Chapter XI: Act V: The Forum (2)

The latter half of this century has witnessed an intense devotion to a barren ideal. Years previous to the advent of the sewing-machine there burst upon the civilized globe a musical storm of great magnitude. Every girl whose parents respected themselves was led almost manacled to the keyboard, and there made to play at least one hour out of the twenty-four. This was before the age of eight; after that crumby and pinafore period an hour was added, and O, the tortures of her generation and the generation that succeeded her! Veritable slaves of the ivory, they worked like the Niebelungs for a stern Alberich, who pocketed the hoard of their fathers and rapped their cold, thin, and despairing fingers with a lead pencil—one usually “made in Germany.” With what infantile malignancy was regarded the lead pencil of the German music-master! Why, even as I write, my very sentence assumes an Ollendorffian cast because of the harrowing atmosphere conjured up by that same irritable Teutonic pencil-wielder. Piano music of those days was a thing of horror. Innumerable variations and the sonatina that stupefied were supplemented by diabolical finger studies without end. One hour after breakfast, one hour after luncheon, and in the evening a little music to soothe digestion and drive away dull drink—something of this sort was the daily musical scheme of our natural rulers. Every girl played the piano. Not to play the instrument was a stigma of poverty. The harp went out with the Byronic pose, though harp-playing was deemed “a fine, ladylike accomplishment” until the Civil War. But a harp is a troublesome instrument “to keep in order”; it needs skilled attention—above all, careful tuning. Now the piano is cheaper than the harp—I mean some pianos—and it is the only instrument I know of that is played upon with evident delight when out of tune. Even the banjo is tuned at times; the average piano so rarely that it resents the operation and speedily relapses below pitch. Because of its unmusical nature, a very uncomplaining beast of burden, the piano was bound to drive out the harp; it is more easily “worked,” and, by reason of its shape, a more useful piece of furniture. Atop of a piano may be placed anything, from a bonnet to an ice-cream freezer; indeed, stories are told of heartless persons using it for a couch; and once a party of French explorers discovered on the coast of Africa an individual, oily but royal, who had removed the action and wires of a grand piano and used the interior for his permanent abode. The unfortunate instrument had drifted ashore from a wreck.

Other reasons, too, there are for the supplanting of the harp by its more stolid half-brother, the piano—bigger brother, a noisier, more assertive one, and a magnificent stop-gap for the creaking pauses of the drawing-room machinery. And how nobly it covers thin talk with a dense mantle of crackling tones! A provoker of speech, an urger to after-dinner eloquence, the piano will be remembered in the hereafter as the greatest social implement of last century’s latter half.

Liszts in petticoats have been so numerous during the past twenty-five years as to escape classification. It was the girl who did not play that was singled out as an oddity. For one Sonia Kovalesky and her rare mastery of mathematics there were a million slaves of the ivory. Not even the sewing-machine routed the piano, though it dealt it a dangerous body blow. Treadles and pedals are not so far asunder, and a neat piano technique has been found quite useful by the ardent typewriter. What this present generation of children has to be especially thankful for is its immunity from useless piano practice. Unless there is discovered a sharply defined aptitude, a girl is kept away from the stool and pedals. Instead of the crooked back—in Germany known as the piano back—and relentless technical studies, our young woman golfs, cycles, rows, runs, fences, dances, and pianolas! While she once wearied her heart playing Gottschalk, she now plays tennis, and she freely admits that tennis is greater than Thalberg. Recall the names of all the great women’s colleges, recall their wonderful curriculums, and note with unprejudiced eyes their scope and the comparatively humble position occupied by music. In a word, I wish to point out that piano-playing as an accomplishment is passing. Girls play the piano as a matter of course when they have nimble fingers and care for it. Life has become too crowded, too variously beautiful, for a woman without marked musical gifts to waste it at the piano.

Begun as a pastime, a mere social adjunct of the overfed, music, the heavenly maid, was pressed into unwilling service at the piano, and at times escorted timid youths to the proposing point, or eked out the deadly lethargy of evenings in respectable homes. Girls had to pull the teeth of this artistic monster, the pianoforte, else be accounted frumps without artistic or social ambitions. Unlike that elephant which refused to play a Bach fugue on the piano, because, as the showman tearfully explained, the animal shudderingly recognized the ivory of the tusks of its mother, the girl of the middle century went about her task muddled in wits, but with matrimony as her ultimate goal. To-day she has forsaken the “lilies and languors” of Chopin, and the “roses and raptures” of Schumann, and if she must have music, she goes to a piano recital and hears a great artist interpret her favorite composer, thus unconsciously imitating the Eastern potentate who boasted that he had his dancing done for him. The new girl is too busy to play the piano unless she has the gift; then she plays it with consuming earnestness. We listen to her, for we know that this is an age of specialization, an age when woman is coming into her own, be it nursing, electoral suffrage, or the writing of plays; so poets no longer make sonnets to our Ladies of Ivories, nor are budding girls chained to the keyboard. Never has the piano been so carefully studied as it is to-day, and, paradoxical as it may sound, never has the tendency of music been diverted to currents so contrary to the genius of the instrument. All this is better for woman—and for the development of her art along broader, nobler lines. The tone-poem and music-drama are now our ideals, and I dare publish my belief that in this year of grace there has been born one who will live to see the decay of the piano recital. He may be a centenarian before this change is wrought, but witness it he will, for music, of all arts, changes most its vesture.

