CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XVIIIFOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTASHamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbed the contemporary wisdom of Wittenberg. And let it be said in passing that their knowledge did not lag behind ours, metaphysically speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet, if he had lived longer, might have said that no philosophy would ever solve the riddle of the sphinx; that we never know, only name, things. Noah is the supreme symbol of science, he the first namer of the animals in the ark. The world of sensation is our ark and we are one branch of the animal family. We come whence we know not and go where we shall never guess. Standing on this tiny Isle of Error we call the present, we think backward and live forward. Hamlet the sceptical would now demand something more tangible than the Grand Perhaps. My kingdom for a fulcrum! he might cry to Horatio—on which I may rest my lever and pry this too too solid earth up to the starry skies! What the implement? Religion? Remember Hamlet wasa Catholic, too sensitive to send unshrived to hell's fire the soul of his uncle. Philosophy? Read Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and realise that if he were alive to-day the melancholy Prince might be a delicate scoffer at all fables. A Hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What then the escape? We all need more elbow-room in the infinite. The answer is—the Fourth Dimension in Higher Space. Eureka!After studying Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius, or the selections in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, even the doubting Thomas is forced to admit that here is no trace of rambling discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stammered enigmas; on the contrary, the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces with crystalline clearness the veil of the visible world. As literary style we find sharp contours and affirmations. Mysticism is not all cobweb lace and opal fire. Remember that we are not stressing the validity of either the vision or its consequent judgments; we only wish to emphasise the absence of muddy thinking in these writings. This quality of precision, allied to an eloquent, persuasive style, we encounter in Claude Bragdon's Four Dimensional Vistas. The author is an architect and has written much of his art and of projective ornament. (He was a Scammon lecturer at the Chicago Art Institute in 1915.) He is a mystic. He is also eminently practical. His contribution to æsthetics in The BeautifulNecessity is suggestive, and on the purely technical side valuable. But Mr. Bragdon, being both a mathematician and a poet, does not stop at three-dimensional existence. Like the profound English mystic William Blake, he could ask: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?"What is the Fourth Dimension? A subtle transposition of precious essences from the earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in a world of three dimensions, the symbols of which are length, breadth, thickness. A species of triangular world, a prison for certain souls who see in the category of Time an escape from that other imperative, Space (however, not the Categorical Imperative of Kant and its acid moral convention). Helmholtz and many mathematicians employed the "n" dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful in some analytical problems, but it is not apprehended by the grosser senses. Pascal, great thinker and mathematician, had his "Abyss"; it was his Fourth Dimension, and he never walked abroad without the consciousness of it at his side. This illusion or obsession was the result of a severe mental shock early in his life. Many of us are like the French philosopher. We have our "abyss," mystic or real. Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician Bolyai, who in 1823 "declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels,'I will draw two lines through a given point both of which will be parallel to a given line.'" Space, then, may be curved in another dimension. Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though he does not attempt to prove it, as that would be impossible; but he gives his readers the chief points in the hypothesis. The "n" dimension may be employed as a lever to the imagination. Even revealed religion demands our faith, and imagination is the prime agent in the interpretation of the universe, according to the gospel of mystic mathematics.Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is interesting to note the imagery of transcendentalism through the ages. It is invariably geometrical. Spheres, planes, cones, circles, spirals, tetragrams, pentagrams, ellipses, and what-not. A cubistic universe. Xenophanes said that God is a sphere. And then there are the geometrical patterns made by birds on the wing. Heaven in any religion is another sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes, many mansions for the soul at its various stages of existence. The Bible, the mystical teachings of Mother Church—why evoke familiar witnesses? We are hemmed in by riddles, and the magnificent and mysterious tumult of life asks for the eye of imagination, which is also the eye of faith. The cold fire and dark light of the mystics must not repel us by their strangeness. Not knowledge but perception is power, and the psychic is the sign-post ofthe future. What do all these words mean: matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules, electrons, but the same old thing? I am a colony of cells, yet that fact does not get me closer to the core of the soul. What will? A fourth spatial dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a poetic concept.He calls man a space-eater. Human ambition is to annihilate space. Wars are fought for space, and every step in knowledge is based upon its mastery. What miracles are wireless telegraphy, flying-machines, the Roentgen ray! Astronomy—what ghastly gulfs it shows us in space! Time and space were abolished as sense illusions by the worthy Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley; but as we are up to our eyes in quotidian life, which grows over and about us like grass, we cannot shake off the oppression. First thought, and then realised, these marvels are now accepted as matter of fact because mankind has been told the technique of them; as if any explanation can be more than nominal. We shall never know the real nature of the phenomena that crowd in on us from lust to dust. Not even that synthesis of the five senses, the sixth, or sex sense, with its evanescent ecstasy, cuts deeply into the darkness. There may be a seventh sense, a new dimension, intimations of which are setting advanced thinkers on fresh trails. But there is as yet no tangible proof. Philosophers, who, like some singers, bray their brainless convictionsto a gaping auditory, ask of us much more credence, and little or no imagination. As that "old mole," working in the ground, gravitation, is defied by aeroplanes, then we should not despair of any hypothesis which permits us a peep through the partly opened door. Plato's cavern and the shadows. Who knows but in this universe there may be a crevice through which filters the light of another life? Emerson, who shed systems yet never organised one, hints at aerial perspectives. A flight through the sky with the sun bathing in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid finite world. In such perilous altitudes I have enjoyed this experience and felt a liberation of the spirit which has no parallel; not even when listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin. Music, indeed, is the nearest approach to psychic freedom.Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Goethe's expression "frozen music," applied to Gothic architecture. (Stendhal appropriated this phrase.) For us the flying buttress is aspiring, and the pointed arch is a fugue. Our author is rich in his analogies, and like Sir Thomas Browne sees "quincunxes" in everything; his particular "quincunx" being Higher Space. The precise patterns in our brain, like those of the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us to perceive and build the universe (otherwise called innate ideas) are geometrical. Space is the first and final illusion. Time—whichis not "a stuff both resistant and substantial," as Henri Bergson declares—is perhaps the Fourth Dimension in the guise of a sequence of states, and not grasped simultaneously, as is the idea of Space. That Time can shrink and expand, opium-eaters, who are not always totally drugged by their dreams, assure us. A second becomes an æon. And space curvature? Is it any wonder that "Lewis Carroll," who wrote those extraordinary parables for little folk, Through the Looking-Glass and Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A topsy-turvy world; it is even upside down as an optical image. The other side of good and evil may be around the corner. Eternity can lurk in a molecule too tiny to harbour Queen Mab. And we may all live to see the back of our own heads without peering in mirrors. That "astral trunk" once so fervently believed in may prove a reality; it is situated behind the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the planet Saturn, and by its aid we should be enabled to converse with spirits! The pineal gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence us in at every step. We fill our belly with the east wind of vain desires. We eat the air promise-crammed. This world is but a point in the universe, and our universe only one of an infinite series. There was no beginning, there is no end. Eternity is now; though death and the tax-gatherer never cease their importunings.All this Mr. Bragdon does not say, though he leans heavily on the arcana of the ancient wisdom. The truth is that the majority of humans are mentally considered vegetables, living in two dimensions. To keep us responsive to spiritual issues, as people were awaked in Swift's Laputa by flappers, is the service performed by such transcendentalists as C. Howard Hinton, author of The Fourth Dimension; Claude Bragdon and Cora Lenore Williams. Their thought is not new; it was hoary with age when the Greeks went to old Egypt for fresh learning; Noah conversed with his wives in the same terminology. But its application is novel, as are the personal nuances. The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may be likened to a fresh lens in the telescope or microscope of speculation. For the present writer the hypothesis is just one more incursion into the fairyland of metaphysics. Without fairies the heart grows old and dusty.The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating shapes. As for the paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush, and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired pawnbroker. The Eternal Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse for life is its brevity. Why, then, do we yearn for that unending corridor through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed by the burden of our chimera—ourego? I confess that I prefer to watch on the edge of some vast promontory the swift approach of a dark sun rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar spaces to the celestial assignation made at the beginning of Time for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the populous path of the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that apocalyptic flare-up—surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing in greasy bliss—Higher Space may be manifested and Time and Tri-Dimensional Space be no more. The rest is silence.CHAPTER XIXO. W.It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr—whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the noteof hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana—or Oscariana—which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy," his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and "horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and spongers, his end might have been different.I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was Barbey d'Aurévilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably modelled—lacecuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations. But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne—(in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his Jumbos")—Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion element, is poor Huysmans's—just look into that masterpiece, A Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salomé is Flaubert in operetta form—his gorgeous Herodias watered down for uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece—which limps dramatically—would never have been seriously considered if not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact,i. e., it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable inany particular. His Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error, yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very gay fancy.He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed à la Byron and Baudelaire; but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a plagiaristfrom art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too seriously—I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the tragic dénouement that has been thrashed to death by those who know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave attitude—always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a second Jesus Christ—which latter statement stuns one. (The Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me, he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne, Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readerswould only take the trouble to study the originals there might be less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called æsthetic movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true; but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the "Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not—nothing but his astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory.CHAPTER XXA SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTSNothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed success, though the æsthetic principle at the base of his theory is eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very titles are significant—a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye; truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to Japan—only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent of armpits—of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New Yorkaudience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Théâtre d'art, Paris, and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made with all the arts—except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music, lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple. The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch the ears of credulous ones. René de Ghil invented an entirely new system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet. I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands of an anarch composer like Illowski—or Richard Strauss. And now New York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine. It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), whilehis brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his étude in D sharp minor. Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it. I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus, the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; principally, Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his Light Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. InParis the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows with perfume symphonies.A quarter of a century ago I visited the Théâtre d'art, in Paris; that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the nombril button, took my Rig-Veda—a sacred buggy—projected my astral being, and sailed through space to the French capital, there to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts, eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a mélange that appealed to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge, yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried(astrally, of course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic."The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor, scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo, sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion) smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin, though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. Soevidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed.Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away, but, full of gumbo soup as I was—and you have no idea how soup discommodes the astral stomach—I was anchored to my seat, and bravely determined not to leave till I had someclew to the riddle of the new evangel of the seven—or seventeen—arts. The stage remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish, dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and, turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play, piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony, cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I had appealed looked fearfully about him—I had foolishly forgotten that I was invisible in my astral shape—then clutched at his windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a slow, putrid silence.Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets. Suddenly the lights wentout, and we were plunged into a blackness that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glacé, and orchids, and the soup supply shifted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced. Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandishing aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland, was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives, and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetratedthe air, the electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse, making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs, and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di bassetto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention! When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis of the arts? Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not too much time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward, wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When Ilanded at the Battery it was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky. New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.CHAPTER XXITHE CLASSIC CHOPINThat Chopin is a classic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature; but that he is of a classical complexion as a composer from the beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox. Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained now, since old party lines have been effaced. To battle seriously for such words as Classic or Romantic or Realism is no longer possible. Cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once wrangled over doctrinal points; as if the salvation of mankind depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation or consubstantiation. Only yesterday that ugly word "degeneracy," thanks to quack critics and charlatan "psychiatrists," figured as a means of estimating genius. This method has quite vanished among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another misunderstood vocable—decadence. Wagner is called decadent. So is Chopin. While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis:"Technically, a decadent style is only suchin relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.... Swift's prose is classic, Pater's decadent.... Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic ... is decadent.... All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes."I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth a profound but not widely appreciated fact. In art, as in life, there is no absolute. Perhaps the most illuminating statement concerning the romantic style was uttered by Théophile Gautier. Of it he wrote (in his essay on Baudelaire): "Unlike the classic style it admits shadow." We need not bother ourselves about the spirit of romanticism; that has been done to the death by hundreds of critics. And it is a sign of the times that the old-fashioned Chopin is fading, while we are now vitally interested in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopinthe romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous, morbid, and Chopin the pianist, need not enter into our present scheme. He has appeared to popular fancy as everything from Thaddeus of Warsaw to an exotic drawing-room hero; from the sentimental consumptive consoled by countesses to the accredited slave of George Sand. All this is truly the romantic Chopin. It is the obverse of the medal that piques curiosity. Why the classic quality of his compositions, their clarity, concision, purity, structural balance, were largely missed by so many of his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of his obviously romantic melodies he was definitely ranged with the most extravagant of the romantics, with Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt; but, as a matter of fact, he is formally closer to Mendelssohn. His original manner of distributing his thematic material deceived the critics. He refused to join the revolutionists; later in the case of Flaubert we come upon an analogous condition. Hailed as chief of the realists, the author of Madame Bovary took an ironic delight in publishing Salammbô, which was romantic enough to please that prince of romanticists, Victor Hugo. Chopin has been reproached for his tepid attitude toward romanticism, and also because of his rather caustic criticisms of certain leaders. He, a musical aristocratpur sang, held aloof, though he permitted himself to make some sharp commentaries on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz.Decidedly not a romantic despite his romantic externalism. Decidedly a classic despite his romantic "content." Of him Stendhal might have written: a classic is a dead romantic. (Heine left no epic, yet he is an indubitable classic.) Wise Goethe said: "The point is for a work to be thoroughly good and then it is sure to be classical."But it is not because of the classicism achieved by the pathos of distance that Chopin's special case makes an appeal. It is Chopin as a consummate master of music that interests us. In his admirable Chopin the Composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley considers Chopin and puts out of court the familiar "gifted amateur," "improvisatore of genius," and the rest of the theatrical stock description by proving beyond peradventure of a doubt that Frédéric François Chopin was not only a creator of new harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but also a musician skilled in the handling of formal problems, one grounded in the schools of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; furthermore, that if he did not employ the sonata form in its severest sense, he literally built on it as a foundation. He managed the rondo with ease and grace, and if he did not write fugues it was because the fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps the divination of his own limitations is a further manifestation of his extraordinary genius. This does not imply that Chopin had any particular genius in counterpoint, but to deny his masteryof polyphony is a grave error. And it is still denied with the very evidence staring his critics in the face. Beethoven in his sonatas demonstrated his individuality, though coming after Mozart's perfect specimens in that form. Chopin did not try to bend the bow of Ulysses, though more than a word might be said of his two last Sonatas—the first is boyishly pedantic, and monotonous in key-contrast, while the 'cello and piano sonata hardly can be ranked as an exemplar of classic form.Of the Etudes Kelley says:"In this group of masterpieces we find the more desirable features of the classical school—diatonic melodies, well-balanced phrase and period-building—together with the richness afforded by chromatic harmonies and modulatory devices heretofore unknown."Indeed, a new system of music that changed the entire current of the art. It was not without cause that I once called Chopin the "open door"; through his door the East entered and whether for good or for ill certainly revolutionised Western music. Mr. Hadow is right in declaring that "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not as far from each other as the music of 1880 from that of 1914." And Chopin was the most potent influence, in company with Beethoven and Wagner, in bringing about that change. I say in company with Beethoven and Wagner, for I heartily agree with Frederick Niecks in his recent judgment:"I consider Chopin to be one of the three most powerful factors in the development of nineteenth-century music, the other two being, of course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute originality of Chopin's personality, and that of its expression through novel harmony, chromaticism, figuration justifies the assertion. And none will deny the fact who takes the trouble to trace the Polish master's influence on his contemporaries and successors. The greatest and most powerful composers came under this influence, to a large extent, by the process of infiltration."Kelley gives us chapter and verse in the particular case of Wagner and his absorption of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the late Anton Seidl many times for my particular benefit.However, this only brings us to Chopin the innovator, whereas it is the aspect of the classic Chopin which has been neglected. "As far back as 1840 Chopin was employing half-tones with a freedom that brought upon him the wrath of conservative critics," writes Hadow, who admires the Pole with reservations, not placing him in such august company as has Kelley and Niecks. True, Chopin was a pioneer in several departments of his art, yet how few recognised or recognise to-day that Schumann is the more romantic composer of the pair; his music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness; his Carneval the epitome of romantic musicalportraiture—with its "Chopin" more Chopin than the original. Contrast the noble Fantasy in C, Opus 17 of Schumann, with the equally noble Fantasy in F minor, Opus 49 of Chopin, and ask which is the more romantic in spirit, structure, and technique. Unquestionably to Schumann would be awarded the quality of romanticism. He is more fantastic, though his fantasy is less decorative; he strays into the most delightful and umbrageous paths and never falters in the preservation of romantic atmosphere. Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin, who, no matter his potentialities, never experimented in the larger symphonic mould, and as fully imbued with the poetic spirit as Schumann; nevertheless a master of his patterns, whether in figuration or general structure. His Mazourkas are sonnets, and this Fantasy in F minor is, as Kelley points out, a highly complex rondo; as are the Ballades and Scherzos. Beethoven, doubtless, would have developed the eloquent main theme more significantly; strictly speaking, Chopin introduces so much new melodic material that the rondo form is greatly modified, yet never quite banished. The architectonics of the composition are more magnificent than in Schumann, although I do not propose to make invidious comparisons. Both works are classics in the accepted sense of the term. But Chopin's Fantasy is more classic in structure and sentiment.The Sonatas in B flat minor and B minor are"awful examples" for academic theorists. They are not faultless as to form and do sadly lack organic unity. Schumann particularly criticises the Sonata Opus 35 because of the inclusion of the Funeral March and the homophonic, "invertebrate" finale. But the two first movements are distinct contributions to Sonata literature, even if in the first movement the opening theme is not recapitulated. I confess that I am glad it is not, though the solemn title "Sonata" becomes thereby a mockery. The composer adequately treats this first motive in the development section so that its absence later is not annoyingly felt. There are, I agree with Mr. Kelley, some bars that are surprisingly like a certain page of Die Götterdämmerung, as the Feuerzauber music may be noted in the flickering chromaticism of the E minor Concerto; or as the first phrase of the C minor Etude, Opus 10, No. 12, is to be found in Tristan and Isolde—Isolde's opening measure, "Wer wagt mich zu höhnen." (The orchestra plays the identical Chopin phrase.) This first movement of the B flat minor Sonata—with four bars of introduction, evidently suggested by the sublime opening of Beethoven's C minor Sonata, Opus 111, does not furnish us with as concrete an example as the succeeding Scherzo in E flat minor, (for me) one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's exquisite formal sense. While it is not as long-breathed as the C sharp minor Scherzo, its concision makes it more tempting to the student. In character stormier than the Scherzo, Opus39, its thematic economy and development—by close parallelism of phraseology, as Hadow points out—reveal not only a powerful creative impulse, but erudition of the highest order. No doubt Chopin did improvise freely, did come easily by his melodies, but the travail of a giant in patience—again you think of Flaubert—is shown in the polishing of his periods. He is a poet who wrote perfect pages.The third Scherzo, less popular but of deeper import than the one in B flat minor, is in spirit splenetic, ironical, and passionate, yet with what antithetic precision and balance the various and antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed. And every measure is logically accounted for. The automatism inherent in all passage work he almost eliminated, and he spiritualised ornament and arabesque. It is the triumph of art over temperament. No one has ever accused Chopin of lacking warmth; indeed, thanks to a total misconception of his music, he is tortured into a roaring tornado by sentimentalists and virtuosi. But if he is carefully studied it will be seen that he is greatly preoccupied with form—his own form, be it understood—and that the linear in nearly all of his compositions takes precedence over colour. I know this sounds heretical. But while I do not yield an iota in my belief that Chopin is the most poetic among composers(as Shelley is among poets, and Vermeer is the painter's painter) it is high time that he be viewed from a different angle. The versatility of the man, his genius as composer and pianist, the novelty of his figuration and form dazzled his contemporaries or else blinded them to his true import. Individual as are the six Scherzos—two of them are in the Sonatas—they nevertheless stem from classic soil; the scherzo is not new with him, nor are its rhythms. But the Ballades are Chopinesque to the last degree, with their embellished thematic cadenzas, modulatory motives, richly decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable "content"; above all, in their amplification of the coda, a striking extension of the postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning as the main themes. The lordly flowing narration of the G minor Ballade; the fantastic wavering outlines of the second Ballade—which on close examination exhibits the firm burin of a masterful etcher; the beloved third Ballade, a formal masterpiece; and the F minor Ballade, most elaborate and decorative of the set—are there, I ask, in all piano literature such original compositions? The four Impromptus are mood pictures, highly finished, not lacking boldness of design, and in the second, F sharp major, there are fertile figurative devices and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic organ-point is original. Polyphonic complexity is to be found in some of the Mazourkas. Ehlertmentions a "perfect canon in the octave" in one of them (C sharp minor, Opus 63).Of the Concertos there is less to be said, for the conventional form was imposed by the title. Here Chopin is not the Greater Chopin, notwithstanding the beautiful music for the solo instrument. The sonata form is not desperately evaded, and in the rondo of the E minor Concerto he overtops Hummel on his native heath. As to the instrumentation I do not believe Chopin had much to do with it; it is the average colourless scoring of his day. Nor do I believe with some of his admirers that he will bear transposition to the orchestra, or even to the violin. It does not attenuate the power and originality of his themes that they are essentially of the piano. A song is for the voice and is not bettered by orchestral arrangement. The same may be said of the classic concertos for violin. With all due respect for those who talk about the Beethoven Sonatas being "orchestral," I only ask, Why is it they sound so "unorchestral" when scored for the full battery of instruments? The Sonata Pathétique loses its character thus treated. So does the A flat Polonaise of Chopin, heroic as are its themes. Render unto the keyboard that which is composed for it. The Appassionata Sonata in its proper medium is as thrilling as the Eroica Symphony. The so-called "orchestral test" is no test at all; only a confusion of terms and of artistic substances. Chopin thought forthe piano; he is the greatest composer for the piano; by the piano he stands or falls. The theme of the grandiose A minor Etude (Opus 25, No. 11) is a perfect specimen of his invention; yet it sounds elegiac and feminine when compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's C minor Symphony.The Allegro de Concert, Opus 46, is not his most distinguished work, truncated concerto as it is, but it proves that he could fill a larger canvas than the Valse. In the Mazourkas and Etudes he is closer to Bach than elsewhere. His early training under Elsner was sound and classical. But he is the real Chopin when he goes his own way, a fiery poet, a bold musician, but also a refined, tactful temperament, despising the facile, the exaggerated, and bent upon achieving a harmonious synthesis. Truly a classic composer in his solicitude for contour, and chastity of style. The Slav was tempered by the Gallic strain. Insatiable in his dreams, he fashioned them into shapes of enduring beauty.You would take from us the old Chopin, the greater Chopin, the dramatic, impassioned poet-improvisatore, I hear some cry! Not in the least. Chopin is Chopin. He sings, even under the fingers of pedants, and to-day is butchered in the classroom to make a holiday for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique. Sometimes the whole in his work is subordinatedto the parts, sometimes the parts are subordinated to the whole. The romantic "shadow" is there, also the classic structure. Again let me call your attention to the fact that if he had not juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanct tonic and dominant, had not distributed his thematic material in a different manner from the prescribed methods of the schools, he would have been cheerfully, even enthusiastically, saluted by his generation. But, then, we should have lost the real Chopin.CHAPTER XXIILITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITYBARNEY IN THE BOX-OFFICEFirst Scene.It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the Savoy (remember this is a play, and the unusual is bound to happen). In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science, two figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted façade. The doors are wide open, a thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are as sandy as his wit. The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his face. They are the two Maxes—Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:"Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?" "By jove, it is, let's go in." "Hasn't he a new play on?" "I can't say. I'm only a critic of the drayma." "No cynicism, Maxixe," urges Nordau. They approach. In unanimous flakes the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard on recognising them:"Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended.I'm giving my annual feast in the Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one scene. No one may enter, least of all you, Nordau, or you, Sir Critic." "Why, what's up, George?" asks in a pleading mid-Victorian timbre the little Maxixe. "Back to the woods, both of you!" commands George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. "Besides," he confidentially adds, "you surely don't wish to go to a play in which your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view." "On view!" quoth the author of Degeneration. "Yes, visible on a short furlough from Sheol, for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest show on earth. I'm in it. Lively, please!" A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. "I'm no Maxixe," he murmurs, "if I can't get into a theatre without paying." Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.Second Scene.On the stage of the theatre there are two long tables. The scene is set as if for a banquet. The curtain is down. Some men walk about conversing—some calmly, some feverishly. Several are sitting. The lighting is feeble. However, may be discerned familiar figures; Victor Hugo solemnly speaking to Charles Baudelaire—who shivers (un nouveau frisson); Flaubert in a corner roaringat Sainte-Beuve—the old row over Salammbô is on again. Richard Strauss is pulling at the velvet coat-tails of Richard Wagner, without attracting his attention. The Master, in company with nearly all the others, is staring at a large clock against the back drop. "Listen for the Parsifal chimes," he says, delight playing over his rugged features. "Ape of the ideal," booms a deep voice hard by. It is that of Nietzsche, whose moustaches droop in Polish cavalier style."Batiushka! If those two Dutchmen quarrel over the virility of Parsifal I'm going away." The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his newest Moujik costume, top-boots and all. In his left hand he holds a spade. "To table, gentlemen!" It is the jolly voice of the Irish Ibsen, G. B. S. Lights flare up. Without is heard the brumming of the audience, an orchestra softly plays motives from Pelléas et Mélisande. Wagner wipes his spectacles, and Maurice Maeterlinck crushes a block of Belgian oaths between his powerful teeth. But Debussy doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly strikes his soup-spoon on a silver salt-cellar and immediately jots down musical notation. "The correspondences of nuances," he sings to his neighbour, who happens to be Whistler. "The correspondence of fudge," retorts James. "D'ye think I'm interested in wall-paper music? Oh, Lil'libulero!" All are now seated. With his accustomed lingual dexterityMr. Shaw says grace, calling down a blessing upon the papier-mâché fowls and the pink stage-tea, from what he describes as a gaseous invertebrate god—he has read Haeckel—and winds up with a few brilliant heartless remarks:"I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods, and demigods, alive or dead, to remember that you are assembled here this evening to honour me. Without me, and my books and plays, you would, all of you, be dead in earnest—dead literature as well as dead bones. As for the living, I'll have a shy at you some day. I'm not fond of Maeterlinck. ["Hear, hear!" comes from Debussy's mystic beard.] As for you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at bettering Shakespeare, and, for Richard Strauss—well, I've never tried orchestration, but I'm sure I'd succeed as well as you——""Oh, please, won't some one give me a roast-beef sandwich? In Russia I daren't eat meat on account of my disciples there and in England—" It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes him with an indignant look, he, the prince of vegetarians: "Give him some salt, he needs salting." In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading of the confessions of Huysmans. The band, on the other side of the curtain, swings into the Kaisermarch. "Stop them! Stop it!" screams Wagner."I'm a Social-Democrat now.I wrote that march when I was a Monarchist." This was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up histall, lanky figure, he began: "You mean, Herr Geyer—to give you your real name—you wrote it for money. You mean, Richard Geyer, that you cut your musical coat to suit your snobbish cloth. You mean, the Wagner you never were, that you wrote your various operas—which you call music-dramas—to flatter your various patrons. Parsifal for the decadent King Ludwig——""Pardieu! this is too much." Manet's blond beard wagged with rage. "Have we assembled this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or are we met to do honour to the only man in England, and an Irishman at that, who, in his plays, has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen, Nietzsche, Wagner? As for me, I don't need such booming. I'm a modest man. I'm a painter." "Hein! You a painter!" Sitting alone, Gérôme discloses spiteful intonations in his voice. "Yes, a painter," hotly replies Manet. "And I'm in the Louvre, my Olympe—" "All the worse for the Louvre," sneers Gérôme. The two men would have been at each other's throats if some one from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened. It was Henrik Ibsen."Children," he remarks, in a strong Norwegian brogue, "please to remember my dignity if not your own. Long before Max Stirner—" Nietzsche interrupted: "There never was such a person." Ibsen calmly continued, "I wrote that 'my truth is the truth.' And whenI see such so-called great men acting like children, I regret having left my cool tomb in Norway. But where are the English dramatists, our confrères? Ask the master of the revels." Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops in his head at a practicable door."Who calls?""We wish to know why our brethren, the English playwrights, are not bidden to meet us?" said Maeterlinck, after gravely bowing to Ibsen. Smiling beatifically, Saint Bernard replied:"Because there ain't nosuchthing as an English dramatist. The only English dramatist is Irish." He disappears. Ensues a lively argument. "He may be right,"exclaims Maeterlinck, "yetI seem to have heard of Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Barrie—well, I'll have to ask the trusty A. B. C. Z. Walkley." "And the Americans?" cries Ibsen, who is annoyed because Richard Strauss persists in asking for a symphonic scenario of Peer Gynt. "I'm sure," the composer complains, "Grieg will be forgotten if I write new incidental music for you." Ibsen looks at him sourly."American dramatists, or do you mean American millionaires?" Manet interpolated. "No, I fancy he means the American painters who imitate my pictures, making them better than the originals, and also getting better prices than I did.""What envy! what slandering! what enviousfeelings!" sighs Nietzsche. "If my doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things sublunary is a reality, then I shall be sitting with these venomous spiders, shall be in this identical spot a trillion of years hence. Oh, horrors! Why was I born?""Divided tones," argues Manet, clutching Whistler by his carmilion necktie, "are the only—" Suddenly Shaw leaps on the stage."Gentlemen, gods, ghosts, idols, I've bad news for you. Max Nordau is in the audience." "Nordau!" wails every one. Before the lights could be extinguished the guests were under the table. "No taking chances," whispers Nietzsche. "Quoi donc! who is this Nordau—a spy of Napoleon's?" demands Hugo, in bewildered accents. For answer, Baudelaire shivers and intones: "O Poe, Poe! O Edgar Poe." Silence so profound that one hears the perspiration drop from Wagner's massive brow.Third Scene.It still snows without. Max, the only Nordau, stands in silent pride. He is alone. The erstwhile illuminated theatre is as dark as the Hall of Eblis. "Gone the idols! All. I need but crack that old whip of Decadence and they crumble. So much for a mere word. And now to work. I'll write the unique tale of Shaw's Cave of Idols, for I alone witnessed the dénouement." He spoke aloud. Judge his chagrin when he heard the other Max give him this cheery leading motive: "I sawit all—what a story for my weekly review." "How like a yellow pear-tree!" exclaims the disgusted theorist of mad genius. Nordau speeds his way, as from the box-office comes the chink of silver. It is G. B. S. counting the cash. Who says a poet can't be a pragmatist? The little Maxixe calls out: "Me, too, Blarney! Remember I'm the only living replica of Charles Lamb." "You mean dead mutton," tartly replied Bernard. The other giggled. "The same dear old whimsical cactus," he cries; "but with all your faults we love you still—I said still, if that's possible for your tongue, George, quite still!" Curtain.THE WOMAN WHO BUYSShe (entering art gallery): "I wish to buy a Titian for my bridge-whist this evening. Is it possible for you to send me one to the hotel in time?" He (nervously elated): "Impossible. I sent the last Titian we had in stock to Mrs. Groats's Déjeuner Féroce." She (making a face): "That woman again. Oh, dear, how tiresome!" He (eagerly): "But I can give you a Raphael." She (dubiously): "Raphael—who?" He (magisterially): "There are three Raphaels, Madame—the archangel of that name, Raphael Sanzio, the painter, and Raphael Joseffy. It is to the second one I allude. Perhaps you would like to see—" She (hurriedly): "Oh! not at all. I fancy it's all right. Send it up this afternoon, or hadn'tI better take it along in my car?" (A shrill hurry-up booing is heard without. It is the voice of the siren on a new one hundred horse-power Cubist machine, 1918 pattern.) She (guiltily): "Tiens! That is my chauffeur, Constant. The poor fellow. He is always so hungry about this time. By the way, Mr. Frame, how much do you ask for that Raphael? My husband is so—yes, really, stingy this winter. He says I buy too much, forgetting we are all beggars, anyhow. And what is the subject? I want something cheerful for the game, you know. It consoles the kickers who lose to look at a pretty picture." He (joyfully): "Oh, the price! The subject! A half-million is the price—surely not too much. The picture is called The Wooing of Eve. It has been engraved by Bartolozzi. Oh, oh, it is a genuine Raphael. There are no more imitation old masters, only modern art is forged nowadays." She (interrupting, proudly): "Bartolozzi, the man who paints skinny women in Florence, something like Boldini, only in old-fashioned costumes?" He (resignedly): "No, Madame. Possibly you allude to Botticelli. The Bartolozzi I mention was a school friend of Raphael or a cousin to Michael Angelo—I've forgotten which. That's why he engraved Raphael's paintings." (He colours as he recalls conflicting dates.) She (in a hurry): "It doesn't much matter, Mr. Frame, I hate all this affectation over a lot of musty, fusty pictures.Send it up with the bill. I ought to win at least half the money from Mrs. Stonerich." (She rushes away. An odour of violets and stale cigarette smoke floats through the hallway. The siren screams, and a rumbling is heard in the middle distance.) He (waking, as if from a sweet dream, vigorously shouts): "George, George, fetch down that canvas Schmiere painted for us last summer, and stencil it Raphael Sanzio. Yes—S-a-n-z-i-o—got it? Hurry up! I'm off for the day. If any one 'phones, I'm over at Sherry's, in the Cafe." (Saunters out, swinging his stick, and repeating the old Russian proverb, "A dark forest is the heart of a woman.")SCHOOLS IN ART"Yes," said the venerable auctioneer, as he shook his white head, "yes, I watch them coming and going, coming and going. One year it's light pictures, another it's dark. The public is a woman. What fashion dictates to a woman she scrupulously follows. She sports bonnets one decade, big picture hats the next. So, the public that loves art—or thinks it loves art. It used to be the Hudson River school. And then Chase and those landscape fellows came over from Europe, where they got a lot of new-fangled notions. Do you remember Eastman Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you remember the Fortuny craze? His Gamblers,some figures sitting on the grass? Well, sir, seventeen thousand dollars that canvas fetched. Big price for forty-odd years ago. Bang up? Of course. Meissonier, Bouguereau, and Detaille came in. We couldn't sell them fast enough. I guess the picture counterfeiters' factories up on Montmartre were kept busy those times. It was after our Civil War. There were a lot of mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a chromo from a Gérôme. Those were the chaps we liked. I often began with: 'Ten thousand dollars—who offers me ten thousand dollars for this magnificent Munkaczy?' Nowadays I couldn't give away Munkaczy as a present. He is too black. Our people ask for flashing colours. Rainbows. Fireworks. The new school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon men have had their day. Mind you, I don't claim they are falling off. A few seasons ago a Troyon held its own against any Manet you put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer in the market, and the picture cranks are beginning to tire of the dull greys, soft blues, and sober skies. The Barbizons drove out Meissonier and his crowd. Then Monet and the Impressionists sent the Barbizons to the wall. I tell you the public is a woman. It craves novelty. What's that? Interested in the greater truth of Post-Impressionism? Excuse me, my dear sir, but that's pure rot. The public doesn't give a hang for technique. It wants a change. Indeed? Really? They havemade a success, those young whippersnappers, the Cubists. Such cubs! Well, I'm not surprised. Perhaps our public is tiring of the Academy. Perhaps young American painters may get their dues—some day. We may even export them. I've been an art auctioneer man and boy over fifty years, and I tell you again the public is a woman. One year it's dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or hats. Silks or satins. Lean or stout. All right. Coming—coming!" Clearing his throat, the old auctioneer slowly moves away.THE JOY OF STARINGWatch the mob. Watch it staring. Like cattle behind the rails which bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece, only to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a thrice-stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the People. Our brethren! Mighty idea—but a stale one before Noah entered the ark. "Let us go to the people," cried Tolstoy. But we are the people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the people surge before a picture which represents an old woman kissing her cow. Or, standing with eyeballs agog, they count the metal buttons on the coat of the MeissonierCuirassier. It is great art. Let the public be educated. Down with the new realism—which only recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence. (Are we not all middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic? Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph—pictures that act. Squeaking records. Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness of Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical machines. Or chromos. Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your "step," watch the mob.A DILETTANTEHe is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze over the pupils of his eyes. He is never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet, when he enters a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step in his direction; then they get to cover as speedily as possible, grumbling: "Look out! it's only the old bird again." But one of them is always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide. He thinks he knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them. He is the embittered dilettante; embittered, because with his moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month in the year. So he rails at the dealers,inveighs against the artists, and haunts auction-rooms. He never bids, but is extremely solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to sit for hours on a small print, until, in despair, the owner leaves. Then, with infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a favoured few. He bought it. He selected it. It is a tribute to his exquisite taste. And the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings and parrot ejaculations. Withal, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of art. He sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a Dürer; but he puts the blame upon his defective eyesight.

Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbed the contemporary wisdom of Wittenberg. And let it be said in passing that their knowledge did not lag behind ours, metaphysically speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet, if he had lived longer, might have said that no philosophy would ever solve the riddle of the sphinx; that we never know, only name, things. Noah is the supreme symbol of science, he the first namer of the animals in the ark. The world of sensation is our ark and we are one branch of the animal family. We come whence we know not and go where we shall never guess. Standing on this tiny Isle of Error we call the present, we think backward and live forward. Hamlet the sceptical would now demand something more tangible than the Grand Perhaps. My kingdom for a fulcrum! he might cry to Horatio—on which I may rest my lever and pry this too too solid earth up to the starry skies! What the implement? Religion? Remember Hamlet wasa Catholic, too sensitive to send unshrived to hell's fire the soul of his uncle. Philosophy? Read Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and realise that if he were alive to-day the melancholy Prince might be a delicate scoffer at all fables. A Hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What then the escape? We all need more elbow-room in the infinite. The answer is—the Fourth Dimension in Higher Space. Eureka!

After studying Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius, or the selections in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, even the doubting Thomas is forced to admit that here is no trace of rambling discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stammered enigmas; on the contrary, the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces with crystalline clearness the veil of the visible world. As literary style we find sharp contours and affirmations. Mysticism is not all cobweb lace and opal fire. Remember that we are not stressing the validity of either the vision or its consequent judgments; we only wish to emphasise the absence of muddy thinking in these writings. This quality of precision, allied to an eloquent, persuasive style, we encounter in Claude Bragdon's Four Dimensional Vistas. The author is an architect and has written much of his art and of projective ornament. (He was a Scammon lecturer at the Chicago Art Institute in 1915.) He is a mystic. He is also eminently practical. His contribution to æsthetics in The BeautifulNecessity is suggestive, and on the purely technical side valuable. But Mr. Bragdon, being both a mathematician and a poet, does not stop at three-dimensional existence. Like the profound English mystic William Blake, he could ask: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?"

