THE CITY OF BROTHERLY NOISE

THE CITY OF BROTHERLY NOISEPhiladelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk about any of the narrow streets of this cold-storage abode of Brotherly Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of the abode of brotherly love. Over there the nerve shock is ultra-dynamic. As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then, will ask the puzzled student of national life, does the venerable witticism persist in living? The answer is that in theUnited States a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race of humourists. Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets that vibrate with the clangour of the loosely jointed machinery, an army of carts and the cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the Schuylkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all these and a thousand other things place New York in a more modest category; in reality our own city emits few pipes in comparison with the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls over the map of Pennsylvania. Yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is stunned by the welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of "society" was forced to go northward to this Mahomet of operatic music; else forego Richard Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden, and Oscar's famous head-tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years Market Street had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians. Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue was Cimmerian darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company, accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say "Girard Avenue" or "Spring Garden" without blushing, because of their increased knowledge of municipaltopography. Society trooped northward. Motor-cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar Street. Philadelphia boasts a much superior culture in the crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom Street hangs his banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder.The difference in the handling of the social "hammer" between Philadelphia and New York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be thus illustrated: At the clubs in Philadelphia they say: "Dabs is going fast. Pity he drinks. Did you see the seven cocktails he got away with before dinner last night?" In Boston they say: "Dabs is quite hopeless. This afternoon he mixed up Botticelli with Botticini. Of course, after that—!" Now, in New York, we usually dismiss the case in this fashion: "Dabs went smash this morning. The limit! Serves the idiot right. He never would take proper tips." Here are certain social characteristics of three cities set forth by kindly disposed clubmen. As the Chinese say: An image-maker never worships his idols. We prefer the Cambodian sage who remarked: "In hell, it's bad form to harp on the heat."THE SOCIALISTThe socialist is not always sociable. Nor is there any reason why he should be. He usually brings into whatever company he frequents his little pailful of theories and dumps them willy-nilly on the carpet of conversation. He enacts the eternal farce of equality for all, justice for none. The mob, not the individual, is his shibboleth. Yet he is the first to resent any tap on his shoulder in the way of personal criticism. He has been in existence since the coral atoll was constructed by that tiny, busy, gregarious creature, and in the final cosmic flare-up he will vanish in company with his fellow man. He is nothing if not collective. His books, written in his own tongue, are translated into every living language except sound English, which is inimical to jargon. If his communal dreams could come true he would charge his neighbour with cheating above his position; being a reformer, the fire of envy brightly burns in his belly—a sinister conflagration akin to that of Ram Dass (see Carlyle). In the thick twilight of his reason he vaguely wanders, reading every new book about socialism till his confusion grows apace and is thrice confounded. From ignorance to arrogance is but a step. At the rich table of life, groaning with good things, he turns away, preferring to chew the dry cud of self-satisfaction.He would commit Barmecide rather than surrender his theory of the "unearned increment." He calls Shaw and Wells traitors because they see the humorous side of their doctrines and, occasionally, make mock of them. The varieties of lady socialists are too numerous to study. It may be said of them, without fear of being polite, that females rush in where fools fear to tread. But, then, the woman who hesitates—usually gets married.THE CRITIC WHO GOSSIPSHe has a soul like a Persian rug. Many-coloured are his ways, his speech. He delights in alliteration of colours, and avails himself of it when he dips pen into ink. He is fond of confusing the technical terms of the Seven Arts, writing that "stuffing the ballot-box is no greater crime than constipated harmonics." But what he doesn't know is that such expressions as gamut of colours, scales, harmonies, tonal values belong to the art of painting, and not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote and gossip than of history. But what's the use! You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic will quote for you, with his gimlet eye of a specialist boring into your own, the story which was whispered to Anthony Trollope (in 1857, please don't forget) if he would be so kind (it was at the Uffizi Galleries, Florence) as to show him the way to the Medical Venus. This is marvelloushumour, and worth a ton of critical comment (which, by Apollo! it be). But, as Baudelaire puts it: "Nations, like families, produce great men against their will"; and our critic is "produced," not made. In the realm of the blind, the cock-eyed is king. The critic is said to be the most necessary nuisance—after women—in this "movie" world of ours. But all human beings are critics, aren't they?THE MOCK PSYCHIATRISTIf for the dog the world is a smell, for the eagle a picture, for the politician a Nibelung hoard, then for the psychiatrist life is a huge, throbbing nerve. He dislikes, naturally, the antivivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection of his fellow creatures. It's a mad world for him, my masters! And if your ears taper at the top, beware! You have the morals of a faun; or, if your arms be lengthy, you are a reversion to a prehistoric type. The only things that are never too long, for our friend the "expert" of rare phobias, are his bills and the length of his notice in the newspapers. If he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise behave too much like married people, he quickly resents any tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception. He maintains that religious feeling is only "a mode of reaction," and our conscience but a readjusting apparatus. His trump-cardis the abnormal case, and if he can catch tripping a musician, a poet, a painter, he is professionally happy. Homer nodded. Shakespeare plagiarised. Beethoven drank. Mozart liked his wife's sister. Chopin coughed. Turner was immoral. Wagner, a little how-come-ye-so! Hurray! Cracked souls, and a Donnybrook Fair of the emotions. The psychiatrist can diagnose anything from rum-thirst to sudden death. Nevertheless, in his endeavour to assume the outward appearance of a veritable man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one of the hermit-crab as described in E. H. Banfield's Confessions of a Beach Comber (p. 132). "The disinterested spectator," remarks Professor Banfield, "may smile at the vain, yet frantically anxious efforts of the hermit-crab to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a flattering misfit; but it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail in a No. 5 shell abandoned." The mock psychiatrist is the hermit-crab of psychology. And of the living he has never been known to speak a word of praise.CHAPTER XXIIITHE REFORMATION OF GEORGE MOOREIDear naughty George Moore—sad, bad, mad—has reformed. He tells us why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky enough to read; for, the American edition is expurgated, nay, fumigated, as was the Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail and Farewell, Ave and Salve being the titles of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell, the poet and painter, better known as "Æ." in a more sympathetic fashion. When Vale was announced several years ago as on the brink of completion I was moved to write: "I suppose when the final book appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his soul, not to say, his shop. But I have my serious doubts." After reading Vale I still had them. Only death will end the streaming confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by the pen. (This latter sentence is not a quotation from thesacred books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave chained to the ink-well.)I said that Vale is expurgated for American consumption. Certainly. We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America—thanks to the mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters—that a hearty oath scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank malodorous soil with his war-worn agricultural implement. When he returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the national literary and artistic movement, he found a devoted band of brethren: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Synge, Edward Martyn, Russell, and others.I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the neo-Celtic awakening. Yeats was the prime instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally discovered Synge, the dramatist—in reality the only strong man of the group, the only dramatist of originality—and, with his exquisite lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland, a fabulous, beautiful Erin, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton, Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault.As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town, given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the smoking-room of the Shelbourne,and a few hours later the clubs will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day, and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults.But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh! in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the "lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume (see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen and ink.Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for physical quarrels.He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats; what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn, very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned—I speak figuratively—and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till, bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight.He "got even" with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant conversion he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties, mental and temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented itself and he hurried to the Cathedral for advice. He sent in his name to the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed: "Moore, Moore, oh, that man again! Well, give him another pair of blankets." In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings, were added to the apocryphal anecdote—which, by the way, set smiling the usually impassive Moore, who can see a joke every now and then.Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in Vale of his riding dangerous mounts; and when challenged at an English country house did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to hounds the better part of a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take the "dare," although when he reached his room he found his boots full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Any one reading his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart. In Vale he describes his father's stable at Castle Moore, County Mayo.Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new imprudencesin black and white, we may expect? He has paid his respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered" by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian experiences—it is the best part of the book—and to my way of thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris; London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of 1880—what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow head of George Moore—that colour so admiredby Manet and so wonderfully painted by him—in the academic camp. He replied with all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated mediocrities—on the pictorial side, at least—though John Millais was a talent—and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe pinches on the other foot—it is George who is a belated critic of the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and many are the wordy battles waged at the Café Royal, London, when Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its critics.IIIn one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the synoptic Gospels.The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in Salammbô, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurévilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the Index beforeit was written. And yet we find in it George Moore among the prophets.Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life, written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge, ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea, in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied, sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature. The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffusesevery page of The Brook Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called "blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently "blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions, and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate The Brook Kerith. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics, the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps the Scriptural Kedron? This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or Temple worship; furthermore, they practised celibacy till a schism within their ranks drove the minority away from the parent body to shift for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother—they have other sons—is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John the Baptist, the precursor of the long-foretold Messiah, lead himastray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a theomaniac—he believes himself to be the son of God, appointed by the heavenly father to save mankind; especially his fellow Jews. Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor, ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the only son of a rich merchant of Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who, inducted into the wisdom of the Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding, a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets. The dialogues between father and son rather recall Erin, hardly Syria. Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal day of the crucifixion he beseeches his friend Pilate to let him have the body of his Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs, then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women Mary and Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre.If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem (heated to this murder by the High Priest) the title of the book might have been "Joseph of Arimathea." He is easily the most viable figure. Jesus is too much of the god from the machine; but he serves the author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to the house of his father, hides him and listens unmoved to the fantastictales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second crucifixion, so Joseph takes him back to the Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of the demon. It seems that in those troubled days the cities and countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching the speedy destruction of the world. For a period Jesus called himself a son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the sword.Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived with his flocks. The idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein; sober, as befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned an undulating prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great landscape-painter.Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's crook to his successor and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem, with Timothy lost somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquentpages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus Christ. A disputatious man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline Christianity, differing from the tender message of Jesus; that Jesus of whom Havelock Ellis wrote: "Jesus found no successor. Over the stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics, which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were unable to melt."If this be the case then Paul was, if not the founder, the foster-father of the new creed. A seer of epileptic visions—Edgar Saltus has said of the "sacred disease" that all founders of religions have been epileptics—Paul, with the intractable temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as if these things were realities." For Paul and those who followed him they were and are realities; from them is spun the web of our modern civilisation. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus that he it was who, crucified, came back to life may be fancy. The sturdy Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing from the blinding light on the road to Damascus: "Paul, Paul, why persecutest thou me?" naturally enough denouncedJesus as a madman, but accepted his services as a guide to Cæsarea, where, in company with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad tidings, there to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Néant, Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have quoted the mystic Joachim Flora—of the Third Kingdom—who said that the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it away. Jesus cast his cross away—his spiritual ambition—believing that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is not going, as he had contemplated,to give himself up to Hanan, the High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda: "The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the "rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which while it must have given its author pains to write—so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it—must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt that he is, followed his vision. Inevery man's heart there is a lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him—though it would be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation—whatBarbey d'Aurévillyonce wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the Christ stand!"CHAPTER XXIVPILLOWLANDIn his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick man "sways his pillow—tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changessidesoftener than a politician." How true this is—even to the italicised word—I discovered for myself after a personal encounter with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet seemingly a land without limit,—who dares circumscribe the imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow is his throne—from it he issues his orders for the day, his bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of officious advisers.But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled. He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas! Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant. In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them." And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers. Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast. The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever. Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say—I read their meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated—we shall have this fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well toorapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give, I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"—as the unchristian unscientists say—on the nurse, my nurse.As an old reporter of things theatrical I had seen many plays with the trained nurse as heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even the gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret Anglin in a piece whose name I've forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus in which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How mistaken I have been. Now, the trained nurse seems an angel withoutwings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl of the footlights; she is often mature and stout and a lover of potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but her severity hath good cause. At first you feebly utter the word "nurse." Later she is any Irish royal family name. Follows, "Mary," and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her "Marie" he is doomed. Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis, and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius Hospital staff. Married sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years hasn't any more chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a "snowbird in hell"—as Brother Mencken phrases it.However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are wet. You are weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only care for your precious carcass but also a surcease from the demands of the world. Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work if you are a convalescent of the true-blue sort. Hence your tears. But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo about your embattled bed. You begin suddenlittle arguments with your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time virility in the technique of household squabbling. You haven't. You swell with masculine satisfaction and for at least five minutes you are the Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness, send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the familiar leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what humility of accent: "Mamma!" The Eternal Masculine? The Eternal Child! You mumble to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on that thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to be haughty. But she knows you are simply a sick grumpy old person of the male species who needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well hidden.The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow white, and find in vernal green, is an experience almost worth the miseries you have so impatiently endured. A veritable vacation for the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of Flatbush break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless interest the manœuvres of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden as he manfully deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries, his little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the makings of a leader. He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel, and Master-politician; but he will always be foremost, else nowhere. "You are the audience,"he imperiously bids his companions, and when rebellion seemed imminent he punched, without a trace of anger, a boy much taller. I envied Georgie his abounding vitality. Furtively I raised the window. Instantly I was spied by Georgie who cried lustily: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!" I almost felt gay, "You come up here," I called out with one lung. "I haven't a stepladder," he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. (Now I'm moralising!) Undismayed, Georgie continued to call: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!"The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend who meets you and says: "I never saw you look better in your life." It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You renounce then and there the doctor with all his pomps of healing. You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd. Notwithstanding you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer King of Pillowland.CHAPTER XXVCROSS-CURRENTS IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATUREIThey order certain things better in France than elsewhere; I mean such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of book-making known as Inquiries ("Enquête," which is not fair to translate into the lugubrious literalism, "Inquest"), Anthologies, and books that masquerade as books, as Charles Lamb hath it. Without a trace of pedantry or dogmatism, such works appear from time to time in Paris and are delightful reminders of the good breeding and suppleness of Gallic criticism. To turn to favour and prettiness a dusty department of literature is no mean feat.What precisely is the condition of French letters since Catulle Mendès published his magisterial work on The French Poetic Movement from 1867 to 1900? (Paris, 1903.) Nothing so exhaustive has appeared since, though a half-dozen Inquiries, Anthologies, and Symposiums are in existence.The most comprehensive recently is Florian-Parmentier's Contemporary History of FrenchLetters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a poet, one of les Jeunes, and an expert swimmer in the multifarious cross-currents of the day. His book is a bird's-eye view of the map of literary France as far as the beginning of the war. He is quite frank in his likes and dislikes, and always has his reasons for his major idolatries and minor detestations.As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds there are several new Anthologies at hand which aid us to form our own opinion of the younger men's prose and verse. And, finally, there is the significant Inquiry of Emile Henriot: "A Quoi Rêvent les Jeunes Gens?" (1913); of which more anon.M. Florian-Parmentier is a native of Valenciennes, a writer whose versatility and fecundity are noteworthy in a far from barren literary epoch. He has, with the facility of a lettered young Frenchman, tried his hand at every form. All themes, so they be human, are welcome to him, from art criticism to playwriting. He is seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps they may not admit this; but the question may be answered in the affirmative: Is he a safe critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day French letters?He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of humour in a critical barometer, the tendency of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others to form schools, to create cénacles, to begin fighting before they have any defined ideal.It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive manifestoes, declarations, and challenges, most of them rather in the air; though it cannot be denied that these ebullitions of gusty temperaments do clear that same air, murky with theories and traversed by an occasional flash of genius.After paying his respects to the daily Parisian press, which he belabours as venal, cynical, and impure, our critic evokes a picture of the condition of literary men; not a reassuring one. Indeed, we wonder how young people can dream of embracing such a profession, with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable poverty. Unless these aspiring chaps have a private income, how do they contrive to live?The answer is, they don't live, unless they write twaddle for the Grand Old Public, which must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You say to yourself, after all Paris is not vastly different in this respect from benighted New York. Detective stories, melodrama, the glorification of the stale triangle in fiction and drama, the apotheosis of the Apache—what are all these but slight variants of the artistic pabulum furnished by our native merchants in mediocrity? Consoled, because your mental and emotional climate is not as inartistic as it is painted, you return to Florian-Parmentier and his divagations. He has much to say. Some of it is not as tender as tripe, but none is salted with absurdity.Then you make a discovery. There is in France a distinct class, the Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior claims; a class to which there is no analogy either in England or in America. (The French Academy is not particularly referred to just now.) Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs, bohemians, and professors—all may belong to it if they have the necessary credentials: brains, talent, enthusiasm. It is the latter quality that floats out on the sea of speculation many adventuring barks. Each sports a tiny pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered by some dreamer of proud, impossible dreams. But they float, do these frail boats, laden with visions and captained by noble ambitions.Or, another image; a long, narrow street, on either side houses of manifold styles—fantastic or sensible, castellated or commonplace, baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty, these eclectic architectures reflect the souls of the dwellers within. The ivory tower is not missing, though a half-century ago it was more in evidence; the church is there, though sadly dwarfed—France is still spiritually crippled and flying on one wing (this means previous to 1914); and a host of other strange and familiar houses that Jack the poet built.On the doors of each is a legend; it may be Neo-Symbolism, Neo-Classicism, Free-Verse, Sincerism, Intenseism, Spiritualists, Floralism or the School of Grace, Dramatism and Simultanism,Imperialism, Dynamism, Futurism, Regionalism, Pluralism, Sereneism, Vivantism, Magism, Totalism, Subsequentism, Argonauts, Wolves, Visionarism, and, most discussed of all, Unanimism, headed by that fiery propagandist and poet, Jules Romains.Now, every one of these cults in miniature has its following, its programmes, sometimes its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They are the numerous progeny of the elder Romantic, Realistic, and Symbolistic schools, long dead and gathered to their fathers.Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet Correspondences the Symbolists dated; Baudelaire, the precursor of so much modern, is to-day chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical and æsthetic. His Little Poems in Prose are a breviary for the youths who are turning out an amorphous prose, which they call Free. Paul Verlaine's influence is still marked, for he is a maker of Debussy-like music; moonlit, vapourish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The very quintessence of poetry haunts the vague terrain of his verse; but his ideas, his morbidities, these are negligible, indeed, abhorred.The new schools, whether belonging to the Extreme Right or Extreme Left, are idealistic in their aim and practice; that or nothing. The brutalities of Zola and the Naturalistic School, the frigid perfection and metallic impassibility of the Parnassians are over and done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind theeye of the ideal. There is a renaissance of sensibility. The universe is become pluralistic, sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony has ceased to be a potent weapon in the armoury of poets and prosateurs. It is replaced by an ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that weeps on the shoulder of one's neighbour, by a horror of egoism—whether masquerading as a philosophy such as Nietzsche's, or a poesy such as the Parnassians. For these poetlings issues are cosmical.Coeval with this revival of sentiment is a decided leaning toward religion; not the "white soul of the Middle Ages," as Huysmans would say; not the mediæval curiosities of Hugo, Gautier, Lamartine; but the carrying aloft of the banner of belief; the opposition to sterile agnosticism by the burning tongues of the holy spirit. No dilettante movement this return to Roman Catholicism. The time came for many of these neophytes when they had to choose at the cross-roads. Either—Or? The Button-Moulder was lying in wait for such adolescent Peer Gynts, and, outraged and nauseated by the gross license of their day and hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts, they turned to the right—some, not all of them. The others no longer cry aloud their pagan admiration of the nymph's flesh in the brake, of the seven deadly arts and their sister sins.In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing across the housetops ofFrench art and literature. Science is too positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again; only, the youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the Cubists are working for formal severity, despite their geometrical fanaticism. Youth will have its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring colours, and those doors in the narrow street called "Perhaps," do but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaning to the infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings also; else his chamber of dreams might overflow into reality, and then we should be converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers and all.What were the controlling factors in young French literature up to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion, graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous, fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barrès is another name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism, replacing the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words: Patriotism,reverence for the dead—a reverence perilously near ancestor-worship—the prose-master Barrès went into the political arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive "modernism," an idealistic reactionary.He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity—"moral earnestness," so called—has never been his. He is no more a sower of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he is accepted as a vital teacher.Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal, Mallarmé, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud—that stepfather of symbolism —Emil Verhaeren—who is truly an elemental and disquieting force—Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont—who contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making—Francis Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue—and how many others, to be found in the pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties.IIWhen we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the intricate polyphony of literary sects and cénacles, the American lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the whirligig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900 has jostled from their place the "elders" of a decade previous: you read of Paul-Napoléon Roinard, Maurice Beaubourg, Hans Ryner—a remarkable writer—André Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul Fort, Paul Claudel, André Suarès, Stéphane Servant, André Spire, Philéas Lebesgue, Georges Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations deserves an English garb), and you recall some of them as potent creators of values.But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Symons, Edmund Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who "create"—as the jargon goes—that same provincialism is a windshield against the draughts of too tempting imitation; but for our criticism there is no excuse. A critic will never be a catholic critic of his native literature or art if he doesn't know the literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical as this may sound. We lack æstheticcuriosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism America is comparable to a cemetery of clichés.Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long, narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its alternations of Septentrional mists and the blazing blue sky of the Midi. This critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been called the "Woad" argument; he goes back not to the early Britons, but to Celticism. He is a sturdy Kymrist, and believes not in literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche," the purveyors of "canned" classics, the chilly rhetoricians who set too much store on conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner, and the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier. In his auscultation of genius, La Physiologie Morale du Poète (1904), may be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar enough now, as does the flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of Renan, in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has had some influence. M. Florian-Parmentier does not admire this movement or its prophet, Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant magic of the word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the cockles of the heart of critics.And then the generation of 1900—AlexanderMercereau, Henri Hertz, Sébastien Voirol, Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand Divoire, Tancrède Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux, Mandin, Guillaume Apollinaire—all workers in the vast inane, dwellers on the threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing extraordinary has come from it. Balzac is still the mighty one in fiction. Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul Adam, the brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille—a brilliant, versatile man—still maintain their primacy.Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gourmont, Camille Mauclair, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois—now sojourning in America and a thinker of verve and originality—and Henry Houssaye, hold their own against the younger generation.In the theatre there are numerous and vexing tendencies: Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness to gentle Charles van Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has disciples; but the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who had his day in Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were accepted not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men of the theatre. There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux, and Marie Leneru; but the technique of the drama is immutable.In the domain of philosophy and experimental science we find Emile Boutroux, and such collective psychologists as Durckheim, Gustave le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names such as Binet, Ribot, Michel Savigny, Alfred Fouillée, and the eminent mathematician, Henri Poincaré—who finally became sceptical of his favourite logic, philosophy, and mathematics. This intellectual volte-face caused endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive vs. intellectualism—what William James called "vicious intellectualism"—is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse, intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time in Bergson caught the fancy of the poets. Naturally enough. Literary dogmatism had prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence of formal verse that is to be feared. Vers-libre, which began with such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud, has run the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yawping from the terrace of the brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted to ask. Voices they have, but not bird-like voices.That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gourmont—who practically introduced him—must not be overlooked, for hehad genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gaultier, who evolved from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme—which, succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than it is; from the philosopher to the snob, from the priest to the actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.Of the influence of politics upon art and literature—which happily are no cloistered virtues in France—we need not speak here. M. Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and bulky book, of which we have only exposed the high lights.Since Jules Huret's Enquête sur l'Evolution Littéraire (1890), followed by similar works of Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard (1913), we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's, mentioned above. He put the questions: "Where are we? Where are we going?" inLe Tempsof Paris, June, 1912, to a number of representative thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers their answers in 1913.The result is rather confusing, a cloud of contradictory witnesses are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies. There are no schools! Yes, there are groups! We are going to the devil headlong! The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial! Better the extravagances of the decayed Romanticists than the debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague on all your houses! say the Unanimists. Onefierce Wolf (Loup) admitted that at the banquets of his cénacle he and his fellow poets always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was it at the Symbolists'? Does it much matter? The gesture counts alone with these youthful "Fumistes"—as Leconte de Lisle had christened their predecessors.Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as "Cymbalists" the Symbolists, his own followers. Gongs would have been a better word. A punster speaks of Theists as those who love "le bon Dieu and tea." The new critical school, at its head Charles Maurras, do not conceal their contempt for all these "arrivistes" and revolutionary groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save Young France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces in faded accents the ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are dead since the war began: Emile Faguet, Jules Lemaître, and Remy de Gourmont. They leave no successors worthy of their mettle.IIIThe three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from 1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch, it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Amongthe rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this poet's testament: "Ce désir d'être tout que j'appelle mon âme!" Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson, but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the poems are more representative.Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it! Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets—Emile Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature, and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse of Henri de Régnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren?What thinker and dramatist is known likeMaeterlinck, except it be the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality—for Verhaeren at one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and "Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poë"; he can boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than constructive.Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same? Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique—all these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly.As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians."Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Châteaubriand was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and Flaubert. They set it downto the fact that none but a Frenchman can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala was temperamentally distasteful.Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one. The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too august body as much as the Belgian poets.As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870 certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by Catulle Mendès, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our contention.CHAPTER XXVIMORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNERTime was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the composer under their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the ambitious chap aforesaid.Never has the music of Wagner been more popular than now; his name on the opera billboards is bound to crowd a house. And never, paradoxical as it may sound, has there been such a critical hue and cry over his works and personality. The publication of his autobiography has much to do with this renewal of interest. There is some praise, much abuse, to be found in the newly published books on the subject. European critics are building up little islands of theory, coral-like, some with fantastic lagoons, others founded on stern truth, and many doomed to be washed away over-night. Nevertheless, the true Richard Wagner is beginning to emerge from the haze of Nibelheim behind which he contrived to hide his real self.Wagner the gigantic comedian; Wagner theegotist; Wagner the victim of a tragic love, Wagner tone-poet, mock philosopher, and a wonderful apparition in the world of art till success overtook him; then Wagner become bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted by his best friends—whom he had alienated—without the solace of the men he had most loved, the men who had helped him over the thorny path of his life—Liszt, Nietzsche, Von Bülow, Otto Wesendonk, and how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom he had treated with characteristic ingratitude! No, Richard Wagner during the sterile years, so called, from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented man, despite his union with Cosima von Bülow-Liszt and the foundation of a home and family at Baireuth.IHowever, there are exceptions. One is the book of Otto Bournot entitled Ludwig Geyer, the Stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote about it in 1913 for theNew York Times. In this slender volume of only seventy-two pages the author sifts all the evidence in the Geyer-Wagner question, and he has delved into archives, into the newspapers of Geyer's days, and has had access to hitherto untouched material. It must be admitted that his conclusions are not to be lightly denied. August Böttiger's Necrology has until recently beenthe chief source of facts in the career of Geyer, but Wagner's Autobiography—which in spots Bournot corrects—and the life of Wagner by Mary Burrell, not to mention other books, have furnished Bournot with new weapons.The Geyers as far back as 1700 were simple pious folk, the first of the family being a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a trombone-player and organist. Indeed, the chief occupation of many Geyers was in some way or other connected with the Evangelical Church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer was a portraitist of no mean merit, an actor of considerable power—his Franz Moor was a favourite rôle with the public—a dramatist of fair ability (he wrote a tragedy, among others, named The Slaughter of the Innocents), and also a verse-maker. His acquaintance with Weber stimulated his interest in music; Weber discovered his voice, and he sang in opera. Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature all the qualities of Wagner. The latter was too young at the time of Geyer's death, September, 1821, to have profited much by the precepts of his stepfather, but his example certainly did prove stimulating to the imagination of the budding poet and composer. Geyer married Johanna Wagner-Bertz (Mary Burrell was the first to give the correct spelling of her maiden name), the widow of the police functionary Wagner (to whose memory Richard pays such cynical homage in his obituary),August 14, 1814. She had about two hundred and sixty-one thalern, and eight children. A ninth came later in the person of Cäcile, who afterward married a member of the Avenarius family. Cäcile, or Cicely, was a prime favourite with Richard.Seven years passed, and again Frau Geyer found herself a widow, with nine children and little money. How the family all tumbled up in the world, owing much to the courage, wit, vivacity, and unshaken will-power of their mother, may be found in the autobiography. Bournot admits that Geyer and his wife may have carried to the grave certain secrets. Richard Wagner until he was nine years old was known as Richard Geyer, and on page thirteen of his book our author prints the following significant sentence: "The possibility of Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in itself nothing detrimental to our judgment of the art-work of Baireuth."IIIn 1900 a twenty-page pamphlet bearing the title Richard Wagner in Zurich was published in Leipsic. It was signed Hans Bélart, and gave for the first time to a much mystified world the story of Wagner's passion for Mathilde Wesendonk, thus shattering beyond hope of repair our cherished belief thatCosima von Bülow-Liszt had been the lode-stone of Wagner's desire, that to her influence was due the creation of Tristan and Isolde, its composer's high-water mark in poetic, dramatic music. Now, Bélart, not content with his iconoclastic pamphlet, has just sent forth a fat book which he calls Richard Wagner's Love-Tragedy with Mathilde Wesendonk.We had thought that the last word in the matter had been said when Baireuth (Queen Cosima I) allowed the publication of Wagner's diaries and love-letters to Mathilde—though her complete correspondence is as yet unpublished. But Bélart is one of the busiest among the German critical coral builders. He has dug into musty newspapers and letters, and gives at the close of his work a long list of authorities. Yet nothing startlingly new comes out of his researches. We knew that Mathilde Wesendonk (or Wesendonck) was the first love of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not his usual self-seeking philandering. We also knew that Otto Wesendonk behaved like a patient husband and a gentleman—any other man would have put a bullet in the body of the thrice impertinent genius; knew, too, that Tristan and Isolde was born of this romance. But there is a mass of fresh details, petty backstairs gossip, all the tittle-tattle beloved of such writers, that in company with Julius Kapp's Wagner und die Frauen, makes Bélart's new book a valuable one for reference.Kapp, who has written a life of Franz Liszt, goes Bélart one better in hinting that the infatuated couple transformed their idealism into realism. Bélart does not believe this; neither does Emil Ludwig, the latest critical commentator on Wagner. But neither critic gives the profoundest proof that the love of Richard and Mathilde was an exalted, platonic one,i. e., the proof psychologic. I firmly believe that if Mathilde Wesendonk had eloped with Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan and Isolde might not have been finished; at all events, the third act would not have been what it now is. A mighty longing is better for the birth of great art than facile happiness. For the first time in his selfish unhappy life Wagner realised Goethe's words of wisdom: "Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce." It was a bitter sacrifice, but out of its bitter sweetness came the honey and moonlight of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner suffered, Mathilde suffered, Otto Wesendonk suffered, and last, but not least, Minna Wagner, the poor pawn in his married game, suffered to distraction. Let us begin with a quotation on the last page but three of Bélart's book: "Remarked Otto Wesendonk to a friend: 'I have hunted Wagner from my threshold....'"This was in August, 1858. Wagner first met the Wesendonks about 1852, three years after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because of his participation in the uprising of1849. (Wagner as amateur revolutionist!) Thanks to the request of his wife Mathilde, Otto Wesendonk furnished a little house on the hill near his splendid villa for the Wagners. First christened "Fafner's Repose," Wagner changed the title to the "Asyl," and for a time it was truly an asylum for this perturbed spirit.But he must needs fall deeply in love with his charming and beautiful neighbour, a woman of intellectual and poetic gifts, and to the chagrin of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife. The gossip in the neighbourhood was considerable, for the complete frankness of the infatuated ones was not the least curious part of the affair. Liszt knew of it, so did the Princess Layn-Wittgenstein. An immense amount of "snooping" was indulged in by interested lady friends of Minna Wagner. She has her apologists, and, judging from the letters she wrote at the time and afterward—several printed for the first time by Kapp and Bélart—she took a lively hand in the general proceedings. Evidently she was tired of her good man's behaviour, and when he solemnly assured her that it was the master-passion of his life she didn't believe him. Naturally not. He had cried "wolf" too often; besides, Minna, like a practical person, viewed the possibility of a rupture with Otto Wesendonk as a distinct misfortune. Otto had not only advanced much money to Richard, but he paid twelve thousand francs for the scores of Rheingoldand Walküre and for the complete performing rights. Afterward he sent both to King Ludwig II as a gift—but I doubt if he ever got a penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed the expenses of the Wagner concert at Zurich, a little item of nine thousand francs. Scandal and calumny invaded his home, the fair fame of his wife was threatened. No wonder the finale, long deferred, was stormy, even operatic.The lady was much younger than her husband; she was born at the close of 1828, therefore Wagner's junior by fifteen years. She was a Luckemeyer, her mother a Stein; a cultured, sweet-natured woman, it is more than doubtful if she could have endured Wagner as a husband. She did a wise thing in resisting his prayers. Not only was her husband a bar to such a proceeding, but her children would have always prevented her thinking of a legal separation. All sorts of plans were in the air. When, in 1857, the American panic seriously threatened the prosperity of Otto Wesendonk, who had heavy business interests in New York, gossip averred that Frau Wesendonk would ask for a divorce; but the air cleared and matters resumed their old aspect. Minna Wagner's health, always poor, became worse. It was a case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs. She daily made scenes at home and threatened to tell what she knew. That she knew much is evident from her correspondence with FrauWilk. She said that Wagner had two hearts, but while he delighted in intellectual and emotional friendship with such a superior soul as Mathilde, he nevertheless would not forego the domestic comforts provided by Minna. Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois. Those intolerable dogs, the parrot, the coffee-drinking, the soft beds and solicitude about his underclothing, all were truly German; human-all-too-human.

Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk about any of the narrow streets of this cold-storage abode of Brotherly Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of the abode of brotherly love. Over there the nerve shock is ultra-dynamic. As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then, will ask the puzzled student of national life, does the venerable witticism persist in living? The answer is that in theUnited States a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race of humourists. Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets that vibrate with the clangour of the loosely jointed machinery, an army of carts and the cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the Schuylkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all these and a thousand other things place New York in a more modest category; in reality our own city emits few pipes in comparison with the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls over the map of Pennsylvania. Yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is stunned by the welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of "society" was forced to go northward to this Mahomet of operatic music; else forego Richard Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden, and Oscar's famous head-tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years Market Street had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians. Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue was Cimmerian darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company, accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say "Girard Avenue" or "Spring Garden" without blushing, because of their increased knowledge of municipaltopography. Society trooped northward. Motor-cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar Street. Philadelphia boasts a much superior culture in the crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom Street hangs his banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder.

The difference in the handling of the social "hammer" between Philadelphia and New York, or Boston and Philadelphia, may be thus illustrated: At the clubs in Philadelphia they say: "Dabs is going fast. Pity he drinks. Did you see the seven cocktails he got away with before dinner last night?" In Boston they say: "Dabs is quite hopeless. This afternoon he mixed up Botticelli with Botticini. Of course, after that—!" Now, in New York, we usually dismiss the case in this fashion: "Dabs went smash this morning. The limit! Serves the idiot right. He never would take proper tips." Here are certain social characteristics of three cities set forth by kindly disposed clubmen. As the Chinese say: An image-maker never worships his idols. We prefer the Cambodian sage who remarked: "In hell, it's bad form to harp on the heat."

The socialist is not always sociable. Nor is there any reason why he should be. He usually brings into whatever company he frequents his little pailful of theories and dumps them willy-nilly on the carpet of conversation. He enacts the eternal farce of equality for all, justice for none. The mob, not the individual, is his shibboleth. Yet he is the first to resent any tap on his shoulder in the way of personal criticism. He has been in existence since the coral atoll was constructed by that tiny, busy, gregarious creature, and in the final cosmic flare-up he will vanish in company with his fellow man. He is nothing if not collective. His books, written in his own tongue, are translated into every living language except sound English, which is inimical to jargon. If his communal dreams could come true he would charge his neighbour with cheating above his position; being a reformer, the fire of envy brightly burns in his belly—a sinister conflagration akin to that of Ram Dass (see Carlyle). In the thick twilight of his reason he vaguely wanders, reading every new book about socialism till his confusion grows apace and is thrice confounded. From ignorance to arrogance is but a step. At the rich table of life, groaning with good things, he turns away, preferring to chew the dry cud of self-satisfaction.He would commit Barmecide rather than surrender his theory of the "unearned increment." He calls Shaw and Wells traitors because they see the humorous side of their doctrines and, occasionally, make mock of them. The varieties of lady socialists are too numerous to study. It may be said of them, without fear of being polite, that females rush in where fools fear to tread. But, then, the woman who hesitates—usually gets married.

He has a soul like a Persian rug. Many-coloured are his ways, his speech. He delights in alliteration of colours, and avails himself of it when he dips pen into ink. He is fond of confusing the technical terms of the Seven Arts, writing that "stuffing the ballot-box is no greater crime than constipated harmonics." But what he doesn't know is that such expressions as gamut of colours, scales, harmonies, tonal values belong to the art of painting, and not alone to music. He is fonder of anecdote and gossip than of history. But what's the use! You can't carve rotten wood. Our critic will quote for you, with his gimlet eye of a specialist boring into your own, the story which was whispered to Anthony Trollope (in 1857, please don't forget) if he would be so kind (it was at the Uffizi Galleries, Florence) as to show him the way to the Medical Venus. This is marvelloushumour, and worth a ton of critical comment (which, by Apollo! it be). But, as Baudelaire puts it: "Nations, like families, produce great men against their will"; and our critic is "produced," not made. In the realm of the blind, the cock-eyed is king. The critic is said to be the most necessary nuisance—after women—in this "movie" world of ours. But all human beings are critics, aren't they?

If for the dog the world is a smell, for the eagle a picture, for the politician a Nibelung hoard, then for the psychiatrist life is a huge, throbbing nerve. He dislikes, naturally, the antivivisectionists, but enjoys the moral vivisection of his fellow creatures. It's a mad world for him, my masters! And if your ears taper at the top, beware! You have the morals of a faun; or, if your arms be lengthy, you are a reversion to a prehistoric type. The only things that are never too long, for our friend the "expert" of rare phobias, are his bills and the length of his notice in the newspapers. If he agrees with Charles Lamb that Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise behave too much like married people, he quickly resents any tracing of a religion to an instinct or a perception. He maintains that religious feeling is only "a mode of reaction," and our conscience but a readjusting apparatus. His trump-cardis the abnormal case, and if he can catch tripping a musician, a poet, a painter, he is professionally happy. Homer nodded. Shakespeare plagiarised. Beethoven drank. Mozart liked his wife's sister. Chopin coughed. Turner was immoral. Wagner, a little how-come-ye-so! Hurray! Cracked souls, and a Donnybrook Fair of the emotions. The psychiatrist can diagnose anything from rum-thirst to sudden death. Nevertheless, in his endeavour to assume the outward appearance of a veritable man of science, the psychiatrist reminds one of the hermit-crab as described in E. H. Banfield's Confessions of a Beach Comber (p. 132). "The disinterested spectator," remarks Professor Banfield, "may smile at the vain, yet frantically anxious efforts of the hermit-crab to coax his flabby rear into a shell obviously a flattering misfit; but it is not a smiling matter to him. Not until he has exhausted a programme of ingenious attitudes and comic contortions is the attempt to stow away a No. 8 tail in a No. 5 shell abandoned." The mock psychiatrist is the hermit-crab of psychology. And of the living he has never been known to speak a word of praise.

Dear naughty George Moore—sad, bad, mad—has reformed. He tells us why in his book, Vale, the English edition of which I was lucky enough to read; for, the American edition is expurgated, nay, fumigated, as was the Memoirs of My Dead Life by the same Celtic Casanova. Vale completes the trilogy; Hail and Farewell, Ave and Salve being the titles of the preceding two. In the first, Moore is sufficiently vitriolic, and in Salve he serves up George Russell, the poet and painter, better known as "Æ." in a more sympathetic fashion. When Vale was announced several years ago as on the brink of completion I was moved to write: "I suppose when the final book appears it means that George Moore has put up the shutters of his soul, not to say, his shop. But I have my serious doubts." After reading Vale I still had them. Only death will end the streaming confessions of this writer. He who lives by the pen shall perish by the pen. (This latter sentence is not a quotation from thesacred books of any creed, merely the conviction of a slave chained to the ink-well.)

I said that Vale is expurgated for American consumption. Certainly. We are so averse to racy, forcible English in America—thanks to the mean, narrow spirit in our arts and letters—that a hearty oath scares us into the Brooklyn backyard of our timid conscience. George calls a spade a spade, and he delights on stirring up rank malodorous soil with his war-worn agricultural implement. When he returned some years ago to Dublin, there to help in the national literary and artistic movement, he found a devoted band of brethren: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, John M. Synge, Edward Martyn, Russell, and others.

I shan't attempt even a brief mention of the neo-Celtic awakening. Yeats was the prime instigator, also the storm-centre. He literally discovered Synge, the dramatist—in reality the only strong man of the group, the only dramatist of originality—and, with his exquisite lyric gift, he, also discovered a new Ireland, a fabulous, beautiful Erin, unsuspected by Tom Moore, Samuel Lover, Carleton, Mangan, Lever, and the too busy Boucicault.

As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town, given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the smoking-room of the Shelbourne,and a few hours later the clubs will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day, and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults.

But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh! in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the "lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume (see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen and ink.Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for physical quarrels.

He once spoke of Shaw as "the funny man in a boarding-house," though he never mentions his name in his memoirs. He doesn't like Yeats; what's more, he prints the news as often and as elaborately as possible. In the present book he doesn't exactly compare Yeats to a crane or a pelican, but he calls attention to the fact that the poet belonged to the "lower middle-class." It seems that Yeats had been thundering away at the artistic indifference of the Dublin bourgeoisie. Now, looking at Yeats the night when John Quinn gave him a dinner at Delmonico's, you could not note any resemblance to exotic birds, though he might recall a penguin. He was very solemn, very bored, very fatigued, his eyes deep sunken from fatigue. Posing as a tame parlour poet for six weeks had tired the man to his very bones. But catch him in private with his waistcoat unbuttoned—I speak figuratively—and you will enjoy a born raconteur, one who slowly distils witty poison at the tip of every anecdote, till, bursting with glee, you cry: "How these literary men do love each other! How one Irishman dotes on another!" Yeats may be an exception to the rule that a poet is as vain and as irritable as a tenor. I didn't notice the irritability, finding him taking himself seriously, as should all apostles of culture and Celtic twilight.

He "got even" with George Moore's virulent attacks by telling a capital story, which he confessed was invented, one that went all over Dublin and London. When George felt the call of a Protestant conversion he was in Dublin. He has told us of his difficulties, mental and temperamental. One day some question of dogma presented itself and he hurried to the Cathedral for advice. He sent in his name to the Archbishop, and that forgetful dignitary exclaimed: "Moore, Moore, oh, that man again! Well, give him another pair of blankets." In later versions, coals, candles, even shillings, were added to the apocryphal anecdote—which, by the way, set smiling the usually impassive Moore, who can see a joke every now and then.

Better still is the true tale of George, who boasts much in Vale of his riding dangerous mounts; and when challenged at an English country house did get on the back of a vicious animal and ride to hounds the better part of a day. He wouldn't, quite properly, take the "dare," although when he reached his room he found his boots full of blood. So there is sporting temper in him. Any one reading his Esther Waters may note that he knows the racing stable by heart. In Vale he describes his father's stable at Castle Moore, County Mayo.

Of course, this is not the time to attempt an estimate of his complete work, for who may say what fresh outbursts, what new imprudencesin black and white, we may expect? He has paid his respects to his fellow countrymen, and is heartily despised by all camps, political, religious, artistic. He has belittled the work of Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Edwin Martyn, and has rather patronised John M. Synge; the latter, possibly, because Synge was "discovered" by Yeats, not Moore. Yet do we enjoy the vagaries of George Moore. I only saw him once, a long time ago, to be precise in 1901, at Bayreuth. He looked more like a bird than Yeats, though his beak is not so predaceous as Yeats's; a golden-crested bird, with a chin as diffident as a poached egg, and with melancholy pale-blue eyes, and an undecided gait. He talked of the Irish language as if it were the only redemption for poor unhappy Ireland. In Vale there is not the same enthusiasm. He dwells with more delight on his early Parisian experiences—it is the best part of the book—and to my way of thinking the essential George Moore is to be found only in Paris; London is an afterthought. The Paris of Manet, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Huysmans, Zola, Verlaine, and all the "new" men of 1880—what an unexplored vein he did work for the profit and delectation of the English-speaking world. True critical yeoman's work, for to preach impressionism twenty-five years ago in London was to court a rumpus. What hard names were rained upon the yellow head of George Moore—that colour so admiredby Manet and so wonderfully painted by him—in the academic camp. He replied with all the vivacity of vocabulary which your true Celt usually has on tap. He even "went for" the Pre-Raphaelites, a band of overrated mediocrities—on the pictorial side, at least—though John Millais was a talent—and for years was as a solitary prophet in a city of Philistines. The world caught up with Moore, and to-day the shoe pinches on the other foot—it is George who is a belated critic of the "New Art" (most of it as stale as the Medes and Persians), and many are the wordy battles waged at the Café Royal, London, when Augustus John happens in of an evening and finds the author of Modern Painting denouncing Debussy in company with Matisse and other Post-Imitators. Manet, like Moore, is "old hat" (vieux chapeau) for modern youth. It's well to go to bed not too late in life, else some impertinent youngster may cry aloud: "What's that venerable granddaddy doing up at this time of night?" To each generation its critics.

In one of his fulminations against Christianity Nietzsche said that the first and only Christian died on the cross. George Moore thinks otherwise, at least he gives a novel version of the narrative in the synoptic Gospels.The Brook Kerith is a fiction dealing with the life of Christ. It is a book that will offend the faithful, and one that will not convince the heterodox. In it George Moore sets forth his ideas concerning the Christ "myth," evoking, as does Flaubert in Salammbô, a vanished land, a vanished civilisation, and in a style that is artistically beautiful. Never has he written with such sustained power, intensity and nobility of phrasing, such finely tempered, modulated prose. It is a rhythmed prose which first peeped forth in some pages of Mr. Moore's Evelyn Innes when the theme bordered on the mystical. Yet it is of an essentially Celtic character. Mysticism and Moore do not seem bedfellows. Nevertheless, Mr. Moore has been haunted from his first elaborate novel, A Drama in Muslin, by mystic and theological questions. A pagan by temperament, his soul is the soul of an Irish Roman Catholic. He can no more escape the fascinating ideas of faith and salvation than did Huysmans. (He has taken exception to this statement in an open letter.) A realist at the beginning, he has leaned of late years heavily on the side of the spirit. But like Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurévilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans, Mr. Moore is one of those sons of Mother Church who give anxious pause to his former coreligionists. The Brook Kerith will prove a formidable rock of offence, and it may be said that it was on the Index beforeit was written. And yet we find in it George Moore among the prophets.

Perhaps Mr. Moore has read the critical work of Professor Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth. It is a masterpiece of destruction. There are many books in which Jesus Christ figures. Ernest Renan's Life, written in his silky and sophisticated style, is no more admired by Christians than the cruder study by Strauss. After these the deluge, ending with the dream by the late Remy de Gourmont, Une Nuit au Luxembourg. And there is the brilliant and poetic study of Edgar Saltus, his Mary Magdalen. Anatole France has distilled into his The Revolt of the Angels some of his acid hatred of all religions, with blasphemous and obscene notes not missing. It may be remembered that M. France also wrote that pastel of irony The Procurator of Judea, in which Pontius Pilate is shown in his old age, rich, ennuied, sick. He has quite forgotten, when asked, about the Jewish agitator who fancied himself the son of God and was given over to the Temple authorities in Jerusalem and crucified. Rising from the tomb on the third day he became the Christ of the Christian dispensation, aided by the religious genius of one Paul, formerly known as Saul the Tent-maker of Tarsus. Now Mr. Moore does in a larger mould and in the grand manner what Anatole France accomplished in his miniature. The ironic method, a tragic irony, suffusesevery page of The Brook Kerith, and the story of the four Gospels is twisted into something perverse, and for Christians altogether shocking. It will be called "blasphemous," but we must remember that our national Constitution makes no allowance for so-called "blasphemers"; that the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and Mormons may be criticised, yet the criticism is not inherently "blasphemous." America is no more a Christian than a Jewish nation or a nation of freethinkers. It is free to all races and religions, and thus one man's spiritual meat may be another's emetic.

Having cleared our mind of cant, let us investigate The Brook Kerith. The title is applied to a tiny community of Jewish mystics, the Essenes, who lived near this stream; perhaps the Scriptural Kedron? This brotherhood had separated from the materialistic Pharisees and Sadducees, not approving of burnt sacrifices or Temple worship; furthermore, they practised celibacy till a schism within their ranks drove the minority away from the parent body to shift for themselves. A young shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, a carpenter in Galilee, and of Miriam, his mother—they have other sons—is a member of this community. But too much meditation on the prophecies of Daniel and the meeting with a wandering prophet, John the Baptist, the precursor of the long-foretold Messiah, lead himastray. Baptised in the waters of Jordan, Jesus becomes a theomaniac—he believes himself to be the son of God, appointed by the heavenly father to save mankind; especially his fellow Jews. Filled with a fanatical fire, he leads away a dozen disciples, poor, ignorant fishermen. He also attracts the curiosity of Joseph, the only son of a rich merchant of Arimathea. Two-thirds of the novel are devoted to the psychology of this youthful philosopher, who, inducted into the wisdom of the Greek sophists, is, notwithstanding, a fervent Jew, a rigid upholder of the Law and the Prophets. The dialogues between father and son rather recall Erin, hardly Syria. Joseph becomes interested in Jesus, follows him about, and the fatal day of the crucifixion he beseeches his friend Pilate to let him have the body of his Lord for a worthy interment. Pilate demurs, then accedes. Joseph, with the aid of the two holy women Mary and Martha, places the corpse of the dead divinity in a sepulchre.

If Joseph hadn't been killed by the zealots of Jerusalem (heated to this murder by the High Priest) the title of the book might have been "Joseph of Arimathea." He is easily the most viable figure. Jesus is too much of the god from the machine; but he serves the author for the development of his ingenious theory. Finding the Christ still alive, Joseph carries him secretly and after dark to the house of his father, hides him and listens unmoved to the fantastictales of a resurrection. But the spies of Caiaphas are everywhere, Jesus is in danger of a second crucifixion, so Joseph takes him back to the Essenes, where he resumes his old occupation of herding sheep. Feeble in mind and body, he gradually wins back health and spiritual peace. He regrets his former arrogance and blasphemy and ascribes the aberration to the insidious temptings of the demon. It seems that in those troubled days the cities and countryside were infested by madmen, messiahs, redeemers, preaching the speedy destruction of the world. For a period Jesus called himself a son of God and threatened his fellow men with fire and the sword.

Till he was five and fifty years Jesus lived with his flocks. The idyllic pictures are in Mr. Moore's most charming vein; sober, as befits the dignity of the theme. He has fashioned an undulating prose, each paragraph a page long, which flows with some of the clarity and music of a style once derided by him, the style coulant of that master of harmonies, Cardinal Newman. He is a great landscape-painter.

Jesus is aging. He gives up his shepherd's crook to his successor and contemplates a retreat where he may meditate the thrilling events of his youth. Then Paul of Tarsus intervenes. He is vigorously painted. A refugee from Jerusalem, with Timothy lost somewhere in Galilee, he invades the Essenian monastery. Eloquentpages follow. Paul relates his adventures under the banner of Jesus Christ. A disputatious man, full of the Lord, yet not making it any easier for his disciples. You catch a glimpse of Pauline Christianity, differing from the tender message of Jesus; that Jesus of whom Havelock Ellis wrote: "Jesus found no successor. Over the stage of those gracious and radiant scenes swiftly fell a fireproof curtain, wrought of systematic theology and formal metaphysics, which even the divine flames of that wonderful personality were unable to melt."

