Chapter II: Part 2

When a well-known man dies in England they ask: What did he do? In France: How did he do it? In the United States: How much did he leave? But the Socialist in every land says: He didn’t do it! The poetic production of Charles Baudelaire, if put to the same test questions, might easily be conceived as evoking even more variety of responses. Baudelaire has said that nations produce great men against their will. While his position in the poetic firmament of France is that of a star of the first magnitude, there are, nevertheless, dissidents, especially among foreign critics, who either cannot or will not admit what is become a truism in French criticism. And the critical literature concerning the poet grows apace. His letters to his mother, recently published, make a volume admirably calculated to illuminate the character of the man. It contains a preface and notes by Jacques Crépet, who, it may be remembered, assisted his father, Eugène Crépet, in the biographical study of Baudelaire, a definitive study, one is tempted to add, for it dissipated a lot of legends (most of them fabricated by the poet himself) and put his house of life into some sort of order. Above all, it cleared up the rather murky atmosphere of his relations with Jeanne Duval, his Black Venus, who was in reality a young woman with hardly a moiety of African blood in her veins. But she served as a peg for the poet upon which to hang some of his most acrid and lovely verse, therefore she must pass muster in any estimate of his disquieting genius.

Withal, the exegetical literature is not large. George Saintsbury introduced him to English readers, although Algernon Charles Swinburne had in practice, if not by precept, brought his “poisonous honey from France”—Tennyson’s phrase. The Letters (1841-66) were published in 1907 by the _Mercure de France_, which also fathered a bulky volume devoted to the posthumous works (1908). La Plume had in 1893 republished from the Belgian edition the condemned pieces from Les Fleurs du Mal, with an extraordinary frontispiece by the Belgian etcher, Armand Rassenfosse. There are some poetic numbers in this rare plaque—eagerly sought for by lovers of exotic literature—yet the majority of the pieces must be read book in one hand, the other hand tightly closing the nostrils. These suppressed poems are not the best Baudelairia. Féli Gautier’s illustrated pamphlet (Editions de la Plume) is the most succinct account of the poet. There is also a handy little volume by Alphonse Seché and Jules Bertaut, garnered from various sources, yet of critical merit. And in 1917, during the heat of conflict, Guillaume Apollinaire prefaced the definitive text of the poems and said some pertinent things of Baudelaire. He calls the poet the literary son of Choderlos de Laclos and Edgar Poe—a shuddering combination, indeed.

The previous collection of Letters are of more general interest, for they are addressed to his most distinguished contemporaries—painters, poets, musicians—his friend Richard Wagner among the rest—men of letters and aristocratic ladies. But in the Letters to his mother, Mme. Aupick, the atmosphere is more dramatic, more intense. A duel is fought from his school days to the year previous to his death; the duel of a man, half crazed with alcohol and drugs, and a mother who failed to understand the queer duckling of genius she had hatched out in her first marriage. Demands for money fill the majority of these epistles. Pleas for his poetic work also loom largely, but poverty is the leading motive throughout. We catch more than a profile portrait of the mother; it is not always winning or “motherly.” How could it be with such a son? A half-Hamlet, he was jealous of his mother’s second husband. It was one of the determining causes in his morbid growth. How has his case so long escaped the psychiatrists of the psychoanalytic school? Albert Mordell, in his Erotic Element in Literature, could have found him a better subject than Stendhal for the Œdipus-complex. Notwithstanding his Flowers of Evil, his diabolic and dandical poses, Baudelaire was not a wicked-hearted man. Weak he was rather than depraved. And too curious of certain matters. He did explore the subcellars of the soul, dive into cesspools, and expose putrid sores. A scavenger poet, nevertheless a great poet, the greatest since Hugo. To-day his successor to the purple is Gabriele d’Annunzio.

