VANARCHS OF ART
The people is a beast of muddy brainThat knows not its own strength, and therefore standsLoaded with wood and stone; the powerless handsOf a mere child guide it with bit and rein;One kick would be enough to break the chain.But the beast fears, and what the child demandsIt does; nor its own terror understands,Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.Most wonderful! With its own hand it tiesAnd gags itself—gives itself death and warFor pence doled out by kings from its own store.Its own are all things between earth and heaven;But this it knows not; and if one ariseTo tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.—Translated byJohn Addington Symonds.
The people is a beast of muddy brainThat knows not its own strength, and therefore standsLoaded with wood and stone; the powerless handsOf a mere child guide it with bit and rein;One kick would be enough to break the chain.But the beast fears, and what the child demandsIt does; nor its own terror understands,Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.Most wonderful! With its own hand it tiesAnd gags itself—gives itself death and warFor pence doled out by kings from its own store.Its own are all things between earth and heaven;But this it knows not; and if one ariseTo tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.—Translated byJohn Addington Symonds.
The people is a beast of muddy brainThat knows not its own strength, and therefore standsLoaded with wood and stone; the powerless handsOf a mere child guide it with bit and rein;One kick would be enough to break the chain.But the beast fears, and what the child demandsIt does; nor its own terror understands,Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.Most wonderful! With its own hand it tiesAnd gags itself—gives itself death and warFor pence doled out by kings from its own store.Its own are all things between earth and heaven;But this it knows not; and if one ariseTo tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.—Translated byJohn Addington Symonds.
The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;
One kick would be enough to break the chain.
But the beast fears, and what the child demands
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties
And gags itself—gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not; and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
—Translated byJohn Addington Symonds.
Have not all great composers been anarchs—from Bach to Strauss? At first blush the hard-plodding Johann Sebastian of the Well-tempered Clavichord seems a doubtful figure to drape with the black flag of revolt. He grew a forest of children, he worked early and late, and he played the organ in church of Sundays; but he was a musical revolutionist nevertheless.His music proves it. And he quarrelled with his surroundings like any good social democrat. He even went out for a drink during a prosy sermon, and came near being discharged for returning late. If Lombroso were cognizant of this suspicious fact, he might build a terrifying structure of theories, with all sorts of inferential subcellars. However, it is Bach’s music that still remains revolutionary. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on aristocratic patronage to play the rôle of Solitaries. But many tales are related of their refusal to lick the boots of the rich, to curve the spine of the suppliant. Both were by nature gentle men, and both occasionally arose to the situation and snubbed their patrons outrageously. Handel! A fighter, a born revolutionist, a hater of rulers. John Runciman—himself an anarchistic critic—calls Handel the most magnificent man that ever lived. He was certainly the most virile among musicians.
I recall the story of Beethoven refusing to uncover in the presence of royalty, though his companion, Goethe, doffed his hat. Theoretically I admire Beethoven’s independence, yet there is no denying that the great poet was the politer of the two, and doubtless a pleasanter man to consort with. The mythic William Tell and his contempt for Gessler’s hat were translated into action by the composer.
Handel, despite the fact that he could not boast Beethoven’s peasant ancestry, had a contemptfor rank and its entailed snobberies, that was remarkable. And his music is like a blow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was henpecked, and for the same reason as was Socrates. The Croatian composer’s wife told some strange stories of that merry little blade, her chamber-music husband. As I do not class Mendelssohn among the great composers, he need not be discussed. His music was Bach watered for general consumption. Schubert was an anarch all his short life. He is said to have loved an Esterhazy girl, and being snubbed he turned sour-souled. He drank “far more than was good for him,” and he placed on paper the loveliest melodies the world has ever heard. Beethoven was the supreme anarch of art, and put into daily practice the radicalism of his music.
Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be none the wiser. Suppose that some Russian professional supervisor of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaïkowsky preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty, preaches anarchy,puts into tone, words, gestures, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated from the convention of authority, from what Bernard Shaw would call the Old Man of the Mountain, the Government.
I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another revolutionist like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt, bitten by the Socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, a rank hater of conventions in art, though in life a silken courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky, who buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon among roses or Bakounine with his terrible prose of a nihilist. Years ago I read and doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis’s interesting “1849,” with its fallacious denial of Wagner’s revolutionary behavior. Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime inspirer. His very ringing of the church bells during the row is a symbol of his attitude. And then he ran away, luckily enough for the world of music, while his companions, Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured and imprisoned. Wagner might be called the Joseph Proudhon of composers—his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of Misery (a subtitle, by the way).