If this be the case then Paul was, if not the founder, the foster-father of the new creed. A seer of epileptic visions—Edgar Saltus has said of the "sacred disease" that all founders of religions have been epileptics—Paul, with the intractable temperament of a stubborn Pharisee, was softened by some Greek blood, yet as Renan wrote of Amiel: "He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, and other theological bric-a-brac, as if these things were realities." For Paul and those who followed him they were and are realities; from them is spun the web of our modern civilisation. The dismay of Paul on learning from the lips of Jesus that he it was who, crucified, came back to life may be fancy. The sturdy Apostle, who recalled the reproachful words of Jesus issuing from the blinding light on the road to Damascus: "Paul, Paul, why persecutest thou me?" naturally enough denouncedJesus as a madman, but accepted his services as a guide to Cæsarea, where, in company with Timothy, he hoped to embark for Rome, there to spread the glad tidings, there to preach the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified.

On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Néant, Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have quoted the mystic Joachim Flora—of the Third Kingdom—who said that the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it away. Jesus cast his cross away—his spiritual ambition—believing that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.

The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is not going, as he had contemplated,to give himself up to Hanan, the High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda: "The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the "rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.

If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which while it must have given its author pains to write—so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it—must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt that he is, followed his vision. Inevery man's heart there is a lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him—though it would be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation—whatBarbey d'Aurévillyonce wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the Christ stand!"

In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick man "sways his pillow—tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changessidesoftener than a politician." How true this is—even to the italicised word—I discovered for myself after a personal encounter with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet seemingly a land without limit,—who dares circumscribe the imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow is his throne—from it he issues his orders for the day, his bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of officious advisers.But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled. He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas! Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant. In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them." And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers. Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast. The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever. Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say—I read their meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated—we shall have this fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well toorapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give, I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"—as the unchristian unscientists say—on the nurse, my nurse.

As an old reporter of things theatrical I had seen many plays with the trained nurse as heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even the gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret Anglin in a piece whose name I've forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus in which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How mistaken I have been. Now, the trained nurse seems an angel withoutwings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl of the footlights; she is often mature and stout and a lover of potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but her severity hath good cause. At first you feebly utter the word "nurse." Later she is any Irish royal family name. Follows, "Mary," and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her "Marie" he is doomed. Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis, and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius Hospital staff. Married sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years hasn't any more chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a "snowbird in hell"—as Brother Mencken phrases it.

However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are wet. You are weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only care for your precious carcass but also a surcease from the demands of the world. Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work if you are a convalescent of the true-blue sort. Hence your tears. But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo about your embattled bed. You begin suddenlittle arguments with your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time virility in the technique of household squabbling. You haven't. You swell with masculine satisfaction and for at least five minutes you are the Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness, send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the familiar leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what humility of accent: "Mamma!" The Eternal Masculine? The Eternal Child! You mumble to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on that thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to be haughty. But she knows you are simply a sick grumpy old person of the male species who needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well hidden.

The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow white, and find in vernal green, is an experience almost worth the miseries you have so impatiently endured. A veritable vacation for the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of Flatbush break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless interest the manœuvres of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden as he manfully deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries, his little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the makings of a leader. He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel, and Master-politician; but he will always be foremost, else nowhere. "You are the audience,"he imperiously bids his companions, and when rebellion seemed imminent he punched, without a trace of anger, a boy much taller. I envied Georgie his abounding vitality. Furtively I raised the window. Instantly I was spied by Georgie who cried lustily: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!" I almost felt gay, "You come up here," I called out with one lung. "I haven't a stepladder," he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. (Now I'm moralising!) Undismayed, Georgie continued to call: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!"

The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend who meets you and says: "I never saw you look better in your life." It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You renounce then and there the doctor with all his pomps of healing. You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd. Notwithstanding you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer King of Pillowland.

They order certain things better in France than elsewhere; I mean such teasing and unsatisfactory forms of book-making known as Inquiries ("Enquête," which is not fair to translate into the lugubrious literalism, "Inquest"), Anthologies, and books that masquerade as books, as Charles Lamb hath it. Without a trace of pedantry or dogmatism, such works appear from time to time in Paris and are delightful reminders of the good breeding and suppleness of Gallic criticism. To turn to favour and prettiness a dusty department of literature is no mean feat.

What precisely is the condition of French letters since Catulle Mendès published his magisterial work on The French Poetic Movement from 1867 to 1900? (Paris, 1903.) Nothing so exhaustive has appeared since, though a half-dozen Inquiries, Anthologies, and Symposiums are in existence.

The most comprehensive recently is Florian-Parmentier's Contemporary History of FrenchLetters from 1885 to 1914. The author is a poet, one of les Jeunes, and an expert swimmer in the multifarious cross-currents of the day. His book is a bird's-eye view of the map of literary France as far as the beginning of the war. He is quite frank in his likes and dislikes, and always has his reasons for his major idolatries and minor detestations.

As a corrective to his enthusiasm and hatreds there are several new Anthologies at hand which aid us to form our own opinion of the younger men's prose and verse. And, finally, there is the significant Inquiry of Emile Henriot: "A Quoi Rêvent les Jeunes Gens?" (1913); of which more anon.

M. Florian-Parmentier is a native of Valenciennes, a writer whose versatility and fecundity are noteworthy in a far from barren literary epoch. He has, with the facility of a lettered young Frenchman, tried his hand at every form. All themes, so they be human, are welcome to him, from art criticism to playwriting. He is seemingly fair to his colleagues. Perhaps they may not admit this; but the question may be answered in the affirmative: Is he a safe critical guide in the labyrinth of latter-day French letters?

He notes, with an unaccustomed sense of humour in a critical barometer, the tendency of youthful poets, prose penmen, and others to form schools, to create cénacles, to begin fighting before they have any defined ideal.It leads to a lot of noisy, explosive manifestoes, declarations, and challenges, most of them rather in the air; though it cannot be denied that these ebullitions of gusty temperaments do clear that same air, murky with theories and traversed by an occasional flash of genius.

After paying his respects to the daily Parisian press, which he belabours as venal, cynical, and impure, our critic evokes a picture of the condition of literary men; not a reassuring one. Indeed, we wonder how young people can dream of embracing such a profession, with its heartaches, disappointments, inevitable poverty. Unless these aspiring chaps have a private income, how do they contrive to live?

The answer is, they don't live, unless they write twaddle for the Grand Old Public, which must be tickled with fluff and flattery. You say to yourself, after all Paris is not vastly different in this respect from benighted New York. Detective stories, melodrama, the glorification of the stale triangle in fiction and drama, the apotheosis of the Apache—what are all these but slight variants of the artistic pabulum furnished by our native merchants in mediocrity? Consoled, because your mental and emotional climate is not as inartistic as it is painted, you return to Florian-Parmentier and his divagations. He has much to say. Some of it is not as tender as tripe, but none is salted with absurdity.

Then you make a discovery. There is in France a distinct class, the Intellectuals, who control artistic opinion because of its superior claims; a class to which there is no analogy either in England or in America. (The French Academy is not particularly referred to just now.) Poets, journalists, wealthy amateurs, bohemians, and professors—all may belong to it if they have the necessary credentials: brains, talent, enthusiasm. It is the latter quality that floats out on the sea of speculation many adventuring barks. Each sports a tiny pennant proclaiming its ideals. Each is steered by some dreamer of proud, impossible dreams. But they float, do these frail boats, laden with visions and captained by noble ambitions.

Or, another image; a long, narrow street, on either side houses of manifold styles—fantastic or sensible, castellated or commonplace, baroque, stately, turreted, spired, and lofty, these eclectic architectures reflect the souls of the dwellers within. The ivory tower is not missing, though a half-century ago it was more in evidence; the church is there, though sadly dwarfed—France is still spiritually crippled and flying on one wing (this means previous to 1914); and a host of other strange and familiar houses that Jack the poet built.

On the doors of each is a legend; it may be Neo-Symbolism, Neo-Classicism, Free-Verse, Sincerism, Intenseism, Spiritualists, Floralism or the School of Grace, Dramatism and Simultanism,Imperialism, Dynamism, Futurism, Regionalism, Pluralism, Sereneism, Vivantism, Magism, Totalism, Subsequentism, Argonauts, Wolves, Visionarism, and, most discussed of all, Unanimism, headed by that fiery propagandist and poet, Jules Romains.

Now, every one of these cults in miniature has its following, its programmes, sometimes its special reviews, monthly or weekly. They are the numerous progeny of the elder Romantic, Realistic, and Symbolistic schools, long dead and gathered to their fathers.

Charles Baudelaire, from whose sonnet Correspondences the Symbolists dated; Baudelaire, the precursor of so much modern, is to-day chiefly studied in his prose writings, critical and æsthetic. His Little Poems in Prose are a breviary for the youths who are turning out an amorphous prose, which they call Free. Paul Verlaine's influence is still marked, for he is a maker of Debussy-like music; moonlit, vapourish, intangible, subtle, and perverse. The very quintessence of poetry haunts the vague terrain of his verse; but his ideas, his morbidities, these are negligible, indeed, abhorred.

The new schools, whether belonging to the Extreme Right or Extreme Left, are idealistic in their aim and practice; that or nothing. The brutalities of Zola and the Naturalistic School, the frigid perfection and metallic impassibility of the Parnassians are over and done with. Cynical cinders no longer blind theeye of the ideal. There is a renaissance of sensibility. The universe is become pluralistic, sentimental pantheism is in the air. Irony has ceased to be a potent weapon in the armoury of poets and prosateurs. It is replaced by an ardent love of humanity, by a socialism that weeps on the shoulder of one's neighbour, by a horror of egoism—whether masquerading as a philosophy such as Nietzsche's, or a poesy such as the Parnassians. For these poetlings issues are cosmical.

Coeval with this revival of sentiment is a decided leaning toward religion; not the "white soul of the Middle Ages," as Huysmans would say; not the mediæval curiosities of Hugo, Gautier, Lamartine; but the carrying aloft of the banner of belief; the opposition to sterile agnosticism by the burning tongues of the holy spirit. No dilettante movement this return to Roman Catholicism. The time came for many of these neophytes when they had to choose at the cross-roads. Either—Or? The Button-Moulder was lying in wait for such adolescent Peer Gynts, and, outraged and nauseated by the gross license of their day and hour, by the ostentation of evil instincts, they turned to the right—some, not all of them. The others no longer cry aloud their pagan admiration of the nymph's flesh in the brake, of the seven deadly arts and their sister sins.

In a word, since 1905 a fresher, a more tonic air has been blowing across the housetops ofFrench art and literature. Science is too positive. Every monad has had its day. Pictorial impressionism is without skeleton. Mysticism is coming into fashion again; only, the youngsters wear theirs with a difference. Even the Cubists are working for formal severity, despite their geometrical fanaticism. Youth will have its fling, and joys in esoteric garb, in flaring colours, and those doors in the narrow street called "Perhaps," do but prove the eternal need of the new and the astounding. Man cannot live on manna alone. He must, to keep from volplaning to the infinite, go down and gnaw his daily bone. The forked human radish with the head fantastically carved has underpinnings also; else his chamber of dreams might overflow into reality, and then we should be converted in a trice to angels, pin-feathers and all.