There was decay in Baudelaire’s bones, a necrosis of the moral nature, yet no more fervent believer among latter-day poets in God and his Mother has penned their praises, except Verlaine. He did lay too much stress on his admiration for Satan, an admiration well-nigh Manichean, but he argued rightly when he said that one can’t believe in the Almighty and not believe in the Adversary. Theologically speaking, this is an inexpugnable position; in reality the world-experiences of the last five years have uprooted a belief that Satan is bound and sealed in some hellish solitude. Roaming about and seeking whom he may devour, would be the consensus of opinion among pious folk. Baudelaire believed in the devil because he had a personal devil. Hence his Litanies to Satan, later imitated by Giosuè Carducci in his Hymn to Satan. “Salute, O Satana, O ribellione, O forza vindice, Della ragione!” But in his Litanies the French poet is more explicit; his refrain is “O Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!” And this from the poet of De profundis clamavi and the hymn, in Latin, to Saint Francis (Francisco meæ Laudes)!

A third person has a share in the new Letters, M. Ancelle, the advocate and guardian of the errant Charles. Alternately cajoling and bullying, the letters addressed him by his charge reveal a curious mentality. The father of Baudelaire bequeathed his son about seventy-five thousand francs, soon dissipated by the incipient dandy on pictures, furniture, jewelry, bibelots, clothes, and light o’ loves; yet he seemed to think that his guardian was robbing him, that his mother hated him. In the mists and ecstasies of his wild life he saw nothing clearly—except his shining visions, and being of an obstinate nature, he pinned these visions to paper. The history of art can show few more laborious workmen than Baudelaire; his was the technical heroism of which Henry James speaks. Despite his drugs and drinks, he never ceased working, the work of an intellectual galley-slave. He filed his poems. He wrote criticism—Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Richard Wagner are specimens of his critical clairvoyancy—read his Salons and his splendid tribute to the genius of Wagner in his Music of the Future. Luck seemed against him. Like Balzac, he was forever in debt. His mother came to the rescue; his friends were worn out helping him across perilous pecuniary quagmires. Then he fled to Belgium, a country he loathed, and celebrated that loathing in distasteful verse, there to be stricken with general paralysis, and later to be brought back to Paris, to die cared for by the mother he believed inimical to him. The mystery is that he didn’t succumb earlier in his life to the perpetual assaults on his health.

When his mother married the father of the poet, Joseph Francis Baudelaire—or Beaudelaire—she was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son, Claude, who, like his half-brother, Charles, died of paralysis. After the death of the father the widow married within a year the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then Chef de Bataillon, Lieutenant-Colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honor, later General and Ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London. Charles was a frail, nervous youth, but, unlike most children of genius, he was an excellent scholar and won brilliant prizes at college. In this d’Annunzio resembled him. His stepfather was proud of him. From the Royal College at Lyons Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839. (He was born in 1821, also the birth year of Flaubert.) Troubles soon began at home. He disdained his mother and quarrelled with General Aupick. She has confessed that she was partially to blame; in the flush of her second love she had forgotten her boy. He could not forget nor forgive what he called her infidelity to the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The worthy Bishop of Montpelier, an old family friend, said that Charles was a little crazy; that second marriages usually bring woe in their train. The young poet contented himself with muttering: “When a mother has such a son she doesn’t remarry.” The reverse was probably the truth. He wrote in his journal: “My ancestors idiots or maniacs ... all victims of terrible passions”; which was another of his exaggerations. His father was a student, a practical man, a steady-going bourgeois. On the paternal side the grandfather of Charles was a Champenois peasant; his mother’s people presumably were of Normandy, though little is known of her forebears. Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken with paralysis, as well he might. Like many others, Baudelaire was a victim to a malady the origins of which were little known in his day. He also believed that his own instability of temperament was the result of the disparity of years in his parents.

