Unicorns Part 10

I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was Barbey d'Aurevilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably modelled--lace cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations.

But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne--(in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a harmless young n.o.body.... I should think you in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his Jumbos")--Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion element, is poor Huysmans's--just look into that masterpiece, A Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salome is Flaubert in operetta form--his gorgeous Herodias watered down for uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece--which limps dramatically--would never have been seriously considered if not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, _i. e._, it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in any particular. His Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error, yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very gay fancy.

He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed a la Byron and Baudelaire; but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a plagiarist from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too seriously--I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't knee-high to a gra.s.shopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the tragic denouement that has been thrashed to death by those who know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave att.i.tude--always att.i.tudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a second Jesus Christ--which latter statement stuns one. (The Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after dropping vast quant.i.ties of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me, he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne, Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readers would only take the trouble to study the originals there might be less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man.

Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called aesthetic movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true; but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the "Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not--nothing but his astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory.

CHAPTER XX

A SYNTHESIS OF THE SEVEN ARTS

Nothing new in all this talk about a fusion of the Seven Arts; it has been tried for centuries. Richard Wagner's attempt just grazed success, though the aesthetic principle at the base of his theory is eminently unsound. Pictures, sculpture, tone, acting, poetry, and the rest are to be found in the Wagnerian music-drama; but the very t.i.tles are significant--a hybrid art is there. With Wagner music is the master. His poetry, his drama, are not so important, though his scenic sense is unfailing. Every one of his works delights the eye; truly moving pictures. Yet if the lips of the young man of Urbino had opened to music, they would have sung the melodies of the young man of Salzburg. Years ago Sadikichi Hartmann, the j.a.panese poet from Hamburg, made a bold attempt in this direction, adding to other ingredients of the sensuous stew, perfume. The affair came off at Carnegie Hall, and we were wafted on the wings of song and smell to j.a.pan--only I detected the familiar odour of old shoes and the scent of armpits--of the latter Walt Whitman has triumphantly sung. A New York audience is not as pleasant to the nostrils as a j.a.panese crowd. That Mr. Finck has a.s.sured us. In the Theatre d'art, Paris, and in the last decade of the last century, experiments were made with all the arts--except the art of the palate. Recently, Mary Hallock, a Philadelphia pianist, has invented a mixture of music, lights, and costumes; for instance, in a certain Debussy piece, the stage a.s.sumes a deep violet hue, which glides into a light purple.

The Turkish March of Mozart is depicted in deep "reds, yellows, and greens." Philip Hale, the Boston music-critic, has written learnedly on the relation of tones and colours, and that astonis.h.i.+ng poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in his Alchimie du Verbe, tells us: "I believe in all the enchantments. I invented the colour of the vowels: A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green." This scheme he set forth in his famous sonnet, Voyelles, which was only a mystification to catch the ears of credulous ones. Rene de Ghil invented an entirely new system of prosody, which no one understood; least of all, the poet.

I wrote a story, The Piper of Dreams (in Melomaniacs), to prove that music and the violet rays combined might prove deadly in the hands of an anarch composer like Illowski--or Richard Strauss. And now New York has enjoyed its first Light Symphony, by Alexander Scriabine.

It was played by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under the suave conductors.h.i.+p of Modeste Altschuler (who is so Jacobean), while his brother Jacob (who is so modest) sat at the keyboard and pressed down the keys which regulated the various tintings on a screen; a wholly superfluous proceeding, as the colours did not mollify the truculence of the score; indeed, were quite meaningless, though not optically unpleasant. I admired this Russian, Scriabine, ever since I heard Josef Hofmann play a piano of his etude in D sharp minor.

Chopinesque, very, but a decided personality was also shown in it.

