Unicorns Part 1

Unicorns.

by James Huneker.

CHAPTER I

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-Gla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce; 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 Guerin, 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 s.e.x, 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. Mallarme 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 ravis.h.i.+ng 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; b.u.t.terflies 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 s.h.i.+eld; matter and spirit, the mult.i.tude and the individual. Then unlock the ivory tower, abolish the tyrannies of superannuated superst.i.tions, 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 t.i.tle 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 Sh.e.l.ley. 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 Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain."

CHAPTER II

AN AMERICAN COMPOSER

THE Pa.s.sING OF EDWARD MACDOWELL

Whom the G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sing 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 succ.u.mb, 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 G.o.ds 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 aesthetic 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 pa.s.sed 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 workmans.h.i.+p, 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 cla.s.ses of Marmontel. It was in 1876. Two years later I saw him at the same inst.i.tution 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 Bulow, 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 Carreno, 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.

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 navete, 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 inc.u.mbency he gave up absolutely to his cla.s.ses. 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 s.h.i.+ne in a small hall. He needed s.p.a.ce, as do his later compositions.

There was something both n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sion 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 mediaeval 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 heroic and chivalric accents, epic pa.s.sion, and feminine tenderness. The psychology is simple if you set this music against that of Strauss, of Loeffler, or of Debussy.

But it is n.o.ble, n.o.ble 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 Deirdre 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 Hamps.h.i.+re 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