Chapter VII: Act II: does he escape the lack of variety. For instance, in Act (2)

In an earlier letter he speaks of Russia “with its vast and sombre countenance, motionless and veiled like the sphinx of Œdipus. She will swallow me up later on. I seem to see her large, inert gaze fixed upon me, with its dreary scrutiny appropriate to eyes of stone. Never mind, sphinx, I shall return to thee; and thou mayest devour me at thine ease, if I do not guess thy riddle! Meanwhile, leave me in peace a little longer; I shall return to thy steppes.” All his life passionately preoccupied with Russia, Turgénieff had the bitter misfortune of being discredited by his countrymen. Never a bard and prophet like Tolstoy, he nevertheless loved Russia and saw her weaknesses with as keen an eye as the other writer. Accused of an ultra-cosmopolitanism, wofully misunderstood, this great man went to his grave sorrowing because young Russia, the extreme left, refused him. If he was solicitous in advancing the names of Flaubert, Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and de Maupassant, his zeal for rising talent in his native land led him to extremes. Halperine-Kaminsky and Mr. James say that he had always in tow some wonderful Russian genius, poet, painter, musician, sculptor, or nondescript, who was about to revolutionize art. In a month he was hot on the trail of a new one, and his pains were usually rewarded by ineptitude or ingratitude. To paint him as an indifferent patriot, an “absentee” landlord,—his behavior to his tenants was ridiculously tender,—is an injustice, as unjust as the reception given Tschaïkowsky at the beginning of his career by certain of his contemporaries.

The friendship of Turgénieff and Flaubert was a beautiful episode in the history of two literatures. Alphonse Daudet spoke of it: “It was George Sand who married them. The boastful, rebellious, quixotic Flaubert, with a voice like a guard’s trumpeter, with his penetrating, ironical outlook, and the gait of a conquering Norman, was undoubtedly the masculine half of this marriage of souls; but who, in that other colossal being, with his flaxen brows, his great unmodelled face, would have discovered the woman, that woman of over-accentuated refinement whom Turgénieff has painted in his books, that nervous, languid, passionate Russian, torpid as an Oriental, tragic as a blind force in revolt? So true is it in the tumult of the great human factory, souls often get into the wrong covering—masculine souls into feminine bodies, feminine souls into cyclopean frames.”

These were the days of the “Dinners of the Hissed Authors,” when Taine, Catulle Mendès, de Heredia, Paul Alexis, Leon Hennique, Philippe Burty, Leon Cladel, Huysmans, Zola, Turgénieff, the de Goncourts, Flaubert, and de Maupassant gathered monthly and defined new literary horizons. There was plenty of wit, satire, enthusiasm, dreams, and theorizing.

Guy de Maupassant relates that “Turgénieff used to bury himself in an arm chair and talk slowly in a gentle voice, rather weak and hesitating, yet giving to things he said an extraordinary charm and interest. Flaubert would listen to him with religious reverence, fixing his wide blue eyes, with their restless pupils, upon his friend’s fine face, and answering in his sonorous voice, which came like a clarion blast from under that veteran Gaul’s mustache of his. Their conversation rarely touched upon the current affairs of life, seldom wandered away from literary topics or literary history. Turgénieff would often come laden with foreign books, and would translate fluently poems by Goethe, Poushkin, or Swinburne.” He knew English; he knew Italian, German, and French. He was crazy over hunting—read his Memoirs of a Sportsman, miniature masterpieces—and crossed the Channel after good game in England.

“Life seems to grow over our heads like grass,” is a phrase of his that is pinned to my memory. It was written to Flaubert, “the dear old boy,” who might have profited by the other’s advice to cast theory to the winds and “do” something “passionate, torrid, glowing.” And yet as Henri Taine says, Madame Bovary is the greatest literary performance of the century. Turgénieff did not always follow his own preaching; “my publisher keeps circling around me like an eagle screaming for _something_,” he writes. Mr. James in a delicately humorous page wonders when Turgénieff found time to work. In Paris he was always at _déjeuner_—that gout of his was not acquired on wind. It was in Russia, where he went to bathe himself, as he puts it, that he took to long spells of toil. Turgénieff was most painstaking in the matter of technical references. He calls Flaubert’s attention to an error in L’Education Sentimentale. Madame Arnoux is made to sing very high notes, though she is a contralto. This was not overlooked by Turgénieff, who, as a friend of Madame Viardot, naturally enough heard much good singing in her _salon_. The mistake is all the more curious because made by Flaubert, one of the most conscientious men in literature. In a burst, a most lovable one, the Russian bids Flaubert, who was either in the cellar or celestial spaces, “Cheer up! After all you are Flaubert.” He writes from London, during the Franco-Prussian War, “We have hard times to go through, we who are born onlookers.”

Rich as he was, but a charitable spendthrift, Turgénieff was not sorry to inherit from his brother a legacy of 250,000 francs. It is a notion of mine that the richer a novelist the better his art. Poverty does not agree with certain geniuses. With composers who masquerade in the theatres money is a necessity. Without it their art never blows to a blossoming. Look at Wagner, at Gluck, for example, and then on the other hand consider that wretched, grimy Beethoven in mean Vienna lodgings, yelling as he composed in his deaf estate, the water he spilt slowly filtering through the crazy seams of a crazy man’s floor! He lived in an ideal land, where clean napery and the pliant spine of the time-server were but encumbrances. Not so the novel maker, the architect of prose philosophies like Schopenhauer’s and Flaubert’s. Leisure, the leisure that feeds on a competence, is a necessity for these latter. Schopenhauer knew it, and, practical man, urged all philosophers to cultivate the wherewithal for leisure—money; and Goethe in the last book of Wilhelm Meister sets forth most admirably his idea of an artist’s abode. Dickens and Thackeray, a great genius, a great artist, were forced to drive their pens for bread and cheese. Both fell short of the perfection achieved by Flaubert, Turgénieff, and Tolstoy, all three very wealthy men and tardy producers. The rule holds good for Balzac. The haste that kills all art was not thrust upon the other three by hunger, and we are the richer. Your lyric poet, your symphonist, fattens spiritually on a lean life, but their brethren should have a bank account.