What is the Fourth Dimension? A subtle transposition of precious essences from the earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in a world of three dimensions, the symbols of which are length, breadth, thickness. A species of triangular world, a prison for certain souls who see in the category of Time an escape from that other imperative, Space (however, not the Categorical Imperative of Kant and its acid moral convention). Helmholtz and many mathematicians employed the "n" dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful in some analytical problems, but it is not apprehended by the grosser senses. Pascal, great thinker and mathematician, had his "Abyss"; it was his Fourth Dimension, and he never walked abroad without the consciousness of it at his side. This illusion or obsession was the result of a severe mental shock early in his life. Many of us are like the French philosopher. We have our "abyss," mystic or real. Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician Bolyai, who in 1823 "declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels,'I will draw two lines through a given point both of which will be parallel to a given line.'" Space, then, may be curved in another dimension. Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though he does not attempt to prove it, as that would be impossible; but he gives his readers the chief points in the hypothesis. The "n" dimension may be employed as a lever to the imagination. Even revealed religion demands our faith, and imagination is the prime agent in the interpretation of the universe, according to the gospel of mystic mathematics.

Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is interesting to note the imagery of transcendentalism through the ages. It is invariably geometrical. Spheres, planes, cones, circles, spirals, tetragrams, pentagrams, ellipses, and what-not. A cubistic universe. Xenophanes said that God is a sphere. And then there are the geometrical patterns made by birds on the wing. Heaven in any religion is another sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes, many mansions for the soul at its various stages of existence. The Bible, the mystical teachings of Mother Church—why evoke familiar witnesses? We are hemmed in by riddles, and the magnificent and mysterious tumult of life asks for the eye of imagination, which is also the eye of faith. The cold fire and dark light of the mystics must not repel us by their strangeness. Not knowledge but perception is power, and the psychic is the sign-post ofthe future. What do all these words mean: matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules, electrons, but the same old thing? I am a colony of cells, yet that fact does not get me closer to the core of the soul. What will? A fourth spatial dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a poetic concept.

He calls man a space-eater. Human ambition is to annihilate space. Wars are fought for space, and every step in knowledge is based upon its mastery. What miracles are wireless telegraphy, flying-machines, the Roentgen ray! Astronomy—what ghastly gulfs it shows us in space! Time and space were abolished as sense illusions by the worthy Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley; but as we are up to our eyes in quotidian life, which grows over and about us like grass, we cannot shake off the oppression. First thought, and then realised, these marvels are now accepted as matter of fact because mankind has been told the technique of them; as if any explanation can be more than nominal. We shall never know the real nature of the phenomena that crowd in on us from lust to dust. Not even that synthesis of the five senses, the sixth, or sex sense, with its evanescent ecstasy, cuts deeply into the darkness. There may be a seventh sense, a new dimension, intimations of which are setting advanced thinkers on fresh trails. But there is as yet no tangible proof. Philosophers, who, like some singers, bray their brainless convictionsto a gaping auditory, ask of us much more credence, and little or no imagination. As that "old mole," working in the ground, gravitation, is defied by aeroplanes, then we should not despair of any hypothesis which permits us a peep through the partly opened door. Plato's cavern and the shadows. Who knows but in this universe there may be a crevice through which filters the light of another life? Emerson, who shed systems yet never organised one, hints at aerial perspectives. A flight through the sky with the sun bathing in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid finite world. In such perilous altitudes I have enjoyed this experience and felt a liberation of the spirit which has no parallel; not even when listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin. Music, indeed, is the nearest approach to psychic freedom.

Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Goethe's expression "frozen music," applied to Gothic architecture. (Stendhal appropriated this phrase.) For us the flying buttress is aspiring, and the pointed arch is a fugue. Our author is rich in his analogies, and like Sir Thomas Browne sees "quincunxes" in everything; his particular "quincunx" being Higher Space. The precise patterns in our brain, like those of the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us to perceive and build the universe (otherwise called innate ideas) are geometrical. Space is the first and final illusion. Time—whichis not "a stuff both resistant and substantial," as Henri Bergson declares—is perhaps the Fourth Dimension in the guise of a sequence of states, and not grasped simultaneously, as is the idea of Space. That Time can shrink and expand, opium-eaters, who are not always totally drugged by their dreams, assure us. A second becomes an æon. And space curvature? Is it any wonder that "Lewis Carroll," who wrote those extraordinary parables for little folk, Through the Looking-Glass and Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A topsy-turvy world; it is even upside down as an optical image. The other side of good and evil may be around the corner. Eternity can lurk in a molecule too tiny to harbour Queen Mab. And we may all live to see the back of our own heads without peering in mirrors. That "astral trunk" once so fervently believed in may prove a reality; it is situated behind the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the planet Saturn, and by its aid we should be enabled to converse with spirits! The pineal gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence us in at every step. We fill our belly with the east wind of vain desires. We eat the air promise-crammed. This world is but a point in the universe, and our universe only one of an infinite series. There was no beginning, there is no end. Eternity is now; though death and the tax-gatherer never cease their importunings.

All this Mr. Bragdon does not say, though he leans heavily on the arcana of the ancient wisdom. The truth is that the majority of humans are mentally considered vegetables, living in two dimensions. To keep us responsive to spiritual issues, as people were awaked in Swift's Laputa by flappers, is the service performed by such transcendentalists as C. Howard Hinton, author of The Fourth Dimension; Claude Bragdon and Cora Lenore Williams. Their thought is not new; it was hoary with age when the Greeks went to old Egypt for fresh learning; Noah conversed with his wives in the same terminology. But its application is novel, as are the personal nuances. The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may be likened to a fresh lens in the telescope or microscope of speculation. For the present writer the hypothesis is just one more incursion into the fairyland of metaphysics. Without fairies the heart grows old and dusty.

The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating shapes. As for the paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush, and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired pawnbroker. The Eternal Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse for life is its brevity. Why, then, do we yearn for that unending corridor through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed by the burden of our chimera—ourego? I confess that I prefer to watch on the edge of some vast promontory the swift approach of a dark sun rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar spaces to the celestial assignation made at the beginning of Time for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the populous path of the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that apocalyptic flare-up—surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing in greasy bliss—Higher Space may be manifested and Time and Tri-Dimensional Space be no more. The rest is silence.

It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr—whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the noteof hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana—or Oscariana—which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy," his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and "horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and spongers, his end might have been different.

I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was Barbey d'Aurévilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably modelled—lacecuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations. But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne—(in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his Jumbos")—Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion element, is poor Huysmans's—just look into that masterpiece, A Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salomé is Flaubert in operetta form—his gorgeous Herodias watered down for uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece—which limps dramatically—would never have been seriously considered if not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact,i. e., it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable inany particular. His Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error, yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very gay fancy.

He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed à la Byron and Baudelaire; but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a plagiaristfrom art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too seriously—I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the tragic dénouement that has been thrashed to death by those who know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave attitude—always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a second Jesus Christ—which latter statement stuns one. (The Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me, he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne, Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readerswould only take the trouble to study the originals there might be less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called æsthetic movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true; but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the "Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not—nothing but his astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory.

Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed success, though the æsthetic principle at the base of his theory is eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very titles are significant—a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye; truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the Japanese poet from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to Japan—only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent of armpits—of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New Yorkaudience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a Japanese crowd. That Mr. Finck has assured us. In the Théâtre d'art, Paris, and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made with all the arts—except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music, lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the stage assumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple. The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonishing poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch the ears of credulous ones. René de Ghil invented an entirely new system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet. I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands of an anarch composer like Illowski—or Richard Strauss. And now New York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine. It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave conductorship of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), whilehis brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his étude in D sharp minor. Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it. I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and passionate twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus, the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; principally, Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if not much addicted to the languishing Lydian mode. But his Light Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. InParis the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows with perfume symphonies.

A quarter of a century ago I visited the Théâtre d'art, in Paris; that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the nombril button, took my Rig-Veda—a sacred buggy—projected my astral being, and sailed through space to the French capital, there to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts, eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny balls of violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a mélange that appealed to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge, yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried(astrally, of course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic."

The lanquid lisp of those assembled in the theatre drifted into little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor, scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo, sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion) smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin, though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. Soevidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed.

Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away, but, full of gumbo soup as I was—and you have no idea how soup discommodes the astral stomach—I was anchored to my seat, and bravely determined not to leave till I had someclew to the riddle of the new evangel of the seven—or seventeen—arts. The stage remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my tired eyeballs, and when the odour had shifted to decayed fish, dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and, turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the title of this play, piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony, cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I had appealed looked fearfully about him—I had foolishly forgotten that I was invisible in my astral shape—then clutched at his windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a slow, putrid silence.

Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets. Suddenly the lights wentout, and we were plunged into a blackness that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glacé, and orchids, and the soup supply shifted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced. Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandishing aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland, was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the slaying of the monster in its many-buttoned waistcoat. How gallantly the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives, and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge carcass, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetratedthe air, the electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse, making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs, and the lights were transposed to a shivering purple. Then lilac steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di bassetto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention! When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis of the arts? Synthesis of rubbish! One at a time, and not too much time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward, wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When Ilanded at the Battery it was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky. New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.

That Chopin is a classic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature; but that he is of a classical complexion as a composer from the beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox. Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained now, since old party lines have been effaced. To battle seriously for such words as Classic or Romantic or Realism is no longer possible. Cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once wrangled over doctrinal points; as if the salvation of mankind depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation or consubstantiation. Only yesterday that ugly word "degeneracy," thanks to quack critics and charlatan "psychiatrists," figured as a means of estimating genius. This method has quite vanished among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another misunderstood vocable—decadence. Wagner is called decadent. So is Chopin. While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis:

"Technically, a decadent style is only suchin relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.... Swift's prose is classic, Pater's decadent.... Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic ... is decadent.... All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes."

I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth a profound but not widely appreciated fact. In art, as in life, there is no absolute. Perhaps the most illuminating statement concerning the romantic style was uttered by Théophile Gautier. Of it he wrote (in his essay on Baudelaire): "Unlike the classic style it admits shadow." We need not bother ourselves about the spirit of romanticism; that has been done to the death by hundreds of critics. And it is a sign of the times that the old-fashioned Chopin is fading, while we are now vitally interested in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopinthe romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous, morbid, and Chopin the pianist, need not enter into our present scheme. He has appeared to popular fancy as everything from Thaddeus of Warsaw to an exotic drawing-room hero; from the sentimental consumptive consoled by countesses to the accredited slave of George Sand. All this is truly the romantic Chopin. It is the obverse of the medal that piques curiosity. Why the classic quality of his compositions, their clarity, concision, purity, structural balance, were largely missed by so many of his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of his obviously romantic melodies he was definitely ranged with the most extravagant of the romantics, with Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt; but, as a matter of fact, he is formally closer to Mendelssohn. His original manner of distributing his thematic material deceived the critics. He refused to join the revolutionists; later in the case of Flaubert we come upon an analogous condition. Hailed as chief of the realists, the author of Madame Bovary took an ironic delight in publishing Salammbô, which was romantic enough to please that prince of romanticists, Victor Hugo. Chopin has been reproached for his tepid attitude toward romanticism, and also because of his rather caustic criticisms of certain leaders. He, a musical aristocratpur sang, held aloof, though he permitted himself to make some sharp commentaries on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz.Decidedly not a romantic despite his romantic externalism. Decidedly a classic despite his romantic "content." Of him Stendhal might have written: a classic is a dead romantic. (Heine left no epic, yet he is an indubitable classic.) Wise Goethe said: "The point is for a work to be thoroughly good and then it is sure to be classical."

But it is not because of the classicism achieved by the pathos of distance that Chopin's special case makes an appeal. It is Chopin as a consummate master of music that interests us. In his admirable Chopin the Composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley considers Chopin and puts out of court the familiar "gifted amateur," "improvisatore of genius," and the rest of the theatrical stock description by proving beyond peradventure of a doubt that Frédéric François Chopin was not only a creator of new harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but also a musician skilled in the handling of formal problems, one grounded in the schools of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; furthermore, that if he did not employ the sonata form in its severest sense, he literally built on it as a foundation. He managed the rondo with ease and grace, and if he did not write fugues it was because the fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps the divination of his own limitations is a further manifestation of his extraordinary genius. This does not imply that Chopin had any particular genius in counterpoint, but to deny his masteryof polyphony is a grave error. And it is still denied with the very evidence staring his critics in the face. Beethoven in his sonatas demonstrated his individuality, though coming after Mozart's perfect specimens in that form. Chopin did not try to bend the bow of Ulysses, though more than a word might be said of his two last Sonatas—the first is boyishly pedantic, and monotonous in key-contrast, while the 'cello and piano sonata hardly can be ranked as an exemplar of classic form.

Of the Etudes Kelley says:

"In this group of masterpieces we find the more desirable features of the classical school—diatonic melodies, well-balanced phrase and period-building—together with the richness afforded by chromatic harmonies and modulatory devices heretofore unknown."

Indeed, a new system of music that changed the entire current of the art. It was not without cause that I once called Chopin the "open door"; through his door the East entered and whether for good or for ill certainly revolutionised Western music. Mr. Hadow is right in declaring that "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not as far from each other as the music of 1880 from that of 1914." And Chopin was the most potent influence, in company with Beethoven and Wagner, in bringing about that change. I say in company with Beethoven and Wagner, for I heartily agree with Frederick Niecks in his recent judgment:

"I consider Chopin to be one of the three most powerful factors in the development of nineteenth-century music, the other two being, of course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute originality of Chopin's personality, and that of its expression through novel harmony, chromaticism, figuration justifies the assertion. And none will deny the fact who takes the trouble to trace the Polish master's influence on his contemporaries and successors. The greatest and most powerful composers came under this influence, to a large extent, by the process of infiltration."

Kelley gives us chapter and verse in the particular case of Wagner and his absorption of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the late Anton Seidl many times for my particular benefit.

However, this only brings us to Chopin the innovator, whereas it is the aspect of the classic Chopin which has been neglected. "As far back as 1840 Chopin was employing half-tones with a freedom that brought upon him the wrath of conservative critics," writes Hadow, who admires the Pole with reservations, not placing him in such august company as has Kelley and Niecks. True, Chopin was a pioneer in several departments of his art, yet how few recognised or recognise to-day that Schumann is the more romantic composer of the pair; his music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness; his Carneval the epitome of romantic musicalportraiture—with its "Chopin" more Chopin than the original. Contrast the noble Fantasy in C, Opus 17 of Schumann, with the equally noble Fantasy in F minor, Opus 49 of Chopin, and ask which is the more romantic in spirit, structure, and technique. Unquestionably to Schumann would be awarded the quality of romanticism. He is more fantastic, though his fantasy is less decorative; he strays into the most delightful and umbrageous paths and never falters in the preservation of romantic atmosphere. Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin, who, no matter his potentialities, never experimented in the larger symphonic mould, and as fully imbued with the poetic spirit as Schumann; nevertheless a master of his patterns, whether in figuration or general structure. His Mazourkas are sonnets, and this Fantasy in F minor is, as Kelley points out, a highly complex rondo; as are the Ballades and Scherzos. Beethoven, doubtless, would have developed the eloquent main theme more significantly; strictly speaking, Chopin introduces so much new melodic material that the rondo form is greatly modified, yet never quite banished. The architectonics of the composition are more magnificent than in Schumann, although I do not propose to make invidious comparisons. Both works are classics in the accepted sense of the term. But Chopin's Fantasy is more classic in structure and sentiment.

The Sonatas in B flat minor and B minor are"awful examples" for academic theorists. They are not faultless as to form and do sadly lack organic unity. Schumann particularly criticises the Sonata Opus 35 because of the inclusion of the Funeral March and the homophonic, "invertebrate" finale. But the two first movements are distinct contributions to Sonata literature, even if in the first movement the opening theme is not recapitulated. I confess that I am glad it is not, though the solemn title "Sonata" becomes thereby a mockery. The composer adequately treats this first motive in the development section so that its absence later is not annoyingly felt. There are, I agree with Mr. Kelley, some bars that are surprisingly like a certain page of Die Götterdämmerung, as the Feuerzauber music may be noted in the flickering chromaticism of the E minor Concerto; or as the first phrase of the C minor Etude, Opus 10, No. 12, is to be found in Tristan and Isolde—Isolde's opening measure, "Wer wagt mich zu höhnen." (The orchestra plays the identical Chopin phrase.) This first movement of the B flat minor Sonata—with four bars of introduction, evidently suggested by the sublime opening of Beethoven's C minor Sonata, Opus 111, does not furnish us with as concrete an example as the succeeding Scherzo in E flat minor, (for me) one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's exquisite formal sense. While it is not as long-breathed as the C sharp minor Scherzo, its concision makes it more tempting to the student. In character stormier than the Scherzo, Opus39, its thematic economy and development—by close parallelism of phraseology, as Hadow points out—reveal not only a powerful creative impulse, but erudition of the highest order. No doubt Chopin did improvise freely, did come easily by his melodies, but the travail of a giant in patience—again you think of Flaubert—is shown in the polishing of his periods. He is a poet who wrote perfect pages.

