LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ
.
XF
BY JAMES HUNEKER
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1889)
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIB MUSIC (iwo)
MELOMANIACS (1902)
OVERTONES (1904)
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (1906)
VISIONARIES (1905)
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909)
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (1910)
FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911)
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912)
NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915)
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS (1915)
UNICORNS (1917)
BEDOUINS (1920)
In Preparation
STEEPLEJACK. TWO VOLUMES
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
BEDOUINS
From a photograph by De Meyer
MARY GARDEN HERSELF
BEDOUINS
MARY GARDEN, DEBUSSY,
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS, BOTTICELLI, POE, BRAHMSODY,
ANATOLE FRANCE, MIRBEAU, CARUSO ON WHEELS,
CALICO CATS, THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT;
IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS; WITH THE SUPREME SIN,
GRINDSTONES, A MASQUE OF MUSIC, AND
THE VISION MALEFIC
JAMES HUNEKER
WITH VARIOUS PORTRAITS OF MARY GARDEN IN
OPERATIC COSTUME
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published February, 19.20
COPYRIGHT, W9, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE ESS ESS PUBLISHING CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE SUN PRINTING & PUBLISHING ASSN.
PS
Z044
H4
B4
THIS BOOK OF BEDOUINS
IS DEDICATED
"A la tres-belle, a la trs-bonne, la trs-chere."
"J'aime mieux le d6sert, je retourne chez les Beclouins
qui sont libres . . . ."
Gustave Flaubert.
"The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls,
and the old war-ship is given over to the rats."
Robert Louis Stevenson.
CHAPTER
PAGE
CONTENTS
PART I MARY GARDEN
I. SUPERWOMAN 3
II. INTIMATE 15
III. THE BABY, THE CRITIC, AND THE GUITAR 21
IV. INTERPRETER 3<>
V. MLISANDE AND DEBUSSY 45
VI. THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT .... 53
VII. THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU . . 64
VIII. ANARCHS AND ECSTASY 73
IX. PAINTED Music 8l
X. POE AND His POLISH CONTEMPORARY . 94
XI. GEORGE LUKS 6
XII. CONCERNING CALICO CATS 118
XIII. CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? 125
XIV. CARUSO ON WHEELS 134
XV. SING AND GROW VOICELESS 144
XVI. ANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST PHASE . .154
XVII. A MASQUE OF Music 164
vii
CONTENTS
PART //IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SUPREME SIN 177
II. BROTHERS-IN-LAW 201
III. GRINDSTONES 216
IV. VENUS OR VALKYR? 225
V. THE CARDINAL'S FIDDLE 247
VI. RENUNCIATION 256
VII. THE VISION MALEFIC . 261
Vlll
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mary Garden Herself ....... Frontispiece
PACING PAGE
Rosina Galli 24
Mary Garden as M61isande 34
Mary Garden as Monna Vanna 38
Mary Garden as Salome 78
Rosina Galli as the Princess in "Le Coq d'Or" . 140
PART I
MARY GARDEN
SUPERWOMAN
LA BEAUTfi
"Je suis belle, 6 mortels! comme un reve de pierrc,
Et mon sein, ou chacun s'est meurtri tour a tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poete un amour
fiternel et meut, ainsi, que la matiere."
Charles Baudelnire.
THAT little girl down Boston way, who had
mastered William James and Boris Sidis before
she was in her teens, behaved badly one after-
noon. Possibly it was the sultry weather, or
growing pains in the psychic sphere, of course
or, perhaps, it may have been due to the re-
flexes from prolonged attention to the Freudian
psycho-analysis and the significance of Twilight
Sleep; but whatever the cause, that precocious
child flew off her serene handle and literally
' 'sassed" the entire household. The tantrum
over she afterward described it as a uric-acid
storm and order reigning once more in Bach
Bay, she was severely interrogated by her male
parent as to the whys and wherefores of her
singular deviation from accustomed glacial in-
tellectual objectivity. Her answer was in the
proper key: "My multiple personalities failed to
3
BEDOUINS
co-ordinate. Hence the distressing lack of cen-
tripetal functioning." She was immediately for-
given. Multiple personalities are to blame for
much in this vale of tears; that is, if you are
unlucky or lucky enough to be possessed of the
seven devils of psychology.
Mary Garden was, no doubt, a naughty little
girl in her time. That she climbed trees, fought
boys twice her size, stuck out her tongue at
pious folk, scandalized her parents, and tore
from the heads of nice girls handfuls of hair, I
am sure. Hedda Gabler thus treated gentle
Thea Elvstad in the play. But was this demon
Mary aware of her multiple personalities? Of
her complexes? Her art fusion is such perfect
synthesis. Subconscious is nowadays an excuse
for the Original Sin with which we are saddled
by theologians.
Well, one bad turn deserves another, and we
may easily picture the wild Scottish thistle de-
fiantly shrugging shoulders at law and order.
She did not analyze her Will-to-Raise-Merry-
Hell. No genius of her order ever does. There
had been signs and omens. Her mother before
her birth had dreamed wonderful dreams;
dreamed and prayed that she might become a
singer. But even maternal intuition could not
have foreseen such a swan triumphantly swim-
ming through the troubled waters of life. A
swan, did I say? A condor, an eagle, a peacock,
a nightingale, a panther, a society dame, a gal-
lery of moving-pictures, a siren, an indomitable
4
MARY GARDEN
fighter, a human woman with a heart as big as
a house, a lover of sport, an electric personality,
and a canny Scotch lassie who can force from
an operatic manager wails of anguish because of
her close bargaining over a contract; in a word,
a Superwoman.
My dear friend and master, the late Remy de
Gourmont, wrote that man differs from his
fellow animals he didn't say "lower" because
of the diversity of his aptitudes. Man is not
the only organism that shows multiple person-
alities; even in plant life pigmentation and the
power of developing new species prove that our
vaunted superiorities are only relative. I may
refer you to the experiments of Hugo de Vries
at the Botanical Gardens, Amsterdam, where
the grand old Dutch scientist presented me with
sixteen-leaf clover naturally developed, and
grown between sunset and dawn; also an eve-
ning primrose ^Eonthera Lamarckiana which
shoots into new flowers. Multiple personalities
again. In the case of Mary Garden we call her
artistic aptitudes "the gift of versatility." All
distinguished actresses have this serpent-like
facility of shedding their skin and taking on a
fresh one at will. She is Cleopatra with
"serpent and scarab for sign" or Melisande,
Phryne, or Monna Vanna; as Thais she is both
saint and courtesan, her Salome breeds horror;
and in the simplicities of Jean the Juggler of
Notre Dame a Mary Garden, hitherto sub-
merged, appears: tender, boyish, sweet, fantastic;
5
BEDOUINS
a ray of moonshine has entered his head and
made of him an irresponsible yet irresistibly
charming youth.
Not without warrant is Karma believed in by
people whose imagination cannot be penned be-
hind the bars of Now. Before to-day was yester-
day, and to traverse that Eternal Corridor of
Time has been the fate of mankind. The Eternal
Return rather say, the Eternal Recommence-
ment mad as it seems, is not to be made mock
of. It is always the same pair of eyes that peer
through windows opening on infinity. What the
Karmas of Mary Garden? In spirit-land what
avatars! Is she the reincarnation of that
Phryne of the "splendid scarlet sins," or the
Faustine who crowded into a moment the mad-
ness of joy and crime; or the recrudescence of
a Sapho who turned her back on the Leuca-
dian promontory, turned from the too mascu-
line Phaon and sought her Anactoria, sought
and wooed her with lyric sighs; has she recap-
tured, this extraordinary Mary of Aberdeen, the
soul of Aspasia, who beguiled Pericles and
artistic Athens with the sinuous irony of the
serpent; and Gismonda, Louise, and Violetta,
all those subtle sonorous sinners was she in
her anterior existence any or all of them?
Did she know the glory that was Greece, the
grandeur that was Rome? Henry James has
warned us not to ask of an author why he selects
a particular subject for treatment. It is a dan-
gerous question to put; the answer might prove
6
MARY GARDEN
disconcerting. And with Miss Garden the same
argument holds. Her preference for certain
characters is probably dictated by reasons ob-
scure even to herself. With her the play-
instinct is imperious; it dominates her daylight
hours, it overflows into her dream-life. Again
the sounding motive of multiple personalities,
Karma, subconsciousness, the profound core of
human nature. And on the palette of her art
there is the entire gamut of tones, from passion-
ate purple to the iridescent delicacies of iris-
grey.
That Mary Garden interprets a number of
widely differentiated characters is a critical
platitude. Chapter and verse might be given
for her excellences as well as her defects. Nor
does she depend upon any technical formula
or formulas. Versatility is her brevet of dis-
tinction. An astounding versatility. Now, the
ways and means of the acting-singer are differ-
ent from actors in the theatre. Dramatic
values are altered. The optique of the opera
shifts the stock attitudes, gestures, poses, and
movements into another and more magnified
dimension. Victor Maurel, master of all sing-
ing-actors, employed a sliding scale of values in
his delineation of De Nevers, Don Giovanni,
lago, and Falstaff. His power of characteriza-
tion enabled him to portray a Valentine true to
type, nevertheless individual; and if there is a
more banal figure on the operatic boards than
Valentine, we do not know his name (perhaps
7
BEDOUINS
Faust . . .!). But every year the space that
separates the lyric from the dramatic stage is
shrinking. Richard Wagner was not the first
composer to stress action; he is the latest, how-
ever, whose influence has been tremendously
far-reaching. He insisted that the action should
suit the singing word. To-day acting and sing-
ing are inextricably blended, and I can conceive
of nothing more old-fashioned and outmoded
than the Wagnerian music-drama as interpreted
in the dramatic terms of the old Wagnerian sing-
ers. They walked, rather waddled, through the
mystic mazes of the score, shouted or screamed
the music, and generally were prodigious bores
except when Lilli Lehmann sang. After all,
Wagner must be sung. When Jean de Reszke
pictured a Tristan a trifle of the carpet-knight
he both sang and acted. It was the begin-
ning of the New Wagner, a totally changed
Wagner, else his music-drama will remain in
dusty pigeonholes. Debussy has sounded the
modern key.
There is bora, or reborn nothing is new since
the early Florentines a New Opera, and in its
train new methods of interpretation. Merely
to sing well is as futile as attempting to act
though voiceless. The modern trend is away
from melodrama, whether Italian, French, or
German; away from its antique, creaking ma-
chinery. Debussy patterned after Wagner for
a time and then blazed new paths. As Serge
ProkorierT so acutely observed to me: "In Pel-
8
MARY GARDEN
16as and Melisande Debussy rewrote Tris-
tan and Isolde." The emotional scale is trans-
posed to fewer dynamic values and rhythms
made more subtle; the action is shown as in a
dream. The play's the thing, and reality is
muffled. Elsewhere we have studied the Meli-
sande of Mary Garden. Like her Monna
Vanna, it reveals the virtues and shortcomings
of the New Opera. Too static for popular taste,
it is nevertheless an escape from the tyranny of
operatic convention. Like the rich we shall
always have "grand opera" with us. It is the
pabulum of the unmusical, the unthinking, the
tasteless. Its theatricalisms are more depressing
than Sardou's. The quintessence of art, or the
arts, which the modern Frenchmen, above all,
the new Russian composers (from the mighty
Slavic races may come the artistic, perhaps the
religious salvation of the world for I am a be-
liever in Dostoievsky's, not Tolstoy's, Christian-
ity), are distilling into their work is for more
auditors than the "ten superior persons scat-
tered throughout the universe" of whom Huys-
mans wrote. There is a growing public that
craves, demands, something different from the
huge paraphernalia of crudely colored music,
scenery, costume, lath and plaster, and vocifer-
ous singing. Oh, the dulness, the staleness, the
brutal obviousness of it all! Every cadence
with its semaphoric signalling, every phrase and
its accompanying gesture. Poetry is slain at a
stroke, the ear promise-crammed, but imagina-
9
BEDOUINS
tion goes hungry. The New Art an art of
precious essences, an evocation, an enchantment
of the senses, a sixth sense is our planetary
ideal.
And in the New Opera Mary Garden is the
supreme exemplar. She sounds the complex
modern note. She does not represent, she
evokes. She sings and she acts, and the densely
woven web is impossible to disentangle. Her
Gaelic temperament is of an intensity; she is
white-hot, a human dynamo with sudden little
retorsions that betray a tender, sensitive soul,
through the brilliant, hard shell of an emerald
personality; she is also the opal, with it chame-
leonic hues. Her rhythms are individual. Her
artistic evolution may be traced. She stems
from the Gallic theatre. She has studied Sarah
Bernhardt and Yvette Guilbert the perfect
flowering of the "diseuse" but she pins her
faith to the effortless art of Eleonora Duse.
The old contention that stirred Coquelin and
Henry Irving does not interest her so much as
does Duse. We have discussed the Coquelin-
Irving crux: should an actor leave nothing to
chance or should he improvise on the spur of
high emotions? that is what the question
comes to. Miss Garden denied her adherence
either to Coquelin or Irving. I asked her to
give us a peep into her artistic cuisine while she
prepared her sauces. Notwithstanding her re-
fusal to let us participate in the brewing of her
magic broth, I still believe that she sided with
10
MARY GARDEN
Coquelin. She is eminently cerebral. And yet
her chief appeal is to the imagination. Not a
stroke of her camel's-hair brush, not the boldest
massing of colors, are left to chance. She knows
the flaming way she came, she knows the misty
return. Not a tone of her naturally rich, dark
voice but takes on the tinting of the situation.
This doesn't forbid a certain latitude for tem-
peramental variations, which are plentiful at
each of her performances. She knows tempo
rubato and its value in moods. She has mas-
tered, too, the difficult quality described by
William Gillette as the First-time Illusion in
Acting. Various are the Mary Gardens in her
map of art.
And she is ours. Despite her Scottish birth
she has remained invincibly Yankee. Despite
long residence in her beloved Paris, enough
American has rubbed off on her, and the resili-
ent, dynamic, overflowing, and proud spirit that
informs her art and character are American or
nothing. Race counts. Can any good come
out of our Nazareth of art? The answer is
inevitable: Yes, Mary Garden. She is Our
Mary. Lyrically, dramatically ours, yet an
orchid. Dear old Flaubert forcibly objected to
Sarah Bernhardt being called "a social expres-
sion." But she was, and this despite her Dutch
ancestry and the exotic strain in her blood.
Miss Garden may not emphasize her American
side, but it is the very skeleton of her artistic
organism. Would that an Aubrey Beardsley
ii
BEDOUINS
lived to note in evanescent traceries her potent
personality, a rare something that arouses the
"emotion of recognition," but which we cannot
define. " Come," said Berlioz to Legouve in the
early years of the third decade of the last cen-
tury. "I am going to let you see something
which you have never seen, and some one whom
you shall never forget." Berlioz meant the
playing and personality of Frederic Chopin.
Garden is leagues asunder from Chopin who
was the rarest apparition of his age; but as an
interpretative artist she is rare enough for sym-
pathetic writers to embalm in the amber of their
pagan prose; definitely to pin to their pages this
gorgeous dragon-fly.
Another bribe to her audience is the beauty
of Mary Garden. But I do not wish here to
dwell upon its value in her unforgettable por-
trayals of the dear dead grand ladies, the stately
courtesans of the dim past. Stephane Mal-
larme wrote a poem, though not in verse, de-
picting a crowd assembled in the canvas house
of the Interpreter of Past Things.
George Moore thus Englished "The Future
Phenomenon." A showman tells the despair-
ing, ugly men and women of his wonderful prize.
"No sign regales you of the spectacle within,
for there is not now a painter capable of present-
ing any sad shadow of it. I bring alive (and
preserved through the years by sovereign sci-
ence) a woman of old time. Some folly, original
and simple, in ecstasy of gold, I know not what
12
MARY GARDEN
she names it, her hair falls with the grace of
rich stuffs about her face and contrasts with
the blood-like nudity of her lips. In place of
her vain gown she has a body; and her eyes,
though like rare stones, are not worth the look
that leaps from the happy flesh; the breasts,
raised as if filled with an eternal milk, are
pointed to the sky, and the smooth limbs still
keep the salt of the primal sea. ..." You
think of fair-haired Melisande as she exquisitely
murmurs her pathetic "Je ne suis pas heureuse
ici."
Some years ago in Paris I saw and heard the
Garden Traviata. The singing was superlative;
she then boasted a coloratura style that would
surprise those who now only know her vocaliza-
tion. It was, however, the conception and act-
ing that intrigued me. Originality stamped
both. The death scene was of unusual poign-
ancy; evidently the young American had been
spying upon Bernhardt and Duse. This episode
adumbrated the marvellous death of Melisande,
the most touching that I can recall in either the
lyric or dramatic theatre. It is a pity that she
cannot find sterner stuff than Massenet, Leroux,
Fevrier, and the rest of that puff-paste decora-
tive school. There are composers, too, of more
vital calibre than Camille Erlanger. Debussy
is a master; but there must be newer men who
could view Mary Garden as the ideal exponent
of their music. Meanwhile, she has discovered
a rdle in which she would pique the curiosity of
BEDOUINS
the most uncritical mossbacks. She has added
Isolde to her long list. Mary Garden and
Isolde ! Incredible ! Nevertheless, an interest-
ing experiment this if she could be persuaded to
voice the sorrows of the Irish Princess. It
would be no longer Wagner. It would suffer a
rich sea-change. Wagner muted, perhaps Wag-
ner undone; certainly unsung if we remember
glorious Olive Fremstad. But a magical Isolde,
with more than a hint of the perversely exotic
we feel in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings of Isolde
and Tristan. The modern note again. Beards-
ley paraphrasing Botticelli; Watteau plucking
at the robe of Rubens; Debussy smiting the
chords of Wagner. Such an Isolde would be
too bewildering to be true.
II
INTIMATE
"Et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches,
des drapeaus, des hanches d'or. ..."
Tentation de Saint Antoine (slightly altered}.
THE penalty of publicity is one which singers
seldom evade. Little need to give the reason,
nevertheless, for sensitive souls it is a trial to
see one's personality put in the wash, squeezed,
and hung up to dry with other linen in the piti-
less laundry of the press. Some singers are born
advertisers, some achieve advertising, but few
have advertising thrust upon them. That sort
usually fade into shadow-land rather than face
the fierce white light which beats about the
operatic throne. Really, it must be disconcert-
ing for a woman singer to hear herself discussed
as if she were a race-horse. Every point in her
make-up is put on a platter ready to serve
hot in the newspapers. You fancy yourself
overhearing the conversation of jockeys and
trainers. "Oi sye, Bill, that there filly is goin'
queer. Jest look at her fetlocks, and her crup-
per is gettin' too heavy. Take her out for an
hour's spin on the downs. Breathe her a bit
and then give her a hard sweatin' run and a
BEDOUINS
rub down. No water, Bill, mind ye, or I'll
knock yer block off."
The private life of a prima donna is not unlike
that of a racing mare's. Flesh reduction, with
all the succulent food and champagne are
banished; indulgence spells decadence, and de-
cadence is eagerly noted by the psychic detec-
tives known as music-critics. We are not in
the game to find fault as simple souls imagine,
but to register values, vocal and personal.
It's a pity, but this is a condition and not a
theory. We have heard of a Mary Garden cult.
Now, as has been said by Dr. Wicksteed, a cult
is always annoying to those who do not join in
it, and generally hurtful to those who do. But
is there such a Garden cult? We doubt it.
She has a certain gleet following, and for those
admirers she can do no- wrong. She has aroused
the critical antagonism of some who, rightly
enough, point out her obvious limitations. To
these the gruff reply of Brahms is appropriate.
A presuming youth called his attention to a
theme in a work of his which was evidently
borrowed from Mendelssohn. "That any fool
can see," said the crusty Johannes. The voice
of Miss Garden is sometimes a voice in the wil-
derness: sandy, harsh, yet expressive. The
same may be said of Geraldine Farrar, who
every year is gravitating toward the zone, not
of silence, but of the singing-actress. A Gallic,
not an Italian zone. Voice does not play the
major r61e; acting, that is, dramatic character-
16
MARY GARDEN
ization, does. Not to recognize in Miss Garden
the quintessence of this art not altogether a new
one, and its most perfect flowering is the art of
Yvette Guilbert is to miss the real Mary Gar-
den. Voilatout! We saw a like misunderstand-
ing of Eleonora Duse. Immediately she was com-
pared, and unfavorably, with Sarah Bernhardt,
when she was achieving something vastly differ-
ent, and, I think, vastly finer. Sarah was more
brilliant, Duse more human; the one an orches-
tra, the other an exquisitely balanced string
quartet. Mary Garden is the nearest approach
to Duse on the lyric stage.
Mary Garden, too, is "different," in the sense
Stendhal meant that banal word. Her cadenced
speech is not singing in the Italian manner.
To begin with, her tonal texture is not luscious.
But there are compensations. Every phrase is
charged with significance. She paints with her
voice, and if her palette is composed of the
cooler tones, if the silver-greys and sombre
greens of a Velasquez predominate, it is because
she needs just such a gamut with which to load
her brush. She is a consummate manipulator
of values. To be sure, we do not expect the
torrential outbursts of Margaret Matzenauer.
Why confuse two antithetical propositions? I
don't look at one of the Paul Cezannes in the
rare collection of Miss Lillie Bliss expecting the
gorgeous hues of a Monticelli. Cezanne is a
master of values. And if these similes seem
far-fetched which they are not; music and color
17
BEDOUINS
are twins in the Seven Arts then let us pitch
upon a more homely illustration: Mary Garden
is an opal, Margaret Matzenauer a full-blown
rose. Voltaire said that the first man who com-
pared a woman to a rose was a poet; the second,
an ass. I hope Mme. Matzenauer will accept
the simile in the poetic sense.
Nuance, which alone makes art or life endur-
able, becomes an evocation with Miss Garden.
I lament that she is not in a more intimate set-
ting, as the misted fire and rhythmic modulations
of her opaline art and personality are lost in
such a huge auditorium as the Lexington Thea-
tre. I saw her, a slip of a girl, at Paris, early
in this century, and framed by the Opera Com-
ique, of whose traditions she is now the most dis-
tinguished exponent. She was then something
precious: a line of Pater's prose, the glance of
one of Da Vinci's strange ladies; a chord by
Debussy; honey, tiger's blood, and absinthe;
or like the enigmatic pallor we see in Renais-
sance portraits; cruel, voluptuous, and suggest-
ing the ennui of Watteau's L'Indifferent.
She is all things to all critics.
There are those who see in her the fascinating
woman. And they are justified in their belief.
There are those who discover in her something
disquieting, ambiguous; one of Baudelaire's
"femmes damnees" from whom he fashioned his
Beethovenian harmonies, fulgurating, profound:
"Descendez le chemin de 1'enfer eternel! . . .
flagelle's par un vent qui ne vient pas du del."
18
MARY GARDEN
. . . And there is still another group to which
I adhere, one that envisages Mary in the more
lucid light of an admirable artist, who has
fashioned of her body and soul a rare instru-
ment, giving forth the lovely music of attitude,
gesture, pose, and rhythm. There are moments
when she evokes the image of the shadow of a
humming-bird on a star; and often she sounds
the shuddering semitones of sex, as in Thais.
The Melisande moods are hers, the dim, remote
poesy of antique sonorous tapestries; and the
"modern" note of Louise, grazing the vulgar,
though purified by passion. But the dissenters
no doubt believe in the Cambodian proverb
when estimating the singing of both Geraldine
Farrar and Mary Garden. It runs thus: When
in hades it is bad form to speak of the heat.
Do you remember the night when Mary Gar-
den came from the refectory of the monastery
in Le Jongleur, and oh, the winsome little
devil! paused on the stairway to remark to
her audience: "La cuisine est tres bonne"?
The accent was indescribable. At Paris they
admired her individual French streaked with
exotic intonations. That night it revealed the
universal accent of a half-starved lad who had
just filled his tummy; a real "tuck-out." The
joy of life! How human she was! It is the
sartorial technique of Miss Garden that is su-
preme. Her taste in costumes is impeccable.
In the eternal game of making masculine eyes
misbehave, she is quite irresistible. But this
19
BEDOUINS
orchidaceous Circe, this uncommon or garden
variety, does not with her fatal philtres trans-
form men into the unmentionable animal; rather
does she cause them to scurry after their vocab-
ulary and lift up their voices in rhetorical praise.
And that is something to have accomplished.
Did you ever read Casuals of the Sea, by
William McFee, a fiction I had the honor to
introduce to the American reading public? On
page 443 there occurs at the chapter end the
following dialogue: "Mother!" "Yes, Min-
nie." "Mother, I was just thinking what fools
men are ! What utter fools ! But oh, mother,
dear mother, what fools we are, not to find it
out sooner ! " Minnie had seen a bit of life on
the Continent; she was then snug in the land-
locked harbor of stagnant matrimonial waters.
But she understood men. Miss Garden is a
profounder philosopher than Minnie Briscoe.
She knew her public " sooner," and the result is
Mary Garden. Qui a bu, boira !
I have been asked whether Miss Garden be-
lieves that she is the wonderful artiste I believe
her to be. I really don't know. But I feel
assured that if she discovers she does not measure
up to all the qualities ascribed to her she will
promptly develop them; such is the plastic,
involutionary force of this extraordinary woman.
20
Ill
THE BABY, THE CRITIC, AND
THE GUITAR
GEORGE SAINTSBURY, that blunt literary critic
who always called a cat a cat, wrote a study of
Charles Baudelaire in an English magazine at
least forty years ago. It practically introduced
the poet to English readers, although Swin-
burne had imported no little of the "poisonous
honey from France" in Laus Veneris. Prof.
Saintsbury told of a friend to whom he had
shown the etching of Francois Flameng after
Herrera's The Baby and the Guitar. "So,"
said the friend, "you like this picture. I al-
ways thought you hated babies !" The remark
is a classic example of that sin against the
holy ghost of criticism, the confusion of two
widely varying intellectual substances; a mixing
up of the babies with a vengeance. The anec-
dote may serve to point a moral if not to
adorn my sermon.
The operatic undertow of the past season
cast up strange flotsam and jetsam and dere-
licts, usually in the shape of letters. Letters
signed and unsigned. Two I select as illustrat-
ing the Baby and the Guitar crux. I stand for
the Baby and two celebrated singing girls repre-
21
BEDOUINS
sent the Guitar. Both letters are unsigned, both
reveal a woman's handwriting, though different
women. The first roundly accuses the dignified
author of being madly in love with Mary Gar-
den; the second wonders why I worship Mar-
garet Matzenauer. Now, the venerable age of
the present alleged and versatile "great lover"
Leo Ditrichstein should look to his laurels !
might serve as an implicit denial of these charges,
were it not the fact that there are hoary-headed
sinners abroad seeking whom they may devour.
If I were a young chap I should pay no atten-
tion, but being as old as I am I proudly confess
my crimes, merely pausing to ask, who isn't in
love with Mary Garden and Margaret Matze-
nauer? Their audiences, to an unprejudiced
eye, seem to be very much so, men, women, and
children alike. Why not that worm-of-all-work,
the music-critic? We, too, have feelings like
any other humans. But worse follows. A sym-
pathetic singer sent me a telegram which read
thus: "Why doesn't your wife put you behind
bars?" to which I promptly replied, Celtic
fashion, by asking another question: "Which
one?" meaning, of course, which bar. Here is
a concrete case of the Baby and the Guitar
muddle. One can't praise the art of Mary
Garden without loving the woman ! One can't
admire the opulent voice of Margaret Matze-
nauer without being dragged a hopeless slave at
her triumphant chariot wheels; a critic butchered
to make a prima donna's holiday ! Absurd !
22
MARY GARDEN
And there are others. What of radiant Ger-
aldine with the starry eyes? What of Frieda
Hempel, exquisite Violetta, delicious Countess
in the Rose-Cavalier? And what of Olive
Fremstad, always beautiful, an Isolde whose
tenderness is without peer, a Sieglinde who
plucks at your heartstrings because of her pity-
breeding loveliness, or as that dazzling witch,
Kundry; and to whose beauty the years have
lent a tragic, expressive mask? There were
queens, too, before Agamemnon's. Lilli Leh-
mann, Emma Eames, Lillian Nordica, Emma
Calve did we not burn incense under the nos-
trils of those beautiful women and great artists?
Go to! Nor was our praise accorded only to
the girls of yesteryear. The De Reszkes, Vic-
tor Maurel, Max Alvary as perfect a type of
the matinee idol as Harry Montague or Charles
Coghlan the stately, if slightly frigid, Pol Plan-
on upon them we showered our warmest en-
thusiasms. And Ignace Jan Paderewski, once
Premier Opus I of Poland was he neglected?
The piano god par excellence. No, such gener-
alizations are unfair. The average music-critic
or dramatic critic is nothing if not versatile in
his tastes. Remember that either one has op-
portunities to see and hear the most comely faces
and sweetest voices. Nevertheless I know of
none who ever lost his head. We play no favor-
ites. I also admit that this apologetic tone is the
kind of excuse that is accusatory. But !
But there is another name which slipped the
23
BEDOUINS
memory of my faultfinders. What of Rosina
Galli, whose pedal technique is as perfect as the
vocal technique of Miss Hempel; whose mimique
is as wonderful in its way as are the hieratic atti-
tudes and patibulary gestures of Mary, the
celebrated serpent of Old Nile? Don't we, to
a man, adore Rosina ? Thunderous affirmations
assail the welkin ! And then there is the " poet's
secret," as Bernard Shaw, the "Uncle Gurne-
manz" of British politics, has it. The secret in
question is as simple as Polchinelle's. Do you
realize that to a writer interested in his art such
women as Mary Garden or Margaret Matze-
nauer serve as a peg for his polyphonic prose or
as models upon which to drape his cloth-of-silver
when writing of Geraldine Farrar? A suscepti-
ble critic may perforce sigh like a symphonic
furnace, but apart from such fatuities he can't
keep up the excitement without a lot of emotional
stoking. And coal is so costly this year. That
alone negates the assertion of undue sentimen-
tality. Pooh! I shouldn't give a hang for a
critic so cold that he couldn't write overheated
prose, Byzantine prose, purple-patched and
swaggeringly rhythmed, when facing these
golden girls. "Passionate press agents," indeed,
but in the strict sense intended when Philip Hale
struck off that memorial phrase. There is Pitts
Sanborn with his "lithe moon-blonde wonderful
Mary," which I envy him; after my spilth of
adjectives he limns in five words the garden-
goddess, Themes, those singers, for gorgeous
24
From a photograph by De Strelecki
ROSINA GALLI
MARY GARDEN
vocables; nothing more. Footlight-prose quickly
forgotten if you take from the shelf in your
library the beloved essays of Cardinal Newman
and swim in the cool currents of his silvery style.
A panacea for the strained, morbid, fantastic
atmosphere of grand opera.
A character in one of Goethe's novels Wil-
helm Meister? exclaims: "Five minutes more
of this and I confess everything ! " Another such
season of overwrought reportage and my bag of
highly colored phrases, all my trick adjectives,
would be exhausted, else gone stale, and the
same gang of girls ever expecting new and more
miraculous homage in four languages with a
brass band around the corner. Oh ! la ! la !
There was one critic that did fall in love with
an actress. His name is Hector Berlioz, and he
celebrated the charms of Henrietta Smithson,
English born, a "guest" at a Parisian theatre,
by passionately pounding the kettle-drums in
the orchestra. His amatory tattoo, coupled with
his flaming locks, finally attracted the lady's
attention, and after she broke her leg and was
forced to abandon the stage she had her revenge
she married the kettle-drum critic and com-
poser, and lived unhappily ever afterward. Yet
the feeling against critics persists, probably
prompted by envy. In a Dublin theatre gallery
a fight broke out, and one chap was getting the
worst of it. His more powerful adversary was
pushing him over the rail into the orchestra,
when a wag called out: "Don't waste him. Kill
25
BEDOUINS
a fiddler with him !" Nowadays he would say,
"Kill a critic." But sufferance is the badge
of our tribe. There are times when I long for
the unaffected charm of Heller rather than
Chopin; when I prefer to gaze at Wagner's Grane
rather than hear Brunhilde sing.
Mary Garden makes herself beautiful, if only
by thinking "beautiful." "Whatever happens, I
must be an emerald," said Antoninus of the
emerald's morality. Havelock Ellis asserts,
"the exquisite things of life are to-day as rare
and as precious as ever they were." She is rare
and precious in Melisande, Monna Vanna, Jean,
and other roles. And what imaginative inten-
sity is hers ! But I don't care a fig for the
depraved creatures of the Lower Empire she so
marvellously portrays. It is Mary with the
strain of mysticism, the woodland fay she shows
us, its nascent soul modulating into the supreme
suffering and sorrow of motherhood. Her bed
of death in Melisande is one of the high consola-
tions in the memory of a critic whose existence
has been spent in the quagmire of mediocrity.
In the kingdom of the mystics there are many
mansions, and Garden lives in one at times.
But the detraque lemans she pictures are
often repugnant. The decadent art of Byzance.
The Infernal Feminine. A vase exquisitely
carved containing corruption. Sculptured slime.
You close your eyes but open your fingers; the
temptation to peep is irresistible.
In his illuminative studies of Fremstad, Far-
26
MARY GARDEN
rar, Garden, Mazarin, Interpreters and Inter-
pretations, Carl Van Vechten says that to Miss
Garden a wig is the all-important thing. "Once
I have donned the wig of a character, I am that
character. It would be difficult for me to go
on the stage in my own hair." However, she
did so in Louise, adds the critic. Felix Orman
reports that when he asked her if she would be
content to give up singing and become a dra-
matic artist, she replied: "No. I need the
music. I depend on it. Music is my medium
of expression." An art amphibian, hybrid, hers.
The flying fish. The bird that swims. The du-
bious trail of the epicene is not a modern note.
Rome and Alexandria knew it. It is vile, soul-
less, yet fascinating. Miss Garden incarnates it
as no other modern since the divine Sarah. She
is "cerebrale," and a cerebral is defined by
Arthur Symons as one who feels with the head
and thinks with the heart. Richard Strauss is
a prime exemplar. The image suggests both
apoplexy and angina pectoris, yet it serves. She
is as hard as steel in Louise or Cleopatre, yet
how melting as Monna and Melisande. She
may be heartless for all I know, and that is in
her favor, artistically considered, for Steeplejack
hath enjoined: A cool head and a wicked heart
will conquer the world; also, what shall it profit
a woman if she saves her soul but loseth love?
Cynical Steeplejack ? Yet, a half-truth though
not the upper half of that shy goddess, Truth.
As for Margaret Matzenauer, her art and per-
27
BEDOUINS
sonality transport the imagination to more
exotic climes. That sombre and magnificent
woman, who seems to have stepped from a
fresco of Hans Makart, himself a follower of
Paolo Veronese, is a singing Caterina Cornaro.
She brought back an element of lyric grandeur
to our pale operatic life; a Judith, a Deborah,
Boadicea, Belkis, Clytemnestra, Dalila, Amneris,
or Aholibah, all those splendid tragic shapes of
the antique world, she evokes, and in her sing-
ing there is a largeness of dramatic utterance
that proclaims her of the line royal: Lehmann,
Brandt, Ternina, Fremstad, Schumann-Heink.
Is it at all remarkable that I admire Matzenauer ?
And now that we have cleared away some
cobwebs of misapprehension with the aid of the
Baby and the Guitar, let me relate a story of
Chateaubriand, that Eternal Philanderer, as I
once named him, who met at Rome gay Hor-
tense Allart, afterward Madame Meritens. The
supreme master of French prose regretfully ex-
claimed to her: "Ah, if I had back my fifty
years." Thereupon the sprightly lady replied:
"Why not wish for twenty-five?" "No,"
moodily returned the Ambassador, "fifty will
do." Which recalls the witty design of Forain,
representing a very old man apostrophizing the
shadow of his past: "Oh, if I only had again my
sixty-five years!" I should be glad to have
my threescore and ten if only to tell those great
ladies of opera how much I admire them. "Bar-
kis is willin'."
28
MARY GARDEN
Another picture and I shall have done. Lis-
ten. I, many years ago, visited the Fondation
Ste. Ferine at Auteuil, an institution endowed by
the Empress Eugenie, one in which the benevo-
lence is so cloaked as not to hurt the sensibilities
of the resident superannuated ladies and gen-
tlemen. The company boasted noble origins.
Among the ladies I met was a Polish-born Mar-
quise, with brilliant eyes and wonderful white
hair, her own. She had studied with Chopin.
She said he was fickle and that George Sand was
often jealous of his pupils. For me she sang in
a sweet, true, but quavering voice Chopin's
Maiden's Wish, and compelled tears. The
Marquise then tinkled with a still small tone a
Nocturne by Field upon a pianoforte whose
ivory keys looked as if they exhaled pearly
sighs. She gently coquetted with a touch of
exquisite Sarmatian evasiveness. For me she
was adorable, although if she had laughed her
face would have cracked its artistic plastering.
What a new Diana of Poitiers ! What wit, fire,
malice, were in the glance of her soft, faded blue
eyes ! What a magically youthful heart ! She
must have been more than fourscore.
But yet a woman.
29
IV
INTERPRETER
TO MARY GARDEN AS CLEOPATRA
"C'estAffreuxMourir"
"And now this scorched terrace is your sole domain,
Your only subject Roman, dying Anthony;
The outer vastnesses they held, the soldiery
Of Caesar; their stout captain will not here refrain.
You lived, Queen, but not to countenance that pain
Which is surrender of the body's sovereignty;
You take your part; is it the frightful thing to die
And see in dying just the realm you must regain?
You have not let the game play you, my Queen, but fed
The aspic at a famished breast the rascal fresh
From gluttony a glutton still ! Why, the hot land
Is dim, alone lies Anthony save for the dead
One more ambition, Queen, for your expiring hand.
The last adventure, woman of imperious flesh !"
Pitts Sanborn.
CLEOPATRA
THOUGH the first hearing of the work in New
York was during the winter of 1919 at the Lex-
ington Theatre, and sung by the Chicago Opera
Association, Cleofonte Campanini, director, it
had been presented before Chicago audiences
when the impersonation of the supersubtle ser-
pent of Old Nile by Mary Garden caused much
30
MARY GARDEN
comment, critical and otherwise. The libretto
states that the conception of M. Payen radically
differs from Shakespeare's tragedy a rather
superfluous remark. It does considerably differ,
the principal difference being that Shakespeare
wrote great poetry as well as great drama.
Payen's attempt resolves itself into a series of
tableaux, the characterization generalized, his
verse respectably tepid. In a word, not the
Queen that Shakespeare drew. Of this Cleo-
patre you dare not say: "Age cannot wither her,
nor custom stale her infinite variety." She is
more germane to that Queen shown us in the
sumptuous prose of Theophile Gautier's Une
Nuit de Cleopatre than the imperial courtesan
who turned the head of Anthony and stirred the
pulse of Julius Caesar to the supreme tune of
Shakespeare's music.
There is plenty of action, some picturesque
episodes, and at least one brutal scene. Of love
and the talk of love there is no end. Yet it is
not all convincing. Moving pictures. You
think of Gerome, of Le Nouy, of the hundred
and one painters who have celebrated on can-
vas this seductive creature of old Egypt. "For
her own person, it beggar 'd all description; she
did lie in her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
o'er-picturing that Venus where we see the
fancy out-work nature."
Cleopatre is Massenet and the modiste.
Brackish-sweet, it is the ultimate expression
of musical impotence. Clever craftsman Masse-
BEDOUINS
het could turn out martial music and amorous,
the clangor of trumpets and voluptuous, dizzy
dance measures. But here it is generally bosh.
Languid, enervating, it attained a feeble climax
in the ballet of the penultimate act. Ambigu-
ous shapes and attitudes crowded the scene.
Two dancers slipped and fell, but the recovery
was so swift that the tumbled ensemble seemed
a veritable climax. Cleopatre cynically regarded
this daring symbolism, though Marc-Antoine
seemed rather shocked. And he should have
been. Musically speaking, nothing happened in
Act I; less followed in Act II, while Act III was
a glittering triumph of vacuity. In the last act
the asp played protagonist. As its name did
not figure on the programme, it probably died
from envy, or else inanition, doubtless humming
Will Shakespeare's mournful lay: "I am dying,
Egypt, dying." You also recall Swinburne's:
"Under those low, large lids of hers She hath
the histories of all times. . . ."
But the Cleopatre ! A youthful Sphinx, her
entrance on the great burnished barge was an
evocation. As she faced Antoine so must have
looked Sheba's Queen before the majesty of Sol-
omon. It would have been trying on the nerves
of the most pudic potentate from Herod down.
A saucy lad, in a later scene, Cleopatre got in a
mix-up at an early-Egyptian boozing-ken. An
extraordinary apparition, a fantastic faun of
Aubrey Beardsley caught the roving riggish eye
of the disguised Queen. She encouraged the
32
MARY GARDEN
advances of the anonymous animal. An Adonis
a rebours. Pavley was this delicate monster
and his subtle rhythms made Cleopatre shiver.
Here the music was too prudish.
Stravinsky or Richard Strauss would have
given the screw an enharmonic wrench. Act III
saw the Queen attired at once so sonorously and
exquisitely that the vast audience gasped with
admiration. It is, however, the tavern scene
that will save the tawdry work. The anatomi-
cal wigwagging of the two golden lads set the
lobby buzzing. Cleopatre is doomed to packed
houses in the future. Nothing succeeds like
true spirituality.
Mary Garden is Cleopatre, as she is Melisande
and Thais. It is not a role that taxes her drama-
tic resources or her personal pulchritude. All
she did was to look beautiful and turn on the full
voltage of her blandishments. Men went to the
ground before that dynamic yet veiled glance, like
soldiers facing a machine-gun. It is uncanny,
the emotion she projects across the footlights
and with such simple but cerebral means.