Turgénieff did not care much for Sarah Bernhardt:—

I could not know that my opinion on Sarah Bernhardt would become
public property, and I am very sorry for it. But I am not in the
habit of withdrawing my opinions, even when I have expressed them
in a private and friendly conversation, and they are made public
against my will. Yes, I consider M. A——’s criticism of her quite
true and just. This woman is clever and skilful; she has her
business at her fingers’ ends, is gifted with a charming voice and
educated in a good school; but she has nothing natural about her,
no artistic temperament whatever, and she tries to make up for
this by Parisian license. She is eaten through and through with
_chic_, _réclame_, and pose. She is monotonous, cold, and dry; in
short, without a single spark of talent in the highest sense of
the word. Her gait is that of a hen; she has no play of features;
the movements of her hands are purposely angular in order to be
piquant; the whole thing reeks of the boulevards, of Figaro, and
patchouli. You see that, to my mind, M. A—— has been even too
lenient. You quote Zola as an authority, although you always rebel
against all authorities, so you must allow me to quote Augier, who
once said to me: “Cette femme n’a aucun talent; on dit d’elle que
c’est un paquet de nerfs—c’est un paquet de ficelles.” But, you
will ask, Why then such a world-wide reputation? What do I care?
I only speak my own feelings, and I am glad to find somebody who
supports my view.

But these _ficelles_ are artistic to-day. Doubtless Turgénieff would have been one of the first to recognize the unassuming realistic talents of Duse. There is nothing more touching than his adjuration to Tolstoy to forsake his half-cracked philosophy and return to literature:—

VERY DEAR LEON NIKOLAIEVITCH: It is a long time since I wrote
to you. I was then, and I am now, on my deathbed. I cannot
recover; there is no longer the least chance of it. I am writing
to you expressly to tell you how happy I have been to be your
contemporary, and to make you a last urgent prayer. My friend,
return to literary work. This gift has come to you from there
whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could
know that you would listen to my prayer!... My friend, great writer
of our Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know if this letter
reaches you. I clasp you for the last time to my heart—you and all
yours.... I can write no more.... I am tired.

Tolstoy, on his side, could never understand Turgénieff’s fear of death. He said:—

Some people wonder at Socrates who died and did not care to flee
from prison. But is it not better to die consciously in fulfilment
of one’s duty than unexpectedly from some stupid bacteria? And I
have always been surprised that so clever a man as Turgénieff
should bear himself as he did toward death. He was awfully afraid
of death. Is it not even incomprehensible that he was not afraid
to be afraid of death? And that darkness of reason was really
astonishing in him! He and Prince D. D. Urusoff used to discuss
religion, and Turgénieff used to dispute and dispute, and all of
a sudden he would no longer be able to control himself, and would
cover up his ears, and, pretending that he had forgotten Urusoff’s
name, would shout, “I won’t listen any longer to that Prince
Trubetzkoy.”

And Tolstoy mimicked Turgénieff’s voice until one would have
thought the man was there in person.

Turgénieff first met de Maupassant in 1876. “A door opened. A giant came in—a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale.” Thus the younger describes the elder man. M. Halperine-Kaminsky has set at rest the disquieting rumors of certain alleged strictures upon his friends, said to have been made by Turgénieff in letters to Sacher-Masoch. Daudet finally declared that he did not believe their validity. “Turgénieff was not a hypocrite,” he wrote to Kaminsky. The Slavic temperament is difficult of decipherment. Especially difficult was Turgénieff. The shining and clear surfaces of his art covered depths undreamed of by his Parisian friends. Mr. James speaks of his reservations and discriminations and “above all the great back garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” M. Renan voices it better in his speech over the dead body of the great Russian. “Turgénieff,” Mr. James translates it, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others. He was born essentially impersonal. His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race; generations of ancestors lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.” This one, said to be lacking in the core of patriotism, could write:—

“In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on the destiny of my native land, thou alone art my support and my staff. Oh, great, powerful, Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for thee how should not man despair at the sight of what is going on at home? But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to great people.”

Prince Krapotkin in his Autobiography of a Revolutionist thus describes Turgénieff:—

His appearance is well known. Tall, strongly built, the head
covered with soft and thick gray hair, he was certainly beautiful;
his eyes gleamed with intelligence, not devoid of a touch of humor,
and his whole manner testified to that simplicity and absence
of affectation which are characteristic of all the best Russian
writers. His fine head revealed a formidable development of brain
power, and when he died, and Paul Bert, with Paul Reclus (the
surgeon), weighed his brain, it so much surpassed the heaviest
brain then known—that of Cuvier—reaching something over two
thousand grammes, that they would not trust to their scales, but
got new ones, to repeat the weighing. His talk was especially
remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. When he wanted to
develop an idea, he did not resort to arguments, although he was a
master in philosophical discussions; he illustrated his idea by a
scene presented in a form as beautiful as if it had been taken out
of one of his novels.