In the heyday of his blood he was perverse. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that ennui can be best cured by evil ways; sin, Baudelaire found the saddest of diversions. Despite Théophile Gautier’s stories about the hashish club, Catulle Mendès denies that the poet was addicted to the hemp habit. What the majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary workers is this prime fact: that men who toil writing poetry—and there is no mental toil comparable to it, not even the higher mathematics—cannot indulge in drink or opium without speedy collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of “inspiration,” spontaneity, easy improvisation, of the sudden bolt from heaven, are delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed at his music for years, that in his smithy Beethoven forged his thunderbolts in the sweat of his sooty brows, that Manet slaved like a dock laborer, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to work, may be a disillusion for the sentimental. Yet such is the case. Minerva springing full-fledged from Jupiter’s skull is a pretty fancy, but Balzac and Flaubert did not encourage that fancy. Work literally killed them, as it killed Poe and Jules de Goncourt. Maupassant went insane because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and worried. His debts haunted him. His constitution was undoubtedly flawed, but that his life was one prolonged debauch is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton night-cap country. These letters to his mother are the most human of documents and they prove the contrary. Charles Baudelaire is the saddest and the profoundest poet in modern literature.

* * * * *

Speaking of Nietzsche, I am reminded of the study by William M. Salter, Nietzsche the Thinker, which happened to be published here at an inopportune time (1917). It is the most satisfactory exposition of the ideas of the great poet-philosopher, who, even if he did not create an inclosed system, has given birth to original and suggestive ideas. Mr. Salter has, of course, exploded the erroneous notion that Nietzsche was persona grata with the Prussians. A letter in my possession, though not addressed to me—alas! I have but one written to me—begins thus: “Woe to the victors, for they shall be vanquished!” A veritable prophecy. This was dated 1875, and alluded to the Franco-Prussian War, the consequences of which sorrowed the soul of Nietzsche. The Salter book is testimony to American scholarship; cogent, bold, brilliant, and conclusive.

THE TWO TEMPTATIONS

The two Temptations! Sounds melodramatic, doesn’t it? But it only refers to the various versions of a great book. All good Flaubertians will rejoice to learn that the earlier draft of Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Antony, has been given a fitting English garb. This translation is made from the 1849 and 1856 manuscripts, edited by Louis Bertrand, and is by René Francis. The preface is by Sir Gaston Maspero, distinguished archæologist, and there is also a prefatory note by Louis Bertrand. This version must not be confounded with the definitive one of 1874, Englished in superlative fashion by Lafcadio Hearn and published here in 1910. The new and bulky volume, admirably printed and copiously illustrated, is a literary curiosity without which no Flaubert collection would be complete. To be sure, Flaubert translated is Flaubert traduced, for as Arthur Symons has written, Flaubert is difficult to translate because he has no fixed rhythm.

“His prose keeps step with no regular march music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence; he changes his cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and interprets. Compare the style,” continues Mr. Symons, “of Flaubert in his books and you will find that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its subject-matter. In Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, the cadence is always the same; the most exquisite word painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm without difficulty into English. Once you have mastered the tune you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same.” Not so with Flaubert. His is truly polyphonic prose—a phrase, by the way, that Amy Lowell uses to describe an amorphous form of prose and poetry. When I invented the combination years ago I meant only prose, what George Saintsbury would call “numerous prose.” See his valuable critical History of English Prose Rhythm.

While on a visit in 1845, Flaubert visited Genoa. There, in the Palace Balbi-Senarega—not at the Doria, as Maxime du Camp wrote with his accustomed carelessness—the French writer saw an old picture by Breughel (probably Pieter the younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that represents a Temptation of St. Antony. It is dingy in color and far from a masterpiece. But Flaubert, who loved the grotesque, procured an engraving of this picture, and it hung till the day of his death in his study at Croisset, near Rouen. I have seen it, as it still hangs in the Flaubert Museum there. This picture was the spring-board for his two Temptations. Their germ may be found in his mystery play, Smarh, with its demon and its metaphysical coloring. But Breughel surely set into motion the mental machinery of the Temptation, which never stopped whirring till 1874.

The first draft of the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848, and finished September 12, 1849. The manuscript numbered five hundred and forty pages. Set aside for Madame Bovary, this draft was again taken up and the second version was made in 1856; when finished the manuscript was reduced to one hundred and ninety-three pages. Not satisfied, Flaubert returned to the work in 1872, and when ready for publication in 1874 the number of pages was one hundred and thirty-six; even then he cut out from ten chapters, three. When a few years later the 1856 version was given to the world French critics were astonished to find it so different from the definitive version of 1874. The critical taste of Flaubert was vindicated. His was true technical heroism. Reading in 1849 the earliest version to his friends Bouilhet and Du Camp he had been bidden to burn the stuff; instead he boiled it down into the 1856 version. To his dearest friend, Ivan Turgénieff, he submitted his 1872 draft. Thus it came that the wonderfully colored psychic and philosophic panorama, this Gulliver-like excursion round and about the master-ideas and religions of the antique and early Christian worlds was at last published.

