Chapter I: Part 1

VARIATIONS

_BY JAMES HUNEKER_

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899)
CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (1900)
MELOMANIACS (1902)
OVERTONES (1904)
ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (1905)
VISIONARIES (1905)
EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909)
PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (1910)
FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911)
THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912)
NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915)
IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS (1915)
UNICORNS (1917)
BEDOUINS (1920)
STEEPLEJACK. TWO VOLUMES (1920)
VARIATIONS (1921)

_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_

VARIATIONS

BY
JAMES HUNEKER

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published November, 1921

COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1919, BY THE NEW YORK TIMES CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1919, 1920, BY THE PRESS PUBLISHING CO.

PRINTED AT
THE SCRIBNER PRESS
NEW YORK, U. S. A.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Mr. Huneker’s literary career was at its flood when ended by his sudden and unlooked for death. He was perhaps our only, certainly our chief, literary journalist, and his instructive, penetrating, and, above all, entertaining criticism in the field of what he liked to call the Seven Arts was almost always first seen in the periodical press, daily or weekly. Afterward it was sifted and the residue abridged or expanded, burnished or simplified, in its assimilation into appropriate permanent style and stuff. Needless to say it lost none of its brilliance in the process which was always minimized by having been largely forestalled, as it were, in the original composition. The result was not so much merely eminent as literally unique. His books have not only no rivals but no competitors. Alone among American belletristic writers he followed in the French journalistic-literary tradition, illustrated and rendered illustrious by the practice of a long and shining roll of littérateurs. Such a practice tends of itself to popularize its product by inevitably keeping the larger public more or less in mind and therefore eschewing professional pedantries. The element of personality acquires prominence as in conversation. Style itself becomes conversational. Huneker is as familiar in address as if he were not often erudite in material. He establishes first of all, however imperceptibly, his relations with his reader. Whatever the effect, it is devoid of dulness, and accordingly the interest of his writing is incontestable even when its value is indeterminate.

Composed of essays written since the publication of his last book—Bedouins—though of necessity lacking the advantage of his personal selection and supervision, Variations is a worthy companion of its shelf-full of predecessors in its possession of these qualities. Aptly named, it presents perhaps better than any of them a wide-reaching diversity of æsthetic material for the consideration, the illumination, and—pre-eminently—the entertainment of the cultivated. Perhaps, too, it shows a maturer treatment, a mellower temper without a whit less energy, and a greater opulence than ever of the author’s stored acquisitions and spontaneous, even exhilarated, exposition of them. And here and there amid the wealth of literary and æsthetic miscellany which he displays and expounds one comes, with greater frequency than ever, upon memorable crystallizations of experience in the contemplation of these matters. Such truths, too, he exemplifies as well as formulates. No one ever, for instance, credited more completely his own maxim: “There is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless,” or conformed more cordially to his own injunction: “Write only for the young. The old will not heed you, being weary of the pother of life and art.” There was nothing, however, of which _he_ was less weary, as this his last volume copiously attests, and the explanation, of course, is his unimpaired youthfulness of mind and spirit.

CONTENTS

PAGE

VARIOUS 1

HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS 11

THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE 20

CRUSHED VIOLETS 30

BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER 37

THE TWO TEMPTATIONS 46

THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY 52

ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES 57

PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING 67

IN PRAISE OF PRINTS 77

NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD 84

CÉZANNE 91

EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI? 99

SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY 111

CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS? 121

ART AND ALCOHOL 130

THE TRAGIC CHOPIN 137

PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN 147

THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I 157

IDLE SPECULATIONS 166

THE MASTER BUILDER 173

VERDI’S OTELLO 181

FAUST AND MEPHISTO 189

BOHEMIAN MUSIC 195

THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY? 203

LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA 210

DREAMING OF LISZT 218

A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD 225

CONTEMPORARY BRAN 233

A MOOD REACTIONARY 241

MUSICAL “POTTERISM” 248

MY “CHILDE ROLAND” 255

“OSCAR” AND DVORAK 263

ENRICO CARUSO 273

VARIOUS

Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that: “The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.” It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is poor because it won’t work both ways. All master reformers, heretics, and rebels at first were great corrupters. “Corruption,” so-called, is a prime factor in their propaganda. Buddha, Jesus, and Moses; Arius and Aristophanes, Mohammed and Napoleon, Paul and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer—here are a few names of men who undermined the current beliefs and practices of their epoch, whether for good or for evil. Rousseau has been accused by Pierre Lasserre as being the greatest corrupter in modern history; yet his name will always be associated with the Constitution of the United States of America. Tom Paine has been called a “dirty little atheist,” but he wrote The Rights of Man. In prose of unequalled force and limpidity Pascal denounced the Jesuits as corrupters of youth—poor, persecuted Jesuits, who were the “Yellow Peril” of that time. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an “intellectual” and a philosophic anarch, wrote to Friedrich Nietzsche: “I, too, love Pascal. But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with notes. The best edition is that of the Jesuits.”

Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting for William Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn’t much matter whether we consider a great man as either a regenerator or a corrupter. It all depends on your critical angle of vision. Taine called Napoleon a bandit, notwithstanding the idolatries of his contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from that of his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, although he borrowed his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the sincerest friendship of his solitary life—his love for Richard Wagner. We know that the most “objective”—comical old categories, “objective” and “subjective”—philosophies are tinged by the temperaments of their makers; perhaps the chief characteristic of philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for fellow-thinkers. This trait Schopenhauer displayed when he abused Hegel & Co., Berlin, Ltd. Nietzsche attacked Wagner after writing that lucid and comprehensive study of him, Richard Wagner and Baireuth. Wagner was a bitter polemist and didn’t spare Meyerbeer and other operatic trusts. He was an amateur philosopher, his rickety system adorned with plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. But Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful, more original intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He “corrupted” both, though it may be admitted that their intellectual and artistic soil was primed for just such corruption. And Schopenhauer, gay old misogynist, was materialist enough to echo an epigram attributed to Fontenelle: “To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked heart.” In other words, if your stomach is sound your soul will take care of itself. All Hobbes, Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Helvetius, and Condillac are in that phrase.

But it is not my intention to stray among the pleasant groves of speculation, taking an occasional potshot at the strange fauna of metaphysic or admiring its many-colored flora. Some one wrote asking me if Manette Salomon, by de Goncourt—the brothers Edmond and Jules,—had been translated into English; also if it were the only fiction about art and artists. I can’t say yes or no as to the translation; if it is not, it should be; but it is safe to say that Manette is the best novel dealing entirely with paint and painters that I know of. Fiction about art and artists is rare; that is, good fiction, not the stuff daily ground out by publishing mills for the gallery gods. A classic example in American literature is The Marble Faun, by Hawthorne. Romola, by George Eliot, is atmospheric with Florentine art and the genius of place. However, it is to the French that we must go for such literature, Manette being a notable example. It depicts the spiritual and physical decadence of a splendid painting talent, Coriolis, and contains veracious pictures of the pre-impressionist days in Paris. Balzac in the Unknown Masterpiece has left a model. His Frenhofer is the first of the impressionists withal, a fumbler of genius. In both Daudet and de Maupassant there are stories clustered about the artistic guild. Strong as Death, by de Maupassant, is long enough to be called a novel (roman), though it is but an expanded episode, and a mighty interesting one, even a touching one, for the usually impassive Guy. Daudet described a Paris Salon on varnishing day in his accustomed facile, febrile style; but it stems from Goncourt and Zola. Zola’s His Masterpiece (L’Œuvre) is one of his best-written books. It was said to be a favorite of his, and it justifies his taste. The much-belauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription of the first Salon of Rejected Painters (Salon des refusés) at Paris in 1863. Napoleon III, after social and political pressure had been brought to bear on him, had consented to a special Salon within the official Salon at the Palais de l’Industrie, where the rejected work of the young lunatics who wished to paint purple turkeys, vermilion water, and black sunsets would be harbored. Ivory hallucinations and girls with carmilion-colored eyes were not barred. It is an enormously clever book, this chiefly deriving from Manette Salomon and Balzac’s Frenhofer. Claude Lantier is said to be the portrait of Paul Cézanne, a schoolmate and friend of Zola at Aix-en-Provence. When I made the trip from Marseilles to Aix Cézanne still lived, but I had been warned not to mention the name of Zola, who shows Cézanne in this novel as an impotent groper after impossible ideals. The irritable Paul would go into spasms of rage when Zola was referred to in his presence. Imbecile, traitor, charlatan! These were sample expressions. A reading of L’Œuvre at once convinces you that the artistic procedures of Claude Lantier and Paul Cézanne are diametrically different. Claude failed and hanged himself. There are contemporary critics who consider Cézanne the greatest master of the impressionist group. But the struggle for artistic veracity on the part of Zola’s sorry hero is not unlike the case of Manet. The Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and the subject of a Manet canvas that had scandalized Paris at this period. The fantastic idea of nude females at an al fresco banquet upon the grass, while the other figures were clothed and in their right mind—all this was too much for a purblind public and hostile critics; although there are many examples in Italian renaissance painting of the same style of composition. The picture became notorious. Manet, like Richard Wagner, knew the uses of advertising.

Poe, Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, inter alia, have dealt with the theme pictorial, and Paul Bourget, in his thrice-charming story, The Lady Who Lost Her Painter. Henry James has written delightful tales, such as The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Tragic Muse—this a full-fledged novel in two volumes—in which artists appear and live their lives. But it is the particular psychologic problem involved, rather than theorizing about art, that steers the cunning pen of James. We all recall the woman in The Liar, who destroyed the portrait of her husband because it revealed to her, at last, the secret of his moral infirmity. In this story John Singer Sargent has been accredited as the psychologist of the brush. There is a nice, fresh young fellow in The Tragic Muse, who, weak-spined as he is, prefers, at the last, his palette and brush to the charms and wealth of Julia Dallow and her ambitious plans for his political career. In The Real Thing we recognize—Henry James would call it the “emotion of recognition”—one of those unerring strokes that prove the writer to be master-psychologist among English novelists. Any discerning painter will tell you that the value of a model who can take the “pose” far outshines crude naturalism. It is the suggestiveness of the pose with its pictorial implications that sets moving the imagination of the artist. Upon this thesis the novelist has built a semi-pathetic, amusing, and striking fable.