That she would have been burned at the
stake a few centuries ago, this lovely witch, is
no conjecture. Her nose is not "tip-tilted like
the petal of a flower," as Cleopatre's is said to
have been; nevertheless, she is the tawny Egyp-
tian. And she has never spoken so eloquently
as in this parlando part. Perhaps the most
poignant criticism was carelessly uttered by a
big policeman who had strayed in during the
33
BEDOUINS
garden scene. "Some Queen!" he said. And
the definitive words had been spoken. Fie on
naughty professional opinion after that memo-
rial phrase !
MLISANDE
Once upon a time we called this "precious"
lyric work Wagner and Absinthe, for there
are many rumors of Tristan and Isolde in it,
and the opalescent music, drugged with dreams,
has the numbing effect of that "green fairy"
no longer permitted in la belle France. Like all
epigrams, this is only a half-truth. In the Bel-
gian poet's The Death of Tintagiles so wonder-
fully interpreted in tone by Charles Martin
Loeffler his marionettes are beginning to mod-
ulate into flesh and blood, and, like the mermaid
of the fairy story, the transformation is a pain-
ful one. We note the achievement of a new
manner in Pelleas and Melisande. Played in
English first by Forbes-Robertson and Mrs.
Patrick Campbell, the piece created a mixed
impression in London, though it may be con-
fessed that, despite the scenic splendor, the act-
ing transposed to a lower realistic key this
lovely drama of souls. No play of Maeterlinck's
is so saturated with poesy, replete with romance.
There are episodes almost as intense as the
second act of Tristan. We listen for King
Mark's distant, tremulous hunting-horns in the
forest scene when Pell6as and Melisande un-
cover their hearts.
34
From a photograph copyrighted by Davis and Eickemeyer
MARY GARDEN AS MELISANDE
MARY GARDEN
The second act begins at an immemorial
fountain in the royal park. Here the young
Prince sits with the wife of his brother. Meli-
sande is the most convincing full-length portrait
of the poet. Exquisitely girlish, she charms
with her strange Undine airs. Melisande is en-
veloped in the haze of the romantically remote.
At times she seems to melt into the green tapes-
try of the forest. She is a woodland creature.
More melancholy than Miranda, she is not
without traces of her high-bred temperament;
less real than Juliet, she is also passion-smitten.
You recall Melusina and Rautendelein. Not
altogether comprehensible, Melisande piques us
by her waywardness, her fascinating if infan-
tile change of moods. At the spring the two
converse of the water and its healing powers.
"You would say that my hands were sick to-
day/' she murmurs as she dips her fingers into
the pool. The dialogue is as elliptical as if
written by Browning or Henry James. But the
symbol floats like a flag.
The mad apostrophe to the hair of Melisande
is in key with this moving tableau. Perhaps
Maeterlinck took a hint from the mournful tale
of his friend, the Belgian poet Georges Roden-
bach (Bruges-la-Morte), with its reincarnation
of a dead woman in the form and features of a
live one. The beautiful hair of the new love
serves but to strangle her. Pelleas is more
tender.
"I have never, never seen such hair as thine,
35
BEDOUINS
Melisande. I see the sky no longer through
thy locks. . . . They are alive like birds in
my hands." The last scene, as Melisande
dies of a broken heart, even when read on the
printed page, is pity-breeding. It is the tragedy
of souls distraught. "She must not be dis-
turbed," urges the venerable Arkel. "The
human soul is very silent. . . . The human
soul likes to depart alone. ... It suffers so
timorously. . . . But the sadness, Golaud, the
sadness of all we see. . . . J Twas a little being
so quiet, so fearful, and so silent. 'Twas a poor
little mysterious being like everybody." Pascal
comes to the mind here. No matter the splen-
dor of human lives, we must die alone.
The speech of the poet in its rhapsodic rush
merges into Debussy's music. That we shall
ever see another such ensemble as at the Man-
hattan Opera House years ago is doubtful.
Mary Garden is Melisande. No further praise
is needful. All her trumpery roles, Thais, Gis-
monda, Cleopatre, with their insincere music
and pasteboard pathos, are quickly dismissed.
Her Melisande is unforgettable.
MONNA VANNA
.This opera was first heard here on February
17, 1914, at the Metropolitan Opera House,
with Mary Garden, Vanni Marcoux, and Huber-
deau. It had been produced by the Boston
Opera Company in December, 1913, and by the
36
MARY GARDEN
present organization January 23, 1918. Miss
Garden was the heroine on that occasion, and
was greeted with overwhelming applause. The
premiere of the play Monna Vanna occurred at
the Nouveau Theatre, Paris, May 17, 1902.
We had the good fortune to see it a week later.
Georgette Leblanc was the original Monna.
Jean Froment, Darmont, and Lugne Poe were
the other principals. The drama enjoyed an
immediate success all over Europe from Bergen
to Palermo. London alone stood firm against
its blandishments. The censor forbade a pro-
duction. New York first saw it in English with
Bertha Kalich at the old Standard Theatre,
Harrison Gray Fiske, manager.
As a play it was a new departure for Maeter-
linck. It is almost theatric. In the heyday of
his glory Sardou never devised anything more
arresting than the denouement setting aside
consideration of the psychologic imbroglio.
There are spots in the dramatic scheme which
tax the credulity. However, something of the
improbable must always be granted a play-
wright, be he never so logical. The rapid
mental change of Vanna hints at a native-born
casuist, an Italian Renaissance type of mind.
Her love of Colonna could not have been deep-
rooted. But she did not betray him in the
tent, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly
immoral; in a word, not to put an edge too fine
upon the sophistries of the situation, this heroine
committed an imaginative infidelity as well as
37
BEDOUINS
uttering a splendid falsehood. The madness of
the finale is the logical outcome of her passion
for Prinzevalle. All that has gone before in her
life had been a bad dream. The true, the beau-
tiful moment is at hand. It will be both her
revenge and justification.
She goes to Prinzevalle in his cell. "This
must end here; it is too perfect. ... It is one
blaze about me and within me. . . . Oh, some
death will run its sudden ringer round this spark
and sever us from the rest!" Thus Browning
sings In a Balcony.
The play's the thing ! though it did not seem
to catch the conscience of the composer. Nev-
ertheless, Monna Vanna is more grateful to our
ears than Gismonda. There are too many
"things" that are set to music in the Sardou
libretto, while Maeterlinck deals only with the
primal passions love, jealousy, hatred, con-
flict of wills. There is more unity in action and
mood in the older score. The music is Wag-
nerian'irom first to final curtain, but it is cleverly
assimilated and swifter, more poignant. The
introduction to the third act recalls the third
act of Valkyrs; so we were not surprised to find
Brunhilde pleading, or to hear the chorus shrilly
cry out the Valkyr theme. In the tent scene,
Tristan and Isolde reign, as might be expected.
The first act has been cut and to its advantage.
At our first view of Mary Garden as the medi-
aeval Judith who fetches to Pisa her beloved
Holofernes, we frankly confess that the impres-
38
prom a photograph copyrighted by Mishkin
MARY GARDEN AS MONNA VANNA
MARY GARDEN
sions of her interpretation were strong. Monna
Vanna will rank in her portrait-gallery among
the finest. It far outshines Gismonda, as
Monna herself outshines the incredible, erotic
Duchess of Athens. There was no attempt to
make a disrobing scandal in the tent scene,
which would be obviously theatrical flimflam.
Miss Garden disposed of the situation simply.
She did not appear half-nude, but clothed in
exquisitely- toned draperies. But if she did not
show her lovely person, she spilled for us the
soul of the heroine who saved her country and
lost her reputation. In the opening act she did
little, but suggested the psychology of a woman
who had begun to loathe a supine husband.
Note the nuance with which she uttered " J'rai,
mon pere," and the repetition when she says it
to Colonna. It was like molten steel at first;
it was cold, rigid steel, the steel of unalterable
resolution the second time. Yet how tender is
her "Si" when she turns to her fuming spouse.
There was tenderness in the tent scene, yes,
true tenderness, not expressed by the senti-
mental symbols of the English theatre, but in
the restrained terms of the French tradition;
therefore, more eloquent, more artistic, despair
and pride modulating into amazed joyfulness at
meeting her early friend, stern Prinzevalle.
But the last scene gave us the most moving side
of this wonderful woman's art. The shock of
incredulity caused by her husband's suspicions,
merging into the supreme ecstasy as she grasps
39
BEDOUINS
\
the key that is to unlock the future in sooth;
no such acting has been witnessed for a long
time. The scale was essentially smaller than
Bernhardt's, but as subtle as the art of Sarah
were the indications of love triumphant with
death staring her in the face. The tiny play of
shadows round her eyes and mouth as she sees
her lover trapped were touching. That she was
a picture in every act is a matter of course. Her
slow steps to the open door most impressive.
It was a veritable march to the scaffold. Fev-
rier's music in this last episode rings true.
GISMONDA
Of Mary Garden it is always the correct thing
to say that she is charming. True. Charming,
and also many other qualities she boasts. She
is exquisite, and she is sometimes a great dra-
matic artist. But her voice is a sonorous
mirage. The lower register is still rich, sombre
in coloring, thrilling when she wills. The gift
of temperamental ecstasy is hers, though the
character she paints so subtly is hardly worth
the powder and shot to blow it sky-high. A
sensual prowling panther, notwithstanding the
al fresco exhibition of mother-love in Act I.
The panther glides from its midnight jungle
to meet its mate, and then Miss Garden's magic
begins to operate. Her soliloquy is the finest
bit of psychology expressed in voice, mimique,
and with the entire arsenal of her personal
40
MARY GARDEN
beauty that we have seen on any stage, dramatic
or lyric, for years. She needs an intimate atmos-
phere. Her diction, her phrasing, her general
grasp of the r61e are most impressive. She has
distinction in every pose, distinction in the car-
riage of her head and arch of the neck.
Her cadenced step in the first scene is replaced
by rhythmic movements in the second act that
reveal her glowing inner life. She is all flame
and gold except when she sings above the
staff. Even then she infuses it with a charac-
teristic timbre. A singing-actress. People like
Mary Garden because she has that rarest of
artistic virtues personality.
THAIS
During the first week of last season's Chicago
opera the temperament of Mary Garden was
carefully chained in its cage; nevertheless, we
overheard its growls in Gismonda, but the mock-
Fafner at the bottom of the cistern outroared
Miss Garden's tame panther. In Monna Vanna
there were whimperings and menacing claws.
The feline had no chance to spring, not even in
the tent scene. At a matinee in the Lexington
Theatre Thais was sung by the Chicago Opera
Association, and now or never ! we said, the tem-
perament so artistically expressed, rather canal-
ized and exquisitely distributed, in the two other
operas, will leap. It did. In the palace of Thais
the panther appeared for a few moments and
BEDOUINS
it as'sumed the form of hysteria. The famous
courtesan of Alexandria experienced a true " con-
version," the physical manifestations of which
were well-nigh pathological. "You have cre-
ated a new shudder," wrote Victor Hugo to
Charles Baudelaire after the production of his
Flowers of Evil. The "nouveau frisson" of
Miss Garden is thrilling, and must have appalled
the well-meaning, stupid Athanael.
This singing-actress does not widely depart
from her usual interpretation, except that
slight perpetual novelty which we expect
from her. Her last scene is beautiful in con-
ception and execution; the "spiritual" flirtation
on the mossy bank as piously piquant as ever.
The kiss suggested and evaded set us to won-
dering again at the morose monk. In the early
acts Thais is too restless. The firm yet plastic
lines of the character are thereby disturbed.
She looked lovelier than ever, and she did not
sing in the best of voice. A trying week was
behind her; besides, the domesticated panther
must have tugged hard and frequently at its
leash.
CARMEN
I attended Miss Garden's reading of the
score for my first time, and freely admit my
mixed feelings. We were assured by perfectly
honorable lobbyists that the last season the
Garden version was much better, more temper-
amental; and one who had overheard her in
42
MARY GARDEN
Paris swore that she was a seething caldron in
Act II. Her interpretation seems to us to be
"overpainted," to employ studio argot. Like
the canvas in Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece,
there is little left of the original design, except
perhaps a miraculously painted foot.
There were bits here and there that are ad-
mirable; the slow awakening of her interest in
the toreador as he thunders forth that supreme
song of table d'hotes. We see some delicate and
definitive notations, yet it is lost in the cloudy
chaos of the scene. All the strong theatrical
points are deliberately renounced; the first tu-
multuous entrance, the Habanera, Seguidilla,
and the duo in Act II. The renunciation sug-
gests technical heroism, but it doesn't help us
much in the development of the character.
Her Carmen is essentially frigid. And it is
neither sinister nor sensuous. To be sure, it is
different, but then so is Hedda Gabler "differ-
ent." We went to see, to hear, Carmen, and
Hedda in a lyric mood was more often adum-
brated than the Merimee-Bizet gypsy. The dis-
turbing element of the performance was the un-
deniable fact that, granted her idea of the r61e,
she didn't even "get it across." She missed fire
in Act III, in the card episode particularly.
Nor did she look bewitching. We quite under-
stand her avoidance of the conventional posing,
hipping, strutting, and inane postures; yet there
should have been compensations. (In the days
of Calve the criticism was " Elle se hanche trop.")
43
BEDOUINS
These were slim, not her singing, nor yet the
beautiful shawl that might have been designed
by Sorolla y Bastida. The famous fan we
missed. If Mary Garden had but lavished a
tithe of her blandishments on her Don Jose
that she so recklessly, so alluringly bestowed
upon Marc-Antoine Maguenat in Cleopatre, we
might have been won over a little to her general
conception. This Carmen was a distinguished
dame. Lilli Lehmann alone outshone her in
aristocratic Sevillian courtesy. But Lilli could
sing. And Lilli had not the Aberdeen-cum
Philadelphia-cum Chicago-aim Boston complex
of Mary.
We have since learned that the singer was
grievously indisposed. And she surely missed
the Don Jose of Dalmores and Muratore.
And on this rather chilly note of dissent I pre-
fer to end. Of Miss Garden's twenty or thirty
other r61es it is hardly necessary to speak. Her
Louise and Salome, so dissimilar, yet both in-
comparable, need no belated praise. She is
unique. Thus endeth the Book of Mary the
Garden.
44
V
MELISANDE AND DEBUSSY
GEORGE MOORE has remarked that we never
speak of Shakespeare or Hugo or Flaubert as
the authors of any particular work. Simply to
utter their names suffices. I give the illustra-
tions haphazard. Any great artist will do. From
Claude Debussy we never ask of what he is the
composer. Pelleas and Melisande is his monu-
ment; rather, Melisande and Pelleas; as, in the
case of Isolde and Tristan, it is the woman who
is protagonist. Is it because in creating charac-
ters of our mother's sex that the Eternal Mascu-
line is projected across the feminine soul? Or,
is woman the genuine, the aboriginal force, that
we unwittingly obey, all the while calling her
"little woman"? (condescendingly, of course).
Oh, what a joke of almost cosmical proportions
it would be if the latter supposition be the truer
one ! But mere male mortals may always con-
sole themselves with the ineluctable fact that it
is man who has endowed woman with a vital
figure in the arts. He has created Ophelia and
Gretchen, Beatrice and Francesca, the Milo
Venus, the Winged Victory and Isolde, Lady
Macbeth and Emma B ovary, Carmen and Me*li-
sande. Honors, then, are even. Even if mod-
45
BEDOUINS
els existed in nature, the art of man it was that
shaped them and breathed life into their clay.
But Melisande is the protagonist in the drama.
The music to Maurice Maeterlinck's strangely
haunting play is so wedded to the moods and
situations that as absolute music it is unthink-
able. And these moods are usually "con sor-
dino." Despite his musicianship, Debussy is
obviously a " literary" composer; his brain had
first to be excited by a dramatic situation, a
beautiful bouquet of verse, an episode in fiction,
or the contemplation of a picture.
Why demand if the initial impulse be the
Monna Lisa or a quatrain by Verlaine? A
composer who can interpret in tone the recon-
dite moods of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, or
the dramatic prose-poem of Maeterlinck, need
not have been daunted by criticism; in sooth, it
is the angle of critical incidence that must be
shifted to adapt itself to the new optique. Pel-
leas and Melisande is a study in musical decom-
position; the phrase is decomposed, rhythms are
dislocated, the harmonic structure melts and re-
solves itself into air. His themes are developed
in opposition to the old laws of musical syntax.
But what have laws in common with genius?
Once assimilated, they may be broken as were
broken the stone tablets by the mighty icono-
clast, Moses. Besides, every law has its holiday.
In the Debussy an idiom there seems to be no
normal sequence. I say seems, for much water
has gone under the bridge since his appearance,
MfiLISANDE AND DEBUSSY
and compared with Schoenberg, Stravinsky,
Ornstein, and Prokofieff he is a conservative; in
another decade he may be called a reactionary.
Life is brief and art is swift.
Our ears were not accustomed to his novel
progressions and the forced marriage of har-
monies. His tonalities are vague, but his values
just. The introduction to the forest scene when
Golaud discovers Melisande is of an acid sweet-
ness. Without anxious preoccupation Debussy
has caught the exact Maeterlinckian note. As
it is impossible to divorce music and text De-
bussy seems to be Maeterlinck's musical other
self so it is needless to dwell upon the charac-
teristic qualities of the score. It is like some
antique and lovely tapestry that hypnotizes the
gaze. It has the dream-drugged atmosphere of
Edgar Allan Poe; the Poe of the dark tarn of
Auber, of Ligeia, of Ellenora, of Berenice, and
Helen, those frail apparitions from claustral
solitudes and the Valley of the Many-Colored
Grass, all as exotic as they are incorporeal. It
is the complete envelopment of the poem by an
atmospheric musical haze shot through with
gleams of light never shown before on land or sea.
We pardon the monotone of mood and music,
the occasional muffled cacophonies, the lack of
exterior action, and the absence of climaxes; after
so long waiting for a passionate outburst, when
it does come it is overpowering in its intensity.
In music the tact of omission has never been
pushed so far. From the pianoforte partition
47
BEDOUINS
little may be gleaned of its poetic fervor, its
reticences, its delicate landscapes, psychologic
subtleties. The pattern seldom obtrudes, as the
web is spun "exceeding fine." The orchestra-
tion reveals the silver-greys of Claude Monet
and the fire-tipped iridescence of Monticelli.
His musical palette proclaims Debussy a sym-
bolist, one in the key of Verlaine, who loved
nuance for its own sake and detested flauntingly
brilliant hues. "Pas la couleur, rien que la
nuance . . . et tout le reste est litter a ture,"
sang Paul of the asymmetrical jaws and supernal
thirst.
Debussy is the most interesting of contem-
porary music-makers and the most subtle com-
poser for the pianoforte since Chopin. His
originality is not profoundly rooted in the his-
tory of his art, but his individuality is indis-
putable. He is a musician doubled by a poet.
He is almost as Gallic as Chopin is Polish. De-
bussy shows race. His artistic pedigree stems
from a grafting of old French composers upon
ultramodern methods. Wagner, Chopin, cer-
tain aspects of Liszt, and Moussorgsky. The
visit he made to Russia in 1879 had important
consequences. He read the manuscript score
of Boris at Rome, he absorbed Moussorgsky
and the whole-tone scale, and this influence
contributed to the richness and complexity of
his style. Above all, he is a stylist. He has
Wagner at his finger-tips, and, like Charpentier,
he can't keep Tristan out of his music; it is his
48
MfiLISANDE AND DEBUSSY
King Charles's head. Naturally such highly
peptonized aural diet is not nourishing. Like
the poetry and prose-poems of Stephane Mal-
larme, too much Debussy becomes trying to the
nerves. Schumann has spoken of the singularly
irritating effect of muted dissonances. Pelleas
is nearly all muted. The mental and emotional
concentration involved in the hearing of this
music fatigues as does no other music; not even
Tristan.
The range of ideas, like the dynamic range,
is limited. Yet there is magic in his music,
the magic of evocation. Not to describe, but
to evoke, in effortless imagery, is the quintes-
sence of his art. He is a painter of cameos and
aquarelles. Never does he carve from the big
block; an exquisite miniaturist, he does not
handle a bold brush, nor boast the epical sweep
of his predecessors; Berlioz for one. But he is
more intimate, he is the poet of crepuscular
moods. The sadness of tender, bruised souls is
in his pages. Of virility there is little trace, it
is music of the distaff, and seldom sounds the
masculine ring of crossed swords. Chopin, too,
had his nocturnal moments, but he also wrote
the A flat Polonaise, with its heroic defiance of
a Poland crushed yet never conquered; with its
motto: "Jescze Polska nie zginiela!"
Long before his death this French master was
critically ranged. Lawrence Oilman, the most
sympathetic of his commentators, is also the
fairest. To his essays I go for delectation. It
49
BEDOUINS
would be rash to say that Debussy had achieved
his artistic apogee; he may have had surprises in
store, but it is safe to conclude that Pelleas and
Melisande is his masterpiece, that the dewy
freshness of L'Apres Midi d'un Faune would
never have been recaptured. The symphonic
suite, Printemps, the Nocturnes, La Mer, and
Images, at once reveal the strength and limita-
tions of Debussy, who was not a builder of the
" lofty rhyme," though he is a creator of com-
plex rhythms; not a cerebral composer like
Vincent d'Indy, for example but an emotional
one; not a master of linear design, but a colorist;
a poet, not an architect. His vision is authen-
tic. He knew that the core of reality is poetry;
he lived not at the circumference but the
hub of things. He loathed the academic. He
is the antipodes of Saint-Saens. He gave us a
novel nuance in music, as did Maeterlinck in
literature. (Think of Interior with its motive
again Poe the fear of fear !) Debussy is a
composer of nuance, of half-hinted murmurings
of "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves," of
the rutilant faun with his metaphysical xeno-
mania, of music overheard, and of mirrored
dreams. Little wonder he sought to interpret
in his weaving tones Baudelaire and Verlaine,
Mallarme and Maeterlinck. He was affiliated
to that choir of sensitive and unhappy souls, of
which Maurice Maeterlinck is the solitary survi-
vor. A poet himself, Claude Achille Debussy,
even if he had never written a bar of music.
So
MfiLISANDE AND DEBUSSY
One summer evening in 1903 I was intro-
duced to him at a cafe on the Boulevard des
Italiens. Debussy spoke a few polite words
when I told him that I belonged to the critical
chain-gang. He had written much musical
criticism, chiefly memorable for its unsympa-
thetic attitude toward Schubert and Wagner,
not because of reasons chauvinistic, but doubt-
less the result of a natural reaction against the
principal educative forces in his life. At least
once in his career an artist curses his artistic
progenitors. Wagner must have hated Weber
because of his borrowings from him, and I am
quite sure Chopin despised Hummel; internal
evidence may be collated in the Pole's wide de-
parture from the academic patterns of Hum-
mel's passage-work. However, Debussy never
went so far as his friend Jean Marnold, who in
the Mercure de France concludes a comparative
study of Pelleas and Tristan in these words:
"Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard; si tard,
qu'il semble aujourd'hui, a sa place adequate en
notre Opera toulousain." Yet if Tristan came
so late, how is it that there is so much of its
music in Pelleas ? a fact that Philip Hale doubts.
There's the score. Who steals my idea steals
trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'twas mine, 'tis
his, and has been slave to thousands; but he
that filches from me my style robs me of that
which not enriches him and makes me poor
indeed ! (This is reorchestrated to suit the
simile.) Tristan always seems to be waiting in
BEDOUINS
the wings when Pelleas is played, awaiting his cue
to enter. It never fails to be given by Debussy.
Later I asked Maurice Maeterlinck his opin-
ion of Debussy's music to Pelleas and Melisande.
It was an imprudent question, for Lucienne Bre-
val had captured the r61e of Melisande, not
Georgette Leblanc. Maeterlinck is a polite
man, and his answer was guarded; never-
theless, his dislike of the music pierced his
phrases. To him it was evident that his play
needed no tonal embellishment, that it was
more poetic, more dramatic, without the De-
bussy frame. He is quite right. And yet the
spiritual collaboration of poet and musician is
irresistible. And in the garden of the gods
there is only one Melisande. Some little dramas,
like little books, have their destiny. The com-
poser of Pelleas and Melisande suffered from
the nostalgia of the ideal, suffered from home-
sickness for his patrie psychique, the land of
fantasy and evanescent visions. The world will
not willingly forget him.
VI
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT'
IT was twenty minutes to Eternity on a sunny
morning in Gotham. The breakfast room was
large, airy, and the view of upper Manhattan
from the various windows gave one a joyous
sense of our quotidian life, its variety and spa-
ciousness. Central Park, a square of dazzling
emerald, the erect golden synagogue on the
avenue, the silver hubs of the wheels on passing
carriages across the East Drive, were pictures
for eyes properly attuned. The four eyes, how-
ever, in this particular apartment, were busily
engaged in devouring, not the dainty breakfast
spread before them eyes eat, too but the
morning newspapers. On the walls were framed
photographs. She as Juliet. He as Tristan.
She as Isolde. He as Faust. She, Carmen.
He, Siegfried. A versatile pair. Theirs had
been a marriage prompted by love. A mag-
nificent, a devastating passion had amalgamated
their destinies Paul Bourget would have said
"sublimes." They still loved despite the poign-
ant promiscuity of matrimony, although mar-
ried nearly a year. They also loved others.
And in the morning hours they hated one an-
other with the holy hatred engendered by per-
53
BEDOUINS
feet sympathy. And they were so consumedly
happy that they couldn't stay indoors for a day.
It is easy to love fervidly; it is hard to hate in-
telligently. On one point, however, this won-
derful soprano and glorious tenor were united
they despised musical criticism, even when it
was unfavorable. Banishing Mildred, the pretty
English maid she was too pretty about six in
the evening, so He noticed to the bedroom,
they read the newspapers undisturbed. They
read aloud, and occasionally as a duet. She
freely embroidered her commentaries. He em-
bellished his with indignant outbursts.
"Dearest, hear this. What a beautiful notice
from Spoggs. I appreciate it all the more be-
cause he was once epris of that Garden woman.
I honestly believe the man is truly in love with
me." "Pooh! Sweetheart, a music-critic has
only ink and ice- water in his veins. Spoggs is
in love with his hifalutin' phrases. All the rest
is cannonading canaries. If he saw you in the
right key he would never speak of your second-
act Isolde. That's just where you fall down, dar-
ling. Whereas my third-act Tristan "Dear
old boy. How you do run on. Always jeal-
ous when his poor little wine is praised." "I
jealous ? Of you ! " Longa pausa ! Suddenly
she exclaims: "Oh, you poor man! Did you
read what he said of your make-up last night?
I hate that man now. He is so unjust to you;
though he does admire me. Why, what's the
54
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
matter, baby? Where are you going? Your
coffee is cold " He storms out of the room,
stumbling over Mildred on her knees near the
door, either praying or polishing the keyhole
with her lustrous eyelashes. Familiarity may
breed contempt, but contiguity breeds, tout
simple.
It really happened. In this instance I have
transposed the key to opera. The true story
deals with a well-known actress and her first
husband, also her leading man. Two prima
donnas under one roof. She read him to his
death with unfavorable criticisms. I know of a
more curious case. He was an idealist of an
idealism so lofty that he often stumbled over
the stars, enmeshed himself in constellations
and took the sun for footstool. Her eyes, young
as yesterday, were like an Irish sea-green moun-
tain lake; at dusk, a sombre pool, profound at
dawn as a sun-misted emerald. He painted.
She sang. He painted her portrait. Then he
painted other women's portraits. Each por-
trait he painted was the portrait of his wife.
She was beautiful. At first society was amused,
flattered, and finally resented the unsought com-
pliment. Time drove the enamored couple
asunder. They were too happy. She married
again, happily. He remarried. I saw the last
portrait he had painted of his second wife, a
lovely creature. As in a pictorial palimpsest
the features of his first wife showed in the new
text; the expression of her eyes peeped through
55
BEDOUINS
the other woman's eyes. A veritable obsession
this, comparable to the exquisite and melan-
choly tale of Georges Rodenbach and the dear
dead woman of Bruges-la-Morte.
What is the artistic temperament so-called?
Years ago I wrote to great lengths of "The
Artist and His Wife," quoting ancient saws and
modern instances to fatten my argument that
artistic people are, in private life, very much
like others; if anything, more human. I proved,
by a string of names beginning with the Robert
Brownings and the Robert Schumanns, that
artists may marry or mix without fear of sudden
death, cross words, bad cookery, rocky behavior,
or diminution of their artistic powers. "There
are no women of genius," said that cross-patch
celibate, Edmond de Goncourt; "the only
women of genius are men." A half-truth and a
whole lie. Artistic men are as "catty" as the
"cattiest" women. But why dwell only upon
the incompatibility of artists? Doesn't Mr.
Worldly Wiseman sometimes weary of his stout
spouse? Why does the iceman in the adjacent
alley beat the skinny mother of his children?
Or why does a woman who never heard of Nora
Helmer, Hedda Gabler, or Anna Karenina leave
her husband, her family, not for the love of a
cheap histrion, but because she thinks she can
achieve fame as a "movie" actress? Is it not
the call of the exotic, the far-away and unfamil-
iar ? A woman can't live alone on stone without
the bread of life at intervals. The echoes of
56
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
wanderlust are heard in the houses of bankers,
tailors, policemen, politicians, as well as in the
studies of artists, poets, and musicians.
But the artist's misdemeanors get into print
first. The news is published early and often.
A beautiful young actress, or a rising young
portrait-painter, a gifted composer, talented
sculptor, rare poet, brilliant pianist, versatile
writer when one of these strays across the bar-
rier into debatable territory, the watchmen on
the moral towers lustily beat their warning
gongs. It is prime matter for headlines. To
the winds strong lungs bawl the naked facts.
Depend upon it no matter who escapes the
public hue and cry, the artist is always found
out and his peccadilloes proclaimed from pulpits
or yawped over the roofs of the world. Why,
you ask, should a devotee of aesthetic beauty
ever allow his feet to lead him astray? Here
comes in your much-vaunted, too-much-dis-
cussed artistic temperament odious phrase!
Hawked about the market-place, instead of
reposing in the holy of holies, this temperament
has become a byword and a stench in the nos-
trils. Every coney-catcher, prizefighter, or co-
cotte takes refuge behind "art." It is become
a name accursed. When the tripesellers of lit-
erature wish to rivet public attention upon
their wares, they cry aloud: "Lo, the artistic
temperament!" If an unfortunate woman is
arrested she is usually described in the police-
blotter as an "actress." If a fellow and his
57
BEDOUINS
wife tire of too much bliss, their "temperaments"
are aired in the courts. Worse "affinities" are
dragged in. Decent folk shudder and your
genuine artist does not boast of his "artistic
temperament." It has become gutter-slang.
It is a synonym for rotten "nerves."
A true artist abhors the ascription^of tempera-
ment, keeping within the sanctuary of his soul
the ideal that is the mainspring of his creation.
The true artist temperament is, in reality, the
perception and appreciation of beauty, whether
in pigment, form, tone, words, nature, or in the
loftier region of moral rectitude. It may exist
coevally with a strong religious sense. And it
may be gayly pagan. But always for the serious
artist the human body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost, as Mother Church, profoundest of psy-
chologists, has taught. The dignity of men
and women dare be violated only at the peril of
their immortal souls. The artistic temperament
adds new values to everv-day life and character.
But its possessor must not parade this personal
quality as an excuse for self-indulgence. That
he leaves to the third-rate artisan, to the char-
latan, to the buffoon who grins through a horse
collar, to the vicious who shield their vileness
behind a torrid temperament. Now, art and
sex are correlated. Sex is the salt of life. Art
without sex is flavorless, hardly art at all, a
frozen simulacrum. All great artists are virile.
And their greatness consists in the victory over
their temperaments; not in the triumph of mind
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
over matter futile phrase but in a synthesis,
the harmonious comminglement of intellect and
artistic material. Sensualist your artist may
be, but if he is naught else, then his technical
virtuosity avails him not. He cannot achieve
artistic grandeur. The noblest art is the tri-
umph of imagination over temperament.
Too often a rainbow mirage is this entering
into wedlock of two congenial souls.
When He whispers it is the marrying month
of June and the moon swims above in the tender
blue "Why, dear, it is just as easy for two to
live as one on fifty dollars a week," the re-
cording angel smiles, then weeps. Nor has the
hardy young adventurer spiders on his ceiling.
He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step
in the path of wisdom. But She? Oh, She is
enraptured. Naturally they will economize;
occasional descents into cheap Bohemias; saw-
dust, pink wine, pinker wit, pinkest women.
No new gowns. No balls. No theatres. No
operas. No society. It is only to be Art, Art,
Art! So they bundle their incompatible tem-
peraments before an official and are made one.
At least they are legally hitched. She plays
the piano. He paints. A wonderful vista,
hazy with dreams, spreads before them. She
will teach a few pupils, keep up her practice,
and save enough to study some day with a
pupil of a pupil of Leschetizky. He will man-
fully paint, yes, a few portraits, though land-
scape is his ambition. But it is hard to resist
59
BEDOUINS
the bribes of our dear common life. They try,
they fail.
A year passes. What a difference ! Gone are
the dreams. There are many spiders on the
ceiling now. To pay for the food they eat, to
own the roof over their heads, are their ultimate
desires. She looks paler. He may or may not
drink; it doesn't much matter. There are no
portraits painted; an artist must be doubled by
a society man to capture commissions, to enjoy
the velvet vulgarities of the new-rich. And
artists demand too much of their wives. She
must be a social success; also a combination of
cook and concubine. Women are versatile.
Women are born actresses. It was a woman,
not a man, who discovered the art of leading a
double life on ten dollars a week. But on thrice
that amount they can't run a household, watch
the baby oh, wretched intruder! play like
Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and look like an
houri. To be a steam-heated American beauty,
your father must be a billionaire.
The artist-woman is a finely attuned fiddle.
You may mend a fiddle, but not a bell, says
Ibsen. True, but if you smash your fiddle the
music is mute. And every day of fault-finding
snaps a string, or reduces its tautness. How
long does beauty endure? Begin misunder-
standings. Pity, the most subtly cruel of the
Seven Deadly Virtues, stalks the studio. Se-
cretly She pities him. Secretly He pities her.
Pity breeds hatred. Difference develops dis-
60
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
content. At breakfast, the most trying time of
the twenty-four hours oh, the temperamental
breakfasts when we were young and delightfully
miserable ! even when you haven't anything to
eat at breakfast, He pities her flushed face as
She runs in from the kitchen with eggs and
coffee. No longer is She a sylph in his eyes.
The fifty dollars a week seem shrunken, not
enough for one to live upon, much less two or
three. She pities him because He is flushed
from his night's outing. His appetite, like his
temper, is capricious. In her eyes He is the
ordinary male brute (feed the brute!). Then
He becomes imprudent and flings Schopenhauer
at her head. That old humbug of a misogynist,
who was always elbow-deep in woman scrapes !
But She has no time to retort with Ibsen and
Shaw for his swift discomfiture. The milkman
is dunning her, and as baby must have pure
milk She smiles at her foolish young man and
teases him for the money. He looks blankly
at her as He dives into empty pockets. This
sort of thing may last for years. In reckless
despair He may throw his lamp at the moon,
She her bonnet over the windmill. Female suf-
frage will make such conditions impossible in
the future by forbidding men the ballot. Like
a sensible shoemaker let him stick to his last, or,
to shift the image, let him grind the handle of
the domestic barrel-organ while She collects
the coppers.
It is when the lean years are upon the philan-
61
BEDOUINS
dering artist, the years of thin thoughts and
bleak regrets, that he may miss the loving wives
of his past. Then will he cry in the stillness of
his heart: O Time! Eternal shearer of souls,
spare me thy slow clippings. Shear me in haste,
shear me closely ! You see, he remains the lit-
erary artist, and in the face of death he wears
his shop mask. His artistic affinity, encoun-
tered late in their earthly pilgrimage, congratu-
lates herself that her latter lonesome years won't
be burdened by the ills and whims and senile
vanity of an old man. She may be a spinster
and boast the artistic temperament. Or she
may escape that fate by marrying a sensible
business or professional man, who pays the
freight and admires her pasty painting, her
facile, empty music-making, her unplayed plays,
unread verse and novels that are privately
printed. Thus doth Nature hit the happy
mean. He who could hold hands with a pretty
girl in eleven languages consoles himself with
his corroded memories. After all, has he not
been a success, has he not eluded entangling
matrimonial alliances? Ah, the artistic tem-
perament !
During a certain London silly season some
enterprising imbecile posed this query: Can a
woman on the boards remain virtuous? This
absurd question set Great Britain buzzing. His
Grace the Archbishop answered, and every
Tom, Dick, and Harry rushed into type to record
their precious opinions. The theatrical profes-
62
THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
sion rose as a single woman. Mrs. Kendal and
Mary Anderson were held up as shining pat-
terns, which they are. But there were many
sceptics. George Moore's Mummer Worship
was hurled at the camp of the optimists. Ra-
chel, Sarah Bernhardt, and Duse were adduced
by the pessimists. Finally it occurred to the
one intelligent person in all London to interview
George Bernard Shaw.
"Mr. Shaw, do you think a woman can be
virtuous in the theatre?"
"Why should she be?" asked St. George,
and then and there the moral symposium went
up in a burst of uncontrolled laughter. Mr.
Shaw is like the little candid girl in the crowd;
for him the truth is always naked. So is the
artistic temperament.
VII
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE
MIRBEAU
OCTAVE MIRBEAU was a prodigious penman.
When Remy de Gourmont called Paul Adam
"a magnificent spectacle" he might have said
with equal propriety the same of Mirbeau. A
spectacle and a stirring one it is to watch the
workings of a powerful, tumultuous brain such
as Mirbeau's. He was a tempestuous force.
His energy electric. He could have repeated
the exclamation of Anacharsis Clootz: "I belong
to the pdrty of indignation!" His whole life
Mirbeau was in a ferment of indignation over
the injustice of life, of literature, of art. His
friends say that he was not a revolutionist born;
nevertheless, he ever seemed in a pugnacious
mood, whether attacking society, the Govern-
ment, the Institutes, the theatre, the army or
religion. There is no doubt that certain tem-
peraments are uneasy if not in opposition to
existing institutions, and while his sincerity was
indisputable an imperious sincerity, a sincerity
that was perilously nigh an obsession Mirbeau
seemed possessed by the mania of contradiction.
After his affiliations with Jules Valles and the
anarchistic group he was nicknamed "Mira-
64
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU
beau," and, indeed, there was in him much of
the fiery and disputatious, though he never in
oratory recalled the mighty revolutionist. Nev-
ertheless, he was a prodigious penman.
He was born in Normandy, 1850 (Ernest Gau-
bert says 1848), the country of those two
giants, Gustave Flaubert and Barbey d'Aure-
villy. He died early in 1917. His Odyssey,
apart from his writings, was not an exciting one.
Well born and well educated, he took a violent
dislike to his clerical instructors, and as may
be noted in Sebastien Roch (1890), he suffered
from the result of a shock to his sensibilities be-
cause of an outrageous occurrence in the course
of his school years. He early went to Paris,
like many another ambitious young man, and
began as an art-critic, but his first article on
Monet, Manet, and Cezanne was also his last
in the journal VOrdre; it created so much scan-
dal by its attack on those mud-gods of art, Meis-
sonier, Cabanel, Lefebvre and Bouguereau, that
he was drafted into the dramatic department.
There he did not last long. After a violent dia-
tribe against the House of Moliere he found
himself with several duels on his hands and
enjoyed the distinction of a personal reply from
Coquelin. He wrote for a little review Les
Grimaces, and in 1891 defended Jean Grave's
La Societe Mourante and composed a preface
for that literary firebrand. He had dipped into
the equivocal swamp of politics and had been
a sous-prefet (at St. Girons, 1877), but the expe-
65
BEDOUINS
rience did not lend enchantment to his patriot-
ism. He saw the inner machinery of a democ-
racy greasy with corruption and it served him
as material for his political polemics.
His first decade in Paris he wrote for such
publications as Ckroniques Parisiennes, La
France, Gaulois, and Figaro. The entire gamut
of criticism was achieved by him. He was fear-
less. His pen was vitriolic and also a sledge-
hammer. Like old Dr. Johnson, if his weapon
missed fire he brained his adversary with its
butt-end. A formidable antagonist, yet the
obverse of his medal shows us a poet of ab-
normal sensibilities, a leather of all injustice, a
Quixote tilting at genuine giants, not missing
windmills; also a man of great literary endow-
ment and achievement. His critics speak of a
period of discouragement during which he
smoked opium, though without ill consequences.
His was not a passive temperament to endure
inaction. Like others, he had perversely imi-
tated Baudelaire and De Quincey, but soon gave
up the attempt. A nature trembling on the
verge of lytic pantheism and truculent satire,
Mirbeau had a hard row to hoe, and it is gratify-
ing to learn that as he conquered in his art so
he conquered himself. He waged war against
Octave Mirbeau to the last. And no wonder.
He has written stories that would bring a crim-
son blush to the brow of Satan.
Turning the pages of the principal Paris re-
views to which he copiously contributed we find
66
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU
him calling the financial press blackmailers; the
law reporters "vermine judiciaire"; French jour-
nalism decidedly decadent: "The press kills lit-
erature, art, patriotism; it aggrandizes the shop
and develops the shopkeeping spirit. It exalts
the mediocre painters, sculptors, writers. Its
criticism is venal." As for the theatre from
the frying-pan into the fire ! The theatre is the
prey of mediocrity, wherein Le Maitre de Forges
is pronounced a masterpiece !
The comedians ("les tripots revenus; caboti-
nisme") of La Comedie Frangaise come in for
their share. Emile Zola, naturally enough, has
his allegiance, but he dealt hard raps on the
skulls of his followers, the Zolaettes, who hung
on the fringe of the novelist's dressing-gown.
