IV

IVThere can be no objection to literature and life coming to grips. Letters should touch reality. Many a sturdy blow has been struck at abuses by penmen masquerading behind fiction. No need to summon examples. As for realism—I deny there are commonplace people. Only those writers are commonplace that believe in the phrase. It is one of the paradoxes of art that the commonplace folk of Thackeray, Flaubert, or Anthony Trollope who delight us between covers would in life greatly bore us. The ennui is artistically suggested,though not experienced by the reader. It is the magic of the novelist, his style and philosophy, that make his creations vital.Dostoievsky says there are no old women—to be sure he puts the expression in the mouth of the sensualist Karamazov—and as a corollary I maintain that nothing is uninteresting if painted by a master hand, from carrots to Chopin. As for the historical novel, there is Sentimental Education as a model, if you desire something epical in scale and charged with the modern ironic spirit. A Flaubertian masterpiece, this book, with its daylight atmosphere; the inimitable sound, shape, gait, and varied prose rhythms of its sentences, its marvellous gallery of portraits executed in the Dutch manner of Hals and Vermeer, its nearness to its environment, and its fidelity to the pattern of life. It is a true "historical" novel, for it is real—to employ the admirable simile of Mr. Howells.No need to transpose the tragic gloom of Artzibashef to America; we are an optimistic people, thanks to our air and sky, political conditions, and the immigration of sturdy peasant folk. Yet we, too, have our own peculiar gloom and misery and social problems to solve. We are far from being the "shadow-land" of fiction, as a certain English critic said. When I praise the dissonantal art of Michael Artzibashef it is not with the idea that either his style or his pessimism shouldbe aped. That way unoriginality lies. But I do contend that in the practice of his art, its sincerity, its profundity, he might be profitably patterned after by the younger generation. Art should elevate as well as amuse. Must fiction always be silly and shallow? It need be neither sordid nor didactic.William James put the matter in a nutshell when he wrote that "the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dish-watery to people who still keep a sense of life's more bitter flavours." And on this fundamentally sound note I must end my little sermon—for I find that I have been practising the very preaching against which I warned embryo novelists. But, then, isn't every critic a lay preacher?CHAPTER VIIITHE CASE OF PAUL CÉZANNEThe case of painter Paul Cézanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a corpse, and though Cézanne died in 1906 he is still a living issue among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment: fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Cézanne question, is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often misrepresented; Brahms, known now as a Romantic writing within the walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist; Cézanne, not a revolutionist, not an innovator, vastly interested in certain problems, has been made "chef d'école" and fathered with a lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist! cried Paul Gauguin—whose work was heartily detested by Cézanne; but truth is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well or swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about Cézanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followersraise a clamour over the banality of "representation" in art, and their master is the one man in the history of art who squandered on canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to the soil. Huysmans was called an "eye" by Remy de Gourmont. Paul Cézanne is also an eye.In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon a picture by Maurice Denis entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly inspired by Manet's Hommage à Fantin-Latour. The canvas depicted a still life by Cézanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard. Himself (as they say in Irish) is shown standing and apparently unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at the Autumn Salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special Salle, so had Eugène Carrière; Cézanne held the place of honour. The critical press was hostile or half-hearted. Poor Cézanne, with his naïve vanity, seemed dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha. In The Sun of 1901, 1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death) appeared my articles on Cézanne, among thefirst, if not the first, that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why not? When juxtaposed with most painters his pictures make the others look like linoleum or papier-mâché.He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas, and aspects of his generation. In the classic retort of Manet he could have replied to those who taunted him with not "finishing" his pictures: "Sir, I am not a historical painter." Nor need we be disconcerted, in any estimate of him, by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don't know B from a bull's foot, but who go off at half-trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabanel, Bouguereau and Henner, too, were idolised once upon a time, and served to make a millionaire's holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has become a tower of strength in the eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical fancy. Sincerity is strength; Cézanne is sincere to the core; but even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his original, synthetic power he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, andseveral others. He achieved at times the foundational structure of Courbet, but his pictures, so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans personal charm. But "Popularity is for dolls," cried Emerson.Cézanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless one. His early modelling in paint was quasi-structural. Always the architectural sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times and he betrays a predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third; tactile values are here raised to thenth degree. His colour is personal and rhythmic. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century ago, he spoke of Cézanne's work as containing the prodromes of a new art. He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital and charged with character. And he often thinks profoundly on unimportant matters.When you are young your foreground is huddled: it is the desire for more space that begets revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all these sporadic outbursts; and while a creative talent may remain provincial, even parochial, as was the case with Cézanne, a critic must be cosmopolitan or nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life long, yet paint like an angel; but a provincial critic isa contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it can't cut butter. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even Cabanel has his good points.The tang of the town is not in Cézanne's portraits of places. His leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore, Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica. There is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the Empress Eugénie that in front of Courbet's Les Baigneuses (Salon, 1853) she asked: "Est-ce aussi une percheronne?" Of the heavy-flanked Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the canvases of Cézanne. The remark of the Empress appealed to the truculent vanity of Courbet. It might not have pleased Cézanne. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don't care for his graceless nudes you may console yourself that there is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless. They are uglier than the females of Degas, and twice as truthful.We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle sonorities, what colour chords are in hisbest work. I once wrote in the Promenades of an Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he painted an onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would have dramatised it. When Cézanne painted one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board of my sensibility.The supreme technical qualities in Cézanne are volume, ponderability, and an entrancing colour scheme. What's the use of asking whether he is a "sound" draughtsman? He is a master of edges and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke of his defective eyesight; but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The abnormal vision of Cézanne gave him glimpses of a "reality" denied to other painters. He advised Emile Bernard to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practised what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cézanne the "temperament" that he was always talking about? If so it was not decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he seldom "finished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited the spot. The pictures do not resemble it; which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonicvariations filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus. And he had the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament.In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate, personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master. You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence, as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlésienne. He sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract" painter—as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate trompe-l'œil on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cézanne never becomes truly lyrical except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him is as beautiful as a naked woman.And he possesses a positive genius for the tasteless.The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety. He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic diabetes. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, A rare impersonality, I should say.There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by propagandists of the New Æsthetic. As if form had not always been significant. No one can deny Cézanne's preoccupation with form; nor Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he seems hopelesslyromantic to our sharper and more petulant modern mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a solid structural sense. But Cézanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of the skeleton.Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise a master. The limitations of Paul Cézanne are patent to all. He is a profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far from the territory he called his own then we should not complain, for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music flows as if from a secret spring.What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow morecolours than one. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.CHAPTER IXBRAHMSODYAfter Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," cried Von Bülow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars. And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful harmonies. In his music the formulistfinds perfect things. Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anæmia, leaving the world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois. Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short, stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But how symbolical of Brahms tofall asleep at the very onset of his career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in omphalic meditation.Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings—wings of great, terrifying monsters;hippogriffsof horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry: "Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our thirsty eyelids!"Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, thechoral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies—true soul-tragedies—how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer in himself, thus a believer in men and women.He reminds me more of Browning than doesSchumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants.Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.CHAPTER XTHE OPINIONS OF J.-K. HUYSMANSA monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition, Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not. Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's natural repugnance to such vulgarmaterial. They were aristocrats. Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff. Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable Æsthetic of the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repellingmisanthropy.In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming and industriousfunctionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines!"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused look of contempt, so profoundthat it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking letters.Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero; as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack—published in Zola's collection, Les Soirées de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules Lemaître describes them collectively as: a young man with the dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness—the critic used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the sadistic Bluebeard—these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious faultfinder.No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraitsof certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in enamelled prose. Whistler, Chéret, Pissarro, Gauguin were praised by him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly enough. With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is only for the connoisseur.Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cézanne, who, he asserts, contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early as 1877.) He found the Cézanne still-life brutally real; above all, a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot, Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cézanne millstone. The Provençalwas a rusé, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber, ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientèle in both professions.American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion is his idol.Huysmans'sopinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time.Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same literary yoke. Hisopinions are concise. Coquiot prints them. Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group, Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his famous preface to Là Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called, the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediæval vileness of Là Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Léon Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the eccentric company ofBarbey d'Aurévilly, in whose apartment he said that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."Of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs." His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist, left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Théophile Gautier did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmansbelieved in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou, Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"), he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even theatrical.Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling salesman—Balzac's Gaudissart—and would play his own Homais, being addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture. Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde nationale."From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux maître," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepidwater always flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y connaît, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se défile!" The style and thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls Maurice Barrès "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand Brunetière as "constipé," a sound definition of a shrewd, unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed ideas as well as objects.In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anæmic hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode; Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he wished. Brunetière, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular vaudeville, Le Voyage à Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaireby the Crépets (Eugène and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank whisky, readPunch, and also sought the company of English grooms in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as Brunetière detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than loved.CHAPTER XISTYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSEIStylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking; witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal manœuvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its amber, and it is a brevet of immortality—that is, as immortality goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoeblack part of the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for schoolmarms in male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains? The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is direct, plain, and simple. The writer'skeyboard is that humble camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own individuality does not always constitute style; for individual opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice. Apes and peacocks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes; as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid. The American critic registers the variations in style and sensibility of theScotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boëthius would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because, like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist, though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life, the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by the college professor—the Eternal Sophomore—about fleeing "journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York, Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most succinct prose,prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose, "numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers," as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey, Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H. Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Châteaubriand of Atala, without its hateful note of morbid egotism.Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of Châteaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled concision of Mérimée or the dry-sherrywit of Voltaire are surer guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the Boanerges.Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh, "O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ... utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85, hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury. And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous "run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton andhis majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..." and then fall down and worship, for we are in the holy of holies. Stevenson preferred the passage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k" through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and classic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word) perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says, "must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity, musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises. He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the classictradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality." The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the "unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours. Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of flutes, peacocks, andpomegranates.No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose a finer art than English, though admittingthat in the richer, denser harmonies of English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate deliquescence of prose form. Forpractical every-day needs the eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible is the Golden Book of English prose.Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts, and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not music-criticism,not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist, like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years without knowing it.IIFancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose, marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning thesewords, because they don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence and practically tested it by declaiming—spouting, he called it—for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose assonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such a phrase as Châteaubriand's in Atala: "Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu'elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does, and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in Literature: "The rule of scansion in verseis to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse." (Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than "anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the classical languages, be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your "ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs, bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely half the story."The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to indorse the axiom of Remy de Gourmont that style is physiological, which Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical literature of a much-debated theme, Prose Rhythms, and this without minifying the admirable labours of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the NewYork University. One of the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor of a highly organised musical ear, even if he be not a practical musician. He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum that the key to literature is music;i. e., number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss Dabney's study, TheMusicalBasis of Verse, dealing as it does with a certain side of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is different. It is less "literary" than psychological, less psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remy de Gourmont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. "Rhythm," he writes in his preface, "is thus regarded as first of all an experience, established, as a rule, by motor performance of however rudimentary a nature." Here is the man of science at work.He speaks of the "lost art of rhythm," adduces syncopation so easily mastered by those born "timers," the Indians and Negroes, pertinently remarks that "no two individuals ever react exactly alike. The term 'type' is in many ways a highly misleading fiction." Prose Rhythm, he continues, "must be classed as subjective organisation of irregular, virtually haphazard arrangement of sounds.... The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however, is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest upon a series of definite temporal units."Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms: "one the regular sound-room belonging to the department of psychology at Columbia; the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound-proof cabinet built into one end of an underground room belonging to the department of physics."It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it not? Padded cells and aural finger-prints!—to make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called John Ruskin a Torquemada of Æsthetics. Professor Patterson might be styled a Tonal Torturer. But the experimentings were painless. "The first object," he informs us, "was to find out, as far as possible, how a group of twelve people, ten men and two women, differed with respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated roughly as the 'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in various tests, one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records on a phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pater, a sentence from Henry James, a passage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes, were tapped upon a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph. The words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each syllable. 'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats.The notes were tapped according to their designated time-values. Observer No. 1, having had long training as a musician, found no technical difficulty in the task. The remaining eleven observers, without being told the source of the records, heard the five series of drumbeats and passed judgment upon them. The most significant judgment made was that of Observer No. 7, who declared that all five records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large number of the observers, especially on the first hearing, found all of the records, including even the passage from Chopin, elusive and more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little organisation each observer could be brought to feel in the beats corresponding to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage of haphazard musical notes." All the data are carefully set down in the Appendices.The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen from his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in The Renaissance. "It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse"; subtly rhythmic, too much so for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas Browne or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the former case, the coda from the Urn Burial, or even that chest-expanding phrase, "To subsistin bones, and to be pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration." Or, best of all, because of its tremendous intensity, the passage from Saint Paul: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The drum-beat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not marked as in the pages of Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of common or four-four time, and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all latter-day composers flee as dulness-breeding. The base-rhythm of English prose is, so Professor Saintsbury writes, "the pæon, or four-syllabled foot," and, he could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears. Variety in rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely quotes from Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: "A picture composed in substitutional symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry." And this applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very kernel of the art of Paul Cézanne; rhythmic irregularity, syncopation, asymmetry.De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal Newman's Grammarof Assent were included among the