All the youthful Flaubert, the “spouter” of blazing phrases, the lover of jewelled words, of picturesque and monstrous ideas and situations is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation; in the definitive version he is more critical, historical. As his emotions cooled with the years, Flaubert had grown intellectually. The first Temptation is romantic, religious; the 1874 is better composed and sceptical. Arranged more dramatically than the first, the author’s leanings toward Oriental mysticism and the dominating ideas of the classic world are better revealed in the last version. The psychological gradations of character are more clearly indicated in this version. We cannot agree with Louis Bertrand, editor of the 1856 version, that it is superior to the version of 1874. It seems more novel, that’s all. Flaubert was never so much the surgeon as when he operated upon this manuscript. He often hesitated, he always suffered, but he never flinched when his mind was fully resolved. It is for the student a subject of enthralling interest to follow the slow growth of these various versions.

“Since Goethe,” would be a suggestive title for an essay on the various epics written since his death. The list would not be large. In France there are only the barren rhetorical exercises of Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus, the insurrectionary poems of Hugo and the frigidly faultless verse of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such profound depth and heroic power as Faust there is not, except the Temptation of St. Antony, which is impregnated by the Faustian spirit—though in its development poles apart from the older poem—that we are not surprised when we learn that the youthful Flaubert was a passionate admirer of Goethe, even addressing to his memory a long poem in alexandrines. The Temptation is the only poem—despite its prose it is poetic—that may be classed with Brand or Zarathushtra. At times, in its sweep of execution and grandeur of conception, it grazes certain episodes in Faust.

But though it may excel in verbal beauty or in its imaginative presentation of the problems of volition, it falls short of Goethe’s ethical vision. Faust is a man who wills. “In the beginning was the act.” Antony is static, not dynamic. Faust is tempted by Mephisto, yet does not lose his soul. Flaubert’s hermit resists Satan at his subtlest; withal, we do not feel that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust’s. Man for man, Faust is the more significant; Antony is narrow-minded; indeed, almost besotted by superstition. He crystallizes, also symbolizes, a vanished period of mythology. Faust stands for the man of the present, and in the second part of the poem the man of the future. Ideas are the heroes of Flaubert’s epic, though St. Antony’s is a metaphysical history, not a human one like Faust’s.

But to Faust alone may the Temptation be compared. George Saintsbury has pronounced this masterpiece to be the most perfect example extant of dream literature. And precisely because of its precision in details, its astounding architectonic and its rich-hued waking hallucinations.

THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY

It is a holy and a wholesome act to visit the grave of a genius, for the memories there aroused may serve as a consolation and an inspiration in our spiritually arid existence. I often thought of this at Rouen when I went there to visit the tomb of Gustave Flaubert, so happily described by François Coppée as The Beethoven of French Prose. A quarter of a century ago I protested in newspapers and books against the tardy official recognition accorded one of the great prose masters of France—which means the world—and one of the most marvellous among novelists. In the Solferino Gardens at Rouen there is the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery, in the Flaubert family plot—Flaubert’s father was a distinguished surgeon—and not far from the Joan of Arc monument, lie the remains of the author of Madame Bovary. His celebrated pupil, Guy de Maupassant, is also remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue; another may be seen in the Parc Monceau. But at the time I began urging some form of a memorial to the master of masters nothing had been done. Since then the government has made of the old Flaubert home at Croisset, a half-hour from Rouen, down the Seine, a worthy memorial. The house in which such masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St. Antony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the Three Tales were created is now a Flaubert museum. Abbé Prevost is said to have written Manon Lescaut there. The old house still stands, though decaying. Flaubert’s study is, however, in fair preservation. The paternal home, occupying a part of the little park, was a dismantled manufactory when last I saw the place.

The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert household, kept a café in the neighborhood, and was always ready to talk of his master, of Mme. Flaubert, the mother. In vain I tried to get a photograph of that lady. Colange would not sell it, would not even have it reproduced. I have seen the picture of Dr. Achille Flaubert, but I am more interested in the mothers of men of genius, and I can recall no edition of the works containing the portrait of Mme. Flaubert. But I recall her features. A sweet, mild, intelligent face, betraying evidences of sorrow and resignation. The typical mother. Her son was a celibate, and, with the exception of Louise Colet, he never gave his mother any worriment over women. And it was that lady, whose portrait was recently exhibited at the Courbet retrospective exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum, who was the disturber, not Flaubert. There had been an affair, and understanding the honorable nature of the man, the wily humbug Louise endeavored to make trouble. She wrote Mme. Flaubert, a deeply pious woman; she harried Gustave, who, like most literary psychologists and sounders of feminine souls, was naïve in the practical conduct of his love-affairs. The epitaph of Louise Colet was composed by Maxime Ducamp: “Here lies the woman who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr; requiescat in pace.” A mean, spiteful masculine witticism this, though well deserved. Of Ducamp a like epitaph might be fabricated: Hic jacet the man who slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving friend Gustave Flaubert, and who was critically snuffed out of existence by Guy de Maupassant.

I have preserved a card sent to me by Mme. Franklin Grout, dated from Villa Tanit, Antibes, in which she expressed her gratitude for several things I wrote regarding the necessity of a Flaubert museum at Croisset; also for the truth in the Ducamp matter. Mme. Grout was the Caroline Commanville of the Flaubert correspondence, the beloved niece of the master, for whom he sacrificed his personal fortune, a considerable one for a man of letters forty years ago (about one million two hundred thousand francs). Her husband, M. Commanville, had suffered from reverses, and Flaubert, the supposed egoist, cold-blooded, self-centred, an epicurean of literature, calmly deprived himself of his last franc and, nearly sixty years of age, went into harness. His noble act was accomplished without the flaring of trumpets. There were no publishers’ “blurbs” then; nowadays this transaction in hearts and bonds would be yawped to the thousand winds of publicity; luckily, the sensitive great man was spared that vulgar fate. After the death of her husband, Caroline Commanville remarried; her second husband was the Dr. Grout who attended Guy de Maupassant during his fatal illness at the famous Maison Blanche.

Think of it! I saw the great Flaubert in the flesh. I may quote Browning: “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to you?”... Set me down as hopelessly romantic, as a cultivator of the cult of great artists in an age when there are only imitators or pigmies. It’s born in me, this species of artistic snobbery. I can’t help it. Every now and then some professorial rabbit pokes its pink snout from the academic hutch and passionately pipes, “Romance is the ruin of the world!” and retires on gliding paws. After his naughty proclamation I always take down from the shelf Alice in Wonderland and read with renewed delight the conversation of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. No romance in the world? Of that particular professorial rabbit Daisy Ashford might say: Render unto Cæsar’s wife the things that are suspicious! Even academic rabbits are romantic; else their breeding propensities have been enormously exaggerated. Flaubert is my romance.

Above all, Flaubert was a musician, a musical poet. His ear was the final court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks the essential richness, the diapasonic undertow of the English, is just short of the miraculous. Until the time of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo the French language was less a liquid, plastic collocation of sounds than a formal pattern, despite the clarity and precision of the eighteenth century; one must go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for richer, more pregnant speech. Omnipresent with Flaubert was the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that should float because of its sheer style. Lyric verbal ecstasy quite overpowered him. He was born December 21, 1821. As Henry James has said, he is one of the glories of French literature. Doubtless there will be a fitting commemoration of his one hundredth birth anniversary two years hence, and I hope that America will be represented at Rouen on that occasion.