He admired Barbey d'Aurevilly and Elemir
Bourges, as well he might; he attacked Daudet,
Paul Bourget, Ohnet, Legouve, Feuillet, Sarcey
dear old Uncle Sarcey, how Huysmans and
Mirbeau did pound him ! and, last and worst,
the art-critic of the Figaro, Albert Wolff. But
he deserved the flaying.
In La Presse Mirbeau saluted the genius of
Rodin, Maupassant, and praised Paul Hervieu.
He adored Victor Hugo, not only as supreme
poet but as humanitarian the very quality that
to-day so many find monotonous in his lyrics.
But there was more than a strain of humanitari-
anism in Mirbeau. He was truly a Brother to
Man, but he never exploited it as do sentimental
socialists. It was the spectacle of poverty, of
BEDOUINS
the cruelty of man to man, of the cruelty to
animals he wrote a novel about a dog that
set the blood boiling in his veins and forced him
to utter terrible, regrettable phrases. His
friends grieved, yet^the'spectacle was not unlike a
volcano in action. That all this was prejudicial
to the serenity of his art is not to be doubted.
Mirbeau cared little. Let art perish if he
accomplished a reform! Yet he has written
some almost perfect pages, and in the presence
of nature his angry soul was soothed, ennobled.
A poet was slain in him before his vision became
voice. He loved the figure of Christ and he
drifted into the mystic and lovable theories of
Kropotkine, Elisee Reclus, and Tolstoy. Their
influence is manifested in his Lettres de ma
Chaumire (1886). These tales overflow with
sympathy and indignation. The French peas-
ant as he is, neither idealized by Millet nor cari-
catured by Zola, is painted here with an intimate
brush it is painted miasma, one is tempted to
add. That he was an unyielding Dreyfusard is
a matter of history.
It may be said in passing that Mirbeau had
not the stuff in him to make a sound or satisfac-
tory critic of the Fine Arts. He was too one-
sided in his Salons, his enthusiasms were often
ill-placed, and he resembled Zola in his vocabu-
lary of abuse if any one disagreed with him.
M. Durand-Ruel, where he was liked for his
sterling qualities, has a pamphlet of Mirbeau's
on the Impressionists. Published here it would
68
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU
have resulted either in a libel suit or a prosecu-
tion for obscenity. His definitionof a certain art-
critic is unprintable. When he hated he stopped
short of nothing. A true Celt. But how he
could tune down the peg of the false heroic to
make sound the mean music of mean souls!
There are a dozen men in Paris who were riddled
by his shot and shell. He did not spare the
Government and told some wholesome truths
about the Tonkin affair. But he was not all
fire and fury. He had intellectual charity, and
the artist in him often prevailed. He was de-
structive, and he could be constructive. He
could be charming and tender, too, and his style
ranged from thunder-words to supple-sweet
magic.
The constructive in him was artistic, but
when the propagandist reins were between his
teeth his judgments were muddied by his
turbulence. And how clearly he could judge
was proved by his clairvoyant article in Le
Figaro on an unknown Belgian, by name Maurice
Maeterlinck (1890). Mirbeau literally discov-
ered Maeterlinck; and while we now smile over
the title of " Belgian Shakespeare/ 7 there is no
denying the flair of the Parisian critic. Cer-
tainly he made a better guess than the amusing
Max Nordau, who once described the author of
The Treasures of the Humble as "a pitiable
mental cripple." In 1888 L'Abbe Jules ap-
peared. It was Mirbeau's first novel. For the
chief character he went to his uncle, a priest of
69
BEDOUINS
rather singular traits. The book became a burn-
ing scandal.
Le Calvaire (1887) confirmed the reputation
of the young writer. He certainly had a predi-
lection "pour la poesie de la pourriture," as one
critic puts it. But Calvary is a masterpiece
and his least offensive fiction. The story of the
little soldier who shoots an Uhlan in the war of
1870 and then tries to revive the dead man,
finally kissing him on the forehead as a testi-
mony of his fraternal feeling, is touching. S6-
bastien Roch, the third novel, is full of verity
and power only marred by a page, one of the
most hideous in French fiction (irrespective of
avowedly crapulous stories). But Mirbeau has
testified to its truth elsewhere. The hero be-
comes a victim to aboulia, or the malady of
doubt. Happiness is not for him and he dies
in the Franco-Prussian conflict. Le Jardin des
Supplices (1899) set Paris cynically shivering
with a new sensation. This garden of tortures
is the most damnably cruel book in contempo-
rary fiction. It was conceived by a Torque-
mada of sadism. Yet Mirbeau disclaimed any
notion of writing for mere notoriety. These
sombre pages of blood and obscenity were
printed to show the cruelty and injustice of all
Governments. The Chinese were selected as
masters of the most exquisite tortures. A vile
nightmare is the result. It demands strong
nerves to read it once through; a rereading
70
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU
would seem incredible. Swift is in comparison
an ironical comedian.
Les Memoires d'une Femme de Chambre
(1901) is backstairs gossip, though the purpose
is not missing; again satire of the better classes,
so-called. Les vingt-et-un jours d'un Neur-
asthenique (1902) need not detain us, nor such
one-act pieces as Vieux Menage (1901), Amanto
(1901), Scrupules (1902), or Le Foyer, with
Natanson (1908). He also wrote a preface to
Margaret Andoux's story, Marie Claire. The
first important dramatic work of Mirbeau was
Les Mauvais Bergers, in five acts, produced at
the Theatre de la Renaissance (December 14,
1897). We can still evoke the image of Sarah
Bernhardt in the last act, an act charged with
pity and irony. The play, because of its politi-
cal and social currents, created a dolorous and
profound impression. The work has in it some-
thing of both The Conquest of Bread and The
Weavers. In Les Affaires sont les Affaires, pro-
duced at the Theatre Frangais (April 20, 1903),
Mirbeau is at his satirical best. The play has
been shown here, but in a colorless, unconvinc-
ing style. In De Feraudy's hands the character
of Isidore Lechat, both a type and an individual
one of our modern captains of industry (in the
old days, a chevalier of industry?) was per-
fectly exhibited. After witnessing in June of the
same year a performance of this bitterly satirical
comedy I met the author, who appeared as
BEDOUINS
mUd-inannered a pirate as ever cut a poet or
scuttled a ship of State.
Paul Hervieu told me at the time that the
bark of this old growling mastiff was worse than
his bite; but his victims did not believe this.
He was, in his dynamic prime, the best-hated
publicist in all Paris and that is saying a lot,
for there were also Barbey d'Aurevilly, Ernst
Hello, Louis Veuillot, J. K. Huysmans and sev-
eral other virtuosi in the noble art of making
foes. Decidedly, Mirbeau was not a lagger be-
hind those pamphleteers and dealers in corrosive
verbal values.
That he could be human was shown in his
vertiginous automobile story La 628-E8, where,
after retelling what Victor Hugo had hinted at
in his Choses vues, Mirbeau made an apology
to the daughter or was it granddaughter? of
Mme. Hanska Balzac for a certain chapter
which relates the Russian lady's doings on the
heels of her great husband's death. Mirbeau
was not legally compelled to withdraw this
chapter, as it was a thrice-told tale in Paris, but
a friend explained to him the lady's distress
and he promptly made the only amend he could.
This man had also a prodigious heart.
72
VIII
ANARCHS AND ECSTASY
LEST we forget. While competition is the
life of cocottes, the rival opera companies that
fill the air of Gotham with their lyric cries
offer to the truly musical only the choice be-
tween two despairs; with our accustomed happy
indecision we prefer Leopold Godowsky to
Puccini. We frankly confess our love of sym-
phonic music, and would rather listen to a Bee-
thoven string quartet played by the Flonzaleys
than all the operas ever written; the majority of
them depicting soul-states in a sanatorium.
However, there is the charm of aversion, and
that piques the curious. Music in opera is
prodigal, never generous. It is the too-much
that appalls. It is as reticent as a female poli-
tician and a hundredfold more attractive. Fly-
ing fish, these singing-actors. They needs must
swim and fly. Winged fish, birds with fins. It
is an ambiguous art, the operatic, and it is de-
vised to tickle the ears, dazzle the eyes, of the
unmusical and myopic. It breeds personal gos-
sip, never thought. For God's sake, let us sit
upon the ground and tell sad stories of Mary
Garden's celebrated eyebrows! (This modern
instance, for Mary always goes first, as Henry
73
BEDOUINS
Arthur of the Jones family would say, does not
necessitate Shakespearean quotation marks.)
From Bach to Scriabin, have not all composers
been anarchs ? At first blush the plodding John
Sebastian Bach of the Ill-Tempered Clavichord
seems a dubious figure with which to drape the
red flag of revolt. He grew a forest of children.
He taught early and late. He played the organ
in church of Sundays. Nevertheless, his music
proves him a revolutionist. And, like any good
social democrat, he quarrelled with his surround-
ings. He even went out for a drink during a
prosy sermon all sermons are necessarily prosy,
else they wouldn't be sermons and was almost
discharged by his superiors for returning late; a
perpetual warning to thirsty organists. If Lom-
broso had been cognizant of this suspicious fact
he would have built a terrific structure of de-
generation theories with all sorts of inferential
subcellars. Stranger still, the music of Bach
remains as revolutionary as the hour it was
written. No latter-day composer has gone so
far as some of his fantasies. Mozart and Gluck
depended too much on aristocratic patronage
to play the r61es of anarchs; yet tales are extant
of their refusal to lick the boots of the mighty
or curve the spine of the suppliant. Handel!
A fighter, a revolutionist born, a hater of ty-:
rants. And the most virile among musicians
except the peasant Beethoven since the recent
war become a Belgian composer ! His contempt
for rank and its entailed snobberies was like a
74
ANARCHS AND ECSTASY
blow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be
considered. He was a henpecked Croatian, and
strange stories are related of this merry little
blade, truly a chamber-music husband. Men-
delssohn was Bach watered down for general
consumption. Schubert and Schumann were
anarchs, but the supreme anarch of art was
Beethoven, who translated into daily practice
the radicalism of his music.
Because of its opportunities for the expansion
of the soul, music has ever attracted the strong
free sons of the earth. It is, par excellence, the
art masculine. The profoundest truths, the
most blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated
within the walls of a symphony, and the police
none the wiser. Think of Chopin and Tchai-
kovsky and the arrant doctrines they preached.
It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of
the censor that has made of music a playground
for brave hearts. In his Siegfried and under
the long nose of royalty Richard Wagner
preached anarchy, put into tone, words, ges-
tures, attitudes, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas,
pronouncements so terrible that the Old Man
of the Mountain, as Bernard Shaw calls Gov-
ernment, if it but knew, would forbid his music,
not because it was penned by a German, but
because it is inimical to tyranny, therefore the
most democratic music ever composed.
Chopin presents us with a psychic "equiva-
lent of war," as William James has put it, in
portions of his music, notably the polonaises;
75
BEDOUINS
while Richard Strauss has buried more bombs
in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon
smothered in roses, or Bakounine and his nihilis-
tic prose. Liszt, midway in his mortal lif e, was
bitten by the socialistic theories of Saint-Simon,
and, though a silken courtier, he was an inno-
vator in his music. Brahms was a free-thinker
and a democrat, but closely hugged the classic
line and seldom strayed from the boundaries of
his Romantic park. Berlioz, Hector of the
Flaming Locks, was, his life long, a fiery indi-
vidualist. He would have made a picturesque
figure waving a blood-red flag on the barricades.
His fantastic symphony is charged with the
tonal commandments of anarchy. Richard
Wagner may not have shouldered a musket
during the Dresden uprising of 1849, yet he was,
with Roeckel and Bakounine, one of its inspirers.
Luckily for us he ran away, else Tristan
might have remained in the womb of eternal
silence. Wagner may be called the Joseph
Proudhon among composers; his music is anar-
chy incarnate, passionately deliberate, like the
sad and logical music we find in the great
Frenchman's Philosophy of Misery (by the way,
a subtitle). His very scheme of harmonization
is the symbol of a soul insurgent in the music of
Richard Strauss. And what shall we say to the
exquisite anarchy of Debussy and Ravel? To
the cerebral insurrection of Schoenberg? To
the devastating sirocco blasts of Scriabin, Stra-
vinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff? The Neo-
ANARCHS AND ECSTASY
Scythians, who, like their savage forebears,
throw across their saddle-bow the helpless dia-
tonic and chromatic scales and bear away their
prisoners to their ultimate goal; the unknown
land of the sinister duodecuple scale ! Ah ! we
did not heed years ago the wise words of our
critical Nestor, H. E. Krehbiel, when he said,
"'Ware the Muscovite!" (He denies having
used this precise phrase. Too late. We have
pinned it to paper and it will go marching down
the corridor of destiny wearing his label.) Ecce
Cossakus ! Bad Latin, but reality. The Tar-
tars are coming. Anarchs all.
And ecstasy ! It is not an eminently modern
quality in the Seven Arts. Sculpture did for a
time resist the universal disintegration, this im-
broglio of all the arts. Before Rodin no sculptor
had so greatly dared to break the line, had
dared to shiver the syntax of stone. Sculpture
is a static, not a dynamic, art; therefore, let us
observe the rules, preserve the chill spirit of the
cemetery ! What Mallarme attempted in poetry
Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles do
not represent, but present emotion, are the evo-
cation of emotion; as in music, form and sub-
stance coalesce. If he does not, as did Mallarme,
arouse "the silent thunder afloat in the leaves/'
he summons from the vasty deep the spirits of
beauty, love, hate, pain, joy, sin, ecstasy, above
all, ecstasy. The primal and danger-breeding
gift of ecstasy is bestowed upon few. Keats had
it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron missed
77
BEDOUINS
it, as did the austere Wordsworth who had, per-
haps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it
from the first. Not Tennyson, and Browning
only in occasional exaltation. Like the "cold
devils" of Felicien Rops, coiled in frozen ecstasy,
the winds of hell booming about them, the po-
etry of Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and
Heine knew ecstasy, and Liszt too; but Wagner,
ill-tempered like all martyrs, was the master
adept of his century. Tchaikovsky closely fol-
lows him, and in the tiny piano pieces of Chopin
ecstasy is pinioned in a few bars, the soul rapt
to heaven in a phrase. Richard Strauss has
shown us a variation on the theme: voluptuous-
ness troubled by pain, the soul tortured by the
very ecstasy of ecstasy. Like Yeats, he is
"Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming
Door." William Blake and his figures rushing
down the secret pathway of the mystic, which
zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bot-
tomless pit of materialism, was a creator of the
darker nuances of pain and ecstasy. A sadistic
strain in all this.
Scriabin is of this tormented choir; as Arthur
B. Davies, our own mystic, primitive painter.
And Charles Martin Loeffler. It may be the
decadence, as any art is in decadence which
stakes the parts against the whole. That ec-
stasy may be aroused by pictures of love and
death, as in the cases of Poe and Baudelaire,
Wagner and Strauss, should not, therefore, be
78
ANARCHS AND ECSTASY
adjudged morbid. In the Far East they hyp-
notize neophytes with a bit of broken mirror,
for in the kingdom of art, as in heaven, there
are many mansions. It was possibly a relic of
his early admiration for the Baudelaire poems
that set Wagner to extorting ecstasy from his
orchestra by images of love and death, though
doubtless the temperament which seeks assuage-
ment in such a comminglement a temperament
more often encountered in mediaeval art than
now was natural to Wagner. He makes his
Isolde sing madly and mournfully over a corpse,
and, throwing herself upon the dead Tristan,
she dissolves into the ecstasies of sweet, cruel
love; in Salome, Richard Strauss closely pat-
terns after Wagner; there is the head of a dead
man though on a charger and there follows a
poignant ecstasy not to be found in all music.
Both men play with similar counters: love and
death, and death and love. In Pisa may be
seen (attributed by Vasari) Orcagna's fresco,
The Triumph of Death. It has been set to
grotesque music by Liszt in his Dance of
Death. Let us not forget the great Italian,
Gabriele d'Annunzio, whose magnificent prose,
from The Triumph of Death to Forse Che Si,
Forse Che No, is a paean to the tutelar gods of
humanity, love and death. The sting of the
flesh and the way of all flesh are intermingled
in Rodin's astounding fugue, The Gate of Hell.
First things and Last things, love and life, bit-
79
BEDOUINS
terness and death, have ever ruled the arts; and
all great art is anarchic, cosmos and chaos cun-
ningly proportioned.
But between the sublime and the silly there
is only a hair's breadth. If not guided by tact
and vision, the ecstatic in art and literature
may degenerate into the erotic, and from the
erotic to the tommyrotic is only a step. All this
tumultuous imagery, this rhapsody Huneker-
esque, is prompted by a photograph of Mary
Garden, whose enigmatic eyes collide with my
gaze across the Time and Space of my writing-
desk. Your memory is wooed by the golden
trumpets of Byzance, and when Mary speaks
she wears the sacred Zaimph of Salammbo.
Voltaire, in Candide, was wise when he advised
us: "II faut cultiver notre Jardin."
80
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PAINTED MUSIC
PAINTED music. The common identity of the
Seven Arts was a master theory of Richard Wag-
ner and a theory he endeavored his life long to
put into practice. Walter Pater, in his essay
on The School of Giorgione, has dwelt upon
the same theme, declaring music the archetype
of the arts. In his Essays Speculative, John
Addington Symonds has said some pertinent
things on the subject. Camille Mauclair, in
Idees Vivantes, seriously proposed a scheme for
the fusion of the arts. The fusion would be cere-
bral, as the actual mingling of sculpture, archi-
tecture, music, drama, acting, painting, and
dancing could never evoke the sensation of
unity. Not thus is synthesis to be attained.
It must be the "idea" of the arts rather than
their material blending. A pretty chimera!
Yet one that has piqued the attention of artists
for centuries. It was the half-crazy E. T. W.
Hoffmann, composer, dramatist, painter, poet,
stage manager, and a dozen other professions,
including those of genius and drunkard, who
set off a train of fireworks that dazzled the brains
of Poe, Baudelaire, and the later symbolists.
81
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Persons who hear painting, see music, touch
poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes
are now classed by the psychical police as deca-
dent, though such notions are as old as art and
literature. In his L'Audition Coloree, Suarez
de Mendoza has said that the sensation of color-
hearing, the faculty of associating tones and
colors, is often a consequence of an association
of ideas established in youth. The colored
vowels of Arthur Rimbaud, which should be
taken as a poet's crazy prank; the elaborate
treatises by Rene Ghil, which are terribly ear-
nest; the casual remarks that one hears, such as
"scarlet is like a trumpet blast" it was scarlet
to the young Mozart; certain pages of Huysmans
and Mallarme, all furnish examples of the curi-
ous muddling of the five senses and the mixing
of artistic genres. Naturally, this confusion has
invaded criticism, which, limited in imagery,
sometimes seeks to transpose the technical terms
of one art to another.
Whistler, with his Nocturnes, Color-Notes,
Symphonies in Rose and Silver, his Color-
Sonatas, boldly annexed well-worn musical
phrases that, in their new estate, took on fresher
meanings, while remaining knee-deep in the
swamp of the nebulous. Modern composers
have retaliated. Musical Impressionism is en-
joying its vogue and the New Poetry is desper-
ately pictorial. Soul-landscapes and etched
sonnets are titles not unpleasing to the ear.
What if they do not mean much ! There was a
82
PAINTED MUSIC
time when to say "she had a sweet voice"
aroused a smile. What has sugar to do with
sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this
melange of terminologies, yet, occasionally, it
strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling
that the arts have a common matrix, that, emo-
tionally, they are akin. "Her slow smile" in
fiction has had marked success, but when I
wrote of the "slow Holland landscape," the
phrase was suspiciously regarded. (I proba-
bly found it in Verlaine or Rodin.) The
bravest critic of the arts was Huysmans, who
pitched pell-mell into the hell-broth of his
critiques any image that assaulted his fecund
brain. He forces us to see his picture; for he
was primarily concerned with the eye, not the
ear. Flaubert represents in its highest estate a
fusion of sound and sense and seeing; he was
both an auditive and a visualist. His prose
sings, while its imagery sharply impinges upon
the optic nerve. Nor are taste and smell neg-
lected recall the very flavor of arsenic that
killed Emma Bo vary or the scents of the wood-
land where that adorable girl lingered with her
lover. Joined to those evocations of the five
senses there is a classic balance of sentence,
phrase, paragraph, page; the syntactic architec-
ture is magnificent, though not excelling the elo-
quent Bossuet or the pictorial Chateaubriand as
to complex, harmonious structure. These three
great French writers had polyphonic minds, and
their books and the orations of the superb Bos-
83
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suet englobe a world of ideas and sensations,
music and painting.
And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "compre-
hensive," as those with the sixth, or synthetic,
sense have been named by Lombroso-Levi ?
Beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botti-
cello, the little bottle), Botticelli as a painter
became the most original in all Italy. His can-
vases possess powers of evocation. He was a
visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mer-
curial Fra Lippo Lippi and of the Brothers
Poliajuolo, and his vision must have been some-
thing more than paint and pattern. A palimp-
sest may be discerned by the imaginative
rather let us say fanciful, since Coleridge set
forth the categories whose secrets are not to
be easily deciphered, and are something more
than those portrayed on the flat surfaces of his
pictures. Like most artists of his period he
painted the usual number of Madonnas; never-
theless, he did not convince his world, or suc-
ceeding generations, that his piety was ortho-
dox. During his lifetime suspected of strange
heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante,
this disciple of Savonarola, is now definitely
ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and
yet a mystic. Does not the perverse clash in
such a temperament produce exotic dissonances ?
All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts
when Botticelli paced its narrow streets and
lived its splendid colored life. His sensitive
nature absorbed, as does a sponge water, the
84
PAINTED MUSIC
impulses and motives of his contemporaries.
The secrets lurking in the "new learning"
doctrines that made for damnation, such as the
recrudescence of the mediaeval conception of an
angelic neuter host, neither for heaven nor hell,
not on the side of Lucifer, nor yet with the
starry hosts were said to have been mirrored
in his pictures. Its note is in Citta di Vita, in
the heresies of the Albigenses, and it may well
go back to Origen. Those who could read his
paintings and there were clairvoyant theolo-
gians abroad in Florence might make of them
what they would. Painted music is less under-
standable than painted heresy. Matteo Pal-
mieri is reported to have dragged Botticelli into
dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medi-
cean days a cruel order of intelligence that de-
lighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of
the young. A nature like Botticelli's, which
frankly surrendered to new ideas if they but
wore the mask of subtlety, was swept, no doubt,
away in the eddying cross currents of Florentine
intellectual movements. Mere instinct never
moved him from his moral anchorage, for he
was a sexless sort of man. Always the vision.
He did not palter with the voluptuous frivolities
of his fellow artists, yet his canvases are fever-
ishly disquieting. The sting of the flesh is
remote. Love is transfigured, though not spiri-
tually, and not served to us as a barren parable,
but made more intense by the breaking down of
the thin partition between the sexes; a consuming
85
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emotion, not quite of this world nor of the next.
However, the rebellion that stirred in the bosom
of Botticelli never took on concrete aspects.
His religious subjects are Hellenized, not after
the sterner, more inflexible method of Mantegna,
but resembling those of a philosophic Athenian
who has read and comprehended Dante. His
illustrations show us a different Dante, one who
might not have altogether pleased that gloomy
exile. The transpositions of the Divine Comedy
by William Blake seem to sound the depths;
Botticelli, notwithstanding the grace of his
"baby Centaurs" and the wreathed car of Bea-
trice, is the profounder man of the pair.
His life, veiled toward the last, was not happy,
although he was recognized as a great painter.
Watteau concealed a cankering secret; so Botti-
celli. Melancholy is the base of the Florentine's
work. As a young man he created in joy and
freedom; but the wings of Diirer's Bat were out-
stretched over his brooding head. Melencolia !
He could ask if there is anything sadder under
the sun than a soul incapable of sadness. There
is more poignant music in his Primavera, in the
weary, indifferent countenances of his lean,
neuropathic Madonnas Pater calls them " pee-
vish " in his Venus at the Uffizi, than in the
paintings of any other Renaissance artist. The
veils are there, the consoling veils of an exquisite
art, which are missing in the lacerated and realis-
tic holy folk of the Flemish Primitives. Joyful-
86
PAINTED MUSIC
ness cannot be denied Botticelli; but it is not
the golden joy of Giorgione; "Big George of
Castelfranco." An emaciated music emanates
from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to
whom love has become a scourge of sense and
spirit. Music? Yes, there is the "colored-
hearing" of Mendoza. The canvases of Bot-
ticelli sound the opalescent overtones of an
unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this
tender, tremulous virgin, whose right hand,
deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor from
invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, su-
premely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the
fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven
paces tread the measures of a dance we but
overhear. Garlanded in blossoms, a glorious
girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric
moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows
her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered
floor of the earth. The light niters through the
thick trees, its rifts as rigid as a candle. The
nymph in the brake is threatening. Another
epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his
bolt in mid-air. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene ?
What the fable? Music plucked down from
vibrating skies, music made visible. A mere
masque, laden with the prim, sweet allegories of
the day, it is not. That blunt soul, Vasari, saw
at best its surfaces. The poet Politian got
closer to the core. Centuries later our percep-
tions sharpened by the stations traversed of sor-
87
BEDOUINS
row and experience, lend to this immortal canvas
a m'ore sympathetic, less literal interpretation.
There is music, too, in the Anadyomene of
the Uffizi. Still stranger music. Those sudden
little waves that lap an immemorial strand;
that shimmering shell, its fan-spokes converging
to the parted feet of the goddess; her hieratic
pose, its modesty symbolic, the hair that ser-
pentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders
that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese
group blowing tiny gem-like buds with their
puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tip-
toe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping
all are vernal breezes, the wind that weeps in
little corners, unseen, yet sensed, on every inch
of the picture what are these mundane things
but the music of an art, original at its birth, and
since never reborn ? The larger, simpler, curved
rhythms of the greater men, Michelangelo, Da
Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, are not in Botti-
celli. Nevertheless, his voice is irresistible.
Modern as is his spirit, as modern as Watteau,
Chopin, or Shelley, he is no less ethereal; ethe-
real and also realistic. We can trace his artistic
ancestry; but what he became no man could
have predicted. Technically, as one critic has
written, "he was the first to understand the
charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in ex-
pressing the joining of the arm and body, the
flexibility of the hips, the roundness of the
shoulder, the elegance of the leg, the little
88
PAINTED MUSIC
shadow that marks the springing of the neck,
and, above all, the carving of the hand; but
even more, he understood "le prestige insolent
des grands yeux."
Pater found his color cold and cadaverous,
"and yet the more you come to understand
what imaginative coloring really is, that all
color is no mere delightful quality of natural
things, but a spirit upon them by which they
become expressive to the spirit, the better you
like this peculiar quality of color." Bernard
Berenson goes further. To him the entire can-
vas, Venus Rising from the Sea, presents us
with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable
to our imagination of touch and movement. . . .
The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-
communicating motion is always there. And
writing of the Pallas in the Pitti galleries, he
most eloquently declares: "As to the hair
imagine shapes having the supreme life of line
you may see in the contours of licking flames,
and yet possessed of all the plasticity of some-
thing which caresses the hand that models it to
its own desire!" And, after speaking of Botti-
celli's stimulating line, he continues: "Imagine
an art made up entirely of these quintessences
of movement-values and you will have some-
thing that holds the same relation to represen-
tation that music holds to speech and this art
exists and is called lineal decoration. In this
art of arts Sandro Botticelli may have had
89
'BEDOUINS
rivals in Japan and elsewhere in the East, but
in Europe never ! . . . He is the greatest mas-
ter of lineal design that Europe ever had."
Again, painted music; not the sounding sym-
bolism of the emotions, but the abstract music
of design. Nevertheless, the appeal of Botti-
celli is auditive. Other painters have spun
more intricate, more beautiful webs; have made
more sensuous color-music; but the subtle sara-
bands of Botticelli they have not composed.
Here is a problem for the psychiatrist. In
paint, manifestations of this order could be set
down to mental lesion; that is how Maurice
Spronck classifies the sensation. He studied it
in the writings of the Goncourts and Flaubert.
The giant of Croisset told the Goncourts that
to him Salammbo was purple and L'Education
Sentimentale grey, Carthage and Paris. A char-
acteristic fancy. But why is it that scientific
gentlemen, who predicate genius as eye-strain,
do not reprove poets for their sensibility to the
sound of words, to the shape and cadence of the
phrase? It would appear that only prose-men
are the culpable ones if they overhear the harp-
ing of invisible harps from Ibsen's Steeplejacks,
or describe the color of the thoughts of Zara-
thustra. In reality, not one but thousands of
people listen in the chill galleries of Florence to
the sweet, nervous music of Botticelli. This
testimony of the years is for the dissenters to
explain. "Fantastico, Stravagante," as Vasari
nicknamed Botticelli, has literally created an
90
PAINTED MUSIC
audience which learned to use its eyes as he did,
fantastically and extravagantly.
He passed through the three stages dear to
arbitrary criticism. Serene in his youthful
years; troubled, voluptuous, and visionary dur-
ing the Medicean period; sombre, mystic, a
convert to Savonarola at the end. He traversed
a great crisis not untouched. Certain political
assassinations and the Pazzi conspiracy hurt
him to the quick. He noted the turbulence of
Rome and Florence, saw behind the gayly tinted
arras of the Renaissance the sinister figures
of supermen and criminals. He never married.
When Tommaso Soderini begged him to take a
wife he responded: "The other night I dreamed
I was married. I awoke in such horror and
chagrin that I could not fall asleep again. I
arose and wandered about Florence like one
possessed." Evidently not intended by nature
to be husband or father. Like Watteau, like
Baudelaire, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries
abiding on the thither side of the facile joys
of life, Botticelli was not tempted by the
usual baits of happiness. His great Calumnia,
in the Uffizi, might be construed as an image
of the soul of Botticelli. Truth, naked and
scorned we see again the matchless silhouette
of his Venus misunderstood and calumniated,
stands in the hall of a vast palace. She points
to the heavens. She is a living interrogation-
mark. Pilate's question ? Botticelli was adored.
But understood? An enigmatic malady rav-
BEDOUINS
aged his innermost being. He died poor, soli-
tary, did this composer of luminous chants and
pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams, and
of angels who long for gods other than those of
Good and Evil. You think of the mystic Joa-
chim of Flora and his Third Kingdom; the
Kingdom of the Holy Spirit which is to follow
the Kingdom of the Father and the Kingdom of
the Son; the same Joachim who declared that
the true ascetic counts nothing of his own, save
only his harp. "Qui vere monachus est nihil
reputat esse suum nisi citharam." And you
also recall St. Anselm, who said that he would
rather go to hell sinless than be in heaven
smudged by a single transgression.
A grievously wounded, timid soul, an intruder
at the portals of Paradise, Botticelli had not
the courage either to enter or withdraw. He
experienced visions that rapt him into the ninth
heaven, but when he reported them in the lan-
guage of his design his harassed, divided spirit
chilled the ardors of his art. In sooth, a spiri-
tual dichotomy. And thus it is that the multi-
tude does not worship at his shrine as at the
shrine of Raphael. Do they unconsciously note
the adumbration of a paganism long dead, but
revived for a brief Botticellian hour? Venus or
Madonna! Adonais or Christ! Under which
god? The artist never frankly tells us. Leg-
ends are revived of fauns turned monks, of the
gods in exile and at servile labor in a world that
has forgotten them, but with a sublimated
92
PAINTED MUSIC
ecstasy not Heine's. When we stand before
Botticelli and hear the pallid, muted music of
his canvases we are certain that the last word
concerning him shall not be uttered until his
last line has vanished; even then his archaic
harmonies may reverberate in the ears of man-
kind. But always music painted.
93
POE AND HIS POLISH CONTEM-
PORARY
IN the City of Boston, January 19, 1809, a
son was born to David and Elizabeth Poe. On
March i, 1809, in the village of Zelazowa-Wola,
twenty-eight English miles from Warsaw, in
Poland, a son was born to Nicholas and Justina
Chopin (Chopena or Szop). The American is
known to the world as Edgar Allan Poe, the
poet; the Pole as Frederic Francois Chopin, the
composer. On October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died,
poor and neglected, in Washington Hospital at
Baltimore, and on October 17, 1849, Frederic
Chopin expired at Paris surrounded by loving
friends, among whom were titled ladies. Tur-
genev has said there were at least one hundred
princesses and countesses in whose arms the
most wonderful among modern composers
yielded up his soul. Poe and Chopin were con-
temporaries, and, curious coincidence, two su-
premely melancholy artists of the Beautiful
lived and died almost synchronously.
My most enduring artistic passions are for
the music of Chopin and the prose of Flaubert.
In company with the cool, clear magic of a Jan
Vermeer canvas, that of the Pole and French-
94
POE'S POLISH CONTEMPORARY
man grazes perfection. But as a lad Chopin
quite flooded my emotional horizon. I had
conceived a fantastic comparison between Poe
and Chopin, and I confess I was slightly piqued
when Ignace Jan Paderewski, not then Premier
of Poland, assured me that Chopin was born
in the year 1810, and not the year earlier.
The date chiselled on Chopin's Paris tomb in
Pere Lachaise a sad tribute to the mediocre
art of Clesinger, who married Solange Sand is,
after all, the correct one, and this new date,
which is also the old, is inscribed on the Chopin
Memorial at Warsaw, Poland. I shall not at-
tempt to dispute the claim; even the most pains-
taking of Chopin biographers, Prof. Frederick
Niecks, admits his error. The latest biog-
raphy, said to be definitive, by the Polish mu-
sicograph, Ferdinand Hoesick, I have not seen;
the war impeded the translation. Yet I am
fain to believe that too many parish registers
were in existence, and perhaps the next one that
is unearthed may give as new dates either 1808
or 1811. I prefer 1809, while apologizing for
my obstinacy. Unhappily for future investi-
gators, Russian Cossacks in 1915 ravaged with
torch and sword the birthplace, not only de-
stroying the Chopin monument, but burning
his house and the parish church. These once
highly esteemed vandals, pogrom heroes, and
butchers of thousands of helpless Jewish women,
children, and old men, only repeated at Zela-
zowa-Wola the actions of their forebears at War-
95
BEDOUINS
saw during the sanguinary uprising of 1831.
The correspondence of Chopin, treasured by his
sister, Louise Jedrzejewicza, and the piano of
his youth were completely destroyed. (Louise
died in 1855, and the other sister, Isabella Bar-
cinska, in 1881.)
The love of Poe began early with me. My
father had been a friend of the poet's in Phila-
delphia, and a member of the Poe circle during
the forties of the last century; " roaring forties,
indeed. That prime old comedian, Billy Burton,
the ideal Falstaff of his day; John Sartain, the
engraver, and father of William Sartain, the
painter; Judge Conrad, who could move his
listeners to tears when he recited the Lord's
Prayer; the elder Booth, a noble tragedian much
given to drink; Graham, the publisher, and sev-
eral others whose names have escaped my mem-
ory, composed this interesting group. In his
memoirs John Sartain has written of Poe and
of a certain wild midnight walk in Fairmount
Park. I remember the elder Sartain as an in-
frequent visitor at our house, and I also remem-
ber how I hung on his words when he spoke of
Poe. My father told me that Poe would be-
come a raving maniac after a thimbleful of
brandy, so sensitive was his cerebral mecha-
nism. But other authorities contradict this
theory. Poe had been often seen to toss off
a tumblerful of cognac neat. Last year at
Atlantic City I met Mr. Hutzler, a well-known
merchant of Baltimore, a spry young octo-
POE'S POLISH CONTEMPORARY
genarian and a seasoned raconteur. He told
me, and in a vivid manner, of seeing Edgar
Poe and Junius Brutus Booth hanging on to
the same lamp-post, both helplessly drunk at
midday. This happened about 1845, as the boys,
Mr. Hutzler among the rest, trooped out to
dinner from the public school on Holiday Street.
Mr. Hutzler's memory has a mirror-like clear-
ness, and he described the occurrence as if it
had happened yesterday. Like irreverent school-
boys, they surrounded the greatest living Shake-
spearean actor and the greatest American poet
and mocked at them.
We lived on North Seventh Street, and twice
a day, on my trip to and from school, I passed
the house where Poe had lived during his sojourn
in Philadelphia, from 1838 to 1844. That house
I should not have been able to locate to-day if
my friend, Christopher Morley (charming writer,
with a name that recalls spacious Elizabethan
times: Kit Morley !), hadn't described it. This
house, in which Poe wrote The Raven and The
Gold Bug, is at the northwest corner of Sev-
enth and Brandywine Streets. Another critic
friend, Albert Mordell, assures me that the old
pear-tree in the back yard still bears fruit for
the present resident, Mrs. Owens. The house
is the rear building of another numbered 530
North Seventh Street. Mr. Mordell sent me a
photograph which shows a typical Philadelphia
red brick structure with white shutters and
marble steps. I have heard of many spots
97
BEDOUINS
where Poe wrote The Raven, Fordham among
the rest, but as boys we told ourselves when
we stared at the old building: "Poe wrote his
Raven and Gold Bug there !" It is something
to remember in these piping times of hypocrisy
and universal hatred of art, music, and litera-
ture.
It would be a strained parallel to compare
Poe with Chopin at all points; nevertheless,
chronological coincidences are not the only com-
parisons that might be instituted without exag-
geration. True, the roots of Chopin's culture
were more cosmopolitan, more richly nurtured
than Poe's; the poet, like an air-plant, found his
spiritual sustenance from sources unknown to
the America of his day. Of Poe's intellectual
ancestry, however, we may form some concep-
tion, though his learning was not profound,
despite his copious quotations from half-forgot-
ten and recondite authors, Glanvil, for example.
Nevertheless, the matchless lines, "Helen, thy
beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore,"
. . . were struck off in the fire of a boyhood
passion. Chopin had a careful training under
the eye of his Polish teacher, Eisner; but who
could have taught him how to compose his
Opus 2, the Variations on Mozart's La ci
darem la mano? Both Poe and Chopin were
full-fledged artists from the beginning, their in-
dividualities and limitations sharply defined.
Perhaps the most exquisite music penned by
Poe is this same Helen, while the first mazourka
POE'S POLISH CONTEMPORARY
of Chopin stamps him as an original poet. In
the later productions of these men there is more
than a savor of morbidity. Consider the Fan-
taisie-Polonaise, Opus 61, with its most musical,
most melancholy cadences; or the F minor Ma-
zourka, composed during the last illness of Cho-
pin; a sick brain betrays itself in the rhythmic
insistence of the theme, a soul-weary Where-
fore? In the haunting repetitions and harmo-
nies of Ulalume there is a poetic analogue. This
poem, in which sense swoons into sound, pos-
sesses a richness of color and rhythmic accent
that betoken the mentality of a poet whose brain
is perilously unhinged. If alcohol produced this
condition, then might a grateful world erect
altars to such a wondrous god of evocation.
Prohibition has not thus far produced a Poe.
But he wasn't the creation of either alcohol or
drugs, though they were contributory causes;
they prodded his cortical cells into abnormal
activity, made leap the neuronic filaments with
surprising consequences. No, a profound cere-
bral lesion was the real reason why Poe resorted
to brandy to soothe his exacerbated nerves, and
not because he drank did he go to wrack and
ruin. His "case" is like Baudelaire's and
E. T. W. Hoffmann's; not to mention the names
of James Clarence Mangan and Monticelli, one
the singer of Dark Rosaleen, the other that
master of gorgeous hues, fantasies of enchanted
lands and crumbling linear designs.
Poe, then, like Chopin, did not die too soon.
99
BEDOUINS
Neurotic natures, they lived their lives with the
intensity which Walter Pater has declared is the
true existence. "To burn always with this
hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy,
is success in life. Failure is to form habits. "
Alas ! that way madness lies for the majority of
mankind, notwithstanding the aesthetic exhor-
tation of Pater. Poe and Chopin fulfilled the
Pater conditions during their brief sojourn on
our parent planet. They ever burned with the
flame of genius, and that flame devoured them.
They were not citizens of moral repute. Nor
did they accumulate "mortal pelf." They
failed to form habits, and while the psychic
delicacy of Chopin proved a barrier against
self-indulgence of the grosser sort, he contrived
to outrage social and ethical canons even
in tolerant Paris. The influence of George
Sand, her ascendancy over his volition, worked
evil and unhappiness. The delicate porcelain of
his genius could not float down-stream in com-
pany with her brassy ware without ensuing
disaster for the finer of the twain. Alcoholic
neurosis did not trouble him, but he was tuber-
cular, and that malady is more fatal than alco-
holism. Poe was not precisely a drunkard;
probably masked epilepsy accounts for his va-
garies; such victims are periodical dipsomaniacs,
" circulates" is the term of the psychiatrists.
His personality was winning, his speech electric,
his eye alight with genius; but, then, the obverse
of the medal ! A sad, slouching creature, with
100
POE'S POLISH CONTEMPORARY
a cynic's sneer, a bitter tongue which lashed
friend and foe alike, a gambler, a libertine
what has this unhappy poet not been called?
Baudelaire asked whether the critical hyenas
could not have been prevented from defacing
the tomb of Poe. (He used Rabelaisian lan-
guage in the original French.) Charles Baude-
laire, a spiritual double of Poe, was another un-
happy wraith of genius, and of the same choir
of self-lacerated and damned souls.
Fancy Poe and Chopin in New York during
the prosaic atmosphere of those days ! If Chopin
had not achieved artistic success at the Soiree
of Prince Radziwill in Paris, 1831, he would
probably have gone to America, where he might
have met Poe. He had declared his intention
to leave Paris for New York, and his passport
was vised "passing through." Poe and Chopin
conversing! The idea is rather disquieting.