There are painters and sculptors scattered throughout English fiction—shall we ever forget Thackeray and Clive Newcome? Ouida has not missed weaving Tyrian purples into the gorgeous patterns of her romantic painters. And Disraeli. And George Bernard Shaw—there is a painting creature in his Love Among the Artists. (I contend that an admirable novelist was killed in Mr. Shaw when he deserted fiction for the playhouse. He won’t agree with me, but I should willingly part with all his prefaces for another Byron Cashel’s Profession.) But it is to George Moore we must go for fiction of this sort. He has devoted more of his pages to paint and painters than other latter-day novelists. The reason is that George Moore went to Paris, there to study art, and he drifted into the Julian atelier just as would any likely young chap with a well-filled purse and hazy notions concerning art. Those early experiences were not wasted, they cropped up in his stories and critical studies. He became the critical pioneer in England of French impressionist art painters, the champion of Manet, Monet, Degas, and the rest. He even declared, in an article of rare acumen, that if Jemmy Whistler had been a heavier man, with more beef and brawn and beer, as was Rubens, for example, the spider-waisted American painter might have been as great an artist as Velasquez. To the weighing scales, fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; nevertheless, the bolt of Mr. Moore reached the mark. Whistler’s remarks about the Irish critic, especially after the Eden litigation, were, so it is reported, not “fit to print.”

In Spring Days, the first volume of Mr. Moore’s trilogy—A Modern Lover and Mike Fletcher are the other two—we are shown a young painter who thinks more of petticoats than paint. Mike Fletcher, the most virile and, for some of us, the quintessence of Moore, has its share of paint talk. In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds in the fashionable world by painting pretty, artificial portraits, thereby winning wealth, popular applause, and official approbation. He also makes love in a fascinating fashion—the secret of his mundane success. This same Lewis Seymour lives and paints modish London beauties in rose color. He may be found in Paris and New York. He is a type. The sitter for this portrait is said to have been Sir Frederick Leighton, a statement I accept on its face value, and one that Mr. Moore would probably vehemently deny. But his irony must have entered the souls of a hundred celebrated humbugs; that is, if they had souls to boast. A Modern Lover, despite the rewriting and consequent defacement of the original design, is distinctly a painter’s novel and the best of its kind, were it not that subsequently the novelist wrote a masterpiece, Mildred Lawson, to be found in the volume entitled Celibates—a Balzacian title, by the way. Masterly in analysis and description, this story chiefly deals with art. Mildred, a selfish English girl without heart, soul, or talent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to Fontainebleau during the summer vacation. Naturally, no one has ever described the Forest better than Flaubert in Sentimental Education; Flaubert, who wrote better than any one else save Balzac. In this great canvas of Parisian life there are marvellous evocations. There is a semi-burlesque painter, Pellerin, who first reads all the literature of æsthetics before he draws a line, and poses his sitters à la Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, or Titian; in a word, the man of precedent. De Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impressions of the Forest and its painters; in particular, François Millet.

It is only just to Mr. Moore to say that you can’t find Mildred Lawson in Flaubert or de Goncourt; no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the very matrix of modern fiction. She is her own cruel, perverse, Moorovian self, and she lives here or London or in the Philippines. Elsewhere I have classed her as one of the most disagreeable heroines in fiction, an inky sister of Hedda Gabler and Undine Spragg (in Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country).

All the one-time novel theories of “plein air” impressionism are discussed in Zola’s His Masterpiece, yet the work as a whole lacks the fine-fibred style and clairvoyance of Manette Salomon; that breviary for painters which in 1867 anticipated the experimentings, the discoveries, and the practice of the naturalistic and impressionist groups, running the gamut from Manet, Monet, to Cézanne, Maufra, and Paul Gauguin. The book is crowded with verbal pictures of art students, atelier and open-air life; painting was still one of the romantic arts when de Goncourt wrote. No such psychological manual of the painter has appeared, before or since, Manette Salomon. The celibate bias of the brothers is revealed in the leading motive—oh, that musty, fusty melodramatic idea—which is the degradation of a man’s artistic ideals because of the woman—Manette, his model—he marries. It was Goncourt who introduced Japanese art to Europe; the brothers were friends of the late M. Bing, a pioneer collector in Paris. And they foresaw the future of fiction as well as painting.

HOW NOT TO BE A GENIUS

How not to be a genius nowadays is as difficult as it is to believe in prohibition. Every other man and woman you meet on the sidewalks of life is a genius; at least they admit it, or their disciples say they are. People with mere talent are becoming rare. If you happen to write a best seller you are acclaimed a genius. And when you think it over, a man who can sell a million copies of a book compounded of sentimental slush and slimy piety must be a genius. What else is he? An artistic writer? No. Respectable? Yes. In Carlyle’s times a person was considered respectable if he owned a gig; he was called a gigman. To-day it is the motor-car that is the symbol of financial well-being. Carlyle had much fun with his gigman. What would he write about those egregious humans who starve themselves and their families in order to sport about the highways in a mortgaged motor? Popularity may be for dolls, declared Emerson, but it’s a mighty asset when all the world is a doll. Even the old Carlyle definition was thrown out of court by Herbert Spencer, himself a prize specimen of one who possessed an infinite capacity for taking pains in his work. Nevertheless, industry is not necessarily an indication of genius, although elbow-grease has been an underrated factor in the case. The truth is that there are no royal paths to Parnassus.