Of all novel writers of our century, Turgénieff has certainly
attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his prose sounds
to the Russian ear like music—music as deep as that of Beethoven.

Touching on the objections raised by the Nihilists as to the truth of the portrait of Bazaroff, Prince Krapotkin writes:—

The principal novels—the series of Dmitri Rudin, A Nobleman’s Nest,
On the Eve, Fathers and Sons, Smoke, and Virgin Soil—represent
the leading “history making” types of the educated classes of
Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched
with a fulness of philosophical conception and humanitarian
understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in
any other literature. Yet Fathers and Sons—a novel which he
rightly considered his profoundest work—was received by the young
people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared that the
Nihilist Bazaroff was by no means a true representation of his
class; many described him even as a caricature upon nihilism.
This misunderstanding deeply affected Turgénieff, and, although
a reconciliation between him and the young generation took place
later on, at St. Petersburg, after he had written Virgin Soil, the
wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.

He knew from Lavroff that I was a devoted admirer of his writings;
and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to
Antokolsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazaroff.
I frankly replied, “Bazaroff is an admirable painting of the
nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you
did your other heroes!” “No, I loved him, intensely loved him,”
Turgénieff replied, with an unexpected vigor. “Wait; when we get
home I will show you my diary, in which I noted how I wept when I
had ended the novel with Bazaroff’s death.” Turgénieff certainly
loved the intellectual aspect of Bazaroff. He so identified himself
with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary
in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazaroff’s point
of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him.
In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the
history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one
or the other of these characters. “Analysis first of all, and
egotism, and therefore no faith; an egotist cannot even believe in
himself;” so he characterized Hamlet. “Therefore he is a sceptic,
and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote who fights
against windmills, and takes a barber’s plate for the magic helm of
Mambrin (who of us has never made the same mistake?) is a leader
of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking
no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions,
march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which
they alone may see. They search, they fall, but they rise again,
and find it—and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a sceptic,
and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates
it; Evil and deceit are his enemies; and his scepticism is not
indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume
his will.”

These thoughts of Turgénieff give, I think, the true key for
understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several
of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved
Hamlet and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazaroff. He
represented his superiority well, but he could not surround him
with that tender, poetical love to a sick friend which he bestowed
on his heroes when they approached the Hamlet type. It would have
been out of place.

Although suffering from a cancer in the spinal cord, Turgénieff wrote to Alexander III, begging him to give Russia a constitution—this was in the autumn of 1881—but of course to no purpose. The man whose books helped to bring about the emancipation of the serfs died in exile, not even a prophet in the literature of his own country. Yet, because of their poets and prose masters Russia will one day be free, and then Turgénieff’s name will be writ in golden letters as the artist, the patriot.

II

In 1868 he writes from Baden to Ambroise Thomas about a sketch made by Viardot for the libretto of an opera. Nothing, however, came of the matter. But only in the new letters translated by Rosa Newmarch, do we catch Turgénieff’s opinion of the neo-Russian school of music. For the most part it is rather a contemptuous opinion and not pleasant reading for his contemporaries. He hated humbug, and the cry of young Russia, with its hatred of the sources whence it derived its inspiration, angered the writer. In correspondence with Vladimir Vassilievich Stassov we catch glimpses of the tempest brewing in the Slavic _samovar_.

“Have faith in your nationality,” preaches Stassov, “and you shall have works also.” “Russian individuality!” cries the contemptuous voice of Turgénieff. “What humbug, what blindness and crass ignorance, what willful disregard of all that Europe has done!”

He loved Schumann, naturally enough, this Schumann, himself a dreamer of dreams. But Balakirew, Glinka, “a rough diamond,” and the rest he would not have. He believed in the genius of the sculptor Antokolsky and in Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. I wonder if Tschaïkowsky and Turgénieff ever met? Probably they did, although I can find no reference in the correspondence. He listened to Dargomijsky, to Cui, to Moussorgsky, but could find nothing but “Slavonic barbarism” and “undisguised Nihilism.” He loved the playing of Anton Rubinstein, but his operas—! He writes Stassov in 1872:—

You are quite wrong in fancying that I “dislike” Glinka: _he_ was a
very great and original man. But come, now, it is quite different
with the others—with your M. Dargomijsky and his Stone Guest. It
will always remain one of the greatest mysteries of my life how
such intelligent people as you and Cui, for example, can possibly
find in these limp, colorless, feeble,—I beg your pardon,—senile
recitatives, interwoven now and then with a few howls, to lend
color and imagination—how you can find in this feeble piping
not only music, but a new, genial, and epoch-making music. Can
it be unconscious patriotism, I wonder? I confess that, except
a sacrilegious attempt on one of Poushkin’s best poems, I find
nothing in it. And now cut off my head, if you like!

Of all these young Russian musicians, only two have decided
talent—Tschaïkowsky and Rimsky-Korsakoff. All the rest, for what
they are worth, may be put in a sack and thrown into the water!
Not, of course, as men—as men they are charming—but as artists. The
Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses XXIX is not more utterly forgotten than
these men will be fifteen or twenty years hence. This is my one
consolation.

This prophecy is accomplished. A new generation has arisen in Russia.

Speaking of some piano pieces of Stcherbatchev he confesses to Stassov:—

Stcherbatchev, as a man, produces an unfavorable impression; but
this need not imply that he is destitute of talent, and I should be
very much obliged to you if you would send me his compositions as
soon as they appear. By the way, you have no ground for fancying
that Rubinstein will treat them with contempt; to me, at least,
he spoke of Stcherbatchev as a very talented young man.... The
day before yesterday I received a parcel containing two copies
of the Zigzags. I have listened with the utmost attention to two
consecutive performances of them, and the interpretation was
excellent. To my great regret I have not been able to discover in
them the merits about which you wrote to me. I cannot say whether
in time original talent will show itself in Stcherbatchev, but
at present I can see nothing in him but the “clamor of captive
thoughts.” All this has been written under the influence of
Schumann’s Carnaval, with a mixture of Liszt’s bizarreries dragged
in without motive. It is altogether lacking in ideas; is tedious,
strained, and wanting in life. The first page pleased me most; the
theme is commonplace, but the working out is interesting.

For this you may chop off my head, if you please. I thank you, all
the same, for your kindness in sending the music....

In short, pray believe that if I find Mozart’s Don Juan a work of
genius, and Dargomijsky’s Don Juan formless and absurd, it is not
because Mozart is an authority and others think so, or because
Dargomijsky is unknown outside his little circle, but simply
because Mozart pleases me, and Dargomijsky does not. Neither do the
Zigzags please me. That is the end of the matter!...

So not for one moment do I doubt the worthlessness (to my mind) of
Maximov’s pictures, I at once placed him in the same category as
your favorites, MM. Dargomijsky, Stcherbatchev, Repin, and _tutti
quanti_; all those half-baked geniuses filled with spiced stuffing
in which you keep detecting the real essence.

He also speaks casually of Saint-Saëns and his wife.

Stassov sums up the matter this way: “Turgénieff, a great writer, was, as might be expected from a Russian, realistic and sincere in his own novels and tales; but in his tastes and views of art his cosmopolitanism made him the enemy of realism and sincerity in others. In such ideas and in such unaccountable prejudices he elected to spend his whole life.”

Which proves that the Russian critic was ultra-Russian in his view of Turgénieff. The new Russians are descendants of Chopin and Schumann and again Chopin. Few have attained to largeness of utterance, perhaps Tschaïkowsky alone. Men like Borodine and Glazanouw over-accent their peculiarities, and much of their music—when it is not sheer imitation—is but rude art. Rimsky-Korsakoff has fallen into the rut of cosmopolitanism, as did Rubinstein, indulging in supersubtleties of orchestral painting, and has never conceived an original idea. Turgénieff was right then, this man who loved Russia, loved her faults and dared to catalogue them in his beautiful novels. His art in its finish reminds one of Chopin’s; there is vaporous melancholy, the vague sighing for days that have vanished and the dumb resignation,—the resignation of the Slav peoples. But his idealism was robuster than Chopin’s and his execution of character hardier. Once at Flaubert’s dinner table the talk turned on love. De Goncourt, I have forgotten which one, told Turgénieff that he was “saturated with femininity.” The other answered:—

With me, neither books nor anything whatever in the world could
take the place of woman. How can I make that plain to you? I
find it is only love which produces a certain expansion of the
being, that nothing else gives ... eh? Listen! When I was quite
a young man there was a miller’s girl in the neighborhood of St.
Petersburg, whom I used to see when out hunting. She was charming,
very fair, with a flash of the eye rather common among us. She
would accept nothing from me. But one day she said to me, “You must
give me a present.”

“What is it you want?”

“Bring me some scented soap from St. Petersburg.”

I brought her the soap. She took it, disappeared, came back
blushing, and murmured, offering me her hands, delicately scented:—

“Kiss my hands—as you kiss the hands of ladies in drawing-rooms at
St. Petersburg.”

I threw myself on my knees—and you know, _that was the finest
moment of my life_.

Like Chopin and Tschaïkowsky, Turgénieff was all love.

BALZAC AS MUSIC CRITIC

While I think that George Moore’s comparative estimate of Shakespeare and Balzac is a trifle more Celtic than critical, yet there can be no denial made to the assertion that Balzac stands next to Shakespeare—if not exactly on his level—in his astonishing fecundity of imagination. “A monstrous debauch of the imagination,” Henley called the Human Comedy; but surely no more of a debauch than the Plays. All abnormal productivity of the intellect gives this impression. Look at Rabelais. There are over two thousand figures in the Human Comedy, all clearly characterized, no two alike; and every man and woman in the work you might meet in a day’s stroll about Paris.

Monstrous, yes; but so is Beethoven, so is Michael Angelo monstrous. All genius has something monstrous in it—something of what Nietzsche so happily called the over man.

Balzac’s Gambara and Massimilla Doni—what genius he had for selecting names which outwardly and inwardly fitted his character! After reading the former I felt almost tempted into echoing Mr. Moore’s extravagant assertion. Balzac is indeed a magician and not a novelist. What puts him apart from other novelists, even from his technical superior, Flaubert, is his faculty of vision. He is a _Seer_, not a novelist. Any motive he touched, whether usury or music-erotics or patriotism, he vivified with his prophetic imagination. He saw his theme concretely; he saw its origins, its roots in the dead past; and plunging his eyes into the future he saw its ghost, its spiritual aura, its ultimate evolution. Such a man as Balzac might have been a second Bonaparte, a second Spencer. He had science, and he had imagination; and he preferred to be the social historian of the nineteenth century, the greatest romancer that ever lived, and a profound philosopher besides. All modern novelists nest in his books, draw nourishment from them, suck in their very souls from his vast fund of spirituality. The difference between such a giant as Balzac and such a novelist as Thackeray is that the latter draws delightful and artistic pictures of manners; but never turns a soul inside out for us. The best way to describe Balzac is to enumerate the negatives of his contemporaries and successors. All they lacked and lack he had in such amazing prodigality that comparison is not only impossible, it is brutal.

Balzac and music! Balzac and women! Balzac and money! Balzac and politics! Or,—Balzac and any subject! The encyclopædic knowledge, extraordinary sympathy and powers of expression—do they not all fairly drench every line the man wrote? He could analyze the art of painting and forsee its future affinities for impressionism—read The Unknown Masterpiece—just as in Gambara he divined Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. I am quite sure that Wagner read Balzac. Gambara was finished June, 1837, and there are things in it that could only have been written about Berlioz. The key to the book, however, is passion, not any particular personality. Balzac always searched for the master passion in men and women’s lives. Given the clew-note, he developed the theme into symphonic proportions. It is Andrea’s love of intrigue that leads him to follow the beautiful Marianna, wife of the composer Gambara,—a fantastic creation worthy of Hoffmann. He is an Italian in Paris, who wrote a mass for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death, and also an opera—Mahomet. But that opera! Has such a score ever been dreamed of by any one except Richard Strauss? Gambara is a poor man, looked upon as a lunatic, living at an Italian cook shop kept by Giardini,—the latter one of Balzac’s most delightful discoveries. Born at Cremona, Gambara studied music in its entirety, especially orchestration. To him music was a science and an art—fancy writers of fiction going into the philosophy of music seventy-five years ago!—to him tones were definite ideas, not merely vibrations that agitate nervous centres. Music alone has the power of restoring us to ourselves, while other arts give us defined pleasures. Mahomet is a trilogy, the libretto by Gambara himself—mark this familiar detail. It contained The Martyrs, Mahomet, and Jerusalem Delivered,—the God of the West, the God of the East, and the struggles of religions around a tomb. In this immense frame, philosophy, patriotism, racial antagonisms, love, the magic of ancient Sabianism and Oriental poetry of the Jewish—culminating in the Arabian—are all displayed. As Gambara says, “Ah! to be a great musician, it is necessary also to be very learned. Without knowledge, no local color, no ideas in the music.” This irresistibly reminds one of a phrase from Wagner’s notebook.

The story of the opera—too long to set down here—as told by Gambara, is wonderful. It has the ring of an analytical programme to some new-fangled and heretical symphonic poem. Here is the curious medley of psychology, musical references, history, stage directions, cries of hysteria, and much clotted egotism. There is the clash of character, the shock of events; and it is well to note such a phrase as this: “The dark and gloomy color of this finale [Act I] is varied by the motives of the three women who predict to Mahomet his triumph, and whose phrases will be found developed in the third act, in the scene where Mahomet tastes the delights of his grandeur.” Does this not forestall Wagner’s Ring? or did Balzac really find the entire idea in Hoffmann’s Kater Murr? Is not Kapellmeister Kreisler the first of his line? Now, while there seems to be far too much praying in this drama of soul and action, it is not such a farrago as it appears at first reading. I imagine that Balzac knew little of the technics of music; yet he guessed matters with astonishing perspicacity. His characterization of the megalomaniacal Mahomet, and his epileptic grandeurs would do as a portrait of most founders of new religions. Balzac had Voltaire to draw upon; but he makes the epilepsy a big motive in Mahomet’s life,—as it is in the lives of the majority of religious geniuses and fanatics, from Buddha to the newest faith-curing healer.

And how was this extraordinary music and libretto received by Gambara’s wife, her admirer, and the Italian cook? “There was not the appearance of a poetical or musical idea in the stunning cacophony which smote the ears: the principles of harmony, the first rules of composition, were totally foreign to this shapeless creation. Instead of music, learnedly connected, which Gambara described, his fingers produced a succession of fifths, sevenths, octaves, major thirds, and steps from fourth without sixth to the bass, a combination of discordant sounds thrown at hazard which seemed to combine to torture the least delicate ear.” I am positive, nevertheless, that it must have been great, wonderful, new music.

As the strange discords “howled beneath his fingers,” Gambara, we are told, almost fainted with intoxicating joy. Furthermore, he had a raucous voice,—the true voice of a composer. “He stamped, panted, yelled; his fingers equalled in rapidity the forked head of a serpent; finally, at the last howl of the piano, he threw himself backward, and let his head fall upon the back of his arm-chair.”

Poor Gambara! poor Kapellmeister Kreisler! And how much it all sounds like the early stories told of Richard Wagner trying to express on the treble keyboard his gigantic dreams, his tonal epics: and for such supercilious men and critics as Mendelssohn, Hiller, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and Schumann!

Signor Giardini, the Italian cook in Gambara, stands for a portrait of the true musical Philistine; he has a pretty taste in music, but melody, or what he conceives to be melody, is his shibboleth. Andrea Marcosini, a nobleman in pursuit of Gambara’s wife, and a musical dilettante, finds Giardini a gabbling boaster. “Yes, your excellency, in less than a quarter of an hour you will know what kind of a man I am. I have introduced into the Italian kitchen refinements that will surprise you. I am a Neapolitan,—that is to say, a born cook. But what good is instinct without science? Science? I have passed thirty years in acquiring it, and see what it has brought me to. My history is that of all men of talent. My experiments and tests have ruined three restaurants established successfully at Naples, Parma, and Rome.”

He keeps a little place where Italian refugees and men who have failed in the black, weltering symphony of Parisian life gather and feed at dusk. It is a queer, interesting crew. Here is a poor composer—not Gambara—of romances. “You see what a florid complexion, what self-satisfaction, how little there is in his features, so well disposed for romance. He who accompanies him is Gigelmi.” The latter is a deaf conductor of orchestra. Then there is Ottoboni, a political refugee—a nice, clean old gentleman, but considered dangerous by the Italian government. A journalist is discovered at the table, the poorest of the lot. He tells the truth about the theatrical performances, hence writes for an obscure journal and is miserably paid. Enter Gambara. He is bald, about forty, a man of refinement, with brains,—a sufferer in a word. Though his dress was free from oddity, the composer’s appearance was not lacking in nobility. A conversation follows, merging into a debate, modulating angrily into a furious discussion about art. It is wonderfully executed.

The composer of romances has written a mass for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death. He asks the count, with assumed modesty, if he will not attend the performance. “Thank you,” responds Andrea. “I do not feel myself endowed with the organs necessary to the appreciation of French singing; but if you were dead, monsieur, and Beethoven had written the mass, I should not fail to hear it.” It may be observed that this epigram has been remembered by several generations since Balzac. Von Büllow is credited with it. Behold the original in all its pristine glory! The deaf orchestra conductor also has his say: “Music exists independently of execution. In opening Beethoven’s symphony in C minor a musical man is soon translated into the world of fancy upon the golden wings of the theme in G natural, repeated in E by the horns. He sees a whole nature by turns illuminated by dazzling sheafs of light, shadowed by clouds of melancholy, cheered by divine song.” It is just possible that some one told Balzac of the indeterminate tonality at the opening of the Fifth Symphony, though he gets his scoring mixed.

“Beethoven is surpassed by the new school,” said the writer of romances, disdainfully. “He is not yet understood,” answered the count; “how can he be surpassed? Beethoven has extended the boundaries of instrumental music, and no one has followed him in his flight.” Gambara dissented by a movement of the head. “His works are especially remarkable for the simplicity of the plan, and for the manner in which this plan is followed out. With the majority of composers the orchestral parts, wild and disorderly, combine only for momentary effect; they do not always coöperate by the regularity of their progress to the effect of a piece as a whole. With Beethoven the effects are, so to speak, distributed in advance.” This is not bad criticism for a writer of fiction. Think of the banalities perpetrated about the same time by Henri Beyle, Stendhal, otherwise a master of psychology.

Then the Count Andrea proceeds to demolish the reputation of Rossini by comparing the “capering, musical chit-chat, gossipy, perfumed” school of the Italian master to Beethoven. “Long live German music!—when it can sing,” he adds _sotto voce_. Of course there is a lively row, the host having much to say. Later Gambara shows Andrea his Panharmonicon, an instrument which is to replace an entire orchestra. He plays upon it. They are all enchanted. Every instrument is represented. The total impression is overwhelming. Gambara sang to its accompaniment—in which the magic execution of Paganini and Liszt was revealed—the adieus of Khadijeh, Mahomet’s first wife. “Who could have dictated to you such chants?” demanded the count. “The spirit,” replied Gambara; “when he appears, everything seems to me on fire. I see melodies face to face, beautiful and fresh, colored like flowers; they radiate, they resound, and I listen, but an infinite time is required to reproduce them.” It is a pity this man drank so much. There follows an admirable exposition of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable too long for transcription. In the end comes ruin. Gambara’s wife, tiring of his habits, his slow progress toward fame, leaves him for Andrea. Abandoned, Gambara falls into disgrace, into dire poverty. The Panharmonicon is sold by the sheriff and his scores sold for waste paper. “On the day following the sale the scores had enveloped at the Halle butter, fish, and fruits. Thus three great operas of which this poor man spoke, but which a former Neapolitan cook, now a simple huckster, said were a heap of nonsense, had been disseminated in Paris, and devoured by the baskets of retailers.” Worse remained. After years Marianna, the runaway wife, returns, lean, dirty, old, and withered. Gambara receives her with tired, faithful arms. Together they sing duets, with guitar accompaniment, on dusty boulevards after dark. Marianna makes Gambara drink cheap brandy so that he will play well. He gives bits from his half-forgotten operas. A duchess asks: “Where do you get this music?” “From the opera of Mahomet,” replied Marianna; “Rossini has composed a Mahomet II,” and the other remarks:—

“What a pity that they will not give us at the Italiens the operas of Rossini with which we are unacquainted! for this certainly is beautiful music.” Gambara smiled! Thus ends the career of a great composer. Gambara knew his failings. “We are victims of our own superiority. My music is fine; but, when music passes from sensation to thought, it can have for auditors only people of genius, for they alone have the power to develop it.” Here is consolation for Richard Strauss!

Massimilla Doni is dedicated to Jacques Strunz, at one time a music critic in Paris. This dedication, charmingly indited, as are all of Balzac’s, acknowledges the author’s indebtedness to the critic. Massimilla Doni is more violent and less credible than Gambara. The chief character is a musical degenerate, a morbid nobleman whose solitary pleasure in life is to hear two tones in perfect concord. This musical Marquis de Sade is described as follows: “This man, who is 118 years old on the registers of vice and forty-seven according to the records of the church, has but one last means of enjoyment on earth that is capable of arousing in him a sense of life. Yes, all the chords are broken, everything is a ruin or a tattered rag; the mind, the intelligence, the heart, the nerves, all that produces an impulse in man, that gives him a glimpse of heaven through desire or the fire of pleasure, depends not so much upon music as upon one of the innumerable effects, a perfect harmony between two voices, or between one voice and the first string of his violin.”

Certainly this evil-minded person would not care for Wagner. He is attached to a beautiful Venetian singer, Clara Tinti. It is she who tells of this horrid Duke Cataneo:—

The old monkey sits on my knee and takes his violin; he plays well
enough, he produces sounds with it; I try to imitate them, and when
the longed-for moment arrives, and it is impossible to distinguish
the note of the violin from the note that issues from my windpipe,
then the old fellow is in ecstasy; his dead eyes emit their last
flames, he is deliriously happy, and rolls on the floor like a
drunken man. That is why he pays Genovese so handsomely. Genovese
is the only tenor whose voice sometimes coincides exactly with
mine. Either we do really approach that point once or twice in an
evening, or the duke imagines it; and for this imaginary pleasure
he has engaged Genovese; Genovese belongs to him. No operatic
manager can engage the singer to sing without me, or me without
him. The duke educated me to gratify this whim, and I owe to him
my talent, my beauty, my fortune. He will die in some spasm caused
by a perfect accord. The sense of hearing is the only one that has
survived in the shipwreck of his faculties—that is the thread by
which he clings to life.

This is a lovely study of a melomaniac, is it not? A man whose sole passion mounts to his ears; who when he hears an accord is vertiginously possessed like a feline over a bunch of catnip. As a foil to this delirious duke there is a cooler headed fanatic of music, named Capraja. He is a sort of Diogenes—never looks at women and lives on a few hundreds a year, though a rich man. “Half Turk, half Venetian, he was short, coarse looking, and stout. He had the pointed nose of a doge; the satirical glance of an inquisitor; a discreet, albeit a smiling mouth.” For him the decorative is the only element in music worth mentioning. He goes to the opera every night of his life. Hear him:—

Genovese will rise very high. I am not sure whether he understands
the true significance of music, or acts simply by instinct, but he
is the first singer with whom I have ever been fully satisfied. I
shall not die without hearing _roulades_ executed as I have often
heard them in my dreams, when on waking it seemed to me that I
could see the notes flying through the air. The _roulade_ is the
highest expression of art. It is the arabesque which adorns the
most beautiful room in the building—a little less, and there is
nothing; a little more, and all is confused. Intrusted with the
mission of awakening in your soul a thousand sleeping ideas,
it rustles through space, sowing in the air seeds which, being
gathered up by the ear, germinate in the heart. Believe me;
Raphael, when painting his Saint Cecilia, gave music precedence
over poetry. He was right. Music appeals to the heart, while
written words appeal only to the intelligence. Music communicates
its ideas instantly, after the manner of perfumes. The singer’s
voice strikes not the thought, but the elements of thought,
and sets in motion the very essence of our sensations. It is a
deplorable fact that the common herd has compelled musicians to
adapt their measures to words, to artificial interests; but it is
true that otherwise they would not be understood by the multitude.
The _roulade_, therefore, is the only point left for the friends
of pure music, the lovers of art in its nakedness, to cling to.
To-night as I listened to that last _cavatina_, I imagined that
I had received an invitation from a lovely girl who, by a single
glance, restored my youth! The enchantress placed a crown on my
head and led me to the ivory gate through which we enter the
mysterious land of Reverie. I owe it to Genovese that I was able
to lay aside my old envelope for a few moments, brief as measured
by watches, but very long as measured by sensations. During a
springtime, balmy with the breath of roses, I was young and beloved!

“You are mistaken, _caro_ Capraja,” said the duke. “There is a power in music more magical in its effects than that of the _roulade_.” “What is it?” queried Capraja. “The perfect accord of two voices, or of one voice and a violin, which is the instrument whose tone approaches the human voice most nearly.” Then follows a rhapsodic word duel between the old amateurs, each contending for his favorite form. And is it not, though purposely exaggerated, the same battle that is being fought to this very day between the formalists and sensationalists? Some of us adore absolute music and decry the sensualities of the music-drama. The war between the _roulade_ and the accord will never end. “Genovese’s voice seizes the very fibres,” cries Capraja. “And La Tinti’s attacks the blood,” rejoins the duke. Then follows a remarkable descriptive analysis of Rossini’s Moses in Egypt, by the wealthy and beautiful Duchess Cataneo, otherwise Massimilla Doni. It is cleverly done. The picture of the rising sun in the score in the key of C proves Balzac a poet as well as a musician. The prayer, so famous because of Thalberg’s piano transcription, is also described, and at the end this opera—better known to us as an oratorio—is pronounced superior to Don Giovanni!! Balzac, Balzac!

There is a realistic account of a small riot in the opera house because Genovese, the tenor, sings out of tune. The Duke Cataneo rages monstrously, Capraja is furious. Both tone-voluptuaries are deprived of their accords and _roulades_. It turns out that the tenor is in love with the soprano, and once away from her presence proves his art by singing the air, Ombra adorata, by Crescentini. This he does at midnight on the Piazzetta, Venice. The Venetian scene setting is lovely. Genovese sings his sweetest. His listeners are rapt to paradise, but are tumbled earthwards when he asks in injured accents, “Am I a poor singer?” Listen to Balzac’s comments upon that phenomenon called a tenor singer: “One and all regretted that the instrument was not a celestial thing. Was that angelic music attributable solely to a feeling of wounded self-esteem? The singer felt nothing, he was no more thinking of the religious sentiments, the divine images which he created in their hearts, than the violin knows what Paganini makes it say. They had all fancied that they saw Venice raising her shroud and singing herself, yet it was simply a matter of a tenor’s _fiasco_.” Most operatic music is.

