net, $1.75 net, $1.50 net, $1.50 net, $2.00 net, $2.00 net, $1.50 net, $1.50 net, $1.50 net, $1.50 net, $1.50 net, $2.00 net, $1.50 net, $1.50 The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unicorns, by James Huneker This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: Unicorns Author: James Huneker Release Date: March 12, 2012 [EBook #39116] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNICORNS *** Produced by David Edwards, Ewa "czupirek" Jaros and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES The original punctuation and spelling were retained, with the exception of a few printer's mistakes. The text contains also inconsistently spelled words. The full list of both changes to the text and the inconsistencies in spelling can be found at the end of this file. All the corrections are marked with a dashed line and the original text should appear on hovering the mouse over it. BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS UNICORNS. 12mo, IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS. 12mo, NEW COSMOPOLIS. 12mo, THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE. 12mo, FRANZ LISZT. Illustrated. 12mo, PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST. 12mo, EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN. 12mo, ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS. 12mo, OVERTONES: A BOOK OF TEMPERAMENTS. 12mo, MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC. 12mo, CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC. With Portrait. 12mo, VISIONARIES. 12mo, MELOMANIACS. 12mo, UNICORNS [i] [ii] UNICORNS BY JAMES HUNEKER “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, ‘Whim.’” —Emerson NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1917 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September, 1917 Copyright, 1906, by THE NEW YORK HERALD COMPANY Copyright, 1907, by THE RIDGEWAY COMPANY Copyright, 1909, 1911, 1916, 1917, by THE SUN PRINTING AND PUBLISHING CO. Copyright, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, by THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY Copyright, 1915, 1916, by PUCK PUBLISHING CO. Copyright, 1917, by NORTH AMERICAN Copyright, 1917, by THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL THIS BOOK OF SPLEEN AND GOSSIP IS INSCRIBED TO MY FRIEND EDWARD ZIEGLER “Come! let us lay a crazy lance in rest And tilt at windmills under a wild sky.” —John Galsworthy. “He is a fribble, a sonsy faddle, whose conceits veer with the breeze like a creaking weather-vane. As the sterile moon hath her librations, so must he boast of his oscillations, thinking them eternal verities. A very cockatoo in his perched-up vanity and prodigious clatter....” [From “The Velvet Cactus.” Anonymous. Printed at the Sign of the Cat and Cameo, Threadneedle Street, London. A.D. 1723. Rare.] [iii] [iv] [v] CHAPTER PAGE I. 1 II. 6 III. 18 IV. 33 V. 53 VI. 67 VII. 82 VIII. 96 IX. 106 X. 111 XI. 121 XII. 139 XIII. 151 XIV. 161 XV. 171 XVI. 187 XVII. 195 XVIII. 203 XIX. 212 XX. 218 XXI. 228 XXII. 241 XXIII. 261 XXIV. 277 XXV. 283 XXVI. 300 XXVII. 317 XXVIII. 323 XXIX. 339 XXX. 353 CONTENTS In Praise of Unicorns An American Composer: The Passing of Edward MacDowell Remy de Gourmont: His Ideas. The Colour of His Mind Artzibashef A Note on Henry James George Sand The Great American Novel The Case of Paul Cézanne Brahmsody The Opinions of J.-K. Huysmans Style and Rhythm in English Prose The Queerest Yarn in the World On Rereading Mallock The Lost Master The Grand Manner in Pianoforte Playing James Joyce Creative Involution Four Dimensional Vistas O. W. A Synthesis of the Seven Arts The Classic Chopin Little Mirrors of Sincerity The Reformation of George Moore Pillowland Cross-Currents in Modern French Literature More About Richard Wagner My First Musical Adventure Violinists Now and Yesteryear Riding the Whirlwind Prayers for the Living UNICORNS UNICORNS CHAPTER I [vi] [vii] [viii] [ix] [Pg 1] IN PRAISE OF UNICORNS "The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown: The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town." ... In the golden book of wit and wisdom, Through the Looking-Glass, the Unicorn rather disdainfully remarks that he had believed children to be fabulous monsters. Alice smilingly retorts: "Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!" "Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?" "Yes, if you like," said Alice. No such ambiguous bargains are needed to demonstrate the existence of Unicorns. That is, not for imaginative people. A mythical monster, a heraldic animal, he figures in the dictionary as the Monoceros, habitat, India; and he is the biblical Urus, sporting one horn, a goat beard and a lion's tail. He may be all these things for practical persons; no man is a genius to his wife. But maugre that he is something more for dreamers of dreams; though not the Hippogriff, with its liberating wings, volplaning through the Fourth Dimension of Space; nor yet is he tender Undine, spirit of fountains, of whom the Unicorn asked: "By the waters of what valley has jealous mankind hidden the source of your secrets?" (Cousin german to the Centaur of Maurice de Guérin, he can speak in like cadence.) Alice with her "dreaming eyes of wonder" was, after the manner of little girls, somewhat pragmatic. She believed in Unicorns only when she saw one. Yet we must believe without such proof. Has not the Book of Job put this question: "Canst thou bind the Unicorn with his band in the furrow?" As if a harnessed Unicorn would be credible. We prefer placing the charming monster, with the prancing tiny hoofs of ivory (surely Chopin set him to musical notation in his capricious second Etude in F; Chopin who, if man were soulless, would have endowed him with one) in the same category as the Chimera of "The Temptation of St. Antony," which thus taunted the Sphinx: "I am light and joyous! I offer to the eyes of men dazzling perspectives with Paradise in the clouds above.... I seek for new perfumes, for vaster flowers, for pleasures never felt before...." With Unicorns we feel the nostalgia of the infinite, the sorcery of dolls, the salt of sex, the vertigo of them that skirt the edge of perilous ravines, or straddle the rim of finer issues. He dwells in equivocal twilights; and he can stare the sun out of countenance. The enchanting Unicorn boasts no favoured zone. He runs around the globe. He is of all ages and climes. He knows that fantastic land of Gautier, which contains all the divine lost landscapes ever painted, and whose inhabitants are the lovely figures created by art in granite, marble, or wood, on walls, canvas, or crystal. Betimes he flashes by the nymph in the brake, and dazzled, she sighs with desire. Mallarmé set him to cryptic harmonies, and placed him in a dim rich forest (though he called him a faun; a faun in retorsion). Like the apocryphal Sadhuzag in Flaubert's cosmical drama of dreams, which bore seventy-four hollow antlers from which issued music of ineffable sweetness, our Unicorn sings ravishing melodies for those who possess the inner ear of mystics and poets. When angered he echoes the Seven Thunders of the Apocalypse, and we hear of desperate rumours of fire, flood, and disaster. And he haunts those ivory gates of sleep whence come ineffable dreams to mortals. He has always fought with the Lion for the crown, and he is always defeated, but invariably claims the victory. The crown is Art, and the Lion, being a realist born, is only attracted by its glitter, not the symbol. The Unicorn, an idealist, divines the inner meaning of this precious fillet of gold. Art is the modern philosopher's stone, and the most brilliant jewel in this much-contested crown. Eternal is the conflict of the Real and the Ideal; Aristotle and Plato; Alice and the Unicorn; the practical and the poetic; butterflies and geese; and rare roast-beef versus the impossible blue rose. And neither the Lion nor the Unicorn has yet fought the battle decisive. Perhaps the day may come when, weariness invading their very bones, they may realise that they are as different sides of the same coveted shield; matter and spirit, the multitude and the individual. Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish the tyrannies of superannuated superstitions, and give the people vision, without which they perish. The divine rights of humanity, no longer of kingly cabbages. The dusk of the future is washed with the silver of hope. The Lion and the Unicorn in single yoke. Strength and Beauty should represent the fusion of the Ideal and the Real. There should be no anarchy, no socialism, no Brotherhood or Sisterhood of mankind, just the millennium of sense and sentiment. What title shall we give that far-away time, that longed-for Utopia? With Alice and the Faun we forget names, so let us follow her method when in doubt, and exclaim: "Here then! Here then!" Morose and disillusioned souls may cry aloud: "Ah! to see behind us no longer, on the Lake of Eternity, the implacable Wake of Time!" nevertheless, we must believe in the reality of our Unicorn. He is Pan. He is Puck. He is Shelley. He is Ariel. He is Whim. He is Irony. And he can boast with Emerson: "I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Cæsar's hand and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain." CHAPTER II AN AMERICAN COMPOSER [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] THE PASSING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL Whom the gods love——! Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica may recall the last movement, in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief of MacDowell that nothing is more sublimely awful than "to heighten the darkness of tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph." This he accomplished in his first sonata, and fate has ironically transposed to the life of its composer the cruel and tragic drama of his own music. Despite occasional days brightened by a flitting hope, the passing of Edward MacDowell has begun. He is no longer an earth-dweller. His body is here, but his brain elsewhere. Not mad, not melancholy, not sunken in the stupor of indifference, his mind is translated to a region where serenity, even happiness, dwells. It is doubtless the temporary arrest of the dread mental malady before it plunges its victims into darkness. Luckily, with the advent of that last phase, the body will also succumb, and the most poetic composer of music in America be for us but a fragrant memory. Irony is a much-abused word, yet does it not seem the very summit of pitiless irony for a man of MacDowell's musical and intellectual equipment and physical health to be stricken down at the moment when, after the hard study of twenty-five years, he has, as the expression goes, found himself? And the gods were good to him—too good. At his cradle poetry and music presided. He was a born tone-poet. He had also the painter's eye and the interior vision of the seer. A mystic and a realist. The practical side of his nature was shown by his easy grasp of the technics of pianoforte-playing. He had a large, muscular hand, with a formidable grip on the keyboard. Much has been said of the idealist MacDowell, but this young man, who had in his veins Scotch, Irish, and English blood, loved athletic sports; loved, like Hazlitt, a fast and furious boxing-match. The call of his soul won him for music and poetry. Otherwise he could have been a sea-captain, a soldier, or an explorer in far-away countries. He had the physique; he had the big, manly spirit. We are grateful, selfishly grateful, considering his life's tragedy, that he became a composer. Here, again, in all this abounding vitality, the irony of the skies is manifest. Never a dissipated man, without a touch of the improvidence we ascribe to genius, a practical moralist—rare in any social condition— moderate in his tastes, though not a Puritan, he nevertheless has been mowed down by the ruthless reaper of souls as if his were negligible clay. But he was reckless of the most precious part of him, his brain. He killed that organ by overwork. Not for gain—the money-getting ideal and this man were widely asunder— but for the love of teaching, for the love of sharing with others the treasures in his overflowing storehouse, and primarily for the love of music. He, American as he was—it is sad to speak of him in the past tense— and in these piping days of the pursuit of the gold piece, held steadfast to