And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors, prosateurs, journalists, and musiciansmight not be included under the roof of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium, whose powerful bass hurls imprecations at the present order; Georges Eckhoud, Maurice Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier, whose eloquent bronzes are a protest against the misery of the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin, William Blake, William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrès, the late Stéphane Mallarmé, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Félicien Rops, the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose men and women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to discern across the frame of his pictures febrile visions of terror; and the great Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon, Huysmans, Heine, Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,—is not the art of these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal expression of anarchic revolt?
Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves with history; if they did, they would know that decadence has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but merely a phase of development as important as normality: Normality is stupidity, decadence is genius! Is there, he asks, a more notable case of the abnormal than the prophet of Protestantism, Martin Luther?
They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones who for the sake of the idea sacrificethe peace of thousands, as Alexander and Napoleon; or those who spoil the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths and love sin because only sin has depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first anarchist; and pain is at the bottom of all art, and with Satan, the father of illusions! It is wise to stop here, else might we become entangled in a Miltonic genealogy of the angels. I give the foregoing list to show how easy it is to twist a theory to one’s own point of view. The decadence theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski’s idea that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but normal or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg style; formerly he lectured on Chopin, and played the F sharp minor polonaise—he was possessed by the key of F sharp minor, and saw “soul-states” whenever a composer wrote in that tonality!Audition colorée, this?
Nor is there cause for alarm in the word anarchy, which means in its ideal state unfettered self-government. If we all were self-governed governments would be sinecures. Anarchy often expresses itself in rebellion against conventional art forms—the only kind of anarchy that interests me. A most signal example is Henry James. Surprising it is to find this fastidiousartist classed among the anarchs of art, is it not? He is one, as surely as was Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, or Flaubert. The novels of his later period,—What Maisie Knew, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, The Better Sort, The Sacred Fount, The Awkward Age, and the rest,—do they not all betray the revolution of Henry James from the army of the conventional? He will be no dull realist or flamboyant romantic or desiccated idealist. Every book he has written, from The Lesson of the Master and The Pattern in the Carpet, is at once a personal confession and a declaration of artistic independence. Subtle Henry James among the revolutionists! Yes, it is even so. He has seceded forever from the army of English tradition, from Bronté, Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray. He may be the discoverer of the fiction of the future.
The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds itself after reading The Wings of the Dove. Here at last is companion work to the modern movement in music, sculpture, painting. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I do not know; possibly because every drayman and pothouse politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has dipped into that well of English undefiled, the seventeenth-century literature, must realize that to-day we write parlous and bastard prose. It is not, however, splendid,stately, rhythmic prose that Mr. James essays or ever has essayed. For him the “steam-dried style” of Pater, as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered attractions. The son of a metaphysician and moralist,—I once fed full on Henry James, senior,—the brother of that most brilliant psychologist, William James, of Harvard, it need hardly be said that character problems are of more interest to this novelist than are the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, the glow and fascination of surfaces. Reared upon the minor moralities of Hawthorne, and ever an interested, curious observer of manners, the youthful James wrote books which pictured in his own exquisite orchestra of discreet tints and delicate grays the gestures, movements, and thoughts of many persons, principally those of travelled Americans. He pinned to the printed page a pronounced type in his Daisy Miller, and shall we ever forget his Portrait of a Lady, the Princess Cassimassima,—the latter not without a touch of one of Turgénieff’s bewilderingly capricious heroines. It is from the great, effortless art of the Russian master that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turgénieff represented only one form of influence, and not a continuing one. Hawthorne it was in whom Mr. James first planted his faith; the feeling that Hawthorne’s love of the moral problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed in his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a Puritan temperedby culture, by a humanism only possible in this age. Mr. James has made the odious word, and still more odious quality of cosmopolitanism, a thing of rare delight. In his newer manner, be it never so cryptic, his Americans abroad suffer a rich sea change, and from Daisy Miller to Milly Theale is the chasm of many years of temperamental culture. We wonder if the American girl has so changed, or whether the difference lies with the author; whether he has readjusted his point of vantage with the flight of time; or if Daisy Miller was but a bit of literary illusion, thepia frausof an artist’s brain. Perhaps it is her latest sister, Milly, whose dovelike wings hover about the selfish souls of her circle, that is the purer embodiment of an artistic dream.
