorb creativeness only
from their nearest and dearest, in the most favoring environment, and
only after the current has been seriously depleted by wastage in
transmission. But these are the two extremes. They are as rare as
extremes usually are.
In general I believe that genius, though normally capable of drawing
creativeness from a number of different sources, has as a rule
depended largely on the collaboration of one chief master by proxy.
This idea gazes wide-eyed down a fascinating vista of speculation.
Who, for instance, was Lincoln's silent partner? the power behind the
throne of Charlemagne? Buddha's better self? Who were the secret
commanders of Grant, Wellington, and Cæsar? Who was Molière's hidden
prompter? the conductor of the orchestra called Beethoven? the psychic
comrade of Columbus?
I do not know. For history has never commemorated, as such, the
masters by proxy with honor due, or indeed with any honor or
remembrance at all. It will take centuries to explore the past with
the sympathetic eye and the understanding heart in order to discover
what great tombs we have most flagrantly neglected.
Already we can single out a few of them. The time is coming when
music-lovers will never make a pilgrimage to the resting-place of
Wagner without making another to the grave of Mathilde Wesendonk,
whose "virtue" breathed into "Tristan and Isolde" the breath of life.
We shall not much longer neglect the tomb of Charles Darwin's father,
who, by making the evolutionist financially independent, gave his
services to the world. Nor shall we disregard the memory of that other
Charles-Darwin-by-proxy--his wife. For her tireless comradeship and
devotion and freely lavished vitality were an indispensable reservoir
of strength to the great invalid. Without it the world would never
have had the "Origin of Species" or the "Descent of Man."
Other instances throng to mind. I have small doubt that Charles Eliot
Norton was the silent partner of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Lowell; Ste.
Clare of Francis of Assisi; Joachim and Billroth of Brahms, and
Dorothy Wordsworth of William. By a pleasant coincidence, I had no
sooner noted down the last of these names than I came upon this
sentence in Sarah Orne Jewett's Letters: "How much that we call
Wordsworth himself was Dorothy to begin with." And soon after, I found
these words in a letter which Brahms sent Joachim with the score of
his second "Serenade": "Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it
is very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, that
music sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or two
people whom one loves as I love you?" The impressionable Charles Lamb
must have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlitt
wrote: "He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your
company, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is the creature of
sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of
him."
Perhaps the most creative master by proxy I have ever known was the
wife of one of our ex-Presidents. To call upon her was to experience
the elevation and mental unlimbering of three or four glasses of
champagne, with none of that liquid's less desirable after-effects. I
should not wonder if her eminent husband's success were not due as
much to her creativeness as to his own.
It sometimes happens that the most potent masters in their own right
are also the most potent masters by proxy. They grind out more power
than they can consume in their own particular mill-of-the-gods. I am
inclined to think that Sir Humphry Davy was one of these. He was the
discoverer of chlorine and laughing-gas, and the inventor of the
miner's safety lamp. He was also the _deus ex machina_ who rescued
Faraday from the bookbinder's bench, made him the companion of his
travels, and incidentally poured out the overplus of his own creative
energy upon the youth who has recently been called "perhaps the most
remarkable discoverer of the nineteenth century." Schiller was another
of these. "In more senses than one your sympathy is fruitful," wrote
Goethe to him during the composition of "Faust."
Indeed, the greatest Master known to history was first and foremost a
master by proxy. It was He who declared that we all are "members one
of another." Writing nothing Himself, He inspired others to write
thousands of immortal books. He was unskilled as painter, or sculptor,
or architect; yet the greatest canvases, marbles, and cathedrals since
He trod the earth have sprung directly from his influence. He was no
musician.
"His song was only living aloud."
But that silent song was the direct inspiration of much of the
sublimest music of the centuries to come. And so we might go on and on
about this Master of all vicarious masters.
Yet it is a strange and touching thing to note that even his exuberant
creativeness sometimes needed the refreshment of silent partners. When
He was at last to perform a great action in his own right He looked
about for support and found a master by proxy in Mary, the sister of
the practical Martha. But when He turned for help in uttermost need
to his best-beloved disciples He found them only negative, destructive
influences. This accounts for the anguish of his reproach: "Could ye
not watch with me one hour?"
Having never been properly recognized as such, the world's masters by
proxy have never yet been suitably rewarded. Now the world is
convinced that its acknowledged masters deserve more of a feast at
life's surprise party than they can bring along for themselves in
their own baskets. So the world bows them to the places of honor at
the banquet board. True, the invitation sometimes comes so late that
the master has long since devoured everything in his basket and is
dead of starvation. But that makes not the slightest difference to
humanity, which will take no refusal, and props the cynically amused
skeleton up at the board next the toastmaster. My point is, however,
that humanity is often forehanded enough with its invitations to give
the masters a charming time of it before they, too, into the dust
descend, _sans_ wine, _sans_ song, etc. But I do not know that it has
ever yet consciously bidden a master by proxy--as such--to the feast.