ROOSEVELT AND BRANDES

My first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, though brief, will be ever memorable for me. I was not precisely “summoned” to Oyster Bay on Election Day early in November, 1915, though I gladly accepted Col. Roosevelt’s invitation in the light of a “royal command,” and went over to Long Island in company with John Quinn, who had arranged the meeting, and Francis J. Heney, once public prosecutor in San Francisco. I had received several letters from the Colonel of Colonels, of which I recall two significant sentences. One ended: “What a trump John Quinn is!” The other begins: “I have just received your New Cosmopolis. My son Kermit, whose special delight is New York, would probably appreciate it more than I do, for I am a countryman rather than a man of the pavements.” Now, I had always thought of Theodore Roosevelt as a “man of the pavements,” notwithstanding his delight in rough-riding across Western prairies. Personally I found him the reverse of either: a scholarly man, fond of music and the fine arts—he showed me a number of canvases by the late Marcius Simmons, a young American painter, who had been greatly influenced by Turner. The colonel had an excellent library of Colonial literature, and was fond of digging out pregnant sentences for quotation in his speeches from early preachers and statesmen. He appeared to be interested in my comparison between his prose style and the prose style of President Woodrow Wilson: the one swift, concise, full of affirmations, striking sentences, and notable for its absence of glitter. For the colonel reality was greater than rhetoric; while the prose of Mr. Wilson is eminently professorial, preserving as it does a nice balance of sound and sense; above all, “literary” prose, the prose of the study, never dynamic, seldom brilliant; prose “standardized,” eighteenth-century, smooth, sinuous, flexible, and ever-illuding prose.

My distinguished host showed some of the trophies he had acquired in Europe when on that historic grand tour; and, as I had not visited him in the guise of a professional interviewer, I did not write at the time of what I saw; but now I may do so without violating the intimacies of private hospitality. One thing that interested me was a photograph of the late Andrew Carnegie, taken in Berlin during the military manœuvres; both Carnegie and Roosevelt had been guests of William Hohenzollern, then Kaiser. I told the colonel that I had been present at the formal opening of the Peace Palace, in September, 1913, at The Hague, and that the day had been so hot that all Holland, there represented, had fled to the beach at Scheveningen, adding that I believed the palace eventually would be turned into the handsomest café in Europe; and I had printed this prophecy (?) in _The Times Sunday Magazine_, when reporting the solemn humbuggery of the peaceful house-warming.

War was discussed with all the zest of the wonderful man. One question I permitted myself: “Colonel, would the Lusitania have been sunk if you had been in the White House?” Snapping his formidable jaw, he exclaimed: “There would have been no Lusitania incident if I had been President.”

Among other various topics the colonel descanted on the poetical merits of George Cabot Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who died in the very harvest time of his genius. In his introduction to the two volumes of Poems and Dramas, Theodore Roosevelt has never written with such a happy mingling of perspicacity and tempered enthusiasm. Among the younger American poets I find Lodge of importance, not along because of his potential promise, but because of his actual performance. An authentic poet, his versatility is marked. In his sonnets and lyrics he paid the admiring tribute of youth to Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and Swinburne. He could mimic Walt Whitman, who is fatally easy to parody, and he early succumbed to Schopenhauer and Baudelaire. In at least one of his dramas I found the cosmic ecstasy of Nietzsche; also the doctrine of the Eternal Return. But young Lodge had assimilated a half dozen cultures, and passed far out to sea the perilous rocks of imitation, upon which so many lesser talents have come to grief. When as an achievement we consider his Herakles we are amazed at its maturity of thought and technical finish. The poet, the Maker, confronts us, and in reclothing the antique and tragic myth with his own lovely language he is, nevertheless, a “modern.” I know few poets of the new school who may boast this sense of the vital present, added to a divination and an evocation of “old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.” His figures are not fashioned by academic black magic, but are vital beings, loving, trusting, suffering, and in conflict with ineluctable destiny. He had the lyric art, also the architectural. He was a singer and a builder of the lofty rhyme. His handling of complex forms and abstruse rhymes was remarkable. George Cabot Lodge possessed both voice and vision. His life, by Henry Adams, shows him to have been a young man beloved by his friends, among whom were Jonathan Stickney Trumbull, Langdon Mitchell, and the late Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. When I met him in Paris he was a student at the Sorbonne. It was about 1896. A charming youth. I may only add now my humble mite of admiration to the manes of this dead genius.