The question that most interests me is the one I posed at the outset: Is this to be the fiction of the future, are The Wings of a Dove or The Ambassadors—the latter is a marvellous illusion—and studies of the like to be considered as prose equivalents of such moderns as Whistler, Monet, Munch, Debussy, Rodin, Richard Strauss, and the rest? In latter-day art the tendency to throw overboard superfluous baggage is a marked one. The James novel is one of grand simplifications. As the symphony has been modified by Berlioz and Liszt until it assumed the shape of the symphonic poem, and was finally made over into the guise of the tone-poem by RichardStrauss, so the novel of manners of the future must stem from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or else remain an academic imitation, a replica of Thackeray or of George Eliot’s inelastic moulds. Despite its length—“heavenly,” as Schumann would say—Sentimental Education contains in solution all that the newer novelists have since accomplished. Zola has clumsily patterned after it, Daudet found there his impressionism anticipated. All the new men, Maupassant, Huysmans, Loti, Barrès, Mirbeau, and others, discovered in this cyclopædic man what they needed; for if Flaubert is the father of realism he is also a parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to his words sound the note of symbolism. Mr. James dislikes Sentimental Education, yet he has not failed to benefit by the radical formal changes Flaubert introduced in his novel, changes more revolutionary than Wagner’s in the music-drama. I call the James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. All barren modulations from event to event are swept away—unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of a character’s name. The elliptical method James has absorbed from Flaubert; his oblique psychology is his own. All thismakes difficult reading for the reader accustomed to the cheap hypnotic passes of fiction mediums. Nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious, and one is forever turning the curve of the unexpected; yet while the story is trying in its bareness, the situations are not abnormal. You rub your eyes when you finish, for with all your attention, painful in its intensity, you have witnessed a pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation wear magic in their misty attenuations. And there is always the triumph of poetic feeling over mere sentiment. Surely Milly Theale is the most exquisite portrait in his gallery of exquisite portraiture. Her life is a miracle, and her ending supreme art. The entire book is filled with the faintly audible patter of destiny’s tread behind the arras of life, of microphonic reverberations, of a crescendo that sets your soul shivering long before the climax. It is all art in the superlative, the art of Jane Austen raised to thenth degree, superadded to Mr. James’s implacable curiosity about causes final. The question whether his story is worth telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered: what most concerns us is his manner in the telling.
The style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives gaze despairingly and from afar at verbs that come thundering in Teutonicfashion at the close of sentences leagues long. It is all very bewildering, but more bewildering is the result when you draft out in smooth, journalistic style this peculiarly individual style. Nothing remains; Mr. James has not spoken; his dissonances cannot be resolved except by his own matchless art. In a word, his meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things and it may not. Either way it is not to the point. And yet the James novels may be the fiction of the future; a precursor of the book our children and grandchildren will enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, of cheap historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. A deeper notation, a wider synthesis will, I hope, be practised. In an illuminating essay Arthur Symons places Meredith among the decadents, the dissolvers of their mother speech, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic purposes. Henry James has belonged to this group for a longer time than any of his critics have suspected; French influences, purely formal, however, have modified his work into what it now is, what the critical men call his “third manner.” In his ruthless disregard for the niceties and conventionalities of sentence structure I see, or seem to see, the effect of the Goncourts, notably in Madame Gervaisais. No matter how involved and crabbed appears his page, a character emerges from thesmoke of muttered enchantments. The chiefest fault is that his characters always speak in purest Jamesian. So do Balzac’s people. So do Dickens’s and Meredith’s. It is the fault, or virtue, of all subjective genius. Yet in his obliteration of self James recalls Flaubert; like the wind upon the troubled waters, his power is sensed rather than seen.
I have left Berlioz and Strauss for the last. The former all his life long was a flaming individualist. His books, his utterances, his conduct, prove it. Hector of the Flaming Locks, fiery speech, and crimson scores, would have made a picturesque figure on the barricades waving a red flag or casting bombs. His Fantastic Symphony is full of the tonal commandments of anarchic revolt. As Strauss is a living issue, the only one,—Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Goldmark, and the neo-Russians are only rewriting musical history,—it is best that his theme is separately considered. But I have written so much of Strauss that it is beginning to be a fascination, as is the parrot in Flaubert’s Un Cœur Simple—and this is not well. Sufficient to add that as in politics he is a Social Democrat, so in his vast and memorial art he is the anarch of anarchs. Not as big a fellow in theme-making as Beethoven, he far transcends Beethoven in harmonic originality. His very scheme of harmonization is the sign of a soul insurgent.
In The Anarchists, with its just motto, “A hundred fanatics are found to support a theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric theorem,” it cannot be denied that Lombroso has worked in futile veins. His conclusions are rash; indeed, his whole philosophy of Degeneration and Madness has a literary color rather than a sound scientific basis. But he has contrived to throw up many fertile ideas; and secretly the reading world likes to believe that its writers, artists, composers, are more or less crazy. Hence the neat little formula of artistic Mattoids, gifted men whose brains are tinged with insanity. Hazlitt, in one of his clear, strongly fibred essays, disposed of the very idea a century back, and with words of stinging scorn. Yet it is fanaticism that has given the world its artistic beauty, given it those dreams that overflow into our life, as Arthur Symons so finely said of Gérard de Nerval. And the most incomplete and unconvincing chapter of the Lombroso book is that devoted to sane men of genius. At the risk of inconsistency I feel like asserting that there are no sane men of genius.