I've heard few of his larger orchestral works. Nevertheless, I did not find Prometheus as difficult of comprehension as either Schoenberg or Ornstein. Judged purely on the scheme set by its composer, I confess I enjoyed its chaotic beauties and pa.s.sionate twaddle, and singular to relate, the music was best when it recalled Wagner and Chopin (a piano part occasionally sounded bilious premonitions of Chopin). But, for such a mighty theme as Prometheus, the Light-Bringer (a prehistoric Ben Franklin without his electrified kite), the leading motives of this new music were often undersized. The dissociation of conventional keys was rigorously practised, and at times we were in the profoundest gulfs of cacophony. But the scoring evoked many novel effects; princ.i.p.ally, Berlioz and vodka. I still think Scriabine a remarkable composer, if not much addicted to the languis.h.i.+ng Lydian mode. But his Light Symphony proved to be only a partial solution of the problem. In Paris the poet Haraucourt and Ernest Eckstein invented puppet-shows with perfume symphonies.

A quarter of a century ago I visited the Theatre d'art, in Paris; that is, my astral soul did, for in those times I was a confirmed theosophist. The day had been a stupid one in Gotham, and I hadn't enough temperament to light a cigarette, so I simply pressed the nombril b.u.t.ton, took my Rig-Veda--a sacred buggy--projected my astral being, and sailed through s.p.a.ce to the French capital, there to enjoy a bath in the new art, or synthesis of the seven arts, eating included. As it was a first performance, even the police were deprived of their press-tickets, and the deepest mystery was maintained by the experimenters. I found the theatre, soon after my arrival, plunged into an orange gloom, punctured by tiny b.a.l.l.s of violet light, which daintily and intermittently blinked. The dominant odour of the atmosphere was Cologne-water, with a florid counterpoint that recalled bacon and eggs, a melange that appealed to my nostrils; and, though at first it seems hardly possible that the two dissimilar odours could even be made to modulate and merge, yet I had not been indoors ten minutes before the subtlety of the duet was apparent. Bacon has a delicious smell, and, like a freshly cut lemon, it causes a premonitory tickling of the palate and little rills of hunger in one's stomach. "Aha!" I cried (astrally, of course), "this is a concatenation of the senses never dreamed of by Plato when he conceived the plan of his Republic."

The lanquid lisp of those a.s.sembled in the theatre drifted into little sighs, and then a low, long-drawn-out chord in B flat minor, scored for octoroons, octopuses, shofars, tympani, and piccolo, sounded. Immediately a chorus of male soprani blended with this chord, though they sang the common chord of A major. The effect was one of vividity (we say "avidity," why can't we say "vividity"?); it was a dissonance, pianissimo, and it jarred my ears in a way that made their drums warble. Then a low burbling sound ascended. "The bacon frying," I cried, but I was mistaken. It was caused by the hissing of a sheet of carmilion (that is carmine and vermilion) smoke which slowly upraised on the stage; as it melted away the lights in the auditorium turned green and topaz, and an odour of jasmine and stewed tomatoes encircled us. My immediate neighbours seemed to be swooning; they were nearly prostrate, with their lips glued to the rod that ran around the seats. I grasped it, and received a most delicious thrill, probably electrical in origin, though it was velvety pleasure merely to touch it, and the palms of my hands exquisitely ached. "The tactile motive," I said. As I touched the rod I noted a small mouthpiece, and thinking I might hear something, I applied my ear; it instantly became wet. So evidently it was not the use to which it should be put. Again inspecting this mouthpiece, I put my finger to it and cautiously raised the moist end to my lips. "Heavenly!" I murmured. What sort of an earthly paradise was I in? And then losing no time, I placed my astral lips to the orifice, and took a long pull. Gorgeous was the result. Gumbo soup, as sure as I ever ate it, not your pusillanimous New York variety, but the genuine okra soup that one can't find outside of Louisiana, where old negro mammies used to make it to perfection. "The soup motive," I exclaimed.