In 1857 Dr. Morel published his Traité des Dégénérescences, and gave modern psychiatry its initial spring-board. Then Guerensen pronounced genius a disease of the nerves, and the floodgates of madcap theories were wide opened. We learned much from Magnan, Ribot, the brothers Janet, Maudsley, Esquinol, and Charcot. After their psychological plumber work genius became a dangerous profession. You were likely to be either a madman or a criminal, and such piffling busybodies as Lombroso and Nordau tracked you to your lair, measured your ears, the cut of your nose and a glance of the eye, Reginald! (Surely Beau Brummel was a clothes maniac.)

Luckily for the world, genius is still a scarce product, and the charlatan theories were laughed off the map when Nordau wrote his partly amusing and wholly ridiculous book on Degeneration. The late William James walloped him into silence. But the vulgar error persists in the mind of the half-baked of culture. Like Mahomet’s coffin, it hangs suspended ’twixt earth and heaven. It bobs up in the so-called new school of Freudian psychoanalysis, which exploits to the reductio ad absurdum the von Hartmann theory of the subliminal consciousness, with a little spice of soothsaying and dream-book twaddle thrown in to lend an air of novelty. We learn from Dr. Freud that dreams are the result of unfulfilled desires—which may mean anything—that authors unconsciously reveal themselves in their writings. What an astounding discovery! Important if true. O la belle histoire! Cut out the erotic element in this “new” theory and the world would pass it by. Who would read Leaves of Grass for its “poetry” if such chaste, odoriferous “poems” as The Woman Who Waits for Me were absent?

Genius is a word that has fallen into disrepute because of its being bandied about so freely by our makers of fiction. That burlesque of a raw-head-and-bloody-bones, Strickland, the alleged painter in Somerset Maugham’s melodramatic “shocker,” The Moon and Sixpence, is a case in point. The clever author expects his readers to believe that a staid business man is transformed into a great painter at the age of forty. To be sure, Strickland was what the French call a “Sunday painter,” one who potters with color tubes and canvas every seventh day, yet is supposed to accomplish what such men of genius as Degas, Manet, Millet, couldn’t in protracted daily toil. And the innocent public swallows such fairy-tales because it believes in miracles. You may be sure of one thing—no one in the history of the Seven Arts has mastered his material save in the sweat of his brow. Works and days. You can’t change your psychology overnight. Mr. Maugham suggested Paul Gauguin, the painter of South Seas landscapes, rich in color, decoration and arabesques. But Gauguin was a real genius. Augustus John too has been dragged in. Ridiculous! We mention Strickland because he seems to embody the popular notion of genius. A bolt from the blue, and a stupid Philistine becomes in a trice a scarecrow painter. No, he won’t do, any more than Theodore Dreiser’s The Genius will serve as a portrait of one. In Shakespeare you are jostled by genius, but, then, the poet was a genius of geniuses. He englobed all forms of genius.

But is genius a disease, like the tenor voice, or the pearl in a mollusk? It is, we know, a gift that seldom brings happiness to its possessor. Either it is unmercifully flouted, or else unrecognized, and no two persons agree as to its specific quality. There is in Poland a poet-novelist-playwright who bears a name that sounds like an unconquered Polish fortress. He is called Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and when his story, Homo Sapiens, was translated and published here the unhappy man was heartily hated by all proofreaders and compositors. Do you wonder? Possibly that dislike was a factor in the suppression of the book, which wasn’t a whit less moral in its implications than the Re-creation of William J. Bryan Kent. Stanislaw—we mercifully omit the full name—has wisely written of genius and has illustrated it in his exceedingly vivid personal career. Readers of Strindberg’s Inferno, which contains in compression more tortures than Dante’s epic, a sort of pemmican hell, need hardly be reminded that the rival to the Swedish dramatist’s affections is Stanislaw P. in the guise of a pianist who plays with overwhelming power and pathos the F sharp minor polonaise of Chopin. That is the way the super-subtle Pole courted one of Strindberg’s lady-loves; it may have been a matrimonial rib, but that is a mere detail.

Stanislaw asserts in his brochure, Chopin and Nietzsche, that physicians do not busy themselves enough with history; if they did they would recognize that “decadence” has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but only a phase of development quite as important as normality; normality is stupidity, decadence is genius. Is there, he demands, a more notable case of the abnormal than the apostle of Protestantism, Martin Luther? We are all children of Satan, he cries. Those rare men who for the sake of their ideals sacrifice the lives and happiness of thousands, such as Alexander or Napoleon—there are more modern instances, if we cared to mention them; or those who dispel the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths of sin—because sin has depth—Poe, Baudelaire, Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin, Schumann, Nietzsche—of such material is genius compounded. Satan is the first philosopher, the first Anarchist, and pain is the foundation of all art and, with Satan, the father of illusions. I quote these luminous reflections to prove how easy it is to twist a theory so as to suit one’s own point of view. The decadence theory is nonsense. I may only refer you to Havelock Ellis’s masterly volume of critical essays, entitled Affirmations, for a concise refutation of the heresy; and equally fallacious is the contention of the Polish writer that the normal always spells stupidity. The reverse is often the case. Coleridge, you may remember, disputed, in his Biographia Literaria, that antique sarcasm of Horace, the “genus irritabile vatum.” He wrote: “The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appeared to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.” Coleridge gives examples to uphold this belief. Taine has written in his history of English literature of the sane genius among such old chaps as Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Goethe, all of whom performed prodigies of labor. No neurasthenia hampered their literary invention. Yet Shakespeare created Hamlet, the incarnation of a disordered will and a poetic soul astray.