What were the controlling factors in young French literature up to the greatest marking date of modern history, 1914? The philosophy of Henri Bergson is one; that philosophy, full of poetic impulsion, graceful phrasing, and charming evocations; a feminine, nervous, fleshless philosophy, though deriving, as it does, from an intellectual giant, Emile Boutroux. Maurice Barrès is another name to conjure with; once the incarnation of a philosophical and slightly cruel egoism; then the herald of regionalism, replacing the flinty determinism of Taine with the watch-words: Patriotism,reverence for the dead—a reverence perilously near ancestor-worship—the prose-master Barrès went into the political arena, and became, notwithstanding his rather aggressive "modernism," an idealistic reactionary.

He is more subtle in his intellectual processes than his one-time master, Paul Bourget, from whom his psychology stemmed, and, if his patriotism occasionally becomes chauvinistic, his sincerity cannot be challenged. That sincerest form of insincerity—"moral earnestness," so called—has never been his. He is no more a sower of sand on the bleak and barren shore of negation. Little wonder he is accepted as a vital teacher.

Other names occur as generators of present schools. Stendhal, Mallarmé, Georges Rodenbach, Rimbaud—that stepfather of symbolism —Emil Verhaeren—who is truly an elemental and disquieting force—Paul Adam, Maeterlinck, the late Remy de Gourmont—who contributed so much to contemporary thought in the making—Francis Jammes, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Renard, Samain, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, Jules Laforgue—and how many others, to be found in the pages of Vance Thompson's French Portraits, which valuable study dates back to the middle of the roaring nineties.

When we are confronted by a litany of strange names, by the intricate polyphony of literary sects and cénacles, the American lover of earlier French poets is bewildered, so swiftly does the whirligig of time bring new talents. Already the generation of 1900 has jostled from their place the "elders" of a decade previous: you read of Paul-Napoléon Roinard, Maurice Beaubourg, Hans Ryner—a remarkable writer—André Gide, Charles-Louis Philippe, of Paul Fort, Paul Claudel, André Suarès, Stéphane Servant, André Spire, Philéas Lebesgue, Georges Polti (whose Thirty-six Dramatic Situations deserves an English garb), and you recall some of them as potent creators of values.

But if London, a few hours from Paris, only hears of these men through a few critical intermediaries, such as Arthur Symons, Edmund Gosse, and other cultivated and cosmopolitan spirits, what may we not say of America, a week away from the scene of action? As a matter of fact, we are proud of our provincialism, and for those who "create"—as the jargon goes—that same provincialism is a windshield against the draughts of too tempting imitation; but for our criticism there is no excuse. A critic will never be a catholic critic of his native literature or art if he doesn't know the literatures and arts of other lands, paradoxical as this may sound. We lack æstheticcuriosity. Because of our uncritical parochialism America is comparable to a cemetery of clichés.

Nevertheless, those of us who went as far as the portraits by Vance Thompson and Amy Lowell must feel a trifle strange in the long, narrow street of Florian-Parmentier, with its alternations of Septentrional mists and the blazing blue sky of the Midi. This critic, by the way, is a staunch upholder of the Gaul. He will have no admixture of Latin influence. He employs what has jocosely been called the "Woad" argument; he goes back not to the early Britons, but to Celticism. He is a sturdy Kymrist, and believes not in literatures transalpine or transpyrenean. He loathes the "pastiche," the purveyors of "canned" classics, the chilly rhetoricians who set too much store on conventional learning. A Frank, a northerner, and the originator of Impulsionism is Florian-Parmentier. In his auscultation of genius, La Physiologie Morale du Poète (1904), may be found the germs of his doctrine. This doctrine seems familiar enough now, as does the flux of Heraclitus and the Becoming of Renan, in the teachings of Bergson. Unanimism has had some influence. M. Florian-Parmentier does not admire this movement or its prophet, Jules Romains. Unanimism. Ah! the puissant magic of the word for these budding poets and philosophers. It ought to warm the cockles of the heart of critics.

And then the generation of 1900—AlexanderMercereau, Henri Hertz, Sébastien Voirol, Pierre Jaudon, Jacques Nayral, Fernand Divoire, Tancrède Visan, Strentz, Giraudoux, Mandin, Guillaume Apollinaire—all workers in the vast inane, dwellers on the threshold of the future. The past and present bearings of the Academy Goncourt are carefully indicated. Thus far nothing extraordinary has come from it. Balzac is still the mighty one in fiction. Thus far the names of Anatole France, Paul Adam, the brothers Rosny, Pierre Mille—a brilliant, versatile man—still maintain their primacy.

Thus far, among the essayists, Remy de Gourmont, Camille Mauclair, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, J. H. Fabre, Jules Bois—now sojourning in America and a thinker of verve and originality—and Henry Houssaye, hold their own against the younger generation.

In the theatre there are numerous and vexing tendencies: Maeterlinck, loyally acknowledging his indebtedness to gentle Charles van Lerburghe, created a spiritual drama and has disciples; but the theatre is the theatre and resists innovation. Ibsen, who had his day in Paris, and Antoine of the Free Theatre were accepted not because of their novelty, but in spite of it. They both were men of the theatre. There is a school of Ideo-realism, and there are Curel, Bataille, Porto-Riche, Maeterlinck, Trarieux, and Marie Leneru; but the technique of the drama is immutable.

In the domain of philosophy and experimental science we find Emile Boutroux, and such collective psychologists as Durckheim, Gustave le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde; names such as Binet, Ribot, Michel Savigny, Alfred Fouillée, and the eminent mathematician, Henri Poincaré—who finally became sceptical of his favourite logic, philosophy, and mathematics. This intellectual volte-face caused endless discussion. The truth is that intuition, the instinctive vs. intellectualism—what William James called "vicious intellectualism"—is swaying the younger French thinkers and poets.

There is, if one is to judge by the anthologies, far too much of metaphysics in contemporary poetry. Poetry is in danger of suffocating in a misty mid-region of metaphysics. The vital impulse, intuitionalism, and rhythmic flow of time in Bergson caught the fancy of the poets. Naturally enough. Literary dogmatism had prevailed too long in academic centres. Now it is the deliquescence of formal verse that is to be feared. Vers-libre, which began with such initiators as that astonishing prodigy, Arthur Rimbaud, has run the gamut from esoteric illuminism to sonorous yawping from the terrace of the brasseries. Have frogs wings? we are tempted to ask. Voices they have, but not bird-like voices.

That fascinating philosopher and friend of Remy de Gourmont—who practically introduced him—must not be overlooked, for hehad genuine influence. I refer to brilliant Jules Gaultier, who evolved from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the idea of his Bovarysme—which, succinctly stated, is the instinct in mankind to appear other than it is; from the philosopher to the snob, from the priest to the actor, from the duchess to the prostitute.

Of the influence of politics upon art and literature—which happily are no cloistered virtues in France—we need not speak here. M. Florian-Parmentier does so in his admirable and bulky book, of which we have only exposed the high lights.

Since Jules Huret's Enquête sur l'Evolution Littéraire (1890), followed by similar works of Vellay, Jean Muller, and Gaston Picard (1913), we recall no such pamphlet as Emile Henriot's, mentioned above. He put the questions: "Where are we? Where are we going?" inLe Tempsof Paris, June, 1912, to a number of representative thinkers and poets, and reprinted between covers their answers in 1913.

The result is rather confusing, a cloud of contradictory witnesses are assembled, and what one affirms the other denies. There are no schools! Yes, there are groups! We are going to the devil headlong! The sky is full of rainbows and the humming of harps celestial! Better the extravagances of the decayed Romanticists than the debasing realism of the modern novel, cry the Symbolists. A plague on all your houses! say the Unanimists. Onefierce Wolf (Loup) admitted that at the banquets of his cénacle he and his fellow poets always ate in effigy the classic writers. Or was it at the Symbolists'? Does it much matter? The gesture counts alone with these youthful "Fumistes"—as Leconte de Lisle had christened their predecessors.

Verlaine, in his waggish mood, persisted in spelling as "Cymbalists" the Symbolists, his own followers. Gongs would have been a better word. A punster speaks of Theists as those who love "le bon Dieu and tea." The new critical school, at its head Charles Maurras, do not conceal their contempt for all these "arrivistes" and revolutionary groups, believing that only a classic renaissance will save Young France. Barnums, the entire lot! pronounces in faded accents the ultra-academic group. Three critics of wide-reaching influence are dead since the war began: Emile Faguet, Jules Lemaître, and Remy de Gourmont. They leave no successors worthy of their mettle.

The three volumes of anthology of French Contemporary Poets from 1866 to 1916 have been supplemented by a fourth entitled Poets of Yesterday and To-day (1916). Edited by the painstaking M. G. Walch, it comprises the verse of poets born as late as 1886. Amongthe rest is the gifted Charles Dumas, who fell in battle, 1914. As epigraph to the new collection the editor has used a line from this poet's testament: "Ce désir d'être tout que j'appelle mon âme!" Another anthology of the new poets is prefaced by M. Gustave Lanson, but the Walch collection reveals more promising talents, or else the poems are more representative.

Signor Marinetti, who is bilingual, is eccentrically amusing. But are his contortions on the tripod art? The auto and aeroplane are celebrated, also steam, speed, mist, and the destruction of all art prior to 1900. The new schools are wary of rhetoric, thus following Paul Verlaine's injunction: Take Eloquence by the neck and wring it! Imagists abound, but they are in an aristocratic minority. The watchword is: sobriety in thinking and expression.

Strangely enough, two names emerge victoriously from the confusing lyric symphony and they are those of Belgian-born poets—Emile Verhaeren, whose tragic death last year was a loss to literature, and Maurice Maeterlinck. What living lyric poet has the incomparable power of that epical Verhaeren, unless it be that of the more sophisticated Gabriele d'Annunzio, or the sumptuous decorative verse of Henri de Régnier, whose polished art is the antithesis of the exuberant, lawless, resonant reverberations of Verhaeren?

What thinker and dramatist is known likeMaeterlinck, except it be the magical Gerhart Hauptmann? Rough to brutality—for Verhaeren at one time emulated Walt Whitman (variously spelled as "Walth" and "Withman"); with the names of foreigners Paris has ever been careless in its orthography, witness "Litz" and "Edgard Poë"; he can boast the divine afflatus. His personality is of the centrifugal order. He has a tumultuous rhythmic undertow that sweeps one irresistibly with him. But his genius is disintegrating, rather than constructive.