Just as I gurgled the gumbo nocturne down my thirsty throat, a shrill burst of brazen clangour (this is not tautological) in the orchestra roused me from my dream, and I gazed on the stage. The steam had cleared away, and now showed a rocky and wooded scene, the trees sky-blue, the rocks a Nile-green. The band was playing something that sounded like a strabismic version of the prelude to Tristan. But strange odour-harmonies disturbed my enjoyment of the music, for so subtly allied were the senses in this new temple of art that a separate smell, taste, touch, vision, or sound jarred the ensemble. This uncanny interfusion of the arts took my breath away, but, full of gumbo soup as I was--and you have no idea how soup discommodes the astral stomach--I was anch.o.r.ed to my seat, and bravely determined not to leave till I had some clew to the riddle of the new evangel of the seven--or seventeen--arts. The stage remained bare, though the rocks, trees, and shrubbery changed their hues about every twenty seconds. At last, as a blazing colour hit my tired eyeb.a.l.l.s, and when the odour had s.h.i.+fted to decayed fish, dried grapefruit, and new-mown hay, I could stand it no longer, and, turning to my neighbour, I tapped him on the shoulder, and politely asked: "Monsieur, will you please tell me the t.i.tle of this play, piece, drama, morceau, stueck, sonata, odour, picture, symphony, cooking-comedy, or whatever they call it?" The young man to whom I had appealed looked fearfully about him--I had foolishly forgotten that I was invisible in my astral shape--then clutched at his windpipe, beat his silly skull, and screamed aloud: "Mon Dieu! still another kind of aural pleasure," and was carried out in a superbly vertiginous fit. Fright had made him mad. The spectators were too absorbed, or drugged, to pay attention to the incident. Followed a slow, putrid silence.

Realising the folly of addressing humans in my astral garb, I sat down in my corner and again watched the stage. Still no trace of actors. The scenery had faded into a dullish dun hue, while the orchestra played a Bach fugue for oboe, lamp-post (transposed to E flat and two policemen) accordions in F and stopped-strumpets.

Suddenly the lights went out, and we were plunged into a blackness that actually pinched the sight, so drear, void, and dead was it. A smell of garlic made us cough, and by a sweep of some current we were saturated with the odours of white violets, the lights were tuned in three keys: yellow of eggs, marron glace, and orchids, and the soup supply s.h.i.+fted to whisky-sours. "How delicate these contrasts!" hiccoughed my neighbour, and I astrally acquiesced.

Then, at last, the stage became peopled by one person, a very tall old man with three eyes, high heels, and a deep voice. Brandis.h.i.+ng aloft his whiskers, he curiously muttered: "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms my beamish boy." Alice in Wonderland, was the mystery-play, and I had arrived too late to witness the slaying of the monster in its many-b.u.t.toned waistcoat. How gallantly the "beamish boy" must have dealt the death-stroke to the queer brute as the orchestra sounded the Siegfried and the Dragon motives, and the air all the while redolent with heliotrope. I couldn't help wondering what the particular potage was at this crucial moment. My cogitation was interrupted by the appearance of a gallant-appearing young knight in luminous armour, who dragged after him a huge carca.s.s, half-dragon and two-thirds pig (the other three-thirds must have been suffering from stage fright). The orchestra proclaimed the Abattoir motive, and instantly rose-odours penetrated the air, the electric shocks ceased, and subtle little kicks were administered to the audience, which, by this time, was well-nigh swooning with these composite pleasures. The scenery had begun to dance gravely to an odd Russian rhythm, and the young hero monotonously intoned a verse, making the vowel sounds sizzle with his teeth, and almost swallowing the consonants: "And as in uffish thought he stood, the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came." "This beats Gertrude Stein," I thought, as the orchestra played the Galumphing motive from The Ride of the Valkyrs, and the lights were transposed to a s.h.i.+vering purple. Then lilac steam ascended, the orchestra gasped in C-D flat major (for corno di ba.s.setto and three yelping poodles), a smell of cigarettes and coffee permeated the atmosphere, and I knew that this magical banquet of the senses was concluded. I was not sorry, as every nerve was sore from the strain imposed. Talk about faculty of attention!

When you are forced to taste, see, hear, touch, and smell simultaneously, then you yearn for a less alembicated art. Synthesis of the arts? Synthesis of rubbis.h.!.+ One at a time, and not too much time at that. I pressed my astral b.u.t.ton, and flew homeward, wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I landed at the Battery it was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky.

New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts.

CHAPTER XXI

THE CLa.s.sIC CHOPIN

That Chopin is a cla.s.sic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is cla.s.sic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature; but that he is of a cla.s.sical complexion as a composer from the beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox.

Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained now, since old party lines have been effaced. To battle seriously for such words as Cla.s.sic or Romantic or Realism is no longer possible. Cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once wrangled over doctrinal points; as if the salvation of mankind depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation or consubstantiation. Only yesterday that ugly word "degeneracy,"

thanks to quack critics and charlatan "psychiatrists," figured as a means of estimating genius. This method has quite vanished among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another misunderstood vocable--decadence. Wagner is called decadent. So is Chopin. While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis:

"Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a cla.s.sic style. It is simply a further development of a cla.s.sic style, a further specialisation, the h.o.m.ogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.... Swift's prose is cla.s.sic, Pater's decadent.... Roman architecture is cla.s.sic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly cla.s.sic in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic ... is decadent.... All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two cla.s.sic and decadent extremes."

I make this quotation for it clearly sets forth a profound but not widely appreciated fact. In art, as in life, there is no absolute.

Perhaps the most illuminating statement concerning the romantic style was uttered by Theophile Gautier. Of it he wrote (in his essay on Baudelaire): "Unlike the cla.s.sic style it admits shadow." We need not bother ourselves about the spirit of romanticism; that has been done to the death by hundreds of critics. And it is a sign of the times that the old-fas.h.i.+oned Chopin is fading, while we are now vitally interested in him as a formalist. Indeed, Chopin the romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous, morbid, and Chopin the pianist, need not enter into our present scheme. He has appeared to popular fancy as everything from Thaddeus of Warsaw to an exotic drawing-room hero; from the sentimental consumptive consoled by countesses to the accredited slave of George Sand. All this is truly the romantic Chopin. It is the obverse of the medal that piques curiosity. Why the cla.s.sic quality of his compositions, their clarity, concision, purity, structural balance, were largely missed by so many of his contemporaries is a mystery. Because of his obviously romantic melodies he was definitely ranged with the most extravagant of the romantics, with Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt; but, as a matter of fact, he is formally closer to Mendelssohn. His original manner of distributing his thematic material deceived the critics.

He refused to join the revolutionists; later in the case of Flaubert we come upon an a.n.a.logous condition. Hailed as chief of the realists, the author of Madame Bovary took an ironic delight in publis.h.i.+ng Salammbo, which was romantic enough to please that prince of romanticists, Victor Hugo. Chopin has been reproached for his tepid att.i.tude toward romanticism, and also because of his rather caustic criticisms of certain leaders. He, a musical aristocrat _pur sang_, held aloof, though he permitted himself to make some sharp commentaries on Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz. Decidedly not a romantic despite his romantic externalism. Decidedly a cla.s.sic despite his romantic "content." Of him Stendhal might have written: a cla.s.sic is a dead romantic. (Heine left no epic, yet he is an indubitable cla.s.sic.) Wise Goethe said: "The point is for a work to be thoroughly good and then it is sure to be cla.s.sical."

But it is not because of the cla.s.sicism achieved by the pathos of distance that Chopin's special case makes an appeal. It is Chopin as a consummate master of music that interests us. In his admirable Chopin the Composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley considers Chopin and puts out of court the familiar "gifted amateur," "improvisatore of genius," and the rest of the theatrical stock description by proving beyond peradventure of a doubt that Frederic Francois Chopin was not only a creator of new harmonies, inventor of novel figuration, but also a musician skilled in the handling of formal problems, one grounded in the schools of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; furthermore, that if he did not employ the sonata form in its severest sense, he literally built on it as a foundation. He managed the rondo with ease and grace, and if he did not write fugues it was because the fugue form did not attract him. Perhaps the divination of his own limitations is a further manifestation of his extraordinary genius.

This does not imply that Chopin had any particular genius in counterpoint, but to deny his mastery of polyphony is a grave error. And it is still denied with the very evidence staring his critics in the face. Beethoven in his sonatas demonstrated his individuality, though coming after Mozart's perfect specimens in that form. Chopin did not try to bend the bow of Ulysses, though more than a word might be said of his two last Sonatas--the first is boyishly pedantic, and monotonous in key-contrast, while the 'cello and piano sonata hardly can be ranked as an exemplar of cla.s.sic form.

Of the Etudes Kelley says:

"In this group of masterpieces we find the more desirable features of the cla.s.sical school--diatonic melodies, well-balanced phrase and period-building--together with the richness afforded by chromatic harmonies and modulatory devices heretofore unknown."

Indeed, a new system of music that changed the entire current of the art. It was not without cause that I once called Chopin the "open door"; through his door the East entered and whether for good or for ill certainly revolutionised Western music. Mr. Hadow is right in declaring that "Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not as far from each other as the music of 1880 from that of 1914." And Chopin was the most potent influence, in company with Beethoven and Wagner, in bringing about that change. I say in company with Beethoven and Wagner, for I heartily agree with Frederick Niecks in his recent judgment:

"I consider Chopin to be one of the three most powerful factors in the development of nineteenth-century music, the other two being, of course, Beethoven and Wagner. The absolute originality of Chopin's personality, and that of its expression through novel harmony, chromaticism, figuration justifies the a.s.sertion. And none will deny the fact who takes the trouble to trace the Polish master's influence on his contemporaries and successors. The greatest and most powerful composers came under this influence, to a large extent, by the process of infiltration."

Kelley gives us chapter and verse in the particular case of Wagner and his absorption of the harmonic schemes of Chopin, as did the late Anton Seidl many times for my particular benefit.

However, this only brings us to Chopin the innovator, whereas it is the aspect of the cla.s.sic Chopin which has been neglected. "As far back as 1840 Chopin was employing half-tones with a freedom that brought upon him the wrath of conservative critics," writes Hadow, who admires the Pole with reservations, not placing him in such august company as has Kelley and Niecks. True, Chopin was a pioneer in several departments of his art, yet how few recognised or recognise to-day that Schumann is the more romantic composer of the pair; his music is a very jungle of romantic formlessness; his Carneval the epitome of romantic musical portraiture--with its "Chopin" more Chopin than the original. Contrast the n.o.ble Fantasy in C, Opus 17 of Schumann, with the equally n.o.ble Fantasy in F minor, Opus 49 of Chopin, and ask which is the more romantic in spirit, structure, and technique. Unquestionably to Schumann would be awarded the quality of romanticism. He is more fantastic, though his fantasy is less decorative; he strays into the most delightful and umbrageous paths and never falters in the preservation of romantic atmosphere. Now look on the other picture. There is Chopin, who, no matter his potentialities, never experimented in the larger symphonic mould, and as fully imbued with the poetic spirit as Schumann; nevertheless a master of his patterns, whether in figuration or general structure. His Mazourkas are sonnets, and this Fantasy in F minor is, as Kelley points out, a highly complex rondo; as are the Ballades and Scherzos. Beethoven, doubtless, would have developed the eloquent main theme more significantly; strictly speaking, Chopin introduces so much new melodic material that the rondo form is greatly modified, yet never quite banished. The architectonics of the composition are more magnificent than in Schumann, although I do not propose to make invidious comparisons.

Both works are cla.s.sics in the accepted sense of the term. But Chopin's Fantasy is more cla.s.sic in structure and sentiment.

The Sonatas in B flat minor and B minor are "awful examples" for academic theorists. They are not faultless as to form and do sadly lack organic unity. Schumann particularly criticises the Sonata Opus 35 because of the inclusion of the Funeral March and the h.o.m.ophonic, "invertebrate" finale. But the two first movements are distinct contributions to Sonata literature, even if in the first movement the opening theme is not recapitulated. I confess that I am glad it is not, though the solemn t.i.tle "Sonata" becomes thereby a mockery.