Schopenhauer has adequately dealt with the theme and with more conviction-breeding results than many of the later explorers in this field, at his time a field outside of the biological laboratory. He finds that “talent is versatile and betrays more acuteness of discursive than intuitive knowledge.” The genius beholds another world because he has a profounder conception of the world which lies before us all, inasmuch as it presents itself with more objectivity and distinctness than it does to less favored mortals. Myriad-minded Goethe summed up the question in a memorable phrase. “Genius is incommensurable,” he told Eckermann when discussing Faust. Mozart confessed that music came to him without his volition. So-called secondary selves exist in the subliminal mind, and in certain circumstances may usurp the reign of the primary self for varying periods of time, just as a saint and sinner may inhabit one soul. The old theologians spoke of guardian angels and angels of evil. Some see God in an ecstatic vision and others peer into the fiery pit of hell with morose delectation. Don’t worry about this moral dichotomy. It’s only your various selves at war. When the dissociation becomes a half-dozen split-up personalities struggling for mastery then it is time to consult a psychiatrist. That way lies the madhouse. But we are all of us the victims of our cells.

A genius is a superman—a man, according to Dr. Jacobson (see his Possible Clues to the Nature of Genius), plus a secondary personality, his genius not residing in the primary self but in his secondary personality. In the one case we have the spiritualistic medium—low mentality, irresponsible secondary personality; in the other case we have genius—high mentality, super-rational secondary personality. It might be well to remember this fact just now when a wave of debasing superstition is rising everywhere, of which the mildest symptom is the Ouija-board and other clotted nonsense; the gravest symptoms, devil-worship and alleged communication with spirits; after all cataclysmic events, war, pestilence, earthquake, the prolonged nerve-tension causes “new” religions, witchcraft, healers, and prophets of evil to flourish like toadstools in a damp, dank cellar. Mock-turtle mysticism and ineffable silliness. It is not the denial of such so-called “phenomena” that concerns us, for there are numberless unexplained mysteries in nature; all occult research is not hocus-pocus; but it is the interpretation, divine or diabolic, of these happenings to which sensible thinkers object. Bateson, quoted by Dr. Jacobson, “conceives of evolution and life as an unpacking of an original complex.” Here we are knocking at the transcendental gates of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. Life is an uncoiling. Humanity is a watch-spring of the infinite. Our existence is the progress of a spiritual tapeworm. Death is the grand vermifuge. Nevertheless, genius is a shy bird. Spear him and put him under the microscope. But first catch your fish. And that is always difficult.

Man has chartered the globe, but, probably by reason of an almost ineradicable superstitious timidity, has left the human soul an undiscovered country, or, at least, but partially explored. Genius, whether manifesting its power in the arts or in the sciences, is the worthiest theme for the philosopher; not reactionary metaphysicians like Bergson, weavers of verbal dreams, spinners of futile cobweb systems; but the biologist, psychiatrist, the practical scientist, for whom the visible as well as the invisible worlds exist. “I breathe, therefore I live,” said, in effect, William James. (Essays in Radical Empiricism.) The mind of man has ever been a house divided in itself. Yet it is a consolation to know that our several subliminal personalities may be the cause of our conflicting thoughts. (The late Prof. Muensterburg declared that such a thing as subconsciousness did not exist.) In Faust we read of two spirits that abide in our breast, also the spirit that denied. Mephisto then may be only our second personality. However, we haven’t answered the question posed at the beginning of this Sunday morning ramble through the tangled forest of minor speculation—how not to be a genius. The answer is as easy as lying—never work!

THE RECANTATIONS OF GEORGE MOORE

I had intended writing of the tragic Chopin to-day, but George Moore supervened; he and Atlantic City—an odd combination. Man cannot live in music alone, and when Maurice Speiser met me on the boardwalk and lent me his copy of Avowals (numbered eighty and privately printed for subscribers), I shooed Chopin to the backyard of my consciousness and proceeded to reread Mr. Moore. I say reread because much of the subject-matter in this new, bulky volume saw the light of publication years ago in various English and at least one American periodical: Lippincotts’, the Fortnightly, et al. Still, it is, all of it, worthwhile, notwithstanding the fact the old nurse of the County Mayo author wouldn’t have blushed at a line therein. Why the book was published as “wicked” by implication is difficult to discover. It should be given to the world at large, after several minor excisions. The one gay anecdote is related in France, and it is so mildly diverting that it will bear repeating here. An eccentric nobleman adorns himself with peacock’s feathers for the edification of his peahens! Yet people subscribe for the pleasure of such innocent foolery. By all means, let us have Avowals naked and unashamed. Only good Moorovians will endure its leagues of technical literary criticism. The Story Teller’s Holiday of last year was another kind of a book. Rather blistering than elevating. But amusing always.