Stendhal, not hoodwinked by Chateaubriand,
with his purple phrases and poetic visions of
virgin forests and sweet Indian girls in an im-
possible Louisiana, declared that America was
materialistic beyond hope of redemption. Tal-
leyrand knew better. However, it was bet-
ter for the artistic development of the Po-
lish composer that he remained in the Old
World. Think of Chopin giving piano les-
sons to the daughters of the New-Rich at
the fashionable Battery, and Poe encountering
him at some conversazione they had conver-
saziones then and propounding to him Heine-
101
BEDOUINS
like questions: Are the roses at home still in
their flame-hued pride? Do the trees sing as
beautifully as ever in the moonlight ? Are hum-
ming-birds and star-dust Francesca Astra
still as rare as ambergris ? At a glance Poe and
Chopin would have sympathized. In sensibility
the American was not inferior to the Pole. Poe
would have felt the "drummed tears" in the
playing of Chopin, and in turn Chopin would
not have failed to divine the vibrations of Poe's
high-strung nature. Both men were mystics,
were seers. What a meeting that would have
been; yet inevitable misery might have come to
the Pole in unsympathetic New York. A dif-
ferent tale if Poe had gone to Paris and enjoyed
a meed of artistic success. Baudelaire, who
was born in April, 1821, therefore a young chap
in 1845, would have known him and, congenial
souls, they would surely have gone to the devil
quicker than apart. Baudelaire and Poe!
There's a marvellous combination for you of
fantasy, moonlight, rotten nerves, hasheesh, and
alcohol! The fine flower of the genius of Poe
might have bloomed more fragrantly on French
soil; perhaps with the added note of depravity
not in his sexless creations, and so corroding a
note in Les Fleurs du Mai. Who may dare say !
But then we might not have had the sinister
melancholia, so sweetly despairing, so despair-
ingly sweet, that we enjoy in the real Poe.
The culture of Chopin was not of a finer stamp
than Poe's, nor was his range so wide. In their
102
POE'S POLISH CONTEMPORARY
intellectual sympathies both were rather narrow,
though intense to an emotional poignancy, and
both were remarkable in mood- versatility. B orn
aristocrats, purple raiment became them well.
Both were sadly deficient in planturous humor
and the Attic salt that conserves the self-mock-
ery of Heine. Irony they possessed to a super-
lative degree. Both created rhythmic beauty,
evoked the charm of evanescence. A crepuscu-
lar art; the notations of twilit souls and the
" October of the sensations." Both were at
their best in smaller artistic forms. When either
one spreads his pinions for symphonic flight we
think of Matthew Arnold's interpretation of
Shelley: "beating in the void his luminous wings
in vain." Which phrase truly is of Mat's own
making, yet somehow misses the essential Shel-
ley. Poe and Chopin supremely mastered their
intellectual instruments. Artificers in precious
cameos, they are of an artistic consanguinity
because of their extraordinary absorption in the
Beautiful. Poe wrote in English, but was he
really as American as Hawthorne and Emerson
were American? His verse and prose depict
characters and landscapes that belong to No
Man's Land, in that mystic region east of the
sun, west of the moon. The American scene
was unsympathetic to him, and he refused
to become even morally acclimated. His El-
dorado is "over the mountains of the moon,
down the valley of the shadow." His crea-
tions are bodiless; shadow of shadows, the
BEDOUINS
incarnation of Silence, set forth in spectral
speech. Unlike any other native-born writer,
he sounds better in a French garb; the Baude-
laire translations improve his style, and Stephane
Mallarme has accomplished an almost miracu-
lous transposition of Ulalume. (The Raven
Le Corbeau by the same master I do not care
for as much, and with its refrain, " Jamais plus ! "
is not so musically sonorous as "Nevermore!")
Henry Beyle-Stendhal wrote in his witty,
malicious manner that "Romanticism is the art
of presenting to the people literary works which
in the actual state of their habitudes and beliefs
are capable of giving the greatest possible plea-
sure; Classicism, on the contrary, is the art of
presenting literature which gave the greatest
possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers."
Stendhal is half right. A Classic is sometimes
a dead Romantic. But Poe and Chopin remain
invincibly Romantic, yet are Classics. Chopin
is more human than Poe, inasmuch as he is
patriotic. His polonaises are "cannons buried
in flowers," his psychic bravery overflows in the
Revolutionary Etude. He is Chopin. And he
is also Poland. Like the national poet, Adam
Mickiewicz, he struck many human chords,
though some of his melodies could dwell in Poe's
"misty mid-region of Weir," where Beauty
boasts an icy reign. There is a disturbing
dissonance in the Poe-Chopin case: Poe was a
man without a country; Chopin had the price-
less possession of Poland. On his heart was
104
POE'S POLISH CONTEMPORARY
engraved "Poland." The love of Frederic
Chopin for his native land dowered him with a
profounder nature than the Lucifer of Amer-
ican poetry, Edgar Allan Poe. But what en-
igmatic, beautiful souls !
105
XI
GEORGE LUKS
OF course, I knew in a vague way where
Edgecombe Road and Jumel Place spotted the
map, for I am a seasoned Manhattan cockney.
But, after all, I mixed up the Jumel Mansion
and the house of George Luks, and so I asked
that painter for some travel indications. He
sent me a map that was clarity itself. All I
had to do was to sit in the Broadway subway
till I reached One Hundred and Sixty-eighth
Street; then take the elevator as deep down in
the bowels of the earth as if in the London Un-
derground; on reaching the sidewalk proceed
northward to One Hundred and Seventieth
Street the little arrows on the chart are marked ;
then eastward (another arrow) and behold ! Am-
sterdam Avenue. There you enter a delicates-
sen bureau and tactfully inquire after Edge-
combe Road.
I did all these things, and was recently told
on a fine, breezy afternoon by a foreign youth
that the road was in front of my face, as was
Highbridge Park; around the corner was Jumel
Place. Enfin! I said to the polite guide, and
nosed my way till I saw an ideal cottage
though rather large for a cottage with a big
1 06
GEORGE LUKS
studio window facing the north. Recalling
what Luks had often said "To hades with a
north light; a man ought to be able to paint in
a cellar!" I wondered. Then I traversed a
garden and broke into the house, a burglar,
armed with a pen and a bagful of question-
marks. It was the home of the only George
Luks, who, happy boy, has a painting tempera-
ment with an "angel in the house" to protect
him from the contact of a world of cruel critics,
and is also the possessor of the disposition de-
scribed as "bubbling." His favorite exclama-
tion is: "Yours for happiness." He means it.
It is the leading-motive of his life.
Here are domestic comfort, a north light, and
plenty of models across the road in the open
air, splashed by sunshine or shadowed by trees;
babies, goats, nurse-girls, park loafers, police-
men, lazy pedestrians, noisy boys, nice little
girls with hoops, and the inevitable sparrows.
Rocks are in abundance. The landscape "com-
poses" itself. And you are not surprised, when
ushered into the great studio on the second
floor, to be confronted by canvases registering
various phases of the vibrating world hard-by.
Since he moved from down-town the painter is
becoming more of a plein-airiste.
Luks doesn't wander afar for subjects. He
still loves the familiar, the homely, the simple.
It had been several years since I saw his work.
Occasionally in Holland I would run across a
canvas by Jan Steen, Adrien Brouwer, or even
107
BEDOUINS
Hals, that recalled Luks. His artistic affinities
are Dutch rather than French; above all, he is
an American painter to his blunt finger-tips.
Beginning in the field of illustration, he was
plunged up to his eyes in New York life. I be-
lieve it was Arthur Brisbane who first suggested
to him that he should go in for painting in oils.
He went to Diisseldorf and survived that try-
ing experience a school that would submerge a
Manet. Paris followed. But George is not a
product of the schools. Theories sit lightly on
his mercurial shoulders. He loathes "move-
ments," and refers to the "new" men, cubists,
lamp-post impressionists, and futurists in words
that curdle the blood. Indeed, his vocabulary
is as variegated and picturesque as his palette.
As for the personality of the man well, it is
absolutely impossible to set down on paper any
adequate description of him. He is Puck. He
is Caliban. He is Falstaff. He is a tornado.
He is sentimental. He can sigh like a lover,
and curse like a trooper. Sometimes you won-
der over his versatility; a character actor, a low
comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a
profound sympathizer with human misery, and
a human orchestra. The vitality of him !
Perhaps the simile of a man-orchestra is the
most fitting. Did you ever see and hear those
curious creatures, less rare in our streets a
quarter of a century ago than now? I remem-
ber one in a small French city, a white-haired
fellow who, with fife, cymbals, bells, concertinas
108
GEORGE LUKS
he wore two strapped under either arm at
times fiddles, made epileptic music as he quivered
and danced, wriggled and shook his skull. The
big drum was fastened to his back, upon its top
were cymbals. On his head he wore a pavilion
hung with bells that pealed when he twisted his
long skinny neck. He carried a weather-worn
violin with a string or two missing; while a pipe
that might have been a clarinet years before
emitted but cackling tones from his thin lips.
By some incomprehensible co-ordination of mus-
cular movements he contrived simultaneously
to sound his armory of instruments; and the
whistling, screeching, scratching, drumming,
wheezing, and tinkling of metal were appalling.
But it was rhythmic, and at intervals the edge
of a tune might be discerned sharply cutting
through the dense cloud of vibrations, like the
prow of a boat cleaving a fog. And the rever-
berating music swelled, multifarious and amaz-
ing, as if a military band, from piccolo to drum,
were about to descend upon the town. A clat-
ter and bang, a sweet droning and shrill scrap-
ing were heard, as the old chap alternately
limped and danced in the middle of the roadway.
Now, George Luks is not venerable; he is a
comparatively young man, yet he reminds me
of that human orchestra. It is an image of
lithe activity that he suggests. What has this
to do with his art? Much. It is rhythmic,
many-colored, intensely alive, charged with
character and saturated with humanity, not
109
BEDOUINS
forgetting humor. Pathos is not absent. In
his latest productions I noted with satisfaction
more repose, deeper feeling, more solicitude for
his surfaces, the modulation of tones; and the
same old riotous joy in color for color's sake.
Yes, in his themes he still belongs to the illus-
trators. He seldom tells a definite story, but
there is no mistaking his point of view.
I saw portraits of girls in masquerade that
were expressed in terms of beautiful paint. A
little red-head, the sheer tonal charm immedi-
ate, made me think of both Henner and Whistler.
Then a Hals-like head, virile and sincere; a sen-
sitively limned portrait of a young girl, his
niece; a large canvas; charming girls under
umbrageous trees, a veritable gamut of greens;
an old woman who simply cried to be framed
and exhibited how many things did I not stare
at, wondering over the inexhaustible fecundity,
and groaning over the reckless prodigality, of
this gifted man ! With a tithe of his talent and
personal quality other painters have achieved
renown. However, he is not lacking in honors.
He has plenty of admirers, plenty of commis-
sions; yet do his friends wish that he would
sometimes apply the brakes to that fiery tem-
perament of his and steer his bark into less
tumultuous waters. His art would gain thereby
in finish, and distinction, and repose. And it
might also die.
I once called George Luks "a hand and an
eye." His power of observation is great. He
no
GEORGE LUKS
has the intensity of a Spaniard and the realism
of a Dutchman. He is both exact and rebel-
lious. Wherever he happens to pitch his tent
becomes his studio; preferably in the open. But
the East Side is his happy hunting-ground. In
the Yiddish restaurants where old men with
Biblical heads drink coffee and slowly converse;
on Houston Street, when, apparently, the entire
population is buying fish Shabbas- abend; in
vile corners where the refuse of humanity drift,
helpless, hopeless there Luks catches some
gleam of humor or pathos, some touch that
Gorky-like brings before us in a dozen strokes
of the brush or pencil a human trait which
emerges to the surface of this vast boiling ket-
tle like a spar thrown up by an angry sea. All
happiness is not lost in those mean streets; a
rift of wintry sunlight, a stray tune from some
wheezy barrel-organ, and two children waltz
with an unconscious zest of life that will sur-
vive until they are nonogenarians. Of such
contrasts Luks is the master.
His Spielers is like a quivering page from
from whom ? The East Side is yet to boast its
Dickens. And Dickens would have enjoyed
the picture of the little tousled Irish girl, with
her red locks, who dances with the pretty flaxen-
haired German child, surely a baker's daughter
from Avenue B. Now, you might suppose that
this vivid art, this painting which has caught
and retained the primal jolt and rhythm of the
sketch, must be necessarily rude and unscientific
in
BEDOUINS
in technique. It is the reverse. This particu-
lar picture is full of delicious tonalities. The
head of the blonde girl might be from an English
eighteenth-century master, and the air it fills
the spaces with a fluid caress.
And his Little Gray Girl, a poor wisp of flesh
wearing a grotesque shawl and hat, shivering in
the chill of a gloomy evening, sounds touching
music. The note of sentiment is not forced;
indeed, the passages of paint first catch the
eye, modulations of grays and blacks that tell
of the artist's sensitive touch. He has wanton
humors. He paints a French coachman, life-
size, seated at a cafe table about to swill brandy.
It is so real that you look another way. Or you
are shown a collection of beggars who were
famous a few years ago on Sixth Avenue, Broad-
way, the east side, Fulton Market: Matches
Mary, the Duchess, the tottering Musician, the
old Italian, "Gooda nighta, Boss!" and a host
of nocturnal creatures since dead or in the
hospital, perhaps in jail. Luks is their inter-
preter. Nor does he lean to the pessimistic; he
is a believer in life and its characteristic beauty.
The pretty he abhors.
There is the Duchess. In life she was an
elderly hag with a distinguished bearing, a
depraved woman of rank, who wore five or six
dresses at once, on her head a shapeless yet
attractive gear, and in her pocket she carried
a fat roll of bills fer purposes of dissipation, or
bribery, or for bailing out some Tenderloin
112
GEORGE LUKS
wreck. She is maleficence incarnate. Just
fancy this bird of the night set forth by a sym-
pathetic brush, endowed with a life that over-
flows the canvas, and you see this grande dame
strut by, the embodiment of evil, yet a duchess
a la Sir Johsua, though a rebours. It is a sinister
art which recalls the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec.
With Lautrec the work of Luks has certain
affinities. He may never have studied that
painter; rather is it a temperamental resem-
blance, a certain tolerant way of seeing men
and things. But Luks is not so cynical as the
Frenchman.
And that striking embodiment of Whisky Bill,
a once well-known personage in the American
Parisian colony! Several judges have praised
the Fraser portrait, which we greatly admire
for its excellent qualities, but personally we
plump for the head of Whisky Bill, the head of
a great violinist and also a profound alcoholist.
In Gorky's Nachtasyl there is an old actor
who runs about the play exclaiming: "I have
poisoned my organism with alcohol." We have
never seen Whisky Bill, but we are sure from
the canvas that he has poisoned his organism
with alcohol. Nevertheless, a man who thinks,
one who has suffered from the mirage of thirst,
not one of the Hals or the Steen jovial drinkers.
The spleen of life has killed the ideals of Bill.
They are submerged in his melancholy eyes.
As for his hair, we might almost compare it to
Masson's engraving of the gray-haired man,
"3
BEDOUINS
Guillaume de Brisacier, after Mignard; but with
a difference the hair is treated more luminously
in mass than detail.
There are the usual number of studies from
life, of Old Mary Curling Her Hair, a companion
piece to the Goose Girl. The most characteris-
tic picture in the Luks collection is an ideal
head of Bobbie Burns's Suter Johnnie. Therein
is the synthesis of all the more admirable quali-
ties of Luks: humor, technical audacity, solid
modelling, vital color, sweet sentiment, and a
searching humanity, all of which combined make
a vigorous appeal to the spectator. Luks
sometimes plays to the gallery, but at the core
he is sincere. His feet are set upon the moun-
tain. He is not pausing to grasp at the flowers
or the applause. But do not imagine because
he is the smiling George Luks with the Napo-
leonic brow, round cherubic cheeks, and nimble
wit, that he is easy to decipher.
As for The Pawnbroker's Daughter she
might have stepped out from some old Holland
master's studio. The Dutch strain in Luks
and his shrewd Yankee humor are here blended
in the happiest manner. The girl is carrying a
carafe on a tray. The rich comminglement of
tones, the tribal " awareness" of the girl's glance,
her tangled hair, and the smouldering splendor
of her garb are indicated without a suspicion of
bravura; yet one is conscious of virtuosity, clair-
voyance, and sympathetic observation.
There is the reverse of the medal. No man
114
GEORGE LUKS
is made all of a piece, and the art of Luks has
its seamy side. He displays an infernal impa-
tience, that chief sin of heresiarchs, according
to Cardinal Newman. He sometimes takes
criticism in no amiable way. And the corollary
of impatience is haste in execution. Luks sel-
dom finishes a canvas. He must have five hun-
dred stowed away in his studio. Many are not
half-begun. Nevertheless, this rough handling
of his material neither irreverent nor careless
bears special fruits. Some subjects respond
instantly to this treatment. Swift, brutal, sel-
dom subtle, though suggestive, his portraits leap
from the bare canvas into vital being. In the
fury of his execution, when the fit is upon him
he could cover miles of walls with figures. This
itching of the nerves, this tugging of the mus-
cles, which impels a pianist to play until Jericho
falls or his listeners die, is but the special artistic
organ of any artist keyed up to the pitch of
intensity. Luks is the most normal man imag-
inable. Full of the kindly sap of life, he too
often boasts his powers when he should be
making lines and color patches. That is his
very human side; " human all too human"
as Nietzsche would say. Slightly inhuman is
his capacity for sustained work mind you, we
don't say sustained in the sense of sticking at
one picture until he has exhausted its possibili-
ties, but a capacity for toil, prolonged, laborious.
This exuberance, this boiling over of energy,
these dashes at reality, these slices of life, bold
BEDOUINS
portraits of men and women who dare to live,
though only painted, this Human Comedy
merely hinted at, are testimonies to the creative
and tumultuous powers of a man who is of Rab-
elaisian energies. The saving fact is that Luks
is not old, and knows what he most lacks. To
advise him to paint like some one else, to make
slim silk purses when he so superbly paints
sows' ears, would be futile. He is not academic.
He has a grim vein of irony that spells at a
glance the tragi-comedy of life his Parisian
sketch-books would have attracted Daumier
and also a superabounding confidence that some-
tunes leads its owner into dubious, as well as
devious, places.
But he is one of our native, commanding tal-
ents, and with study and experience must come
the purging of the dross; with his mellowing
Luks will take his proper place among his con-
temporaries, and it will be in the seats of the
mighty or nowhere. The only possible school-
ing that will hasten this result will be the stern
self-schooling of George Luks. But he is just
the style of man who may bid criticism go hang
and nevertheless win out at the end. Like the
turbulent and fleshly Bard of Camden, he can
"sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the
world," and make of this "yawp" an art ex-
tremely personal and arresting.
As a portraitist he has his good days and bad.
When he is deeply gripped by his subject he is
usually successful. The head of Senator Root
116
GEORGE LUKS
was criticised because of a certain hardness and
rigidity in texture and pose, but there were
critics who declared that the painter's psychol-
ogy had revealed the essential Root austere,
profound, Machiavellian statesman and scholar.
The self-portrait, like the Smoker of Brouwer,
is the record of a passing mood. It is a swift
sketch, and is Luks in the heydey of a happy,
devil-may-care humor. Truly a * human docu-
ment/ I admire his landscape, Round Houses
at High Bridge. The atmosphere is finely
evoked; Luks knows his values. Steam, and
again steam, is painted in a delicate scale of
pearl-greys.
But even Lux pinxit becomes a long-drawn-out
line of light. I bade my hosts good day. "I'll
see you as far as the subway," said Luks. He
accompanied me to the station, where you go
down to the train in a lofty elevator, as you do
in the gloomy London Underground. I had
passed an admirable afternoon with a human
painter. Some painters are not human.
1-17
XII
CONCERNING CALICO CATS
THIS is to be a sober Sunday sermon, even
though it largely concerns Calico Cats. What
is a calico cat? you will ask. The first we ever
heard of the strange beast, after the Eugene
Field poem, was at a concert of the Philharmonic
Society, when Mortimer Wilson conducted a
clever orchestral suite in which figured the
Funeral of the Calico Cat; that is, a specific cat,
one, let it be said in passing, that was quite tiny
at the beginning of the music, but grew to mon-
strous proportions before its interment; a cat
that would have put to blush the "Cheshire
Puss" of Alice's in the fable. Cats in calico may
be seen on the streets any Gotham summer day,
but a calico cat what in the world may that
be? The simulacrum of a feline, an eidolon,
such as Mr. Howell once described? We can't
ask Mr. Wilson, because he might refer us
to his charming score, which speaks for itself.
Verhaeren, the Belgian poet, the greatest living
poet at the time of his death at Rouen, with the
solitary exception of Gabriele d'Annunzio, Emile
Verhaeren has written about "Cats of ebony,
Cats of flame," but, manifestly, a cat can't be
both flaming and calico. We must turn to that
118
CONCERNING CALICO CATS
lover of cats, Charles Baudelaire, who wrote
sonnets to his cats as others have penned praises
of their mistresses' eyebrows. He discovered to
France the genius of Richard Wagner and the
genius of Edouard Manet, not to mention Poe's.
Jules Clare tie relates that Baudelaire said to
him, with a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the
music I prefer is that of a cat hung by his tail
outside of a window, and trying to stick to the
panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd
grating on the glass which I find at the same
time strange, irritating, and singularly harmo-
nious."
Now, obviously, this is an invention. Per-
verse as Baudelaire undoubtedly was, he loved
cats too much to torture them. Without know-
ing it, the late director of the Theatre Frangais
has described, "avant la lettre," as the etchers
say, the music of the future: Schoenberg, Stra-
vinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff. But calico
cats! Not a spoor of them in all this, so we
are forced to fall back upon symbolism, which
seems to be the art of saying the reverse of
what you think. (I nearly meant this.) In
his Hunting of the Snark Lewis Carroll finds
that it is a Boojum. Perhaps our calico cat is
not a cat at all, but a critic. But then a cat
may look at a critic, as a critic is privileged to
stare a composer out of countenance. A calico
cat may, for all we know, house the soul of a
real cat. Therefore, children, do not treat it
rudely ! It may be watching you with its ma-
119
BEDOUINS
lignant, beady eyes, ready to spring, ready to
scratch when you least expect it! And we
should not forget Baudelaire, who would lower
his voice when showing his friends some Poly-
nesian idol of wood, bidding them not mock,
because once upon a time a deity may have in-
habited the rude carving. The remote ancestor
of a calico doll may have been that scourge of
a vanished geological epoch, the sabre-toothed
tiger, just as the iridescent dragon-fly that
flashes winged sunshine as it skims is the pitiful
reduction of the dread Pterodactyl, the flying
saurian, which also reappears as the Jabberwock
(furnished with a monocle by Sir John Tenniel,
ever a stickler for etiquette). The calico cat
might be a prowling version of the Frumious
Bandersnatch, with the claws that scratch.
But a truce to paleontology ! Let us of the
nonce assume that the cat in question stands
for the tutelar totem of criticism. A mere figure
of speech, "Hypocrite lecteur mon semblable
mon frere ! " I can see my surprised colleagues:
He has called us musical lounge lizards, now we
are calico cats ! What the next recrudescence ?
In Hindu-land what Avatar? I remember the
sage advice of Vance Thompson: When all
trumps fail, write about your liver! He was
speaking of criticism. Musical trumps are, as
a rule, mesugah, in the classic parlance of
pinochle; hence I fall back on a hypothetical
hepatic condition, i. e., calico cats and criticism;
criticism of music, art, literature, or mixed.
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CONCERNING CALICO CATS
Swinburne's theory that "I have never been
able to see what should attract a man to the
profession of criticism but the noble art of
praising" was vitiated in practice by the poet
himself, who wrote scurrilously of any one who
disagreed with him. "After all, what are crit-
ics?" asked Balzac, and later Disraeli-Beacons-
field. "Men who have failed in literature and
art." Mascagni, the Single-Speech Hamilton of
Italian composers, cried aloud in resentment
that a critic was only a "compositore mancato."
(Probably some fellow musician had wounded
him with a pen.)
But every one is a critic, a calico cat, your
gallery god, as well as the most stately practi-
tioner of the gentlest art. The difference be-
tween your criticism and mine, as I have re-
marked elsewhere, is that I am paid for mine,
and you must pay for your privilege to criticise.
As some Paris wit said of a certain actress:
"She is not beautiful, she is worse." A critic
is never unjust he is worse. Nevertheless, I
prefer the plain critic's opinions rather than the
professional pronouncement of a composer. He
always knows more than the critic, yet I doubt
his attitude, which is seldom disinterested.
How could it be? Why should it be? Schu-
mann, who "discovered" Chopin and Brahms,
missed Wagner. In Wagner he met his critical
Waterloo, and as George Moore wrote of Ruskin
vs. Whistler: "It is the lot of critics to be remem-
bered by what they have failed to understand."
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BEDOUINS
Berlioz also missed Wagner Wagner who had
helped himself so generously to the ideas on
instrumentation of the Frenchman. But Balzac
did not miss Stendhal, whose generation refused
to recognize his genius. The "creative" critics
are few. Montaigne, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve,
Taine, Baudelaire, Georg Brandes, Nietzsche,
Pater, Benedetto Croce, Havelock Ellis, Mat-
thew Arnold, Arthur Symons, Anatole France,
De Gourmont, Edgar Saltus, Brownell the list
might be spun out, but these names suffice. Yet
my idol among them, Sainte-Beuve, missed Bal-
zac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo
was inconsiderate possibly on account of his
affair with Adele Hugo. Consider the Osrics of
literature eternally embalmed in the amber of
Sainte-Beuve's style, a fatal immortality for so
many futile butterflies, and you will admit that
he still lives when many a mighty reputation
has withered.
In sheer wonderment George III asked how
the apples got inside the dumpling. How can
a critic criticise a creator ! Oscar Wilde, shrewd
enough when he so willed, has a middle term;
critics who are "creative." But isn't he the
man who looks on while the other fellow does
things ! He should be artist as to temperament,
and he should have a credo. And like most
prima donnas, he is "catty." He need not be
a painter to write of painting, a composer to
speak of music. His primary appeal is to the
public. He is the interpreter. The psycho-
122
CONCERNING CALICO CATS
physiological processes need not concern us.
There are the inevitable limitations. Describ-
ing music in terms of prose is hopeless. The
only true criticism of music is the playing
thereof. We are again confronted by the Vance
Thompson crux: write about your liver, or the
weather, or calico cats, as I am now doing. All
the rest is technical camouflage. Of course, a
catholic critic doesn't mean an unprejudiced
one. A critic without prejudices would be a
faultless monster, and like Aristides the Just,
should be stoned.
Carl Van Vechten has told us of Erich Satie,
the eccentric French composer, who sets snails
and oysters to music, and, no doubt, has com-
posed a Cooties Serenade for wind instruments
with a fine-tooth comb obbligato, and we are
amazed at the critical exposition of such a per-
plexing "case." To let his music speak for it-
self, would be unwise, as it is not sufficiently
explicative. Rhizopods can't converse. Just
here is where your music-critic, your calico cat,
intervenes. After Van Vechten has polished off
his man, we feel that we know all about Satie,
so much so that we never wish to hear a bar of
his crustacean music. The difference between
tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee is infinitesimal,
but that very difference may contain great art.
Professor, now Sir Walter Raleigh, has said
that "Criticism, after all, is not to legislate but
to raise the dead." Sometimes it raises hades.
Millet declared that "there is no isolated truth";
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BEDOUINS
Constable denied that a good thing is ever done
twice, and Alfred Stevens the Belgian painter,
not the English sculptor defined art as "na-
ture seen through the prism of an emotion,"
thus forestalling the more pompous pronounce-
ment of Zola in The Experimental Novel.
These are not merely epigrams, but truths. On
the other hand, recall what Velasquez is reported
to have said to Salvator Rosa, according to
Boschini and Carl Justi. Salvator had asked
the incomparable Spaniard whether he did not
believe Raphael to be the best of all the painters
he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered:
"Raphael, to be plain with you, for I like to be
candid and outspoken, does not please me at
all." There were the mountains criticising, deep
calling unto deep. All said and done, a ques-
tion of temperament, this opinion of one great
man about the work of another.
Therefore, brethren, it behooves us to be
humble, as pride goeth before a fall. Like the
industrious crow, the critic, or, as you will, the
calico cat, should hop after the sowers of beauty,
content to pick up in the furrowed field the
grains dropped by genius. At best the critic
sits down to a Barmecide's feast, to see, to smell,
but not to taste the celestial manna vouchsafed
by the gods. We are only contemporaries of
genius, all of us, and the calico cat is the badge
of our tribe. But who dares confess this shock-
ing truth? And who shall bell the calico cat?
124
XIII
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS ?
RATHER hotly I argued the question with my
editor: "After all, music-critics are men and
brethren," I said. "Except when they are sis-
ters/' he ironically interposed. I sternly re-
sisted a temptation to blush and continued:
"Because I love Chopin must I forever write of
his music tou jours perdrix! It's an indiges-
tion of strawberries, clotted cream, and green
eyes. I'm suffering from spring-fever. Let me
write a story about the circus." "Why not
Ibsen?" interposed my editor, who is subtle or
nothing. "He was a grand man," I assented,
"but in the present case he is only red-herring
across the trail. Suppose I mix up Chopin with
sawdust merely for the sake of the melange?"
My chief assented, wearily. There are more
important problems on the carpet than Chopin.
Jim Beck vs. Pop Hylan in a catch-as-catch-can
for the welter-weight championship. Or the
celebrated Mrs. J. and the Beethoven-Hambur-
ger steak controversy. Why not Chopin and
sawdust? I retired with a thoughtful mien.
Had I ever been to the circus? What a sin-
gular question. Yet, yet ! No, I confessed
to myself, I had not been to the circus for at
125
BEDOUINS
least three decades. Critics are tame cats away
from their regular guests. In the concert-room
or at the play, armed with our little hammers,
we are as brave as plumbers; but on a roof gar-
den, in church, at a circus, or innocently slum-
bering, we are the mildest gang of pirates that
ever scuttled an American sonata or forced
ambitious leading-ladies to walk the plank. We
may go alone to the theatre with impunity and
another fellow's girl, but at the circus we need
a nurse to show us the ropes and keep us from
falling under the elephants' hoofs. A private
nurse not necessarily old say I, is the only
safety for a critic out of his element; otherwise
a sense of the dignity of our calling is not main-
tained.
Therefore, I swallowed my Chopin scheme
without undue fervor and went to the circus.
No matter which one. All circuses are in an
attractive key to me. Thackeray said the same
thing about the play, and said it better. Any
circus will serve as a peg for my sawdust sym-
bolism. Any Garden will do, so that it has a
capitalized initial letter. (No allusion to Magi-
cal Mary.) The circus ! What a corrective for
the astringent Ibsen or the morbidezza of Sar-
matia's sweet singer, Chopin! The circus. It
is a revelation. One thing I regretted that I
could not be a boy again, with dirty hands, a
shining brow, and a heart brimming over with
joy. Peter Pan! Oh! to recapture that first
careless rapture, as Browning or some other
126
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?
writing Johnny said; surely he must have meant
the circus, which is the one spot on our muddy
planet where rapture rhymes with the sawdust
ring.
"Have you ever seen Hedda Gabler?" I asked
of the Finland giantess. We were wedged in
front of the long platform at the Garden, upon
which were the Missing Link, the Snake-En-
chantress, the Lion-Faced Boy, the English Fat
Girl so fat the Human Skeleton, the Welsh
Giant, the Lilliputians, tattooed men, a man
with an iron skull, dancers, jugglers, gun-spin-
ners, "lady" musicians, and the three-legged
boy. Eternal types at the circus. The noise
was terrific, the air dense with the aura of un-
washed humanity. This aura was twin to the
aura in a monkey-house. But I enjoyed my
"bath of multitude," as Charles Baudelaire
names it, and I should not have bothered the
tall creature with such an inept question. She
coldly regarded me:
"No, I haven't seen Hedda to-day, but I re-
member George Tesman always teased her with
one question, 'What do you know about that,
Hed?' Shoo! Sardou for mine." "Do you
read George Blarney Shaw?" I persisted. "He
ought to be in a cage here. He would draw
some crowds. But I'm told he lives in Germany
now on account of the beer." I backed away
quickly as an East Side family consisting of a
baker's dozen would allow. Why had I asked
such a question of a perfect stranger? This
127
BEDOUINS
giantess, I mused before the rhinoceros with
the double prongs, is Finnish. That's why she
knew the name of Hedda Gabler. Why didn't
I speak of Rosmersholm? Rebecca West had
Finnish blood in her veins. Careful, careful
this Ibsen obsession must be surmounted, else I
shall be inquiring of the giraffe if neck or noth-
ing is the symbol of Brand. All or Nothing!
of course. How stupid of me. Among the ani-
mals I regained my equilibrium. Their odors
evoked memories. Yes, I recalled the old-time
circus, with its compact pitched canvas tent on
North Broad Street, Philadelphia; the pink lem-
onade, the hoarse voice of the man who en-
treated us to buy tickets there were no mega-
phones in those days the crisp crackling of the
roasting peanuts, the ovens revolved by the
man from Ravenna, the man from Ascoli, and
the man from Milan. They followed the circus
all the way from Point Breeze, and I swear they
were to me far more human than the policemen
who gently whacked us with their clubs when
we crawled under the tent.
The sense of smell is first aid to memory. As
I passed the cages saluting our pre-Adamic
relatives, bidding the time of day to the zebu,
nodding in a debonair fashion to the yak, I
could not help longing for my first circus. Again
I saw myself sitting in peaceful agony on a
splintery plank; again I felt the slaps and
pinches of my tender-hearted Aunt Sue now
in Paradise, I hope; again my heart tugged like
128
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?
a balloon at its moorings as the clowns jumped
into the ring, grimacing, chortling, and fascinat-
ing us with their ludicrous inhumanity.
Other days, other ways. I sighed as I tore
myself loose from the prehensile trunk of a too
friendly baby elephant and passed into the huge
auditorium where Gilmore had played. Ah ! the
sad, bad, glad, dear, dead, tiresome, poverty-
stricken, beautiful days when we were young
imbeciles and held hands with a fresh "ideal"
every week (sometimes two). Ah ! the senti-
mental "jag" induced by peanut eating, and
the chaste, odoriferous apes.
It is time. We seat ourselves. I look about
me. Two resplendent gentlemen wearing eve-
ning clothes at high noon, after the daring man-
ner of our Gallic cousins, toll a bell. I became
excited. Why those three-and- thirty strokes?
What the symbolism ! Chopin, or Ibsen; again,
I groaned, and turned my attention to my
neighbors, one of whom I could feel, though did
not see. I raised my voice, employing certain
vocables hardly fit to print. The effect was
magical. "Johnny, take your feet out of the
gentleman's collar. That's a good boy." It
was the soothing voice of a mother. Bless her
clairvoyance! I sat comfortably back in my
seat. Johnny howled at the interference with
his pleasure. I felt sorry for him. Childhood
is ever individualistic, even pragmatic. But I
only had one collar with me, and it was well the
matter ended thus.
129
BEDOUINS
Hurrah ! Here they come ! A goodly band.
The clowns ! the clowns ! Some hieratic owl of
wisdom has called the clown the epitome of
mankind. He certainly stands for something,
this "full-fledged fool," as good old Tody Hamil-
ton used to write, and "surcharged with the
Roe of Fun," which phrase beats Delaware shad.
Odds fish! There was only one Hamilton.
What a Rabelaisian list of names boast these
merry clowns! If the years have passed over
the skulls of these lively rascals, the jolly boys do
not show them. The same squeaks, the identi-
cal yodling, the funny yet sinister expression of
the eyes, the cruel, red-slitted mouths not a
day older than ten did I seem as they came tum-
bling in and began their horse-play, punctuated
with yelling, yahoo gestures, ribald ejaculations,
and knock-about diversions. It must all mean
something, this hooting, in the economy of the
universe, else "life is a suck and a sell," as Walt
Whitman puts it. As in a dream-mirror I saw
Solness slowly mount the fatal tower when
Hilda Wangel cries to him: "My my Master-
builder!" She sings The Maiden's Wish, and
he hears the harps of Chopin hum in the air. I
rub my ears. It is not Hilda who is crying, but
a pet pig in a baby carriage, wheeled by a chalk-
faced varlet. How difficult it is to escape the
hallucinations of the critical profession. I
couldn't forget Chopin or Ibsen, even at the
circus.
It was a relief, after more bellmanship from
130
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?
the man with the shiny silk hat and spiked
coat, when the elephants majestically entered.
Followed the horses. Tumblers and wire-walk-
ers, women who stood on their heads and smiled
as they do in life, something like the " inverted
pyramid," as James Hinton called modern civ-
ilization plastic poseurs, Oriental jugglers, the
show was let loose at last. Human projectiles
were launched through mid air to the tap of a
drum. My nerves forbade me to look at them,
so I read a programme advertisement of wall-
paper for bathrooms. Some people like such
horrible sights. I do not. They dare not pre-
cisely formulate to themselves the wish that
"something" would happen, and if it does
they shudder with sadistic joy. I close my eyes
when the Whirl of Death or any other sensa-
tional act is staged. " Something" might hap-
pen.
The mad dancers delight our rhythmic sense
as they make marvellous arabesques. The
chariot races stir the blood. The crash around
curves, the patters of gleaming metal excite so
that you stand up, and, brushing the feet of
inevitable Johnny from your neck (notwith-
standing his remonstrances), you shout with
woolly mouth and husky voice. Instinctively
you turn down your thumbs: "Pollice verso,"
which Bayard Taylor translated "the perverse
police." You remember the Ger6me painting?
"This beats Ibsen," I hilariously exclaimed
to Johnny's mother. (She was a comely ma-
BEDOUINS
tron.) "His name is John, and when he gets
home his father will beat him," she tartly re-
plied. With the prevoyance of boyhood Johnny
burst into despairing howls. I at once folded
up my mind. A million things were happening
in the haze of the many rings. The New Circus
is polyphonic, or naught.
Enough ! Filled to the eyes with the distract-
ing spectacle, ear-drums fatigued by the blare
and bang of the monster brass band, my collar
quite wilted by Johnny's shoemaker, my temper
in rags because of the panting, struggling army
of fellow beings, I reached the avenue in safety,
perspiring, thirsty, unhappy. Like Stendhal,
after his first and eagerly longed-for battle with
love, I exclaimed: "Is that all?" In sooth, it
had been too much. The human sensorium is
savagely assaulted at the twentieth century cir-
cus. I was in pessimistic enough humor to
regret the single ring, the antique japes of a
solitary clown, and the bewitching horseman-
ship of Mile. Leonie, with her gauze skirts and
perpetual rictus. As a matter of fact, we
wouldn't endure for five minutes the old-fash-
ioned circus and its tepid lemonade. Where are
the mullygrubs of yesteryear? But the human
heart is perverse. It always longs for the penny
and the cake in company, while ineluctable des-
tiny separates them ever. Perhaps my editor
was right. Render unto Chopin the things that
are Chopin's; send Ibsen back to his Land of the
Midnight Whiskers. Smell the sawdust at the
132
CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?
Garden, not forgetting that the chilly, dry days
are at hand when even Panem et Circenses shall
be taboo; when pipe and prog and grog will be
banned; when these United States shall have
been renamed Puritania; when a fanatically sel-
fish minority shall take all the joy from life.
Ergo, carpe diem ! I thank you.
XIV
CARUSO ON WHEELS
THAT trip was all the fault of Billy Guard,
better known to the musical world as Signor
Guglielmo Guardi though no relative of the
famous painter of Venetian waterscapes by the
same name; it is even rumored that Guardi
originally hails from the "Ould Dart/' but that
knotty question will be solved, no doubt, by
future historians. He is none the less no-per-
cent American in the shade. However, to my
story. I was standing in the concourse of the
Pennsylvania Station when Billy interrupted
my meditation on the evils of near-beer. "Are
you going with us?" he hospitably inquired.
I was about to board the regular three o'clock
train to Philadelphia and I cheerfully accepted
his invitation. And then something happened.
Not far from us a circle of spectators enclosed
as a focal point the natty person of Enrico
Caruso and a Red Cross girl. Evidently curi-
osity had ascended to the blood-heat mark of
the human thermometer. With difficulty was
the mass kept from swamping the border of
safety, and, literally, embracing the well-be-
loved Italian tenor. What was he doing in
suet a place at the uncanny hour of 2.30 p. M. ?
134
CARUSO ON WHEELS
Singers operate their throats all night and sleep
out the daylight. It was not difficult to guess
that he was going to Philadelphia on the Metro-
politan Opera House Special, which during the
season leaves every Tuesday afternoon at 2.54,
returning some time after 2 o'clock the next
morning. The present intermezzo piqued my
interest. I shouldered my diminutive frame
through the mob, exclaiming, "Tickets, please !"
and because of this official camouflage soon
reached the centre of attraction. Attired hi
garb of fashionable hue and cut, Signer Caruso
held earnest converse with a pretty Red Cross
nurse, whose face beamed with joy. Something
had been given which pleased her sense of the
fitness of things, and later I heard that Caruso
had enrolled the names of his two sons as mem-
bers of the Red Cross Association; both lads
were then fighting in the Italian army; Caruso
is patriotic.
"Say, ain't dat guy Caroos?" was asked of
me by one of the chaps at the news-stand.
"Doesn't he get ten thousand dollars a night?"
he further queried. "More," I replied. "Well,
he don't look it," came the unexpected com-
ment. Young America thus paid tribute to
the absence of fuss and feathers in the person-
ality of the singer. It is true Caruso does not
look like the typical tenor of Italian opera, nor
does he behave like one. There he was, happy
as a boy out on a lark, the dingy December day
not depressing him, and his spirits so high that
135
BEDOUINS
we expected him to waltz with that gentle
nurse on the finest dancing esplanade in the
world. Nor did the young lady seem averse
from the diversion. To the disappointment of
the crowd by this time grown to monstrous
size Caruso did not dance, contenting himself
with lustily carolling a basketful of precious high
notes as he descended to his drawing-room car.