The theory of the _roulade_ is further explained:—

Capraja is intimate with a musician from Cremona who lives in
the Capello palace; this musician believes that sound encounters
within us a substance analogous to that which is engendered by
the phenomena of light, and which produces ideas in us. According
to him man has keys within, which sounds affect, and which
correspond to our nerve centres from which our sensations and
ideas spring. Capraja, who looks upon the arts as a collection
of the means whereby man can bring external nature into harmony
with a mysterious internal nature, which he calls an inward life,
has adopted the idea of this instrument maker, who is at this
moment composing an opera. Imagine a sublime creation in which
the marvels of visible creation are reproduced with immeasurable
grandeur, lightness, rapidity, and breadth, in which the sensations
are infinite, and to which certain privileged natures, endowed
with a divine power, can penetrate—then you will have an idea
of the ecstatic delights of which Cataneo and Capraja, poets in
their own eyes only, discoursed so earnestly. But it is true also
that as soon as a man, in the sphere of moral nature, oversteps
the limits within which plastic works are produced by the process
of imitation, to enter into the kingdom, wholly spiritual, of
abstractions, where everything is viewed in its essence and in
the omnipotence of results, that man is no longer understood by
ordinary intellects.

The foregoing paragraph, rather inflated and tortuous in style, was thoroughly disliked by the great critic Sainte-Beuve, who never would recognize the great genius of Balzac, the romantic rather than the realist in this book. The composer referred to must be Gambara, for Massimilla Doni, after the death of the Duke of Cataneo, weds young Varese and assists the unfortunate Gambara in Paris. Massimilla Doni was finished May 25, 1839. Its concluding paragraph is a masterpiece of irony. After the love of Varese and Massimilla came the usual anti-climax. Balzac writes, in a passage of unexampled splendor: “The peris, nymphs, fairies, sylphs of the olden time, the muses of Greece, the marble Virgins of the Certosa of Pavia, the Day and Night of Michael Angelo, the little angels that Bellini first drew at the foot of church paintings, and to whom Raphael gave such divine form at the foot of the Vierge au donataire, and of the Madonna freezing at Dresden; Orcagna’s captivating maidens in the Church of Or San Michele at Florence, the heavenly choirs on the tomb of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, several Virgins in the Duomo at Milan, the hordes of a hundred Gothic cathedrals, the whole nation of figures who ruin their shapes to come to you, O all-embracing artists—all these angelic incorporeal maidens rushed to Massimilla’s bed and wept there.”

Richard Wagner might have been a Gambara; and mark how Balzac treats the vibratory theory of sound, when it was practically unknown. Where did he gather his wisdom? Another story of his, hitherto untranslated, Sarrasin, will not bear recounting. Its psychology is morbid; yet it is stamped with probability. The great male soprano Farinelli could have been the hero. Nevertheless, the tale is not a pleasant one. George Moore eloquently describes how, in chase of the exotic, he pursued certain books, like a pike after minnows, along the quays of Paris. And like a pike he rudely knocked his nose one day against the bottom. The real lover of Balzac, pike-like, accepts Sarrasin, just as he accepts Seraphita. They are many octaves apart, yet both sound a distinct note in the scale of this great human symphony. However, Sarrasin is but semi-musical, so need not be discussed here.

“O mighty poet! Thy works are not as other men’s, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun, the sea, the stars, and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert; that the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!”

Thomas De Quincey, master of the sonorous singing word, wrote this—he meant Shakespeare. It will also fit Balzac. And I know of no other name except Balzac’s, that I dare bracket with Shakespeare’s except Beethoven’s.

ALPHONSE DAUDET

“The entire work of Balzac pulsates with a fever of discovery and of impromptu.” It was Alphonse Daudet, the little David of the south, with “the head of an Arabian Christ,” who wrote that sentence, a sentence that might be aptly fitted to his own case. Daudet loved Balzac, loved Beethoven, and—this may be a surprise for some—loved Wagner, knew Wagner. Why not? Style for him was a question of intensity, and what is Wagner if not intense? And Daudet was no mean critic. He could recognize the unchanging _moi_ of Hugo, and the miraculous gift of transforming himself that gave to Balzac the power of multitudinous creation. He could speak of Georges Rodenbach as “the most exquisite and refined of poets and prose writers, moist and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a writer whose sentence has the tender effect of belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of reliquaries and stained glass windows.” Friedrich Nietzsche was “that admirable writer with a surprising power for destruction”; while in Ibsen’s Wild Duck he found “the india-rubber laugh, the laugh of Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet.” The reading of Dostoïevsky’s Crime and Punishment was a “crisis of his mind”; and for Tolstoy he always entertained a warm admiration. After Turgénieff died some alleged souvenirs of his were published and gave Daudet exquisite unhappiness, for he had loved the man and extolled the artist. M. Halperine-Kaminsky cleared up the mystery by proving that Turgénieff had never written the offensive paragraphs. They were really not of serious import, consisting of several free criticisms about the realistic group to which Daudet belonged. As I remember, Turgénieff is reported to have said that much of the work of Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and a few others smelt of the lamp. Yet this simple phrase caused Daudet pain, for he prided himself on his spontaneity of style, his freedom from use of the file. Possibly, Turgénieff—and this is pure conjecture on my part—knew of Daudet’s opinions touching upon what he called “Russian pity, which is limited to criminals and low women.” He named it a “sentimental monstrosity,” and for that reason depreciated the “rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations of the Russian Dickens”—Dostoïevsky.