And I contend that if a man's deserts are to be measured at all by his
creativeness, then the great masters by proxy deserve seats well up
above the salt.
For is it any less praiseworthy to make a master than to make a
masterpiece? I grant that the masterpiece is the more sudden and
dramatic in appearing and can be made immediate use of, whereas the
master is slowly formed, and even then turns out unsatisfactory in
many ways. He is apt to be that well-known and inconvenient sort of
person who, when he comes in out of the rain to dress for his wedding,
abstractedly prepares to retire instead, and then, still more
abstractedly, puts his umbrella to bed and stands himself in the
corner. All the same, it is no less divine to create a master by slow,
laborious methods than to snatch a masterpiece apparently out of
nothing-at-all. In the eye of the evolutionist, man is not of any the
less value because he was made by painful degrees instead of having
been produced, a perfect gentleman, out of the void somewhat as the
magician brings forth from the empty saucepan an omelette, containing
a live pigeon with the loaned wedding-ring in its beak.
The master-makers have long been expending their share of the power.
It is high time they were enjoying their share of the glory. What an
unconscionable leveling up and down there will presently be when it
dawns upon humanity what a large though inglorious share it has been
having in the spiritually creative work of the world! In that day the
seats of the mighty individualists of science, industry, politics, and
discovery; of religion and its ancient foe ecclesiasticism; of
economy, the arts and philosophy, will all be taken down a peg by the
same knowledge that shall exalt "them of low degree."
I can imagine how angrily ruffled the sallow shade of Arthur
Schopenhauer will become at the dawn of this spiritual Commune. When
the first full notes of the soul's "Marseillaise" burst upon his
irritable eardrums, I can hear above them his savage snarl. I can see
his malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearned
increment of fame with some of those _Mitmenschen_ whom he, like a bad
Samaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil of
vitriol and the sour wine of sadness. And how like red-ragged
turkey-cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napoleon will puff out when
required to stand and deliver some of their precious credit!
There will be compensations, though, to the genius who, safely dead,
feels himself suddenly despoiled of a fullness of fame which he had
counted on enjoying in _sæcula sæculorum_. When he comes to balance
things up, perhaps he will not, after all, find the net loss so
serious. Though he lose some credit for his successes, he will also
lose some discredit for his failures. Humanity will recognize that
while the good angels of genius are the masters by proxy, the bad
angels of genius exert an influence as negative and destructive as the
influence of the others is positive and constructive.
How jolly it will be, for all but the bad angels, when we can assign
to them such failures as Browning's "The Inn Album"; Davy's contention
that iodine was not an element, and Luther's savage hounding of the
nobles upon the wretched peasants who had risen in revolt under his
own inspiration. But enough of the bad angels! Let us inter them with
this epitaph: "They did their worst; devils could do no more."
Turn we to the bright side of the situation. How delighted Keats will
be when at last the world develops a little sense of proportion, and
after first neglecting and then over-praising him, finally proposes to
give poor old Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine Sir William
Herschel's pleasure when his beloved sister Caroline begins to
receive her full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough his morbidness
and improvise a Slavic Hallelujah Chorus when his unseen patroness
comes into her own. It is true that the world has already given her
memory two fingers and a perfunctory "thank ye." This was for putting
her purse at Tschaikowsky's disposal, thus making it possible for him
to write a few immortal compositions instead of teaching mortals the
piano in a maddening conservatory. But now, glory! hallelujah! the
world is soon going to render her honor long overdue for the spiritual
support which so ably reinforced the financial.
And Sir Thomas More, that early socialist--imagine his elation! For he
will regard our desire to transfer some of his own credit to the man
in the pre-Elizabethan street as a sure sign that we are steadily
approaching the golden gates of his Utopia. For good Sir Thomas knows
that our view of heroes and hero-worship has always been too little
democratic. We have been over-inclined, with the aristocratic
Carlyle, to see all history as a procession of a few transcendent
masters surrounded, preceded, and followed by enormous herds of abject
and quite insignificant slaves. Between these slaves and the masters,
there is, in the old view, about as much similarity as exists in the
child's imagination between the overwhelming dose of castor oil and
the single pluperfect chocolate drop whereby the dose is supposed to
be made endurable. Already the idea is beginning to glimmer that
heroic stuff is far more evenly distributed throughout the throng than
we had supposed.