There was a time when Mr. Moore was content to be called the Irish Flaubert; nowadays he is evidently after the title of the Celtic Casanova, though hardly in these new avowals. They will never rank in interest with Memoirs of My Dead Life; or, indeed, with his Hail and Farewell Trilogy. For one thing, printed dialogue makes slow reading, even when the prose is the incomparable prose of Walter Savage Landor. The opening chapters are devoted to discussions, purely academic, between Edmund Gosse and George Moore. English prose narrative is the weakest part of English literature—a paradoxical contention. Mr. Gosse puts up a good fight, but is pulverized by his opponent, who leaves him gasping on a balcony wrapped in a shawl, feebly expostulating. The Moore dialectic is fairly familiar to his admirers. It is one-third lack of logic and two-thirds persuasion and browbeating. Need I add that the persuasiveness is not wholly divested of a certain veiled Donnybrookishness? Mr. Moore goes for the hated Sassenach, and only those Englishmen who seem to resemble him are treated with consideration; the Rev. Laurence Sterne, whose wheedling prose style is admirably wedded to his prurient themes (“Are you Jewish or ticklish?” he was asked by a critic long ago), is praiseworthy in the eyes of our critic.

I should have preferred to pose as an adversary to Mr. Moore the redoubtable Prof. George Saintsbury, who with a Sam Johnson bluffness would have smashed the Irishman’s arguments at the very first throw out of the box. No doubt about that. Mr. Moore admits the genius of Landor, Pater, Lamb, De Quincey, in the essay form; but it is fiction narrative he centres upon, and despite De Foe, Fielding, Jane Austen, not to speak of Dickens, Thackeray and Meredith, he finds no good has come forth from that British Nazareth. Of the exquisite prose patterns which Cardinal Newman has woven for us he speaks no word; elsewhere, years past, he has expressed his dislike of Newman’s flowing style; the “style coulant” abhorred of Charles Baudelaire, especially when it issued from the pen of George Sand. Yet Mr. Moore’s Keltic prose (spell it with a K, Samivel!) is like Newman’s in so far as both are subtle, sensitive, and rippling; both avoid dynamic contrasts, both persuade rather than assault. And there is a suspicion of the serpentine in the writings of both men. The spiral prose of The Brook Kerith is a case in point. Can’t you see that minotaur of English literary criticism—or should I say Torquemada?—George Saintsbury frowning and thundering on Mr. Moore, and quoting from his History of English Prose-Rhythms! A battle of the bookmen, indeed.

The recantations of George Moore become increasingly numerous with the passage of the years. I had expected the inclusion in Avowals of his top-notch in criticism, not dealing with the plastic arts—naturally his stronghold—a criticism that appeared about twenty years ago in _Cosmopolis_, an international magazine edited, if I remember aright, by Lady Randolph Churchill. Far finer than his study of Zola is this study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, entitled A Tragic Novel, the tragedy of drab, commonplace living, not that of high heroics or tragic and romantic gestures. But Mr. Moore violently repudiates his Flaubert worship and explains why he doesn’t reprint the splendid pages of that particular criticism. Flaubert, it seems, is not a novelist, only a satirist—he says something of the same sort earlier concerning George Meredith—and he places him far below Balzac as a creator of character, below Turgénieff as a teller of tales; he even decries his style—the sanity, simplicity, which, allied to its sonorous harmonies, is one of the most fascinating in French literature. I fancy Mr. Moore suffered from the revulsion which often attacks critical pioneers; as soon as the public, wooed or banged into submission by the critic, begins to admire them the critic moves on; his object accomplished, newer idols must be sought, fresher victories achieved; the old idol is again become a block of wood. Mr. Saintsbury fought for Baudelaire and Flaubert before George Moore; nevertheless, Mr. Moore was the first English-writing novelist who adopted Flaubert’s methods; recall Untilled Fields and Evelyn Inness—the manner, of course, not the matter. And there is Swinburne, who after extravagantly praising Walt Whitman violently repudiated the Camden “bard,” later inventing the word “Whitmaniac” to signify his contempt for Walt’s comical yawping. In humbler fashion I may give as an example of this critical dog-in-the-manger attitude my own case. In 1877 I went as a lad to visit Walt across the Delaware River from my home, and from him received the kiss of peace and went away with the glowing brow of the neophyte. I became an ardent Whitmaniac in my teens, and for two decades or more I wrote of W. W. as if he were really a great poet. I can’t read him now, nor can I read the effusions of his followers. He has been a disruptive force, still is one; to imitate his “poetry” is so easy that an entire new school of lads and lassies are murdering English prosody and filling the urn with their lascivious caterwaulings. Walt is to blame. He did it first in his Children of Adam.

Flaubert is not the only writer from whom Mr. Moore has seceded. Being a peculiarly susceptible Celt, he is always changing his opinions, which is a legitimate function of the male as well as the female intellect. At one epoch Dublin never knew when beginning a fresh day whether her favorite son was a Catholic or a Protestant. It was like a barometrical puzzle. He recanted his Catholicism—decanted might be a better word—and he changed his mind every morning about his best friend, the poet, William Yeats. The New Irish movement was to be George Moore or it was to be nothing. Finally John Millington Synge appeared, and the movement, luckily enough, became Synge. Being dead, this master is spared from the scarifications to which Moore subjected Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady Gregory. Ireland is no longer Erin go bragh! and the Lord knows what he thinks of Sinn Fein. In fact, since Ireland did not appreciate the genius of George Moore, he abandons Ireland—as he abandoned England during the Boer Rebellion. We hear no more of Douglas Hyde or the revival of Erse—says the Shan Van Vocht!