tests. Also one from Henry James; in the preface to The Golden Bowl: "For I have nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose depend all on withheld tests." If, according to lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding "purple panels" of Bossuet, Châteaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and Ruskin, the cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be "spouted"; nevertheless, the interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1, simple in rhythmic structure though less interesting than its sister nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in common, the second in six-eighths time). Professor Patterson knows Riemann and his "agogic accent," which, according to that editor of the Chopin Etudes, is a slight expansion in the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.In his treatment of vers libre our author is not too sympathetic. He thinks that "in their productions"—free-verse poets—"the disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a mountain" is suggested. "For those who find this task exhilarating vers libre, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle cadence, however, which has been claimed as the chief distinction of the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have surpassed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of Walter Pater." They have not,despite the verbal ingenuity, banished the impression of dislocation, of the epileptic. In French, in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Régnier, Stuart Merrill, Vielé Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are supple, the assonances grateful to the ear, the irregular patterns not offensive to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation from form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian language than to the English. Most of our native vers libre sounds like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the sidewalk. However, "it's not the gilt that makes a god, but the worshipper."For musicians and writers the interesting if abstruse study of Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the results in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we have been, all of us, talking rhythmic prose our life long.CHAPTER XIITHE QUEEREST YARN IN THE WORLDThe way the story leaked out was this: A young Irishman from Sligo, as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty stamped by nature herself, had served two customers over the bar of the old chop-house across the street from the opera-house. To him they were just two throats athirst; nothing more. They ordered drinks, and this first attracted his attention, for they agreed on cognac. Now, brandy after dinner is not an unusual drink, but this pair had asked for a large glass. Old brandy was given them, and such huge swallows followed that the bartender was compelled by his conscience to ring up one dollar for the two drinks. It was paid, and another round commanded, as if the two men were hurried, as indeed they were, for it was during an entr'acte at the opera that they had slipped out for liquid refreshments. Against the bar of the establishment a dozen or more humans were ranged, and the noise was deafening, but not so great as to prevent the Irishman from catching scraps of the conversation dropped by the brandy-drinkers. Their talk went something like this, and, although Michael had littleschooling, his memory was excellent, and, being a decent chap, there is no need to impeach the veracity of his report.The taller man, neither young, neither old, and, like his friend, without a grey hair, burst out laughing after the disappearance of the second cognac. "I say, old pal, who was it wrote that brandy was for heroes? Kipling? What?" The other man, stockily built, foreign-looking, answered in a contemptuous tone ("sneering-like," as my informant put it):"Where's your memory? Gone to rack and ruin like your ideals, I suppose! Kipling! What do such youngsters know? Doctor Johnson or Walter Savage Landor was the originator of the lying epigram; after them Byron gobbled it up, as he gobbled up most of the good things of his generation, and after him, the deluge of this mediocre century. When I told Byron this, at Milan, I think it was, he vowed me an ass. Now, it was Doctor Johnson.""Cheer up, it's not so bad. I remember once at Paris, or was it Vienna, you said the same thing about——" and here followed a strange name."And, anyhow, you are mixing dates; Landor followed Byron, please, but I suppose he said it first. I told Metternich of your bon-mot, and, egad! he laughed, did that old parchment face. As for Bonaparte, upstart and charlatan, he was too selfish to smile at anybody's witbut his own, and little he had. Do you remember the Congress of Vienna?""Do I—1815?""Some such year. Or was it in 1750 when we saw Casanova at Venice? Well—" At this point the alarm-signal went off, and the mob went over to the opera. The young bartender's heart was beating so fast that it "leapt up in his bosom," as he described it. Two middle-aged men talking of a century ago as calmly as if they had spoken of yesterday flustered him a bit. He heard the dates. He noticed the perfectly natural manner in which events were mentioned. There was no mystification. For the first time in his life Michael was sorry the between-act pause was so short, and he longed for the next one, though fatigued from the labours of the last. Would these gentlemen return for more cognac? In an hour they came back with the crowd, again drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about a lot of incomprehensible things that had evidently taken place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century; at least, Michael overheard them disputing dates, and one of them bet the other that the big fire in London occurred in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Peppers, or Peps—some such name."Ah, poor old Pepys," sighed the dark man; "if he had only taken better care of himself he might have been with us to-day instead of mouldering in his grave.""Oh, well! you can't expect every one to believe in your Struldbrug cure," replied his friend dreamily. "Even Her Majesty, Queen Anne, would not take your advice, though Mrs. Masham and Mr. Harley begged her to.""Yes, about the only thing they ever agreed upon in their life. Where is Harley to-day?""Oh, I suppose in London," carelessly replied the other. "For a young bird of several centuries he's looking as fit as a fiddle; but see here, Swift, old boy, your bogy-tales are worrying our young friend," and with that Michael says they pointed to him, heartily laughed, and went away.He crossed himself, and for a moment the electric lights burned dim, so it seemed to the superstitious laddie-buck. But he had had a good chance to study the odd pair. They were not, as he repeated, old men, neither were they youthful. Say thirty-five or forty years, and he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions, the brilliancy of their eyes. They were just gentlemen in evening clothes and had run across Broadway without overcoats, a reprehensible act even for a young man. But they were healthy, self-contained, and hard-headed—they took, according to the statistician behind the bar, about a quart of brandy between them, and were as fresh as daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they? "Blagueurs," said I, after I had carefully deciphered the runic inscriptions in Michael's mind.(This was a week later.) Two fellows out on a lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy. But what was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternich, or Mr. Harley to him? Just words. Bonaparte he might be expected to remember. It was curious all the same that he could reel off the unusual names of Mrs. Masham and Casanova. The deuce! was there something in the horrid tale? Two immortals stalking the globe when their very bones should have been dissolved into everlasting dust! Two wraiths revisiting the glimpses of the moon—hold on! Struldbrug! Who was Struldbrug? What his cure? I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the worthies of the eighteenth century. Struldbrug. Swift. Struldbrug. Sir William Temple. Struldbrug—ah! by the great horn spoon! The Struldbrugs of the Island of Laputa! Gulliver's hideous immortals—and then the horror of the story enveloped me, but, despite my aversion to meeting the dead, I determined to live in the chop-house till I saw face to face these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity was soon gratified, as the sequel will show.Just one week after the appearance of this pair I stood talking to the Irish barman, when I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here are my men. I was not mistaken. Two well-built and well-groomed gentlemen asked for brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare. No wonder I stared. They recalled familiarfaces, yet I couldn't at once place the owners. Presently they went over to a table and seated themselves. Loudly calling for a mug of musty ale, I boldly put myself at an adjacent spot, and continued my spying tactics. The friends were soon in hot dispute. It concerned the literary reputation of Balzac. I sat with my mouth wide open.The elder of the pair, the one called Swift, snapped at his friend: "Zounds, sir! you and your Balzac. Hogwash and roosters in rut—that's about his capacity. Of course, when your own dull stuff appeared he praised you for the sake of the paradox. You moderns! Balzac the father of French fiction! You the father, or is it grandfather, of psychology—a nice crew! That boy Maupassant had more stuff in him than a wilderness of Zolas, Goncourts, and the rest. He is almost as amusing as Paul de Kock—" The other, the little man, bristled with rage."Because you wrote a popular boy's book, full of filth and pessimism, you think you know all literature. And didn't you copy Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyagers, and Defoe? You satirise every one except God, whom you spare because you don't know him. I don't care much for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did treat me handsomely in praising my Chartreuse——""Good God!" I groaned, "it's Stendhal, otherwise Henry Beyle, laying down the law to thetremendous author of Gulliver's Travels." And yet neither man looked the accepted portrait of himself. Above all, no Struldbrug moles were in view. I forgot my former fear, being interested in the dispute of these two giant writers who are more akin artistically than ever taken cognisance of by criticism. Dead? What did I care! They were surely alive now, and I was not dreaming. I didn't need to pinch myself, for my eyes and ears reported the occurrence. A miracle? Why not. Miracles are daily, if we but knew it. Living is the most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he wrote:"Enough, friend Beyle. You are a charlatan. Your knowledge of the human heart is on a par with your taste in literature. You abominate Flaubert because his prose is more rhythmic than yours.""I vow I protest," interrupted Stendhal."No matter. I'm right. Mérimée, your pupil, is your master at every point."I could no longer contain myself, and, bursting with curiosity, I cried:"Pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting such a luminous altercation, but, notwithstanding the queerness of the situation, may I not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift and Henry Beyle-Stendhal?""Discovered, by the eternal Jehovah!" roared Swift, adding an obscene phrase, whichI discreetly omit. Stendhal took the incident coolly."As I am rediscovered about every decade by ambitious young critics anxious to achieve reputations, I am not disturbed by our young friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted. Pray, join us in a fresh drink and conversation." But I was only thirsty for more talk, oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendhal, who regarded me with cynical eyes, all the while fingering his little whisker: "Did you ever hear Chopin play?""Who," he solemnly asked in turn, "is Chopin?""He was at his best in the forties, and as you didn't die till——""Pardon me, monsieur. I never died. Your Chopin may have died, but I am immortal.""You venerable Struldbrug," giggled Swift. I was disagreeably impressed, yet held my ground:"You must have met him. He was a friend of Balzac—his music was then in vogue at Paris—" I stumbled in my speech."He probably means that little Polish piano-player who dangled at the petticoats of George Sand," interpolated Swift."I knew Cimarosa, Rossini I saw, but I never heard of Chopin. As for the Sand woman, that cow who chewed and rechewed her literary cud—don't mention her name to me, please. She is the village pump of fiction;water, wet water. Balzac was bad enough." My heart sank. Chopin not even remembered by a contemporary! This then is fame. But the immortality of Stendhal, of Swift—what of that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps Balzac, Sand, Flaubert were still alive. I propounded the question. Swift answered it."Yes, they are alive. My Struldbrugs are meant to symbolise the immortality of genius. Only stupid people die. Sand is a barmaid in London. Balzac is on the road selling knit-goods, and a mighty good drummer he is sure to be; but poor Flaubert has had hard luck. He was the reader to a publishing house, and forced to pass judgment on the novels of the day—favourable judgment, mind you, on the popular stuff. He nearly burst a blood-vessel when they gave him a Marie Corelli manuscript to correct—to correct the style, mind you, he, Flaubert! The gods are certainly capricious. Now the old chap—he has aged since 1880—is in New York reading proof at a daily newspaper office. He sits at the same desk with Ben de Casseres, and every time he mutters over the rhythm of a sentence Ben raps him on the knuckles, and says:

There can be no objection to literature and life coming to grips. Letters should touch reality. Many a sturdy blow has been struck at abuses by penmen masquerading behind fiction. No need to summon examples. As for realism—I deny there are commonplace people. Only those writers are commonplace that believe in the phrase. It is one of the paradoxes of art that the commonplace folk of Thackeray, Flaubert, or Anthony Trollope who delight us between covers would in life greatly bore us. The ennui is artistically suggested,though not experienced by the reader. It is the magic of the novelist, his style and philosophy, that make his creations vital.

Dostoievsky says there are no old women—to be sure he puts the expression in the mouth of the sensualist Karamazov—and as a corollary I maintain that nothing is uninteresting if painted by a master hand, from carrots to Chopin. As for the historical novel, there is Sentimental Education as a model, if you desire something epical in scale and charged with the modern ironic spirit. A Flaubertian masterpiece, this book, with its daylight atmosphere; the inimitable sound, shape, gait, and varied prose rhythms of its sentences, its marvellous gallery of portraits executed in the Dutch manner of Hals and Vermeer, its nearness to its environment, and its fidelity to the pattern of life. It is a true "historical" novel, for it is real—to employ the admirable simile of Mr. Howells.

No need to transpose the tragic gloom of Artzibashef to America; we are an optimistic people, thanks to our air and sky, political conditions, and the immigration of sturdy peasant folk. Yet we, too, have our own peculiar gloom and misery and social problems to solve. We are far from being the "shadow-land" of fiction, as a certain English critic said. When I praise the dissonantal art of Michael Artzibashef it is not with the idea that either his style or his pessimism shouldbe aped. That way unoriginality lies. But I do contend that in the practice of his art, its sincerity, its profundity, he might be profitably patterned after by the younger generation. Art should elevate as well as amuse. Must fiction always be silly and shallow? It need be neither sordid nor didactic.

William James put the matter in a nutshell when he wrote that "the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dish-watery to people who still keep a sense of life's more bitter flavours." And on this fundamentally sound note I must end my little sermon—for I find that I have been practising the very preaching against which I warned embryo novelists. But, then, isn't every critic a lay preacher?

The case of painter Paul Cézanne. Is he a stupendous nobody or a surpassing genius? The critical doctors disagree, an excellent omen for the reputation of the man from Provence. We do not discuss a corpse, and though Cézanne died in 1906 he is still a living issue among artists and writers. Every exhibition calls forth comment: fair, unfair, ignorant, and seldom just. Yet the Cézanne question, is it so difficult to resolve? Like Brahms, the Frenchman is often misrepresented; Brahms, known now as a Romantic writing within the walls of accepted forms, neither a pedant nor a revolutionist; Cézanne, not a revolutionist, not an innovator, vastly interested in certain problems, has been made "chef d'école" and fathered with a lot of theories which would send him into one of his famous rages if he could hear them. Either a revolutionist or a plagiarist! cried Paul Gauguin—whose work was heartily detested by Cézanne; but truth is ever mediocre, whether it resides at the bottom of a well or swings on the cusps of the new moon. What is the truth about Cézanne? The question bobs up every season. His so-called followersraise a clamour over the banality of "representation" in art, and their master is the one man in the history of art who squandered on canvas startling evocations of actuality, whose nose was closest to the soil. Huysmans was called an "eye" by Remy de Gourmont. Paul Cézanne is also an eye.

In 1901 I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon a picture by Maurice Denis entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly inspired by Manet's Hommage à Fantin-Latour. The canvas depicted a still life by Cézanne on a chevalet and surrounded by Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellerio, and Vollard. Himself (as they say in Irish) is shown standing and apparently unhappy, embarrassed. Then came the brusque apotheosis of 1904 at the Autumn Salon, the most revelatory of his unique gift thus far made. Puvis de Chavannes had a special Salle, so had Eugène Carrière; Cézanne held the place of honour. The critical press was hostile or half-hearted. Poor Cézanne, with his naïve vanity, seemed dazzled by the uproarious championship of "les jeunes," and, to give him credit for a peasant-like astuteness, he was rather suspicious and always on his guard. He stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, looking all the while like a bourgeois Buddha. In The Sun of 1901, 1904, and 1906 (the latter the year of his death) appeared my articles on Cézanne, among thefirst, if not the first, that were printed in this country. Since then he has been hoisted to the stars by his admirers, and with him have mounted his prices. Why not? When juxtaposed with most painters his pictures make the others look like linoleum or papier-mâché.

He did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the manners, ideas, and aspects of his generation. In the classic retort of Manet he could have replied to those who taunted him with not "finishing" his pictures: "Sir, I am not a historical painter." Nor need we be disconcerted, in any estimate of him, by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don't know B from a bull's foot, but who go off at half-trigger when a hint is dropped about the possibilities of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the hour, as were Manet and Monet a decade ago. These fluctuations must not distract us, because Cabanel, Bouguereau and Henner, too, were idolised once upon a time, and served to make a millionaire's holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has become a tower of strength in the eyes of the younger generation of artists which intrigues critical fancy. Sincerity is strength; Cézanne is sincere to the core; but even stark sincerity does not necessarily imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his original, synthetic power he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, andseveral others. He achieved at times the foundational structure of Courbet, but his pictures, so say his enemies, are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans personal charm. But "Popularity is for dolls," cried Emerson.

Cézanne's was a twilight soul. And a humourless one. His early modelling in paint was quasi-structural. Always the architectural sense, though his rhythms are elliptical at times and he betrays a predilection for the asymmetrical. Nevertheless, a man who has given to an art in two dimensions the illusion of a third; tactile values are here raised to thenth degree. His colour is personal and rhythmic. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, nearly a half-century ago, he spoke of Cézanne's work as containing the prodromes of a new art. He was absorbed in the handling of his material, not in the lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. His portraits are vital and charged with character. And he often thinks profoundly on unimportant matters.

When you are young your foreground is huddled: it is the desire for more space that begets revolutionists; not unlike a big man elbowing his way in a crowd. Laudable then are all these sporadic outbursts; and while a creative talent may remain provincial, even parochial, as was the case with Cézanne, a critic must be cosmopolitan or nothing. An artist may stay rooted in his own bailiwick his life long, yet paint like an angel; but a provincial critic isa contradiction in terms. He reminds one of a razor so dull that it can't cut butter. Let us therefore be hospitable to new ideas; even Cabanel has his good points.

The tang of the town is not in Cézanne's portraits of places. His leaden landscapes do not arouse to spontaneous activity a jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. As for the groups of bathing women, how they must wound the sensibility of George Moore, Professor of Energy at the University of Erotica. There is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt. It is related of the Empress Eugénie that in front of Courbet's Les Baigneuses (Salon, 1853) she asked: "Est-ce aussi une percheronne?" Of the heavy-flanked Percheron breed of horse are the ladies on the canvases of Cézanne. The remark of the Empress appealed to the truculent vanity of Courbet. It might not have pleased Cézanne. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don't care for his graceless nudes you may console yourself that there is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless. They are uglier than the females of Degas, and twice as truthful.

We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a slightly stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a score by Stravinski. But what thrice-subtle sonorities, what colour chords are in hisbest work. I once wrote in the Promenades of an Impressionist that his fruits and vegetables savour of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he painted an onion it revealed a certain grace. Vollon would have dramatised it. When Cézanne painted one you smelt it. A feeble witticism, to be sure, but it registered the reaction on the sounding-board of my sensibility.

The supreme technical qualities in Cézanne are volume, ponderability, and an entrancing colour scheme. What's the use of asking whether he is a "sound" draughtsman? He is a master of edges and a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke of his defective eyesight; but disease boasts its discoveries, as well as health. The abnormal vision of Cézanne gave him glimpses of a "reality" denied to other painters. He advised Emile Bernard to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tones. He practised what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the artist. Had Cézanne the "temperament" that he was always talking about? If so it was not decorative in the accepted sense. An unwearying experimenter, he seldom "finished" a picture. His morose landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I visited the spot. The pictures do not resemble it; which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonicvariations filled his simple life. Art submerged by the apparatus. And he had the centripetal, not the centrifugal temperament.

In his rigid, intense ignorance there was no room for climate, personal charm, not even for sunshine. Think of the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence; the romantic, semitropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and search for this mellow richness and misty golden air in the pictures of our master. You won't find them, though a mystic light permeates the entire series. The sallow-sublime. He did not paint portraits of Provence, as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L'Arlésienne. He sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an "abstract" painter—as the jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate trompe-l'œil on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, patient delineation by a geologist of art of a certain hill on old Mother Earth, shamelessly exposing her bare torso, bald rocky pate, and gravelled feet. The illusion is not to be escaped. As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, and as austere in linear economy; and as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, Cézanne never becomes truly lyrical except in his still-life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion for him is as beautiful as a naked woman.And he possesses a positive genius for the tasteless.

The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him their chief of school, which may be true, but also declare him to be the greatest painter that ever wielded a brush since the Byzantines. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Paris would have been astounded at some of the things printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon (as did Zola for a seat in the Academy) he disliked notoriety. He loved work; above all, solitude. He took with him a fresh batch of canvases every morning and trudged to his pet landscapes, the Motive he called it, and it was there that he slaved away with technical heroism, though he didn't kill himself with his labours as some of his fervent disciples have asserted. He died of unromantic diabetes. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary, A rare impersonality, I should say.

There is a lot of inutile talk about "significant form" by propagandists of the New Æsthetic. As if form had not always been significant. No one can deny Cézanne's preoccupation with form; nor Courbet's either. Consider the Ornans landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, by the crassest realist among French painters (he seems hopelesslyromantic to our sharper and more petulant modern mode of envisaging the world); there is "significant form," and a solid structural sense. But Cézanne quite o'ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive. Sometimes you can't see the ribs because of the skeleton.

Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognise a master. The limitations of Paul Cézanne are patent to all. He is a profound investigator, and if he did not deem it wise to stray far from the territory he called his own then we should not complain, for therein he was monarch of all he surveyed. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss! The idea seems monstrous. Yet this, figuratively speaking, constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made, like Puvis, but one born to a crabbed simplicity. His veiled, cool harmonies sometimes recall the throb of a deep-bass organ-pipe. Oppositional splendour is there, and the stained radiance of a Bachian chorale. The music flows as if from a secret spring.

What poet asked: "When we drive out from the cloud of steam majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men, who led black ones by the mane?" Why can't we be truly catholic in our taste? The heaven of art contains many mansions, and the rainbow morecolours than one. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, and as a painter, pure and complex. No man who wields a brush need wish a more enduring epitaph.

After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," cried Von Bülow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars. And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful harmonies. In his music the formulistfinds perfect things. Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.

The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anæmia, leaving the world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois. Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short, stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But how symbolical of Brahms tofall asleep at the very onset of his career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in omphalic meditation.

Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings—wings of great, terrifying monsters;hippogriffsof horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry: "Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our thirsty eyelids!"

Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, thechoral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies—true soul-tragedies—how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer in himself, thus a believer in men and women.

He reminds me more of Browning than doesSchumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants.

Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.

A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition, Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not. Nor for that matter did Flaubert. The De Goncourts have told us in their copious confidences the agony they endured when digging for documents. Germinie Lacerteux was painful travail, not alone because of the tortuous style it demanded, but also because of the author's natural repugnance to such vulgarmaterial. They were aristocrats. Huysmans came of a solid bourgeois family; Dutch on the paternal side, his father hailed from Breda, and Parisian on the distaff. Therefore he might have described his modest surroundings with less acerbity than the irritable De Goncourts. Such was not the case. He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable Æsthetic of the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repellingmisanthropy.

In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming and industriousfunctionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines!

"Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused look of contempt, so profoundthat it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking letters.

Pitiless he was, as pitiless to himself as to others. Yet Coquiot found him entertaining betimes, while De Gourmont scoffs at his tales of stomachic woe. Huysmans, he says, ate heartily in the very restaurants he so viciously abuses throughout that Iliad of indigestion, A Vau-l'Eau. He was the M. Folantin, the unheroic hero; as he was the unpatriotic hero of The Knapsack—published in Zola's collection, Les Soirées de Medan. In all his books he figures. Jules Lemaître describes them collectively as: a young man with the dysentery; a young man who disliked single blessedness—the critic used a stronger expression; a man who couldn't get a beefsteak in Paris cooked as he wanted it, and a man who liked to read the chaste chronicle of Gilles de Rais, otherwise known as the sadistic Bluebeard—these comprise the characters of Huysmans. After his conversion he made amends, though he was always the atrabilious faultfinder.

No matter. One of the most notable of art critics in a city abundantly supplied with criticism was this same Huysmans. His critical achievement may outlive his fiction and his religious confessions. He preferred Certains to his other books. It is written in his most astounding and captivating style. The portraitsof certain artists in this unique volume recite the history of the critic's acuity and clairvoyance. He first announced Edgar Degas as the "greatest artist we possess to-day in France." He discovered Odilon Redon, Raffaelli, Forain, and wrote of Gustave Moreau in enamelled prose. Whistler, Chéret, Pissarro, Gauguin were praised by him before they had attracted the pontifical disdain of academic criticism. To Rops he consecrated some extraordinary pages, for Huysmans was a verbal virtuoso superior to any of the artists he praised and later he cynically confessed to Coquiot that he didn't highly estimate the Belgian etcher, but found in him excellent pasture for his own picture-making pen. In a word, the erotic Rops attracted him more than Rops the every-day craftsman, and rightly enough. With the Japanese this erotic side of Rops is only for the connoisseur.

Huysmans said some just things of Whistler, and he was the first critic to salute the rising star of Paul Cézanne, who, he asserts, contributed more to the impressionist movement than Manet; and one who also discovered the prodromes of a new art. (This was as early as 1877.) He found the Cézanne still-life brutally real; above all, a preoccupation with forms and "edges," that betrayed this painter's tendency toward a novel synthesis. But according to Coquiot, Huysmans saw through the hole in the Cézanne millstone. The Provençalwas a rusé, an intrigant, and a money-grubber in his old age, and proved his plebeian ancestry. His father began barber, ended banker, shaved faces as well as notes, bled his clientèle in both professions.

American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion is his idol.Huysmans'sopinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time.

Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same literary yoke. Hisopinions are concise. Coquiot prints them. Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group, Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his famous preface to Là Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called, the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediæval vileness of Là Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Léon Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the eccentric company ofBarbey d'Aurévilly, in whose apartment he said that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."

Of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dante, Schiller, and Goethe he spoke with ill-concealed contempt. Raseurs, all these "solemn pontiffs." His major detestation was Voltaire. Balzac, the prodigious novelist, left him unstirred. "Not an artistic epithet" in his edition, fifty volumes long, and not a novelist easy to reread. Théophile Gautier did not attract him; he found the impeccable master cold and diluted; so many pages published to say nothing! Huysmansbelieved in "saying something," and for him it usually meant something disagreeable, or else contrary to accepted belief. He hated the theatre and his opinions of Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou, Feuillet, and of the "old pedant" Sarcey, are savage. He had no feeling for the footlights, and not possessing much imagination and deficient in what are called "general ideas" (that is, the stereotyped commonplaces of journalism and tenth-rate "thinkers"), he revolted at the lean or hysterical stuff manufactured by dramatists; plays that are neither life nor literature, nor even theatrical.

Baudelaire, the profoundest of soul-explorers in the poetical Parnassus of that period, appealed to Huysmans. He admired, as well he might, Flaubert, but found his company intolerable. That giant from Normandy was too healthy for the slender overwrought Parisian. He had, so said Huysmans, the manners of a traveling salesman—Balzac's Gaudissart—and would play his own Homais, being addicted to punning and disconcerting joking. Poor Flaubert! Poorer Huysmans! Such sensibility as his must have been a daily torture. Victor Hugo was "an incomparable trumpet, an epic of the garde nationale."

From Edmond de Goncourt with his condescending airs of "un vieux maître," he escaped by flight; and Turgenev, most amiable of great men, was a tedious Russian, "a spigot of tepidwater always flowing." If Verlaine had been penned up in hospital or prison it would have been for the greater glory of French poetry. Jules Laforgue, "Quelle joie!" Remy de Gourmont: "I wrote a preface to one of his books" (Le Latin mystique). "That says enough." Marcel Provost: "Le jeune premier des romans de Georges Ohnet," which isn't bad. He rather evades a definite judgment of Anatole France: "Il s'y connaît, le gaillard; mais ce qu'il se défile!" The style and thought of these two remarkable artists is antipodal. He calls Maurice Barrès "Lord Beaconsfield," a high compliment to that exquisite writer's political attainments. He sums up Ferdinand Brunetière as "constipé," a sound definition of a shrewd, unsympathetic critic. Naturally women writers, "little geese," are not spared by this waspish misogynist, whose intense, pessimistic vision deformed ideas as well as objects.

In A Rebours there is the account of a trip to London by the anæmic hero, Des Esseintes. He gets no further than one of the English taverns opposite the Gare Saint-Lazare. It is risible, this episode; Huysmans could display verve and a sort of grim humour when he wished. Brunetière, who was serious to solemnity, and lacked a funny bone, declared that Huysmans borrowed the incident from a popular vaudeville, Le Voyage à Dieppe, by Fulgence and Wafflard. He need not have gone so far afield, for in the life of Baudelaireby the Crépets (Eugène and Jacques) there is the genesis of the story. To become better acquainted with English speech and manners, Baudelaire frequented an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, where he drank whisky, readPunch, and also sought the company of English grooms in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Huysmans loved Baudelaire as much as Brunetière detested him. There is no doubt he knew this thoroughly Baudelairian anecdote. A perverse comet in the firmament of French literature, Joris-Karl Huysmans will always be more admired than loved.

Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking; witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal manœuvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its amber, and it is a brevet of immortality—that is, as immortality goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoeblack part of the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for schoolmarms in male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains? The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is direct, plain, and simple. The writer'skeyboard is that humble camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own individuality does not always constitute style; for individual opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.

Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice. Apes and peacocks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes; as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid. The American critic registers the variations in style and sensibility of theScotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boëthius would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because, like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist, though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.

If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life, the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by the college professor—the Eternal Sophomore—about fleeing "journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York, Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most succinct prose,prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose, "numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers," as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey, Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H. Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Châteaubriand of Atala, without its hateful note of morbid egotism.

Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of Châteaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled concision of Mérimée or the dry-sherrywit of Voltaire are surer guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the Boanerges.

Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh, "O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ... utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85, hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury. And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous "run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton andhis majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..." and then fall down and worship, for we are in the holy of holies. Stevenson preferred the passage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k" through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and classic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word) perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says, "must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity, musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.

Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises. He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the classictradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality." The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the "unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours. Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of flutes, peacocks, andpomegranates.

No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose a finer art than English, though admittingthat in the richer, denser harmonies of English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.

But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate deliquescence of prose form. Forpractical every-day needs the eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible is the Golden Book of English prose.

Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts, and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.

He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not music-criticism,not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist, like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years without knowing it.

Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose, marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning thesewords, because they don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence and practically tested it by declaiming—spouting, he called it—for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose assonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such a phrase as Châteaubriand's in Atala: "Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu'elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.

If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does, and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in Literature: "The rule of scansion in verseis to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse." (Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than "anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the classical languages, be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your "ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs, bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely half the story."

The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to indorse the axiom of Remy de Gourmont that style is physiological, which Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical literature of a much-debated theme, Prose Rhythms, and this without minifying the admirable labours of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the NewYork University. One of the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor of a highly organised musical ear, even if he be not a practical musician. He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum that the key to literature is music;i. e., number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss Dabney's study, TheMusicalBasis of Verse, dealing as it does with a certain side of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is different. It is less "literary" than psychological, less psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remy de Gourmont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. "Rhythm," he writes in his preface, "is thus regarded as first of all an experience, established, as a rule, by motor performance of however rudimentary a nature." Here is the man of science at work.

He speaks of the "lost art of rhythm," adduces syncopation so easily mastered by those born "timers," the Indians and Negroes, pertinently remarks that "no two individuals ever react exactly alike. The term 'type' is in many ways a highly misleading fiction." Prose Rhythm, he continues, "must be classed as subjective organisation of irregular, virtually haphazard arrangement of sounds.... The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however, is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest upon a series of definite temporal units."

Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms: "one the regular sound-room belonging to the department of psychology at Columbia; the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound-proof cabinet built into one end of an underground room belonging to the department of physics."

It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it not? Padded cells and aural finger-prints!—to make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called John Ruskin a Torquemada of Æsthetics. Professor Patterson might be styled a Tonal Torturer. But the experimentings were painless. "The first object," he informs us, "was to find out, as far as possible, how a group of twelve people, ten men and two women, differed with respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated roughly as the 'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in various tests, one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records on a phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pater, a sentence from Henry James, a passage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes, were tapped upon a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph. The words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each syllable. 'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats.The notes were tapped according to their designated time-values. Observer No. 1, having had long training as a musician, found no technical difficulty in the task. The remaining eleven observers, without being told the source of the records, heard the five series of drumbeats and passed judgment upon them. The most significant judgment made was that of Observer No. 7, who declared that all five records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large number of the observers, especially on the first hearing, found all of the records, including even the passage from Chopin, elusive and more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little organisation each observer could be brought to feel in the beats corresponding to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage of haphazard musical notes." All the data are carefully set down in the Appendices.

The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen from his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in The Renaissance. "It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse"; subtly rhythmic, too much so for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas Browne or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the former case, the coda from the Urn Burial, or even that chest-expanding phrase, "To subsistin bones, and to be pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration." Or, best of all, because of its tremendous intensity, the passage from Saint Paul: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The drum-beat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not marked as in the pages of Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of common or four-four time, and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all latter-day composers flee as dulness-breeding. The base-rhythm of English prose is, so Professor Saintsbury writes, "the pæon, or four-syllabled foot," and, he could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears. Variety in rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely quotes from Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: "A picture composed in substitutional symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry." And this applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very kernel of the art of Paul Cézanne; rhythmic irregularity, syncopation, asymmetry.

De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal Newman's Grammarof Assent were included among the tests. Also one from Henry James; in the preface to The Golden Bowl: "For I have nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose depend all on withheld tests." If, according to lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding "purple panels" of Bossuet, Châteaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and Ruskin, the cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be "spouted"; nevertheless, the interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1, simple in rhythmic structure though less interesting than its sister nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in common, the second in six-eighths time). Professor Patterson knows Riemann and his "agogic accent," which, according to that editor of the Chopin Etudes, is a slight expansion in the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.

In his treatment of vers libre our author is not too sympathetic. He thinks that "in their productions"—free-verse poets—"the disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a mountain" is suggested. "For those who find this task exhilarating vers libre, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle cadence, however, which has been claimed as the chief distinction of the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have surpassed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of Walter Pater." They have not,despite the verbal ingenuity, banished the impression of dislocation, of the epileptic. In French, in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Régnier, Stuart Merrill, Vielé Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are supple, the assonances grateful to the ear, the irregular patterns not offensive to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation from form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian language than to the English. Most of our native vers libre sounds like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the sidewalk. However, "it's not the gilt that makes a god, but the worshipper."

For musicians and writers the interesting if abstruse study of Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the results in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we have been, all of us, talking rhythmic prose our life long.

The way the story leaked out was this: A young Irishman from Sligo, as he blushingly admitted, whose face was a passport of honesty stamped by nature herself, had served two customers over the bar of the old chop-house across the street from the opera-house. To him they were just two throats athirst; nothing more. They ordered drinks, and this first attracted his attention, for they agreed on cognac. Now, brandy after dinner is not an unusual drink, but this pair had asked for a large glass. Old brandy was given them, and such huge swallows followed that the bartender was compelled by his conscience to ring up one dollar for the two drinks. It was paid, and another round commanded, as if the two men were hurried, as indeed they were, for it was during an entr'acte at the opera that they had slipped out for liquid refreshments. Against the bar of the establishment a dozen or more humans were ranged, and the noise was deafening, but not so great as to prevent the Irishman from catching scraps of the conversation dropped by the brandy-drinkers. Their talk went something like this, and, although Michael had littleschooling, his memory was excellent, and, being a decent chap, there is no need to impeach the veracity of his report.

The taller man, neither young, neither old, and, like his friend, without a grey hair, burst out laughing after the disappearance of the second cognac. "I say, old pal, who was it wrote that brandy was for heroes? Kipling? What?" The other man, stockily built, foreign-looking, answered in a contemptuous tone ("sneering-like," as my informant put it):

"Where's your memory? Gone to rack and ruin like your ideals, I suppose! Kipling! What do such youngsters know? Doctor Johnson or Walter Savage Landor was the originator of the lying epigram; after them Byron gobbled it up, as he gobbled up most of the good things of his generation, and after him, the deluge of this mediocre century. When I told Byron this, at Milan, I think it was, he vowed me an ass. Now, it was Doctor Johnson."

"Cheer up, it's not so bad. I remember once at Paris, or was it Vienna, you said the same thing about——" and here followed a strange name.

"And, anyhow, you are mixing dates; Landor followed Byron, please, but I suppose he said it first. I told Metternich of your bon-mot, and, egad! he laughed, did that old parchment face. As for Bonaparte, upstart and charlatan, he was too selfish to smile at anybody's witbut his own, and little he had. Do you remember the Congress of Vienna?"

"Do I—1815?"

"Some such year. Or was it in 1750 when we saw Casanova at Venice? Well—" At this point the alarm-signal went off, and the mob went over to the opera. The young bartender's heart was beating so fast that it "leapt up in his bosom," as he described it. Two middle-aged men talking of a century ago as calmly as if they had spoken of yesterday flustered him a bit. He heard the dates. He noticed the perfectly natural manner in which events were mentioned. There was no mystification. For the first time in his life Michael was sorry the between-act pause was so short, and he longed for the next one, though fatigued from the labours of the last. Would these gentlemen return for more cognac? In an hour they came back with the crowd, again drank old five-star brandy, and gossiped about a lot of incomprehensible things that had evidently taken place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century; at least, Michael overheard them disputing dates, and one of them bet the other that the big fire in London occurred in 1666, and referred the question to Mr. Peppers, or Peps—some such name.