Manager Gatti-Casazza would have shuddered
if he had been present. His supreme vocal
planet prodigally wasting his golden wind in a
hall bigger than the Metropolitan Opera House
and no box-office in view ! Besides, it was fly-
ing in the face of nature. Tenors always bundle
up to the eyebrows; they do not speak, much
less vocalize, and usually are as cross as the
proverbial bear. Caruso, who has defied doctors
and vocal hygiene since he opened his magical
mouth, is a false beacon to other singers. His
care-free behavior should be shunned by lesser
men who attempt to bend the bow of this great
singing Ulysses.
But Caruso is careful about tobacco. He does
not enter the compartment where others smoke.
He prefers the odor of his own choice cigarettes.
I never saw him without one, either in mouth
or fingers. The despair he is of any throat
specialist. He sits in company with his old
friend, Signor Scognomillo, otherwise the Man-
Mountain. Sits and smokes. He is to sing
and so he doesn't talk, only smokes, or makes
caricatures. Returning is another tale. In
136
CARUSO ON WHEELS
hilarious mood, he orders carte-blanche supper
for the chorus. He plays pranks on his fellow
passengers. Even that most potent, grave, and
bearded Signor, Manager Gatti, is forced to
smile. Caruso is irresistible. He recalls the
far-away days when he sang two operas every
Sunday in the Teatro Mercadante at Naples
or the good old summer-time at Salerno, when,
during entr'actes, he would drop a string from
his dressing-room window and draw up the
fond prize sardine and cream-cheese sand-
wiches. He was thin in those youthful days,
and thin boys always have hollow legs that
must be filled. Prosperity has not spoiled
Caruso. He is human and tolerant, with a big
heart, and he is devoid of professional mega-
lomania. In common with oldsters I have railed
betimes at altered musical tastes and often de-
clared that in the days of my youth there were
better singers. I still abide by this belief.
There were vocal giants in those days; but there
was not Enrico Caruso.
Since my dear old friend Italo Campanini
there has been no one to match Caruso. Italo
was a greater actor, indeed more versatile.
His Lohengrin, the first I ever heard, I shall
never forget. Mr. Finck is happy in his sug-
gestion that Caruso add Lohengrin to his long
Hst of operatic portraits. I have heard tenors
from Brignoli to Gayarre, from Campanini to
Tamagno, Masini and Nicolini this second
husband of Aunt Adelina Patti wasn't such a
BEDOUINS
mediocrity as represented by some critics; he
suffered only from contiguity to a blazing star
of the first magnitude yet no one possessed a
tithe of the vocal richness of Camerado Enrico.
Some have outpointed him in finesse, Bond;
Tamagno could have outroared him; Jean de
Reszke had more personal charm and artistic
subtlety; nevertheless, Caruso has a marvellous
natural voice, paved with lyric magic. It is
positively torrential in its outpouring, and with
the years it grows as mellow as a French horn.
Why, there are men in this vast land of ours
who would rather be Caruso than the Presi-
dent of the United States of Europe. Can you
blame them? In his golden prime, happily
mated, full of verve, gayety and healthy
well, his presence, apart from his art, consoles
us for many a gray day on this ocky little orb
we inhabit.
The recognition of personality has become in
my "middle-years" a veritable obsession. With
Henry James I could say that "I have found
myself, my life long, attaching values to every
noted thing in respect to a great person."
Please strike out "great" from this sentence
and substitute "any"; any person is interest-
ing to me. Himself exquisitely aware of the
presence of others, Henry James placed his
fastidious preference amid certain castes, social
and artistic. Like Walt Whitman, I prefer the
company of "powerful uneducated persons," and
nothing inhuman or human is foreign to me. I
138
CARUSO ON WHEELS
shouldn't be surprised to find more interesting
"stories" among the members of the chorus
than in the ranks of the "stars"; but the "stars"
alone capture the curiosity of the public, and
thus it is that I speak of some of them to-day
instead of la bella ragazzina in Mr. Setti's
forces. I was bundled on Manager Gatti's
special car and promptly paid my fare to a
conductor who suspiciously appraised my pres-
ence; to him I was neither fish nor flesh, nor
good red chorus. I should have liked very
much to walk through the chorus car, but with
Otto Weil on one side and Edward Ziegler on
the other I couldn't escape; furthermore, young
Ziegler thus admonished me: "Sir, it's no place
for an elderly inflammable person, is that car
full of pretty young song-birds; Pattis and
Scalchis en herbe." I meekly submitted and
found myself in a smoking-compartment where
a card-table was promptly installed.
A friendly game of old cat bridge-whist.
Now, I play Bach inventions every morning,
but I can't play cards. I despise card games,
agreeing with my friend J. K. Huysmans, who
asserted that a monument should be erected to
the memory of the inventor of cards because
"he did something toward suppressing the free
exchange of human imbecility." If the dis-
tinguished French pessimist and master of
jewelled prose could have been with us that day
he might have revised his polite judgment.
Such gabbling. Such "kachesse," such feminine
139
BEDOUINS
squabbles. No hotel piazza on the Jersey coast
of an August afternoon could have held a can-
dle to the shrewd repartee and vivacious wran-
gling over a few painted pasteboards. Antonio
Scotti, drumming on the table the rhythm of
the Rataplan, would suddenly scowl, and, with
Scarpia-Uke intensity, demand: "Why you play
that ace?" And Technical Director Siedle
would groan in reply. A flash of lightning
from a blue sky. Then Otto Weil banged down
his cards and audibly expressed his opinion of
his partner's playing. It is not fit to print.
Judels never turned a hair, and he isn't bald.
Even Scotti relaxed for a moment his ferocious
Neapolitan air. No one can "stay mad" long
with Judels. Pan Ordynski drops in, and
Am'ato, Chalmers, or Althouse. Scotti is smoke-
proof. It is pleasant to record that this big
operatic organization with its divers national-
ities is en route a happy family. Music, after
all, is the solvent, the real melting-pot of which
we hear so much and see so little in every-day
fife,
Caruso is not the only f unmaker on the wheels
of this Opera Special. Rosina Galli of the
dainty, tapering toes and woven paces is al-
ways rollicksome. Her imitations would make
her fortune in vaudeville. Signor Gatti philo-
sophically reposes after the fatigue of travel and
Union League Club terrapin. Scotti munches
chicken, resting after his Sergeant Sulpizio
140
From a photograph by De Strelecki
ROSINA GALLI AS THE PRINCESS IN "LE COQ D'OR"
CARUSO ON WHEELS
r61e, and still strums the Rataplan. Caruso
smokes. Friend Scognomillo sleeps with one
eye open. Florence Easton, wrung from her
triumph as Santuzza, is there. In a compart-
ment sits Geraldine Farrar. She sips coffee.
Her mother is with her. So are chicken sand-
wiches. "Our Jerry" is bright-eyed and keyed
up as might be expected. I mention the name
"Sid" Farrar, my boyhood's idol. The ladies
become sympathetic. When I stoutly declared
that I had never fallen in love with a prima
donna during four decades as a music reporter,
my "specialty" being admiration of the mothers
of singers, the air is charged with interrogation-
marks. Why hasn't some authoritative pen
been employed in behalf of the mother of the
singer who has succeeded ? What a theme !
What peeps into a family inferno! I think
that Mrs. Farrar could write a better book
about her brilliant daughter than did Mrs. Lou
TeUegen of herself.
Another time I talk with Frieda Hempel,
who is one of the rapidly dwindling race of
artists who know Mozart as well as Donizetti.
What a Marguerite she would be ! On the train
she is like her contemporaries. She sits. She
chats. For all I know, she may doze. Singers
are very human. To fancy them as "gloomy,
grand, and peculiar" is to imagine a vain
thing. In private they behave like their butch-
ers, bakers, candlestick makers. If they have
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one weakness peculiar to their tribe, it is never
to read newspaper criticism of their perform-
ances! This is discouraging for music-critics.
But the public likes sentimental flimflam, and
the opera singer is pictured as a strange and
fearful bird of prey; when seen at close range
she is in reality a domesticated fowl. The much-
advertised artistic temperament is only inter-
mittent; even arrant bohemians are normal at
least twice every twenty-four hours.
The call is sounded. Again New York! A
jumble of voices is heard in the smoking-com-
partment. " If you hadn't played that trump ! "
it is Judels speaking. "Oh!" groans Papa
Siedle. Scotti is now whistling the Rataplan.
The blond Ordynski, having wished the Polish
curse on Otto Weil "may you have hangnails
and dandruff!" dons his greatcoat. "Addio,
Hunekero ! " sings Caruso. After refusing Ned
Ziegler's kind offer of "First Aid to Flatbushers,"
which means his private car, I find myself
alone on the chilly concourse. The hour of dis-
illusionment, three past midnight. I've been on
and off wheels with Caruso for twelve times
sixty minutes. I ponder Flatbush and the possi-
bilities of getting there by dawn. The scrub-
women are at work, a new postwoman saunters
along. The luncheon-room cat rubs against
me, almost coos with joy. I slink away, being
superstitious regarding cherry-colored cats, step-
ladders, and cross-eyed theatre managers. (I
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CARUSO ON WHEELS
am writting plays.) Then, resigned to the in-
evitable, I seek my trusty Glenn Curtiss hydro-
aeroplane, which is anchored in the Thirty-third
Street enclosure, and fly home to Flatbush-by-
the-Sea. I've had a crowded and enjoyable day.
143
XV
SING AND GROW VOICELESS
SING and grow voiceless! Why not? We
know of a dozen methods that are guaranteed
to ruin even a Rose Ponselle vocal equipment
in thirty lessons by mail, better known as ab-
sent treatment. We have had over forty years'
experience in the fair land of song, a scarred
battle-field strewn with the shards and wrecks of
beautiful voices and high hopes. In no sphere
of music are there so many sharks, cormorants,
swindlers, humbugs, criminals, as in the ranks
of vocal teaching so-called. The hard-earned,
carefully saved money of parents is extorted
from victims, who usually return home with
health impaired, voices gone, even worse. It
is pitiful. It is cruel. What are you going to
do about it? The profession of medicine is
protected. Why not music? Malpractice is
swiftly punished. Why not lock up the ras-
cals who ruin a voice and get money under false
pretenses? No, chewing gum in public is of
far more importance to people; now a national
neurosis, it will soon be elevated to the dignity
of a Fine Art. If we had our way we should
drive every one of these vocal parasites who in-
144
SING AND GROW VOICELESS
fest the temple of music into the swamp of
public odium.
Now, having worked off my chronic bad
humor, let us look at the matter through the
spectacles of the absurd. There is a comic side
to everything, from a volcano to a prohibition-
ist. The fake singing-teachers are as funny as
their fakery is pernicious.
I am reminded of all the pamphlets from How
to be Happy Though Divorced, How to Starve
and Grow Fat when I read the pompous pro-
nouncements of certain Voice Builders. I con-
fess that I am not an expert in vocal hygiene,
but I have heard all the great men and women
for the past half-century who have made this
drab, dreary planet worth living on with their
beautiful voices. And that is a brevet of taste.
Standards. Without standards we critically
perish, says, in effect, Mr. Brownell. I also
confess that I don't know a resonator from a
refrigerator, or the difference between a lynx
and a larynx. Both growl, I believe, if you rub
them the wrong way. I have not the science of
W. J. Henderson or Holbrook Curtis. But I do
know when a singer slathers her phrases or sings
above or below pitch and there are more who
sing sharp than you think. The main thing is
that I criticise by ear, not with a laryngoscope
or a mirror to peep at the breath-control.
Herbert Witherspoon, not unknown to fame
as an operatic artist and concert singer, summed
up for me the situation in a phrase. "Opera
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singers open their mouths too wide." Hence
screaming and bawling which nearly splits
sensitive ears. That the public likes shouting
on top-tones is only evidence of the public's
appalling taste. Noise, noise, noise ! We wor-
ship noise in America. Another neurosis.
Noise the Ultimate Vulgarity. At last the sub-
way voice has penetrated our opera-houses;
charmless, voiceless, vicious. The three dra-
matic unities in the modern theatre have re-
solved themselves into Legs, Glitter, Buncombe.
On the lyric stage the chief unit is yelling. No
wonder they sing and grow voiceless. Purdon
Robinson, himself a concert singer of note, in
the course of an instructive lecture recently re-
marked: "My own opinion, backed by thirty
years of singing and teaching, has resulted in
the belief that a mechanical method makes a
mechanical singer"; and "after the voice has
been placed and one has it under control, forget
it when singing. Try to get at the composer's
meaning, realizing that words in themselves
mean little, and that notes in music are simply
the symbols by which musical ideas are indi-
cated." For the average vocalist words are not
symbols but cymbals. But Mr. Robinson's
words are golden.
Years ago (do sit still a moment, this is not a
spun-out story of my life !) a young woman con-
sulted me about a vocal master. She was a choir
singer from the remote South, her parents poor
as brewery mice are to be and she thought
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SING AND GROW VOICELESS
she had a remarkable voice. I say "thought."
Care killed a cat. Thought never slew a larynx.
I played a hymn tune. She sang. I shuddered,
but was relieved when she told me that her
name was Elvina Crow. After all, there is
something to be said for Prof. Slawkenbergius
and his theory of names as set forth by the
veracious Rev. Laurence Sterne. I suggested
that if she decided on a career she change her
name to "Sgallinacciare," which appropriately
enough means to crow; also a faulty method of
singing. " Signorina Sgallinacciare ! " How that
would ring in the credulous ears of the dear old
deluded public, which, Hamlet-like, doesn't know
a hawk from a hand-saw, or, if you prefer, a
hernshaw. Shriek and grow rich ! Nothing else
matters but "mazuma" in the box-office of the
Seven Deadly Arts.
It must have been a month after our interview
that Miss Crow again visited me. I was at the
time assistant professor of applied paleontology,
and mightily interested in the psychic life of
micro-organisms, so naturally singers came first
on the list. Into my large and sympathetic
tympani Elvina poured a tale, not of woe, but
of thrilling truth. This is not the first time I
have related it, yet it improves on repetition,
just because of its probability. Not discouraged
by my slurring, even portamento, criticism of
her voice, the lone girl bravely started to find
out the truth herself; the real test of charac-
ter. She said that her first experience was in
147
BEDOUINS
the studio of a maestro. She had a letter to him
which he barely read. In a rich Italian brogue
he bade her be seated. He wore a velvet
jacket. He was bald. He smoked cigarettes.
The type was perfect.
" I giva da lesson in fiva minuta," he explained,
and then scowled at a tall girl who faced a mir-
ror in a guilty manner as her eyes computed the
possible value of the newcomer's gown. " Must
I sit here like a fool?" the professor angrily de-
manded. His pupil opened her mouth. Elvina
eagerly listened. But no sound escaped the
lips of the other girl. She gazed into the mirror
and mouthed and grimaced, and almost, though
not quite, formed words. "Faster," cried the
teacher at the keyboard. The student's lips
moved like a praying mill; she clicked her teeth
Castanet fashion; and at last with a wild bang
on the keyboard the voiceless aria ended. The
maestro knitted his dyed eyebrows. " Vara fair,
not presto assai. You sing without expression.
You are too cold what shall I call it?" A
husky voice asked: "Shall I try it over again?"
"Dio mio ! girl, how dare you speak after singing
such a difficult aria from Rossini's Cinderella?
Your vocal pores are open, you perspire with
your lungs pouf ! You die of the inflamma-
tus by, by" he impatiently pulled at his large
nose. "The Inflammatus by Rossini, you
mean!" interposed Elvina. "How? No, no,
ah ! by pneumonia, that's it." And he bustled
from the instrument. Throwing an old bearskin
148
SING AND GROW VOICELESS
rug over his speechless singer, he led her to a
chair, admonishing her : ' ' Now perspire ! ' ' She
coughed in a terrifying way while the maestro
imperturbably explained his method to Elvina.
He did not permit his pupils to open their mouths
for a year, during which time he put them
through a severe throat and lung drill. All songs
were given in vocal miming, with due facial ex-
pression, and the ventriloquist was adduced as
the highest type of masterly vocal control, for a
ventriloquist can sing in his stomach without
moving a muscle of his face. Think of Fred
Stone and his Very Good Eddie. The Signer
became eloquent. Had the young Miss Elvina
Corpo di Baccho ! what a pretty name ! had
she a little money for tuition? One thousand
dollars. Dirt cheap. A second Patti she would
become for the money. Sign a contract with
him for ten years. Then the movies for a year
so that her stage nervousness would wear off,
then vaudeville, et puis done grand opera.
A ravishing prospect. He rolled his eyes ecstati-
cally as he took Elvina's ten-dollar bill. She
escaped. To her taste the method seemed a
trifle too swift.
In another part of the town she found the
atelier of Mme. Boche. She was about to enter
the anteroom unannounced when she heard low
moaning sounds, which presently increased in
volume and intensity, then suddenly died away
in a sickening style. It seemed as if some ani-
mal were undergoing vivisection, and Elvina, her
149
BEDOUINS
sympathies aroused, pushed open the door with-
out knocking. It was a strange sight that met
her indignant gaze, a sight that set her wonder-
ing, and soon smiling. On a huge mattress,
which occupied half the room, were a dozen
girls in seaside bathing costume. They lay on
their backs, and upon their diaphragms rested
twenty-pound weights, and from their closed
lips issued the moans made by their respiration.
The Madame, a high-nosed old dame, stood by,
rattan cane in hand, and in militarist accents
gave her commands: "One, two, three inhale!
Hold breath! Shoulders up ! Relax! Down!"
And the class went patiently through this ven-
tral drill until completely fagged. After the
order to arise a babel of chatter ensued as Elvina
told the Madame of her aspirations and the
amount of cash she possessed.
"Na ! I have the only system for the breath-
ing. My pupils know how to breathe, how to
breathe, and, again how to breathe. There is
one necessary thing in singing, the breath. If
my pupils can't stand my system I send them
forth."
Elvina positively feared this martinet. Her
pupils' figures were lanky. She mildly inquired
when they sang. " What, sing ? Niemals, never,
jammai, jamais de la leben ! You heard them
breathing? Did they breathe or no?" Then
turning to her class she resumed: "Young ladies,
attention! Fall down! Relax!" Elvina slipped
150
SING AND GROW VOICELESS
away, muttering as she went: "Calisthenics, not
art." It had cost her another ten dollars.
After a hurried Automat luncheon she pro-
ceeded to a cross town street, the address of
which she had read in the newspapers. The
window displayed this sign, " Professor Erasmus
Brick, Voice Builder." He was a burly gentle-
man, the Prof. His linen was not irreproach-
able, his forehead looked like a mansard roof,
and his eyes were shrewd. She named her
errand, confided her doubts, hinted at the pov-
erty of her purse. He laughed, and his voice
restored her courage, if not her confidence.
"My dear Miss, cast your eye round this room
and see if I have a piano, a looking-glass, a pul-
someter, or any other foreign fiddle-faddle of
those Signers or Fraus. I build the voice up
into the perfect thing the good Lord intended
it to be, and without any extry fixin's or bricks
and mortar. The job is simple if you know how.
All this gabble about vocal registers and nasal
emission makes me tired. I build up a voice
on the word 'Moo'; jest keep 'em right at that
word till the old cow so to speak dies of the
tune. While you sing I work this pocket-fan.
I use it to fan away the breath as you sing
'Moo.' By this means the lungs are unob-
structed and the voice grows of its free accord.
My theory is that the breath kills the voice
Moo!" Elvina passed out, and in the hall a
phonograph hoarsely sang: "Do, re, mi, fa, sol.
BEDOUINS
Five dollars. Please put the cash on the man-
telpiece." "That's a dollar a note," she calcu-
lated. She paid, and her bank-roll became omi-
nously slender.
She found Mile. Pinson in her apartment,
small, stuffy, crowded with rickety furniture,
books, china, music, even a parrot. The lady
was drinking chocolate. "Via, Mamselle ! I've
purchased a frugal meal, is it not? I diet my-
self as carefully as in the days when I was lead-
ing soprano at the Grand Opera. Helas ! those
miserable days when I was so happy. Oh, Paris !
Now sing ' la/ Mamselle. No, no, louder, please.
C'est bon. You must know that when you sing
correctly the vibrations travel to the knee-caps.
I test them and know exactly if the tone is
formed naturally or not. My vibratory system
is the only true one. Yes, twenty dollars will
be enough for this time. You have a sweet
voice, my dear, and I'll make a great singer of
you in five years." Elvina faintly asked : ' ' When
do I begin on songs ? " " What ! Songs ? Ah !
those Americans, they are always in a hurry,
what you call get rich in a week! My child,
you can't hurry art. Bonsoir, Mamselle ! To-
morrow at nine, precisely, and I'll test your
knee-caps. Take one of my pamphlets. Vibra-
tion, vibration, vibration !" The parrot opened
its beak: " Vibration, vibration, vibration. I'm
in for life, ch6rie. Take me out of jail, che"rie."
Elvina sat in a Madison Avenue tram and read
the booklet of Mile. Mimi Pinson, entitled Hy-
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SING AND GROW VOICELESS
giene for Voiceless Singers. Numerous rules
and "Don'ts," ending with, "Don't marry.
Husbands of opera-singers always collect their
wives' salaries. Vibrate when you breathe.
You may achieve fame and happiness. Think
blue! It is the color of hope. Vogue la galere !"
"This is becoming monotonous," said Elvina
aloud, and gritting her teeth she packed her duds
and returned to her home town with only one
dollar and twenty-five cents in her pocket.
However, family affection, above all family flap-
jacks, restored her jarred nerves to their normal
pitch. From time to time she sends me pro-
grammes of concerts in which she is described:
"Our native song-bird, Elvina, Prima Donna
Dissoluta." As Esther Beautiful Queen (newly
reorchestrated by Stravinsky) she made a "real
hit." She may have exaggerated a little hi her
confidences, but I can personally vouch for the
heavy weights on pupils' chests to promote
breathlessness. There was advocated such a
vocal system two or three decades ago in New
York. Sing and grow voiceless ! Basta !
153
XVI
ANATOLE FRANCE: THE LAST
PHASE
ANATOLE FRANCE is seventy-six years old, but
his mind is still vigorous, if that word be not
too brisk when applied to such a subtle, supple,
undulating intelligence as his. He now writes
prose glowing with patriotism. Like the late
Remy de Gourmont he shed his cynic's skin
when war invaded his beloved land. And it
was not the first time that he, a writer of human-
itarian impulses, opened the door of his ivory
tower and descended into the stormy arena;
witness the Dreyfus case. However, it would
be idle to deny that his best work is well behind
him. Prefaces to letters to distinguished men
and women he occasionally publishes, such as
Sur la Voie Glorieuse, or Ce que disent nos
morts; but the Anatole France of La Revoke
des Anges seems to have vanished forever. In
the vast whirlwind of European events his scep-
ticism, irony, and pessimism have given way to
pity and tenderness for human suffering. The
son of the bookseller Thibaut may figure, some
day, in a modern hagiography of those lay-
saints who fought for a new spiritual freedom.
The subject-matter composing Sur la Voie
154
ANATOLE FRANCE
Glorieuse is altogether patriotic and contains
much that is striking. The cloven hoof of the
original faun that lurks somewhere in this
Frenchman's temperament is shown in a pas-
sage wherein he groups the Christmas festival
with other antique festivals and symbols of
Adonis and Mithra. A pagan to the end. Pos-
sibly the best pages are devoted to a free trans-
lation from Herodotus, a dialogue between the
potentate Xerxes and a Spartan slave. The
moral rings clear. Of quite different material is
fashioned The Revolt of the Angels. We can-
not conscientiously recommend the fiction to
elderly persons of either sex, though, no doubt,
it is favorite reading of the "advanced" college
girl. What would be vulgarity in another writer
is turned to favor and prettiness by the wand
of the Gallic enchanter. Violence, rapine, hiss-
ing irony, and Rabelaisian episodes make a feast
for lovers of Anatolian literature. Those who
have retained any old-fashioned prejudices con-
cerning propriety morality is out of the run-
ning may expect to be shocked. Has he not
said: "Man, seek not to know thyself ! Man is
not a reasoning animal."
In this fable the deity that created us is in
the new cosmology only a tribal god, who, since
he deposed Lucifer in pitched battle, rules ty-
rannically. He keeps close watch on our mud-
pie of a planet because he suspects that numer-
ous angels disguised as men and women are
fomenting a second angelic rebellion. With
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BEDOUINS
them are the socialists and anarchists, and this
gives M. France an opportunity to score monar-
chical forms of government. The clerical order
is lashed. He spares no one. He repeats his
familiar axiom: "Les guerres sont tou jours les
affaires." There are pages in which sensuality
and sheer burlesque are mingled in a disquieting
compound. The book is one of the most dar-
ing. In its essence it is a supreme revolt against
all social systems that uphold slavery: indus-
trial, militaristic, religious, political. The de-
basing Asiatic systems that still make captive
the conscience of mankind are mercilessly at-
tacked, and while the castigating hand is in-
cased in velvet the shining steel is none the less
deadly.
Constable, the English landscapist, said that a
good thing can't be done twice. Anatole France
has demonstrated the contrary in his latest, let us
hope not his last book, Le Petit Pierre, another
series of exquisite notations of childhood. His
delightful Livre de Mon Ami gave us glimpses of
his early days. Fascinating are the chapters de-
voted to Pierre and Suzanne in this memoir.
The tenderness of M. France, and his power of
summoning up the wonder and awe of our youth,
may be seen in Abeille; the development of the
lad is followed in Pierre Noziere. A portrait of
the young Anatole reveals his excessive sensibil-
ity. His head was large, the brow too broad for
the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm
mouth contradict possible weakness in the lower
156
ANATOLE FRANCE
part of the face. It was in the eyes that the
future of the child might have been read they
were lustrous, in shape beautiful, with a fulness
that argued eloquence and imagination. Such
eyes were possessed by the boy Charles Dickens.
France has told us that he was a strange child,
whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second
St. Simon Stylites, and after that thrilling ex-
perience to write a history of France in fifty
volumes! In Le Petit Pierre his memory for
the important little events of a child's exist-
ence is unusual; evidently nothing has been in-
vented, all happened. Through the haze of the
immemorial years there now and then sharply
shines some significant incident, some old wives'
tales, a portrait of an elderly contemporary
like the Balzacian Uncle Hyacinthe or the in-
comparable evocation of the beloved servant
Melanie a dog, like Caire, the truant parrot,
the boy chimney-sweep, and the sweet smile of
Pierre's mother, who seems to be every one's
mother so admirably generalized is the type
what a magician is this writer! Told with
naivete and verve, we feel in every page of Le
Petit Pierre the charm of personality.
In clarity Anatole France is the equal of
Renan and John Henry Newman, and, while at
one time clarity was a conventional quality
of French prose, it is rarer to-day. Symbolism
has supervened, if not to darken counsel, cer-
tainly to trouble verbal values. Never synco-
pated, moving at a moderate tempo, in transi-
157
BEDOUINS
tions smooth, replete with sensitive rejections,
crystalline in diction, a lover and a master of
large, luminous words, the very marrow of the
man, Anatole France is in his style. And what
a model he should be for those wilful young
writers who boast that lumpy, graceless para-
graphs are better suited to their subjects than
swift, clear, concise prose. It was not so long
ago that one scribe positively glorified in his
own dull style; he asserted that it was a truth-
ful reflection of his drab themes. There is, in-
deed, such a thing as an apposite garbing, a
verbal orchestration. The pellucid sentences of
Mr. Howells, so free from the overblown, are
happily wedded to his admirable character etch-
ing. Flaubert, master of ornate, or " numer-
ous" prose, as well as cool, rhythmic prose,
wrote Salammbo in a purple, splendid key, and
Madame Bovary in the greyer tonalities of the
province; yet nothing could be further removed
from the style of either novel than Sentimental
Education, which is urban and suffused with
sober daylight. It was a favorite contention of
de Gourmont that at his sovereign best Flaubert
is to be found in Bouvard et Pecuchet, the style
of which is sinewy, pregnant, powerful. The
principal mistake of beginners is to believe that
ornament is good style. In Anatole France
matter and manner are perfectly welded.
Few writers swim so easily as he under their
heavy*burdens of erudition. His knowledge is
precise, his range wide. He is a humanist. He
158
ANATOLE FRANCE
knows many literatures. He loves learning for
the sake of learning. He loves words, treasures
them, fondles them, burnishes anew their mean-
ings tarnished by custom. He seldom tarries in
the half-way house of epigram. Over all, his
interest in humanity sheds a tranquil glow.
Without a marked feeling for the dramatic,
nevertheless, he surprises mankind engaged in
its minute daily acts; those he renders as can-
didly as snow in the sunshine; just as the old
Dutch painters stir our "emotion of recognition "
with a simple shaft of light passing through a
half -open door, or upon an old wrinkled woman
polishing her spectacles. He sees and notes
many gestures, inutile or tragic, and notes them
with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated
artistic nature. He deals with ideas so vitally
that they seem human. Yet his personages are
never abstractions, nor do they serve as pallid
allegories. They are all alive from Sylvestre
Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the
Foro Romano (Sur la Pierre Blanche) ; from his
Penguins to his Angels. A dog, a cat, he de-
picts with the same love; his dog Riquet bids
fair to endure in literature. France is an in-
terpreter of life, not precisely after the manner
of the novelist, but life as viewed through the
temperament of a poet of extreme delicacy and
one doubled by a tolerant philosopher.
This ultramodern thinker, who has outgrown
the despotism of positivist dogma, has the soul
of a chameleon. He loves, he understands,
BEDOUINS
Christianity with a fervor and a knowledge that
surprise, until we measure the depth of his
affection for antique cultures. Further to con-
fuse us, he exhibits sympathy with the Hebraic
lore. He has rifled the Talmud for half-forgot-
ten tales. He delights in juxtaposing the Greek
sophist and the strenuous Paul. He contrasts
Mary Magdalen repentant with a pampered
Roman matron. He is familiar with the pro-
ceeds of science, particularly astronomy. With
the scholastic speculations of the Renaissance,
with the simple affirmations of mediaeval piety,
he is as conversant as with the destructive pyr-
rhonism of a boulevard philosopher. So com-
mingled are his contradictory cultures, so nu-
merous his angles, so avid of impressions is he,
that we end in wholly admiring the exercise of
a beneficent magic that can blend into a happy
synthesis moral dissonances and harmonize such
a bewildering moral preciosity. But there are
moments when we regard the operation as intel-
lectual legerdemain. We suspect dupery. How-
ever, it is his humor that is the most potent of
his solvents. This humor often transforms a
doubtful battle into radiant victory. We see
him, the protagonist of his own psychical com-
edy, dancing on a tight rope in the airiest fash-
ion, deliciously capering in the metaphysical
void, and, like a prestidigitator, bidding us doubt
the very existence of his rope.
Proofs from life gay pagan Anatole does not
demand. He has the hesitations of profound
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ANATOLE FRANCE
erudition. Possessing the gift of paradox, he
rejoices in his philosophic indifferentism. Not-
withstanding his famous phrase, "the mania of
certitude," Renan was ever pursued by the idea
of an Absolute. He cried for proof. To Ber-
tholet he wrote: "I am eager for mathematics."
To him numbers promised rigid reality. Not
so, however, to M. France, who could have
asked with Ibsen whether two added to two do
not make five on the planet Jupiter ! To Mon-
taigne's "What know I?" he opposes the injunc-
tion of Rabelais: "Do what thou wilt!" Of
Plato he might have asked, "What is Truth?"
and if Plato in turn would have posed the same
question, Anatole could reply by handing him a
copy of Jardin d'Epicure, that perfect breviary
of Anatolian scepticism. In Socrates perhaps
he would discover a congenial companion; yet he
might mischievously allude to Montaigne "con-
cerning cats," or quote Aristotle as to the form
of hats. And then we spy him adorning the
Wheel of Ixion with garlands. A wilful child of
belles-lettres and philosophy, M. France always
may be expected to utter the starting, lucent
phrase.
He believes in the belief of God. By the
gods of all times and climes he swears. His the
cosmic soul. A man who infuses into his tales
something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bru-
yere's Characters, and the Lucian Dialogues,
with faint flavors of Racine and La Fontaine
superadded, may be pardoned his polychromatic
161
BEDOUINS
faiths. This chromatism in creeds, a trust in
all or none, is rather diverting. But the classic
world of thought shows several exemplars for
M. France, from the followers of Aristippus to
the Sophists. Nevertheless, there is a specific
note of individuality, a roulade altogether Ana-
tolian in the Parisian. No one but this accom-
plished sceptic could have devised The Opinions
of Jerome Coignard, and his scheme for a Bureau
of Vanity (Villiers de ITsle Adam invented a
machine for manufacturing glory). "Man is an
animal with a musket," declares Anatole. Here
is a morsel for hypocrites: "Even virtue may be
unduly praised. Since it is overcoming which
constitutes merit, we must recognize that it is
concupiscence which makes saints. J ' This sounds
like William Blake done into choice French;
Blake who has said that "the fool cannot enter
the kingdom of heaven be he ever so pious";
that Blake who believed that the road to wis-
dom lies through the valley of excess.
Henry James has declared that the province
of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all
vision. According to this rubric, M. France is
a many-sided artist. Philosopher as well, he
plays with the appearances of life, lifting be-
times the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood
of his spectators with the sight of Buddha's
shadow in some grim cavern beyond. He shows
his Gallic tact in decorating the empty spaces
of theory and the blank spots of reality. A fol-
lower of Kant, in his denial of the objective, we
162
ANATOLE FRANCE
cannot imagine him approving of that sage's
admiration of the starry heavens and the moral
law. Both are relative, would be the report of
the Frenchman. Yet he yearns for faith. He
humbles himself beneath the humblest. He ex-
cels in exposing the splendor of the simple soul,
though faith has not anointed his intellect with
its chrism. He admires the golden filigree of
the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him.
At the portals of Paradise he lingers, or stoops
to pick a rare and richly colored feather. He
eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty. But he
hears not the whirring of the wings whence
it has fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity
wholly Christian, Anatole France betrays a
nuance of Petronius and a touch of St. Francis.
Because of this spiritual dislocation or dare I
say bilocation ? he is in art, letters, and life a
consummate flowering of the dilettante.
163
XVII
A MASQUE OF MUSIC
HERE is an evocation of a projected Masque
of Music. Not a Miltonic hymn in praise of
the melting art, nor yet an Alexander's Feast
celebrating its power, after the manner of John
Dryden, but a grandiose vision which would
embrace the legend of sound from its unor-
ganized beginnings to the to-morrow of the ulti-
mate Kalmuck. It is written with such men as
Reinhardt, David Belasco, Gordon Craig, Stan-
islavsky, Michel Fokine, and Richard Ordyn-
ski in view. They, or artists of their calibre,
might make the idea viable in the theatre.
What music would best envelope my Masque is
a question answered by the composers whose
names are figuratively deployed. Or what gifted
American composers might "set" the Masque in
a symphonic poem! Where this kaleidoscope
would be produced and how many evenings it
might need for complete interpretation are puz-
zles I do not seek now to solve; suffice to add,
that I have for the sake of dramatic unity placed
myself at the centre and circumference of this
prose recital, as sensations are veritable hallu-
cinations for me. In a performance the spec-
tators would occupy the same relative position.
164
A MASQUE OF MUSIC
. . . The curtains of Time and Space drew apart.
I stood on the cliff of the World, saw and heard
the travailing and groaning of light and sound
in the epochal and reverberating void. A pedal-
bass, a diapasonic tone that came from the
bowels of the firmament, struck fear to my
heart; this tone was of such magnitude as might
be overheard by the gods. No mortal ear could
have held it without cracking. This gigantic
flood, this cataclysmic roar, filled every pore of
my body. It blew me about as a blade of grass
is blown in a boreal blast, yet I sensed the pitch.
Inchoate nature, the unrestrained cry of the
rocks and their buried secrets crushed aspira-
tions, and the hidden sorrows of mineral, plants,
and animals became vocal. It was the voice of
the monstrous abortions of nature, the groan of
incomplete or transitional types, born for a
moment and shattered forever. All God's mud
made moan for recognition.
It was night. The strong fair sky of the
South was sown with dartings of silver and
starry dust. I walked under the great wind-
bowl with its few balancing clouds and listened
to the whirrings of the infinite. I knew that I
was close to the core of existence, and though
sound was less vibratile than light, sound touched
earth, embraced it, and was content with its
eld and homely face. Light, a mischievous
Loge; Sound, the All-Mother Erda. I walked on.
My way seemed clearer. . . .
Reaching a plain, fabulous and mighty, I
165
BEDOUINS
came upon a Sphinx, half-buried in sand and
looming in the starlight. As I watched her face
I felt that the tone had ceased to surround me.
The dawn filtered through the dark and there
were stirrings abroad in the air. From afar
sounded a fluttering of thin tones. As the sun
shone rosy on the vast stone, like a clear-colored
wind came back the tone from the sea. And in
the music-filled air I fell on my knees and wor-
shipped the Sphinx, for music is a window
through which we gaze upon eternity. Then
followed a strange musical rout of the nations;
I saw defile before me Silence, "eldest of all
things"; Brahma's consort, Saraswati, fingered
her Vina, and Siva and his hideous mate, Devi,
sometimes called Durga; and the brazen heavens
were like a typhoon that showered appalling
evils upon mankind. All the gods of Egypt
and Assyria, dog-faced, moon-breasted, and
menacing, passed playing upon dreams, making
choric music, black and fuliginous. The sacred
Ibis stalked in the silvery footsteps of the
Houris; the Graces held hands. Phoebus Apollo
appeared. His face was as a shining shield.
He improvised upon a many-stringed lyre of
tortoise-shell, and his music was shimmering and
symphonious. Hermes and his Syrinx wooed
the shy Euterpe; the maidens went in woven
paces, a medley of masques flamed by, and the
great god Pan breathed into his pipes.
I saw Bacchus pursued by ravening Maenads,
saw Lamia and her ophidian flute, as Orpheus
166
A MASQUE OF MUSIC
sorrowfully sped, searching his Eurydice. Nep-
tune blew his wreathed horn. The Tritons gam-
bolled in the waves. Cybele changed her cym-
bals. And with his music Amphion summoned
rocks to Thebes. Jepthah danced to her death
before the Ark of the Covenant, praising the
Lord God of Israel. Unabashed behind her
leered the rhythmic Herodias, while were heard
the praiseful songs of Deborah and Barak as
St. Caecilia smote the keyboard. With her
timbrel Miriam sang hymns of triumph. Before
the Persian Satrap on his purple litter Abyssinian
girls, their little breasts carolling to the sky,
alluringly swayed; the air was crowded by the
crisp tinklings of tiny bells at wrist and ankles
as the Kabaros drummed; and hard by in the
brake brown nymphs moved in languorous
rhythms, droning hoarse sacrificial chants. The
colossus Memnon hymned, priests of Baal
screamed as they lacerated themselves with
knives, Druid priestesses crooned sybillic incan-
tations. And over this pageant of Woman and
Music the proud sun of old Egypt scattered
splendid burning rays.
From distant strands and hillsides came the
noise of unholy instruments with names, sweet-
sounding, and clashing. Nofres from the Nile,
Ravanastrons of Ceylon, Javanese gongs, Chi-
nese Pavilions, Tambourahs, Sackbuts, Shawms,
Psalteries, Dulcimers, Salpinxes, Keras, Tim-
brels, Sistra, Crotala, double flutes, twenty-
two stringed harps, Kerrenas, the Indian flute
167
BEDOUINS
called Yo, and the quaint Yamato-Koto. Fol-
lowed fast the Biwa, the Gekkin, and its cousin
the Genkwan; the Ku, named after a horrid god;
the Shunga and its cluttering strings, the Sama-
sien, the Kokyu, the Vamato Fuye which
breathed moon-eyed melodies the Hichi-Riki,
and the Shaku-Hachi. The Sho was mouthed
by slant-haired yellow boys, while the sharp roll
of drums covered with goatskins never ceased.
From this bedlam there occasionally emerged a
splinter of tune like a plank thrown up by the
sea. No melody could I discern, though I
grasped its beginnings. Double flutes gave me
the modes: Dorian, Phrygian, ^Eolian, Lydian,
Ionian; after Sappho and her Mixo-Lydian mode
I longed for a modern accord.
The choir went whirling on with Citharas, Re-
becs, Citoles, Domras, Goules, Serpents, Crwths,
Pentachords, Rebabs, Pantalons, Conches, Flag-
eolets made of Pelican bones, Tams-tams, Caril-
lons, Xylophones, Crescents of beating bells,
Mandoras, Whistling Vases of clay, Zampognas,
Zithers, Bugles, Octochords, Naccaras or Turk-
ish Castanets, and Quinternas. I heard blare
the two hundred thousand curved trumpets
which Solomon had made for his Temple, and
the forty thousand which accompanied the
Psalms of David. Jubal played his Magrepha.
Pythagoras came with his Monochord. To the
music of the Spheres Plato listened. The priests
of Joshua blew seven times upon Shofars, or
rams-horns. Then fell the walls of Jericho. To
168
A MASQUE OF MUSIC
this came a challenging blast from the terrible
horn of Roland of Roncesvalles. The air had the
resonance of hell as the Guatemalan Indians wor-
shipped their Black Christ upon the Plaza; and
naked Ishtar, Daughter of Sin, stood shivering
before the Seventh Gate. A great silence en-
sued. I saw a green star drop over Judea and
thought music itself were slain. The pilgrims
with their Jew's-harps dispersed into sorrowful
groups. Blackness usurped the sonorous sun.
There was no music in all the universe, and this
tonal eclipse lasted long. From remote coasts
came faint cries: The Great God Pan is dead!
They have slain Our Lord and we know not
where to find Hun. . . .