his art. He attempted to do what others have failed in, he attempted to lead, here in our huge, noisy city, antipathetic to æsthetic creation, the double existence of a composer and a pedagogue. He burned away the delicate neurons of the cortical cells, and to-day he cannot say "pianoforte" without a trial. He suffers from aphasia, and locomotor ataxia has begun to manifest itself. It would be tragedy in the household of any man; it is doubly so in the case of Edward MacDowell. He has just passed forty-five years and there are to his credit some sixty works, about one hundred and thirty-two compositions in all. These include essays in every form, except music-drama—symphonic and lyric, concertos and sonatas for piano, little piano pieces of delicate workmanship, charged with poetic meanings, suites for orchestra and a romance for violoncello, with orchestral accompaniment. As a boy of fifteen MacDowell went to the Paris Conservatoire, there entering the piano classes of Marmontel. It was in 1876. Two years later I saw him at the same institution and later in comparing notes we discovered that we had both attended a concert at the Trocadero, wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant brother of Anton, played the B flat minor concerto of a youthful and unknown composer, Peter Illyitch Tschaikovsky by name. This same concerto had been introduced to America in 1876 by Hans von Bülow, to whom it is dedicated. Rubinstein's playing took hold of young MacDowell's imagination. He saw there was no chance of mastering such a torrential style in Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany. He had enjoyed lessons from Teresa Carreño, but the beautiful Venezuelan was not then the virtuosa of to-day. So MacDowell, who was accompanied by his mother, a sage woman and deeply in sympathy with her son's aims, went to Frankfort, where he had the benefit of Karl Heymann's tuition. He was the only pianist I ever heard who could be compared to our Rafael Joseffy. But his influences, while marked in the development of his American pupil, did not weaken MacDowell's individuality. Studies in composition under Joachim Raff followed, and then he journeyed to Weimar for his baptism of fire at the hands of Liszt. That genial Prospero had broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted himself to the culture of youthful genius and his own compositions. He was pleased by the force, the surety, the brilliancy and the poetic qualities of MacDowell's playing, and he laughingly warned Eugen d'Albert to look to his laurels. But music was in the very bones of MacDowell, and a purely virtuoso career had no attraction for him. He married in 1884 Marian Nevins, of New York, herself a pianist and a devoted propagandist of his music. The pair settled in Wiesbaden, and it was the happiest period of MacDowell's career. He taught; he played as "guest" in various German cities; above all, he composed. His entire evolution is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic monograph. It was in Wiesbaden that he laid the foundation of his solid technique as a composer. [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] [Pg 10] I once asked him during one of our meetings how he had summoned the courage to leave such congenial surroundings. In that half-smiling, half-shy way of his, so full of charm and naïveté, he told me his house had burned down and he had resolved to return home and make enough money to build another. He came to America in 1888 and found himself, if not famous, at least well known. To Frank van der Stucken belongs the glory of having launched the young composer, and so long ago as 1886 in the old Chickering Hall. Some would like to point to the fact that America was MacDowell's artistic undoing, but the truth is against them. As a matter of musical history he accomplished his best work in the United States, principally on his farm at Peterboro, N. H.—hardly, one would imagine, artistic soil for such a dreamer in tones. But life has a way of contradicting our theories. Teaching, I have learned, was not pursued to excess by MacDowell, who had settled in Boston. Yet I wish there were sumptuary legislation for such cases. Why should an artist like MacDowell have been forced into the shafts of dull routine? It is the larger selfishness, all this, but I cling to it. MacDowell belonged to the public. Joseffy belongs to the public. They doubtless did and do much good as teachers, but the public is the loser. Besides, if MacDowell, who was a virtuoso had confined himself to recitals he might not—— Alas! all this is bootless imagining. He launched himself with his usual unselfishness into the advancement of his scholars, and when in 1896 he was called to the chair of music at Columbia the remaining seven years of his incumbency he gave up absolutely to his classes. A sabbatical year intervened. He went to Switzerland for a rest. Then he made a tour of the West, a triumphal tour; and later followed the regrettable difference with Columbia. He resigned in 1904, and I doubt if he had had a happy day since— that is, until the wave of forgetfulness came over him and blotted out all recollections. As a pianist I may only quote what Rafael Joseffy once said to me after a performance of the MacDowell D minor concerto by its composer: "What's the use of a poor pianist trying to compete with a fellow who writes his own music and then plays it the way MacDowell does?" It was said jestingly, but, as usual, when Joseffy opens his mouth there is a grain of wisdom in the speech. MacDowell's French training showed in his "pianism" in the velocity, clarity, and pearly quality of his scales and trills. He had the elegance of the salon player; he knew the traditions. But he was modern, German and Slavic in his combined musical interpretation and fiery attack. His tone was large; at times it was brutal. This pianist did not shine in a small hall. He needed space, as do his later compositions. There was something both noble and elemental in the performance of his own sonatas. At his instrument his air of preoccupation, his fine poetic head, the lines of which were admirably salient on the concert stage, and his passion in execution were notable details in the harmonious picture. Like Liszt, MacDowell and his Steinway were as the rider and his steed. They seemed inseparable. Under the batons of Nikisch, Gericke, Paur, and Seidl we heard him, and for once at least the critics were unanimous. When I first studied the MacDowell music I called the composer "a belated Romantic." A Romantic he is by temperament, while his training under Raff further accentuated that tendency. It is a dangerous matter to make predictions of a contemporary composer, yet a danger critically courted in these times of rapid-fire judgments. I have been a sinner myself, and am still unregenerate, for if it be sinful to judge hastily in the affirmative, by the same token it is quite as grave an error to judge hastily in the negative. So I shall dare the possible contempt of the succeeding critical generation, which I expect—and hope—will not calmly reverse our dearest predictions, and range myself on the side of MacDowell. And with this reservation; I called him the most poetic composer of America. He would be a poetic composer in any land; yet it seems to me that his greatest, because his most individual, work is to be found in his four piano sonatas. I am always subdued by the charm of his songs; but he did not find his fullest expression in his lyrics. The words seemed to hamper the bold wing strokes of his inspiration. He did not go far enough in his orchestral work to warrant our saying: "Here is something new!" He shows the influence of Wagner slightly, of Grieg, of Raff, of Liszt, in his first Orchestral Suite, his Hamlet and Ophelia, Launcelot and Elaine; The Saracens and Lovely Alda, the Indian Suite, and in the two concertos. The form is still struggling to emerge from the bonds of the Romantics—of classic influence there is little trace. But the general effect is fragmentary. It is not the real MacDowell, notwithstanding the mastery of technical material, the genuine feeling for orchestral colour, which is natural, not studied. There are poetic moods— MacDowell is always a poet—yet no path-breaker. Indeed, he seemed as if hesitating. I remember how we discussed Brahms, Tschaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. The former he admired as a master builder; the latter piqued his curiosity tremendously, particularly Also Sprach Zarathustra. I think that Tschaikovsky made the deepest appeal, though he said that the Russian's music sounded better than it was. Grieg he admired, but Grieg could never have drawn the long musical line we find in the MacDowell sonatas. The fate of intermediate types is inevitable. Music is an art of specialisation: the Wagner music-drama, Chopin piano music, Schubert songs, Beethoven symphony, Liszt symphonic poems, and Richard Strauss tone-poems, all these are unique. MacDowell has invented many lovely melodies. That the Indian duet for orchestra, the Woodland Sketches, New England Idyls, the Sea Pieces—To the Sea is a wonderful transcription of the mystery, and the salt and savour of the ocean—will have a long life, but not as long as the piano sonatas. By them he will stand or fall. MacDowell never goes chromatically mad on his harmonic tripod, nor does he tear passion to tatters in his search of the dramatic. If he recalls any English poet it is Keats, and like Keats he is simple and sensuous in his imagery, and a lover of true romance; not the sham ecstasies of mock mediæval romance, but that deep and tender sentiment which we encounter in the poetry of Keats—in the magic of a moon half veiled by flying clouds; in the mystery and scent of old and tangled gardens. I should call MacDowell a landscape-painter had I not heard his sonata music. Those sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse, and Keltic, with their broad, coloured narrative, ballad-like tone, their [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] [Pg 15] heroic and chivalric accents, epic passion, and feminine tenderness. The psychology is simple if you set this music against that of Strauss, of Loeffler, or of Debussy. But it is noble, noble as the soul of the man who conceived it. Elastic in form, orchestral in idea, these sonatas—which are looser spun in the web than Liszt's—will keep alive the name of MacDowell. This statement must not be considered as evidence that I fail to enjoy his other work. I do enjoy much of it, especially the Indian Orchestral Suite; but the sonatas stir the blood, above all the imagination. When the Tragica appeared I did not dream of three such successors. Now I like best the Keltic, with its dark magic and its tales of Deirdré and the "great Cuchullin." This fourth sonata is as Keltic as the combined poetic forces of the neo-Celtic renascence in Ireland. I believe MacDowell, when so sorely stricken, was at the parting of the ways. He spoke vaguely to me of studies for new symphonic works, presumably in the symphonic-poem form of Liszt. He would have always remained the poet, and perhaps have pushed to newer scenes, but, like Schumann, Donizetti, Smetana and Hugo Wolf, his brain gave way under the strain of intense study. The composition of music involves and taxes all the higher cerebral centres. The privilege was accorded me of visiting the sick man at his hotel several weeks ago, and I am glad I saw him, for his appearance dissipated the painful impression I had conjured up. Our interview, brief as it was, became the reverse of morbid or unpleasant before it terminated. With his mental disintegration sunny youth has returned to the composer. In snowy white, he looks not more than twenty-five years old, until you note the grey in his thick, rebellious locks. There is still gold in his moustache and his eyes are luminously blue. His expression suggests a spirit purged of all grossness waiting for the summons. He smiles, but not as a madman; he talks hesitatingly, but never babbles. There is continuity in his ideas for minutes. Sometimes the word fits the idea; oftener he uses one foreign to his meaning. His wife, of whose devotion, almost poignant in its earnestness, it would be too sad to dwell upon, is his faithful interpreter. He moves with difficulty. He plays dominoes, but seldom goes to the keyboard. He reads slowly and, like the unfortunate Friedrich Nietzsche, he rereads one page many times. I could not help recalling what Mrs. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche told me in Weimar of her brother. One day, noticing that she silently wept, the poet-philosopher exclaimed: "But why do you weep, little sister? Are we not very happy?" MacDowell is very happy and his wife is braver than Nietzsche's sister. One fragment of his conversation I recall. With glowing countenance he spoke of the thunderbolt in his wonderfully realistic piano poem, The Eagle. There had been a lightning-storm during the afternoon. Then he told me how he had found water by means of the hazel wand on his New Hampshire farm—a real happening. As I went away I could not help remembering that the final words I should ever hear uttered by this friend were of bright fire and running water and dream-music. [The above appeared in the New York Herald, June 24, 1906, and is reprinted by request. Edward MacDowell died January 23, 1908.] CHAPTER III REMY DE GOURMONT HIS IDEAS. THE COLOUR OF HIS MIND "Je dis ce que je pense"—R. de G. I Those were days marked by a white stone when arrived in the familiar yellow cover a new book, with card enclosed from "Remy de Gourmont, 71, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris." Sometimes I received as many as two in a year. But they always found me eager and grateful, did those precious little volumes bearing the imprint of the Mercure de France, with whose history the name of De Gourmont is so happily linked. And there were post-cards too in his delicate handwriting on which were traced sense and sentiment; yes, this man of genius possessed sentiment, but abhorred sentimentality. His personal charm transpired in a friendly salutation hastily pencilled. He played exquisitely upon his intellectual instrument, and knew the value of time and space. So his post-cards are souvenirs of his courtesy, and it was through one, which unexpectedly fell from the sky in 1897, I began my friendship with this distinguished French critic. His sudden death in 1915 at Paris (he was born 1858), caused by apoplexy, was the heroic ending of a man of letters. Like Flaubert he was stricken while at his desk. I can conceive no more fitting end for a valiant soldier of literature. He was a moral hero and the victim of his prolonged technical heroism. De Gourmont was incomparable. Thought, not action, was his chosen sphere, but ranging up and down the vague and vast territory of ideas he encountered countless cerebral adventures; the most dangerous of all. An aristocrat born, he was, nevertheless, a convinced democrat. The latch was always lifted on the front door of his ivory tower. He did live in a certain sense a cloistered existence, a Benedictine of arts and [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] [Pg 19] letters; but he was not, as has been said, a sour hermit nursing morose fancies in solitude. De Gourmont, true pagan, enjoyed the gifts the gods provide, and had, despite the dualism of his nature, an epicurean soul. But of a complexity. He never sympathised with the disproportionate fuss raised by the metaphysicians about Instinct and Intelligence, yet his own magnificent cerebral apparatus was a battle- field over which swept the opposing hosts of Instinct and Intelligence, and in a half-hundred volumes the history of this conflict is faithfully set down. As personal as Maurice Barrès, without his egoism, as subtle as Anatole France, De Gourmont saw life steadier and broader than either of these two contemporaries. He was one who said "vast things simply." He was the profoundest philosopher of the three, and never, after his beginnings, exhibited a trace of the dilettante. Life soon became something more than a mere spectacle for him. He was a meliorist in theory and practice, though he asserted that Christianity, an Oriental-born religion, has not become spiritually acclimated among Occidental peoples. But he missed its consoling function; religion, the poetry of the poor, never had for him the prime significance that it had for William James; a legend, vague, vast, and delicious. Old frontiers have disappeared in science and art and literature. We have Maeterlinck, a poet writing of bees, Poincaré, a mathematician opening our eyes to the mystic gulfs of space; solid matters resolved into mist, and the law of gravitation questioned. The new horizons beckon ardent youth bent on conquering the secrets of life. And there are more false beacon-lights than true. But if this is an age of specialists a man occasionally emerges who contradicts the formula. De Gourmont was at base a poet; also a dramatist, novelist, raconteur, man of science, critic, moralist of erudition, and, lastly, a philosopher. Both formidable and bewildering were his accomplishments. He is a poet in his Hieroglyphes, Oraisons mauvaises, Le Livre des Litanies, Les Saintes du Paradis, Simone, Divertissements—his last appearance in singing robes (1914); he is a raconteur—and such tales—in Histoires magiques, Prose moroses, Le Pèlerin du silence, D'un Pays lointain, Couleurs; a novelist in Merlette—his first book—Sixtine, Le Fantôme, les Chevaux de Diomède, Le Songe d'une Femme, Une Nuit au Luxembourg, Un Cœur virginal; dramatist in Théodat, Phénissa, Le vieux Roi, Lilith; as master critic of the æsthetics of the French language his supremacy is indisputable; it is hardly necessary to refer here to Le Livre des Masques, in two volumes, the five volumes of Promenades littéraires, the three of Promenades philosophiques; as moralist he has signed such works as l'Idealisme, La Culture des Idées, Le Chemin de Velours; historian and humanist, he has given us Le Latin mystique; grammarian and philologist, he displays his learning in Le Problème du Style, and Esthétique de la Langue française, and incidentally flays an unhappy pedagogue who proposed to impart the secret of style in twenty lessons. He edited many classics of French literature. His chief contribution to science, apart from his botanical and entomological researches, is Physique de l'Amour, in which he reveals himself as a patient, thorough observer in an almost new country. And what shall we say to his incursions into the actual, into the field of politics, sociology and hourly happenings of Paris life; his Epilogues (three volumes), Dialogues des Amateurs, the collected pages from his monthly contributions to Mercure de France? Nothing human was alien to him, nor inhuman, for he rejected as quite meaningless the latter vocable, as he rejected such clichés as "organic and inorganic." Years before we heard of a pluralistic universe De Gourmont was a pragmatist, though an idealist in his conception of the world as a personal picture. Intensely interested in ideas, as he was in words, he might have fulfilled Lord Acton's wish that some one would write a History of Ideas. At the time of his death the French thinker was composing a work entitled La Physique des Mœurs, in which he contemplated a demonstration of his law of intellectual constancy. A spiritual cosmopolitan, he was like most Frenchmen an ardent patriot. The little squabble in the early eighties over a skit of his, Le Jou-jou—patriotisme (1883), cost him his post at the National Library in Paris. As a philosopher he deprecated war; as a man, though too old to fight, he urged his countrymen to victory, as may be noted in his last book, Pendant l'Orage (1916). But the philosopher persists in such a sorrowful sentence as: "In the tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte." To show his mental balance at a time when literary men, artists, and even philosophers, indulged in unseemly abuse, we read in Jugements his calm admission that the war has not destroyed for him the intellectual values of Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche. He owes much to their thought as they owed much to French thought; Goethe has said as much; and of Voltaire and Chamfort, Schopenhauer was a disciple. Without being a practical musician, De Gourmont was a lover of Beethoven and Wagner. He paid his compliments to Romain Rolland, whose style, both chalky and mucilaginous, he dislikes in that overrated and spun-out series Jean-Christophe. Another little volume, La Belgique littéraire, was published in 1915, which, while it contains nothing particularly new about Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren, Van Lerberghe, Camille Lemonnier, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is excellent reading. The French critic was also editor of the Revue des Idées, and judging from the bibliography compiled by Pierre de Querlon as long ago as 1903, he was a collaborator of numerous magazines. He wrote on Emerson, English humour, or Thomas à Kempis with the same facility as he dissected the mystic Latin writers of the early centuries after Christ. Indeed, such versatility was viewed askance by the plodding crowd of college professors, his general adversaries. But his erudition could not be challenged; only two other men matched his scholarship, Anatole France and the late Marcel Schwob. And we have only skimmed the surface of his accomplishments. Remy de Gourmont is the Admirable Crichton of French letters. II Prodigious incoherence might be reasonably expected from this diversity of interests, yet the result is quite the reverse. The artist in this complicated man banished confusion. He has told us that because of the [Pg 20] [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 24] diversity of his aptitudes man is distinguished from his fellow animals, and the variety in his labours is a proof positive of his superiority to such fellow critics as the mentally constipated Brunetière, the impressionistic Anatole France, the agile and graceful Lemaître, and the pedantic philistine Faguet. But if De Gourmont always attains clarity with no loss of depth, he sometimes mixes his genres; that is, the poet peeps out in his reports of the psychic life of insects, as the philosopher lords it over the pages of his fiction. A mystic betimes, he is a crystal-clear thinker. And consider the catholicity evinced in Le Livre des Masques. He wrote of such widely diverging talents as Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Paul Adam; of Henri de Régnier and Jules Renard; of Huysmans and Jules Laforgue; the mysticism of Francis Poictevin's style and the imagery of Saint-Pol-Roux he defined, and he displays an understanding of the first symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, while disliking the personality of that abnormal youth. But why recite this litany of new talent literally made visible and vocal by our critic? It is a pleasure to record the fact that most of his swans remained swans and did not degenerate into tame geese. In this book he shows himself a profound psychologist. Insatiably curious, he yet contrived to drive his chimeras in double harness and safely. His best fiction is Sixtine and Une Nuit au Luxembourg, if fiction they may be called. Never will their author be registered among best-sellers. Sixtine deals with the adventures of a masculine brain. Ideas are the hero. In Un Cœur virginal we touch earth, fleshly and spiritually. This story shocked its readers. It may be considered as a sequel to Physique de l'Amour. It shows mankind as a gigantic insect indulging in the same apparently blind pursuit of sex sensation as a beetle, and also shows us the "female of our species" endowed with less capacity for modesty than the lady mole, the most chaste of all animals. Disconcerting, too, is the psychology of the heroine's virginal soul, not, however, cynical; cynicism is the irony of vice, and De Gourmont is never cynical. But a master of irony. Une Nuit au Luxembourg has been done into English. It handles with delicacy and frankness themes that in the hands of a lesser artist would be banished as brutal and blasphemous. The author knows that all our felicity is founded on a compromise between the dream and reality, and for that reason while he signals the illusion he never mocks it; he is too much an idealist. In the elaborately carved cups of his tales, foaming over with exquisite perfumes and nectar, there lurks the bitter drop of truth. He could never have said with Proudhon that woman is the desolation of the just; for him woman is often an obsession. Yet, captain of his instincts, he sees her justly; he is not subdued by sex. With a gesture he destroys the sentimental scaffolding of the sensualist and marches on to new intellectual conquests. In Lilith, an Adamitic Morality, he reveals his Talmudic lore. The first wife of our common ancestor is a beautiful hell-hag, the accomplice of Satan in the corruption of the human race. Thus mediæval play is epical in its Rabelaisian plainness of speech. Perhaps the Manichean in De Gourmont fabricated its revolting images. He had traversed the Baudelairian steppes of blasphemy and black pessimism; Baudelaire, a poet who was a great critic. Odi profanum vulgus! was De Gourmont's motto, but his soul was responsive to so many contacts that he emerged, as Barrès emerged, a citizen of the world. Anarchy as a working philosophy did not long content him, although he never relinquished his detached attitude of proud individualism. He saw through the sentimental equality of J.J. Rousseau. Rousseau it was who said that thinking man was a depraved animal. Perhaps he was not far from the truth. Man is an affective animal more interested in the immediate testimony of his senses than in his intellectual processes. His metaphysic may be but the reverberation of his sensations on the shore of his subliminal self, the echo of the sounding shell he calls his soul. And our critic had his scientific studies to console him for the inevitable sterility of soul that follows egoism and a barren debauch of the sensations. He did not tarry long in the valley of excess. His artistic sensibility was his saviour. Without being a dogmatist, De Gourmont was an antagonist of absolutism. A determinist, (which may be dogmatism à rebours), a relativist, he holds that mankind is not a specially favoured species of the animal scale; thought is only an accident, possibly the result of rich nutrition. An automaton, man has no free will, but it is better for him to imagine that he has; it is a sounder working hypothesis for the average human. The universe had no beginning, it will have no end. There is no first link or last in the chain of causality. Everything must submit to the law of causality; to explain a blade of grass we must dismount the stars. Nevertheless, De Gourmont no more than Renan, had the mania of certitude. Humbly he interrogates the sphinx. There are no isolated phenomena in time or space. The mass of matter is eternal. Man is an animal submitting to the same laws that govern crystals or brutes. He is the expression of matter in physique and chemistry. Repetition is the law of life. Thought is a physiological product; intelligence the secretion of matter and is amenable to the law of causality. (This sounds like Taine's famous definition of virtue and vice.) And who shall deny it all in the psychochemical laboratories? It is not the rigid old-fashioned materialism, but a return to the more plastic theories of Lamarck and the transformism of the Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries. For De Gourmont the Darwinian notion that man is at the topmost notch of creation is as antique and absurd as most cosmogonies; indeed, it is the Asiatic egocentric idea of creation. Jacob's ladder repainted in Darwinian symbols. Voilà l'ennemi! said De Gourmont and put on his controversial armour. What blows, what sudden deadly attacks were his! Quinton has demonstrated to the satisfaction of many scientists that bird life came later on our globe than the primates from whom we stem. The law of thermal constancy proves it by the interior temperature of birds. Man preceded the carnivorous and ruminating animals, of whom the bodily temperature is lower than that of birds. The ants and bees and beavers are not a whit more automatic than mankind. Automatism, says Ribot, is the rule. Thought is not free, wrote William James, when to it an affirmation is added; then it is but the affirmation of a preference. "L'homme," asserts De Gourmont, "varie à l'infini sa [Pg 25] [Pg 26] [Pg 27] [Pg 28] [Pg 29] mimique. Sa supériorité, c'est la diversité immense de ses aptitudes." He welcomed Jules de Gaultier and his theory of Bovaryisme; of the vital lie, because of which we pretend to be what we are not. That way spells security, if not progress. The idea of progress is another necessary illusion, for it provokes a multiplicity of activities. Our so-called free will is naught but the faculty of making a decision determined by a great and varied number of motives. As for morality, it is the outcome of tribal taboos; the insect and animal world shows deepest-dyed immorality, revolting cruelty, and sex perversity. Rabbits and earthworms through no fault of their own suffer from horrible maladies. From all of which our critic deduces his law of intellectual constancy. The human brain since prehistoric times has been neither diminished nor augmented; it has remained like a sponge, which can be dry or saturated, but still remains itself. It is a constant. In a favourable environment it is enriched. The greatest moment in the history of the human family was the discovery of fire by an anthropoid of genius. Prometheus then should be our god. Without him we should have remained more or less simian, and probably of arboreal habits. III A synthetic brain is De Gourmont's, a sower of doubts, though not a No-Sayer to the universe. He delights in challenging accepted "truths." Of all modern thinkers a master of Vues d'ensembles, he smiles at the pretensions, usually a mask for poverty of ideas, of so-called "general ideas." He dissociates such conventional grouping of ideas as Glory, Justice, Decadence. The shining ribs of disillusion shine through his psychology; a psychology of nuance and finesse. Disillusioning reflections, these. Not to be put in any philosophical pigeonhole, he is as far removed from the eclecticism of Victor Cousin as from the verbal jugglery and metaphysical murmurings of Henri Bergson. The world is his dream; but it is a tangible dream, charged with meaning, order, logic. The truest reality is thought. Action spoils. (Goethe said: "Thought expands, action narrows.") Our abstract ideas are metaphysical idols, says Jules de Gaultier. The image of the concrete is De Gourmont's touchstone. Théophile Gautier declared that he was a man for whom the visible world existed. He misjudged his capacity for apprehending reality. The human brain, excellent instrument in a priori combinations is inept at perceiving realities. The "Sultan of the Epithet," as De Goncourt nicknamed "le bon Théo," was not the "Emperor of Thought," according to Henry James, and for him it was a romantic fiction spun in the rich web of his fancy. A vaster, greyer world is adumbrated in the books of De Gourmont. He never allowed symbolism to deform his representation of sober, every-day life. He pictured the future domain of art and ideas as a fair and shining landscape no longer a series of little gardens with high walls. A hater of formulas, sects, schools, he teaches that the capital crime of the artist, the writer, the thinker, is conformity. (Yet how serenely this critic swims in classic currents!) The artist's work should reflect his personality, a magnified reflection. He must create his own æsthetic. There are no schools, only individuals. And of consistency he might have said that it is oftener a mule than a jewel. Sceptical in all matters, though never the fascinating sophist that is Anatole France, De Gourmont criticised the thirty-six dramatic situations, reducing the number to four. Man as centre in relation to himself; in relation to other men; in relation to the other sex; in relation to God, or Nature. His ecclesiastical fond may be recognised in Le Chemin de Velours with its sympathetic exposition of Jesuit doctrine, and the acuity of its judgments on Pascal and the Jansenists. The latter section is as an illuminating foot-note to the history of Port-Royal by Sainte-Beuve. The younger critic has the supple intellect of the supplest-minded Jesuit. His bias toward the order is unmistakable. There are few books I reread with more pleasure than this Path of Velvet. Certain passages in it are as silky and sonorous as the sound of Eugène Ysaye's violin. The colour of De Gourmont's mind is stained by his artistic sensibility. A maker of images, his vocabulary astounding as befits both a poet and philologist, one avid of beautiful words, has variety. The temper of his mind is tolerant, a quality that has informed the finer intellects of France since Montaigne. His literary equipment is unusual. A style as brilliant, sinuous, and personal as his thought; flexible or massive, continent or coloured, he discourses at ease in all the gamuts and modes major, minor, and mixed. A swift, weighty style, the style of a Latinist; a classic, not a romantic style. His formal sense is admirable. The tenderness of Anatole France is absent, except in his verse, which is less spontaneous than volitional. A pioneer in new æsthetic pastures, De Gourmont is a poet for poets. He has virtuosity, though the gift of tears nature— possibly jealous because of her prodigality—has denied him. But in the curves of his overarching intellect there may be found wit, gaiety, humour, the Gallic attributes, allied with poetic fancy, profundity of thought, and a many-sided comprehension of life, art, and letters. He is in the best tradition of French criticism only more versatile than either Sainte-Beuve or Taine; as versatile as Doctor Brandes or Arthur Symons, and that is saying much. With Anatole France he could have exclaimed: "The longer I contemplate human life, the more I believe that we must give it, for witnesses and judges, Irony and Pity...." CHAPTER IV ARTZIBASHEF I Once upon a time Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: "Whereas, it is far away from bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and the tears of men are silent to-day, and invisible, and [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] [Pg 32] [Pg 33] almost spiritual...." This is a plea for his own spiritualised art, in which sensations are attenuated, and emotions within emotions, the shadow of the primal emotions, are spun into crepuscular shapes. But literature refused to follow the example of the Belgian dreamer, and since the advent of the new century there has been a recrudescence of violence, a melodramatic violence, that must be disconcerting to Maeterlinck. It is particularly the case with Russian poetry, drama, and fiction. That vast land of promise and disillusionment is become a trying-out place for the theories and speculations of western Europe; no other nation responds so sensitively to the vibrations of the Time-Spirit, no other literature reflects with such clearness the fluctuations of contemporary thought and sensibility. The Slav is the most emotional among living peoples. Not that mysticism is missing; indeed, it is the key-note of much Russian literature; but it was the clash of events; the march of ideas which precipitated young Russia into the expression of revolt, pessimism, and its usual concomitant, materialism. There were bloodshed, battle-cries, and sword-thrusts, and tears, tangible, not invisible, in the uprising of ten years ago. The four great masters, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, still ruled the minds of the intellectuals, but a younger element was the yeast in the new fermentation. Tchekov, with his epical ennui, with his tales of mean, colourless lives, Gorky and his disinherited barefoot brigade, the dramatic Andreiev, the mystic Sologub, and Kuprin, Zensky, Kusmin, Ivanov, Ropshin, Zaitzeff, Chapygin, Serafimovitch (I select a few of the romancers)—not to mention such poets as Block, Reminsov, and Ivanov—are the men who are fighting under various banners but always for complete freedom. Little more than a decade has passed since the appearance of a young man named Michael Artzibashef who, without any preliminary blaring of trumpets, has taken the centre of the stage and still holds it. He is as Slavic as Dostoievsky, more pessimistic than Tolstoy, though not the supreme artist that was Turgenev. Of Gogol's overwhelming humour he has not a trace; instead, a corroding irony which eats into the very vitals of faith in all things human. Gorky, despite his "bitter" nickname, is an incorrigible optimist compared with Artzibashef. One sports with Nietzsche, the other not only swears by Max Stirner, but some of his characters are Stirnerism incarnate. His chosen field in society is the portrayal of the middle-class and proletarian. To André Villard, his friend and one of his translators,...