The composer adequately treats this first motive in the development section so that its absence later is not annoyingly felt. There are, I agree with Mr. Kelley, some bars that are surprisingly like a certain page of Die Gotterdammerung, as the Feuerzauber music may be noted in the flickering chromaticism of the E minor Concerto; or as the first phrase of the C minor Etude, Opus 10, No. 12, is to be found in Tristan and Isolde--Isolde's opening measure, "Wer wagt mich zu hohnen." (The orchestra plays the identical Chopin phrase.) This first movement of the B flat minor Sonata--with four bars of introduction, evidently suggested by the sublime opening of Beethoven's C minor Sonata, Opus 111, does not furnish us with as concrete an example as the succeeding Scherzo in E flat minor, (for me) one of the most perfect examples of Chopin's exquisite formal sense. While it is not as long-breathed as the C sharp minor Scherzo, its concision makes it more tempting to the student. In character stormier than the Scherzo, Opus 39, its thematic economy and development--by close parallelism of phraseology, as Hadow points out--reveal not only a powerful creative impulse, but erudition of the highest order. No doubt Chopin did improvise freely, did come easily by his melodies, but the travail of a giant in patience--again you think of Flaubert--is shown in the polis.h.i.+ng of his periods. He is a poet who wrote perfect pages.

The third Scherzo, less popular but of deeper import than the one in B flat minor, is in spirit splenetic, ironical, and pa.s.sionate, yet with what ant.i.thetic precision and balance the various and antagonistic moods are grasped and portrayed. And every measure is logically accounted for. The automatism inherent in all pa.s.sage work he almost eliminated, and he spiritualised ornament and arabesque. It is the triumph of art over temperament. No one has ever accused Chopin of lacking warmth; indeed, thanks to a total misconception of his music, he is tortured into a roaring tornado by sentimentalists and virtuosi. But if he is carefully studied it will be seen that he is greatly preoccupied with form--his own form, be it understood--and that the linear in nearly all of his compositions takes precedence over colour. I know this sounds heretical. But while I do not yield an iota in my belief that Chopin is the most poetic among composers (as Sh.e.l.ley is among poets, and Vermeer is the painter's painter) it is high time that he be viewed from a different angle. The versatility of the man, his genius as composer and pianist, the novelty of his figuration and form dazzled his contemporaries or else blinded them to his true import. Individual as are the six Scherzos--two of them are in the Sonatas--they nevertheless stem from cla.s.sic soil; the scherzo is not new with him, nor are its rhythms. But the Ballades are Chopinesque to the last degree, with their embellished thematic cadenzas, modulatory motives, richly decorated harmonic designs, and their incomparable "content"; above all, in their amplification of the coda, a striking extension of the postlude, making it as pregnant with meaning as the main themes. The lordly flowing narration of the G minor Ballade; the fantastic wavering outlines of the second Ballade--which on close examination exhibits the firm burin of a masterful etcher; the beloved third Ballade, a formal masterpiece; and the F minor Ballade, most elaborate and decorative of the set--are there, I ask, in all piano literature such original compositions? The four Impromptus are mood pictures, highly finished, not lacking boldness of design, and in the second, F sharp major, there are fertile figurative devices and rare harmonic treatment. The melodic organ-point is original. Polyphonic complexity is to be found in some of the Mazourkas. Ehlert mentions a "perfect canon in the octave" in one of them (C sharp minor, Opus 63).

Of the Concertos there is less to be said, for the conventional form was imposed by the t.i.tle. Here Chopin is not the Greater Chopin, notwithstanding the beautiful music for the solo instrument. The sonata form is not desperately evaded, and in the rondo of the E minor Concerto he overtops Hummel on his native heath. As to the instrumentation I do not believe Chopin had much to do with it; it is the average colourless scoring of his day. Nor do I believe with some of his admirers that he will bear transposition to the orchestra, or even to the violin. It does not attenuate the power and originality of his themes that they are essentially of the piano. A song is for the voice and is not bettered by orchestral arrangement. The same may be said of the cla.s.sic concertos for violin. With all due respect for those who talk about the Beethoven Sonatas being "orchestral," I only ask, Why is it they sound so "unorchestral" when scored for the full battery of instruments? The Sonata Pathetique loses its character thus treated. So does the A flat Polonaise of Chopin, heroic as are its themes. Render unto the keyboard that which is composed for it. The Appa.s.sionata Sonata in its proper medium is as thrilling as the Eroica Symphony. The so-called "orchestral test" is no test at all; only a confusion of terms and of artistic substances. Chopin thought for the piano; he is the greatest composer for the piano; by the piano he stands or falls. The theme of the grandiose A minor Etude (Opus 25, No. 11) is a perfect specimen of his invention; yet it sounds elegiac and feminine when compared with the first tragic theme of Beethoven's C minor Symphony.

The Allegro de Concert, Opus 46, is not his most distinguished work, truncated concerto as it is, but it proves that he could fill a larger canvas than the Valse. In the Mazourkas and Etudes he is closer to Bach than elsewhere. His early training under Elsner was sound and cla.s.sical. But he is the real Chopin when he goes his own way, a fiery poet, a bold musician, but also a refined, tactful temperament, despising the facile, the exaggerated, and bent upon achieving a harmonious synthesis. Truly a cla.s.sic composer in his solicitude for contour, and chast.i.ty of style. The Slav was tempered by the Gallic strain. Insatiable in his dreams, he fas.h.i.+oned them into shapes of enduring beauty.

You would take from us the old Chopin, the greater Chopin, the dramatic, impa.s.sioned poet-improvisatore, I hear some cry! Not in the least. Chopin is Chopin. He sings, even under the fingers of pedants, and to-day is butchered in the cla.s.sroom to make a holiday for theorists. Nevertheless, he remains unique. Sometimes the whole in his work is subordinated to the parts, sometimes the parts are subordinated to the whole. The romantic "shadow" is there, also the cla.s.sic structure. Again let me call your attention to the fact that if he had not juggled so mystifyingly with the sacrosanct tonic and dominant, had not distributed his thematic material in a different manner from the prescribed methods of the schools, he would have been cheerfully, even enthusiastically, saluted by his generation.

But, then, we should have lost the real Chopin.

CHAPTER XXII

LITTLE MIRRORS OF SINCERITY

BARNEY IN THE BOX-OFFICE

_First Scene._ It is snowing on the Strand. Not an American actor is in sight, though voices are wafted occasionally from the bar of the Savoy (remember this is a play, and the unusual is bound to happen).

In front of the newly built Theatre of Arts, Shaw, and Science, two figures stand as if gazing at the brilliantly lighted facade. The doors are wide open, a thin and bearded man sits smiling and talking to himself in the box-office. His whiskers are as sandy as his wit.

The pair outside regard him suspiciously. Both are tiny fellows, one clean-shaven, the other wearing elaborately arranged hair on his face. They are the two Maxes--Nordau and Birnbaum. Says Nordau:

"Isn't that Bernard in the booking-office?" "By jove, it is, let's go in." "Hasn't he a new play on?" "I can't say. I'm only a critic of the drayma." "No cynicism, Maxixe," urges Nordau. They approach.

In unanimous flakes the snow falls. It is very cold. Cries Bernard on recognising them:

"Hi there, skip! To-night free list is suspended. I'm giving my annual feast in the Cave of Culture of the modern idols, in one scene. No one may enter, least of all you, Nordau, or you, Sir Critic." "Why, what's up, George?" asks in a pleading mid-Victorian timbre the little Maxixe. "Back to the woods, both of you!" commands George, who has read both Mark Twain and Oliver Herford. "Besides,"

he confidentially adds, "you surely don't wish to go to a play in which your old friends Ibsen and Nietzsche are to be on view." "On view!" quoth the author of Degeneration. "Yes, visible on a short furlough from Sheol, for one night only. My benefit. Step up, ladies and gentlemen. A few seats left. The greatest show on earth. I'm in it. Lively, please!" A mob rushes in. The two Maxes fade into the snow, but in the eyes of one there is a malicious glitter. "I'm no Maxixe," he murmurs, "if I can't get into a theatre without paying."

Nordau doesn't heed him. They part. The night closes in, and only the musical rattle of bangles on a naughty wrist is heard.