I heard as if in a magic mirror the submerged
music of Dufay, Okeghem, Josquin Depres, Or-
lando di Lasso, Goudimel, and Luther; the cathe-
dral tones of Palestrina, the frozen sweetness of
Arezzo, Frescobaldi, Monteverde, Carissimi, Tar-
tini, Corelli, Scarlatti, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Lulli,
Rameau, Couperin, Buxtehude, Sweelinck, Byrd,
Gibbons, Purcell, and the Bach; with their Lutes,
Monochords, Virginals, Harpsichords, Clavicy-
therums, Clavichords, Cembalos, Spinets, Theor-
bos, Organs, and Pianofortes, and accompanying
them an army, vast, formidable, of the immemo-
rial virtuosi, singers, castrati, the night-moths
and midgets of music. Like wraiths they waved
desperate ineffectual hands and made sad mim-
ickings of their dead and dusty triumphs. . . .
Again I heard the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach,
169
BEDOUINS
ever new, yet old. In its weaving sonant pat-
terns were the detonations of the primeval world
I had just left; also something disquieting and
feminine. But the Man predominates in Bach,
subtle, nervous, magnetic as he is in this Fan-
tasia.
A mincing, courtly old woman bows low. It
is Joseph Haydn, and there is sprightly malice in
his music. The glorious periwigged giant of
London conducts a chorus of a million. The
hailstones of Handel pelt the pate of the Sphinx.
"A man!" I cried, as the very heavens stormed
out their cadenced hallelujahs. A divine youth
approaches. His mien is excellent, and his voice
of rare sweetness. His band discourses ravish-
ing music. The primeval tone is there, but fem-
inized, graceful; troupes of painted stage players
in fallals and furbelows present pictures of
rakes, rustic maidens, and fantastics. An or-
chestra minces as Mozart disappears. Behold,
the great one approaches, and beneath his Jovian
tread the earth trembles ! Beethoven, the sub-
lime peasant, the conqueror, the god ! All that
has gone before, all that is to be, is globed in
his symphonies, was divined by this seer. A
man, the first since Handel! And the eagles
triumphantly jostle the scarred face of the
Sphinx. Von Weber prances by on his gayly
caparisoned arpeggios, Meyerbeer and Verdi fol-
low; all three footlight folk. Schubert, a pan-
pipe through which the wind discourses exquisite
melodies; Gluck, whose lyre is stringed Greek
170
A MASQUE OF MUSIC
fashion, but bedecked with Parisian gauds and
ribbons; Mendelssohn, a charming, girlish echo
of Bach; Chopin and Schumann, romantic wres-
tlers with their muted dreams, strugglers against
ineffable madness and sorely stricken at the end ;
Berlioz, a primitive Roc, half-bird, half-human,
also a Minotaur who dragged to his Crete all
the music of the Masters; and the Turk of the
keyboard, Franz Liszt, with Cymbalom, Czardas,
and crazy Kalamaikas pass. But suddenly I
noted a shriller tonal accent, the accent of a
sun that has lost its sex, a sun that is stricken
with moon-sickness. A hybrid appears, fol-
lowed by a cohort of players. A huge orchestra
plays straightway; the Sphinx wears a sinister
smile. . . .
Then I saw the tone-color of each instrument.
Some malign enchanter had diverted from their
natural uses every member of the tonal army.
I saw the strings in rainbow hues, red trumpets,
blue flutes, green oboes, purple clarinets, horns
glorious golden yellow, scarlet trombones, dark-
brown bassoons, carmilion ophecleides, as the
drums punctured space with ebon crepitations.
That the triangle always had been silver I never
questioned, but this new chromatic blaze, these
novel tin tings of tone what did they portend?
Was it a symbol of the further degradation and
effeminization of music? Was art become as the
sigh of a woman? A vain, selfish goddess was
about to be placed on high and worshipped ; soon
the rustling of silk would betray her sex. Re-
171
BEDOUINS
leased from the wise bonds imposed upon her
by Mother Church, music is now a parasite of
the emotions, a modern Circe whose "feet take
hold on hell," whose wand enchants men into
listening swine. Gigantic as antediluvian ferns,
as evil-smelling and as dangerous, music in the
hands of this magician is dowered with ambigu-
ous attitudes, with anonymous gestures, is color
become sound, sensuality masking as chaste
beauty. This Klingsor evirates, effeminates,
disintegrates. He is the spirit who denies all
things natural, and his revengeful theatric music
goes about in the guise of a woman. She has-
tens its end, its spiritual suicide is at hand. I
lifted my eyes. Surely I recognized that short,
dominating figure conducting the orchestra.
Was it the tragic comedian, Richard Wagner?
Were those his mocking, ardent eyes fading in
the morbid mist?
A fat, cowled monk stealthily marches after
him. He shades his eyes from the fierce rays of
the Wagnerian sun; to him more grateful are
moon-rays and the reflected light of lonely forest
pools. He is the Arch-Hypocrite of Tone, and
he speaks in divers tongues. Brahms it is and
he wears the mask of a musical masquerader.
Then swirled by a band of gypsies, with guitars,
castanets, and led by Bizet. Spain seemed
familiar land, Spain with the odors of the bou-
doir. Gounod and Faust go simpering on tip-
toe; a disorderly mass of Cossacks stampeded
them, Tchaikovsky at their head. They yelled
172
A MASQUE OF MUSIC
as they banged upon resounding Svirelis, Bala-
laikas, and Kobzas, dancing the Ziganka all the
while. And as a still more horrible uproar was
heard I became suddenly conscious of a change
on the face of the Sphinx; streaked with grey
it seemed to be crumbling. As the clatter in-
creased I diverted my regard from the massive
stone and beheld an orgiastic mob of men and
women howling and playing upon instruments of
fulgurating colors and vile shapes. Their skins
were white, their hair yellow, their eyes of vic-
torious blue.
"Nietzsche's Blond Barbarians, the Apes of
Wagner!" I exclaimed, and I felt the ground
giving away. The naked music, pulsatile and
opium-charged, turned hysterical as Zarathustra-
Strauss waved on his myrmidons with frenzied
philosophical motions. Music was become ver-
tiginous, a mad vortex wherein whirled mad
atoms madly embracing. Dancing, the disso-
nant corybantes of the Dionysiac evangel scarce
touched earth, thus outvying the bacchantes.
The roar of enemy cannon pursued them as the
last Superman yielded his ghost to the Time-
Spirit. . . .
Then there gravely marched a group of men
of cold cerebral expression. They carried steel
hammers with which they beat upon their anvils
the whole-tone scale. Near by hovered Arnold
Schoenberg with Claude Debussy, but they put
their fingers into their pained ears as the Neo-
Scythians, Scriabine Stravinsky, Ornstein and
173
BEDOUINS
Prokofieff hammered with excruciating dynamics
hell itself into icy enharmonic splinters. With
thunderous peals of ironic laughter the Sphinx
sank into the sand, yawning as it vanished and
mumbling: "No longer are there dissonances,
Nothing is true. All is permitted!" By a
mighty effort to escape the nipping arctic air
and the harsh grindings of impending icebergs,
I fled.
And that is my Masque of Music.
174
PART II
IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS
" Idols and ambergris and rare inlays. . . ."
Ezra Pound.
I
THE SUPREME SIN
'Et Diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est."
From the Litany of the Damned Saints.
"Shall no new sin be born for men's trouble?"
Swinburne.
*' Let us deny Satan!"
-Sar Piladan.
IDLY tapping the metal-topped table of the
cafe with his stick, Oswald Invern waited for
the Hollin boys. They had promised, the night
before, to be punctual. It was past eleven and
the pair had not turned up; he was bored, ir-
ritated. If they couldn't remember their en-
gagement, well and good; but why !
"Oswald, have we kept you waiting?" in-
toned two pleasant tenor voices. There they
were at last! Oswald made room for them on
the divan and at once the twin brothers be-
gan smoking. Harry fetched a pipe from the
bulging pocket of his coat and Willy lighted a
cigarette. It was their pet affectation to pre-
tend that they disliked any suggestion of twin-
ship. Willy wore high heels and fashionably
cut clothes so as to appear taller than his
177
BEDOUINS
brother, while Harry sported Bohemian velvet
and a broad-brimmed hat. But both agreed
as to art and brotherly love. People endured
them for these salient traits, though Oswald
declared that it only made them the more
stupid.
"No headache this morning, Oswald?"
"No heartache this morning, Oswald?"
The young man envied them as they pulled
their fan-shaped beards and sipped their ver-
mouth-citron. They were in key with the
cosmos and he was not.
"Neither one nor the other," he absently
replied.
"But is not Miss Tilney a charmer? I saw
you looking at her the entire evening. Come
now, say?" Harry Hollin spoke with en-
thusiasm. Invern slowly shook his head and
he continued to gaze down the Boulevard de
Vaugirard. The cafe stood at the meeting of
this boulevard and the Place du Maine, across
from the Gare Mont-Parnasse. The Avenue
du Maine intersected the Place and, while be-
yond lay the choicer precincts of the Quarter,
there was no spot on the "left bank" that was
gayer in silent weather or duller when the rain
fell. This particular morning the sky reported a
delicate pigeon-blue, a nuance that occasion-
ally may be seen in Paris after a storm; it had
withdrawn above the housetops and was im-
measurably far away; a melochromatic horizon
was tinged with flushes of pink and ochre.
178
THE SUPREME SIN
The twins followed Oswald's eyes and boiled
over ecstatically:
"What tones!'' cried Harry.
"I could model them in precious gems!" ex-
claimed his brother.
"There you go, with your atelier slang,"
muttered their companion. " I've been in Paris
ten years longer than you and you beat me as
a Frenchman."
"Qa ne biche pas?" Harry continued. "It's
lovely."
"Oui, c'est kif kif!" chimed his brother.
Invern watched them, the echo of a smile
sounding across his compressed lips. He was
not more than twenty-eight; a slender figure
proclaimed his youth. The head was well set
on his shoulders. It was the expression of his
.frowning forehead and large, dark, heavy eyes
that made the man look much older. Not
dissipation, rather discontent, marred features
of a Byzantine type. Yes, he had been thirteen
years in Paris and these foolish good-hearted
fellows only three; but they knew the argot of
the Beaux-Arts better than he, and they openly
boasted their anti- Americanism. He asked
them:
"Frankly, what are you going to do with
yourselves in America when you get there?"
They answered in happy unison: "Make
money."
He shook his head.
"Make money by selling tombstones that's
179
BEDOUINS
you, Willy! and painting society dames in
impossible attitudes, tints, and expressions
that's you, Harry."
"Never mind us, Invern. You may never
go, but if you do a comic opera with a howl-
ing success is our wish."
"I'll never return now," said Invern.
"The cursed microbe of artistic Paris is in my
system. And, what's more, I'll never do any-
thing. When a Yankee comes over here to
paint he tries to paint like a Frenchman. Look
at the three Salons with their half-baked imi-
tations. Let me finish" the brothers had
lifted angry shoulders " and if a Yankee
studies music here he composes French music
ever afterward French music which is a sad
mixture of German and Italian; eclectic style,
the wise ones call it."
"And if he goes to Germany?" demanded
Harry.
"Then he composes German music." Sud-
denly Willy stood up.
" I have solved the mystery. This pessimism,
Oswald, is the result of of why, you're
in love, man ! I know her name. It's Miss
Tilney June Tilney. The secret is out."
"Is her name June?" asked Oswald irrele-
vantly.
"It's June and she's rich as the sound of her
name." The Hollin boys were irrepressible
this gay morning.
"So! But why June?"
180
THE SUPREME SIN
"You're interested. Listen," interpolated
Harry. "She's a Yankee girl with a Russian
mother or had one and she was educated
in London, Russia, Italy, Germany, Paris "
" Go on ! Why not New York ? "
"She never saw New York, but she speaks
United States."
"And," added Willy, "the Count hates it
like the dickens."
" What a pair of rattles you are ! Who's the
Count?"
"Why, Count Van Zorn, her guardian, of
course. Haven't you met old Van Zorn yet?
He's very musical, goes to all the swell musical
Salons of Paris, to the Princesse de Brancovan,
to the Comtesse de Blanzay, to Duchesse de
Bellune, to the Princesse de Bibesco " Oswald
held up his hands in consternation.
" Stop ! I don't care a sou where he goes.
Who is he?"
"He's very rich and looks after June Tilney's
affairs. And they say wants to marry her
only thirty years' difference she won't
have it, though she likes the old codger and is
seen everywhere with him and they say the
Rasta he's from Roumania or South America
goes in for magic and puts spells upon the
girl."
"Drop the mufle," interrupted Oswald. "The
main thing now is breakfast. And, incidentally,
why don't you marry the girl yourself, Willy?"
"C'est Bibi!" exclaimed Harry, pointing
181
BEDOUINS
to himself. "Willy has signed over all rights
and interests to his loving brother. And we
have the cabot on the run he will be here in
five minutes "; the brothers were embarrassed
after this statement. Their friend stared at
them shrewdly for a moment and then laughed
one of his rare " Rosmersholm " laughs, as the
brothers had christened such a happening.
"So that's the game? Coming here to de-
jeuner! Miss June with him?" They blushed
over the tops of their beards. Invern began
grumbling.
"Oswald !" exclaimed the boys deprecatingly;
they were fond of him, notwithstanding his
frowns and gloomy moods. A waiter was sum-
moned and the order given for the mid-day meal.
" Five plates, Louis, and have the whitest table
linen in the house, please !"
After the introductions Oswald again ad-
mired the girl he had seen the previous night.
She had accompanied the fraternal pair much
against the wish of her guardian to a ball in the
Quarter and she had not, she said, found it
wonderfully diverting. The color of her eyes
was hazel they were wide with golden flecks
in them, the same curious gold as her hair
and her little ears and nose with its tiny nos-
trils, that became inflated when she was inter-
ested, held the gaze of the young man. Under
his dyed eyebrows Count Van Zorn regarded
the company. It was not quite to his liking,
the Hollin brothers soon discovered, so they
182
THE SUPREME SIN
engaged him in conversation and paid him ex-
aggerated compliments. His bird-like profile,
with the dull, prominent eyes, moved slowly
from one brother to the other.
" Who's your friend?" he finally asked. He
was told all sorts of impossible things; Invern
was the coming composer; he had not arrived
yet, but ! The Count grunted. He had
heard this blague before. In Paris all your
artistic friends are just about to, but never do,
arrive. Miss Tilney spoke to Invern.
"It is charming to think of an American giv-
ing up his great country for the sake of music
preferring notes to gold." He made a gesture
of disapproval.
"Ah, don't play the modest genius," she gayly
cried. "You know, I am very sensitive to
genius. I've never heard your music, yet I'm
sure you are doomed to greatness or sorrow."
She added these last two words under her
breath. Oswald heard them. He started and
looked into her eyes, but he might as well have
questioned two pools of light; they reflected no
sentiment, nor did they directly return his
glance. Across the table the Count made a
motion and she colored; he summoned at the
same time the attention of the young composer.
"You write music, do you?" he asked in a
grating voice. "I am a composer myself. I
studied with a great Russian musician, now
dead. I-
"Tell us about Sar Merodack Peladan," in-
183
BEDOUINS
terrupted the vivacious Willy; "tell us if you
ever witnessed his incantations." Every one
but the Count and Invern laughed. The girl
rapidly said something to her guardian. It
must have been in Russian. He shook his head.
"Not to-day," he answered in French.
"No secrets!" the brothers adjured. At last
the crowd began to modulate into that hazy
amiable humor which follows a copious break-
fast. As they drank coffee conversational
themes were preluded, few developed; the ball
of dialogue was lightly tossed and Oswald no-
ticed that Miss Tilney could, at will, be Ameri-
can, French, German, Russian, and English,
and again Russian. Like a many-colored skein
she unwound her various temperaments accord-
ing to her mood. With him she was sombre;
once she flashed anger at the Count and showed
her teeth; for the two Hollins she played any
tune they wished. The real June Tilney
what was she? Oswald wondered. But, when
he fancied himself near the edge of a revelation,
his mind must have collided with her guardian's
Van Zorn's expression was repellent. Invern
greatly disliked him. The talk drifted to art,
thence to religion, and one of the Hollins jested
about the Devil. Count Van Zorn fixed him
at once.
"No one must mock sacred things in my
presence," he coldly announced. The others
were startled.
"M. Van Zorn!" said Miss Tilney. Oswald
184
THE SUPREME SIN
saw her hands fluttering in nervous excite-
ment.
"I mean it," was the firm response of the
Count. "The Devil is the mainspring of our
moral system. Mock him and you mock God
who created him. Without him this world
would be all light without shadow, and there
would be no art, no music the Devil is the
greatest of all musicians. He created the chro-
matic scale that's why Richard Wagner ad-
mired the Devil in music what is Parsifal but
a version of the Black Mass ! Ah ! it is easy to
see that Wagner knew Baudelaire only too well
in Paris, and was initiated into the mysteries
of Satanism by that poet who wrote a Litany
to Lucifer, you know, with its diabolic refrain !"
These words were fairly pelted upon the ear-
drums of his listeners. The girl held her peace,
the brothers roared at the joke, but Invern
took the phrases as a serious insult. He arose
and bowed.
"The Count sees fit to insult my art very
well! But I am not compelled to hear any
more." Before he could leave June plucked at
his sleeve and tried to hold him; stranger still
was the behavior of the old man. He reached
across the table, his hands clasped in supplica-
tion.
"My dear young man," he panted, "I meant
no offense. Pray be seated. I adore your art
and practise it daily. I am a devout Wagnerian.
I was but repeating the wisdom of certain an-
185
BEDOUINS
cient Fathers of the Church who ascribed, not
without cause, the origin of music to Satan.
Do not be annoyed. Beg of him, June, not to
go." Invern fell back in his seat bewildered
by this brusque cannonade. The Count held
up t his ten skinny ringers.
"These claws," he cried, "are worn to the
bone on the keyboard. I belong to an antique
generation, for I mingle music and magic.
Credit me with good intentions. Better still,
visit me soon to-night June, we go nowhere
to-night, hein ! Perhaps as you do not believe
in the existence of the Devil, perhaps music
my music may "
Oswald received a shock, for a small foot was
placed upon his and pressed down with such
electric vigor that he almost cried aloud. It
told him, this foot, as plainly as if its owner
had spoken: "Say no! Say no!" Responding
to a stronger will than his own, he did not
answer.
"Ha, you fear the Devil! But I assure you
the Devil is a gentleman. I have met him,
conversed with him." His voice filed down to
a brittle whisper and to the acute perception of
the young man an air of melancholy enveloped
the speaker. Oswald hung his head, wondering
all the while. Was this fanatic really in his
sane senses? And the girl what part did she
play in such a life? Her voice cut sharply
across his perplexity.
"Dear guardian, stop your Devil talk. I'm
sick of it. You spoil our fun. Besides, you
186
THE SUPREME SIN
know the Devil is not a gentleman at all the
Devil is a woman." Shocked at the very tone
of her voice, almost as harsh and guttural as
her uncle's, Oswald intercepted a look rapidly
exchanged between the Count and his ward.
The blood rushed to his head and he slowly
balled his fists. Then he arose:
"I don't know what you boys expect to do
to-night, but I'm going to see the Devil I
mean the Count; that is, if he does not with-
draw his invitation." The Rollins looked re-
gretfully at Oswald and Miss Tilney. She had
upset the salt and was slowly passing the tips
of her fingers over its gritty surface, apparently
dreaming, leagues distant. The Count was al-
most amiable.
"Ah, my dear June, I shall at last have an
auditor for my bad Wagner playing! I live,
Monsieur Invern, around the corner in the little
Impasse du Maine, off the Avenue. We are
neighbors, I think, and perhaps it may interest
you to know that we, June and myself, inhabit
the old atelier of Bastien Lepage, where he
painted Sarah Bernhardt, where, also, unfortu-
nate Marie Bashkirtseff was often wheeled to
see the dying painter."
"Oh ! oh !" remonstrated the girl in a toneless
voice, "first Devil-worship, and now studio scan-
dal. Fie !" Her high spirits had vanished; her
face was ash-grey as she bowed to Invern.
After shaking hands with the brothers, Count
Van Zorn turned to him and said:
"Don't forget eleven o'clock. Impasse du
BEDOUINS
Maine. The Devil perhaps; anyhow, Wagner.
And the Devil is a gentleman." He tittered,
baring his gums, his painted eyebrows high on
his forehead.
"The Devil is a woman/' tremulously insisted
the girl. "Have you forgotten Klingsor and
his 'Rose of Hell'?" With Van Zorn she dis-
appeared.
II
When he reached his room Invern sat on the
bed. These new people puzzled him. He had
shaken off the Hollin brothers, telling them
they were idiots to have introduced such an old
lunatic to him.
"But we thought you liked occult Johnnies !"
had been their doleful answer; and then Oswald
bade them seek the old Nick himself, but leave
him to his own thoughts; many had clustered
about his consciousness during that afternoon;
the principal one, the girl. Who was she ? With f
all the boastings of the brothers that Count
Van Zorn was welcome in distinguished musical
circles, Oswald made up his mind to a decided
negative. That man never went into the polite
world nowadays, though he may have done so
years before. An undefinable atmosphere of
caducity and malodorous gentility clung to this
disciple of music and the arts esoteric. How
came it then that June Tilney, so mundane, so
charming, so youthfully alert, could tolerate
the vulture? What a vulture's glance suggest-
188
THE SUPREME SIN
ing inexpressible horrors was his brief, warning
look! Oswald grew dizzy. "By God!" he
groaned, "no, not that! But surely some sort
of diabolic business !"
Why not go? Nothing but boredom could
result at the worst, and boredom in his life was
rapidly merging into a contempt for existence,
contempt for this damnable Parisian morass.
His ambition had winged away years before.
Occasionally at dusk, on white summer nights,
he seemed to discern a flash of some shining
substance aloft, and felt his eyes fill, while in
his ears he heard the humming of a" great col-
ored melody. Then he would make marks in
his note-book and the next day forget his infre-
quent visitor; he believed in old-fashioned in-
spiration, but when it did arrive he was too
indifferent to open the doors of his heart.
The Devil? Any belief but the dull, cynical
unfaith of his existence, any conviction, even a
wicked one, any act of the will, rather than the
motiveless, stagnant days he was leading. Why
not call on the Count ? Why not see June Til-
ney again? He recalled vaguely the freshness
of her face, of her presence. Yes, alert was the
word, alert, as if she were guarding herself
against an enemy. Ah ! hiding a secret. That
was in her light fencing, feathery raillery, cold
despondency, half-smothered anger, fierce out-
burst, and, at the close, in her obstinate reiter-
ation. What did it all mean? He sat on his
bed and wondered.
BEDOUINS
And in the dim light of early evening he heard
his name called, once, twice with the memory
of June Tilney's warning earlier in the day
pressing thick upon his spirit, he rushed into
the hallway from whose vacancy came no re-
sponse to his excited challenge. Yet he could
have sworn to the voice, a soundless voice which
had said to him: " Don't go! Don't go!"
Oswald put on his hat, picked up his walking-
stick, and left the house. . . .
HI
He wandered up and down the BouP Mich'
obsessed by his ideas, and the clocks in the cafes
were pointing to five minutes of eleven when
he turned from the Avenue du Maine into the
little street, closed at one end, which bears the
name of the adjacent avenue. Invern had never
been before in this Impasse du Maine, though
he had passed it daily for ten years. He remem-
bered it as a place where painters and sculptors
resided; it was dark, and the buildings for the
most part were dingy, yet his impression, as he
slowly moved along the lower side of the street,
was not a depressing one. He reached the
number given him as the bells in the neighboring
church began to sound the hour. He had not
time to summon the concierge when a hand was
laid upon his arm; a woman, wearing a hood,
and enveloped in a long cloak, peered at him
through a heavy veil. He knew that it was June
190
THE SUPREME SIN
Tilney and his heart began to pump up the
blood into his temples. She stooped as if en-
deavoring to hide her identity, and in her hand
she carried a little cane.
"Don't go in!" she adjured the young man
who, astounded by this apparition, regarded her
with open-mouthed disquiet.
"Don't go in there !" she again admonished
him. "It means peril to your immortal soul if
you do. I caution you for the second time."
"But how can it harm me?"
"I have warned you," she answered abruptly
was this his June Tilney of the bright morn-
ing airs? "and I repeat: it is my wish that
you do not visit there to-night." Something in
her tone aroused opposition.
"Nevertheless, Miss Tilney, I mean to see
the Devil to-night."
"Then go see her! But deny her if you
dare!" She vanished in a doorway across the
street. . . .
Shocked as was Oswald, he stolidly pulled the
bell until the massive doors opened. A light at
the end of a large, dim court showed him the
staircase of the atelier. A moment later he had
let fall a grinning bronze knocker in the image
of a faun's hoof, and he had hardly time to ask
himself the mystery of Miss Tilney's request,
when he was welcomed by Count Van Zorn.
Nothing could have been pleasanter than the
apartment into which he was conducted. The
Count apologized for the absence of the young
191
BEDOUINS
lady Miss Tilney was a slave to social obliga-
tions ! Invern winced. He looked about while
the Count busied himself with carafe and
glasses. Decidedly an ideal home for a modern
wizard of culture. Book-shelves crowded with
superb volumes, pictures of the Barbizon school
on the walls, an old-fashioned grand pianoforte,
an alcove across which was drawn black velvet
drapery; everything signalized the retreat of a
man devoted to literature and the arts. There
were no enchantments lurking in the corners.
Then his glance fell upon a warmly colored
panel, a Monticelli, of luscious hues with richly
wrought figures. It depicted a band of youths
and maidens in flowing costumes, strayed revel-
lers from some secret rites, but full of life's in-
toxication; hard-by stood an antique temple, at
its portals a wicked smiling garden god. And
over all was the flush of a setting sun, a vivid
stain of pomegranate. . . . The desk of the
piano held an engraving. Invern approached,
but turned away his head. He saw that it was
by that man of unholy genius, Felicien Rops.
The Count crossed to his visitor and smilingly
told him to look again.
"My Rops! You do not admire this Temp-
tation of St. Anthony? No? Yet how differ-
ent in conception from the conventional com-
bination of the vulgar and voluptuous. Wag-
ner's Parsifal is only a variation on this eternal
theme of the Saint tempted by the Sinner. The
Woman here is crucified what a novel idea !"
192
THE SUPREME SIN
Invern was ill at ease. The place was not
what it seemed. He read the titles of several
imposing tomes: the Trait6 Methodique de Sci-
ence Occulte, by Dr. Papus; Sar Peladan's
Amphitheatre des Sciences Mortes, and Com-
ment on devient mage; Au Seuil du Mystere and
Le Serpent de la Genese, by Stanislaus de
Guaita. Eliphas Levi, Nicolas Flamel, Ernest
Bosc, Saint-Martin, Jules Bois, Nehor, Remy
de Gourmont's Histoires Magiques, and many
other mystics were represented. Upon the
dados were stamped winged Assyrian bulls, the
mystic rose, symbolic figures with the heads of
women and anonymous beasts, lion's paws ter-
minating in fish-tails and serpent scales. In-
scriptions in a dead language, possibly Chaldean,
streamed over the walls, and the constellations
were painted in gold upon a dark-blue ceiling.
Luini's Sacrifice to Pan, an etching of the picture
in the Brera at Milan, caught his eye and he
wondered why its obvious Satanic quality had
been so seldom noted by diabolists. A cum-
brous iron lamp of ornate Eastern workman-
ship, in which burned a wisp of green flame,
comprised all that was bizarre in this apartment;
otherwise, the broad student's table, the com-
fortable chairs and couches, did not differ from
hundreds of other studios on the left bank of the
Seine.
Count Van Zorn coaxed Invern into a loung-
ing chair and gave him a glass of wine. It was
Port, of a quality that to the young man's pal-
193
BEDOUINS
ate tasted like velvet fire. He was soon smok-
ing a strong cigar in company with the old man,
his fears quite obliterated. But his visitor noted
that the Count was engrossed. As he sat, his
eyes fastened upon the pattern of the polished
parquet, Van Zorn looked like a man planning
some grave project, perhaps a great crime. His
head was hollowed at the temples, on his fore-
head the veins were puffy, his eyebrows, black
as ink in the morning, were now interspersed
with whitish-gray the dye had worn away.
At intervals he groaned snatches of melody,
and once Invern heard him gabble in a strange
tongue.
"And the music and the magic!" broke in
the young man, weary of this interval. Slowly
Van Zorn arose and stared at him steadily with
his bird-of-prey eyes.
"Have you ever realized," he finally began
in sing-song tones, "what an instrument for
good or evil is the art you profess to practise?
Hear me out," he continued, as the composer
made a motion of dissent; "I don't refer to the
facile criticism which classifies some music pro-
fane, some music sacred. The weaklings who
are hurt by sensual operatic music would be
equally hurt by a book or a picture; I refer to
the music that is a bridge between here and
over there, over there!" His voice sank as he
waved his lean brown fingers toward the alcove.
"In the days of old, when man was nearer to
nature, nearer to the gods, music was the key
194
THE SUPREME SIN
to all the mysteries. Pan and Syrinx answered
its magic summons. A lost art, lost with the
vulgarization of the other beautiful arts, you
say? I deny it!" He drew up his rickety
figure as if he held the keys of a conquered city.
"No! I repeat, music is still the precious
art of arts and across its poisonous gulf of sound,
on the other side, over there" again he pointed
to the alcove, with its sable velvet funeral pall
"the gods await our homage. Wagner a
worshipper at the diabolic shrine pictured his
faith in Parsifal. He is his own Klingsor, and
the music he made for the evocation of Kundry
came straight from the mouth of hell. Ah ! how
it burns the senses ! How it bites the nerves'
'Gundryggia there, Kundry here!' Yes, the
gods and the greatest of all the gods, my master.
Music is the unique spell that brings him to
his worshippers on earth. We near the end of
things. This planet has lived its appointed
years. All the sins save the supreme one
have been committed, all the virtues have
bleached in vain our cowardly souls. Tell me,
young man, tell me," he grasped Oswald by his
wrist, "do you long for a sight of the true mas-
ter ? Through the gates of music will you go
with me to my heaven where dwells the Only
One?"
Invern nodded. He was more curious than
afraid. With apish agility Van Zorn darted to
the pianoforte and literally threw his hands
upon its keyboard. A shrill dissonance in B
195
BEDOUINS
minor sounded; like the lash of hail in his face
the solitary auditor felt the stormy magnetism
of the playing. He had sufficient control of his
critical faculties though it seemed as if he
were launched into space on the tail of some
comet to realize the desperate quality of the
performance. It was not that of a virtuoso;
rather the travail of a spirit harshly expressing
itself in a language foreign to its nature. The
symmetry of the Wagner structure was almost
destroyed; yet between the bits of broken bars
and splintered tones there emerged the music of
some one else, a stranger, newer Wagner. Was
the Horla of Wagner buried in this demoniacal
prelude to the second act of Parsifal struggling
into palpable being! Carried before the ban-
ners of this surging army of tones, Oswald
clutched his couch and eagerly listened to the
evil music of Kundry and Klingsor.
He saw the stony laboratory with its gloomy
battlements, from which the necromancer Kling-
sor witnessed Parsifal defeat the emasculate
squires. He saw the mystic abyss hidden in
the haze of violet vapor whence, obeying the
hoarse summons of her master, Kundry slowly
emerged. Her scream, the symphonic scream
of woman, beast, or devil, fell upon his ears as
though an eternity of damned souls had gnashed
their teeth. And the echoes of her laughter
reverberated through the porches of hell.
Gundryggia dort! Kundry hier! The suc-
cubus, or she-devil, demon, Rose of Hell, after
196
THE SUPREME SIN
vainly refusing to obey the demands of the
harsh magician, sank with a baffled cry: "Oh!
Woe is me!" The vast fabric of Klingsor's
abode shivered, dissipated into nothingness.
But there followed no shining garden filled with
strange and gorgeous flowers, shapes of delights,
wooing maidens with promises of unearthly love
on their lips. Vainly Oswald awaited that scene
of tropical splendor with its dream-terraces,
living arabesques, and harmonious commingle-
ment of sky and mountain, earth and fountain,
the fair mirage painted by Klingsor's dark art.
It did not appear. Instead the music became
no longer Wagner's, became no longer music.
Van Zorn amid brazen thunders wrenched him-
self from the keyboard, and prostrate upon the
floor fairly kissed its surface, mumbling an aw-
ful litany. The room was murky, though violet
hues suffused the velvet at the end. Invern
became conscious of a third person, where he
could not say. An icy vibration like the re-
mote buzzing of monstrous dynamos apprised
him that a door or window had been opened in
the apartment which permitted the entrance of
-what! His heart beat in the same rhythm
with the mighty dynamos and the hoarse chant-
ing of the Count.
"O Exiled Prince on whom was wrought such wrong I
Who, conquered, still art impious and strong I"
"O Satan have mercy on us !"
"0 Satan, patron saint of evil !"
"0 Satan take pity on our misery!"
197
BEDOUINS
"0 Prince of Suicide, Maker of music t"
"0 Satan have pity on us 1"
"O Father of Pain, King of Desolation, true Master of
the House of Planets I"
"0 Satan have mercy on us I"
"0 Creator of black despair t"
"O Satan take pity on us I"
Indifferent Christian as was Invern, his knees
knocked at this sacrilegious Baudelairian invo-
cation. The violet grew in intensity as the
prayers of the blasphemer increased. Slowly
across the sombre velvet stretched in patibulary
attitude a human skeleton. No thorns crowned
its grinning skull; instead a live viper wreathed
about its bony nest and turned glittering eyes
upon the two men. Van Zorn's voice became a
wail, calling down imprecations on earth to
men of good-will. He cursed life and praised
death, and his refrain was ever:
"O Satan? take pity on" our misery I"
Oswald no longer heard him. With hysterical
agitation he remarked the transformation of the
adumbrated phantom. The skeleton had begun
to carnify its frame was first covered with
ivory-white flesh, and then, with amazing veloc-
ity, a woman bourgeoned before his eyes.
Gone the skull, gone the viper. In their stead
emerged the delicate head of a goddess fil-
leted by Easter lilies with smiling lips, en-
ticing pose, the figure of a delicious nubility.
Hazel were the wide, gold-flecked eyes that
198
THE SUPREME SIN
shot forthright shafts into the bosom of Oswald,
and charged him with ineffable longing. The
arms, exquisite in proportion, the graciously
modelled torso, pierced him with an epileptic
ecstasy. And the crazy tones of Van Zorn as-
sailed his ears as if from a great distance:
"0 Satan, have mercy on us /"
But the entranced youth cared little now for
the diabolic litany. One idea seized and was
burning up the vital spark of him. As the
creature waxed in beauty he knew her June
Tilney ! Yes, it was she or was it the daugh-
ter of the devil in the Rops picture ? who
drew him toward her with an irresistible caress
in her eyes; eyes full of the glamour of Gehenna,
eyes charged with sins without joy, penitence
without hope. Forgotten her warnings before
this Kundry of Golgotha.
"0 Satan come down to us" rhythmically
crooned the grovelling old man.
This, Satan? This radiant maiden with the
flowery nimbus and beaming eyes, her young
breasts carolling a magnificat as they pointed
to the zenith Oswald stumbled to the foot
of the gibbet, in his ears the throbbing of death.
Her glance of cadent glory transfixed him.
Scorched by the vision, some fibre snapped in
his brain and he triumphantly cried:
"Thou art a goddess, not the Devil."
A freezing blast overturned him, the saints of
199
BEDOUINS
hell encircled him, as he heard Van Zorn's
grinding sobs:
"Thou hast denied the Devil! Thou hast
committed the Supreme Sin ! Quickly worship,
else be banished forever from the only Para-
dise!"
Sick, his lips twisting with anguish, Invern
had sufficient will to close his eyes and despair-
ingly groan: "Son of Mary, save me!" The
apparition crumbled. After a panic plunge he
found himself somehow in the wintry street, his
forehead wet with fear, his nerves tugging in
their sheaths like wild animals leashed, his
heart a cinder in a world of smoke. . . .
From Asia Minor, years later, the brothers
received a letter signed by Oswald Invern. In
it there were misty hints of monastic immure-
ment, and the hopelessness of expiating a cer-
tain strange crime, compared with which the
sin against the Holy Ghost is but a youthful
peccadillo. The Hollin boys giggled in unison.
"What joy!" they exclaimed, "to have in-
vented the Supreme Sin!"
200
II
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
WITH the vision of an antique marble facade
lingering in his memory he slowly walked up
the Avenue, only stopping at Fiftieth Street
to turn and as leisurely retrace his route. Vin-
cent Serle was in the middle of his vigorous life,
but this day, an early one in April, his forces
seemed arrested; like the curling wave which
crests before its ultimate recoil and crumble.
He attributed his mood to the weather. It was
not precisely spring-fever, but a general slacken-
ing of physical fibre. He felt almost immoral:
he desired respite from toil; he longed for some
place where his eyes would not encounter
palette or print; and, a versatile man of uncer-
tain purpose, he longed to write a novel, chiefly
about himself.
The clock on the church-tower told him that
he was farther down-town than he had planned.
He had mechanically spoken to passing ac-
quaintances. He had saluted Mrs. Larce, over
whose portrait he was laboring, with a vacant
regard and flamboyant hat. Then he emerged
from his engulfing spleen and hastily ascended
Delmonico's steps. It was his day of disap-
pointments. All the windows in the cafe were
201
BEDOUINS
occupied; nothing remained except a large table
in the centre of the room, decidedly an unpleas-
ant spot, with people passing and repassing.
He hesitated and would have gone away when
he remembered that this hour always saw a
mob of hungry folk at any establishment. And
Benedict, his favorite waiter, whispered to him
that he would assiduously attend to monsieur's
wants. The bored painter sank heavily into his
chair.
The meal was not an enlivening one. Like
most artists educated in Paris, Vincent never
took anything save coffee and rolls before one
o'clock. He was not an early riser; he deplored
morning work, being lazy and indifferent; but
he soon discovered that if he were to keep pace
with the desperate pace of New York artistic
life he dared not waste the first half of the day.
Mrs. Larce, for example, insisted upon a ten-
o'clock sitting. At that precise hour he wished
himself a writer with liberty to work at mid-
night; then he might indulge in more tobacco,
dreams, and later uprisings. In the meantime
he was munching his fish without noting its
flavor, a fact that Benedict witnessed with dis-
appointed eyes.
He had achieved coffee and cognac and was
about to light a black cigar when a man hurried
in, and, after gazing at the coveted window-
tables, sat himself opposite Serle with a short
nod, though hardly looking at him. The match
burned Serle's fingers and he struck a fresh
202
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
one. Instinctively he stood up, searching the
room for another place. The garc,on asked if
he desired his account. Vincent shook his
head and fumingly demanded a newspaper;
behind it he swallowed his brandy and puffed
his cigar. The fine print melted into a blurred
mass before his eyes and his hands trembled.
He could feel the beating of blood at his wrists
and temple. He did not peep over the paper
rampart because of his discomposed features.
"Damn him!" he thought, "I wonder if he
knows me yet?"
The newcomer calmly ate his omelette with
the air of a man intent upon some problem. He
was not so tall, so dark as Serle, but older,
wirier and of a type familiar to Fifth Avenue
after four o'clock on fine afternoons: a law-
yer, broker, an insurance officer, but never an
artist. He did not glance at his table com-
panion until the other had folded his newspaper,
and then without a gleam of recognition.
"He doesn't know me," reflected Serle; "so
much the better, I'll not go away. I'll watch
him. It will be interesting."
He sardonically hoped that the absorbed man
would choke as he swallowed his chop. Then
he smiled at his vindictive temper, smiled bit-
terly because of his childishness after all the
fellow was not to blame; he had been a mere
accomplice of a stronger, a more unprincipled
will. Yet, slowly studying the face, he could
not call it a foolish one. Its owner showed by
203
BEDOUINS
his concentrated pose, the stern expression of
his mask, that he was not a weakling.
"But," mused the painter, "I've seen men
with jaws as if modelled in granite, eyes that
imperiously reminded you that they were your
master, men whose bearing recalled that of a
triumphant gladiator; well, these same indi-
viduals, artists, despots, brutes, bankers, were
like whipped dogs in the presence of some
woman. No. Hector Marden's outward sem-
blance is not an indication of the real man.
We are all consummate actors in our daily
lives, none more so than those who have much
to conceal."
Hector Harden and had he not much to
conceal the beast! Vincent's clinched fists
were drumming on the table. " Come," he pon-
dered, "I'll have to cease this baby game or I'll
end by making a scene and consequently an
ass of myself." He stared at Benedict just as
Marden raised his finger. The waiter hurried
to the table and presented his memoranda to
the men. Serle frowned. He was in a nasty
humor.
"What's this, Benedict?" He tendered the
embarrassed gargon his slip of paper.
"Pardon, a thousand times pardon, monsieur !
I made a mistake." Marden looked up smiling.
"I fear I have the bill intended for you," he
said, in a conciliating tone.
"It's nothing," murmured Serle. Both men
bowed. The accounts were soon settled and
204
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
Benedict nervously retreated to the background.
But neither one stirred. Vincent, without paus-
ing to analyze his action, offered Marden the
newspaper. It was politely refused. Possibly
because of the mellowness of the moment, or
the ample repose that follows luncheon, Marden
was not averse from entering into conversation,
one of hazy indirectness, equally suggestive and
non-committal. He made a few commonplace
remarks about the unseasonable heat, the de-
plorable twilight of New York's tower-begirt
highways, and soon, against the prompting of
his inner spirit, Serle chimed an accordance.
They chatted. Benedict discreetly moved
nearer. Presently Serle asked his neighbor if
he would have a cigar or perhaps a liqueur.
"I don't mind," rejoined Marden. "The
fact is I feel lazy this afternoon. I had ex-
pected to meet a friend here a client of mine
-but I fancy he is off somewhere wondering
if New York shall ever boast a decent sky-line.
He is an architect and enthusiastic over French
Gothic." Serle's ears began to burn.