He sharply criticised Jane Austen and women writers generally in articles published in the _North American Review_, but in Avowals Jane is given her just dues, which is well. George Eliot and the Brontës he won’t have. He rightfully rates Tolstoy and his absence of true spirituality. The great Russian writer is not a prober of the human soul, despite the accepted belief to the contrary; that is, he doesn’t deeply probe. His rendering of reality borders on hallucination. Simply prodigious is his mastery of realism. Yet Dostoievsky is the profounder man of the pen. He lived and suffered the life that Tolstoy only wrote about but never experienced. His novels, tedious, explosive, tumultuous, may be the “psychological mole-runs” of Turgénieff’s dictum; nevertheless they are aglow with vitality, palpitating with pity for the downtrodden and humiliated, and pullulating with humanity. Dostoievsky, an essentially morbid man, as was Nietzsche, by reason of this very deviation from normality, was enabled to sink his plummet into the darkest recesses of the soul. His self-cruelty had a sadistic tinge. But he is the real psychologist, not Tolstoy. Deploring Tolstoy’s dodging of psychological issues—for his religion was of the old intolerant order and he was suffering from an excess of moralic acid in the blood, which finally killed his art—Mr. Moore yet refuses to give Dostoievsky a truly exalted position. He better likes Turgénieff, nor need we quarrel with him on this score. Turgénieff represents the almost perfect artist, blithe, Greek, charming, while his rival, a Prometheus of the inkpot, groans in travail as he shows us his wounded soul. In the Confessions of a Young Man the author speaks of Dostoievsky as “Gaboriau with psychological sauce.” When he wrote an introduction to a translation of Poor Folk he had evidently seen a great light. But in Avowals he is back in the Gaboriau trenches.

A more definite recantation is his present view of Tolstoy. The first avowals, in periodical form, saw him a worshipper at the shrine. I well remember his essay, Since the Elizabethans, and its contemptuous comparison of Tolstoy and Thackeray. English fiction, he said, in effect, never dives below the surface; it is an affair of decoration, never of depth. Well and good. Tolstoy, like Balzac, has no counterpart in English literature, Mr. Moore says, and maintains his argument with admirable examples. Musical analogies are employed. Verdi or Donizetti, never the passionately profound harmonies of Wagner, are overheard in English fiction. With a sense of relief I find that Mr. Moore is still faithful to Walter Pater. The best pages in the volume are those in which he describes the art and personality of the shy, complex author of Marius. It may be remembered, his eulogy of Marius in the early confessions. From this faith he has never swerved. Of Henry James he was not an admirer. He seems not to have gone further than The Portrait of a Lady. He encountered Mr. James at the home of the Robinson girls, Mary and Mabel. Here is a portrait of our famous countryman: “And these thoughts drew my eyes to the round head, already going bald, to the small, dark eyes, closely set, and to the great expanse of closely shaven face. His legs were short, and his hands and feet large, and he sat portentously in his chair, speaking with some hesitation and great care, anxious that every sentence, or if not all, at least every third or fourth, should send forth a beam of humor.” Apart from the fact that the eyes of Henry James were not small, but large and heavy lidded, eyes in which were pictured an entire social world, his description is not without a certain malicious verisimilitude. The two men were, naturally enough, antipathetic to each other. Mr. James failed to recognize the greatness of Esther Waters, and Mr. Moore hated humor. He objurgates humor in a writer. Yet he is, consciously or unconsciously, humorous. And what a bon mot was his summing up of Bernard Shaw as being only the “funny man in a boarding house.” Perhaps. But at the time that boarding house comprised Europe and America.

Moore and Whistler were always clawing and scratching. Both feline, both tenors, and possessing the tenor temperament, how could they be expected to sing in amiable ensemble? Moore relates that James the Butterfly presented him with a copy of his Ten o’Clock, inscribed: “To George Moore—for furtive reading,” which is the epitome of irony. But George never began to repeat the epigrams of “Jemmy,” as did Jemmy those of Oscar Wilde. Whistler, according to friends who knew, would sit up half the night manufacturing witticisms. It was to himself, not to Oscar, that he should have applied the remark: “But you will, Oscar, you will.” The Irishman was as spontaneous in his wit as the American constipated. However, “furtive reading” is distinctly good. George Moore paid off his score in his Modern Painting when he wrote of Whistler that if he had been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted as well as Velasquez. And weight and substance are precisely the qualities lacking in the Whistlerian canvases, which are becoming more attenuated, more ghostly as the years wear on. If it were not for the etchings the next generation would have cause for wonderment over the exaggerated praise bestowed upon a painter whose originality principally derives from his Paris friend, Fantin-Latour, and from the Japanese.

But Avowals is good fun. It should be placed on the general market. It’s too decent to be locked away in the “enfer” of a bibliophile. Apropos of nothing, did you hear George Moore on the League of Nations? He is convinced enough on that score to exclaim: “There’s only one way of bringing about the League. Leave off talking about the President and hang the Kaiser.”

CRUSHED VIOLETS

“Good God! I forgot the violets!” exclaimed Walter Savage Landor, after he had thrown his cook out of the window. This happened at Fiesole, near Florence, and within one year of a century ago. The great prose master had a rather excitable temperament, as Charles Dickens has testified. (The novelist put him in Bleak House as Boythorn—“with the genius and much else left out,” as Havelock Ellis says.) Landor dearly loved his flowers, and in his dismay he gave birth to a classic phrase. Nowadays we would gladly put a chef on the throne, so debased has become the world’s cuisine. But Landor was an aristocrat masquerading as a fierce democrat and his gesture was a typical one, and in the gentlemanly interest; we might say a gentleman’s prerogative, one that has gone quite out of fashion.