III

Balzac, master of souls, knower of the heart feminine, made his lovely Princesse de Cadignan say to the enamored Daniel d’Arthez: “I have often heard miserable specimens regret that they were women, wish that they were men; I have always looked upon them with pity.... If I had to choose I would still prefer to be a woman. A fine pleasure it is to have to owe one’s triumph to strength, to all the powers that are given you by the laws made by you! But when we see you at our feet, uttering and doing sillinesses, is it not then an intoxicating happiness to feel one’s self the weakness that triumphs? When we succeed we are obliged to keep silent under pain of losing our empire. Beaten women are still obliged to keep silent through pride. The silence of the slave frightens the master.”

This was written in 1839. If Balzac had lived a half-century, he would have painted full-length portraits of women who keep quiet neither in triumph nor in defeat; and at whose feet pedals, not men, register new emotional experiences—for the pedals of the piano are the soul of it. To be ashamed of one’s sex nowadays would be an insane confession wrung from some poor overworked creature, one to whom the French novelist might refuse even the name of woman. Females may deny the beauty of being born to wear petticoats; women, never. Indeed, the boot is now on the masculine leg. As the current phraseology runs, Woman has found herself. She has also found a panacea for irritated vanity and indigestion, at one time called in romances a broken heart. This prophylactic is art; and when it is used intelligently, misery flies forth from the window as music opens the door.

Once, for the sheer fun of it, I made an imaginary classification of music which various heroines of fiction preferred, or, rather, might prefer—for many of them are, as you know, tone-deaf. Mr. Howells remarked this years ago. But consider Clarissa Harlowe, or any of the immortal Jane’s brood—do they not all suggest musical possibilities? What a paper that would be to read before a mothers’ meeting on a sultry day in September!—The Musical Tastes of Fiction’s Heroines. And with what facile logic, the logic of numbers, a clever girl could unhorse her ruder opponents. The theme fascinates me; I am loath to leave it. Think of the year 1800! Beethoven had written some piano sonatas, but was not very well known abroad. In London town there were still harpsichords, and Scarlatti and Mozart. The modern grand piano was a dream that nestled in the later sonatas of Beethoven—and in the brain of their maker. Tone was not thought of; while a pearly touch, smooth scales, and crisp little rhythms were affected by such women as spared the time to practise from their social duties. The piano music of the eighteenth century was written for women, is woman’s music. All these virginals, spinets, clavecins, clavichords, harpsichords, are they not feminine? Are they not the musical rib plucked by an amiable fate from the side of the masculine church organ? Historical retrospects gall the mind at all times, but it may not be amiss to consider the century’s piano music which preceded ours. Out of the old dance suites burgeoned latter-day piano music. Those graceful writers of old Italy and old France made gay melodies, full of the artificial life of their time, of their surroundings. You catch glimpses of delicate faces, with patches, powdered heads, courtly struttings, and the sounds of courtly wooing. The stately minuetto, lively courantes, decorous allemandes, smooth sarabands, tripping gavottes and gigues,—all these, and many more with high-colored titles, enchanted our great-great-grandmothers. The more tragic note was not missing, either. They had L’Homicide and the Fair Murderess, and any number of pieces named after tears, anger, caprice, sorrow, revenge and desire. Animals and the gods of Greece and Rome were quoted; flanked by wax candles, with suitors smirking at the side of them, and peering in front of them, fair women played music, played it with genteel gravity or bewitching coquetry; played Scarlatti and Emanuel Bach, and all for the love of art—and perhaps a matrimonial future. Let it be remarked, _en passant_, that the keyboard, vastly modified, developed and improved as it is, is still a favorite weapon of feminine offence. Just here get down your Browning from the shelf and consider A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Of Bach, the giant, we do not read in the diaries, letters, and books of this fashionable epoch. That grim old forge-master of fugues would hardly have appealed to the dreams of fair women, even had they been cognizant of his existence. Handel’s piano music was more to their taste; his suites, classical and solid in character, are full of brightly said things, and lie well for the instrument. Joseph Haydn, owing much to Bach’s son Emanuel, wrote pleasing music, light music, for the piano. His sonatas are not difficult, were not difficult for those ladies who could fluently finger Scarlatti. This Italian, with his witty skippings, rapid hand-crossings, and implacable vivacity, is still rainbow gold for most feminine wrists. Mozart, the sweetly lyric, the mellifluous and ever gay Mozart, made sonatas as gods carve the cosmos. Every form he touched he beautified. The piano sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of Beethoven and his mighty thunderings.

Behold the conqueror approaches, the Bonaparte, the Buonarroti, the Balzac of music—Ludwig van Beethoven. In the track of his growling tempests followed women, nobly nurtured, charming women of fashion, Nanette Streicher, Baroness Ertmann, Julia Guicciardi, Thérèse, Bettina, and many more besides. They played for him, and he, great genius and despiser of idle conventions, stretched his stout short body out upon drawing-room couches.

It is not a pretty picture this, but is a characteristic. It must please latter-day pagans who flout the niceties of society. Not all the Beethoven sonatas were admired to the studying point. The early ones—mere exercises of a young athlete juggling with the weapons of his grandsire—alone called for commendation. Dedicated to Haydn, the first three did not excite the ire of critics or teachers. But as the man grew, as he felt, suffered, and knew, then his canvases began to excite fear and repulsion. “Why these gloomy tints, Herr van Beethoven?” they cried, and listened eagerly to his rivals, the Wölffls, the Gelineks, the Hummels. There is a modishness even in the art of writing for the piano, and Beethoven despised modishness, as would have Diana of the Ephesians the millinery of Lutetia. So he was neglected for a half-century, and the long-fingered, long-haired virtuosi overran Europe, with their variations, their fantasias, their trills, and their trickeries. From Hummel to Thalberg effect was their god, and before the shrine of the titillating, the ornamental and the suave, womankind prostrated herself, pouring out homage and gold—the latter provided by patient fathers and husbands. It was a carnage, a musical rout, and a superior warrior like Liszt trailed thousands of scalps after his chariots during triumphal tours. The mediæval dancing manias were as nothing when compared with the hysteria evoked by the new Pied Piper of Hungary. Chopin never had the physique, and Mendelssohn was too moral, to copy Liszt. These two men wrote lovely music, feminine music; while down in Vienna a young man named Schubert died, after writing incomparable songs and much beautiful piano music. His sonatas are not so feminine in texture as his musical Moments, impromptus and dances. This music is made for woman, with its intimate, tender feeling, its loose and variegated structure. Von Weber composed chivalric sonatas and that marvellous epitome of the dance, The Invitation. Schumann, broken in fingers through too curious experimentings, dreamed twilight music, which his gifted wife Clara interpreted to an incredulous world.

Since then the rest is history. Women virtuosi are as plentiful as the shining sands, beginning with Clara Schumann and ending with the prodigy of yesterday. Such thunderers as Sophie Menter and Teresa Carreño, women of iron will and great muscular power, and a subtle interpreter like Annette Essipoff, challenge men in their own sphere, and relatively hold their own. I say relatively; and now comes into view a serious question. It is this: Should women essay the music of all composers? The answer is in the affirmative, for who shall assert that a severe course of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms may result in aught else but good. But do women interpret all composers with equal success? The answer is here decidedly a negative one. Though I have heard Menter play Liszt’s rhapsodies with overwhelming brilliancy, though I have listened to Carreño in amazement as she crashed out Chopin’s F sharp minor polonaise on her Steinway, yet I know that the brawn and brain of this pair are exceptional. Half a dozen such do not appear during a century. Therefore big tonal effects, called orchestral by the critics, are usually not to be found in the performances of women. For that reason I enjoy the playing of women who are genuinely feminine in their style—Essipoff or Madame Zeisler. Smoothness, neatness, delicacy, brilliancy, and a certain grace are common enough. The average woman pianist is a hard student, and strives to achieve that which men easily accomplish. As a rule she has finger facility, a plentiful lack of rhythm, and no particular interpretative power—exactly the qualities of the average male pianist. When Maud Powell plays Bach or Beethoven on her violin we are amazed and say, “Why, this is virile!” When Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler delivers the scherzo from the Litolff concerto, we are surprised—not at her swiftness, ease, or delicacy, but at her nervous force and bravura—these latter being selfishly annexed by men as eminently masculine attributes. Are they? Certain feminine Wagner singers possess them, and in opera they are accepted as a matter of course. A genuine paradox, is it not?

The muscular conformation of a woman’s arm militates against her throwing a stone as far as a man; it also operates adversely in modern piano-playing, where the triceps muscles are a necessity for a broad, sonorous tone. I have considered the pros and cons of emotional intensity in writing of woman as a Chopin player, and shall not again traverse that barren and ungrateful region. The intellect remains to be discussed. Are women intellectual in the interpretative sense? Yes. Without hesitation I answer this question, for music, apart from the creative side, is a feminine art, and one in which woman’s intuitions lead her many leagues toward success. That women have as yet—you mark my use of a future contingency!—that women have as yet exhibited powers of interpretation as keen, as original, or even on a par with men, I am not prepared to say. Illuminative in Bach or Beethoven they are not, though delightfully poetic in Schumann and Chopin. I have never heard a woman play the Hammer-Klavier Sonata, opus 106, of Beethoven with force, lucidity, or imaginative lift.

_Enfin_: The lesson of the years seems to be that women can play anything written for the piano, and play it well. In all the music of the eighteenth century, in the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven, in Hummel, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, some of Schumann, some of Chopin, a goodly portion of Liszt, all of Field, Heller, Hiller, Moszkowski, Grieg, Scharwenka, and a moiety of Brahms,—all these composers have been essayed with success. Bach’s Well-tempered Clavichord should be the bread and butter of a woman’s musical _menu_; it should begin and end her day. One may quote Balzac again—that dear Princesse de Cadignan, sometimes called Madame la Duchesse Maufrigneuse, “Women know how to give to their words a peculiar saintliness; they communicate to them I know not what of vibration, which extends the sense of their ideas and lends them profundity; if later, their charmed auditor no longer recalls what they have said, the object has been completely attained, which is the proper quality of eloquence.” And of this species of eloquence is a woman’s playing of Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. It is often charming; but is it ever great, spiritual, moving art?

The woman question—is it not one to be shunned? I mean the question, not the theme itself, though one may recommend Laura Marholm’s volumes. Frau Marholm is a Scandinavian, and Northern women must have been bound with iron social gyves, to judge by the quality of their protestant literature. Ibsen, Björnson, even Strindberg—whose erratic pendulum swings to the other extreme—are full of the heady polemics of sex. Sex—why, one sickens of the subject after reading problem plays and novels. To all American women between the ages of eighteen and eighty I say study Laura Marholm’s Studies in the Psychology of Woman. The dissatisfied ones, those who really believe all they read, may perhaps realize how much better off is The Unquiet Sex—this capital phrase is of Helen Watterson Moody’s coining—in America. Little wonder that there is a woman movement in Europe. For its psychology read Marholm. Best of all, here is a woman telling us secrets, secrets not to be captured by men watchful of the Sphinx that Defies. And it is a sad corrective for masculine presumption, masculine vanity. _We_ are only tolerated. Some of us have known that for years; here it is elevated to the dignity of a psychological system. These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant described them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that are mortifyingly candid, excusing us if they love us, but after all only _tolerating us_, allowing the lords of creation to kneel in humble attitudes at the shrine and rewarded at the end by—toleration. And if this is the case on the Continent, where the equality of women is as yet a half-hatched idea, how is it in America, where she is queen, queen from kitchen to palace? I think Mrs. Marholm herself would be amazed, and mayhap after five years’ residence here would write a book about the Wrongs of Man. Her Six Famous Women betrays the writer’s keenness of vision, the Studies reveal breadth of idea and judgments. She does not belong to the “Shrieking Sisterhood.” She is a woman, a defender of home and family. I assure you I enjoyed her book far better than Zola’s Fecondité—that most miraculously dull and moral tract. Tolstoy is the remote parent of both books, though Marholm has her own feminine point of attack. No man may hope to understand women as does a woman. It was Zangwill, I think, who said that all women writers are of value—do they not tell us the secrets of their sex? This is hardly polite, but it is true. When the “messages” of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté have grown stale from usage—all truths breed rust after a time—their unconscious self-portraitures will preserve them from those giant moths, the critics.

The Marholm knows better than any envious male the limitations of woman as artist, politician, and writer. In the admirable study of Mrs. Besant she writes: “She has always possessed the wholly feminine capacity of assimilating the most varied and incompatible mental food, without disturbance or indigestion, and of giving it forth with a certain accuracy; her brain was like a photographic plate upon which the exposed picture is clearly and mechanically printed. These characteristics, the quick perception and exact repetition, are frequently praised by professors who examine feminine students, and many have declared that in eagerness for knowledge and ability to acquire it, women excel men. It is undeniable that in these characteristics they excel most men; it would be a pity if most men excelled them, for these characteristics rest upon the lesser power and capacity for original thought, independent selection, and deeper affinity to the appropriate idea; they depend upon a mechanical instead of an organic process.”

This is not a pleasing paragraph, but it shows the writer’s style of argument. She girds with something approaching violence at the milk-and-water men of the day, declaring that Woman’s Emancipation is the result of some deficiency in modern manhood. However, read Marholm and draw your own pictures of what women should or should not be. A charming woman told me that she had asked Jean de Reszké if he cared to sing Romeo or Tristan with any particular singer.

“I always sing to my ideal woman,” replied the artist. And I fancy that we all pursue that illuding composite. It is Woman who composes all the great music, paints all the great pictures, writes all the great poems—Woman the inspirer of all art! Is _She_, after all, our coast of Bohemia? Then mankind, from the torrid time of undifferentiated protozoa, has been frantically striving to acquire a footing upon that fascinating territory.

IX

AFTER WAGNER—WHAT?

I

THE CAPRICE OF THE MUSICAL CAT

Few critics are prophets honored in their own musical country, and but one or two in a generation possess _prévoyance_ enough to predict the way the musical cat will jump. The antics of that exotic feline since the day Richard Wagner pinched its tail and bade it leap through the large and rather gaudy hoop of the music-drama, have been mystifying and extraordinary. It coquetted with Brahms, it visited Italy, and for a time took up its abode in the house of Grieg.

In a word, caprice of a deep-seated order has marked the progress of music during the past half-century. I am not speaking now of America, but of the world at large. Chopin died in 1849, Schumann in 1856; with them were buried the ideals that lit the lantern of the romantic school. It has flickered on, this sweet, phosphorescent signal of revolt, but chiefly in the music of imitators. The strong light of the torch first firmly held by Bach and passed on by men like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms was not the sort desired of the dreamers. For them the twilight and the strange-winged creatures bred in the twilight; the classical composers—who were romantics in their time—loved too much the luminary of day, and had few favors for melancholy and moonshine.

Then came Richard Wagner, revolutionist, genius by the grace of God, and a marvellous moulder of other men’s ideas. We are no longer alarmed by the senile warnings of the extreme right camp; as for the crazy boasts and affirmations of the musical romantics, we who know our Wagner smile at the godlike things claimed for him. He had genius and his music is genuine; but it is music for the theatre, for the glow of the footlights; rhetorical music is it, and it ever strives for effect. That this cannot be music to touch the tall stars of Bach and Beethoven we know; yet why compare the two methods when they strive for such other and various things? Wagner arrogated everything to his music-dramas; this he had to do or else be left lonely, bawling his wares to unsympathetic listeners in the market-place of art. But he did not hesitate to invade its most sacrosanct precincts to vend his musical merchandise. And we must not criticise him for this—such auctioneering in his case was absolutely necessary.

Wagner caught up into a mighty synthesis all the loose threads of romanticism, all the widely-severed strands of opera. He studied Bach and Beethoven, and utilized the polyphony of the one, the symphonic orchestra of the other; then, knowing that opera as opera on Rossinian lines had reached its apogee, and that Mozart and Gluck contained in solution the very combinations he needed, he, like the audacious alchemist, the cunning Cagliostro that he was, made a composite that at first smacked of German and then of Italian. He ran through his Rienzi, Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser days, strenuously testing his originality the meanwhile; and when the time had arrived—in his case late in life—he calmly threw overboard old formulas and served us the Ring and the rest of his masterpieces. It was the most deliberate chase after and assumption of genius the world had ever witnessed; and, strange as it seems, the wings that carried Wagner, Icarus-wise, to the vistas of the sun showed no weaknesses, no threatened and precipitous meltings. To change the figure: We know that this conscious composer perfected his style with other men’s ideas; he beat, bruised, battered into shape a method of his own, strong, individual, and all-sufficing for his purpose. He knew that certain subjects could stand operatic treatment, and that your opera orchestra must not be a big guitar, nor yet as symphonic as Beethoven’s. With the prescience of genius he helped himself to precisely the material he wanted. How well he knew his needs we all realize when we listen to Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde.

George Bernard Shaw, in a long since vanished and brilliant essay, held that “Wagner, like most artists who have great intellectual power, was dominated in the technical work of his gigantic scores by so strong a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, and syntax that, when in the course of time his melody and harmony become perfectly familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel as a composer whose extreme regularity of procedure must make his work appear dry to those who cannot catch his dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having no sense of that inspiration, had said: ‘This fellow, whom you all imagine to be the creator of a new heaven and a new earth in music out of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an arrant pedant and formalist,’ I should have pricked up my ears and listened to him with some curiosity, knowing how good a case a really keen technical critic could make out for that view.”

Wagner was the last of the great romantics; he closed a period, did not begin one. It is the behavior of the musical cat—to resume our illustration—since Wagner’s death that is so puzzling to the prophets. The sword and the cloak, the midnight alarums and excursions sentimental, occupied for long the foreground; but music discarded adventure when adventure was reëntering the land of letters in the person of Robert Louis Stevenson,—Stevenson who wore his panache so bravely in the very presence of Émile Zola and other evangelists of the drab in fiction. A curious return to soberer ideals of form was led by Johannes Brahms. I may add that this leadership was unsought, indeed was hardly apprehended, by the composer. A more unpromising figure for a musical Messiah would have been difficult to find. Wagner, a brilliant, disputatious, magnetic man, waged a personal propaganda; Brahms, far from being the sympathetic, cultured man of the world that Wagner was, lived quietly and thought highly. His were Wordsworthian ideals; he abhorred the world, the flesh, and the devil,—this last person being incarnate for him in the marriage of music with the drama. Yet his music is alive to-day; alive with a promise and a potency that well-nigh urge me to fatidical utterance, so sane is it, so noble in contrast, so richly fruitful in treatment. A sympathetic writer he is, and also a man who deals largely in the humanities of his art. Learned beyond the dreams of Wagner, Brahms buried his counterpoint in roses, set it to blooming in the Old-World gardens of Germany; decked his science with the sweet, mad tunes of Hungary, withal remaining a Teuton, and one in the direct line of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.

And yet Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind at times, and you hear the rustling of wings,—wings of great, terrifying monsters, hippogriffs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, often spectral; yet his songs have the homely lyric fervor and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, I have been amazed at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata, and was stirred by the moonlight tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted, and cry, “Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious chrism our thirsty eyelids!”

Brahms is an inexorable form maker. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colorist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are unsought. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon an enormous rhythmic versatility and a strenuousness of ideation. Ideas—noble, profundity-embracing ideas—he has. They are not in the smart, epigrammatic, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms’s melodies are world typical, not cabined and confined to his native soil. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politeness of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his intermezzi! There he catches the tender sigh of childhood, or the faint intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age!

He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrene depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed in the company of these giants.

Now comes another enigmatic tangent of music, the heavenly maid. The seed planted by Berlioz and carefully husbanded by Liszt has come to a pretty and a considerable harvest. Of Liszt, whose revolutionary music the world has not yet recognized, this is not the time to write. Only volumes can do justice to his rare genius as a man, artist, and composer. I spoke of the death of Chopin and Schumann stifling the aspirations of the romantics; nothing ever dies, and by an elliptical route there has returned to us something of the fire and fury-signifying passion of these same romantics. All this we find in the music of Peter Tschaïkowsky, all this and more. Tschaïkowsky, artistically, is another descendant of Liszt and Berlioz, with a superadded Slavic color—or, shall I say flavor? Tschaïkowsky deliberately, though without malice, abandoned the old symphonic form. Ravished by what Henry James calls the “scenic idea,” though without compelling talent for the theatre, he poured into the elastic and anonymous mould of the symphonic poem passion and poetry. A poetic dramatist, he selected as typical motives Hamlet, Francesca da Rimini, Romeo and Juliet, Don Juan, Jeanne d’Arc, and Manfred; his six symphonies are romantic suites, resplendent with the pomp and color of an imagination saturated in romanticism. His fierce Cossack temperament and mingling of realistic, sensuous savagery and Malo-Russian mysticism set him apart among composers. As musical as Wagner or Brahms, he lacks the great central, intellectual grip of these two masters. He never tested his genius with fundamental brainwork. But if we wish a picture of musical psychological life of the latter half of this century, it is to Tschaïkowsky that we must go.

Rubinstein I do not consider a factor in the musical strife. He was an ardent upholder of both camps, and, being a German-Russian and a Russian-German Jew and Lutheran, his eclecticism proved his undoing. Something of the same sort may be said of Saint-Saëns, the clever Frenchman. Grieg built his nest overlooking Norwegian fjords, and built it of bright colored bits of Schumann and Chopin. He is the bird with the one sweet, albeit monotonous note. He does not count seriously. Neither does Dvořák, of Bohemia, who, despite his intimate mastery of orchestral color, has never said anything particularly novel or profound. Smetana is his superior at every point. Eugen d’Albert treads with care the larger footprints of Brahms; and Goldmark, a very Makart in his prodigal amazements of color, has contributed a few canvases to the gallery. But Germany and Austria, with one exception, are dead. I do not count Bruckner; he patterned after Wagner too closely. Italy, with the exception of Boïto, is as bare of big young talent as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. France has Massenet, Bruneau, Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Vincent d’Indy, Fauré, Charpentier, Lalo—!

We have heard little except a string quartet of Claude Debussy’s in New York. The music to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande is so absolutely wedded to the play, so incidental in the true sense of a much-abused word, that as absolute music it is unthinkable. Hearing it you set the composer down as lacking ear. But Richard Strauss _via_ the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz has set the pace for the cacophonists. Debussy, notwithstanding his unquestionable musicianship, is obviously a “literary” composer. That is to say, his brain must first be excited by the contemplation of a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, a picture, a stirring episode in a novel. But why cavil whether the initial impulse for his music be the need of money or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa! A composer who can set Mallarmé’s difficult L’Après Midi, and the more recondite poems of Baudelaire, need not be daunted by criticism as to his methods of work. Take this Pelléas music for example; it is a perfect specimen of decomposition. The musical phrase is dislocated; the rhythms are decomposed, the harmonic structure is pulled to pieces, melts before our eyes—or ears; is resolved into its constituent parts. And his themes are often developed in opposition to all laws of musical syntax. In Debussy’s peculiar idiom there seems to be no normal sequence—I say seems, for it is simply because our ears are not accustomed to the novel progressions and apparent forced conjunctions of harmonies and thematic fragments. Tonalities are vague, even violently unnatural. The introduction to the forest scene, where Golaud discovers Mélisande is of a singular sweetness. The composer has caught, without anxious preoccupation, the exact note of Maeterlinck, and he never misses the note throughout the opera. As it is impossible to divorce music and text,—Debussy seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self,—so it is a useless task to point out the beauties, the ugliness, the characteristic qualities of the score. In the piano partition nothing may be gleaned of its poetic fervor, its bold landscape painting, its psychologic penetration. There are some isolated spots where the orchestra soliloquizes, though few. It is the complete enveloping of Maeterlinck’s strangely beautiful play with a musical atmosphere that wins the attention. It is easy to conceive of the play apart from the music, but not of the music as a separate entity.

Debussy, then, has a musical idiom of his own. He is a stylist and an impressionist. There are purples on his palette—no blacks. If the Western world ever adopted Eastern tonalities, Claude Debussy would be the one composer who would manage its system, with its quarter-tones and split quarters. The man seems a wraith from the East; his music was heard long ago in the hill temples of Borneo, was made as a symphony to welcome the head-hunters with their ghastly spoils of war! Debussy’s future should be viewed with suspicion from all the critical watch-towers.

In Belgium there are major talents such as Peter Benoit, Gilson, Edgar Tinel, Jan Blockx, Lekeu, Van der Stucken—the last named was one of the first among the young Belgians to compose tone-poems.

Charles Martin Loeffler is an Alsatian with French blood in his artistic veins. He belongs by affinity to the Belgian group. His symphonic poem is called The Death of Tintagiles after the mysterious and horrible drama of Maurice Maeterlinck—whose plays, despite their exquisite literary quality, act better than they read. Mr. Loeffler’s poem was first produced in Boston under Emil Paur’s direction, January 8, 1898. Then there were two violas d’amore employed in the obligato, perhaps symbolizing the sobbing voices of Tintagiles and Ygraine. Since that performance—when Messrs. Kneisel and Loeffler played the violas—the composer has dispensed with one of these quaint instruments, has remodelled the score and has also re-orchestrated it.

Thoroughly subjective as must ever be the highest type of the symphonic poem, The Death of Tintagiles is rather a series of shifting mood-pictures than an attempt to portray the drama too objectively. One feels the horrid suspense of the storm—it is a sinister night!—and what went on behind closed doors in that gloomy castle not far from the sonorous breakers on the beach. There is soul strife, but it is muted. Life here is a tragedy too deep for blood or tears, and the silence—the Loeffler orchestra can suggest hideous and profound silence when playing fortissimo—has the true Maeterlinckian quality.

And then Ygraine’s agony, as she searches for her murdered brother, Tintagiles,—“I have come up, come up high, countless steps between high, pitiless walls,”—can be poignantly felt. Those four harsh knocks, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, must surely indicate the tragedy embouched in hidden spaces.

The music, considered as music, is very beautiful. It easily ranks its composer among the stronger of the modern men. Loeffler is primarily a painter, and then a poet. He seldom sounds the big heroic note; he is too subtle, and a despiser of the easily compassed. His orchestral prose is rather the prose of Walter Pater than the prose of—say, Macaulay or Meyerbeer. Despising the cheap and grandiose, he has formulated a style that is sometimes “precious” in its intensity and avoidance of the phrase banal. A colorist, his tints begin where other men’s leave off; and his palette is richer than the rainbow’s. In general “tone” he hovers between the modern Russians and Richard Strauss.

In theme he is Loeffler. The Death of Tintagiles has enclosed within it much lacerating emotion, many new color perspectives, many harmonic devices, and withal a human, though somewhat sublimated human, quality which endears the music at the first hearing.

Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares, recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective; and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric” music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic.

Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic; Brahms leisurely breasting the turbid billows of this maelstrom and speaking in golden tones the doctrine of art for art’s sake; and, finally, Richard Strauss, a _Übermensch_ himself, seeking with furious and rhythmic gestures to divert from the theatre the art he loves—who shall say whither all this will lead? After Wagner—music for music’s own symphonic sake, and not for impossible librettos, acting-singers, and scene-painters.

II

WAGNER AND THE FRENCH

Stendhal—Henry Beyle—once wrote:—

“Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.”

That the reaction from a brutal realism, a minute photography of nasty details, would come in Parisian art was a foregone conclusion to any acute observer of the history of literature, art, and music since Goethe’s imperial mind set the fashion of things in the early years of the last century. The splendor of Théophile Gautier’s famous “gilet rouge,”—he declared that it was a pink doublet,—which graced the memorable days of the first violent representations of Ernani, was naught but a scarlet protest against the frozen classicism of Cherubini the composer, the painters Ingres and David, and the worship of writers like Boileau, Racine, and Malherbe. A wild rush toward romanticism was inevitable after the colorless elegiacs of Lamartine. And the grand old man at Weimar, in the twilight of his glorious career, summed up the whole movement of 1830 by saying:—“They all come from Châteaubriand.”

But Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Delacroix, Chopin, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Heinrich Heine, and later, Charles Baudelaire, in fact all that brilliant coterie which was the nucleus of the artistic rebellion, strove at first independently, with little knowledge of the others’ doings. They possibly came from Châteaubriand, whose Genius of Christianity was but a return to Middle Age ideals: but Walter Scott, with his great romantic historical novels, and Lord Byron, with his glowing, passionate verse, were the true progenitors of the reaction against stiff scholasticism; and their influence even stirred phlegmatic Germany, with its Gallic lacquer, to new and bolder utterances. Heinrich Heine, an exile who spoke of himself as a “German swallow who had built a nest in the periwig of M. Voltaire,” threw himself into the fray with pen dipped in sparkling vitriol and did doughty deeds for the cause.

Frédéric Chopin, despite the limited field of a piano keyboard, was the unconscious centre of all the hazy, purple dreams, drifting ideals, and perfumed sprays of thought that to-day we call romanticism. As the hub of that vast wheel of poesy and gorgeous imaginings, he absorbed the spirit of the time and shot out radiant spokes, which lived after the whole romantic school became a faded flower, a pallid ghost of the yesteryear. Hugo flamed across the historical canvas like a painted scarlet meteor; Berlioz’s mad talent, expressed by his symbolical coloring in orchestration—color carried to insanity pitch—was a lesser musical Hugo. Delacroix, with his brush dipped in the burning sun, painted vertigoes of color and audacities of conception. All was turbulent exaggeration, all was keyed above the normal pitch of life, and in the midst the still, small voice of Chopin could be heard.

The end had come to all monstrous growths of the romantic epoch in French art—be it remembered that earlier the movement was equally as strong in Germany, beginning with Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Schubert, Schumann, and Jean Paul Richter; the revolution of 1848 shattered the dream of the mad republicans of art. That sphinx-like nonentity, the third Napoleon, mounted the imperial tribune, and the Cerberus of Realism barked its first hoarse bark. For a time this phantasmagoria dominated Parisian art and letters.

All this was typical of cynicism, unbelief; technical perfection was carried to heights undreamed of, and the outcome of it all was Émile Zola. French painting was realized in the miniature manner of Meissonier, or later in the marvellous brutalities of Degas. Two geniuses who attempted to stem the tide that ran so swiftly died untimely deaths: Georges Bizet, the creator of Carmen, and Henri Regnault, who painted the Moorish Execution in the Luxembourg. The last-named perished before Bougival in 1871, done to death by a spent Prussian bullet. These two remarkable men, with possibly the addition of Fortuny, the Spanish virtuoso of arabesques in color, might have changed history if they had lived. But the fates willed it otherwise, and realism became the shibboleth.

Even that ardent young group, the Parnassians, as they called themselves, were beguiled into this quagmire of folly and half-truths. La Terre marked the lowest depths of the bog, and again a reaction began. Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, the graceful Banville (a belated romanticist), Coppée, Puvis de Chavannes; the impressionists, Monet, Manet, Rodin, the sculptor; the poets, René Ghil, Catulle Mendès, Verlaine, ill-fated Albert Glatigny, Anatole France, unhappy de Maupassant, and our own countrymen, Stuart Merrill and Vielé-Griffin began steering for other waters. Symbolism, Buddhism, every _ism_ imaginable, have been at the rudder since then. Synthetic subtlety in art was the watchword of the party of new ideas, and a renaissance of the arts seemed to be at hand. For this movement, which agitated artistic Paris, the younger and fierier spirits, musicians, painters, actors, poets, and sculptors, banded, and, emulative of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuthian ideal, began the fabrication of a new art, or rather the synthesis of all arts, which seemed the wildest and most extravagant dream ever conceived by a half-dozen frenzied brains.

The history of art moves in cycles, and each cycle carries with it a residuum of the last. Richard Wagner attempted on a gigantic scale a synthesis of the arts. He wished to condense, concentrate, epitomize in his music-drama the arts of mimicry or pantomime, elocution, singing, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and instrumental music. He literally levied tribute on two of the senses and welded them into an ensemble, in which every shade of emotion, particularly the heroic and the tender, was depicted. But Wagner’s genius is, after all, Teutonic in its diffusiveness. He could not escape his national environment.

“Fifteen years ago,” said Paul Bourget, “poetry’s ambition was in picturesqueness and execution to rival painting. To-day it models itself on music. It is preoccupied with effects of mystery, of shadow, of the intangible. This is strikingly illustrated in the verse of Verlaine, whose poetic creed I have given you before in the ‘O la nuance, seule fiance, Le rêve au rêve et la flute au cor.’” These new men are musicians in words. They follow Wagner; above all are they descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, who has literally deflected the mighty wave of French literature into his neglected channel. Ah, if we but appreciated Poe as do our Gallic brethren! Mallarmé and Gustav Kahn produce verbal effects akin to music, with its melancholy mystery.

It is Richard Wagner who has done much of all this, preceded by Poe. Symbolism, a soft green star, is but a pin-prick in the inverted bowl of the night, but it sings like flame in thin glass. Its song is as beautiful as the twilights of Chopin’s garden, or as the wavings of the trees in Wagner’s luminous forest. Slowly but resistlessly, and despite himself,—for Wagner never bridled his tongue where the French were concerned,—this positive force conquered France, and penetrated, not alone the musical world, but to the world of letters, of moral ideas. It is nothing short of a miracle. The revolt all along the line, as manifested by the impressionists in painting, who preferred to use their eyes and see an infinity of tintings in nature, undreamed of by the painters of a generation ago; the poets and littérateurs who formed the new group called The Companions of the New Life, whose aspirations are for the ideal of morality, justice; sculptors like Marc Antokolsky and Auguste Rodin, who sought to hew great ideas from the rude rock, instead of carving lascivious prettiness,—all these new spirits, I say, but fell in with the vast revolution instituted by Richard Wagner. In the region of moral ideas Melchior de Vogüé, Ernest Lavisse, and Paul Desjardins are combating the artistic indifferentism and black despair of the school of materialists, realists, and the rest. A new idea in France germinates as in no other country on the globe, because it finds congenial soil somewhere. From an idea to a school is but a short step, hence the rapidity of the Wagner worship after it once took root.

III

ISOLDE AND TRISTAN

You notice the inversion! Wagner’s music-drama primarily concerns the woman; she is the protagonist, not Tristan. Even in Act III, where this lover of lovers lies awaiting Isolde and death, it is her psychology which most concerns the composer. So I call it Isolde and Tristan—the subjugation of man by woman.

It was Wagner himself who confessed that he had thrown overboard his theories while penning this marvellous score. In it the music stifles the action. It is the very flowering of the Wagnerian genius; his best self, his fantasy, his wonderful power of making music articulate, are there. And from the tiny acorn in the prelude grows the mighty oak of the symphonic drama.

There is something primal, something of the rankness of nature, of life’s odor and hum, and life’s fierce passions in this music—music before which all other pictures of love made by poet, painter, and composer pale. It is one of the most complex scores in existence; yet it is built upon but one musical motive. Because of its epical quality Tristan and Isolde may be compared to the works of the Greek dramatists, to the Divine Comedy, to Hamlet, and to Faust.

Its weltering symphonic mass is as the surge and thunder of tropical seas. It seems almost incomprehensible for a single human brain to have conceived and carried to fruition such a magnificent composition. In it are the pains, pleasures, and consoling philosophies of life. Hamlet and Faust are its spiritual brethren. The doubting, brooding spirit of these two dreamers are united to the pessimistic, knightly nature of Tristan. He is human, all too human; as Nietzsche phrased it—but he is also the human glorified.

He has grafted upon his mediæval soul the modern spirit, which we are pleased to believe Schopenhauer typified in his profoundly pessimistic philosophy. But this spirit is as old as Himalaya’s hills. Saka-Munyi sang of the pains of love centuries ago; and the bliss-stricken pair, Tristan and Isolde, dive down to death, groping as they sink, for the problems of life, love, and mortality. Death and Love is the eternal dualism chanted by Wagner in this drama. And has the theme ever been chanted so enthrallingly?