"Architecture in New York? That's a taU
joke. Curiously enough, though, this very
morning I was admiring the new library. It
has a stunning facade. If I were Emperor of
America I'd raze every building within the
radius of ten blocks so as to give the building a
chance. Only think of the Cathedral without
a house near it!"
"You are an artist, evidently," Marden said
205
BEDOUINS
without the faintest trace of curiosity in his
voice. Serle nodded. Benedict with clasped
hands hinted that the two gentlemen might
prefer a window. There were empty tables upon
which the sun no longer shone, since the for-
midable walls across the street blocked its rays.
The painter shuddered. They would surely be
seen by impertinent passers-by. He sent the
man away, sharply adding that he would be
called when needed. As for Marden, he was
languidly drifting on the current of his fancy.
Was it pleasant or unpleasant? The watcher
could not decide. But he had made up his
mind that he would draw Marden up to the
danger-line, and if discovered, if discovered?
He would at least tell him what he thought of
the mean scoundrel who had
"I've noticed/' Marden broke in on Serle's
ugly revery, "that painters seem to have lots
of time on their hands. I beg your pardon.
You have quite as much reason for advancing
a similar remark about a professional man.
Here I am lounging as if I had no office or desk
loaded with unanswered correspondence. But I
assure you I don't often dissipate this way, and
I take it you are of the same opinion regarding
yourself." He paused.
"You spoke of painters loafing. What made
you single out that particular profession? I
believe it may be called a profession," Vincent
laughed.
"Oh! You said you were a painter "
206
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
"Yes, but you were not thinking of me, I'll
wager. You've only seen me half an hour."
"You're right; I was not thinking of painters,
or of you in general, but of a particular case
that came under my personal observation."
"Yes, yes," eagerly responded Serle, as he
mentally abused the lawyer for his measured,
pedantic delivery. "Your story interests."
Marden glanced at the other's flaming cheeks
and replied, rather abruptly:
"But you haven't heard it yet. However, it's
not much of a yarn. It happened several
years ago. A lady, a client, came to me for
advice. She was married, married, I say, to
an artist, a painter a big, good-for-nothing
fellow, who was lazy, who drank, ran after his
models and spent her money." Marden was
interrupted.
"Excuse me, you said the lady was rich?"
"Did I?"
"Certainly, spent her money was your last
phrase."
"Oh! Well, perhaps I shouldn't have said
her money. She had no money. I meant that
her husband had money and didn't spend it on
her. A mere slip of the tongue."
"Good. I'm a regular cross-examiner, you
see."
"True. You might prove a difficult witness
in the chair. My friend my client, informed
me that her husband was so lazy that he re-
mained in bed until one or two o'clock in the
207
BEDOUINS
afternoon; then he would slowly dress and
saunter for a walk, and often she did not see
him until the next morning."
"How did he make a living?"
"Oh, I suppose he painted a portrait or two
and managed to get on."
"A portrait or two? That would hardly pay
household expenses that is, unless your friend
I mean your client's husband, was a Sargent
or a Boldini. Then they could have struggled
along at the rate of one portrait every year."
Serle laughed so harshly that Harden looked at
him wonderingly.
"I see you are acquainted with the artistic
temperament, as they call it in the newspapers,"
observed the lawyer.
"Not as they call it, but as it is. My
dear sir, an artist is not built to put in a ton
of coal every day. A man whose brain is
delicately adjusted, whose whole soul is in his
eyes-
"When he sees a pretty girl?" The sly tone
of Marden angered the painter.
"No, hang it! For a painter there are no
pretty, no ugly girls; no pretty, no ugly land-
scapes; no agreeable, no disagreeable subjects.
Only a surface to be transferred to canvas, to
be truthfully rendered. And that's what busi-
ness men, with their lack of imagination, will
never understand." He spoke hotly.
"I confess I have a lack of imagination when
it comes to an appreciation of the artistic tem-
208
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
perament." Harden said this so slyly that
Serle at once begged his pardon.
"After all, we are not at Dehnonico's just to
thrash out a stale question. Pray go on your
story interests me strangely."
"It's not very interesting that's all I know.
The woman left the man "
"For another?" calmly interjected Vincent.
"Not at all, not at all that is, not at the
time." The lawyer fumbled his glass, his ex-
pression overcast.
"You know what strange creatures women
are. I had the greatest difficulty in persuading
my client to make up her mind. She suffered,
yet she cared for the fellow "
Serle impatiently asked: "But you haven't
revealed what the fellow did to her what his
special crime! Didn't he give her a good
home?"
"My dear sir ! A good home when he turned
night into day ! A good home when he seldom
put brush to canvas ! A good home why, I
thought I told you he was too friendly with his
models."
"His models! A portraitist ! Do you mean
his sitters? Did he flirt with them? If he did
so he was a fool, for he was killing the goose
that laid the No, I'll not be so impolite. I
meant to say he would endanger his reputation."
Marden dryly laughed.
" That's good reputation is good. My client
informed me, and she is a serious woman, that
209
BEDOUINS
she never met an artist who could be relied upon.
And she knew, for she was one herself. "
Serle's jaw dropped. "How odd ! What did
she do?"
"Oh, she painted a little, just enough to make
pin-money and to annoy her husband. You see,
it was this way. She did not care to take money
from a man she loathed."
"Loathed!"
" I said loathed. She literally loathed him.
She told me so."
"Why didn't she leave him sooner? Besides,
a few moments ago you said he never offered
her money. Now, she loathed him so she
wouldn't take any "
"Ah! That's not in my fable," tartly an-
swered Harden. Again he turned gloomy and
tapped nervously on the table.
The afternoon waned. A soft light slipped
through the high curtained windows and modu-
lated into glancing semitones over the richly
decorated apartment. Several men entered
the vanguard of the five-o'clock brigade of ab-
sintheurs. Serle became nervous. What if !
But he determined to take the chance of seeing
some imbecile who might salute him by name.
He leaned forward on his folded arms and asked
with a show of concern:
"And what became of your charming client?"
"My charming Oh! Why, she married
and settled down."
"At last! Is she happy?"
210
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
"How can I tell?" The response betrayed
an irritable nuance.
"I didn't mean to put the question so bluntly.
The reason I ask is a simple one. I studied a
case not unlike the one you narrated. It is just
as sordid and commonplace. My artist, also a
painter, had married a pupil whom he taught
as much as she could absorb. She hadn't much
talent; it was the sort you see expressed on fans
and bon-bon boxes.
" She might have been all right if her admiring
friends had not told her that she had more talent
than her husband really, there wasn't enough
between them both to set the river on fire.
However, she devilled him so effectually that
he took a separate studio to get away from the
sound of her voice and from their home. Like
your painter, he turned day into night, but with
a difference; he made illustrations for the maga-
zines and newspapers, painted cheap portraits,
demeaned himself generally to get money
enough to run the house. She enjoyed herself,
flirted, went into society of some sort, a cheap
compromise between Bohemia and the frayed
fringe of Fifth Avenue you may not know the
variety, as you are a member of another profes-
sion. It is diverting, this society, because it is
as false as the hair on the head of its women.
The bohemian side largely consists of bad claret,
worse music, and ghastly studio teas; its fash-
ionable side, poverty-stricken grand ladies with
tarnished reputations. I've seen it all. One of
211
BEDOUINS
the sights of greater Gotham is this glittering
set of fakirs. The woman I speak of was whirled
off her feet by the cheap show. She was a fresh,
pretty little girl when she came here from a
small town up State. Her friends were ambi-
tious fools, she was green and very vain. So
vain! Then her name crept into the newspa-
pers; it's hard work keeping out of them now-
adays. She was called 'The beautiful Mrs.
Somebody, who painted exquisite miniatures of
socially prominent ladies'; you know the style
of such rot? The horror of it! Rather you
don't, for you have never lived in this particular
set "
"But, I do, I do!" cried Harden. "My
client told me something of it." Serle sneered.
"She didn't tell you much or you might have
asked her whether there wasn't another side to
her case. The girl I am talking about went the
pace; and, as an old philosopher on the police
force remarks: 'When a woman is heading for
hell, don't try to stop her; it's a waste of time/
Her husband saw it and he did try. Her friends
knew it and helped her on her merry way. The
painter even sent her to Europe, and with her
some of her friends to keep her company, if
they couldn't keep her straight. Well Paris is
worse than poison for such women. She was
soon back in New York, leaving behind her a
sweet record, many unpaid bills and with a half a
dozen fools, picked up, God knows where, at her
heels. And then he went away. It was too
212
BROTHERS-IN-LAW
much. However, being a woman, she won all
the sympathy. Her story was believed, not his,
and-
" Singular coincidence. But wasn't the hus-
band to blame a little?"
"Oh!" said Vincent. "Men are always to
blame."
"Could he have forgiven her?"
"He did better, he forgot her."
"Did she go to the bad?" sympathetically
inquired Harden.
"On the contrary. She married well a pro-
fessional man of some sort." He smiled with
good-humored malice.
"And is she is she right now? I mean
is she happy?"
"She will be happy always, a selfish little soul.
You mean is her present husband happy ? "
"Yes." Marden leaned back nonchalantly
and his hands, lean-fingered, traversed the cor-
ner of the table. To Serle the air became as
dense as a vapor-bath. He continued, merci-
lessly:
"Of course he is happy her husband. Why
shouldn't he be? He doesn't know."
"Doesn't know what? Really, you set me on
edge," exclaimed Marden. He tried to smile,
but his upper lip lifted, displaying white eye-
teeth. Vincent lighted a fresh cigar. His arm
did not tremble now. Then, swallowing the last
of his cold coffee, he continued:
"Her husband doesn't dream the truth of her
213
BEDOUINS
life in New York and Paris. She is, as I said,
very pretty and can pull the wool over any man's
eyes. She is so interesting, so poetic, you know.
She plays that little trick of the abused wife
with the artistic temperament; plays it off on
all the men she meets, on my friends "
"Your friends?"
"My friends know her as a capricious vixen,
masquerading as a delicate oversoul. I knew
her once." (Serle was cool; he had himself well
in hand.) "And she always wins and still plays
the game. At this moment she is probably fool-
ing her husband, taking tea with some soft-
head. She gets her wealthy male friends "
"How does she get them? Tell me." Mar-
den's voice was subdued. "Does she say to
her husband that she must secure orders for
miniatures by dining with rich fellows ? Doesn't
she "
" Really, my dear sir, I don't know everything
about this clever lady's method. You seem
quite taken with her story. It is, I pride my-
self, more exciting than your narrative of the
artistic temperament." Vincent's intonations
were markedly sarcastic. The older man's face
was afire.
"Who the devil "
Benedict came to the table and placatingly
asked:
"Is this Mr. Marden?"
"I'm Mr. Marden. What do you want?"
"Madame, your wife, has just arrived. She
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BROTHERS-IN-LAW
is in the large salon with a gentleman, and she
desires me to ask you to join her." The men
arose.
"It was quite a pleasant afternoon, was it
not?" In his most charming manner Serle
put out his hand and Marden took it, grudgingly,
his shrewd face surly, his little eyes suspiciously
fastened on the smiling countenance of his com-
panion. Then he followed the obsequious gar-
on, and Serle went into the street, first looking
after the pair. He discerned Marden at a table
on the Fifth Avenue side; with him was a fresh-
colored, graceful woman, in elaborate afternoon
toilette; a big, overdressed man sat beside her.
Once in a taxi Vincent Serle gave the order
to cross over to Madison Avenue.
"I'll not risk passing that window," he mut-
tered. "It was a mean trick, but it served the
meddling fool right. I wonder which one of us
lied the more? And I never saw Amy look so
bewitching!"
215
Ill
GRINDSTONES
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard;
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword."
Oscar Wilde.
IT was nearly nine o'clock in the evening
when the young ladies entered the fashionable
boarding-house drawing-room. Madame Re-
camier's, on the upper West Side, was large
enough to defy the heated spell; yet the group
seemed languid on this tepid night in June,
fluttered fans and were not disposed to chatter.
No one had called. Miss Anstruther, a brilliant
brunette, cried out:
" Oh, my kingdom for a man ! " Mild laughter
was heard. The girl went to the grand piano and
said: "What shall it be?"
"No Chopin," exclaimed Miss Beeslay.
"Do play a Chopin nocturne. Why, it's the
very night for nocturnes. There's thunder in
the air," protested Miss Pickett.
"Listen to Anne. Isn't she poetic "
By this time the young women were quite
animated. Tea served, Madame Recamier sent
216
GRINDSTONES
down word by the black page to ask Miss An-
struther for a little music. The dark girl
pouted, yawned, and finally began the noc-
turne in F minor. Before she had played two
bars the door-bell rang, and its echoes were not
stilled before a silvery gong sounded somewhere
in the rear. The drawing-room was instantly
deserted.
Presently the page brought in two young
men, both in evening dress.
"We should like to see Miss Anstruther and
Miss Pickett," said the delicate-looking fellow.
"Say that Mr. Harold and a friend are here."
The page departed. Mr. Harold and his com-
panion paced the long apartment in a curious
mood.
"Tea! They don't drink tea, do they?"
asked the other man, a tall blond, who wore his
hair like a pianist.
"I'm afraid that's all we'll get, Alfred; unless
Madame Recamier comes down-stairs or else
is magnetized by your playing. She keeps a
mighty particular boarding-house."
"For God's sake, Ned, don't ask me to touch a
piano. I've only come with you because you've
raved about this dark girl and her playing.
There they are!" Two came in; introductions
followed, and the conversation soon became
lively.
"We drink tea," said Anne Pickett, "because
Madame Recamier believes it is good for the
complexion."
217
BEDOUINS
"You have a hygiene like a young misses'
school, haven't you?" said Ned, while Harold,
fascinated by the rather gloomy beauty of Miss
Anstruther, watched closely and encouraged her
talk. She had a square jaw; her cheek-bones
were prominent. She was not pretty. The
charm of her face it was more compelling
than charming lay in her eyes and mouth.
Brown, with a hazel nuance, the eyes emitted
a light like a cat's in the dark. Her mouth was
a contradiction of the jaw. The lips were full
and indicated a rich, generous nature, but the
mask was one of a Madonna a Madonna who
had forsaken heaven for earth. Harold found
her extremely interesting.
"Of course, you are musical?" he asked.
"Yes; I studied at Stuttgart, and have re-
gretted it all my life. I can never get rid of the
technical stiffness."
"Play for me," he begged. But playing was
not to the girl's disposition. Sultry was the
night, and a few faint flashes of heat-lightning
near the horizon told of a storm to come. Anne
Pickett was laughing very loudly at her com-
panion's remarks and did not appear to notice
the pair. Several times, at the other end of
the long drawing-room, eyes peeped in, and
once the black page put his head in the door
and coughed discreetly.
It seemed a dull hour at Madame Recamier's.
Suddenly Harold placed his hand on Miss
Anstruther's and said: "Come to the piano,"
218
GRINDSTONES
and, as one hypnotized, she went with him. He
lifted the fall-board, put back the lid, glanced
carelessly at the maker's name, and fixed the
seat for the young woman. Anne Pickett was
watching him from the other side of the room.
" Who's your friend? He acts like a piano
man. There were three here last night."
"H'sh!" said Ned, as the pianist struck a
firm chord in C-sharp minor and then raced
through the Fantaisie-Impromptu. The man
beside her listened and watched rather cynically
as her strong fingers unlaced the involved fig-
ures of the music. That he knew the work was
evident. When she had finished he congratu-
lated her on her touch, observing: "What a pity
you don't cultivate your rhythms!' 7 She
started.
"You are a musician, then?" Before he
could answer, the page came in and whispered
in her ear: "Madame Recamier wants to know
if the gentlemen will have some wine."
Miss Anstruther blushed, got up from the
piano and walked toward the window. Harold
followed her, and Miss Pickett called out:
"Ned, we can have some champagne; old
Mumsey says so."
When Harold reached the girl she was lean-
ing out of the window regarding the western
sky. Darkness was swallowing up the summer
stars: he put his hand on her shoulder, for she
was weeping silently, hopelessly.
"How can you stand it?" he murmured, and
219
BEDOUINS
the ring in his voice caused the girl to turn
about and face him, her eyes blurred but full
of resentment.
"Don't pity me don't pity me; whatever
you feel, don't pity me," she said in a low,
choked voice.
"My dear Miss Anstruther, let me under-
stand you. I admire you, but I don't see why
I should pity you." Harold was puzzled.
"Anne, he doesn't know; Harold doesn't
know," cried Miss Anstruther, and Anne
laughed, when a sharp flash of lightning al-
most caused the page to drop the tray with the
bottles and glasses.
It grew hot; the wine was nicely iced, so the
four young people drank and were greatly re-
freshed. Madame Recamier was justly proud
of her cellar. Anne pledged Ned, and Harold
touched glasses with Miss Anstruther, while the
first thunder boomed in the windows, and the
other boarders out in the back conservatory
shivered and thirsted.
Harold went to the piano. He felt wrought
up in a singular manner. The electricity in the
atmosphere, the spell of the dark woman's sad
eyes, her harsh reproof and her undoubted
musical temperament acted on him like a whip-
lash. He called the page and rambled over the
keyboard. Miss Anstruther sat near the pian-
ist. Soon the vague modulations resolved into
a definite shape, and the march from the Fan-
taisie in F minor was heard. It took form, it
220
GRINDSTONES
leaped into rhythmical life, and when the rolling
arpeggios were reached, a crash over the house
caused Miss Pickett to scream, and then the
page entered with a tray.
Harold stopped playing. Miss Anstruther,
her low, broad brow dark with resentment, said
something to the boy, who showed his gums and
grinned. "It's de wine, missy," he said, and
went out on ostentatious tiptoe. The group in
the conservatory watched the comedy in the
drawing-room with unrelaxed interest, though
little Miss Belt declared the thunder made her
so nervous that she was going to bed. Madame
Recamier rang the gong twice, and a few min-
utes later a smell of cooking mounted from
the area kitchen. Harold started afresh. The
storm without modulated clamorously into the
distance, and orange-colored lightning played
in at the window as he reached the big theme
of the bass. It was that wonderful mel-
ody in F minor which Beethoven might have
been proud to pen, and was followed by the
exquisite group of double notes, so fragrant, so
tender, so uplifting, that Anne Pickett forgot
her wine; and the other girl, her eyes blazing,
her cheek-bones etched against the skin, sat
and knotted her ringers and followed with dazed
attention the dance of the atoms in her brain.
She saw Harold watching her as she went to
school; Harold peeping in at the lodge of her
college; Harold waiting to waylay her when
she left her father's house, and she saw Harold
221
BEDOUINS
that terrible night ! He had reached the medi-
tation in B and her pulses slackened. After
the crash of the storm, after the breathless rush
of octaves, Miss Anstruther felt a stillness that
did not come often into her life. The other
pair were sitting very close, and the storm was
growling a diminuendo in the east. Already a
pungent and refreshing smell of earth that had
been rained upon floated into the apartment,
and Harold, his eyes fixed on hers, was rushing
away with her soul on the broad torrent of
Chopin's magic music. She was enthralled, she
was hurt; her heart stuck against her ribs and
it pained her to breathe. When the last harp-
like figure had flattened her to the very wall,
she sank back in her chair and closed her eyes.
"Ho, Margery, wake up; your wine's getting
warm !" cried lively Anne Pickett as she sipped
her glass, and Ned rang the bell for the page.
Harold sat self-absorbed, his hands resting on
the ivory keys. He divined that he had won
the soul of the woman who sat near him, and
he wondered. He looked at her face, a strong
face, in repose with a few hard lines about
the eyes and mouth. He gazed so earnestly
that she opened her eyes, and catching his re-
gard, blushed blushed ever so lightly. But
he saw it and wondered again. More wine
came, but Miss Anstruther refused and so did
Harold. By this time the other pair were jolly.
Ned called out:
"Harold, play something lively. Wake up
222
GRINDSTONES
the bones, old man! Your girl isn't getting
gay." Harold looked at her, and she walked
slowly toward the conservatory. Miss Pickett,
crazy Anne, as they called her, went to the
piano and dashed into a lively galop. Ned
drank another glass of wine and began to dance
from the end of the room to the piano.
"Come on, let's have a good racket!" he
yelled, as the piano rattled off in rag-time while
Miss Anstruther and Harold sat on near the
conservatory. The whispering increased behind
them, but the girl did not hear it. The music
unlocked her heart, and her commonplace sur-
roundings faded. If she had but met a man like
him that other time! She realized his innate
purity, his nobility of nature. Little wonder
that his playing aroused her, made live anew
the old pantomime of her life. She unconsciously
placed in the foreground of her history the fig-
ure of the man beside her, yet she had never
before seen him. It was wonderful, this spirit-
ual rebirth. Only that morning she told the
girls at breakfast she could never love again
she hated men and their ways. "They are ani-
mals, the best of them!" and Madame Re-
camier laughed the loudest.
Harold left her, took another glass of wine,
and seeing Miss Pickett light a cigarette, asked
permission to do the same.
"Can't I bring you another glass of wine?"
Harold tenderly asked. The gang of girls in
the conservatory nudged one another and stared
223
BEDOUINS
with burning eyes at Miss Anstruther through
the lattice. She gently shook her head, and
again he saw her blush. She did not stir. He
began the luscious nocturne in B the Tube-
rose Nocturne, and Madame Recamier's gong
sounded. The page entered and said:
"No more piano playing to-night. Madame
wants to sleep."
Miss Anstruther started so angrily that there
was a titter behind the lattice. But she did not
notice it; her whole soul was bent on watching
Harold. He spoke to Ned, and Miss Pickett's
jarring laugh was heard.
Then he went over to her, and, sitting down
beside her, leaned and touched her face with
his finger. The girl grew white and she felt her
heart beat. At the next word, the old, tired,
cold look came back, and she faced him as she
had first received him.
Then suddenly the laughter behind the lat-
tice grew noisy. Anne Pickett screamed out:
"Another of Margery's dreams shattered!"
Ned laughed and rang for more wine.
As they came down the steps the next morn-
ing Harold said to Ned:
"My boy, there are worse crimes than mur-
dering a woman."
"Oh, let's get a cocktail," croaked Ned.
224
IV
VENUS OR VALKYR ?
PAUL GODARD found the ride between Nu-
remberg and Baireuth discomforting. The hot
July breezes that blew into the first-class coupe
of the train were almost breath-arresting; and
Paul had left Stuttgart that morning in a savage
mood. The slowness of the railway service ir-
ritated him, the faces of his travelling compan-
ions irritated him, and he had shocked an Eng-
lishman by remarking early in the afternoon:
"If the old engine doesn't run any faster
than this we had better get out and walk, or
push."
The other simply peered at the speaker and
then resumed Wolzogen's book on Leading-
Motives.
Three Roumanian ladies laughed in oily
Eastern accents. They understood English,
and the sight of a human being, a strong young
man, in a passion about such a little matter as
European railroad punctuality struck them as
ridiculous. So they laughed again and Paul
finally joined in, for he was an American.
He had been rude, but he couldn't help it;
besides, it looked as if they would reach Bai-
225
BEDOUINS
reuth too late for the opening performance, and
his was the laughter of despair.
The youthful pilgrim journeying to Bai-
reuth was born in New York. He had studied
music like most young people in his country,
and had begun with that camel, that musical
beast of all burdens, the piano. This he prac-
tised most assiduously at intervals, because he
really loved music; but college, lawn- tennis,
golfing, dancing, and motor-boating had claims
not easily put aside. Naturally, the piano suf-
fered until Paul left college; then for want of
something better to do he took lessons from
Joseffy and edified that master by his spurts of
industry. His club began to encroach on his
attention, and again the piano was forgotten.
Paul, whose parents were rich, was not a society
butterfly, but his training, instincts, and asso-
ciations forced him to regard a good dinner, a
good tailor, and a racing motor-car as necessary
to his existence. From his mother he inherited
his love of music, and his father, dead many
years, had bequeathed him a library; better
still, a taste for reading.
An average cultivated American, intensely
self-conscious, too self-conscious to show him-
self at his best, ashamed of his finer emotions,
like most of his countrymen, and a trifle spoiled
and shallow.
One day Edgar Saltus told Paul he should
read Schopenhauer, and he at once ordered the
two volumes of The World as Will and Rep-
226
VENUS OR VALKYR?
resentation. It was not difficult reading, be-
cause he had been in Professor Bowne's class at
college and enjoyed the cracking of meta-
physical nuts. He began to get side glimpses
of Wagner's philosophy, but despite the wit of
the German Diogenes his pessimism repelled
him. He could not agree with Saltus's ingenious
defense of pessimism in his two early books, and
he looked about for diversion elsewhere. Walter
Pater's silken chords, velvety verbal music,
had seduced Paul from the astringencies of
Herbert Spencer, and Chopin made moonlight
for his soul on morbid nights.
Yet Paul, with his selfish, well-bred, easy life,
had encountered no soul-racking convulsions;
he had never been in love, therefore he played
the nocturnes of Chopin in a very unconvinc-
ing manner.
He always declared that Poe was bilious, and
this remark gained for him the reputation of
wit and scholar among his club associates.
The Calumel Club is not given to velleites of
speech. . . .
n
Then Paul Godard fell into the clutches of
Richard Wagner and swallowed much of him.
Chopin seemed tiny, exotic, and feminine
compared to the sirocco blasts of the Baireuth
master. Paul was not too critical, and, like
most Americans, he measured music by its im-
mediate emotional result. The greater the as-
227
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sault upon the senses, the greater the music.
The logic was inescapable.
Friedrich Nietzsche was the next milestone in
Paul's mental journeyings. The attack on Wag-
ner, the attack on the morals that made our
state stable, the savage irony, sparkling wit, and
brilliant onslaught on all the idols, filled the
mind of the young man with joy. He dearly
loved a row, and though he recognized Nordau's
borrowed polemical plumage, he liked him be-
cause of his cockiness.
So he devoured Nietzsche, reckless of his
logical inferences, reckless of the feelings of his
poor mother, a most devoted Episcopalian of
the High Church variety. Paul always pained
her with his sudden somersaults, his amazing
change of attitude, and, above all, his heartless
contempt for her idols, the Church and good
society. Society sufficed her soul hunger, and
Paul's renunciation of Mozart and Donizetti
she simply loved Lucia his sarcastic flouting
of churchgoers and his refusal to range himself,
were additional weeds of woe in her mourning
life.
There was Edith Vicker; but Paul was such a
hopeless case and wouldn't see that a nice, pretty,
rich, moderately intelligent, well-reared young
woman was slipping through his fingers. Mrs.
Godard often sighed that winter in her sump-
tuous uptown apartment.
Nietzsche revealed new intellectual vistas for
Paul and he actually became serious. The
228
VENUS OR VALKYR?
notion of regarding one's own personality as a
possible work of art to be labored upon and
polished to perfection's point, set him thinking
hard. What had he done with his life? What
wasted opportunities ! He deserted his club
and began piano-playing again, and when re-
proached by his friends for his fickleness he
excused himself by quoting Nietzsche; a thinker,
as well as a snake, must shed his skin once a
year, else death. He also was ready with Emer-
son's phrase about fools being consistent, and
felt altogether very fine, and superior to his
fellow-beings. Nietzsche feeds the flame of
one's vanity, and Paul was sure that he belonged
to the quintessential band of elect souls that is
making for the Uebermensch the Superman !
He really was a nice, boyish lad, and he could
never pass a pretty girl whether a countess or
a chambermaid without making soft eyes at
her. Paul was popular; and so the Roumanian
ladies laughed at him admiringly. Paul had
left his mother in Paris, the heat was too trying
for travel, and he was close to Baireuth on this
torrid summer day, one Sunday afternoon in
July-
Yet another hour before him, he turned his
critical attention to the laughing trio. One was
a princess. She told Paul so, and spoke of the
sultry diversions of Bucharest. The second was
a fat singer, who startled the Englishman by
inquiring if there wasn't a good coloratura part
in Parsifal. If there were, she intended asking
229
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Frau Cosima Wagner to let her sing it; but if
there wasn't, she supposed she would have to
be content with the Forest Bird; even Melba
had been a Waldvogel, why couldn't she be one
also?
Her sparkling eyes and mountain of flesh
amused Paul exceedingly. He knew Heinrich
Conried very well, and he told the singer that
when Parsifal was sung next season at the Met-
ropolitan Opera House he would speak to the
impresario and get her the part of Kundry. It
was for a lark-like voice, such as the lady said
she possessed, and full of Bellinian fioritura.
As he gravely related these fables he was con-
scious of the penetrating gaze of the third
woman. She was tall, frail-looking, with a dark
skin, hair black and glossy, and she had the
most melancholy eyes in the world. Paul re-
turned her glance with discretion. His eyes
were Irish blue-gray and full of the devil at
times, and they could be very sympathetic and
melting when he willed. The two young people
examined each other with that calm regard
which, as Schopenhauer declares, mars or makes
the destiny of a new generation. But metaphys-
ics and the biology of the sexes bothered not at
all the youth and maiden. Paul admired the
classic regularity of her nose and forehead, and
wondered why her face seemed familiar. Her
mouth was large, irregular, perverse. It sug-
gested Marie Bashkir tseff's, and it was just as
yearning and dissatisfied. Despite their sadness,
230
VENUS OR VALKYR?
fun lurked in the corners of her eyes, and he
knew that she enjoyed his harmless hoax.
Then they both burst out laughing, and the
princess said in a surprised voice:
"Helena, why do you laugh with the young
American gentleman?"
She also mentioned a family name that caused
the New Yorker to stare. What, was this girl
with the determined chin and brows the identical
one who almost set Russia quarrelling with an-
other nation and upset the peace of Roumania?
Yes, it was, and Paul no longer puzzled over her
face. It had been common property of the
photographers and newspaper illustrators a few
years ago, and as he mentally indexed its features
he almost said aloud that her curious beauty
had never been even faintly reproduced.
His imagination was stirred; Roumania had
always seemed so remote, and here was he, Paul
Godard, a plain American citizen, face to face
with the heroine of one of those mysterious
Eastern intrigues in which kings, crowns, queens,
and ladies-in-waiting were all delightfully mixed
up. So he chatted with Helena about Wagner
and Degeneracy, and discovered that she was
an admirer of Ludwig of Bavaria, Nietzsche,
Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Schumann, Chopin,
Marie Bashkirtseff, and all the rest of the sick-
brained people born during the sick-brained
nineteenth century. She, too, had written a
book, which was soon to appear. It was full of
the Weltzchmerz of Schopenhauer and the bold
231
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upspringing individualism of Nietzsche. She had
odd theories concerning the Ring of the Nibe-
lungs, and had read Browning's Sordello. She
told Paul that she found but one stumbling-block
in Wagner. How, she asked gravely, with a
slight blush how could Parsifal become Lohen-
grin's father?
Paul said he didn't know. It must have oc-
curred long after his experiences with Kundry
and the Flower Girls, and perhaps it was a sort
of
"Oh, no, M. Godard !" she quickly answered.
"Not that. The swan died, you know; besides,
Parsifal was always a Pure Fool." Paul sug-
gested that it might have been another of the
same name but of a different family. And then
the conversation went to pieces, for the soprano
called out:
"Voila! Baireuth, the Wagner theatre!"
and they all craned their necks to catch the first
glimpse of that mystic edifice built on the hill,
the new musical Pantheon, the new St. Peter's
of the Bewitched Ones.
And the Englishman continued to calmly read
about the Loki-motif as the train slowly steamed
into Baireuth.
m
Paul found comfortable lodgings in the Liszt-
strasse and his new friends went to the Hotel
Sonne. At half-past four he was up on the hill
looking at the world, and as immaculately dressed
232
VENUS OR VALKYR?
as if he stood in the bow window of the Calumel
Club, ogling Fifth Avenue girls. He was only
vaguely interested in the approaching perform-
ance, and his pulses did not quicken when Don-
ner's motif told the gabbling, eager throng that
the great Trilogy was about to unfold its fables
of water, wood, and wind. He took his seat
unconcernedly, and then the house became
black and from space welled up those elemental
sounds, not merely music, but the sighing, dron-
ing swish of waters. The Rhine calmly, majes-
tically stole over Paul's senses, he forgot New
York, and when the curtains parted he was with
the Rhine Daughters, with Alberich, and his
heart seemed to stop beating. All sense of
identity vanished at a wave of Wagner's magic
wand, and not being a music-critic, his ego was
absorbed as by the shuiing mirror in the hand
of a hypnotist. This, then, was Wagner, a
Wagner who attacked simultaneously all the
senses, vanquished the strongest brain, smoth-
ered, bruised, and smashed it; wept, sang, surged,
roared, sighed in it; searched and ravished your
soul until it was put to flight, routed, vanquished,
and brought bleeding and captive to the feet
of the master.
The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed
with bliss, and Paul felt the wet of the waters.
He panted as Alberich scaled the slimy steeps,
and the curves, described by the three swimming
mermaids, filled him with the joy of the dance.
The rape of the Rhinegold, the hoarse shout
233
BEDOUINS
of laughter from Alberich's love-forsworn lips,
and the terrified cries of the three watchers were
to Paul as real as Wall Street.
Walhall didn't bore him, and he began at last
to catch faint clues of the meaning of the mighty
epic. He went to the underworld, and saw the
snake, the ring, and the tarnhelm; he heard the
anvil chorus so different from Verdi's ! he
saw the giants quarrelling over their booty, and
the rainbow seemed to bridge the way to an-
other, brighter world. As the Walhall march
died in Paul's ears he found himself in the open
air, and he thought it all over as he slowly went
with the crowd down the hill, that new Mount
of Olives trod by the feet of musical martyrs.
He had a programme, but he was too confused,
too overcome by the clangor of his brain-parti-
cles, to read it. He was not dreaming, nor yet
was he awake; he was Wagnerized. The first
attack is not always fatal, but it is always
severe, even to the point of pain. Paul God-
ard had become a Wagnerite, and his Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer skins melted from him as
melts the snow in sunshine.
Striking through his many exalted moods was
the consciousness of having recognized one of
the Rhine Daughters. It was the contralto, an
Eastern girl from Maine. Rue Towne was her
odd name, and she had been once a pupil of a
New England vocal school, but she had lived
that down, and after the usual hard, interest-
ing struggle abroad she had reached Baireuth.
234
VENUS OR VALKYR?
Paul remembered her well. A blonde girl, eyes
indescribably gray, with dark lashes, a face full
of interesting accents, a rhythmic chin and cheek-
bones that told of resolution. Her figure was
lovely, and Paul resolved to call on her the very
next day.
He soon discovered Rue's address; Baireuth
is small and full of information for the curious.
Paul on Monday morning went to the Alexan-
derstrasse, where she resided, only to find her
at a rehearsal of Die Walkiire. He was rather
put out, as he was accustomed to accomplish
what he wanted without much exertion. He
then bethought him of Helena, the Roumanian
beauty, and he warmed at the recollection of a
glance he had received the afternoon previous.
That, and the hand pressure, had been unmistak-
able. So he went to the Sonne Hotel and sent
up his card. The three ladies were at breakfast.
Would Mr. Godard call in an hour ?
Paul cursed his luck and walked to Wahn-
fried, wondering if he was to be bored during
his stay. The reaction from the exalted condi-
tion after Rhinegold had set in. Paul was not
a beer-drinker, so he could not avail himself of
the consolations offered by Gambrinus, the
Drowsy Deity of Germany. He had taken a
pint of bad champagne and some tough chicken
and slept badly. His cigar, too, was abomina-
ble, and he felt absolutely disillusioned as he
paced the historic garden of Wahnfried. The
true Wagnerite is always in heaven or hades.
235
BEDOUINS
There is no middle-distance in his picture of life
and art. At Wagner's grave Paul felt a return
of the thrill, but it passed away at the barking
of a boarhound. He went slowly toward the
hotel and was in such a perverse mood that he
avoided it and turned into the Ludwigstrasse.
Then he met some one.
A girl passed him, gave him a shy, half-
startled glance, hesitated, and spoke to him. It
was Rue Towne.
"Mr. Gpdard, I found your card a moment
ago. I am very glad to see you. How did you
likeRhinegold?"
Paul was standing in the street, the girl look-
ing down into his eyes; he made a conventional
answer, their hands touched, and they went
down the street together.
That afternoon Paul received a pretty note
from the Roumanian. She wrote of her sorrow
at his not having called again, and asked him to
join them during the first entr'acte of Die Wal-
kiire. He tossed the note away, for his brain was
filled with the vision of a girl in a straight-
brimmed straw hat, a girl with a voice like a woo-
ing clarinet and eyes that were dewy with desire.
Paul was hard hit, and, as one nail drives out
another, the blonde woman supplanted the bru-
nette in his easily stirred imagination.
The first act of Die Walkiire did not lay the fair
ghost in his brain; he went out on the esplanade
and encountered the three Roumanians. Helena
detached herself and came to him with that
236
VENUS OR VALKYR?
gracious gait and proud lift of head and throat
that gave her a touch of royalty. She re-
proached him with her magnetic gaze, and soon
the pair were strolling in the leafy lanes about
the theatre.
Paul had never met a woman who mentally
tantalized him as did Helena. She had a man-
ner of half uttering a sentence, of putting a
nuance into her question that interested while it
irritated him. Artistic people are mutually at-
tracted, and there was a savor in the personality
of this distinguished girl that was infinitely en-
ticing to his cultivated taste and at the same
time slightly enigmatic. Without effort they
glided into confidences, and the Sword-motive
sounding for the second act found them old
friends. Youth is not the time for halting com-
promise.
Lilli Lehmann's art took Paul out of himself,
and the beauty and vigor of the act stirred him
again. But he could not recapture the first fine,
careless rapture of the night before. To the
nerves, virginal of Wagner, that thrill comes once
only.
In the long intermission Paul found Helena
and took her to the crowded cafe across the road
to get something to eat and drink. It was a
quarter after seven, and Wagner wears on the
stomach. Even a poetical Roumanian girl has
earthly appetites. So they drank champagne
and ate pasties of goose liver, and confessions
were many. Nothing establishes a strong bond
237
BEDOUINS
of sympathy like the hunger and thirst of two
healthy young humans. Paul seemed to have
forgotten Rue and the splendour of her hair and
complexion. He was rapidly losing his head in
the subtle blandishments of the Eastern woman.
He saw that she was a coquette, but her serious-
ness, her fierceness, that broke through the shell
of silky manners, gave him a glimpse of a woman
worth winning, and he was just gambler enough,
American enough to dare. When he left her he
carried away a look that was an unequivocal
challenge.
Paul's brain was on fire during the Ride of
the Valkyries, and hardly realized that it was
Hans Richter's masterly reading. The stage
failed to interest him until he discovered Rue
in Valkyrean garb, and then he watched with
his soul in his eyes. Her profile, so charming in
its irregularity; her freedom of pose, her heroic
action filled him with admiration. By the light
from the stage he read her name, Fraulein Rue
Towne, and she was the last in the list of the
Valkyries. He watched with indifferent gaze the
close of the act, and mentally voted the Paris
version of the Magic-Fire scene far superior to
Baireuth's.
He went toward the Hotel Sonne, as he had
promised to sup with Helena, and wondered how
he could see Rue that night. The American girl
seemed something infinitely sweet, healthy, sun-
swept in nature compared with her Slavic rival.
"By Jove," said Paul aloud, "it's a case of
238
VENUS OR VALKYR?
rouge et noir, and I'm in for it and no mistake."
Paul was fond of polyphony.
IV
After supper he suggested to Helena the Sam-
met Garden. The artists always flocked there
and it might prove interesting. Although a
chaperon was a necessity, Helena persuaded the
princess that she could go out just once in the
American fashion. It would be so novel. Paul
pleaded and, of course, won. The young people
hardly spoke as they went down the dark street
to the garden. The air was full of electricity.
A touch, a glance, and a storm would be pre-
cipitated. So they reached the garden and
found a seat near enough the house to be tor-
tured by Herr Sammet's crazy trombone. At
the same table was a black-bearded little man
dressed in white flannels.
"It is the Sar Peladan; I know him by his
musk," said Helena discontentedly, and they
changed their seats.
"What a decadent you are!" said Godard
laughingly.
"Yes. I believe sometimes I can think with
my nose, my smelling sense is so keen. I can
almost divine approaching enemies. Who is
that girl staring at you so hard, M. Godard, a
very pretty blonde; she looks like an American?
No, not near the house there, over there!"
Helena reminded Paul of a cat that lifts a threat-
239
BEDOUINS
ening furry back when she scents a hostile
dog.
"Oh, Lord !" he groaned. "It must be Rue.
That settles me for good." It was Rue, and
she had never looked lovelier. The slight bruise
under her eyes betokened emotional exhaustion.
She was dressed in white, and the simplicity of
her gown and its charming fit made the German
women plainer. Paul's heart knocked against
his ribs as he returned her constrained bow. He
saw that she had quietly and earnestly examined
Helena, and as the eyes of the women met an-
tagonism kindled. But the American girl was
mistress of herself. She began to talk to the
group of artists about her, while Helena sulked
and glowered at Paul's too openly expressed
admiration.
"You admire your own countrywomen, do
you not, M. Godard?" she asked, and the in-
flection in her voice was cruelly sarcastic. Be-
fore Paul could answer she touched his arm softly
and said:
"If you can't look at me when I talk to you,
why, you may take me home."
Paul at once begged her pardon, called for
his reckoning and they prepared to leave the
garden. He did not again salute Rue Towne,
for she was talking earnestly to an ugly old fat
man with a grey beard and a Wagnerian fore-
head half a foot high. But from the tail of his
eye he saw that she was fully conscious of his
departure. Scarlet spots came into her face, and
240
VENUS OR VALKYR?
as Paul walked down the garden steps he felt
as if two eyes burned into his back. Then he
did what other desperate men have done under
similar circumstances. He made violent love to
Helena, and it relieved the pain of his heart.
