lavishes much and to whom she sacrifices much.
Upon Greatness she has fixed her Protection.
She pours forth her Creations out of Nothingness and tells them not
whence they came nor whither they go; they are only to go; the Road she
knows.
She has few Motive Impulses—never worn out, always effective, always
manifold.
Her Drama is ever New because she ever creates new Spectators.
Life is her most beautiful Invention and Death her Ruse that she may
have much life.
She envelops Mankind in Obscurity and spurs him ever toward the Light.
She makes him dependent upon the Earth, inert and heavy; and ever shakes
him off again.
She gives Needs because she loves Action.
It is marvelous how she attains all this Movement with so little.
Every Need is a blessing, quickly satisfied, as quickly awakened again.
If she gives another Need—then it is a new source of Desire; but soon
she comes to Equipoise.
She starts every Moment upon the longest Race and every Moment is at the
Goal.
She is Futility itself: but not for us for whom she has made herself of
the greatest importance.
She lets every Child correct her, every Simpleton pronounce Judgment
upon her; she lets thousands pass callous over her seeing nothing and
her Joy is in all and she finds in all her Profit.
We obey her Laws even when we most resist them, we work with her even
when we wish to work against her.
She turns everything she gives into a Blessing; for she makes it
first—indispensable.
She delays that we may long for her, she hastens on that we may not be
sated with her.
She has no Speech nor Language; but she creates Tongues and Hearts
through which she feels and speaks.
Her Crown is Love.
Only through Love can we approach her.
She creates Gulfs between all Beings and all wish to intertwine.
She has isolated all that she may draw all together.
With a few Draughts from the Beaker of Love she compensates a Life full
of Toil.
She is Everything.
She rewards herself and punishes herself, rejoices and torments herself.
She is harsh and gentle, lovely and terrible, powerless and omnipotent.
Everything is ever present in her.
Past and Future she knows not—The Present is her Eternity.
She is generous.
I glorify her with all her Works.
She is wise and calm.
One drags no Explanation from her by Force, wrests no gift from her
which she does not freely give.
She is cunning but for a good purpose and it is best not to observe her
Craft.
She is complete and yet ever uncomplete; so as she goes on she can ever
go on.
To Everyone she appears in special Form.
She conceals herself behind a thousand Names and Terms and yet always is
the same.
She has placed me here; she will lead me hence;—
I confide myself to her.
She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her Work.
I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false; She herself has
spoken all;
All the Fault is hers; hers is all the Glory.
My Friend, the Incurable
IV.
Pro domo mea: on the vice of simplicity. John Cowper Powys—a
revelation
One of my critics sent me a New Year’s wish and admonition: “You are
hectic. Why not see things as they are? You must learn to be simple.”
This is another attempt on the part of my good-wishers to cure me, in
defiance of my resolute declaration that I cannot and do not want to be
cured. Furthermore, I am in the position of a normal lunatic who
considers the whole world, except himself, insane; not only do I refuse
to learn the art of being simple, but I regard simplicity as a vice, a
defect, a misery.
What is simplicity? I cannot define things; definitions are absurd,
limiting, simplifying. In this case perhaps I ought to adopt the method
of the school-boy who defined salt as “what makes potatoes nasty when
not applied to.” It is an English joke which I have tried with
discouraging results on the American sense of humor; it suits my purpose
nevertheless. How would this do: “Simplicity is that which makes life
dull when applied to?” No; decidedly, I cannot think in Procrustean
formulas.
Nothing is simple. What nonsense it is to synonymize this word with
“natural,” as if nature were not most complex and complicated! Neither
is the primitive savage simple, for he conceives things not “as they
are,” but through a veil of awe and mystery. Nor is the child simple,
Messrs. and Mesdames Pedagogues; you may instruct it scientifically,
tell it “plain truths” and facts, but the not-yet-educated young mind
will distrust you and will continue to live in its illusionary,
fantastic world. Not even beasts may be accused of that vice: recall
Maeterlinck’s subtle dogs and horses.
Nothing is simple, although civilization has attempted to simplify a
good deal. We have come to live in accordance with established
standards, customs, regulations; inertia and routine have replaced
impulse and initiative. Science has endeavored to explain away man’s
dreams, to do away with religion, soul, imagination, to prove away our
mysteries and wonders. Known stuff. Thus has come to be the
matter-of-fact multitude, the simple, the all-knowing, those who act and
think and feel “as everybody else does,” as they are taught and trained
by the ingenious apparatus of scientific, moral, and social
classifications, definitions, simplifications, in a word—the civilized
man.
Yet side by side with civilization, machinization, automatonization,
there is another powerful force moving the world: culture. Culture
_versus_ civilization, this is how I gauge the issue. Do not ask me to
define these words: let Professor Herrick do it. We are all civilized,
of course; especially the Germans: witness their recent astounding
achievements. Now try to apply the term “culture” to the activities of
those _Kulturtraeger_ in Belgium and before Rheims—Q. E. D.
Michael Bakounin “tried” it in 1848, when he suggested to his
fellow-revolutionists in Dresden that they place on the besieged walls
Raphael’s Madonna in order to avert the canon of the cultured Prussians;
luckily the Saxons knew better their cousins, “the blond beasts.” Pardon
this paroxysm of my old disease, Prussophobia. Bakounin, you see,
belonged to the few, to the non-simple, to those who had an insight
beyond the apparent, the fact, to the hectic, to the abnormal, if you
please; “abnormal” is the label given to such individualities by the
many, the civilized.
I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am
cultured: this is an _apologia_, a confession of my sins before my
critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not
simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation
of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of
associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions
imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that
make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to
me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy
one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying
grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing things
_creatively_, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through
multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate
them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to
be simple?”
Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few
scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise
superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half
dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the
ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange
them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become
enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible
radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde,
performed by John Cowper Powys.
Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend.
What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark
temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see
once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking
the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized,
demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in
flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral
courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered
the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment,
dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of
discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s
break-down from the shock of having discovered a heart in himself. The
lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of
the hovering spirit.
To quote Powys is as impossible as to _tell_ a symphony. It is the How
and the What and the stage background that combine in creating the
inexpressible charm of that experience. As to Oscar Wilde—well, what
does it matter whether we agree with Mr. Powys’s interpretation or not?
Wilde was my idol for a long time; I chanted dithyrambs to him and
worshiped him fanatically. Later, in the perpetual process of dethroning
gods, I observed the halo of the Prince of Paradoxes becoming paler in
my eyes. Mr. Powys rekindled in my heart the sacred flame, for a moment
at least, and gave me the rare sensation of reliving an old love.
À propos of simplicity: Wilde proclaimed artificiality as the great
virtue, and certainly lived up to his theory. Compare his short but
italicized life with the last weary years of Tolstoy that were an
attempt for “simple life.” Need I tell you which I prefer?
Muck and Music
ALFRED A. KNOPF
(_We disagree with Mr. Knopf in too many respects not to be eager to
print his interesting article._)
Dr. Karl Muck resumed charge of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the
fall of 1912. Looking over the twenty-two programs which he has given
since then one is forced to admit that his tastes are, to say the least,
peculiar. There have been frequent performances of Beethoven and Brahms
and occasional classical programs. These, perhaps, serve to keep his
feet on solid earth, but at other times he soars into the realm of
incomprehensible novelty and one can tell in advance where he will land
just about as easily as if he were a German Zeppelin headed for Paris.
One thing only seems certain—he cannot resist the virtuoso that is in
him; he gluts us with what can only be called virtuosity for its own
sake. If he offers a novelty (and when Brahms and Beethoven are taken
care of he chooses, for the most part, to offer little else) it is sure
to be some outrageously difficult affair—difficult both to play and to
listen to. One cannot reasonably object to music merely because it is
difficult to understand. The test is whether there is sufficient real
beauty in it to repay careful and painstaking attention. And my point is
simply that many of us feel that the beauty in Sibelius, Holbrooke,
Reger, Lendvai, Mraczek, Loeffler, Mahler, Schmitt and others is
disproportionately small.
The reasons for the New Yorker’s peculiar bitterness against Dr. Muck
are not difficult to discover. He makes only ten appearances each
season: the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony each gives many more
concerts. From our point of view, would it not be better if we relied on
Stransky and Damrosch (the merits of the one and the fripperies of the
other are too apparent to call for comment here) for our first hearings
of novelties? Then, if a particular composition seemed to warrant it,
the Boston Orchestra could play it for us in its usual masterly manner.
Just so long as New York worships the men from Boston in the mad
feminine way it does, just that long will it resent Dr. Muck’s playing
what it doesn’t want to hear. It was Theodore Thomas, I think, who,
discovering that people cared very little for Wagner’s music, played it
until they changed their minds. That is all very well when you have a
Wagner, but I wonder just how heartily Dr. Muck admires the music he has
recently served up to his New York audiences.
To begin with there was Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. Now Sibelius is one
of the great living composers. He is a genuine musician—by which I mean
that you do not suffer all the agonies of stage fright when you hear a
composition of his for the first time. He knows the business of his
craft and you usually feel safe in his hands, thanks to three Symphonies
and Finlandia. But how rudely this fourth symphony shakes your
confidence! Call it musicianly: show how consistently-planned and
executed it is: you won’t like it any the more. To be sure, Sibelius is
a Finn and an intensely feeling one. He gives expression to the emotions
of that curiously unhappy race. But music to appeal must be more
universal than this angry symphony of ugly moods. You can’t explain it
on cubist grounds—unless the Finns also call it disagreeable. But one
ventures the guess that they, perchance, find it richly agreeable, in
which case its performance should, by International law (or what is left
of it) be confined to Finland.
Then there was _Schlemihl_—a symphonic biography by one Emil Nikolaus
von Reznicek. This was the pièce de resistance at the evening concert.
It is scored for one piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn,
three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, double bassoon, four
horns, four trumpets, three trombones, contra bass tuba, two trumpets
off the stage, kettle drums, snare drums, bass drum and tambourine,
Glockenspiel, Cuckoo, Xylophone, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, two harps,
celesta, organ, sixteen first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve
violas, ten violoncellos, eight double basses, and a tenor voice. This
huge orchestra, plus the detailed analysis of his work furnished by the
composer, explains _Schlemihl_. It is an attempt to out-Richard Richard
Strauss, and, like almost all such attempts, it fails. Reznicek recounts
the life and fate of a modern man pursued by misfortune who goes to
destruction in the conflict between his ideal and his material
existence. A compound essentially of _Tod und Verklärung_, _Tyll
Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_, but at no time reaching the heights
attained by Strauss in all three of these tone poems. Imitators somehow
almost always fall down in two ways—they devote far too little attention
to what they want to say and far too much to their manner of saying it.
And as a not unnatural result of this, they forget, or appear to forget
at any rate, that melody is the prime essential in great music. Wagner
had melodic genius, as we all realize today, and that Strauss has it is
no longer open to very serious questioning. Reznicek hasn’t. His music
is all rather good, but none of it good enough to grip you as the finest
music does. It has no great moments but only moments of very great
sound. The house fairly quaked at some of the fortissimos. And yet
_Schlemihl_ would be pleasant enough were it not so pretentiously
bombastic and did it not last twice too long. But the mere existence of
_Ein Heldenleben_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ deprives
_Schlemihl_ of any greater claim than that.
After these two pieces Scheinpflug’s _Overture to a Comedy of
Shakespeare_ proved quite simple and enjoyable. It is a musicianly piece
of work lacking neither in melodic invention nor in skilful
orchestration. The Allegretto Graziosa, in which an old English tune
from the Fitz William Virginal Book is introduced, is wholly delightful.
And having said that much, one really has said all. The overture can
have no possible chance of immortality; it is not great music, it is not
intensely interesting or unusually delectable: one feels rather that
such compositions as this are the by-products of the daily practice of
the art of music by men of no little talent but very little genius. As
such, they demand an occasional hearing—today Scheinpflug has the stage:
tomorrow someone else—what matter who, since none are really masters.
An occasional performance of Strauss’s early Symphonic Suite, _Aus
Italien_, is probably quite justifiable because of his imposing
importance among the composers of today. When a musician attains
greatness almost everything he ever wrote becomes of interest to his
disciples. _Aus Italien_ calls for little comment. First performed in
1887, it is difficult today to realize the great uproar and rage it
evoked. Now it seems quite tame. It was indeed Strauss’s “first step
towards independence,” and it is interesting as the connecting link
between his very early work and _Don Juan_ and its successors. Its first
movement “On The Campagna” is probably the most successful, reaching as
it does gravely grey and tragic heights. A sense of oppressiveness
fairly overwhelms the listener and there are chords that are exquisite.
“Amid Rome’s Ruins” is not nearly so sustained and well-knit. The
opening of the third movement, “On the Shore of Sorrento,” depicts with
wonderful effectiveness the brilliance of an Italian sea under a
dazzling sun—a brilliance that no one who has seen it is likely ever to
forget. Strauss, for all his reputed blare and noise, handles his
orchestra pianissimo in a manner immeasurably more impressive than
anyone else of his time. (The opening bars of _Tod und Verklärung_ and
the love scene in _Don Juan_ immediately come to mind). And you can
measure a generation’s progress in orchestration by the unruffled
placidity with which people nowadays listen to the at-one-time
“brilliant, tumultuous, audacious, unusual, and bold” finale—“Neapolitan
Folk-Life.”
Even the casual concert-goer must notice the amazing duplications that
are being offered this season. For two or three seasons a particular
composition is neglected; then suddenly it is played five times in half
as many weeks. Stransky plays _Don Juan_; a week later Muck, as it were,
shows us how it ought to be played. The Symphony Society plays Brahms’s
Second Symphony and shortly thereafter Muck administers his reproach to
Damrosch. Is there any reason why conductors shouldn’t meet occasionally
and plan to avoid such ways? Muck appears the chief offender. His
program stated that he was playing Ropartz’s Fourth Symphony for the
first time in New York, but Stransky had played it only eight days
earlier. When will we hear it again?
For this Symphony deserves another hearing. The only work by a Frenchman
that Dr. Muck has offered this season, it is far more satisfying than
any of his other novelties. The restless swing of the opening theme
grips you at once—and your curiosity is piqued as the violins sing
against the “Kernel” in the horns. The Adagio is not so successful—the
theme sung by the English horn is not sufficiently melodious. You need
only compare it with the heart-breaking Largo of Dvorak’s _Aus Der Neuen
Welt_. But there are the most engaging rhythms—many of them typically
Scotch in their snap. In fact did Ropartz’s gift for melody (it is far
from negligible) approach his rhythmic talent, he might produce really
great music. As it is, this Fourth Symphony interests and gratifies. But
it is too long. Its three movements are played without a pause and one’s
attention flags at times. It seems likely that this is inevitable in
absolute music: only a program can really hold one’s attention for
almost forty minutes. Strauss does it in _Ein Heldenleben_; but _Don
Juan_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ last only about
twenty minutes each, despite the fascinating explanations that the
program notes always give of their musical contents. Ropartz’s Fourth
Symphony would be much better if played with pauses, and the sections
are so clearly indicated that this could be done without great
difficulty. But, on the whole, a hearing of his work makes one wish for
more French music, with its charming, clear-cut rhythms so typical of
the Gaul. (To my mind Ropartz’s indebtedness to César Franck is a matter
of comparative unimportance. Disciple or not, he has brought to his task
of writing music freshness and charm, a fund of melody and a quite
adequate technique).
After listening to these five compositions, what effect would
Beethoven’s _Egmont_ Overture naturally have? Relief,—pure unalloyed
relief. And it confirms one in the feeling that relief is ever going to
be one of the prime functions thrust by the musicians of today upon the
greatest master of them all. Invariably he brings us back to earth, and
as we sit listening to him in smug contentment, we can say over, without
fear of contradiction: “This after all is music.”
While Hearing a Little Song
(_Solveigs Lied_)
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
A song flew lazily
Over my upturned head.
It dropped and I could see
The ivoried limbs, the spread
Of swaying, dream-colored wings,
And barely sense the drift
Of slender, cloud-voiced rings
Of notes which seemed to lift
The oval of my soul
Up to their lingering death ...
A purplish pallor stole
Down to my leaden breath,—
It was my melted soul
And the soft death of the throng
Of notes from the slim song.
A Hard Bed
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
Warfare against suffering, this is man’s most natural fight. Suffering
is an attack upon man, upon his will to live. On this account, he has a
right to protect himself from suffering, to hold suffering far from him.
But the struggle seems futile. The host of sufferings seems illimitable.
For each old suffering which we thought we had vanquished, ten new ones
come of which we had never dreamt. Indeed, the capacity to suffer grows
with the growth of man. The feeling of pain grows as the senses become
sharper and finer. The higher a man’s development, the stronger becomes
his ability to feel life’s pains. Even if we could exchange all the
sufferings of life for pure joy and bliss, this latter life would be
suffering still, a surfeit and a search, and I doubt not we would long
for an hour of some old anguish again that would redeem us from a
pleasure now grown oppressive and intolerable.
Shall we, then, hate life? Shall we say that it were better not to be
than to be? We might, did we not find strength and comfort in and with
every suffering,—did we not allow every item or event of experience the
democratic right to a trial by a jury of its peers and to our trust that
it is worth while until it shall prove that it is not,—did we not
experience that up from the abyss of every suffering, painful as it
seems, a path leads to a summit where all sufferings are only shadows of
a blinding flood and fullness of light; that all articulate and fit into
the eternal process of an upward-striving life.
There is no question but that this is the workable view of life to
present to the heart of man, draining, as one must, pain’s bitter cup
for one’s self. But the sufferings one feels for others, sufferings in
which one’s love, expressed in sympathy and pity, is complicated—this is
another matter, here one may fall into mischievous aberration. There can
be no doubt that the pain of our pity for others may be more painful
than the pain of our own lives. In the throes of such pity, the woes of
our own lives may seem small indeed, and finally fade away. To behold a
human being that is deeply dear to us suffer is worse than it would be
to suffer in his place. And if the man of moral elevation of soul feels
equal in the end to all that brings pain to his own life, all the more
defenseless does he feel with regard to the great all-prevailing misery
which, in pity, celebrates its triumphal entry into his heart. Love is
our noblest human power, and it is love that lets us feel such misery,
it is love whose wealth of recognition and experience renders it
possible for us to descry sorrow’s abysses, to anticipate them even in
advance of the poor sufferer himself.