It is, of course, very meet and very right and our bounden duty to
admire the world's standard, official heroes. But it is wrong to
revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less
essential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the
horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their
admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the
very existence of its patient and unself-conscious propeller.
It is especially fitting that we should awake to the worth of the
master by proxy just now, when the movement for the socialization of
the world, after so many ineffectual centuries, is beginning to engage
the serious attention of mankind. Thus far, one of the chief
reactionary arguments against all men being free has been that men are
so shockingly unequal. And the reactionaries have called us to witness
the gulf that yawns, for example, between the god-like individualist,
Ysaye, and the worm-like little factory girl down there in the
audience balanced on the edge of the seat and listening to the
violin--her rapt soul sitting in her eyes. Now, however, we know that,
but for the wireless tribute of creativeness that flashes up to the
monarch of tone from that "rapt soul" and others as humble and as
rapt--the king of fiddlers would then and there be obliged to lay down
his horsehair scepter and abdicate.
We have reached a stage of social evolution where it is high time that
one foolish old fallacy should share the fate of the now partially
discredited belief that "genius will out" in spite of man or devil.
This fallacy is the supposition that man's creativeness is to be
measured solely by its visible, audible, or tangible results.
Browning's old Rabbi made a shrewd commentary on this question when he
declared:
"Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done that took the eye and had the price....
But all the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb....
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped:
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."
Yes, we are being slowly socialized, even to our way of regarding
genius; and this has been until now the last unchallenged stronghold
of individualism. We perceive that even there individualism must no
longer be allowed to have it all its own way. After a century we are
beginning to realize that the truth was in our first socially minded
English poet when he sang:
"Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle."
To-day we have in library, museum, gallery, and cathedral tangible
records of the creativeness of the world's masters. Soon I think we
are to possess--thanks to Edison and the cinematographers--intangible
records--or at least suggestions--of the modest creativeness of our
masters by proxy. Some day every son with this inspiring sort of
mother will have as complete means as science and his purse affords,
of perpetuating her voice, her changing look, her walk, her tender
smile. Thus he may keep at least a gleam of her essential creativeness
always at hand for help in the hour of need.
I would give almost anything if I could have in a storage battery
beside me now some of the electric current that was forever flowing
out of my own mother, or out of Richard Watson Gilder, or out of Hayd
Sampson, a glorious old "inglorious Milton" of a master by proxy whom
I once found toiling in a small livery-stable in Minnesota. My faith
is firm that some such miracle will one day be performed. And in our
irreverent, Yankee way we may perhaps call the captured product of the
master by proxy--"canned virtue." In that event the twenty-first
centurion will no more think of setting out on a difficult task or for
a God-forsaken environment without a supply of "canned virtue" than of
starting for one of the poles equipped with only a pocketful of
pemmican.
There is a grievous amount of latent master-making talent spoiling
to-day for want of development. Many an one feels creative energy
crying aloud within himself for vicarious spiritual expression. He
would be a master by proxy, yet is at a loss how to learn. Him I
would recommend to try learning the easiest form of the art. Let him
resolve to become a creative listener to music. Once he is able to
influence reproducers of art like pianists and singers, he can then
begin groping by analogy toward the more difficult art of influencing
directly the world's creators. But even if he finds himself quite
lacking in creativeness, he can still be a silent partner of genius if
he will relax purse-strings, or cause them to be relaxed, for the
founding of creative fellowships.
I do not know if ever yet in the history of the planet the mighty
force which resides in the masters by proxy has been systematically
used. I am sure it has never been systematically conserved, and that
it is one of the least understood and least developed of earth's
natural resources. One of our next long steps forward should be along
this line of the conservation of "virtue." The last physical frontier
has practically been passed. Now let us turn to the undiscovered
continents of soul which have so long been awaiting their Columbuses
and Daniel Boones, their country-life commissions and conferences of
governors.
When the hundredth part of you possible masters by proxy shall grow
aware of your possibilities, and take your light from under the
bushel, and use it to reinforce the flickering flame of talent at your
elbow, or to illumine the path of some unfortunate and stumbling
genius, or to heighten the brilliance of the consummate master--our
civilization will take a mighty step towards God.
Try it, my masters!
THE END
* * * * *
By Robert Haven Schauffler
THE JOYFUL HEART.
SCUM O' THE EARTH AND OTHER POEMS.
THE MUSICAL AMATEUR.
* * * * *
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
* * * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's The Joyful Heart, by Robert Haven Schauffler