But the girl was capricious, and only by dint of
magnificent lying did he finally force her hand
into his. They were now walking toward the
Hofgarten, down a deserted street. The many
bells of 'Baireuth told them that it was a
quarter past eleven, and the moon rode tenderly
in the blue. It was a night made for soft vows
and kisses, and as Paul walked he thought of
Rue; Helena fell to dreaming of the prince in
her native Roumania who had played the weak-
ling to her strong woman's heart, and thus the
pair reached the hotel, and after a brief parley
at its door said good night and parted.
O blessed love, that can at least console two
hearts glowing for the absent !
Paul awoke next morning with what the hard-
headed Germans call a moral headache. He
had a bad taste in his conscience, and he decided
to call as soon as possible on Rue. It was
nearly eleven before he got to her house. As
she had no rehearsal for Siegfried, she received
him. He thought that she was distant, but he
talked fast and earnestly, and soon the ice
began to thaw. Paul felt happy. Helena ap-
pealed to his decadent taste, but Rue was as
the perfume of the morning. He told her so,
and explained at great length and with consid-
241
BEDOUINS
erable ingenuity how he came in the company
of a lone young woman. Her two chaperons
Paul fancied two sounded more imposing had
gone by mistake to the garden of the Sonne
Hotel; that is why he left so soon with the lady,
who was only a recent acquaintance.
He felt Rue's eyes on him as he wove this
roundelay, and, feeling hot about the neck and
a little fearful of his ability to keep up the
strain much longer, he suddenly grasped the
girl, crying out, and most sincerely:
"0 Rue ! why do we waste time talking about
a woman I never cared for and never expect to
see again. I love you, I love you, my darling !
Kiss me just once and tell me you care a little
for me."
As he fell upon her she was taken off her
guard, and the inevitable happened. She kissed
Paul and he placed a big ring on her finger, and
left the house an hour later an engaged and also
a much be-perjured man. He was happy until
he thought of Helena.
That evening when Siegfried was finished
Paul walked arm and arm with Rue down the
hill to Sammet's. As they entered they brushed
against three ladies, and Paul said aloud: "Oh,
Lord!"
The next day Rue had to go to a rehearsal for
the Rhine Daughters in Die Gotterdammerung,
and Paul was whistling the Spring Song from
Die Walkure in his room when a knock at his
door brought the news that a lady wished to
242
VENUS OR VALKYR?
see him. He wondered who the lady was, and,
as the parlor of the house had been turned into
a bedroom, he put on his hat and went into the
hall, to be confronted by Helena, shamefaced
but resolute.
"Come out into the street," he begged, for in
her implacable eyes he read signs of the ap-
proaching storm.
They silently descended to a lower 6tage.
Then she turned and faced him:
"So you didn't come to me this morning/'
she said. Roumania excited was a stirring spec-
tacle, nevertheless Paul wished that he was up
the Hudson playing golf.
He endeavored to placate her. Helena, an-
gered at her loss of dignity in condescending
to call on this man, reproached him bitterly,
and it seemed to him that she was about to sing
the picturesque songs of hate which Carmen
Sylva has made known to us, when they reached
the street. Then her rage vanished in a moment.
"You conceited man, and you really took me
in solemn earnest! I fancied the Americans
had a sense of humor. Pooh! You're not a
man to love more than a moment, anyhow,"
and she went on her way laughing mockingly,
leaving Paul shamefaced, angered, his self-love
all bruised and his senses aroused, for Helena
wrathful was more beautiful than Helena ami-
able.
He was so distressed in mind that he only sat
through one act of Die Gotterdammerung; his
243
BEDOUINS
Wagner madness seemed to have evaporated.
He hovered around the back of the theatre, and
caught a glimpse of Rue getting in a carriage
with the same fat old German her singing-
teacher, he fancied.
Although it was late, he called at her house.
She had not yet arrived, the maid told him.
He mooned about disconsolately until one
o'clock, keeping at a safe distance from the
Hotel Sonne. Then he wearily went to bed
and dreamed that the Nornes were chasing him
down Fifth Avenue.
The next morning he called again on Rue. She
sent down word that she was tired. He called
again in the afternoon; she was not at home.
In the evening, feeling as if he were going mad,
he was told that she had gone out and would
not be back until late. He hung around the
house in a hungry-dog fashion, smiling bitterly
at times and beginning to doubt even his own
intentions. But no Rue.
He went home at last, and in a rage of love
and jealousy he sat down and wrote to Rue this
letter:
"Rue, my Rue, darling, what is the matter?
Have I offended you? Why did you not see
me to-day, to-night? Oh, how lonely was the
street, how sad my heart! I thought of Ver-
laine's 'It rains in my heart as it rains in the
town.' Why don't you see me? You are mine;
you swore it. My sweet girl, whose heart is as
fragrant as new-mown hay ! Darling, you must
244
VENUS OR VALKYR?
see me to-morrow to-day for I am writing
to you in the early, early morning. You know
that you promised to come to me next year in
America. Only think, sweetheart, what joy
then ! The sky is aflame with love. We walk
slowly under few soft spring stars, and your
hand is in mine, and that night, that night your
heart will sob on my breast, my lovely woman,
and your heart will fiercely beat as we both slip
over the hills to heaven. Rue, you will make
me a poet. Only tell me, I beg of you, the
hour when I may see you."
Then Paul threw himself on the bed, but not
to sleep. It was daybreak, and the Teutonic
chanticleer of the dawn had lusty lungs, and it
was almost time for coffee. He dressed in fever-
ish haste, went out of doors, secured a messenger
and despatched the letter. He walked up and
down the Lisztstrasse for twenty minutes, and
his emotion was so great at the sight of the boy
returning, a letter in hand, that he retreated into
the doorway and awaited the news. It was
brief. He read this in Rue's firm handwriting:
"Your friend Helena has told me all. Here
is your ring."
There was no signature.
Then Paul did what most cowards do. He
went to the other woman. The storm in his
soul might be allayed, and he could have the
pleasure of showing Rue that she was not neces-
sary to him. Of course the jealousy of Helena
had spoiled his game; for he really had meant
245
BEDOUINS
to be sincere with Rue, so he told himself in the
inward, eloquent manner which paves hell with
composite intentions. It was all clear to him,
Helena loved him, else why did she tell Rue of
his double-dealing ? It gave him a glowing feel-
ing again in his distracted bosom, and as he
walked into the Hotel Sonne he said between
clutched teeth:
"Black wins!"
He was met by a polite portier, who told him
that his friends had left on the early train for
Vienna. But there was a letter !
Heart-sick and with trembling hands he tore
open the envelope.
"Did you really think I loved an American
when I can have a Roumanian ? Better console
your singer."
No signature.
"When does the next train leave for Paris?"
asked Paul of the polite portier.
There is a rumor in society that Paul God-
ard is engaged to Edith Vicker. He never
goes to a Wagner music-drama, and is passion-
ately addicted to cabaret dancing.
Americans are versatile.
246
V
THE CARDINAL'S FIDDLE
YAKOV leaned out of his window and greedily
listened to the Cardinal playing his fiddle. The
window was small and under a hot roof. From
it a view of the great palace of his Eminence was
easy, for the house of Yakov's mother stood in
a narrow court at the rear, and was a low-sized
building, not far from the Cathedral which
dominated this old-fashioned and once aristo-
cratic section of the city. The bedroom of the
boy was on a level with the living-room of the
Cardinal a tall, spare old man with mild
eyes and ascetic face. His bushy white hair
and ruddy complexion, coupled with a high,
hawk-like nose, gave him the appearance, in
Yakov's eyes, of a benevolent bird of exotic
origin. Stranger still was his passion for music.
At least once a day he could be seen by the lad,
walking with long, elastic strides about the large
bare room, a violin tucked under his chin, his
eyes closed, and he fiddling as if rehearsing for
a classical concert. Yakov knew it was u clas-
sical^ music because he couldn't make head or
tail of it, although he was studying the instru-
ment himself at the big conservatory on the
square. But he was only a beginner that's
247
BEDOUINS
what his cross teacher told him when his lesson
was a poor one and he realized the fact, while
the Cardinal oh! he played everything diffi-
cult, and always without notes.
He wondered why this kindly old gentleman
in the queer dress should fiddle in the great pal-
ace across the way; he, so rich and powerful,
doing for fun what the poor little Yiddish boy
did as a task. When Yakov could play he
wouldn't live in a palace, but would try to get
a' job in a theatre orchestra. His mother an-
swered his query, "What is a cardinal?" with a
vague, "Oh, he is a sort of high rabbi/' which
didn't tell her son much. He was brought up
in the orthodox faith, went to Shool the syn-
agogue and was careful to eat no food that
had not been prepared in Kosher fashion. This
last practice brought him into conflict with the
boys of his class at the public school around
the corner. They were American born, though
many of foreign descent. That made no differ-
ence, for, as much as they quarrelled with one
another, they were a unit as to the undesirabil-
ity of the Jew. Their teacher had scolded, had
even punished them, but uselessly. They were
sarcastic, were these boys of Italian, Irish
and German parents, calling aloud, "Micky,"
"Dutchy," "Guinney," "Wop," but for Yakov
and his like in the majority at the school
they had choicer terms: "Sheeny" "Kike!"
"Mekmek!" Yakov didn't much mind the
nicknames.
248
THE CARDINAL'S FIDDLE
He only feared the suddenly delivered punches
at his back, the vise-like grip of "Jimmy the
Brick" (self-christened) on his neck, and the
hateful grin with which a ham sandwich would
be thrust into his mouth. This last was the
supreme insult. If he did not complain to his
teacher, it was because he feared reprisals. So
he only told his mother, with tears in his large,
dark, expressive eyes, and she comforted him.
She said it was the glory of his race, this badge
of suffering, these insults from the Gentiles.
He must not fight back, but meekly endure.
Jehovah would watch over him. She was a
decent widow woman, who had a small dress-
making business in her house and barely sup-
ported herself and child, also giving him a musi-
cal education. Oh ! to see him a great violinist !
She loved music, and as she worked her sewing-
machine she hummed to its rhythms. Once,
many years ago, she had heard in Lemberg, her
Galician birthplace, the greatest violinist in the
world, Joseph Joachim, and one of her race.
She was unmarried then, yet she made a silent
vow that if ever she had a son . . .
She had Yakov now, and his father was gone.
She always said to him dead. But she knew
better. He had deserted her for another woman,
left her without a dollar, and she had been fight-
ing for ten years to keep their heads above
water. Living in this humble yet genteel court
behind the Cathedral, she dreamed of Yakov's
future, and she cried with joy when the teacher
249
BEDOUINS
at the conservatory grudgingly admitted that
the boy had talent and might he coughed his
reservations with hard work make a fair
musician. Yakov went to school and in the
afternoons practised. The weather was warm,
windows were opened, and he attentively heard
the fiddle of the Cardinal.
The music was a succession of beautiful sounds
for the young visionary. His eyes glittering, his
lips apart, his arms tightly folded about his thin
little frame, he listened as if to the voice of God.
The Cardinal played the slow movement of
Mendelssohn's concerto, and, threadbare as has
become this familiar song, to Yakov it was an
enchantment. Its obvious sentiment seemed a
call from his dead father in heaven. When the
music ceased he involuntarily stretched aloft his
arms. The eye of the Cardinal must have
caught the glint of white the boy was in his
shirt-sleeves and came to the window cau-
tiously, peering across to Yakov. He vaguely
smiled, and to Yakov's sorrow he closed the
window, yet the sound of his fiddle softly echoed
in the ears of the boy.
Every evening he stationed himself at the
same spot, but the Cardinal did not play.
Yakov yearned for his music. His own cheap
red fiddle became hateful to him. Its rasping
tones when he attempted scales extinguished his
ambition. One day his mother said in her purr-
ing Yiddish: "Yakov, you must be more indus-
trious, else the gentleman at the conservatory
250
THE CARDINAL'S FIDDLE
will send you home." Even that didn't arouse
him. He suddenly took to playing in the court
with the other boys after school. Such rough
games ! He stood a lot of kicking and punching,
especially from Jimmy the Brick, who, after all,
wasn't a bad-hearted chap. He once grabbed
Yakov's lunch-box and critically swallowed the
contents, which pleased him, as he liked full-
flavored food. "Say, Kike, that's not bad
grub. I like your stuffed fish better than the
macaroni of that Wop kid Tony." With this
backing of the boss Yakov enjoyed comparative
peace. He had thought of revenge, of organiz-
ing into a compact phalanx the large body of
Jewish boys at the school, but his mother's ad-
vice and the patience of his race dissuaded him
from active rebellion. He let things slide along,
and in the meantime his music was almost neg-
lected. In vain did his teacher rap his knuckles
with the fiddle-bow and threaten him with dis-
missal. Yakov knew the crosspatch wouldn't
keep his word, for he was a pay pupil; not much
pay, to be sure; anyhow, not a charity scholar.
The magic of a windless June night trans-
formed the old Red Lion court into an operatic
picture. Moonlit, it recalled a prosperous past
that had hardly modulated into its present mid-
dle-class shabbiness. Old houses, colonial in
style, but sadly defaced by time, slept tranquilly
in the magnetic rays of a moon which breasted
the low housetops. The din and gabble had
ceased, the only noise being the sound of ham-
251
BEDOUINS
mered iron on the anvil of the blacksmith's at
the corner. So changed were times that the
legend over the door of the smithy read, " Soko-
lov & Griinstein Horseshoers." The ancient
and honorable profession had been wrested from
sturdy English and Irish hands by the more per-
sistent hosts from southeastern Europe. For
Yakov the change meant nothing, but it gave
extreme pain to Jimmy's parents, and so Jimmy,
with his faithful band, was in the habit of yell-
ing defiant and insulting words at the two
blacksmiths, though keeping at a safe distance.
The rhythmic tapping of the hammers brought
peace to Yakov, who stood in his window re-
garding with awakened curiosity the spectacle
of the Cardinal's living-room, lighted for the
first time in weeks; perhaps ! Presently the
sound of a fiddle oozed through the open space.
He was back, the Cardinal with his fiddle.
What was he playing? Hymn tunes, surely.
First, the Adeste Fideles, which Yakov remem-
bered because in a moment of condescending
generosity Jimmy had taken him to Vespers at
the Cathedral and had told him the name of
the music he had heard.
Then the tune shifted to a more solemn, a
celestial tune, indeed, which the listener couldn't
place. He didn't know it was the Jesu, by
Haydn, but that didn't matter; his ear was rav-
ished by its pleading strains, and he hung out
of his perch, tremulously absorbing every tone.
The Cardinal's humor shifted. He dashed off a
252
THE CARDINAL'S FIDDLE
gay Tipperary jig, and followed this with The
Valley Lay Smiling Before Me, and The Harp
of Tara. Yakov felt that the violinist must be
an Irishman, but ever so different from the noisy
Jimmy. Yet Irish !
What, what! He pinched himself as the
grave music of the Kol Nidre, the sacred tune
sounded on the Day of Atonement, came swell-
ing across the Cardinal's windows. The Kol
Nidre, that immemorial cantillation of the He-
brews, in it compressed the dolors of the ages,
and perhaps first chanted in the house of Egyp-
tian bondage, perhaps out of the dim centuries
before Egypt, before the shadowy Sumerians!
Who knows? What concerned the boy was the
strange happening a potentate of the Gentile
Church playing on a fiddle the grand and ven-
erable hymn of the Jews. But that he was fas-
cinated by the music he would have rushed
down to his mother to tell her the glad tidings.
She knew of the playing across in the palace,
and was pleased because of Yakov's evident in-
terest. She would welcome the return of the
Cardinal, for her boy would be again spurred to
study. He couldn't leave the window till the
last note had been squeezed from the august and
mournful melody.
In a fever Yakov seized his tiny instrument
and lovingly mimicked the Cardinal. Its squeak
reached the priest, who came to the window
and waited until Yakov's imperfect interpreta-
tion of the Kol Nidre ended, and, smiling a kind
253
BEDOUINS
smile that melted the heart within the bosom
of the boy, he waved a slender hand, as if to
say, "I salute a brother artist!" It was too
much for Yakov, who ran to his mother's sew-
ing-room, there to pour out his joy and receive
her gentle blessing. He, too, would play the
fiddle like the Cardinal play the Kol Nidre for
a hall full of listeners, who would applaud him !
The mighty Cardinal had played the Kol Nidre
for the poor little Jew boy, and he hadn't even
bowed his profound gratitude !
On wings of song, he mounted the stairway to
his garret, but the music was no longer heard,
though the windows were still alight. Not able
to control himself, Yakov took his instrument,
and, all the while playing, marched down-stairs
into the court, and in the mystic moonshine he
played on, played the Kol Nidre. Soon the
gang surrounded him, and Jimmy the Brick
cried: "Aw, give us a rest with that tune. Play
a coon song." Yakov only shook his head and
kept on playing.
"Stop it, I say!" yelled Jimmy. "We want
none of yer Kike music in this court. D'ye
hear?" Yakov still played, and the tune rang
out with the terror and desolation of the Day
of Atonement.
"Hit him, Tony ! Grab his fiddle, you Wop ! "
hoarsely commanded the leader. The boys
closed about him and in a twinkling the current
of the music was cut off, the red violin smashed
into a hundred bits, the bow snapped in two and
254
THE CARDINAL'S FIDDLE
its coarse hair twisted about Yakov's neck. He
fought silently, tearlessly. The firm of Sokolov
& Griinstein came to his rescue, and, being mus-
cular men, they routed the band and sent the
victim to his home with consoling phrases. But
he was hopeless. That another fiddle might be
bought for him found no place in his whirling
imagination. He had been cruelly treated.
Why should he be so punished ? As he sank on
his knees at his attic window tears flowed and
sobs followed. Yakov mourned and would not
be comforted. And across the court in the
chamber of the palace the Cardinal played with
exquisite melancholy that antique Hebraic tune,
the Kol Nidre.
255
VI
RENUNCIATION
The hearts of some women are as a vast cathedral.
There are its gorgeous high altars, its sounding gloom, its
lofty arches, and perhaps in an obscure niche burns a tiny
taper before the votive shrine. And many pass through
life with this taper unlighted, despite the pomp and cere-
monial of the conjugal comedy. Others carry in the little
chapel of their hearts a solitary glimmering lamp of love
that only flames out with death.
A GRAND piano, its burnished ivory teeth
gleaming in the candle-light, stood near the
open window, and at it one lounged and idly
preluded Schumann-like harmonies that ques-
tioned the night. Outside a veiled fumidity,
behind which lurked thunderous prospects; the
air was still with languorous anticipation, and
the month of the year was April. He would
not have been human and an artist to have
withstood the dumb depression of the moment.
Snatches of heavily brocaded harmonies of
Chopin, mute interrogations of Brahms, and
furtive glitterings of Liszt vibrated through the
chamber. One sultry chord, persistently re-
peated and unresolved, told the temper of him
who played.
It was a sober"apartment; a half-score of wax
tapers sang with a bunch of tuberoses a sweet
duo.
256
RENUNCIATION
A few chairs, some music scattered about, a
tall bookcase, gaunt and shadowy in the back-
ground, and a polished floor made the ensemble
of an artist's living-room. The playing grew
vaguer and the night without more menac-
ing. Then the first eight or ten bars of the
prelude to Tristan und Isolde forced into shape
on the keyboard and hush ! a delicate knock
at the door. He harshly called, "Entrez!"
She was without a wrap, her head enveloped in
a filmy burnoose. She faltered, then moved
to him as moves a sleep-walker. "I know that
it is wrong, but I how can I help it ? I have
come to you and you?" She paused, her
face illuminated by love-doubt. His voice was
muffled when he answered her, "Pray be seated,
madame."
She divined his reluctance: "We leave to-
morrow, and you must play for me once more."
"I could have called at your hotel," he gently
replied.
Impetuously she cried: "I have risked much
to be near you, to hear you play; yet you stand
coldly, and after yesterday Ah, you for-
get!"
"I do not forget," he replied.
She moved toward him; his reserve vanished
and he advanced with both hands outstretched.
"Dearest, it is madness. See, it is late; you
will be missed, and the night bodes a storm.
Play ! I would play for you if Paradise threat-
ened and hell yawned rather than refuse you."
257
BEDOUINS
"Play!" she cried. "Play for me Chopin,
but do not come near me." He shivered, and
their eyes kissed, hers burning like misty-green
signals of love and sorrow; then he faced the
night for a moment, and turning to the piano
began without preluding.
It was the Second Impromptu of Chopin, the
rarely heard one in the key of F sharp, major
mode. As he struck the octave in the bass the
approaching storm muttered in the west, the
wind soughed into the room, and the flame
of the wax tapers flickered faint messages
to the tuberoses. She on the couch sighed
softly. The magic of Chopin enveloped them
as the plaintive theme broke the air into melodic
ripples. It sang her into depths of dreams,
anterior to which lurked other dreams dreams
with soft-sounding syllables, dreams that lapped
her consciousness into the golden gloom of
drugged slumber, dreams opal-tinted and music-
melancholy beyond compare. She swooned and
then swam out to the infinite with bold, blissful
strokes, for he was playing with rare cunning
the closing choral-like measures of the first part
of the Impromptu.
The moan without deepened into a roar, then
came a vermilion flash followed by a crash of
thunder. The lights were extinguished, all but
one, swayed feebly in the rush of the wind, and
the tuberoses listened thirstily to the plash of
the new-born rain.
He had begun the D major section of the Im-
258
RENUNCIATION
promptu; the rhythmical swing of the bass
seemed a proud spirit defying destiny, and the
massive chords, with virile assertive tones,
blended with the night and roared answer to
the thunder's bellow. They rose to a crescendo,
they dominated all, for the man within was
storming out his resolves and passions on the
keyboard. The fury increased to a sheer height
of tone; then, melting away into a mere echo, it
almost fainted. His soul chased hers and to-
gether they followed the enigmatic tones of that
modulation which is an abysm betwixt fragrant
meads, and warns them that seek its depths.
The lovely F major part glimmered in the air.
"Come back to me, to the first of all;
Let us learn and love it over again.
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall."
"Browning," she softly mused, "and life."
The plot thickened, the harmony grew denser
a musical palimpsest lay before them, and as
they strove to unweave its meaning they shud-
dered at the gulf. Weary and panting in spirit
they stared askance and questioned the future.
"Not that," the music implored. Then burst
that delicious cascade of silvery scales. They
coruscated, they foamed, they boiled with melo-
dic laughter. It seemed as if God was with the
world and he and she heard the lark trilling to
the dawn as hand in hand they mounted in
259
BEDOUINS
their dizzy flight. Their naked, unabashed
souls groped in the azure and they carolled that
song which is as old as eternity. They fell
through space into fathomless twilight, and the
piano sang the echo-like refrain of the first
motif. It was the swan-song of their hopes.
The heavy-scented night spoke softly to their
hearts; a nightingale dimly piped in the distance,
and with velvety clangor the music ceased.
He remained at the piano. She rose. With-
out were odors and starlight. The two drank
each other's gaze with the thirst of lost souls.
Then she went into the night, and the other one,
staring at the tuberoses, heard their perfumed
murmur: "Renounce thou shalt; thou shalt re-
nounce."
260
VII
THE VISION MALEFIC
"To be in Heaven the second, he disdains:
So now the first in Hell and flames he reigns,
Crown'd once with joy and light: crown'd now with fire
and pains."
Phineas Fletcher (1582).
I AM not a diabolist. I was an agnostic until
... I have read Huysmans and I do not believe
he ever saw half he describes. Yet I, and in
commonplace America, have seen things, have
heard things, that would make mad the group
of Parisian occultists. I dislike publicity, but
Vance Thompson has asked me to relate the
story, and so I mean to give it, names and all,
with the fauit hope that it may serve as a warn-
ing to callow astrologists, and all the younger
generation affected by the writings of impious
men who deny the existence of the devil.
More than twenty years ago I was the organist
of a Roman Catholic church in the lower part
of my city. I had studied the instrument in
Germany and believed in Johann Sebastian
Bach. I played and pedalled fugues on week-
days for my own pleasure, and on Sundays exe-
cuted with unction easy masses by Bordoni,
Mercadante, and Haydn; my choir was not an
ambitious one. The stipendium was small, the
261
BEDOUINS
work light, and the two priests amiable enough.
One, a German, Father Oelschlager, was the
rector. His assistant was an Irishman with
French blood in his veins. His name shall I
ever forget his name and face? was Father
Michael Moreau. He was crazy about music
and occultism. The former he made no secret
of; the latter I discovered only after a long ac-
quaintance. Moreau came to the organ-loft
when I practised on week-days, sang a little,
and feasted much on Bach chorales. Urged
often to visit his room, I did so, and he showed
me rare black-letter missals, and later the backs
of a number of old books whose titles I could
not decipher. I am no Latinist, yet I knew
these volumes were written neither in Latin nor
Greek. The characters I had never seen before,
and when I remarked their strangeness, Father
Moreau smiled and even laughed as I quoted
Poe: "the volumes of the Magi in the iron-
bound melancholy volumes of the Magi."
Music led us to discuss religion, and my friend
astonished me by his erudition. His sensitive
features would become illuminated when he
spoke of the strange tales of the Talmud. "Oh,
my God !" he would cry with a patibulary ges-
ture. "Why hast Thou not vouchsafed us more
light?" And then would beg for Bach, and on
the mighty stream of the D minor fugue his har-
assed mind seemed to float and find comfort. As
time wore on he grew morbid, morose, reticent,
and devoted himself to his dull duties with a
262
THE VISION MALEFIC
fanaticism that was almost harsh. The parish-
ioners noticed it, and his reputation for saint-
liness increased. His confessional was always
crowded and his sermons remarkable for the
acerbity, the awful pictures he made of the suf-
ferings of the damned and of the relentlessness
of God's wrath. His superior, good-natured
Father Oelschlager, bade the other look at the
cheerful side of the question, to believe more in
God's mellowness and sweetness, and would
quote Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light,
and certain comforting texts from the Scriptures,
and then smoke his pipe. But the ascetic tem-
perament of Moreau barred all attempts at pal-
liation or attenuation of the God of Hosts, of
the God who laid low the pride of Greece and
Rome. Life to him was a cancer to be extir-
pated, and he confessed to me one night after
rehearsal that he had almost doubted God's
existence and courted suicide after reading
Renan's Vie de Jesus. I suggested change of
scene, less strenuous labors, above all, the world,
music, and athletics. My advice availed not,
and I saw that Father Moreau was fast becom-
ing a monomaniac. His sermons during the
hot summer were devoted to the personality of
the devil, to his corporeal existence, to his daily
presence in the marts of mankind; and so con-
stant was his harping on this theme that Father
Oelschlager had to forbid him the subject. "It
is so warm, my son ! Why, then, do you hold
forth on hell? Let the poor people hear more
263
BEDOUINS
of the crystal rivers, the green meads of the
New Jerusalem. It would be more seasonable."
Moreau frowned, but obeyed his superior.
With the autumn and winter his habits became
more secretive, his visits to me less frequent,
and his air of detachment most melancholy.
Advent saw him a mere wraith of a man, worn
by speculation, devoured by an interior flame, a
flame that was wasting his very soul to despair.
He seldom conversed with me, although I
watched him anxiously and occasionally interro-
gated him regarding his health. At last I spoke
to his associate, but encountered an easy-going
philosophic spirit, which assured me Father
Moreau was going through what most young
priests should. He was at the period of unfaith,
was nettled by doubt, and after he had wrestled
with Satan, and won the good fight, he would
again become normal. This seemed consoling
though vague.
The day before Christmas I promised that I
would not send a substitute to play the mid-
night mass at the church. Our church was the
only one in the city where the old-fashioned
mass at twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve was
celebrated. It is located near the river, and my
journey was a long one, for I lived up-town. I
ate a six o'clock supper and went to bed, telling
them to arouse me at a quarter before eleven.
I wished to be fresh for the early service. By
eleven I was out on the street, and took a car
bound south. I reached the church in time,
264
THE VISION MALEFIC
and soon the solemn high mass began. My
choir had with elaborate care prepared Cheru-
bim's mass, and despite the poor organ, the
extra chorus and much enthusiasm made some
effect. The congregation was attentive, and
Father Oelschlager delivered a short, happy ser-
mon, urging his flock to rejoice at the birth of
the Babe of Bethlehem, Jesus the Infant Christ,
uncrucified, but newly born into a world of toil
and sin for our redemption. At the consecra-
tion of the host the good rector's beaming faith
was most edifying. He was served by Father
Moreau, a melancholy deacon, indeed. "Ite
Missa Est" pronounced, the faithful dismissed,
I was overjoyed at the release, for I was tired.
The choir chatted about the service, the singing,
and at last I was alone. I placed the music-
books back in the tall Gothic cupboard, closed
the manuals of my instrument, and put on my
overcoat. It must have been half past one, per-
haps quarter of two, and I relished the prospect
of my arrival home, where a warm breakfast
would be awaiting me, and then once more to
bed, for I had to play the regular half past ten
o'clock Christmas mass for the benefit of the
sleepy ones, who loved their couch better than
their Christ.
Father Moreau met me at the bottom of the
choir-loft steps. He was dressed for the street,
his eyes were blazing, and as he took my arm
his fingers were vise-like. "Will you come with
me?" he asked. I was startled. I explained
265
BEDOUINS
that I would not have much rest, nor should he
waste his sleeping time on the dismal, cold
streets; besides, I was hungry. I feared that he
was about to deluge me with more of his studies
in the customs of the early Gnostics, and, to be
quite frank, I was worn out and not in a recep-
tive humor for such untoward cryptic wisdom.
Any other time "Will you come with me?"
he reiterated, and the clutch on my arm became
oppressive. "Where?" I asked, for I hated to
affront a friend. "Will you come with me?"
By this time the church was quite empty,
and I pushed out into the street. It was dark
and snowing hard. We walked toward the
street, and as we neared the corner I heard the
lucky sound of a horse-car there were no
trolleys then. I excused myself, ran and caught
the car; the priest, following, sat down beside
me. I paid both fares, and as I had nothing to
say we preserved a sad silence. The mean light,
the deserted streets, the lonely car, and the
muffled strokes of the horses' hoofs on the snow
chilled my soul. I looked sideways at Father
Moreau. He was reading a big parchment-
covered book, which I saw by the dim lamplight
was entitled Le Satanisme, by Jules Bois. I was
shocked. A priest fresh from the holy sacrifice
of the mass devouring the blasphemies that I
was sure were in the gruesome volume, alarmed
my piety. Presently he saw me and shut its
leaves. "There are curious things in it, my
dear friend," he muttered, and his voice came
266
THE VISION MALEFIC
from across a waste of sorrow. " Curious things;
but you are a believer, are you not?" he eagerly
repeated. "I am," I replied devoutly, and I
crossed myself. He fairly jumped at me, his
eyes wide open and full of devouring flames.
"Will you come with me?" he almost screamed,
and for the fourth time. "East Street," called
out the conductor, and rather than let my half-
mad companion alone he surely must have
been mad I left the car with him, the con-
ductor gazing after us with cynical eyes. He
evidently took us for belated revellers.
We walked slowly for ten minutes until we
arrived in front of a sad-looking church, and
then I stopped: "The place is not open yet;
they do not have Christmas service until five
o'clock." For the last time my companion
whispered, "Will you come with me?" and,
pushing past me, struck three times on the big
doors. A small postern gate opened at once
and we entered the vaulted passageway. I
trembled at the strangeness of the adventure,
and held fast to Moreau, for it was pitch black,
and while I heard soft footfalls beside me the
footfalls of an unknown man I could not see
my hand before my face. We must have trav-
ersed a long yard, for the wind blew freely
about me; I heard it playing on the housetops
like a balloon in distress. Yet it felt as if issuing
from a sepulchre, and my heart went to my
empty stomach. Even in my growing terror I
craved for coffee; its aroma would have made
267
BEDOUINS
me stronger for this inhuman cruise. We went
down eleven steps I counted them my con-
ductors on either side of me. Dampness and
malodors warned me of our proximity to some
ancient cellarage, some forgotten catacombs,
wherein Father Moreau expected to give me a
sacerdotal surprise, a revival perhaps of an
antique and early Christian ritual. I feebly
applauded his intentions, but wished he had
chosen some other time and that the surround-
ings had been less sinister.
At last we paused and descended another
flight of steps this time I didn't number them,
for the cold was intense, and it was with
relief that we suddenly arrived in a dimly lighted
and warm chapel. It was empty, devoid of
pews, of chairs, of furnishings of any sort, except,
at the upper end, a small votive altar. Before
it swung a lamp of Byzantine workmanship, in
which burned a solitary tongue of yellow flame.
The lamp swayed rhythmically, and on the altar
were two tall tapers, lighted and perfumed. And
then my eyes rested on the spot where should
have been the tabernacle, surmounted by the
gold cross. Judge of my consternation when I
saw, saw as distinctly as I see the pen which
traces these letters, a huge bronze serpent, with
overlapping, glistening, metallic scales. The eyes
of this python were almost feminine, and their
regard gentle, reproachful, and voluptuous. My
knees bent beneath me and my face was wet
with fright.
268
THE VISION MALEFIC
"You are a believer, then?" crooned a dull
voice in my ear. It was Moreau. He had
thrown off his outer wrap and stood in a black
soutane. He was white with emotion and said
in tenderest accents: "Listen; be my friend.
Do not desert me at the crisis of my life. It is
to be my first mass, my first three o'clock mass.
My deacon is already at the altar. Be the soli-
tary worshipper. It will be a low mass re-
member, a low mass!" He spoke clearly, rap-
idly, sanely, and seeing that I had something
more than a lunatic to deal with, I removed my
overcoat and knelt down near the altar just as
Father Moreau ascended its steps, his assistant
holding the end of his Hack canonicals. If it
had not been for the apparition of the serpent,
I might have fancied that I was assisting at the
lonely, pious vigil of a parochial curate. But
the eyes of the serpent devoured mine, and I
had none for the two silhouetted figures that
went through with febrile velocity the familiar
motions of the mass. It was low mass, and
from the introit to the preface the space was
scarcely appreciable. I heard mumblings, and
the air became chillier as the celebrants moved
and bowed or extended arms; the air grew colder,
denser, and tenser. It vibrated like the wires
of a monstrous zither, and my temples throbbed
as if in the midst of a magnetic storm. I felt
that I was nearing a great catastrophe, that God
had abandoned His universe to its wicked will,
and that I must sob, or scream, or pray, or die,
269
BEDOUINS
or be damned forever, or the tap of the sil-
very little bell was as if a sweet summer air had
swum over my agitated soul. It was the bell
that announced the solemn moment when God
became man, when the divine spirit, by the
miracle of transubstantiation. became flesh and
blood.
In an ecstasy of faith, of awe, I plunged on
my face and adored and wept, and a mighty
wind swept from the altar with strange moanings
and lamentings, and the lights were extinguished;
yet there was a luminous fog, that enfolded
us, and in it I saw the great serpent, symbol of
wisdom, symbol of eternity, rear spirally aloft,
and beneath it oh, beneath it! was the
Beatific Vision. In swelling nimbus of flame
was a counterfeit Mother of God, and holding
the hand of Him, of the Infant, Jesus, born but
three hours, and oh, the horror of it! not
my Christ, not our Christ, not the Christ of the
Christians, but an Antichrist from some fetid
hell, sent to seduce us, curse us, destroy us!
My eyes almost burst from their sockets, and
the humming of hell's loom roared about me as
I met the gaze of the Woman. And now
her eyes were the serpent's eyes, and on her head
was the crown of hell and its multiple kingdoms.
She was naked, and set against her breasts were
sharp swords. She was Mater Malorum, and
her breath sowed discord, lust, and cruel murder.
I yearned to pronounce the name of the true
Mother of God, to bid this blinding vision, this
270
THE VISION MALEFIC
damnable vision, vanish, but my tongue was
like wet twine and my sight blistered by the
pageantry of Satan, of Satan and his Dam. And
as I struggled the silvery little bell tapped once
more, and in a fading perspective I saw the
Madonna and the Child give me such a sweet,
beseeching glance that my heart dissolved within
me, and I cried aloud, my tongue snapping in
the roof of my mouth:
"Mary, Mother of God, preserve us from the
Devil and all his works!" A withering streak
of light struck my eyeballs, and I glimpsed the
serpent falling to earth with distended jaws, as
two priestly figures reeled off the altar-steps,
and in the brassy clangor of despair we fell, all
three, and swooning blackness shut down upon
us like smothering velvet.
It was still dark when solicitous hands lifted
me to my feet: my coat was thrown about my
shoulders, and I was hurried in shivering gloom
to the street. The other one disappeared at the
little postern gate, and, parting outside, with
damp, hot hands, and face plastered with hide-
ous passion, the mad priest said to me, in a
cracked voice:
"You have seen my God, the only true God
of hell heaven and earth/'
271
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
What some distinguished writers have said of
them :
Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: "Do
you know that 'Iconoclasts' is the only book of high
and universal critical worth that we have had for
years to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It is at
once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and
sure."
And of "Ivory Apes and Peacocks" he said, among
other things: "I have marvelled at the vigilance and
clarity with which you follow and judge the new liter-
ary and artistic movements in all countries. L do not
know of criticism more pure and sure than yours."
(October, 1915.)
"The Mercure de France translated the other day
from Scribner's one of the best studies which have been
written on Stendhal for a long tune, in which there was
no evasion of the question of Stendhal's immorality.
The author of that article, James Huneker, is, among
foreign critics, the one best acquainted with French
literature and the one who judges us with the greatest
sympathy and with the most freedom. He has pro-
tested with force in numerous American journals
against the campaign of defamation against France and
he has easily proved that those who participate in it
are ignorant and fanatical." "Promenades Litteraires"
(Troisieme Serie), Remy de Gourmont. (Translated by
Burton Rascoe for the Chicago Tribune.)
Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, 1909, of
"Egoists": "I have browsed through the pages of
your book and found that you touch in a sympathetic
style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the
case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatment is ex-
tremely rare and courageous."
Dr. Geprg Brandes, the versatile and profound
Danish critic, wrote: "I find your breadth of view
and its expression more European than^ American; but
the essential thing is that you are an artist to your very
marrow."
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
UNICORNS
"The essays are short, full of a satisfying and fascinating
crispness, both memorable and delightful. And they are full of
fancy, too, of the gayest humor, the quickest appreciation, the
gentlest sympathy, sometimes of an enchanting extravagance."
New York Times.
MELOMANIACS
"It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase.
Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater con-
trasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and
obscurity."
HAROLD E. GORST, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906).
VISIONARIES
"In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fan-
tasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most
unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has
cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds
no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering, and unblessed.
But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with
a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories."
London Academy (Feb. 3, 1906).
ICONOCLASTS:
A Book of Dramatists
"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which
e are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence."
G. K. CHESTERTON, in London Daily News.
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN
MUSIC
"Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the
music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words
as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping
strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And
as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of
quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and tem-
perament a string that vibrates and sings in response to music
we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable
contribution to the world's tiny musical literature."
J. F. RUNCMAN, in London Saturday Review.
BOOKS BY JAMBS HUNEKER
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS
"Out of the depressing welter of our American writing upon
aesthetics, with its incredible thinness and triteness and paltriness,
its intellectual sterility, its miraculous dulness, its limitless and
appalling vapidity, Mr. James Huneker, and the small and honor-
able minority of his peers, emerge with a conspicuousness that is
both comforting and disgraceful. . . . Susceptibility, clairvoyance,
immediacy of response, are his; he is the friend of any talent that is
fine and strange and frank enough to incur the dislike of the mighty
army of Bourbons, Puritans, and Boeotians. He is innocent of
prepossessions. He is infinitely flexible and generous. Yet if, in
the twenty years that we have been reading him, he has ever praised
a commonplace talent, we have no recollection of it. His critical
tact is well-nigh infallible. . . . His position among writers on
sesthetics is anomalous and incredible: no merchant traffics in his
heart, yet he commands a large, an eager, an affectionate public.
Is it because he is both vivid and acute, robust yet fine-fingered,
tolerant yet unyielding, astringent yet tender a mellow pessimist,
a kindly cynic? Or is it rather because he is, primarily, a tem-
perament dynamic, contagious, lovable, inveterately alive ex-
pressing itself through the most transparent of the arts?"
LAWRENCE OILMAN, in North American Review (October, 1915).
NEW COSMOPOLIS
"Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a crafts-
man of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and
distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He is
intensely 'modern,' well read in recent European writers, and not
lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. Ancient seren-
ity has laid no chastening hand on his thought and style, but he has
achieved at times a fineness of expression that lifts his work above
that of the many eager and artistic souls who strive to be the thinkers
of New England to-day. He flings off his impressions at fervent
heat; he is not ashamed to be enthusiastic; and he cannot escape
that large sentimentality which, to less disciplined transatlantic
writers, is known nakedly as 'heart interest.' Out of his chaos
of reading and observation he has, however, evolved a criticism of
life that makes for intellectual cultivation, although it is of a Bo-
hemian rather than an academic kind. Given a different environ-
ment, another training, Mr. Huneker might have emerged as an
American Walter Pater." London Athenaeum (November 6, 1915)-
BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
FRANZ LISZT
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
CHOPIN: The Man and His Music
OVERTONES:
A Book of Temperaments
WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS
"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most
brilliant of all living writers on matters musical."
Academy, London.
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE
A Book of a Thousand and One Moments
"He talks about Bergson as well as Matisse; he never can keep
still about Wagner; he hauls over his French library of modern
immortals, and he gives a touch to George Moore, to Arthur Davies,
and to many another valiant worker in paint, music, and letters.
The book is stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected bril-
liancy." Chicago Tribune.
PROMENADES OF AN
IMPRESSIONIST
"We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the
technical contributions of Cezanne and Rodin. Here Mr. Huneker
is a real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways
in art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such
appreciations as the Monticelli and Chardin." FRANK JEWETT
MATHER, JR., in New York Nation and Evening Post.
EGOISTS
WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS
"Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as
a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very shrewd."
ROYAL CORTISSOZ, in the New York Tribune.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK
THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
This book is due on the last DATE stamped below.
Om-8,'65(F6282s8)2373
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