The third Scherzo, less popular but of deeper import than the one in B flat minor, is in spirit splenetic, ironical, and passionate, yet with what antithetic precision and balance the various and antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed. And every measure is logically accounted for. The automatism inherent in all passage work he almost eliminated, and he spiritualised ornament and arabesque. It is the triumph of art over temperament. No one has ever accused Chopin of lacking warmth; indeed, thanks to a total misconception of his music, he is tortured into a roaring tornado by sentimentalists and virtuosi. But if he is carefully studied it will be seen that he is greatly preoccupied with form—his own form, be it understood—and that the linear in nearly all of his compositions takes precedence over colour. I know this sounds heretical. But while I do not yield an iota in my belief that Chopin is the most poetic among composers(as Shelley is among poets, and Vermeer is the painter's painter) it is high time that he be viewed from a different angle. The versatility of the man, his genius as composer and pianist, the novelty of his figuration and form dazzled his contemporaries or else blinded them to his true import. Individual as are the six Scherzos—two of them are in the Sonatas—they nevertheless stem from classic soil; the scherzo is not new with him, nor are its rhythms. But the Ballades are Chopinesque to the last degree, with their embellished thematic cadenzas, modulatory motives, richly decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable "content"; above all, in their amplification of the coda, a striking extension of the postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning as the main themes. The lordly flowing narration of the G minor Ballade; the fantastic wavering outlines of the second Ballade—which on close examination exhibits the firm burin of a masterful etcher; the beloved third Ballade, a formal masterpiece; and the F minor Ballade, most elaborate and decorative of the set—are there, I ask, in all piano literature such original compositions? The four Impromptus are mood pictures, highly finished, not lacking boldness of design, and in the second, F sharp major, there are fertile figurative devices and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic organ-point is original. Polyphonic complexity is to be found in some of the Mazourkas. Ehlertmentions a "perfect canon in the octave" in one of them (C sharp minor, Opus 63).

Of the Concertos there is less to be said, for the conventional form was imposed by the title. Here Chopin is not the Greater Chopin, notwithstanding the beautiful music for the solo instrument. The sonata form is not desperately evaded, and in the rondo of the E minor Concerto he overtops Hummel on his native heath. As to the instrumentation I do not believe Chopin had much to do with it; it is the average colourless scoring of his day. Nor do I believe with some of his admirers that he will bear transposition to the orchestra, or even to the violin. It does not attenuate the power and originality of his themes that they are essentially of the piano. A song is for the voice and is not bettered by orchestral arrangement. The same may be said of the classic concertos for violin. With all due respect for those who talk about the Beethoven Sonatas being "orchestral," I only ask, Why is it they sound so "unorchestral" when scored for the full battery of instruments? The Sonata Pathétique loses its character thus treated. So does the A flat Polonaise of Chopin, heroic as are its themes. Render unto the keyboard that which is composed for it. The Appassionata Sonata in its proper medium is as thrilling as the Eroica Symphony. The so-called "orchestral test" is no test at all; only a confusion of terms and of artistic substances. Chopin thought forthe piano; he is the greatest composer for the piano; by the piano he stands or falls. The theme of the grandiose A minor Etude (Opus 25, No. 11) is a perfect specimen of his invention; yet it sounds elegiac and feminine when compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's C minor Symphony.

The Allegro de Concert, Opus 46, is not his most distinguished work, truncated concerto as it is, but it proves that he could fill a larger canvas than the Valse. In the Mazourkas and Etudes he is closer to Bach than elsewhere. His early training under Elsner was sound and classical. But he is the real Chopin when he goes his own way, a fiery poet, a bold musician, but also a refined, tactful temperament, despising the facile, the exaggerated, and bent upon achieving a harmonious synthesis. Truly a classic composer in his solicitude for contour, and chastity of style. The Slav was tempered by the Gallic strain. Insatiable in his dreams, he fashioned them into shapes of enduring beauty.

You would take from us the old Chopin, the greater Chopin, the dramatic, impassioned poet-improvisatore, I hear some cry! Not in the least. Chopin is Chopin. He sings, even under the fingers of pedants, and to-day is butchered in the classroom to make a holiday for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique. Sometimes the whole in his work is subordinatedto the parts, sometimes the parts are subordinated to the whole. The romantic "shadow" is there, also the classic structure. Again let me call your attention to the fact that if he had not juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanct tonic and dominant, had not distributed his thematic material in a different manner from the prescribed methods of the schools, he would have been cheerfully, even enthusiastically, saluted by his generation. But, then, we should have lost the real Chopin.

First Scene.It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the Savoy (remember this is a play, and the unusual is bound to happen). In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science, two figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted façade. The doors are wide open, a thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are as sandy as his wit. The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his face. They are the two Maxes—Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:

"Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?" "By jove, it is, let's go in." "Hasn't he a new play on?" "I can't say. I'm only a critic of the drayma." "No cynicism, Maxixe," urges Nordau. They approach. In unanimous flakes the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard on recognising them:

"Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended.I'm giving my annual feast in the Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one scene. No one may enter, least of all you, Nordau, or you, Sir Critic." "Why, what's up, George?" asks in a pleading mid-Victorian timbre the little Maxixe. "Back to the woods, both of you!" commands George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. "Besides," he confidentially adds, "you surely don't wish to go to a play in which your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view." "On view!" quoth the author of Degeneration. "Yes, visible on a short furlough from Sheol, for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest show on earth. I'm in it. Lively, please!" A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. "I'm no Maxixe," he murmurs, "if I can't get into a theatre without paying." Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.

Second Scene.On the stage of the theatre there are two long tables. The scene is set as if for a banquet. The curtain is down. Some men walk about conversing—some calmly, some feverishly. Several are sitting. The lighting is feeble. However, may be discerned familiar figures; Victor Hugo solemnly speaking to Charles Baudelaire—who shivers (un nouveau frisson); Flaubert in a corner roaringat Sainte-Beuve—the old row over Salammbô is on again. Richard Strauss is pulling at the velvet coat-tails of Richard Wagner, without attracting his attention. The Master, in company with nearly all the others, is staring at a large clock against the back drop. "Listen for the Parsifal chimes," he says, delight playing over his rugged features. "Ape of the ideal," booms a deep voice hard by. It is that of Nietzsche, whose moustaches droop in Polish cavalier style.

"Batiushka! If those two Dutchmen quarrel over the virility of Parsifal I'm going away." The speaker is Tolstoy, attired in his newest Moujik costume, top-boots and all. In his left hand he holds a spade. "To table, gentlemen!" It is the jolly voice of the Irish Ibsen, G. B. S. Lights flare up. Without is heard the brumming of the audience, an orchestra softly plays motives from Pelléas et Mélisande. Wagner wipes his spectacles, and Maurice Maeterlinck crushes a block of Belgian oaths between his powerful teeth. But Debussy doesn't appear to notice either man. He languidly strikes his soup-spoon on a silver salt-cellar and immediately jots down musical notation. "The correspondences of nuances," he sings to his neighbour, who happens to be Whistler. "The correspondence of fudge," retorts James. "D'ye think I'm interested in wall-paper music? Oh, Lil'libulero!" All are now seated. With his accustomed lingual dexterityMr. Shaw says grace, calling down a blessing upon the papier-mâché fowls and the pink stage-tea, from what he describes as a gaseous invertebrate god—he has read Haeckel—and winds up with a few brilliant heartless remarks:

"I wish you gentlemen, ghosts, idols, gods, and demigods, alive or dead, to remember that you are assembled here this evening to honour me. Without me, and my books and plays, you would, all of you, be dead in earnest—dead literature as well as dead bones. As for the living, I'll have a shy at you some day. I'm not fond of Maeterlinck. ["Hear, hear!" comes from Debussy's mystic beard.] As for you, Maurice, I can beat you hands down at bettering Shakespeare, and, for Richard Strauss—well, I've never tried orchestration, but I'm sure I'd succeed as well as you——"

"Oh, please, won't some one give me a roast-beef sandwich? In Russia I daren't eat meat on account of my disciples there and in England—" It is Tolstoy who speaks. Shaw fixes him with an indignant look, he, the prince of vegetarians: "Give him some salt, he needs salting." In tears, Tolstoy resumes his reading of the confessions of Huysmans. The band, on the other side of the curtain, swings into the Kaisermarch. "Stop them! Stop it!" screams Wagner."I'm a Social-Democrat now.I wrote that march when I was a Monarchist." This was the chance for Nietzsche. Drawing up histall, lanky figure, he began: "You mean, Herr Geyer—to give you your real name—you wrote it for money. You mean, Richard Geyer, that you cut your musical coat to suit your snobbish cloth. You mean, the Wagner you never were, that you wrote your various operas—which you call music-dramas—to flatter your various patrons. Parsifal for the decadent King Ludwig——"

"Pardieu! this is too much." Manet's blond beard wagged with rage. "Have we assembled this night to fight over ancient treacheries, or are we met to do honour to the only man in England, and an Irishman at that, who, in his plays, has kept alive the ideas of Ibsen, Nietzsche, Wagner? As for me, I don't need such booming. I'm a modest man. I'm a painter." "Hein! You a painter!" Sitting alone, Gérôme discloses spiteful intonations in his voice. "Yes, a painter," hotly replies Manet. "And I'm in the Louvre, my Olympe—" "All the worse for the Louvre," sneers Gérôme. The two men would have been at each other's throats if some one from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers hadn't intervened. It was Henrik Ibsen.

"Children," he remarks, in a strong Norwegian brogue, "please to remember my dignity if not your own. Long before Max Stirner—" Nietzsche interrupted: "There never was such a person." Ibsen calmly continued, "I wrote that 'my truth is the truth.' And whenI see such so-called great men acting like children, I regret having left my cool tomb in Norway. But where are the English dramatists, our confrères? Ask the master of the revels." Ibsen sat down. Shaw pops in his head at a practicable door.

"Who calls?"

"We wish to know why our brethren, the English playwrights, are not bidden to meet us?" said Maeterlinck, after gravely bowing to Ibsen. Smiling beatifically, Saint Bernard replied:

"Because there ain't nosuchthing as an English dramatist. The only English dramatist is Irish." He disappears. Ensues a lively argument. "He may be right,"exclaims Maeterlinck, "yetI seem to have heard of Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Barrie—well, I'll have to ask the trusty A. B. C. Z. Walkley." "And the Americans?" cries Ibsen, who is annoyed because Richard Strauss persists in asking for a symphonic scenario of Peer Gynt. "I'm sure," the composer complains, "Grieg will be forgotten if I write new incidental music for you." Ibsen looks at him sourly.

"American dramatists, or do you mean American millionaires?" Manet interpolated. "No, I fancy he means the American painters who imitate my pictures, making them better than the originals, and also getting better prices than I did."

"What envy! what slandering! what enviousfeelings!" sighs Nietzsche. "If my doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things sublunary is a reality, then I shall be sitting with these venomous spiders, shall be in this identical spot a trillion of years hence. Oh, horrors! Why was I born?"

"Divided tones," argues Manet, clutching Whistler by his carmilion necktie, "are the only—" Suddenly Shaw leaps on the stage.

"Gentlemen, gods, ghosts, idols, I've bad news for you. Max Nordau is in the audience." "Nordau!" wails every one. Before the lights could be extinguished the guests were under the table. "No taking chances," whispers Nietzsche. "Quoi donc! who is this Nordau—a spy of Napoleon's?" demands Hugo, in bewildered accents. For answer, Baudelaire shivers and intones: "O Poe, Poe! O Edgar Poe." Silence so profound that one hears the perspiration drop from Wagner's massive brow.

Third Scene.It still snows without. Max, the only Nordau, stands in silent pride. He is alone. The erstwhile illuminated theatre is as dark as the Hall of Eblis. "Gone the idols! All. I need but crack that old whip of Decadence and they crumble. So much for a mere word. And now to work. I'll write the unique tale of Shaw's Cave of Idols, for I alone witnessed the dénouement." He spoke aloud. Judge his chagrin when he heard the other Max give him this cheery leading motive: "I sawit all—what a story for my weekly review." "How like a yellow pear-tree!" exclaims the disgusted theorist of mad genius. Nordau speeds his way, as from the box-office comes the chink of silver. It is G. B. S. counting the cash. Who says a poet can't be a pragmatist? The little Maxixe calls out: "Me, too, Blarney! Remember I'm the only living replica of Charles Lamb." "You mean dead mutton," tartly replied Bernard. The other giggled. "The same dear old whimsical cactus," he cries; "but with all your faults we love you still—I said still, if that's possible for your tongue, George, quite still!" Curtain.

She (entering art gallery): "I wish to buy a Titian for my bridge-whist this evening. Is it possible for you to send me one to the hotel in time?" He (nervously elated): "Impossible. I sent the last Titian we had in stock to Mrs. Groats's Déjeuner Féroce." She (making a face): "That woman again. Oh, dear, how tiresome!" He (eagerly): "But I can give you a Raphael." She (dubiously): "Raphael—who?" He (magisterially): "There are three Raphaels, Madame—the archangel of that name, Raphael Sanzio, the painter, and Raphael Joseffy. It is to the second one I allude. Perhaps you would like to see—" She (hurriedly): "Oh! not at all. I fancy it's all right. Send it up this afternoon, or hadn'tI better take it along in my car?" (A shrill hurry-up booing is heard without. It is the voice of the siren on a new one hundred horse-power Cubist machine, 1918 pattern.) She (guiltily): "Tiens! That is my chauffeur, Constant. The poor fellow. He is always so hungry about this time. By the way, Mr. Frame, how much do you ask for that Raphael? My husband is so—yes, really, stingy this winter. He says I buy too much, forgetting we are all beggars, anyhow. And what is the subject? I want something cheerful for the game, you know. It consoles the kickers who lose to look at a pretty picture." He (joyfully): "Oh, the price! The subject! A half-million is the price—surely not too much. The picture is called The Wooing of Eve. It has been engraved by Bartolozzi. Oh, oh, it is a genuine Raphael. There are no more imitation old masters, only modern art is forged nowadays." She (interrupting, proudly): "Bartolozzi, the man who paints skinny women in Florence, something like Boldini, only in old-fashioned costumes?" He (resignedly): "No, Madame. Possibly you allude to Botticelli. The Bartolozzi I mention was a school friend of Raphael or a cousin to Michael Angelo—I've forgotten which. That's why he engraved Raphael's paintings." (He colours as he recalls conflicting dates.) She (in a hurry): "It doesn't much matter, Mr. Frame, I hate all this affectation over a lot of musty, fusty pictures.Send it up with the bill. I ought to win at least half the money from Mrs. Stonerich." (She rushes away. An odour of violets and stale cigarette smoke floats through the hallway. The siren screams, and a rumbling is heard in the middle distance.) He (waking, as if from a sweet dream, vigorously shouts): "George, George, fetch down that canvas Schmiere painted for us last summer, and stencil it Raphael Sanzio. Yes—S-a-n-z-i-o—got it? Hurry up! I'm off for the day. If any one 'phones, I'm over at Sherry's, in the Cafe." (Saunters out, swinging his stick, and repeating the old Russian proverb, "A dark forest is the heart of a woman.")

"Yes," said the venerable auctioneer, as he shook his white head, "yes, I watch them coming and going, coming and going. One year it's light pictures, another it's dark. The public is a woman. What fashion dictates to a woman she scrupulously follows. She sports bonnets one decade, big picture hats the next. So, the public that loves art—or thinks it loves art. It used to be the Hudson River school. And then Chase and those landscape fellows came over from Europe, where they got a lot of new-fangled notions. Do you remember Eastman Johnson? He was my man for years. Do you remember the Fortuny craze? His Gamblers,some figures sitting on the grass? Well, sir, seventeen thousand dollars that canvas fetched. Big price for forty-odd years ago. Bang up? Of course. Meissonier, Bouguereau, and Detaille came in. We couldn't sell them fast enough. I guess the picture counterfeiters' factories up on Montmartre were kept busy those times. It was after our Civil War. There were a lot of mushroom millionaires who couldn't tell a chromo from a Gérôme. Those were the chaps we liked. I often began with: 'Ten thousand dollars—who offers me ten thousand dollars for this magnificent Munkaczy?' Nowadays I couldn't give away Munkaczy as a present. He is too black. Our people ask for flashing colours. Rainbows. Fireworks. The new school? Yes, I'm free to admit that the Barbizon men have had their day. Mind you, I don't claim they are falling off. A few seasons ago a Troyon held its own against any Manet you put up. But the 1830 chaps are scarcer in the market, and the picture cranks are beginning to tire of the dull greys, soft blues, and sober skies. The Barbizons drove out Meissonier and his crowd. Then Monet and the Impressionists sent the Barbizons to the wall. I tell you the public is a woman. It craves novelty. What's that? Interested in the greater truth of Post-Impressionism? Excuse me, my dear sir, but that's pure rot. The public doesn't give a hang for technique. It wants a change. Indeed? Really? They havemade a success, those young whippersnappers, the Cubists. Such cubs! Well, I'm not surprised. Perhaps our public is tiring of the Academy. Perhaps young American painters may get their dues—some day. We may even export them. I've been an art auctioneer man and boy over fifty years, and I tell you again the public is a woman. One year it's dark paint, another it's light. Bonnets or hats. Silks or satins. Lean or stout. All right. Coming—coming!" Clearing his throat, the old auctioneer slowly moves away.

Watch the mob. Watch it staring. Like cattle behind the rails which bar a fat green field they pass at leisure, ruminating, or its equivalent, gum-chewing, passing masterpiece after masterpiece, only to let their gaze joyfully light upon some silly canvas depicting a thrice-stupid anecdote. The socialists assure us that the herd is the ideal of the future. We must think, see, feel with the People. Our brethren! Mighty idea—but a stale one before Noah entered the ark. "Let us go to the people," cried Tolstoy. But we are the people. How can we go to a place when we are already there? And the people surge before a picture which represents an old woman kissing her cow. Or, standing with eyeballs agog, they count the metal buttons on the coat of the MeissonierCuirassier. It is great art. Let the public be educated. Down with the new realism—which only recalls to us the bitterness and meanness of our mediocre existence. (Are we not all middle-class?) How, then, can art be aristocratic? Why art at all? Give us the cinematograph—pictures that act. Squeaking records. Canned vocally, Caruso is worth a wilderness of Wagner monkeys. Or self-playing unmusical machines. Or chromos. Therefore, let us joyfully stare. Instead of your "step," watch the mob.

He is a little old fellow, with a slight glaze over the pupils of his eyes. He is never dressed in the height of the fashion, yet, when he enters a gallery, salesmen make an involuntary step in his direction; then they get to cover as speedily as possible, grumbling: "Look out! it's only the old bird again." But one of them is always nailed; there is no escaping the Barmecide. He thinks he knows more about etchings than Kennedy or Keppel, and when Montross and Macbeth tell him of American art, he violently contradicts them. He is the embittered dilettante; embittered, because with his moderate means he can never hope to own even the most insignificant of the treasures exposed under his eyes every day, week, and month in the year. So he rails at the dealers,inveighs against the artists, and haunts auction-rooms. He never bids, but is extremely solicitous about the purchases of other people. He has been known to sit for hours on a small print, until, in despair, the owner leaves. Then, with infinite precautions, our amateur arises, so contriving matters that his hard-won victory is not discovered by profane and prying eyes. Once at home, he gloats over his prize, showing it to a favoured few. He bought it. He selected it. It is a tribute to his exquisite taste. And the listeners are beaten into dismayed silence by his vociferations, by his agile, ape-like skippings and parrot ejaculations. Withal, he is not a criminal, only a monomaniac of art. He sometimes mistakes a Whistler for a Dürer; but he puts the blame upon his defective eyesight.

Back to IndexNext