I am minded of his despairing cry when I think of Walter Pater. A member of the delicious Hermione’s family, indelibly recorded by Don Marquis, asked me once upon a time if the prose of Pater didn’t remind me of crushed violets. I related then and there the adventure of Landor’s cook and the flowerbed. Her answer threw much light on her mentality: “I wonder what the cook said?” she asked. But Pater prose and crushed violets! For the life of me I can’t bridge this gulf of the dissimilar. Some of Whistler is an indigestion of strawberries and cream; but Pater and violets! Walter Pater wasn’t as “precious,” as insipid, as his imitators.

On a certain occasion Matthew Arnold advised Frederic Harrison to “flee Carlylese as the very devil,” and doubtless would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. It is true Pater is dangerous for students. This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Sir Walter Raleigh’s monograph—the best we know of; Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on the technical elements of style is too technical, valuable as it is—has been worn threadbare from Aristotle to Renton and his Logic of Style. Pater produced slowly—he wrote five books in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two every year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The chief accusation brought against the Pater method of working and his consequent style is its lack of spontaneity; it is not a natural style. But a “natural style,” so called, is not encountered in its full flowering more than a half dozen times during the course of a century; perhaps that figure is an exaggeration. The French write all but flawless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France we must go to Ruskin, Newman, and Pater. When we say, “Let us write simple, straightforward English,” we are setting a standard that has been reached only by Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and how few others? There are as many victims of the “natural English” formula as there are of the “artificial” formula of Pater and Stevenson. The first-named write careless, flabby, colorless, undistinguished, lean commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliché is lord of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of affected “fine writing,” are more easily detected and denounced by purists, pedants, and other sultry professorial persons. A master, Renan, disliked the teaching of “style” per se—as if the secret could be imparted—yet he toiled over his manuscripts. We recall the Flaubert case. With Pater one should not rush to the conclusion, because he produced slowly, that he was of an artificiality all compact. For him prose was a fine art. He could no more have used a phrase coined by another than he could have worn the other man’s hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his themes the grave and lovely phrases we so envy and admire. Prose—“cette ancienne et très jalouse chose,” as it was described by Stéphane Mallarmé—for Pater was at once a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid “poetic-prose,” the stillness of his style—atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet undertones—is always in the true rhythm of prose. Speed is absent. The tempo is usually lenten. Brilliancy is not pursued; there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp. The sentences uncoil their many-colored lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that occasionally confuse; for compensation we are given harmonies newly orchestrated, as salient, as mordant, and as subtly rare as chords in the music of Brahms or Debussy. Sane prose it always is; but seldom simple. It is extremely personal, and while it may not make music for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it garbs. Read Ruskin aloud and then apply the same vocal test to Pater, and the magnificent harmonies of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will make your ear captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in eloquence slightly muffled, the last manner of Pater hinted at newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, quoting his own words concerning another theme: “It is beauty wrought from within, ... the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”

The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Sir Thomas Browne’s richer and full of flashing conceits; there are deeper organ tones in De Quincey, and Ruskin excels in effects, rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is more sinuous, subtle, more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it is, sometimes, and its rich polyphony palls if one is not in the mood, and in greater measure than the prose of classic masters, for the world is older and Pater was often weary of life. But suggestions of morbidity may be found in every writer from Plato to Dante, from Dante to Shakespeare and Goethe. It is but the faint spice of mortality which lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures. Beautiful art is always challenged as corrupting. There may be a grain of truth in the accusation. Man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art was invented by him to console, to disquiet, to arouse. Art may be a dangerous adventure and also an anodyne, like religion. And unhappily we are losing our taste for adventuring amidst dangerous ideas. Once deprived of moral self-determination, of the right of private judgment, man soon relapses into a vegetable existence. Whenever a new poet or philosopher appears he is straightway accused of tampering with the moral currency. This is only mediocrity’s mode of adjusting too marked mental disproportions. Difference engenders hatred. In this period, when art and literature are violently despised and persecuted, do not let us be frightened by the word “wicked.” For my part, as an old practitioner in literary and artistic poisons, I have never encountered a book or a picture or a sonata that was so immoral as to kill at twenty paces. So let us cheer up, read Pater, Baudelaire, and the Bible—from which they derive—and blench not before the dissonantal batteries of the Neo-Scythian composers.

There is another Pater, one far removed from the weaver of colored silken phrases. If he recalls the richness of Keats in the texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Spencer. There are essays of his as cold, as logically adamant, and as tortuous as sentences in the Synthetic Philosophy. Luckily his tendency to abstract reasoning was subdued by the humanism of his temper. There are not many “purple panels” in his prose; “purple” in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no “fringes of the north star” style. He never wrote in sheer display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern writing he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, not to mention those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, Botticelli, Joachim du Bellay. Even the newly gathered minor essays, slight as they are in theme and treatment, reveal the master.

Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work, often the artist for art’s sake, he may never trouble the main currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers, a critic for critics. Little books may have their destiny. Pater was a thinker whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer of a polyphonic prose-music which echoes a harmonious adagio heard within the spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the multicolored windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favorite contention of his that all the arts aspire toward the condition of music. This idea is the keynote of Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius the Epicurean, carried, his life long, “in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul.” And yet——!

BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER