Chapter VII: Act II: is a capitally arranged interior of the inn, with the wooden (1)

shoes of the servant maid clopping around, where the inevitable happens. Hanna Elias, accompanied by a young Russian girl--whose German accent furnishes mild humour--promptly swoops down on the anaemic painter. There is brief resistance on his part. She tells him she can't, can't live without him--oh, thrice-familiar feminine music!--and with a double sob that shakes you in your seat the pair embrace. Curtain. The next act is frittered away in talk, the principal object seemingly to show how much the sculptor hates Hanna. In Act IV Gabriel is ill. He has had a fall, but it is really a heart attack. A doctor, an old friend, is summoned from a neighbouring island. Unfortunately Mrs. Schilling, the neglected wife is informed by the not very tactful doctor that her husband is ill. She rushes up from Berlin, and the best, indeed the only, dramatic scene then ensues. She is not permitted to see the sick man. She demands the reason. She is naturally not told, for Hanna is nursing him. She can't understand, and it is the difficult task of Lucie Heil, the violinist, to get her away before the fat is in the fire. Unfortunately, at that critical moment, Hanna Elias walks calmly from Gabriel's sleeping chamber. The row is soon on. Hanna was enacted by an emotional actress, Tilla Durieux, whose personality is forthright, whose methods are natural. (Her Hedda Gabler is strong.) She dressed the character after the approved Friedrichstrasse style. You must know that the artistic Bohemienne wears her hair plastered at the sides of her head a la Merode. The eyes are always "done up," the general expression suggested, if the lady is dark, being that of Franz von Stuck's picture, Sin. To look mysterious, sinister, exotic, ah! that appeals to the stout, sentimental German beer heroes of the opera, theatre, and studio. Fraeulein Durieux is entirely successful in her assumption of a woman who is "emancipated," who has thrown off the "shackles" of matrimony, who drinks beer in the morning, tea in the afternoon, coffee at night, and smokes cigarettes all the time. It is a pronounced type in Berlin. She talks art, philosophy, literature, and she daubs or plays or models. She is the best portrait in the play, though a thrice-familiar one. The poet showed this "misunderstood woman" in one of his early works, Before Sunrise.

Hanna Elias stands the reproaches and berating of Evelin Schilling until her patience fades. Then the two women, despite the warning of the doctor that his patient must not be disturbed, as it might prove fatal, go for each other like a pair of fishwives. It is exciting, though hardly edifying. If you have ever seen two chickens, two hens, fight over the possession of a shining slug in a barnyard, then you will know what kind of a quarrel this is between the outraged wife, a feeble creature, and the bold, strong-willed Hanna. And the disputed booty is about as worthless as the slug. Gabriel appears. He is half dead from the excitement. A plague on both the women, he cries, and the scene closes with his whispered request to the doctor for poison to end his life. You remember Oswald Alving and his cry: "The sun, mother, give me the sun!" Act last shows the first scene, the beach, and a figurehead from a brig which had stranded during a storm some years before. This carved head and bust of a woman with streaming hair serves as a symbol. Gabriel is attracted by the wooden image, as is Lucie. The painter is fascinated by the tale of the shipwreck. He has escaped the nurse and is out on the dunes watching the figure as it is intermittently illuminated by the gleam of a revolving lighthouse further up the coast. He is in an exalted mood. There is some comic relief in the grave-digger manner between him and a joiner, who is also the undertaker of the island, a well-conceived character. A storm is rising. Gabriel, after many wild and whirling words, leaves a message for his friends. He is bathing. And so he makes by suicide his last flight, his escape from the horns of the dilemma, too weak to decide one way or the other. The ending is ineffective, and the sudden repentance of the middle-aged sculptor (fat men with forty-five-inch waists never do seem wicked), who promises to marry his Lucie, the fiddle player, is very flat. Nor does the storm strike terror as it should. What the moral? I don't know, except that it is dangerous to keep late hours on the Friedrichstrasse. A clock can't always strike twelve, and The Flight of Gabriel Schilling, notwithstanding some striking episodes and at moments poetic atmosphere, is not a masterpiece of Hauptmann.

II

Ever since I heard and saw Agnes Sorma in Liebele, I have admired the dramatic writings of Arthur Schnitzler, and, remember, that charming, withal sad, little play was written in 1895. I haven't seen all his works, but I have read many. The latest adapted into English for the American stage is the Anatol one-act cyclus (1893), and his new play I witnessed at the Kleines Theatre, Berlin. It bears the singularly unpromising title Professor Bernhardi, and is a five-act comedy. Its performance was interdicted in Vienna. The reason given by the Austrian authorities seems a simple one, though it is specious: for fear of stirring up religious animosities Professor Bernhardi was placed on the black books of the censor. The Jewish question, it appears, is still a live one in Austria, and this new play of Schnitzler's, himself of Semitic descent, is the very frank discussion of a certain incident which occurred in Vienna in which a Roman Catholic clergyman and a Jewish doctor were embroiled. The dramatist is fair, he holds the scales evenly. At the end of the piece both priest and surgeon stand alike in your regard. That the incident hardly suggests dramatic treatment is beside the mark; Schnitzler, with his invariable deftness of touch, has painted a dozen vital portraits; the priest is superb, the character values of exquisite balance. The hero, if hero he be, Professor Bernhardi, is carved out of a single block and the minor personalities are each and every one salient. I can't altogether believe in the thesis. Any one who has lived in Vienna must know that, except in certain restricted circles, there is no Judenhetz, no social ostracism for Hebrews. At the eleven-o'clock high mass in St. Stefan's Cathedral, the numbers of Oriental faces that one sees would be surprising if we did not hear of so many conversions. It is considered rather fashionable in Vienna to join the Christian fold. And on the score of business certainly the Austrian Hebrews have little to complain of, as they are said to be the leading factors in commerce. However, Henry James has warned us not to question too closely the theme of an artist; that is his own affair; his treatment should concern us. Has Schnitzler succeeded in making a play of heterogeneous material? I don't think he has altogether, yet I enjoyed several acts and enjoyed still more the reading of it in book form.

Professor Bernhardi is the professor of a medical institute in Vienna known as the Elizabethinum. A patient, a young woman, is dying in one of the wards, the victim of malpractice. But her passing away will be painless. She is happy because she believes that she is on the road to recovery, that she will live to marry her beloved young man. Euphoria, the doctor calls her condition. To tell her the truth would be in his eyes criminal. She would die in anguish. Why not let her go out of the world in bliss? But a female nurse, a conscientious Roman Catholic, thinks differently. With the aid of a budding student she sends for Father Franz Reder in the near-by Church of the Holy Florian. The priest obeys the summons, anxious to shrive a sinning soul, and to send her out of the world if not to Paradise, at least to Purgatory. In the office he encounters Professor Bernhardi, who tells him politely but firmly that he won't allow his patient to be disturbed. The priest, without excitement but painfully impressed, argues that, even if there are a few moments of sorrow, the saving of the girl's immortal soul is of paramount importance. The physician shrugs his shoulders. His business is with the body, not the soul, and he continues to bar the way. The priest makes one last appeal, uselessly; but, unperceived, the nurse has slipped out, and going to the bedside of the dying woman announces the advent of the holy man. The patient screams in agony: "I am dying!" and she does die, from fright. Bernhardi is enraged, though he never loses his air of sardonic politeness. The act ends. The result of the incident, magnified by a partisan press, is serious. A great lady, an archduchess, refuses to head the list of the Elizabethinum annual charity ball. She also snubs the wife of an aristocratic doctor. The politicians make fuel for their furnace, and presently the institution finds itself facing a grave deficit, perhaps ruin, for the minister of instruction does not favour further subventions, though he is a school friend of Bernhardi; worse follows, the board of directors is split, some of its Jewish members going so far as to say that Bernhardi should not have refused the consolations of religion to the dying. Wasn't the Elizabethinum Roman Catholic, after all?

There can be no doubt that the reason Arthur Schnitzler enjoyed handling the difficulties of such a theme is because his father was a well-known laryngologist of the University of Vienna, and he himself studied medicine and was an assistant doctor from 1886 to 1888 in the principal hospital of Vienna. With his father he helped to write a book entitled: The Clinical Atlas of Laryngology (1895). Hence his opportunity of studying the various types of Viennese professors in a little world must have been excellent. The veracity of his characters seems unimpeachable. There are all kinds of Jews--in Europe there is no such false sensitiveness if a Jewish type is portrayed on the boards, so long as it is not offensive; for example, there is the Jew who believes himself the victim of anti-Semitism, and, while the dramatist makes him "sympathetic," nevertheless he is funny with his mania of persecution. Then there is Doctor Goldberg, the lawyer, the counsel for Professor Bernhardi, in the prosecution case for insulting religion. He sends his boy to a Catholic college, his wife has Christian friends, and in his zeal not to seem friendly to Bernhardi, he loses the case. There are several others, all carefully sketched and with a certain wit that proves Schnitzler is as fair to his coreligionists as to the Gentiles. Let me hasten to add that there is nothing that would cause offence to either race throughout the piece. Its banning in Austria is therefore a mystery to me, as it must have been to the author.

What is more serious is the absence of marked dramatic movement in the play. It reads much like a short story made long in its dramatic garb. Fancy a play all men, chiefly bewhiskered; one woman in Act I, and only for ten minutes; fairly long-winded arguments for and against the ethics of the case. Not for more than one act would this capitally written work be tolerated on the English or American stage. Until Act IV there is hardly one genuine dramatic episode, though Bernhardi at a directors' meeting is forced to resign and is eventually sent to prison for two months. But in the penultimate act the priest calls on him, and for fifteen minutes the situation is strong and splendidly conceived. The conscience of the ecclesiastic brings him to Bernhardi, not to confess, but to explain.

At the trial he positively insisted that he did not believe Bernhardi had wished to insult religion, but that he followed the dictates of his conscience; he believed that he was doing his duty in sparing the girl the pain of discovery. But this statement was of no avail, for the nurse swore that the professor had employed physical violence to prevent the priest from entering the hospital ward. Later she confesses her perjury. Bernhardi is pardoned, is convoyed home in triumph by enthusiastic medical students, but is so disgusted by the perfidy of some of his friends and associates that he returns to his private practice. His argument with the priest throws light on his obstinate character; in reality neither man retreats a jot from his original position. I must add that the priest, because of his honest attitude, although pressure had been put upon him, was relieved of his duties at St. Florian's and sent to a little village on the Polish border. He had displeased the powers that be. Again I must admire this portrait of a sincere man, obsessed by his sense of duty, a fanatic, if you will, but upheld by his supreme faith.

The acting throughout was artistic, Professor Bernhardi impersonated by Bruno Decarli, and Father Reder by Alfred Abel, the latter a subtle characterisation. The "team play" of the Kleines Theatre company was seen at its best in the third act, where the directors hold a stormy meeting. It was the perfection of ensemble work. The creator of Das Suesse Maedel type of Vienna has painted a large canvas and revealed a grip on the essentials of characterisation. To Ibsen's An Enemy of the People he is evidently under certain obligations; Professor Bernhardi is a variation of Doctor Stockmann, plus not a little irony and self-complacency. But the thesis of Ibsen is less academic, sounder, of more universal interest than Schnitzler's. There is no metaphysical hair-splitting in An Enemy of the People, nor sentimental talk about euphoria and going happily to death. Grim old Daddy Ibsen told us that people were being poisoned by impure spring water, and, as Alan Dale said, was the first man to write a drama around a drain-pipe. Arthur Schnitzler, shedding for the nonce his accustomed Viennese charm and nonchalance, has written a comedy about a very grave subject, and has not uttered a single word that can be construed as disrespectful to either religion, Jewish or Roman Catholic. He is a genre painter almost to the point of perfection.

III

Once upon a time I called Hermann Sudermann the Klingsor of the German stage, meaning thereby that he was a master of black magic. Of course, like most comparisons, this was a far-fetched one. Yet Sudermann is a master of theatrical machinery. With a pressure of his little finger he can set the wheels whirring and make their noise attractive if not precisely significant. This is the case with his latest offering, Der gute Ruf (Good Reputation), which captured Berlin at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus on the Friedrichstrasse. The play, in four acts, is a variation on its author's early theme, Honour. It is also a variant of his Joy of Life (Es lebe das Leben), translated by Edith Wharton, but with the difference that the motive of Honour was more malleable for the purpose of dramatic treatment, and also truer to life, while in Reputation (as I suppose it will be called when translated) the thesis is too incredible for belief; hence the magician, wily as he is, scrambles about aimlessly in the last two acts, sparring for wind, and seemingly anxious to escape from a blind alley of situations. That he does it so well is a tribute to his technical prowess.

He knows how to write a play. This play would succeed in foreign countries where the Hauptmann and Schnitzler plays would fall down. The reason is because of the strong theatrical quality of the piece, and the grateful role for the heroine, a role that might have been written in Paris; indeed, the entire work, despite its local flavour, recalls the modern Parisian theatre of Bernstein & Co., because of its cynical satire, its mysterious intrigue, its doors and bells, its numerous exits and entrances.

A woman, rather a superwoman, the Baroness von Tanna, sacrifices her name--not of the best because she flirts--to save the good, nay, spotless reputation of her dearest friend, a millionaire's wife--who, in a "mad moment" (Aha!) becomes the beloved of a certain fascinating Max, a young and handsome ne'er-do-well. To add to the piquancy of the situation, the baroness, a beautiful woman, and not, like her friend, the mother of children, is entangled in the same net; she, too, adores Max the heart crusher, though she will not cross the Rubicon for his silly sake. The usual "triangle" becomes star-shaped, for a new feminine presence appears, a girl who is matched to marry the fatal Max. That makes five live wires; two husbands, two wives, a naive virgin, with Max as inaccessible as a star. But after a capital exposition, Sudermann gets us in a terrible state of mind by making the lady with the good reputation go off in a hysterical crisis, and almost confess to her stiff, severe husband--who is a maniac on the subject of his house being above suspicion. The charming, reckless baroness intervenes at the crucial point, becomes a lightning-rod that draws the electric current, and pretends to be the real culprit. Her husband, a sinister baron and ex-lieutenant in the Hussars, is present. A duel with Max is the result. In the last act, after she has been subjected to all kinds of ignominy, Baroness Dorrit von Tanna, without confessing, is socially rehabilitated. Skim-milk in this instance has passed for cream, the prudish millionaire's wife, her honour saved for the world at large, is now revealed as a hypocrite to her astounded and snobbish husband. The curtain falls on a maze of improbabilities, with the baroness in the centre.

For people who don't take their theatre seriously, _i. e._, neither as a fencing ground for propagandists nor for puling poets, this new Sudermann piece will please. It has triumphed in Berlin and Munich. Its people are portraits taken from fashionable West End Berlin, while the dialogue, witty, incisive, and also characteristic, is one of the consolations of a play that does not for a moment produce any illusion. There are plenty of striking episodes, but logic is lacking, not only the logic of life, but the logic of the theatre. No living playwright knows better how to arouse suspense than Sudermann, and he can't make us believe in his false theme, consequently his motivation in the last two acts is false and disappointing. But there is the old Sudermann pyrotechnical virtuosity, the fireworks dazzle with their brilliancy, and you think of Paris, and also that some drama may be divorced from life and literature and yet be interesting. Insincere as is the denouement, the note of insincerity was absent in the acting of the cast. The honours were easily borne away by a pretty Viennese actress from the Volks Theatre there, Elsa Galafres by name, whose methods are Gallic, whose personality is charming. Critical Berlin has taken her to itself, and her theatrical fortune is made. It may be confessed that her part, despite its artificiality, is one that any actress in the world would jump at. Sudermann is a conjurer. His puppets are all agreeable, and, in one instance, vital: the father of the baroness, a financier, who could be easily turned into a "heavy" conventional father, but, as played by Hermann Nissen, is a positively original characterisation. Max the butterfly (Ernst Dumcke) was wholly admirable. I shall be very much surprised if Der gute Ruf does not soon appear on the stage of other lands. Its picture of manners, its mundane environment, its epigrams and dramatic bravoura will make it welcome everywhere. Sudermann is still Klingsor, the evoker of artificial figures, not the poet who creates living men and women.

XII

KUBIN, MUNCH, AND GAUGUIN: MASTERS OF HALLUCINATION

I

Because it is a simpler matter to tell the truth than casuists admit I shall preface this little sermon on three hallucinated painters by a declaration of my artistic faith.

I believe in Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt; the greatest harmonist, the greatest painter of daylight, and the profoundest interpreter of the human soul--Rembrandt as pyschologist is as profound as Beethoven.

The selection of this triune group of genius, one Spaniard and two Dutchmen, doesn't mean that I'm insensible to the purity of Raphael, the rich colouring of Titian, or the giant power of Michael Angelo. Botticelli is probably, so Mr. Berenson thinks, the most marvellous draughtsman thus far produced by European art (we can still go to old China and Japan for his masters), and who shall say him nay? Ruskin, on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter, Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci--what of that incomparable genius?

After Haarlem and Frans Hals you may realise that Manet and Sargent had predecessors; after a visit to The Hague the View of Delft may teach you that Vermeer was an Impressionist long before the French Impressionists; also that he painted clear light as it never before was painted, nor since. As for Rembrandt, the last word will never be said. He is the eternal Sphinx of art, whether as portraitist, landscape painter, etcher, or revealer of the night side of life, of its bestiality, madness, cruelty, and terrific visions. But Velasquez and Vermeer are more sane.

Anything I may write of Kubin, Munch, and Gauguin should be read in the light of my artistic credo. These three names do not swim in main currents, rather are they to be found in some morbid morass at the equivocal twilight hour, not the hour exquisite, but that indeterminate moment when the imagination recoils upon itself and creates shadows that flit, or, more depressing, that sit; the mood of exasperated melancholy when all action seems futile, and life a via crucis. Nor is this mood the exclusive possession of perverse poets; it is an authentic one, and your greengrocer around the corner may suffer from its presence; but he calls it the blues and resorts to alcohol, while the artist, ever conscious of the "values" of such a psychic state of soul, resorts to ink or colour or tone (not always despising wine).

This Alfred Kubin has done; with his etching-needle he has aroused images from the plate that alternately shock and exalt; occasionally he opens the valves of laughter for he can be both witty and humorous. His Slavic blood keeps off the encroaching danger of himself taking his own work too seriously. I wish his German contemporaries boasted such gifts of irony. Kubin is a Bohemian, born in 1877, the son of an Austrian Army officer. His boyhood was given over to caprice, and he appears to have passed through the various stages familiar in the career of romantic pathological temperaments. Disillusionment succeeded disillusionment; he even contemplated Werther's end.

He found himself in Munich at the beginning of this century with a slender baggage of ideals, much scorn of life, and a determination to express his tortured and complicated personality in art. No matter what comical old women professors (in trousers) tell you of "objective art" and the superior advantage of drawing from plaster casts, that is the ultimate aim of an artist (naturally I don't refer to fashionable face painters, who make a lucrative trade of their slippery paint). Nevertheless, a more rigid discipline might have smoothed the way for Kubin, who has not yet mastered the tools of his art. He has always practised his scales in public.

A man's reading proclaims the man. Kubin's favourite authors for years were Schopenhauer and Mainlaender, the latter a disciple of the mighty Arthur and one who put into practice a tenet of his master, for he attained Nirvana by his own hand.

Now, a little Schopenhauer is an excellent thing to still restless, egotistic spirits, to convince them of the essential emptiness of life's coveted glories; but a surfeit of Schopenhauer is like a surfeit of lobster--mental indigestion follows and the victim blames the lobster (_i. e._, life) instead of his own inordinate appetite. Throughout Kubin's work I detect traces of spleen, hatred of life, delight in hideous cruelty, a predisposition to obscurity and a too-exclusive preoccupation with sex; indeed, sex looms largest in the consciousness of the new art.

To burlesque the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation. Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo, but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar. However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone Age, as it is to-day, as it always will be. Some of Rembrandt's etched plates are unmentionable, and Goya even went to further lengths.

Now, Kubin is a lineal descendant of this Spaniard, minus his genius, for our young man is not a genius, despite his cleverness. He burlesques the themes of Goya at times, and in him there is more than a streak of the cruelty which causes such a painful impression when viewing the Proverbs or the Disasters of War.

Kubin has chosen to seek earlier than Goya for his artistic nourishment. He has studied the designs of the extraordinary Pieter Breughel, and so we get modern versions of the bizarre events in daily life so dear to old Pieter. On one plate Kubin depicts a hundred happenings. Cruelty and broad humour are present and not a little ingenuity in the weaving of the pattern. He, too, like Breughel, is fond of trussing up a human as if he were a pig and then sticking him with a big knife. Every form of torture from boiling oil to retelling a stale anecdote is shown. The elder Teniers, Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, Goya, and among later artists, Rops, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Aubrey Beardsley, are apparent everywhere in Kubin's work. Neither is Rembrandt missing.

Beardsley is, perhaps, the most marked influence, and not for the best, though the Bohemian designer is a mere tyro when compared to the Englishman, the most extraordinary apparition in nineteenth-century art.

Kubin has illustrated Poe--notably Berenice; of course the morbid grimace of that tale would attract him--Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia, Maerchen by W. Hauff, and his own volume of short stories entitled, Die andere Seite, written in the fantastic Poe key and with literary skill. The young artist is happy in the use of aquatint, and to judge from his colour combinations one might call him a rich colourist. Singularly enough, in his woodcuts he strangely resembles Cruikshank, and I suppose he never saw Cruikshank in his life, though if he has read Dickens he may have. In his own short stories there are many illustrations that--with their crisp simplicity, their humour and force--undoubtedly recall Cruikshank, and a more curious combination than the English delineator of broad humour and high animal spirits and the Bohemian with his predilection for the interpretation in black and white of lust, murder, ghosts, and nightmares would be hard to find. Like Rops, Kubin is a devil-worshipper, and his devils are as pleasant appearing as some of the Belgian's female Satans.

I've studied the Sansara Blaetter, the Weber Mappe, and Hermann Esswein's critical edition of various plates, beginning with one executed when Alfred was only sixteen; but in it may be found his principal qualities. Even at that age he was influenced by Breughel. Quaint monsters that never peopled our prehistoric planet are being bound in captivity by dwarfs who fire cannon, stab with lances, and attack enemies from the back of impossible elephants. The portrait of what Kubin calls his muse looks like a flamingo in an ermine skirt posing previous to going to jail. Then we see the shadow, a monstrous being pursuing through a lonely street at night a little burgher in a hurry to reach his bed. The "shudder" is there. Kubin has read Baudelaire. His Adventure resembles a warrior in No Man's Land confronted by a huge white boa-constrictor with the head of a blind woman, and she has a head upon which is abundant white hair. Puerile, perhaps, yet impressive.

I shall skip the numerous devil's laboratories wherever people are being stewed or sawn asunder, also the scenes of men whipped with leather thongs or broken on the rack. One picture is called The Finger. An aged man in night-dress cowers against the wall of his bedroom and gazes with horror at an enormous index-finger which, with the hand to which it is attached, has crawled across the floor as would a devilfish, or some such sort of monster. The finger threateningly points to the unhappy person. Unquestionably it symbolises a guilty conscience. Franz von Stuck has left his impression on Kubin. He portrays mounds of corpses, the fruit of war, which revolt the spectator, both on account of the folly and crime suggested and the morbid taste of the artist.

Kubin's Salome is the last word in the interpretation of that mellifluous damsel. It is a frank caricature of Beardsley, partially nude, the peculiar quality of the plate being the bestial expression of the face. No viler ugliness is conceivable. And, according to Flaubert, who created the "modern" Salome, she was fascinating in her beauty. I fancy foul is fair nowadays in art. Never before in its history has there been paid such a tribute to sheer ugliness. Never before has its house been so peopled by the seven devils mentioned in the Good Book.

In the domain of fantasy Kubin is effective. A lonely habitation set in nocturnal gloom with a horde of rats deserting it, is atmospheric; two groups of men quarrelling in sinister alleys, monks of the Inquisition extinguishing torches in a moonlit corridor, or a white nightmare nag wildly galloping in a circular apartment; these betray fancy, excited perhaps by drugs. When in 1900 or thereabouts the "decadence" movement swept artistic Germany, the younger men imitated Poe and Baudelaire, and consumed opium with the hope that they might see and record visions. But a commonplace brain under the influence of opium or hasheesh has commonplace dreams. To few is accorded by nature (or by his satanic majesty) the dangerous privilege of discerning la-bas, those visions described by De Quincey, Poe, or De Nerval. Alfred Kubin has doubtless experienced the rapture of the initiate. There is a certain plate in which a figure rushes down the secret narrow pathway zigzagging from the still stars to the bottommost pit of hell, the head crowned as if by a flaming ecstasy, the arms extended in hysteria, the feet of abnormal size. A thrilling design with Blake-like hints--for Blake was master of the "flaming door" and the ecstasy that consumes.

A design that attracts is a flight of steps feebly lighted by a solitary light, hemmed in by ancient walls; on the last step lurks an anonymous person. A fine bit of old-fashioned romance is conjured up; also memories of Piranesi.

The drowning woman is indescribable, yet not without a note of pathos. Buddha is one of the artist's highest flights. The Oriental mysticism, the Kef, as ecstasy is called in the East, are admirably expressed. His studies of deep-sea life border on the remarkable. I have seldom encountered such solicitude for exact drawing, such appreciation of the beauties of form and surface colouring, as these pictures of shells, sea flora, and exotic pearls. The Cardinal series must not be forgotten, those not easily forgotten portraits of a venerable ecclesiastic.

It is difficult to sum up in a brief article all the characteristics of this versatile Bohemian, as it is difficult to find a picture that will give a general idea of his talent. I select the Nero, not because it exhibits any technical prowess (on the contrary, the arms are of wood), but because it may reveal a tithe of the artist's fancy. Nero has reached the end of a world that he has depopulated; there remains the last ship-load of mankind which he is about to destroy at one swoop. The design is large in quality, the idea altogether in consonance with the early emotional attitude of Kubin toward life.

II

Edvard Munch, the Norwegian, is a much bigger man and artist. The feminine note, despite his sensibility, is missing. He has control of his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a more precise vision; in a word he is a mystic, and a true mystic always sees dreams as sharp realities.

It was Mr. Saintsbury who first called attention to the clear flame of Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony. So Munch, who pins to paper with almost geometrical accuracy his personal adventures in the misty mid-region of Weir. And a masculine soul is his. I can still recall my impressions on seeing one of his early lithographs entitled, Geschrei. As far as America is concerned, Edvard Munch was discovered by Vance Thompson, who wrote an appreciation of the Norwegian painter, then a resident of Berlin, in the pages of _M'lle New York_ (since gathered to her forefathers). The "cry" of the picture is supposed to be the "infinite cry of nature" as felt by an odd-looking individual who stands on a long bridge traversing an estuary in some Norwegian harbour. The sky is barred by flaming clouds, two enigmatic men move in the middle distance. To-day the human with the distorted skull who holds hands to his ears and with staring eyes opens wide a foolish mouth looks more like a man overtaken by seasickness than a poet mastered by cosmic emotion.

In 1901 I visited Munich and at the Secession exhibition at the Glass Palace I saw a room full of Munches. It was nicknamed the Chamber of Horrors, and the laughter and exclamations of disgust indulged in by visitors recalled the history of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and the treatment accorded it by Parisians (an incident utilised by Zola in L'Oeuvre). But nowadays, in company with the Neo-Impressionists, the Lampost Impressionists, Cubists, and Futurists, Munch might seem tame, conventional; nevertheless he was years ahead of the new crowd in painting big blocks of colour, juxtaposed, not as the early Impressionists juxtaposed their strokes of complementary colour to gain synthesis by dissociation of tonalities, but by obvious discords thus achieve a brutal optical impression.

His landscapes were those of a visionary in an Arcadia where the ugly is elevated to the tragic. Tragic, too, were his representations of his fellow men. Such every-day incidents as a funeral became transfigured in the sardonic humour of this pessimist. No one had such a quick eye in detecting the mean souls of interested mourners at the interment of a relative. I possess an original signed lithograph called, The Curious Ones, which shows a procession returning afoot from a funeral. Daumier, himself, could not beat the variety of expressions shown in this print. The silk hat (and Goya was the first among modern artists to prove its value as a motive) plays a role in the Munch plates. His death-room scenes are unapproachable in seizing the fleeting atmosphere of the last hour. The fear of death, the very fear of fear, Maeterlinck has created by a species of creeping dialogue. (The Intruder is an example), but Edvard Munch working in an art of two dimensions where impressions must be simultaneous, is more dynamic. The shrill dissonance in his work is instantly reflected in the brain of the speaker. In his best work--not his skeletons dancing with plump girls, or the youthful macabre extravagances after the manner of Rops, Rethel, De Groux, or James Ensor--he does invoke a genuine thrill.

Psychologic, in the true sense of that much-abused word, are his portraits; indeed, I am not sure that his portraits will play second fiddle to his purely imaginative work in the future. There is the Strindberg, certainly the most authoritative presentment of that strange, unhappy soul. The portraits of Hans Jaeger, the poet (in oil), the etched head of Doctor A., the etched head of Sigbjorn Obstfelder, poet who died young, as well as the self-portraits and the splendidly constructed figure and eloquent expression in the portrait of a woman, an oil-painting now in the National Gallery, Christiania, these and many others serve as testimony to a sympathetic divination of character. His etched surfaces are never as silvery as those of Anders Zorn, who is a virtuoso in the management of the needle. Not that Munch disdains good craftsmanship, but he is obsessed by character; this is the key-note of his art. How finely he expresses envy, jealousy, hatred, covetousness, and the vampire that sometimes lurks in the soul of woman. An etching, Hypocrisy, with its faint leer on the lips of a woman, is a little masterpiece. His sick people are pitiful, that is, when they are not grotesque; the entire tragedy of blasted childhood is in his portrait of The Sick Child.

As a rule he seldom condescends to sound the note of sentimentality. He is an illustrator born, and as such does not take sides, letting his parable open to those who can read. And his parable is always legible. He distorts, deforms, and with his strong, fluid line modulates his material as he wills, but he never propounds puzzles in form, as do the rest of the experimentalists. The human shape does not become either a stovepipe or an orchid in his hands. His young mothers are sometimes dithyrambic (as in Madonna) or else despairing outcasts. One plate of his which always affects me is his Dead Mother, with the little daughter at the bedside, the cry of agony arrested on her lips, the death chamber exhaling poverty and sorrow. By preference Munch selects his themes among the poor and the middle class. He can paint an empty room traversed by a gleam of moonlight and set one to thinking a half day on such an apparently barren theme. He may suggest the erotic, but never the lascivious. A thinker doubled by an artist he is the one man north who recalls the harsh but pregnant truths of Henrik Ibsen.

III

Every decade, or thereabouts, a revolution occurs in the multicoloured world of the Seven Arts; in Paris, at least a half dozen times in the year, a new school is formed on the left bank of the Seine or under some tent in the provinces. Without variety--as well as vision--the people perish. Hence the invention known as a "new art," which always can be traced back to a half-forgotten one. After the hard-won victories of Impressionism there was bound to ensue a reaction. The symbolists crowded out the realists in literature and the Neo-Impressionists felt the call of Form as opposed to Colour. Well, we are getting form with a vengeance, and seldom has colour been so flouted in favour of cubes, cylinders, and wooden studio models and muddy paste.

Paul Gauguin, before he went to the equator, saw the impending change. He was weary of a Paris where everything had been painted, described, modelled, so he sailed for Tahiti, landing at Papeete. Even there he found the taint of European ideas, and after the funeral of King Pomare and an interlude of flirtation with an absinthe-drinking native princess, niece of the departed royalty (he made a masterly portrait of her), he fled to the interior and told his experiences in Noa Noa, The Land of Lovely Scents. This little book, illustrated with appropriate sketches by the author-painter, is a highly important contribution to the scanty literature dealing with Gauguin. I've read Charles Morice and Emil Bernard, but beyond telling us details about the Pont-Aven School and the art and madness of gifted Vincent Van Gogh, both are reticent about Gauguin's pilgrimage to the South Seas. We knew why he went there, now we know what he did while he was there. The conclusion of the book is illuminating. "I returned to Paris two years older than when I left, but feeling twenty years younger."

The cause of this rejuvenation was a complete change in his habits. With an extraordinary frankness, not at all in the perfumed manner of that eternal philanderer, Pierre Loti, this one-time sailor before the mast, this explosive, dissipated, hard-living Paul Gauguin became as a child, simulating as well as could an artificial civilised Parisian with sick nerves the childlike attitude toward nature that he observed in his companions, the gentle Tahitians. He married a Maori, a trial marriage, oblivious of the fact that he had left behind him in France a wife and children, and, clothed in the native girdle, he roamed the island naked, unashamed, free, happy. With the burden of European customs from his shoulders, his almost moribund interest in his art revived. Gauguin there experienced visions, was haunted by exotic spirits. One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour inversion of Manet's Olympe. With the cosmology of the islanders the Frenchman was familiar.

He has, in addition to portraying the natives, made an agreeable exposition of their ways and days, and their naive blending of Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons and fairies in every bush.

The flowerlike beauty of the brown women comes in for much praise, though to be truthful, the ladies on his canvases seem far from beautiful to prejudiced Occidental eyes. This Noa Noa is a refreshing contribution to the psychology of a painter who, in broad daylight dreamed fantastic visions, a painter to whom the world was but a painted vision, as the music of Richard Wagner is painted music overheard in another world.

"A painter is either a revolutionist or a plagiarist," said Paul Gauguin. But the tricksy god of irony has decreed that, if he lasts long enough, every anarch will end as a conservative, upon which consoling epigram let us pause.

If I were to write a coda to the foregoing, loosely heaped notes, I might add that beauty and ugliness, sickness and health, are only relative terms. The truth is the normal never happens in art or life, so whenever you hear a painter or professor of aesthetics preaching the "gospel of health in art" you will know that both are preaching pro domo. The kingdom of art contains many mansions, and in even the greatest art there may be found the morbid, the feverish, the sick, or the mad. Such a world-genius as Albrecht Duerer had his moment of "Melencolia," and what can't you detect in Da Vinci or Michael Angelo if you are overcurious?

"Beauty," like that other deadly phrase, "beautiful drawing," is ever the shibboleth of the mediocre, of imitators, in a word, of the academy. These men of narrow vision pin their faith to Ingres (which is laudable enough), but groan if the "mighty line" of Degas is mentioned; yet Degas, a pupil of Ingres, has continued his master's tradition in the only way tradition should be continued, _i. e._, by further development and by adding an individual note. Therefore, when I register my overwhelming admiration for Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt I do not bind myself to close my eyes to originality, personal charm, or character in the newer men. There is no such thing as schools of art; there are only artists.

XIII

THE CULT OF THE NUANCE LAFCADIO HEARN

Lafcadio Hearn, shy, complex, sensuous, has in Elizabeth Bisland a sympathetic biographer. In her two volumes, the major portion is devoted to the letters of this exotic and extraordinary writer; he was both, without being either a great man or a great artist. The dominant impression made by his personality, so much and often so unhappily discussed, is itself impressionistic. Curiously enough, as he viewed the world, so has he been judged by the world. His life, fragmentary, episodic, restless, doubtless the result of physical and psychical limitations, is admirably reflected in his writings with their staccato phrasing, overcoloured style, their flight from anything approaching reality, their uneasy apprehension of sex, and their flittings among the folk-lore of a half dozen extinct civilisations. His defective eyesight was largely the cause of his attitude toward life and art--for with our eyes we create our world--and his intense sufferings and consequent pessimism must be set down to the inevitable tragedy of a soul that greatly aspired, but a soul that had the interior vision though not the instrument with which to interpret it. Lafcadio Hearn was a poetic temperament, a stylist, but an incomplete artist.

His biographer, Miss Bisland, speaks of him as a "stylist." Unfortunately this is not far from the truth; he was a "stylist," though not always with an individual style. The real Hearn had superimposed upon him the debris of many writers, usually Frenchmen. He began his literary life as a worshipper and translator of Theophile Gautier and died in the faith that Pierre Loti had said the last word of modern prose. Gautier attracted him by his sumptuousness of epithet, the perfectly realised material splendours of gold, of marble, of colour. To the neurasthenic Hearn, his brain big with glorious dreams, the Parisian pagan must have seemed godlike in his half-smiling, half-contemptuous mastery of language, a mastery in its ease not outrivalled even by Flaubert. Gautier was a gigantic reflector of the visible world, but without genuine sympathy for humanity, and he boasted that his periods, like cats, always fell on their feet, no matter how high or carelessly he tossed them. And then he was Greek in his temperament, Greek grafted upon a Parisian who loved form and hue above all else, and this appealed to Hearn, whose mother was Greek, whose tastes were exotic. It was only after he had passed the half-century mark and when he was the father of three sons that some apprehension of the gravity of Occidental ethical teaching was realised by him.

When M. Loti-Viaud, that most exquisite of French prose artists and sentimental sensualists, made his appearance, Lafcadio was ravished into the seventh heaven. Here was what he had sought to do, what he never would do--the perfection of impressionism, created by an accumulation of delicate details, unerringly presented, with the intention of attacking the visual (literary) sense, not the ear. You can't read a page of Loti aloud; hearing is never the final court of appeal for him. Nor is the ear regarded in Hearn's prose. He is not "auditive"; like Loti and the Goncourts, he writes for the eye. Fr. Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the predominance des sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the dash--he must have studied Poe not too wisely--infinitesimal strokes of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of architectonic and the fatal lack of variety, surprise, or grandeur in the harmonic sense, these disbar the prose of Lafcadio Hearn from the exalted position claimed for it by his admirers.

Yet it is a delicate prose; the haunted twilight of the soul has found its notations in his work. With Amiel he could say of a landscape that it was a state of soul. His very defects became his strength. With normal eyesight we should not have had the man of ghostly reveries, the patient, charming etcher on a miniature block of evanescent prose, the forger of tiny chords, modulating into Chopin-like mist. His mania for the word caused him to neglect the sentence; his devotion to the sentence closed for him any comprehensive handling of the paragraph; he seldom wrote a perfect page; never an entire chapter or book. At his best he equals Loti in his evocation of the mystery that encompasses us, a mystery that has been sounded in music, seldom in language. His cast of mind was essentially romantic. Hearn does not mention the name of Goncourt in his letters, and yet it is a certain side of the brothers, the impressionistic side, that his writings resemble. But he had not their artistry. Nor could he, like Maupassant, summon tangible spirits from the vasty deep, as did the Norman master in Le Horla. When Rodin was told by Arthur Symons that William Blake saw visions, the sculptor, after looking at the drawings, replied: "Yes, he saw them once; he should have seen them three or four times." Hearn seldom pinned down to the paper his dreams, though he had a gift of suggestion, of spiritual overtones, in a key of transcendentalism, that, in certain pages, far outshines Loti or Maupassant. Disciple of Herbert Spencer--he was forced because of his feminine fluidity to lean on a strong, positive brain--hater of social conventions, despiser of Christianity, a proselyte to a dozen creeds, from the black magic of Voodooism to Japanese Shintoism, he never quite rid himself of the spiritual deposits inherited from his Christian ancestry. This strain, this contradiction, to be found in his later letters, explains much of his psychology, all of his art. A man after nearly two thousand years of Christianity may say to himself: "Lo! I am a pagan." But all the horses from Dan to Beersheba cannot drag him back to paganism, cannot make him resist the "pull" of his hereditary faith. The very quality Hearn most deplored in himself gives his work an exotic savour; he is a Christian of Greek and Roman Catholic training, a half Greek, half Celt, whole gipsy, masquerading as an Oriental. The mask is an agreeable one, the voice of the speaker sweet, almost enticing, but one more mask it is, and therefore not the real Hearn. He was Goth, not Greek; he suffered from the mystic fear of the Goth, while he yearned for the great day flame of the classics. Even his Japonisme was skin-deep.

Miss Bisland relates the uneventful career of Hearn in an unaffected manner. He was loved by his friends, while he often ran away from them. Solitary, eccentric, Hearn was an unhappy man. He was born June 27, 1850, on one of the Ionian Isles, Santa Maura, called in modern Greek, Leokus, or Lafcada, the Sappho Leucadia, promontory and all. His father was Charles Bush Hearn, of an old Dorsetshire family--Hearn, however, is a Romany name--and an Irishman. His mother was Rosa Cerigote, a Greek, whose brothers, it is said, stabbed their sister's suitor, but she, Isolde-like, nursed him, and he married her. The marriage was not a happy one. Young Lafcadio drifted to Ireland, was adopted by a rich aunt of Doctor Hearn's, a Mrs. Brenane, and went with her to Wales. He is said to have been educated in the north of France at a Jesuit college. He learned the language there. Later he was at Ushan, the Roman Catholic college of Durham. His life long he hated this religion, hated it in a superstitious fashion, and seemed to have suffered from a sort of persecution mania--he fancied Jesuits were plotting against him. At school he lost the sight of one eye through an accident while at play. In 1869 Hearn was five feet three inches tall, weighed one hundred and thirty-seven pounds, and had a chest measurement of thirty-six and three-fourths inches. Disappointed of an expected inheritance--his grandaunt left him nothing--he went to London with his head full of dreams, but his pockets were empty. In 1869 he landed in New York, penniless, poor in health, half blind, friendless, and very ambitious.