"'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop Flaubert! Some night I'll take you over to Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to teach you what brilliance and Bovarysmereally mean.'" I was shocked at this blasphemy, and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to keep my temper."But isn't Mr. Swift joking?""Mr. Swift is always joking," was the far from reassuring reply. To fill in the interval I called for the waiter. The ghosts again demanded cognac. Stendhal looked like the caricature by Félicien Rops, in which his little pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose, and protuberant eyes are shown dominating some strange Cosmopolis of 1932. In life—or death—he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in the sad existence of the mighty prose master, but he smiled superciliously when I reproached him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic fantasy of the gods of Greece, alive, and still in hiding, was not precisely convincing in the present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion ensued, and finally I arose and said good night to my very new and very old friends. Swift's picture of the Struldbrugs was realised, and it was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should never be seen; in their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated humour; Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my dismay."You're disappointed. So sorry!" said Swift ironically. "At first I was vastly intrigued at the opportunity of talking with one of youmodern persons, but I see I'm mistaken—ha! Beyle, what d'ye say?"Stendhal pondered. "Cimarosa, Rossini, and Haydn I knew. Correggio I admire, but who was Chopin?"Stung to anger, I retorted: "Yours is the loss, not Chopin's." Whereat Michael, the bartender, merrily laughed, and the company joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My head was on the chopping-block, and Stendhal was the executioner. Forgetting the respect due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger under Stendhal's upturned nostrils: "You may be a couple of impostors for all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily I dislike your petty carping criticisms. Better oblivion than immortality for your lean and sinister souls." Again hysterical laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful accents, as if his vanity had been wounded:"This saucy Yahoo reads our books and believes in them, but when we talk he doubts us. As Sam Johnson used to say, 'The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.'"Stendhal boomed out: "He is dead himself but doesn't know it yet. All critics are stillborn. Butwelive on for ever. Garçon! some more brandy."Out on crowded, expressive Broadway I stood, dazed and irritated. After all the palaverof authors, it is the critic who has the last word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the originality of the idea, I went my wooden way.CHAPTER XIIION REREADING MALLOCKIt seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's rôle was that of a philosophical novelist and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of castigation, irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned in the seventies—he occupied then aplace midway between Bentham and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society, therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side; witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of print—which is equivalent to saying, out of mind.With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste, a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type. Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the intrigueless intense, and the characterisation more human. The unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction, but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these qualities would make him unpopular in our present century.What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew Arnold, Professor Jowett—a fine character etching—Huxley, Tyndall, Carlyle, Pater—rather cruelly treated—Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs. Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane—how theauthor juggles with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The décor is always gorgeous—Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls, charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs. Norham, "celebrated authoress and upholder of the people." One of the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins—a complete picture-gallery may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry, tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman," lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a daguerreotype.But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such polemics. In the moral world there are analogies to the physical, and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications, its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries, the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl—now reduced to the exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Büchner, and at the base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your gaseous invertebrate god? Surelythere is sadly required in the cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar Saltus as its first incumbent.Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis, the modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms in molecules—a renewed geology, astronomy, palæontology, biology, embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become another organ. Ramon yCajal, the Spanish biologist, with his neurons—little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory nerves—has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of metaphysicians.That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?" may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual. And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells, else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr. Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities. Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content that comes withsound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will. But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without vision, old as well as young limp through life.Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry;from Werther to Sanine it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life." Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, æsthetic and ethical; nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable annihilation. The holy name of Altruism—social emotion made functional—has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the subconscious—what else is his intuition?—is set before the lovers of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't reason! Just dream! The poet Rogersreplied to a lady who asked his religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr. Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still worth rereading.CHAPTER XIVTHE LOST MASTER"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared. "You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We sat still, hoping against hope."See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not fair." "Ididn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown? Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's Frenhofer—is that the chap's name?—than Browning's Waring. He is the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but itrose afar.'" "Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter, now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle. You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us westward until we reached a warehouse—gloomy, in need of repair, yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway, traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so. Approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most magnificent I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance. If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of this stranger. We turned anxiously to to our friend. He had disappeared. What atrick to play at such a moment. "Who do you wish?" rumbled a mellow voice. "Albertus Magnus?" we timidly inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute. "Ah!" was the reply. Silence. Then, "Come in, please; don't stumble over the canvases." We followed the old man, whose stature was not as heroic as his head; and we did not fail to stumble, for the way was obscure, and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets, wretched furniture, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room that doubtless concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by another door, he explained; and, without noticing our discontented air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the brain that came out of his wonderful eyes, were as young as to-morrow."Isn't he a corker?" irreverently demanded our friend. "He is not even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he calls himself an idealist." The old painter smiled. "I suppose I have been described as Waring to you, because Iknew Robert Browning. I did vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or kingship, like the original Alfred Domett, called Waring in the poem. But when I returned from Italy I was a stranger in a strange land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri. Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time fashions change in art as in dress, and nowadays no one understands me, and, with the exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines; his line is as beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love gold more than didFacino Caneof Balzac. Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters. Tell me, do you love Titian?" We swore allegiance to the memory of Titian. The artist seemed pleased. "You younger men are devoted to Velasquez and Hals—too much so. Great as painters, possibly greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil like runaway balloons. They miss height and depth. Their colour never sings like Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of their sitters, but never the secret surprised by the Italian. I sat at his feet, before his canvases, fifty years, and I'm further away than ever—" Our friend interrupted this rhapsody."Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas, don't you think you are playing on your visitors' nerves, just toset them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably noticed that you had a trump of your own up your sleeve. You love Titian. Well, admit it. You don't paint like him, your colour scheme is something else, and what you are after you only know yourself. Come! trot out your Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or, better still, that landscape with a river-bank and shepherds." The old man gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light, placed a big easel in proper position, fumbled among the canvases that made the room smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath. "Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt, was the inspiration," murmured the master.The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays, so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown. Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned the restless soul of Vanderdeckenpacing his quarter-deck, cursing the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend, the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then, credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all, the grip! Only Turner—" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque; then followed apocalyptic visions,in which the solid earth staggered through the empyrean after a black sun—a magnetic disk doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished." Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt, faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the whites—ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche hermine"—the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows—what were all these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity" obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare as a lyric by Shelley or the playing ofFrédéric Chopin.What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he neverexhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint. His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus—" "But I must," expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer. While I go nowhere—I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years. What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we sneered.Then we crossed over to the club and talkedart far into the night. Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who knows? As the Russians say—Avos!CHAPTER XVTHE GRAND MANNER IN PIANOFORTE PLAYINGHere lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats. Despite cunning reproductive contrivances the executive musician has no more chance of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is brief, but brilliant. Glory, then, is largely a question of memory, and when the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away then he has no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not interpretative, art endures. Better be "immortal" while you are alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters mundane.Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws of Anton Rubinstein caress the keyboard shall never forget the music. He is the greatest pianist in my long and varied list. Think ofhis delivery of the theme at the opening of Beethoven's G major concerto; or in that last page of Chopin's Barcarolle. It was no longer the piano tone, but the sound of distant waters and horns from elf-land. A mountain of fire blown skyward, when the elemental in his profoundly passionate temperament broke loose, he could roar betimes as gently as a dove. Yet, when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining pupils of Chopin declared that he was brutal in his treatment of their master. He played Rubinstein, not Chopin, said Georges Mathias to me. Mathias knew, for he had heard the divine Frédéric play. Nevertheless, Rubinstein played Chopin, the greater and the miniature, as no one before or since.To each generation its music-making. The "grand manner" in piano-playing has almost vanished. A few artists still live who illustrate this manner; you may count them on the fingers of one hand. Rosenthal, D'Albert, Carreño, Friedheim—Reisenaur had the gift, too—how many others? Paderewski I heard play in Leipsic in 1912 at a Gewandhaus concert under the baton of the greatest living conductor, Arthur Nikisch, and I can vouch for the plangent tone quality and the poetic reading he displayed in his performance of that old war-horse, the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore, my admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer was considerably increased after hearing his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikisch.How far away we were from Manru. Joseffy, who looked upon Paderewski, as a rare personality, told me that the Polish Fantasy for piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its seeming simplicity in figuration. "Only the composer," enthusiastically exclaimed Joseffy, "could have made it so wonderful."But the grand manner, has it become too artificial, too rhetorical? It has gone out of fashion with the eloquence of the old histrions, probably because of the rarity of its exponents; also because it no longer appeals to a matter-of-fact public. Liszt was the first. He was dithyrambic. He was a volcano; Thalberg—his one-time rival—possessed all the smooth and icy perfections of Nesselrode pudding. Liszt in reality never had but two rivals close to his throne; Karl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton Rubinstein, the Russian. Von Bülow was all intellect; his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms were cerebral, not emotional. He had the temperament of the pedant. I first heard him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of Music. He introduced the Tschaikovsky B flat minor concerto, with B. J. Lang directing the orchestra, a quite superfluous proceeding, as Von Bülow gave the cues from the keyboard and distinctly cursed the conductor, the band, the composition, and his own existence, as befitted a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh! he could be fiery enough, though in his playing of the Romantics the fervent note was absent; buthis rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible. You need only recall the pungency of his reading of Beethoven's Scherzo in the Sonata Opus 31, No. 3. It was staccato as a hail-storm. Two years later, in Paris, I heard the same concerto played by Nicholas Rubinstein at the Trocadéro (Exposition, 1878), the very man who had first flouted the work so rudely that Tschaikovsky, deeply offended, changed the dedication to Von Bülow.Anton Rubinstein displayed the grand manner. His style was a compound of tiger's blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip about his "false notes" (he wrote a Study on False Notes, as if in derision), he was, with Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was not always in practice and most of the music he wrote for his numerous tours was composed in haste and repented of at leisure. It is now almost negligible. The D minor concerto reminds one of a much-traversed railroad-station. But Rubinstein the virtuoso! It was in 1873 I heard him, but I was too young to understand him. Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he gave his Seven Historical Recitals in Paris and I attended the series, not once, but twice. He played many composers, but for me he seemed to be playing the Book of Job, the Apocalypse, and the Scarlet Sarafan. He had a ductile tone like a golden French horn—Joseffy's comparison—and the power and passion of the man have never been equalled. Neither Tausig norLiszt did I hear, worse luck, but there were plenty of witnesses to tell me of the differences. Liszt, it seems, when at his best, was both Rubinstein and Tausig combined, with Von Bülow thrown in. Anton Rubinstein played every school with consummate skill, from the iron certitudes of Bach's polyphony to the magic murmurs of Chopin and the romantic rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann. Beethoven, too, he interpreted with intellectual and emotional vigour. Yet this magnificent Calmuck—he wasn't of course, though he had Asiatic features—grew weary of his instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the stars in their courses by composing. But his name is writ in ivory, and not in enduring music.Scudo said that when Sigismund Thalberg played, his scales were like perfectly strung pearls falling on scarlet velvet; with Liszt the pearls had become red hot. This extravagant image is of value. We have gone back to the Thalbergian pearls, for too much passion in piano-playing is voted bad taste to-day. Nuance, then colour, and ripe conception. Technique for technique's sake is no longer a desideratum; furthermore, as Felix Leifels wittily remarked: "No one plays the piano badly"; just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably. Mr. Leifels, as a veteran contrabassist and at present manager of the Philharmonic Society, ought to be an authority on the subject; the old Philharmonic has had all thepianists, from H. C. Timm, in 1844—a Hummel concerto—to Thalberg and Rubinstein, Joseffy, Paderewski, and Josef Hofmann. Truly the standard of virtuosity is higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals with programmes that are staggering. The Chopin concertos now occupy the position, technically speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn concertos. Every one plays Chopin as a matter of course, and, with a few exceptions horribly. Yes, Mr. Leifels is right; no one plays the piano badly, yet new Rubinsteins do not materialise.The year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, was a memorable one for visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von Bülow, but also two beautiful women, one at the apex of her artistic career, Annette Essipoff (or Essipowa) and Teresa Carreño, just starting on her triumphal road to fame. Essipowa was later the wife of Leschetizky—maybe she was married then—and she was the most poetic of all women pianists that I have heard. Clara Schumann was as musical, but she was aged when I listened to her. Essipowa played Chopin as only a Russian can. They are all Slavs, these Poles and Russians, and no other nation, except the Hungarian, interpret Chopin. Probably the greatest German virtuoso was Adolf Henselt, Bavarian-born, though a resident of Petrograd. He had a Chopin-like temperament and played thatmaster's music so well that Schumann called him the "German Chopin." Essipowa, I need hardly tell you, communicated no little of her gracious charm to Paderewski. He learned more from her plastic style than from all the precepts of Leschetizky.On a hot night in 1876, and in old Association Hall, I first saw and heard Teresa (then Teresita) Carreño. I say "saw" advisedly, for she was a blooming girl, and at the time shared the distinction with Adelaide Neilson and Mrs. Scott-Siddons of being one of the three most beautiful women on the stage. Carreño, still vital, still handsome, and still the conquering artist, till her death last spring, was in that far-away day fresh from Venezuela, a pupil of Gottschalk and Anton Rubinstein. She wore a scarlet gown, as fiery as her playing, and when I wish to recall her I close my eyes and straightway as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear her; for her playing has always been scarlet to me, as Rubinstein's is golden, and Joseffy's silvery.The French group I have heard, beginning with Theodore Ritter, who came to New York in company with Carlotta Patti; Planté—still living and over eighty, so I have been told by M. Phillipp; Saint-Saëns, whom I first saw and heard at the Trocadéro, Paris, with his pupil, Montigny-Remaury; Clotilde Kleeberg, Diémer, Risler; the venerable Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin; Raoul Pugno, who wasveritably a pugnacious pianist, Cécile Chaminade, Marie Jaell, and her corpulent husband, Alfred Jaell.Eugen d'Albert, surely the greatest of Scotch pianists—he was born at Glasgow, though musically educated in London—is another heaven-stormer. I heard him at Berlin some years ago, in Philharmonic Hall, and people stood up in their excitement—Liszt redivivus!It was the grand manner in its most chaotic form. A musical volcano belching up lava, scoriæ, rocks, hunks of Beethoven—the Appassionata Sonata it happened to be—while the infuriated little Vulcan threw emotional fuel into his furnace. The unfortunate instrument must have been a mass of splintered steel, wood, and wire after the musical giant had finished. It was a magnificent spectacle, and the music glorious. Eugen d'Albert, whether he is or isn't the son of Karl Tausig—as Weimar gossip had it; Weimar, when in the palmy days every other pianist you met was a natural son of Liszt—or else pretended to be one—has more than a moiety of that virtuoso's genius. He is a great artist, and occasionally the magic fire flares and lights up the firmament of music.I think it was in 1879 that Rafael Joseffy visited us for the first time; but I didn't hear him till 1880. The reason I remember the date is that this greatly beloved Hungarianmade his début at old Chickering Hall (then at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street); but I saw him in Steinway Hall. Another magician with a peculiarly personal style. In the beginning you thought of the aurora borealis, shooting-stars, and exquisite meteors; a beautiful style, though not a classic interpreter then. With the years Joseffy deepened and broadened. The iridescent shimmer was never absent. No one played the E minor Concerto of Chopin as did Joseffy. He had the tradition from his beloved master, Tausig, as Tausig had it from Chopin by way of Liszt. (Tausig always regretted that he had never heard Chopin play.) Joseffy, in turn, transmitted the tradition to his early pupil, Moriz Rosenthal, in whose répertoire it is the most Chopinesque of all his performances.And do you remember the Chevalier de Kontski, Carl Baermann, Franz Rummel, S. B. Mills—who introduced here so many modern concertos—the huge Norwegian Edmund Neupert, who lived at the Hotel Liszt, next door to Steinway Hall, Constantin von Sternberg, and Max Vogrich, the Hungarian with the Chopin-like profile?In the same school as Joseffy is the capricious De Pachmann; with Joseffy I sat at the first recital of this extraordinary Russian in Chickering Hall (1890). Joseffy, with his accustomed generosity of spirit—he was the most sympathetic and human of great virtuosi—at oncerecognised the artistic worth of Vladimir de Pachmann. This last representative of a school that included the names of Hummel, Cramer, Field, Thalberg, Chopin, the little De Pachmann (he was then bearded like a pirate) captivated us. It was all miniature, without passion or pathos or the grand manner, but in its genre his playing was perfection; the polished perfection of an intricately carved ivory ornament. De Pachmann played certain sides of Chopin incomparably; capriciously, even perversely. In a small hall, sitting on a chair that precisely suited his fidgety spirit, then, if in the mood, a recital by him was something unforgettable.After De Pachmann—Paderewski. Paderewski, the master-colourist, the grand visionary, whose art is often strained, morbid, fantastic. And after Paderewski? Why, Leopold Godowsky, of course. He belongs to the Joseffy-De Pachmann, not to the Rubinstein-Josef Hofmann, group. I once called him the superman of piano-playing. Nothing like him, as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano-playing since Chopin. He is an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a contrapuntalist. Bach and Chopin. The spirit of the German cantor and the Polish tone-poet in curious conjunction. His playing is transcendental; his piano compositions the transcendentalism of the future. That way, else retrogression! All has been accomplished inideas and figuration. A new synthesis—the combination of seemingly disparate elements and styles—with innumerable permutations, he has accomplished. He is a miracle-worker. The Violet Ray. Dramatic passion, flame, and fury are not present; they would be intruders on his map of music. The piano tone is always legitimate, never forced. But every other attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten independent voices recreating the ancient polyphonic art of the Flemings. He is like a Brahma at the piano. Before his serene and all-embracing vision every school appears and disappears in the void. The beauty of his touch and tone are only matched by the delicate adjustment of his phrasing to the larger curve of the composition. Nothing musical is foreign to him. He is a pianist for pianists, and I am glad to say that the majority of them gladly recognise this fact.One evening Godowsky was playing his piano sonata with its subtle intimations of Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and its altogether Godowskian colour and rhythmic life—he is the greatest creator of rhythmic values since Liszt, and that is a "large order"—when he was interrupted by the entrance of Josef Hofmann. Godowsky and Hofmann are as inseparable as were Chopin and Liszt. Heine called the latter pair the Dioscurii of music. In the Godowsky apartment stood several concert grands. Hofmann nonchalantly removedhis coat and, making an apology for disturbing us, he went into another room and soon we heard him slowly practising. What do you suppose? Some new concerto with new-fangled bedevilments? O Sancta Simplicitas! This giant, if ever there was one, played at a funereal tempo the octave passages in the left hand of the Heroic Polonaise of Chopin (Opus 53). Every schoolgirl rattles them off as "easy," but, with the humility of a great artist, Hofmann practised the section as if it were still a stumbling-block. De Lenz records that Tausig did the same.Later, Conductor Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera dropped in, and several pianists and critics followed, and soon the Polish pianist was playing for us all some well-known compositions by a certain Dvorsky; also an extremely brilliant and effective concert study in C minor by Constantin von Sternberg. From 1888, when he was a wonder-child here, Jozio Hofmann's artistic development has been logical and continuous. His mellow muscularity evokes Rubinstein. No one plays Rubinstein as does this Harmonious Blacksmith—and with the piety of Rubinstein's pet pupil. I once compared him to a steam-hammer, whose marvellous sensitivity enables it to crack an egg-shell or crush iron. Hofmann's range of tonal dynamics is unequalled, even in this age of perfected piano technique. He is at home in all schools, and his knowledge is enormous.At moments his touch is as rich as a Kneisel Quartet accord.At the famous Rudolph Schirmer dinner, given in 1915, among other distinguished guests there were nearly a score of piano virtuosi. The newspapers humorously commented upon the fact that there was not a squabble, though with so many nationalities one row, at least, might have been expected. As a matter of fact, if any discussion had arisen it would not have been over politics, but about the fingering of the Double-Note Study in G sharp minor of Chopin, so difficult to play slowly—the most formidable of argument-breeding questions among pianists. A parterre of pianists, indeed, some in New York because of the war, while Paderewski and Rosenthal were conspicuous by their absence. Think of a few names: Joseffy—he died several months later, Gabrilowitsch, Hofmann, Godowsky, Carl Friedberg, Mark Hambourg—a heaven-stormer in the Rubinstein-Hercules manner—Leonard Borwick, Alexander Lambert, Ernest Schelling, Stojowski, Percy Grainger—the young Siegfried of the Antipodes—August Fraemcke, Cornelius Ruebner, and—another apparition in the world of piano-playing—Ferruccio Busoni.This Italian, the greatest of Italian piano virtuosi—the history of which can claim such names as Domenico Scarlatti, Clementi, Fumigalli, Martucci, Sgambati—is also a composer who has set agog conservative critics by theboldness of his imagination. As an artist he may be said to embody the intellectuality of Von Bülow, the technical brilliancy of the Liszt group. Busoni is eminently a musical thinker.America probably will never again harbour such a constellation of piano talent. I sometimes wonder if the vanished generation of piano artists played much better than those men. Godowsky, Hofmann, the lyric and most musical Harold Bauer; the many-sided, richly endowed, and charming Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Hambourg, Busoni, and Paderewski are not often matched. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel (not a negro minstrel, for a chalk-burner is necessarily white), Mme. Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist! The contemporary piano hierarchy might be thus classed: Josef Hofmann, a king; Paderewski, a poet; Godowsky, a prophet; Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, a sibyl; D'Albert, a titan; Busoni, a philosopher; Rosenthal, a hero, and Alexander Lambert—a pianist. Well, Mr. Lambert may be congratulated on such an ascription; Doehler was a great technician in his day, and when the "friend of pianists" (Lambert could pattern after Schindler, whose visiting-card read: "l'Ami de Beethoven") masters his modesty an admirable piano virtuoso is revealed. So let him be satisfied with the honourable appellation of "pianist." He is in good company.And the ladies! I am sorry I can't say, "place aux dames!" Space forbids. I've heard them all, from Arabella Goddard to Mme. Montigny-Remaury (in Paris, 1878, with her master, Camille Saint-Saëns); from Alide Topp, Marie Krebs, Anna Mehlig, Pauline Fichtner, Vera Timinoff, Ingeborg Bronsart, Madeline Schiller, to Julia Rivé-King; from Cecilia Gaul and Svarvady-Clauss to Anna Bock; from the Amazon, Sofie Menter, the most masculine of Liszt players, to Adèle Margulies, Yoland Maero, and Antoinette Szumowska-Adamowska; from Ilonka von Ravacsz to Ethel Leginska—who plays like a house afire; from Helen Hopekirk to Katharine Goodson; from Clara Schumann to Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Olga Samaroff, and the newly come Brazilian Guiomar Novaes—the list might be unduly prolonged.I heard Paderewski play last spring. Surely he has now the "grand manner" in all its dramatic splendour, and without its old-fashioned pretentious rhetoric. Nor has he lost the lusciousness of his touch—a Caruso voice on the keyboard—or the poetic intensity of his Chopin and Schumann interpretations. He is still Prince Charming.Not only do I fear prolixity, but the confusing of critical values, for I write from memory, and I admit that I've had more pleasure from the "intimate" pianists than from the forgers of tonal thunderbolts; that is—Rubinstein excepted—from such masters in miniatureas Joseffy, Godowsky, Carl Heyman, De Pachmann, and Paderewski. I find in the fresh, sparkling playing of Mischa Levitski, Benno Moiseivich, and Guiomar Novaes high promise for their future. The latter came here unheralded and as the pupil of that sterling virtuoso and pedagogue, Isidor Phillipp of the Paris Conservatory.It is noteworthy that only Chopin, Liszt, and Von Bülow were Christian born among the supreme masters of the keyboard; the rest (with a few exceptions) were and are members of that race whose religious tenets specifically incline them to the love and practice of music.CHAPTER XVIJAMES JOYCEWho is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn, who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good health—his eyes trouble him—and that he was once a student in theology, but soon gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of the new group of young Irish writers who see their country and countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the most beautiful and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the Isle of Saints for those iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who happens to write English, though he often thinks in French; Bernard Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the Londoners; while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic, and both poets. Yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen, who mingles angels' pin-feathers with rainbow gold; a magic decoction of which we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet, and a realist of the De Maupassant breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as truthful as Tchekov, and as grey—thatTchekov compared with whose the "realism" of De Maupassant is romantic bric-à-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of middle-class life, and he sometimes suggests the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a hell of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the heart of the peasantry, and Yeatsand Lady Gregory brought back from the hidden spaces fairies and heroes.Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their unhappy temperaments.The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive of what follows; also a title that seems to have emerged from the catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college, from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's apron-strings to coarse revelry, thehero is put to the torture by art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked. This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tells his student friend about his father. These were his attributes: "A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a story-teller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present a praiser of his own past." He could talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a turkey—as they say up Cork way. The portrait is well-nigh perfect. The wild goose over again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of riotous living he wastransformed into a militant Catholic. The reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist, but his mind was too speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing. To analyse the sensibility of a soul mounting on flaming pinions to God is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not again sink into the slough of Dublin low life. Cranly, the student, saw through the hole in his sceptical millstone. "It is a curious thing, do you know," Cranly said dispassionately, "how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." A profound remark. Once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic, particularly if you are born in Ireland.Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He neither abuses nor praises. He is evidently out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of the Jesuits with affection and admiration. The sermons preached by them during the retreat are models. They are printed in full—strange material for a novel. And he can show us the black hatred caused by the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with verity. At a Christmas dinner the argument between Dante (a certain Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man andwoman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles, watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his temper—he has had several tumblers of mountain dew and is a little "how come you so?" He bursts forth: "No God in Ireland! We have had too much God in Ireland! Away with God!" "Blasphemer! Devil!" screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face. "Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!" The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. "Poor Parnell!" he cried loudly. "My dead King." Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab.There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful. Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable to the average reader. There is relief in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr. Joyce. There is no ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and theportrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity—as an artistic performance—and its passionate personal note, is bound to give offence in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish; not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales entitled Dubliners reveals a wider range, a practised technical hand, and a gift for etching character that may be compared with De Maupassant's. A big comparison, but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as The Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or Two Gallants, and be convinced that we do not exaggerate.Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery. Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes. From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to Dalkey or Drumcondra; from the Monument to Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip is unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with Dublinesque anecdotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of the town. The slackers who pester servant-girls for their shillings to spend on whisky; the young man in the boarding-house who succumbs to the "planted" charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the matrimonial trap—only De Maupassant could better the telling of this too commonplace story; the middle-aged man, parsimonious as to his emotions and the tragic ending of a love-affair that had hardly begun; and the wonderfully etched plate called TheDead with its hundred fine touches of comedy and satire—these but prove the claim of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he could say—oh, terrifying irony!—that "mankind is not necessary" in the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he may become mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of "life's more bitter flavours." Insipid novelists are legion. He is Huysmans's little brother in his flair for disintegrating character. But yet an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a vision that too often vanishes before he can pin its beauty on canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humour of such a story as Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, which would bring to a Tammany heeler what Henry James called "the emotion of recognition." Ah! the wild goose. The flying dream.CHAPTER XVIICREATIVE INVOLUTIONIsrael Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to theStrand Magazineand later reunited in a book bearing the happy title Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers as being significant chiefly in their self-revelation. What they tell of themselves is of more value than what they write about. Whether Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes widely after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L. Williams, M. S., with an apposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams deals with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension of Space (what we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalised). Speculative as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter, a Christian Scientist, or a member of any of the other queer rag-tag and bobtail beliefs and superstitions—fortune-telling, astrology, selling "futures" in the next life, table-rapping, and such like. Cora Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the brilliant, unhappy Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then, are not verbal wind-pudding, but have a basisof mathematics and the investigations of the laboratory, where "chemists and physicists are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity."We have always enjoyed the idea of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. The fact that it is anxin the plotting of mathematicians in general does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J. K. F. Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved to his own satisfaction the existence of a Fourth Dimension when he turned an india-rubber ball inside out without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable melancholy. No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's Flatland, or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford, you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion, squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of positivism craves more spiritual nourishment to-day. Hasn't the remarkable mathematician Henri Poincaré (author of Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method) declared that between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary elimination which have necessitatedsuch inferences? Note the word "free"; free-will is restored to its old and honourable estate in the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron determinism of the seventies and eighties has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Büchner and Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly Intuition—a dangerous vocable—rules over mere mental processes. (There is, as George Henry Lewes asserted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox:i. e., there are more false facts than false theories current.) Science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and relativity of things—no mean intellectual feat, by the way—but not of the things themselves; one must join, adds Poincaré, to the faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy. In a word, Intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable, and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann are as legitimate as Euclid's. And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles now?Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension. Time may be in two dimensions. Heraclitus before Bergson compared Time to a river always flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged from this stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, would it not signify that Time has two dimensions. And where does music stand in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical structure and melodywith its horizontal flow proof that music is another dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion of the Fourth Spatial Dimension is a spiritual one. Creative Involution is to supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All roads lead to religion. Expel religion forcibly and it returns under strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions. Yet religion without dogma is like a body without a skeleton—it can't be made to stand upright.Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor, just as philosophy is the diversion of professors. Modern science, said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's stage when it denied religion. But matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to revise the conclusions of his once famous Belfast address in the presence of radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the essential thing is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of form. From a macrocosmic monster our gods are become microcosmic; god may be a molecule, a cell. A god to put in a phial; thus far has the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," says Salomon Reinach in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations in vain. All is vanity, even doctrinalfluctuations. Goethe has warned us that "Man is not born to solve the mystery of Existence; but he must nevertheless attempt it, in order that he may learn how to keep within the limits of the Knowable." Goethe detested all "thinking about thought." Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation.Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental workings of a jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a jury-box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment is, as a rule, that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant humour) fashion, adding that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the Great, candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees salvation for the single soul in the collective soul—not necessarily socialistic—nevertheless warns parents against the dangers in our public-school system, where the individuality of the child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by class teaching. Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the ego. Yet to collective consciousness may belong the future. It is all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification, the result, and the prop of limited class interests. (This was years ago.) Stately,sedate, stable is the class that won't tolerate war; a class of moral lollipops. War we must have; it is one of the prime conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetich, taboo is the basis of all superstitions, so the superstition of yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's Golden Bough—James Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a glass to hold it; and if patriotism is a crime of lèse-majesty against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and patriotism are precious essences in the scheme of life, and we shall always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a timely one. At school our children's souls are clogged with bricks and mortar, instead of being buoyant and individual.She quotes—and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt quotations—with evident approbation from Some Neglected Factors in Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English thinker: "Organic life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that one on which we ourselves, the organisms of to-day, and the human societies to which we belong, are swept onward. Here we must necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm which has brought life so far will carry it on to still greater heights in the unknown future?"Rhythm, measured flow, is the shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of plant and ghost. "I teach you Beyond-Man (superman); Man is something that will be surpassed ... once man was ape, and is ape in a higher degree than any ape.... Man is a rope connecting animal and Beyond-Man." "Believe that which thou seest not," cries Flaubert in his marvellous masque of mythologies ancient and modern, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same centuries before the Frenchman: Believe what is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is the price we pay for cognition.Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though she appreciates his plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to answer Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott's three questions: "1. Bergson says, 'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.' Where is the specimen on which this allegation is founded? 2. Consciousness is to some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson thinks he is disproving a crude theory of localisation of mental qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life that intellect can never give. Will Professor Bergson furnish instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where intellect has failed?" (From ModernScience and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, 1912.) These "metaphysical curiosities," as they are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lankester in his preface to this solidly reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of numerous persons, dilettantes, with a craving for an embellished theory of the Grand Perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the air—which, like the earth, hath bubbles, as was observed by the greatest of poets—she plants her feet on tangible affirmations. And to have faith we must admit the Illative sense of John Henry Newman. Thus "the wheel is come full circle." Creative Involution will please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author somersaults in the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother earth.
"'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop Flaubert! Some night I'll take you over to Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to teach you what brilliance and Bovarysmereally mean.'" I was shocked at this blasphemy, and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to keep my temper.
"But isn't Mr. Swift joking?"
"Mr. Swift is always joking," was the far from reassuring reply. To fill in the interval I called for the waiter. The ghosts again demanded cognac. Stendhal looked like the caricature by Félicien Rops, in which his little pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose, and protuberant eyes are shown dominating some strange Cosmopolis of 1932. In life—or death—he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in the sad existence of the mighty prose master, but he smiled superciliously when I reproached him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic fantasy of the gods of Greece, alive, and still in hiding, was not precisely convincing in the present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion ensued, and finally I arose and said good night to my very new and very old friends. Swift's picture of the Struldbrugs was realised, and it was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should never be seen; in their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated humour; Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my dismay.
"You're disappointed. So sorry!" said Swift ironically. "At first I was vastly intrigued at the opportunity of talking with one of youmodern persons, but I see I'm mistaken—ha! Beyle, what d'ye say?"
Stendhal pondered. "Cimarosa, Rossini, and Haydn I knew. Correggio I admire, but who was Chopin?"
Stung to anger, I retorted: "Yours is the loss, not Chopin's." Whereat Michael, the bartender, merrily laughed, and the company joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My head was on the chopping-block, and Stendhal was the executioner. Forgetting the respect due to such illustrious shades, I shook my finger under Stendhal's upturned nostrils: "You may be a couple of impostors for all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily I dislike your petty carping criticisms. Better oblivion than immortality for your lean and sinister souls." Again hysterical laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful accents, as if his vanity had been wounded:
"This saucy Yahoo reads our books and believes in them, but when we talk he doubts us. As Sam Johnson used to say, 'The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.'"
Stendhal boomed out: "He is dead himself but doesn't know it yet. All critics are stillborn. Butwelive on for ever. Garçon! some more brandy."
Out on crowded, expressive Broadway I stood, dazed and irritated. After all the palaverof authors, it is the critic who has the last word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the originality of the idea, I went my wooden way.
It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's rôle was that of a philosophical novelist and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of castigation, irony. He laughed at the gods of the new scientific dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned in the seventies—he occupied then aplace midway between Bentham and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society, therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side; witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the crass and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of print—which is equivalent to saying, out of mind.
With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste, a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type. Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the intrigueless intense, and the characterisation more human. The unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction, but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these qualities would make him unpopular in our present century.
What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew Arnold, Professor Jowett—a fine character etching—Huxley, Tyndall, Carlyle, Pater—rather cruelly treated—Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs. Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane—how theauthor juggles with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The décor is always gorgeous—Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who anxiously examine in the glass their expressive countenances, asking the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls, charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs. Norham, "celebrated authoress and upholder of the people." One of the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins—a complete picture-gallery may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry, tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman," lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a daguerreotype.
But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such polemics. In the moral world there are analogies to the physical, and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications, its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries, the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl—now reduced to the exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Büchner, and at the base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your gaseous invertebrate god? Surelythere is sadly required in the cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar Saltus as its first incumbent.
Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral analysis, the modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms in molecules—a renewed geology, astronomy, palæontology, biology, embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become another organ. Ramon yCajal, the Spanish biologist, with his neurons—little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory nerves—has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of metaphysicians.
That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?" may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual. And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells, else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr. Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities. Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content that comes withsound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.
Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will. But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which think by associating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without vision, old as well as young limp through life.
Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last superstition of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry;from Werther to Sanine it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental attitudes, usually a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life." Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, æsthetic and ethical; nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable annihilation. The holy name of Altruism—social emotion made functional—has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of discontent have modulated into the debasing superstition of universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the subconscious—what else is his intuition?—is set before the lovers of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't reason! Just dream! The poet Rogersreplied to a lady who asked his religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr. Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still worth rereading.
"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared. "You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We sat still, hoping against hope.
"See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not fair." "Ididn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown? Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's Frenhofer—is that the chap's name?—than Browning's Waring. He is the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but itrose afar.'" "Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter, now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.
The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle. You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us westward until we reached a warehouse—gloomy, in need of repair, yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway, traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so. Approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most magnificent I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance. If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of this stranger. We turned anxiously to to our friend. He had disappeared. What atrick to play at such a moment. "Who do you wish?" rumbled a mellow voice. "Albertus Magnus?" we timidly inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute. "Ah!" was the reply. Silence. Then, "Come in, please; don't stumble over the canvases." We followed the old man, whose stature was not as heroic as his head; and we did not fail to stumble, for the way was obscure, and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets, wretched furniture, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room that doubtless concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by another door, he explained; and, without noticing our discontented air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the brain that came out of his wonderful eyes, were as young as to-morrow.
"Isn't he a corker?" irreverently demanded our friend. "He is not even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he calls himself an idealist." The old painter smiled. "I suppose I have been described as Waring to you, because Iknew Robert Browning. I did vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or kingship, like the original Alfred Domett, called Waring in the poem. But when I returned from Italy I was a stranger in a strange land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri. Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time fashions change in art as in dress, and nowadays no one understands me, and, with the exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines; his line is as beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love gold more than didFacino Caneof Balzac. Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters. Tell me, do you love Titian?" We swore allegiance to the memory of Titian. The artist seemed pleased. "You younger men are devoted to Velasquez and Hals—too much so. Great as painters, possibly greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil like runaway balloons. They miss height and depth. Their colour never sings like Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of their sitters, but never the secret surprised by the Italian. I sat at his feet, before his canvases, fifty years, and I'm further away than ever—" Our friend interrupted this rhapsody.
"Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas, don't you think you are playing on your visitors' nerves, just toset them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably noticed that you had a trump of your own up your sleeve. You love Titian. Well, admit it. You don't paint like him, your colour scheme is something else, and what you are after you only know yourself. Come! trot out your Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or, better still, that landscape with a river-bank and shepherds." The old man gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light, placed a big easel in proper position, fumbled among the canvases that made the room smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath. "Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt, was the inspiration," murmured the master.
The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays, so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown. Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned the restless soul of Vanderdeckenpacing his quarter-deck, cursing the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend, the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then, credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all, the grip! Only Turner—" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque; then followed apocalyptic visions,in which the solid earth staggered through the empyrean after a black sun—a magnetic disk doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished." Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt, faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the whites—ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche hermine"—the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows—what were all these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity" obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare as a lyric by Shelley or the playing ofFrédéric Chopin.
What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he neverexhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint. His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus—" "But I must," expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer. While I go nowhere—I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years. What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we sneered.
Then we crossed over to the club and talkedart far into the night. Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who knows? As the Russians say—Avos!
Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats. Despite cunning reproductive contrivances the executive musician has no more chance of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is brief, but brilliant. Glory, then, is largely a question of memory, and when the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away then he has no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not interpretative, art endures. Better be "immortal" while you are alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters mundane.
Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws of Anton Rubinstein caress the keyboard shall never forget the music. He is the greatest pianist in my long and varied list. Think ofhis delivery of the theme at the opening of Beethoven's G major concerto; or in that last page of Chopin's Barcarolle. It was no longer the piano tone, but the sound of distant waters and horns from elf-land. A mountain of fire blown skyward, when the elemental in his profoundly passionate temperament broke loose, he could roar betimes as gently as a dove. Yet, when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining pupils of Chopin declared that he was brutal in his treatment of their master. He played Rubinstein, not Chopin, said Georges Mathias to me. Mathias knew, for he had heard the divine Frédéric play. Nevertheless, Rubinstein played Chopin, the greater and the miniature, as no one before or since.
To each generation its music-making. The "grand manner" in piano-playing has almost vanished. A few artists still live who illustrate this manner; you may count them on the fingers of one hand. Rosenthal, D'Albert, Carreño, Friedheim—Reisenaur had the gift, too—how many others? Paderewski I heard play in Leipsic in 1912 at a Gewandhaus concert under the baton of the greatest living conductor, Arthur Nikisch, and I can vouch for the plangent tone quality and the poetic reading he displayed in his performance of that old war-horse, the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore, my admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer was considerably increased after hearing his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikisch.How far away we were from Manru. Joseffy, who looked upon Paderewski, as a rare personality, told me that the Polish Fantasy for piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its seeming simplicity in figuration. "Only the composer," enthusiastically exclaimed Joseffy, "could have made it so wonderful."
But the grand manner, has it become too artificial, too rhetorical? It has gone out of fashion with the eloquence of the old histrions, probably because of the rarity of its exponents; also because it no longer appeals to a matter-of-fact public. Liszt was the first. He was dithyrambic. He was a volcano; Thalberg—his one-time rival—possessed all the smooth and icy perfections of Nesselrode pudding. Liszt in reality never had but two rivals close to his throne; Karl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton Rubinstein, the Russian. Von Bülow was all intellect; his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms were cerebral, not emotional. He had the temperament of the pedant. I first heard him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of Music. He introduced the Tschaikovsky B flat minor concerto, with B. J. Lang directing the orchestra, a quite superfluous proceeding, as Von Bülow gave the cues from the keyboard and distinctly cursed the conductor, the band, the composition, and his own existence, as befitted a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh! he could be fiery enough, though in his playing of the Romantics the fervent note was absent; buthis rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible. You need only recall the pungency of his reading of Beethoven's Scherzo in the Sonata Opus 31, No. 3. It was staccato as a hail-storm. Two years later, in Paris, I heard the same concerto played by Nicholas Rubinstein at the Trocadéro (Exposition, 1878), the very man who had first flouted the work so rudely that Tschaikovsky, deeply offended, changed the dedication to Von Bülow.
Anton Rubinstein displayed the grand manner. His style was a compound of tiger's blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip about his "false notes" (he wrote a Study on False Notes, as if in derision), he was, with Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was not always in practice and most of the music he wrote for his numerous tours was composed in haste and repented of at leisure. It is now almost negligible. The D minor concerto reminds one of a much-traversed railroad-station. But Rubinstein the virtuoso! It was in 1873 I heard him, but I was too young to understand him. Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he gave his Seven Historical Recitals in Paris and I attended the series, not once, but twice. He played many composers, but for me he seemed to be playing the Book of Job, the Apocalypse, and the Scarlet Sarafan. He had a ductile tone like a golden French horn—Joseffy's comparison—and the power and passion of the man have never been equalled. Neither Tausig norLiszt did I hear, worse luck, but there were plenty of witnesses to tell me of the differences. Liszt, it seems, when at his best, was both Rubinstein and Tausig combined, with Von Bülow thrown in. Anton Rubinstein played every school with consummate skill, from the iron certitudes of Bach's polyphony to the magic murmurs of Chopin and the romantic rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann. Beethoven, too, he interpreted with intellectual and emotional vigour. Yet this magnificent Calmuck—he wasn't of course, though he had Asiatic features—grew weary of his instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the stars in their courses by composing. But his name is writ in ivory, and not in enduring music.
Scudo said that when Sigismund Thalberg played, his scales were like perfectly strung pearls falling on scarlet velvet; with Liszt the pearls had become red hot. This extravagant image is of value. We have gone back to the Thalbergian pearls, for too much passion in piano-playing is voted bad taste to-day. Nuance, then colour, and ripe conception. Technique for technique's sake is no longer a desideratum; furthermore, as Felix Leifels wittily remarked: "No one plays the piano badly"; just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably. Mr. Leifels, as a veteran contrabassist and at present manager of the Philharmonic Society, ought to be an authority on the subject; the old Philharmonic has had all thepianists, from H. C. Timm, in 1844—a Hummel concerto—to Thalberg and Rubinstein, Joseffy, Paderewski, and Josef Hofmann. Truly the standard of virtuosity is higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals with programmes that are staggering. The Chopin concertos now occupy the position, technically speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn concertos. Every one plays Chopin as a matter of course, and, with a few exceptions horribly. Yes, Mr. Leifels is right; no one plays the piano badly, yet new Rubinsteins do not materialise.
The year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, was a memorable one for visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von Bülow, but also two beautiful women, one at the apex of her artistic career, Annette Essipoff (or Essipowa) and Teresa Carreño, just starting on her triumphal road to fame. Essipowa was later the wife of Leschetizky—maybe she was married then—and she was the most poetic of all women pianists that I have heard. Clara Schumann was as musical, but she was aged when I listened to her. Essipowa played Chopin as only a Russian can. They are all Slavs, these Poles and Russians, and no other nation, except the Hungarian, interpret Chopin. Probably the greatest German virtuoso was Adolf Henselt, Bavarian-born, though a resident of Petrograd. He had a Chopin-like temperament and played thatmaster's music so well that Schumann called him the "German Chopin." Essipowa, I need hardly tell you, communicated no little of her gracious charm to Paderewski. He learned more from her plastic style than from all the precepts of Leschetizky.
On a hot night in 1876, and in old Association Hall, I first saw and heard Teresa (then Teresita) Carreño. I say "saw" advisedly, for she was a blooming girl, and at the time shared the distinction with Adelaide Neilson and Mrs. Scott-Siddons of being one of the three most beautiful women on the stage. Carreño, still vital, still handsome, and still the conquering artist, till her death last spring, was in that far-away day fresh from Venezuela, a pupil of Gottschalk and Anton Rubinstein. She wore a scarlet gown, as fiery as her playing, and when I wish to recall her I close my eyes and straightway as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear her; for her playing has always been scarlet to me, as Rubinstein's is golden, and Joseffy's silvery.
The French group I have heard, beginning with Theodore Ritter, who came to New York in company with Carlotta Patti; Planté—still living and over eighty, so I have been told by M. Phillipp; Saint-Saëns, whom I first saw and heard at the Trocadéro, Paris, with his pupil, Montigny-Remaury; Clotilde Kleeberg, Diémer, Risler; the venerable Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin; Raoul Pugno, who wasveritably a pugnacious pianist, Cécile Chaminade, Marie Jaell, and her corpulent husband, Alfred Jaell.
Eugen d'Albert, surely the greatest of Scotch pianists—he was born at Glasgow, though musically educated in London—is another heaven-stormer. I heard him at Berlin some years ago, in Philharmonic Hall, and people stood up in their excitement—Liszt redivivus!
It was the grand manner in its most chaotic form. A musical volcano belching up lava, scoriæ, rocks, hunks of Beethoven—the Appassionata Sonata it happened to be—while the infuriated little Vulcan threw emotional fuel into his furnace. The unfortunate instrument must have been a mass of splintered steel, wood, and wire after the musical giant had finished. It was a magnificent spectacle, and the music glorious. Eugen d'Albert, whether he is or isn't the son of Karl Tausig—as Weimar gossip had it; Weimar, when in the palmy days every other pianist you met was a natural son of Liszt—or else pretended to be one—has more than a moiety of that virtuoso's genius. He is a great artist, and occasionally the magic fire flares and lights up the firmament of music.
I think it was in 1879 that Rafael Joseffy visited us for the first time; but I didn't hear him till 1880. The reason I remember the date is that this greatly beloved Hungarianmade his début at old Chickering Hall (then at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street); but I saw him in Steinway Hall. Another magician with a peculiarly personal style. In the beginning you thought of the aurora borealis, shooting-stars, and exquisite meteors; a beautiful style, though not a classic interpreter then. With the years Joseffy deepened and broadened. The iridescent shimmer was never absent. No one played the E minor Concerto of Chopin as did Joseffy. He had the tradition from his beloved master, Tausig, as Tausig had it from Chopin by way of Liszt. (Tausig always regretted that he had never heard Chopin play.) Joseffy, in turn, transmitted the tradition to his early pupil, Moriz Rosenthal, in whose répertoire it is the most Chopinesque of all his performances.
And do you remember the Chevalier de Kontski, Carl Baermann, Franz Rummel, S. B. Mills—who introduced here so many modern concertos—the huge Norwegian Edmund Neupert, who lived at the Hotel Liszt, next door to Steinway Hall, Constantin von Sternberg, and Max Vogrich, the Hungarian with the Chopin-like profile?
In the same school as Joseffy is the capricious De Pachmann; with Joseffy I sat at the first recital of this extraordinary Russian in Chickering Hall (1890). Joseffy, with his accustomed generosity of spirit—he was the most sympathetic and human of great virtuosi—at oncerecognised the artistic worth of Vladimir de Pachmann. This last representative of a school that included the names of Hummel, Cramer, Field, Thalberg, Chopin, the little De Pachmann (he was then bearded like a pirate) captivated us. It was all miniature, without passion or pathos or the grand manner, but in its genre his playing was perfection; the polished perfection of an intricately carved ivory ornament. De Pachmann played certain sides of Chopin incomparably; capriciously, even perversely. In a small hall, sitting on a chair that precisely suited his fidgety spirit, then, if in the mood, a recital by him was something unforgettable.
After De Pachmann—Paderewski. Paderewski, the master-colourist, the grand visionary, whose art is often strained, morbid, fantastic. And after Paderewski? Why, Leopold Godowsky, of course. He belongs to the Joseffy-De Pachmann, not to the Rubinstein-Josef Hofmann, group. I once called him the superman of piano-playing. Nothing like him, as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano-playing since Chopin. He is an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a contrapuntalist. Bach and Chopin. The spirit of the German cantor and the Polish tone-poet in curious conjunction. His playing is transcendental; his piano compositions the transcendentalism of the future. That way, else retrogression! All has been accomplished inideas and figuration. A new synthesis—the combination of seemingly disparate elements and styles—with innumerable permutations, he has accomplished. He is a miracle-worker. The Violet Ray. Dramatic passion, flame, and fury are not present; they would be intruders on his map of music. The piano tone is always legitimate, never forced. But every other attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten independent voices recreating the ancient polyphonic art of the Flemings. He is like a Brahma at the piano. Before his serene and all-embracing vision every school appears and disappears in the void. The beauty of his touch and tone are only matched by the delicate adjustment of his phrasing to the larger curve of the composition. Nothing musical is foreign to him. He is a pianist for pianists, and I am glad to say that the majority of them gladly recognise this fact.
One evening Godowsky was playing his piano sonata with its subtle intimations of Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and its altogether Godowskian colour and rhythmic life—he is the greatest creator of rhythmic values since Liszt, and that is a "large order"—when he was interrupted by the entrance of Josef Hofmann. Godowsky and Hofmann are as inseparable as were Chopin and Liszt. Heine called the latter pair the Dioscurii of music. In the Godowsky apartment stood several concert grands. Hofmann nonchalantly removedhis coat and, making an apology for disturbing us, he went into another room and soon we heard him slowly practising. What do you suppose? Some new concerto with new-fangled bedevilments? O Sancta Simplicitas! This giant, if ever there was one, played at a funereal tempo the octave passages in the left hand of the Heroic Polonaise of Chopin (Opus 53). Every schoolgirl rattles them off as "easy," but, with the humility of a great artist, Hofmann practised the section as if it were still a stumbling-block. De Lenz records that Tausig did the same.
Later, Conductor Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera dropped in, and several pianists and critics followed, and soon the Polish pianist was playing for us all some well-known compositions by a certain Dvorsky; also an extremely brilliant and effective concert study in C minor by Constantin von Sternberg. From 1888, when he was a wonder-child here, Jozio Hofmann's artistic development has been logical and continuous. His mellow muscularity evokes Rubinstein. No one plays Rubinstein as does this Harmonious Blacksmith—and with the piety of Rubinstein's pet pupil. I once compared him to a steam-hammer, whose marvellous sensitivity enables it to crack an egg-shell or crush iron. Hofmann's range of tonal dynamics is unequalled, even in this age of perfected piano technique. He is at home in all schools, and his knowledge is enormous.At moments his touch is as rich as a Kneisel Quartet accord.
At the famous Rudolph Schirmer dinner, given in 1915, among other distinguished guests there were nearly a score of piano virtuosi. The newspapers humorously commented upon the fact that there was not a squabble, though with so many nationalities one row, at least, might have been expected. As a matter of fact, if any discussion had arisen it would not have been over politics, but about the fingering of the Double-Note Study in G sharp minor of Chopin, so difficult to play slowly—the most formidable of argument-breeding questions among pianists. A parterre of pianists, indeed, some in New York because of the war, while Paderewski and Rosenthal were conspicuous by their absence. Think of a few names: Joseffy—he died several months later, Gabrilowitsch, Hofmann, Godowsky, Carl Friedberg, Mark Hambourg—a heaven-stormer in the Rubinstein-Hercules manner—Leonard Borwick, Alexander Lambert, Ernest Schelling, Stojowski, Percy Grainger—the young Siegfried of the Antipodes—August Fraemcke, Cornelius Ruebner, and—another apparition in the world of piano-playing—Ferruccio Busoni.
This Italian, the greatest of Italian piano virtuosi—the history of which can claim such names as Domenico Scarlatti, Clementi, Fumigalli, Martucci, Sgambati—is also a composer who has set agog conservative critics by theboldness of his imagination. As an artist he may be said to embody the intellectuality of Von Bülow, the technical brilliancy of the Liszt group. Busoni is eminently a musical thinker.
America probably will never again harbour such a constellation of piano talent. I sometimes wonder if the vanished generation of piano artists played much better than those men. Godowsky, Hofmann, the lyric and most musical Harold Bauer; the many-sided, richly endowed, and charming Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Hambourg, Busoni, and Paderewski are not often matched. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel (not a negro minstrel, for a chalk-burner is necessarily white), Mme. Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist! The contemporary piano hierarchy might be thus classed: Josef Hofmann, a king; Paderewski, a poet; Godowsky, a prophet; Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, a sibyl; D'Albert, a titan; Busoni, a philosopher; Rosenthal, a hero, and Alexander Lambert—a pianist. Well, Mr. Lambert may be congratulated on such an ascription; Doehler was a great technician in his day, and when the "friend of pianists" (Lambert could pattern after Schindler, whose visiting-card read: "l'Ami de Beethoven") masters his modesty an admirable piano virtuoso is revealed. So let him be satisfied with the honourable appellation of "pianist." He is in good company.
And the ladies! I am sorry I can't say, "place aux dames!" Space forbids. I've heard them all, from Arabella Goddard to Mme. Montigny-Remaury (in Paris, 1878, with her master, Camille Saint-Saëns); from Alide Topp, Marie Krebs, Anna Mehlig, Pauline Fichtner, Vera Timinoff, Ingeborg Bronsart, Madeline Schiller, to Julia Rivé-King; from Cecilia Gaul and Svarvady-Clauss to Anna Bock; from the Amazon, Sofie Menter, the most masculine of Liszt players, to Adèle Margulies, Yoland Maero, and Antoinette Szumowska-Adamowska; from Ilonka von Ravacsz to Ethel Leginska—who plays like a house afire; from Helen Hopekirk to Katharine Goodson; from Clara Schumann to Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Olga Samaroff, and the newly come Brazilian Guiomar Novaes—the list might be unduly prolonged.
I heard Paderewski play last spring. Surely he has now the "grand manner" in all its dramatic splendour, and without its old-fashioned pretentious rhetoric. Nor has he lost the lusciousness of his touch—a Caruso voice on the keyboard—or the poetic intensity of his Chopin and Schumann interpretations. He is still Prince Charming.
Not only do I fear prolixity, but the confusing of critical values, for I write from memory, and I admit that I've had more pleasure from the "intimate" pianists than from the forgers of tonal thunderbolts; that is—Rubinstein excepted—from such masters in miniatureas Joseffy, Godowsky, Carl Heyman, De Pachmann, and Paderewski. I find in the fresh, sparkling playing of Mischa Levitski, Benno Moiseivich, and Guiomar Novaes high promise for their future. The latter came here unheralded and as the pupil of that sterling virtuoso and pedagogue, Isidor Phillipp of the Paris Conservatory.
It is noteworthy that only Chopin, Liszt, and Von Bülow were Christian born among the supreme masters of the keyboard; the rest (with a few exceptions) were and are members of that race whose religious tenets specifically incline them to the love and practice of music.
Who is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn, who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good health—his eyes trouble him—and that he was once a student in theology, but soon gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of the new group of young Irish writers who see their country and countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the most beautiful and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the Isle of Saints for those iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who happens to write English, though he often thinks in French; Bernard Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the Londoners; while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic, and both poets. Yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen, who mingles angels' pin-feathers with rainbow gold; a magic decoction of which we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet, and a realist of the De Maupassant breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as truthful as Tchekov, and as grey—thatTchekov compared with whose the "realism" of De Maupassant is romantic bric-à-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of middle-class life, and he sometimes suggests the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.
Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a hell of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the heart of the peasantry, and Yeatsand Lady Gregory brought back from the hidden spaces fairies and heroes.
Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their unhappy temperaments.
The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive of what follows; also a title that seems to have emerged from the catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college, from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's apron-strings to coarse revelry, thehero is put to the torture by art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked. This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.
Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tells his student friend about his father. These were his attributes: "A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a story-teller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present a praiser of his own past." He could talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a turkey—as they say up Cork way. The portrait is well-nigh perfect. The wild goose over again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of riotous living he wastransformed into a militant Catholic. The reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist, but his mind was too speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing. To analyse the sensibility of a soul mounting on flaming pinions to God is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not again sink into the slough of Dublin low life. Cranly, the student, saw through the hole in his sceptical millstone. "It is a curious thing, do you know," Cranly said dispassionately, "how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." A profound remark. Once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic, particularly if you are born in Ireland.
Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He neither abuses nor praises. He is evidently out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of the Jesuits with affection and admiration. The sermons preached by them during the retreat are models. They are printed in full—strange material for a novel. And he can show us the black hatred caused by the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with verity. At a Christmas dinner the argument between Dante (a certain Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man andwoman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles, watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his temper—he has had several tumblers of mountain dew and is a little "how come you so?" He bursts forth: "No God in Ireland! We have had too much God in Ireland! Away with God!" "Blasphemer! Devil!" screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face. "Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!" The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. "Poor Parnell!" he cried loudly. "My dead King." Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab.
There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful. Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable to the average reader. There is relief in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr. Joyce. There is no ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and theportrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity—as an artistic performance—and its passionate personal note, is bound to give offence in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish; not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales entitled Dubliners reveals a wider range, a practised technical hand, and a gift for etching character that may be compared with De Maupassant's. A big comparison, but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as The Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or Two Gallants, and be convinced that we do not exaggerate.
Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery. Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes. From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to Dalkey or Drumcondra; from the Monument to Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip is unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with Dublinesque anecdotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of the town. The slackers who pester servant-girls for their shillings to spend on whisky; the young man in the boarding-house who succumbs to the "planted" charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the matrimonial trap—only De Maupassant could better the telling of this too commonplace story; the middle-aged man, parsimonious as to his emotions and the tragic ending of a love-affair that had hardly begun; and the wonderfully etched plate called TheDead with its hundred fine touches of comedy and satire—these but prove the claim of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he could say—oh, terrifying irony!—that "mankind is not necessary" in the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he may become mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of "life's more bitter flavours." Insipid novelists are legion. He is Huysmans's little brother in his flair for disintegrating character. But yet an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a vision that too often vanishes before he can pin its beauty on canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humour of such a story as Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, which would bring to a Tammany heeler what Henry James called "the emotion of recognition." Ah! the wild goose. The flying dream.
Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to theStrand Magazineand later reunited in a book bearing the happy title Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers as being significant chiefly in their self-revelation. What they tell of themselves is of more value than what they write about. Whether Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes widely after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L. Williams, M. S., with an apposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams deals with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension of Space (what we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalised). Speculative as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter, a Christian Scientist, or a member of any of the other queer rag-tag and bobtail beliefs and superstitions—fortune-telling, astrology, selling "futures" in the next life, table-rapping, and such like. Cora Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the brilliant, unhappy Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then, are not verbal wind-pudding, but have a basisof mathematics and the investigations of the laboratory, where "chemists and physicists are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity."
We have always enjoyed the idea of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. The fact that it is anxin the plotting of mathematicians in general does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J. K. F. Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved to his own satisfaction the existence of a Fourth Dimension when he turned an india-rubber ball inside out without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable melancholy. No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's Flatland, or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford, you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion, squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of the baser metals, the cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of positivism craves more spiritual nourishment to-day. Hasn't the remarkable mathematician Henri Poincaré (author of Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method) declared that between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary elimination which have necessitatedsuch inferences? Note the word "free"; free-will is restored to its old and honourable estate in the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron determinism of the seventies and eighties has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Büchner and Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly Intuition—a dangerous vocable—rules over mere mental processes. (There is, as George Henry Lewes asserted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox:i. e., there are more false facts than false theories current.) Science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and relativity of things—no mean intellectual feat, by the way—but not of the things themselves; one must join, adds Poincaré, to the faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy. In a word, Intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable, and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann are as legitimate as Euclid's. And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles now?
Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension. Time may be in two dimensions. Heraclitus before Bergson compared Time to a river always flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged from this stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, would it not signify that Time has two dimensions. And where does music stand in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical structure and melodywith its horizontal flow proof that music is another dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion of the Fourth Spatial Dimension is a spiritual one. Creative Involution is to supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All roads lead to religion. Expel religion forcibly and it returns under strange disguises, usually as debasing superstitions. Yet religion without dogma is like a body without a skeleton—it can't be made to stand upright.
Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor, just as philosophy is the diversion of professors. Modern science, said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's stage when it denied religion. But matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to revise the conclusions of his once famous Belfast address in the presence of radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the essential thing is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of form. From a macrocosmic monster our gods are become microcosmic; god may be a molecule, a cell. A god to put in a phial; thus far has the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," says Salomon Reinach in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations in vain. All is vanity, even doctrinalfluctuations. Goethe has warned us that "Man is not born to solve the mystery of Existence; but he must nevertheless attempt it, in order that he may learn how to keep within the limits of the Knowable." Goethe detested all "thinking about thought." Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation.
Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental workings of a jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a jury-box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment is, as a rule, that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant humour) fashion, adding that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the Great, candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees salvation for the single soul in the collective soul—not necessarily socialistic—nevertheless warns parents against the dangers in our public-school system, where the individuality of the child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by class teaching. Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the ego. Yet to collective consciousness may belong the future. It is all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification, the result, and the prop of limited class interests. (This was years ago.) Stately,sedate, stable is the class that won't tolerate war; a class of moral lollipops. War we must have; it is one of the prime conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetich, taboo is the basis of all superstitions, so the superstition of yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's Golden Bough—James Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a glass to hold it; and if patriotism is a crime of lèse-majesty against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and patriotism are precious essences in the scheme of life, and we shall always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a timely one. At school our children's souls are clogged with bricks and mortar, instead of being buoyant and individual.
She quotes—and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt quotations—with evident approbation from Some Neglected Factors in Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English thinker: "Organic life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that one on which we ourselves, the organisms of to-day, and the human societies to which we belong, are swept onward. Here we must necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm which has brought life so far will carry it on to still greater heights in the unknown future?"Rhythm, measured flow, is the shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of plant and ghost. "I teach you Beyond-Man (superman); Man is something that will be surpassed ... once man was ape, and is ape in a higher degree than any ape.... Man is a rope connecting animal and Beyond-Man." "Believe that which thou seest not," cries Flaubert in his marvellous masque of mythologies ancient and modern, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same centuries before the Frenchman: Believe what is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is the price we pay for cognition.
Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though she appreciates his plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to answer Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott's three questions: "1. Bergson says, 'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.' Where is the specimen on which this allegation is founded? 2. Consciousness is to some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson thinks he is disproving a crude theory of localisation of mental qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life that intellect can never give. Will Professor Bergson furnish instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where intellect has failed?" (From ModernScience and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, 1912.) These "metaphysical curiosities," as they are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lankester in his preface to this solidly reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of numerous persons, dilettantes, with a craving for an embellished theory of the Grand Perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the air—which, like the earth, hath bubbles, as was observed by the greatest of poets—she plants her feet on tangible affirmations. And to have faith we must admit the Illative sense of John Henry Newman. Thus "the wheel is come full circle." Creative Involution will please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author somersaults in the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother earth.