"Ah, poor old Pepys," sighed the dark man; "if he had only taken better care of himself he might have been with us to-day instead of mouldering in his grave."

"Oh, well! you can't expect every one to believe in your Struldbrug cure," replied his friend dreamily. "Even Her Majesty, Queen Anne, would not take your advice, though Mrs. Masham and Mr. Harley begged her to."

"Yes, about the only thing they ever agreed upon in their life. Where is Harley to-day?"

"Oh, I suppose in London," carelessly replied the other. "For a young bird of several centuries he's looking as fit as a fiddle; but see here, Swift, old boy, your bogy-tales are worrying our young friend," and with that Michael says they pointed to him, heartily laughed, and went away.

He crossed himself, and for a moment the electric lights burned dim, so it seemed to the superstitious laddie-buck. But he had had a good chance to study the odd pair. They were not, as he repeated, old men, neither were they youthful. Say thirty-five or forty years, and he noticed this time the freshness of their complexions, the brilliancy of their eyes. They were just gentlemen in evening clothes and had run across Broadway without overcoats, a reprehensible act even for a young man. But they were healthy, self-contained, and hard-headed—they took, according to the statistician behind the bar, about a quart of brandy between them, and were as fresh as daisies after the fiery stuff. Who were they? "Blagueurs," said I, after I had carefully deciphered the runic inscriptions in Michael's mind.(This was a week later.) Two fellows out on a lark, bent on scaring a poor Irish boy. But what was Swift, or Queen Anne, or Metternich, or Mr. Harley to him? Just words. Bonaparte he might be expected to remember. It was curious all the same that he could reel off the unusual names of Mrs. Masham and Casanova. The deuce! was there something in the horrid tale? Two immortals stalking the globe when their very bones should have been dissolved into everlasting dust! Two wraiths revisiting the glimpses of the moon—hold on! Struldbrug! Who was Struldbrug? What his cure? I tried to summon from the vasty deep all the worthies of the eighteenth century. Struldbrug. Swift. Struldbrug. Sir William Temple. Struldbrug—ah! by the great horn spoon! The Struldbrugs of the Island of Laputa! Gulliver's hideous immortals—and then the horror of the story enveloped me, but, despite my aversion to meeting the dead, I determined to live in the chop-house till I saw face to face these ghosts from a vanished past. My curiosity was soon gratified, as the sequel will show.

Just one week after the appearance of this pair I stood talking to the Irish barman, when I saw him start and pale. Ha! I thought, here are my men. I was not mistaken. Two well-built and well-groomed gentlemen asked for brandy, and swallowed it in silence. They were polite enough to avoid my rather rude stare. No wonder I stared. They recalled familiarfaces, yet I couldn't at once place the owners. Presently they went over to a table and seated themselves. Loudly calling for a mug of musty ale, I boldly put myself at an adjacent spot, and continued my spying tactics. The friends were soon in hot dispute. It concerned the literary reputation of Balzac. I sat with my mouth wide open.

The elder of the pair, the one called Swift, snapped at his friend: "Zounds, sir! you and your Balzac. Hogwash and roosters in rut—that's about his capacity. Of course, when your own dull stuff appeared he praised you for the sake of the paradox. You moderns! Balzac the father of French fiction! You the father, or is it grandfather, of psychology—a nice crew! That boy Maupassant had more stuff in him than a wilderness of Zolas, Goncourts, and the rest. He is almost as amusing as Paul de Kock—" The other, the little man, bristled with rage.

"Because you wrote a popular boy's book, full of filth and pessimism, you think you know all literature. And didn't you copy Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyagers, and Defoe? You satirise every one except God, whom you spare because you don't know him. I don't care much for Balzac, though I'm free to confess he did treat me handsomely in praising my Chartreuse——"

"Good God!" I groaned, "it's Stendhal, otherwise Henry Beyle, laying down the law to thetremendous author of Gulliver's Travels." And yet neither man looked the accepted portrait of himself. Above all, no Struldbrug moles were in view. I forgot my former fear, being interested in the dispute of these two giant writers who are more akin artistically than ever taken cognisance of by criticism. Dead? What did I care! They were surely alive now, and I was not dreaming. I didn't need to pinch myself, for my eyes and ears reported the occurrence. A miracle? Why not. Miracles are daily, if we but knew it. Living is the most wonderful of all miracles. The discussion proceeded. Swift spoke tersely, just as he wrote:

"Enough, friend Beyle. You are a charlatan. Your knowledge of the human heart is on a par with your taste in literature. You abominate Flaubert because his prose is more rhythmic than yours."

"I vow I protest," interrupted Stendhal.

"No matter. I'm right. Mérimée, your pupil, is your master at every point."

I could no longer contain myself, and, bursting with curiosity, I cried:

"Pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting such a luminous altercation, but, notwithstanding the queerness of the situation, may I not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift and Henry Beyle-Stendhal?"

"Discovered, by the eternal Jehovah!" roared Swift, adding an obscene phrase, whichI discreetly omit. Stendhal took the incident coolly.

"As I am rediscovered about every decade by ambitious young critics anxious to achieve reputations, I am not disturbed by our young friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted. Pray, join us in a fresh drink and conversation." But I was only thirsty for more talk, oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendhal, who regarded me with cynical eyes, all the while fingering his little whisker: "Did you ever hear Chopin play?"

"Who," he solemnly asked in turn, "is Chopin?"

"He was at his best in the forties, and as you didn't die till——"

"Pardon me, monsieur. I never died. Your Chopin may have died, but I am immortal."

"You venerable Struldbrug," giggled Swift. I was disagreeably impressed, yet held my ground:

"You must have met him. He was a friend of Balzac—his music was then in vogue at Paris—" I stumbled in my speech.

"He probably means that little Polish piano-player who dangled at the petticoats of George Sand," interpolated Swift.

"I knew Cimarosa, Rossini I saw, but I never heard of Chopin. As for the Sand woman, that cow who chewed and rechewed her literary cud—don't mention her name to me, please. She is the village pump of fiction;water, wet water. Balzac was bad enough." My heart sank. Chopin not even remembered by a contemporary! This then is fame. But the immortality of Stendhal, of Swift—what of that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps Balzac, Sand, Flaubert were still alive. I propounded the question. Swift answered it.

"Yes, they are alive. My Struldbrugs are meant to symbolise the immortality of genius. Only stupid people die. Sand is a barmaid in London. Balzac is on the road selling knit-goods, and a mighty good drummer he is sure to be; but poor Flaubert has had hard luck. He was the reader to a publishing house, and forced to pass judgment on the novels of the day—favourable judgment, mind you, on the popular stuff. He nearly burst a blood-vessel when they gave him a Marie Corelli manuscript to correct—to correct the style, mind you, he, Flaubert! The gods are certainly capricious. Now the old chap—he has aged since 1880—is in New York reading proof at a daily newspaper office. He sits at the same desk with Ben de Casseres, and every time he mutters over the rhythm of a sentence Ben raps him on the knuckles, and says:

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