Of what French poet among the younger group dare we say the same? Grace, lyric sweetness, subtlety in ideas, facile technique—all these, yes, but not the power of saying great things greatly.

As for Maeterlinck, he owes something to Emerson; but his mellow wisdom and clairvoyance are his own. He is a seer, and his crepuscular pages are pools of glimmering incertitudes, whereas of Verhaeren we may say, as Carlyle said of Landor's prose: "The sound of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians."

Henry James tells a story of an argument between Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev, the Russian novelist declaring that for him Châteaubriand was not the Ultima Thule of prose perfection. This insensibility to the finer nuances of the language angered and astounded Zola and Flaubert. They set it downto the fact that none but a Frenchman can quite penetrate the inner sanctuary of his own language; which may be true, though I believe that for Turgenev the author of Atala was temperamentally distasteful.

Therefore, when an American makes the statement that the two Belgians are superior to the living Frenchmen it may be classed as a purely personal judgment. But the proposition first mooted by a distinguished critic, Remy de Gourmont, that Maeterlinck and Verhaeren be elected to the French Academy, was not a bizarre one. The war has effaced many artistic frontiers. The majority of the little circles that once pullulated in Paris no longer exist. Both Verhaeren and Maeterlinck are now Frenchmen of the French. Their inclusion in the Academy would have honoured that venerable and too august body as much as the Belgian poets.

As to the war's influence on French letters, that question is for soothsayers to decide, not for the present writer. After 1870 certain psychiatrists pretended that a degeneration of body and soul had blighted artistic and literary Europe. Well, we can only wish for the new France of 1920 and later such a galaxy of talents and genius as the shining groups from 1875 to 1914. No need to finger the chaplet of their names and achievements. Such books as those by Catulle Mendès, Florian-Parmentier, Lanson, and Walch prove our contention.

Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the composer under their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the ambitious chap aforesaid.

Never has the music of Wagner been more popular than now; his name on the opera billboards is bound to crowd a house. And never, paradoxical as it may sound, has there been such a critical hue and cry over his works and personality. The publication of his autobiography has much to do with this renewal of interest. There is some praise, much abuse, to be found in the newly published books on the subject. European critics are building up little islands of theory, coral-like, some with fantastic lagoons, others founded on stern truth, and many doomed to be washed away over-night. Nevertheless, the true Richard Wagner is beginning to emerge from the haze of Nibelheim behind which he contrived to hide his real self.

Wagner the gigantic comedian; Wagner theegotist; Wagner the victim of a tragic love, Wagner tone-poet, mock philosopher, and a wonderful apparition in the world of art till success overtook him; then Wagner become bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted by his best friends—whom he had alienated—without the solace of the men he had most loved, the men who had helped him over the thorny path of his life—Liszt, Nietzsche, Von Bülow, Otto Wesendonk, and how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom he had treated with characteristic ingratitude! No, Richard Wagner during the sterile years, so called, from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented man, despite his union with Cosima von Bülow-Liszt and the foundation of a home and family at Baireuth.

However, there are exceptions. One is the book of Otto Bournot entitled Ludwig Geyer, the Stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote about it in 1913 for theNew York Times. In this slender volume of only seventy-two pages the author sifts all the evidence in the Geyer-Wagner question, and he has delved into archives, into the newspapers of Geyer's days, and has had access to hitherto untouched material. It must be admitted that his conclusions are not to be lightly denied. August Böttiger's Necrology has until recently beenthe chief source of facts in the career of Geyer, but Wagner's Autobiography—which in spots Bournot corrects—and the life of Wagner by Mary Burrell, not to mention other books, have furnished Bournot with new weapons.

The Geyers as far back as 1700 were simple pious folk, the first of the family being a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a trombone-player and organist. Indeed, the chief occupation of many Geyers was in some way or other connected with the Evangelical Church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer was a portraitist of no mean merit, an actor of considerable power—his Franz Moor was a favourite rôle with the public—a dramatist of fair ability (he wrote a tragedy, among others, named The Slaughter of the Innocents), and also a verse-maker. His acquaintance with Weber stimulated his interest in music; Weber discovered his voice, and he sang in opera. Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature all the qualities of Wagner. The latter was too young at the time of Geyer's death, September, 1821, to have profited much by the precepts of his stepfather, but his example certainly did prove stimulating to the imagination of the budding poet and composer. Geyer married Johanna Wagner-Bertz (Mary Burrell was the first to give the correct spelling of her maiden name), the widow of the police functionary Wagner (to whose memory Richard pays such cynical homage in his obituary),August 14, 1814. She had about two hundred and sixty-one thalern, and eight children. A ninth came later in the person of Cäcile, who afterward married a member of the Avenarius family. Cäcile, or Cicely, was a prime favourite with Richard.

Seven years passed, and again Frau Geyer found herself a widow, with nine children and little money. How the family all tumbled up in the world, owing much to the courage, wit, vivacity, and unshaken will-power of their mother, may be found in the autobiography. Bournot admits that Geyer and his wife may have carried to the grave certain secrets. Richard Wagner until he was nine years old was known as Richard Geyer, and on page thirteen of his book our author prints the following significant sentence: "The possibility of Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in itself nothing detrimental to our judgment of the art-work of Baireuth."

In 1900 a twenty-page pamphlet bearing the title Richard Wagner in Zurich was published in Leipsic. It was signed Hans Bélart, and gave for the first time to a much mystified world the story of Wagner's passion for Mathilde Wesendonk, thus shattering beyond hope of repair our cherished belief thatCosima von Bülow-Liszt had been the lode-stone of Wagner's desire, that to her influence was due the creation of Tristan and Isolde, its composer's high-water mark in poetic, dramatic music. Now, Bélart, not content with his iconoclastic pamphlet, has just sent forth a fat book which he calls Richard Wagner's Love-Tragedy with Mathilde Wesendonk.

We had thought that the last word in the matter had been said when Baireuth (Queen Cosima I) allowed the publication of Wagner's diaries and love-letters to Mathilde—though her complete correspondence is as yet unpublished. But Bélart is one of the busiest among the German critical coral builders. He has dug into musty newspapers and letters, and gives at the close of his work a long list of authorities. Yet nothing startlingly new comes out of his researches. We knew that Mathilde Wesendonk (or Wesendonck) was the first love of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not his usual self-seeking philandering. We also knew that Otto Wesendonk behaved like a patient husband and a gentleman—any other man would have put a bullet in the body of the thrice impertinent genius; knew, too, that Tristan and Isolde was born of this romance. But there is a mass of fresh details, petty backstairs gossip, all the tittle-tattle beloved of such writers, that in company with Julius Kapp's Wagner und die Frauen, makes Bélart's new book a valuable one for reference.

Kapp, who has written a life of Franz Liszt, goes Bélart one better in hinting that the infatuated couple transformed their idealism into realism. Bélart does not believe this; neither does Emil Ludwig, the latest critical commentator on Wagner. But neither critic gives the profoundest proof that the love of Richard and Mathilde was an exalted, platonic one,i. e., the proof psychologic. I firmly believe that if Mathilde Wesendonk had eloped with Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan and Isolde might not have been finished; at all events, the third act would not have been what it now is. A mighty longing is better for the birth of great art than facile happiness. For the first time in his selfish unhappy life Wagner realised Goethe's words of wisdom: "Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce." It was a bitter sacrifice, but out of its bitter sweetness came the honey and moonlight of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner suffered, Mathilde suffered, Otto Wesendonk suffered, and last, but not least, Minna Wagner, the poor pawn in his married game, suffered to distraction. Let us begin with a quotation on the last page but three of Bélart's book: "Remarked Otto Wesendonk to a friend: 'I have hunted Wagner from my threshold....'"

This was in August, 1858. Wagner first met the Wesendonks about 1852, three years after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because of his participation in the uprising of1849. (Wagner as amateur revolutionist!) Thanks to the request of his wife Mathilde, Otto Wesendonk furnished a little house on the hill near his splendid villa for the Wagners. First christened "Fafner's Repose," Wagner changed the title to the "Asyl," and for a time it was truly an asylum for this perturbed spirit.

But he must needs fall deeply in love with his charming and beautiful neighbour, a woman of intellectual and poetic gifts, and to the chagrin of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife. The gossip in the neighbourhood was considerable, for the complete frankness of the infatuated ones was not the least curious part of the affair. Liszt knew of it, so did the Princess Layn-Wittgenstein. An immense amount of "snooping" was indulged in by interested lady friends of Minna Wagner. She has her apologists, and, judging from the letters she wrote at the time and afterward—several printed for the first time by Kapp and Bélart—she took a lively hand in the general proceedings. Evidently she was tired of her good man's behaviour, and when he solemnly assured her that it was the master-passion of his life she didn't believe him. Naturally not. He had cried "wolf" too often; besides, Minna, like a practical person, viewed the possibility of a rupture with Otto Wesendonk as a distinct misfortune. Otto had not only advanced much money to Richard, but he paid twelve thousand francs for the scores of Rheingoldand Walküre and for the complete performing rights. Afterward he sent both to King Ludwig II as a gift—but I doubt if he ever got a penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed the expenses of the Wagner concert at Zurich, a little item of nine thousand francs. Scandal and calumny invaded his home, the fair fame of his wife was threatened. No wonder the finale, long deferred, was stormy, even operatic.

The lady was much younger than her husband; she was born at the close of 1828, therefore Wagner's junior by fifteen years. She was a Luckemeyer, her mother a Stein; a cultured, sweet-natured woman, it is more than doubtful if she could have endured Wagner as a husband. She did a wise thing in resisting his prayers. Not only was her husband a bar to such a proceeding, but her children would have always prevented her thinking of a legal separation. All sorts of plans were in the air. When, in 1857, the American panic seriously threatened the prosperity of Otto Wesendonk, who had heavy business interests in New York, gossip averred that Frau Wesendonk would ask for a divorce; but the air cleared and matters resumed their old aspect. Minna Wagner's health, always poor, became worse. It was a case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs. She daily made scenes at home and threatened to tell what she knew. That she knew much is evident from her correspondence with FrauWilk. She said that Wagner had two hearts, but while he delighted in intellectual and emotional friendship with such a superior soul as Mathilde, he nevertheless would not forego the domestic comforts provided by Minna. Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois. Those intolerable dogs, the parrot, the coffee-drinking, the soft beds and solicitude about his underclothing, all were truly German; human-all-too-human.

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