* * * * *

When I saw Dr. Georg Brandes at the Hotel Astor a few months before the outbreak of the Great War I told him that he resembled the bust made of him by Klinger. It was the first time I had talked to the celebrated Danish author, to whom I had dedicated Egoists. Then past seventy, as active as a young man, I could see no reason why he shouldn’t live to be a centenarian. An active brain is lodged in his nimble body. I had made up my mind to ask him no questions about America. I found him in a rage over the way he was misquoted by some of the interviewers. It should be remembered that primarily he is a cosmopolitan thinker. He writes in English, French, German, and Danish with equal ease. As to the provinciality of our country’s literature and the seven arts he has definite opinions; but he was polite enough not to rub them in on me. He was accused of finding his favorite reading in the “works” of Jack London! That idea amused him. Among our “moderns” it is Frank Norris he likes; a slight difference, indeed. Emerson, Poe, Whitman interested him, though not as iconoclasts or pathfinders. The originality of this trinity he didn’t dwell upon; made-over Europeans, he called them; Emerson and German transcendental philosophy; Poe and E. T. W. Hoffmann; Whitman and Ossian—Walt’s rugged speech is a windy parody of MacPherson’s, and Ossian himself is a windy parody of the Old Testament style.

Brandes is an iconoclast, a radical, a non-conformist born, and more often a No-Sayer than a Yes-Sayer. The many-headed monster has no message for him. As he was the first European critic to give us true pictures of Ibsen and Nietzsche, I led him to speak of the poet-philosopher. At Baireuth, where I had gone to hear the Wagner music-drama at its fountainhead—and very muddy was the music-making, I am sorry to say—I was shown the house where was born Max Stirner. My friend said: “When the very name of Richard Wagner is forgotten, Stirner’s will be in the mouth of the world.” Of course, this sounded improbable. I know Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own, knew his real name, Johann Kaspar Schmidt, and that he had been a poor, half-starved school-master in Berlin, and, in 1845, imprisoned by the Prussian Government. This intellectual anarch—rather call him nihilist, for, compared with his nihilism, Bakunin’s is only revolutionary resistance—was to become later the most powerful disrupting force in Europe! I couldn’t believe it. But now I recall my friend’s prophecy when I read of the doings of the Russian Bolsheviki. Not Nietzsche, but Stirner, has been the real motor force in the contemporary revolution. No half-way house of socialism for the Reds! And that is the lesson of Artzibachev’s Sanine, the import of which the majority of critics missed, partially because of the imperfect English translation—many suppressions—and also because they missed the significance of the new man, who, while continuing the realistic tradition of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, was diametrically opposed to their sentimental Brotherhood of Man—toujours that old fallacy of Rousseau!—and preached the fiercest individualism, violently repudiating Nietzsche and his aristocratic individualism. It may be said in passing that a reaction to individualism is bound to come; the lesson of the war will not be lost. Nor the teaching of Emerson. After the present overt suppression of the individual, the pendulum will surely swing from tyrannical socialism to the greater freedom of the individual. And it can’t come quickly enough here in America.

Dr. Brandes sets more store by Nietzsche than Stirner; he was the first to call Nietzsche a “radical aristocrat.” We switched to the theme of Strindberg. Brandes said: “Yes, he was mad. Once he visited me and told me of a call he had made at a lunatic asylum near Stockholm. He rang the bell and asked the physician if he—Strindberg, the greatest of dramatists—was crazy; to which the doctor replied: ‘My dear Mr. Strindberg, if you will only consent to stay with me six weeks and talk with me every day, I promise to answer your question.’” After that Brandes had no doubts on the question. Brandes is not only the discoverer of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, but he himself is a revaluer of old valuations. Therein lies his significance for this generation. In 1888 he wrote to Nietzsche: “I have been the best hated man in the north for the last four years. The newspapers rave against me every day, especially since my long feud with Bjornson, in which all the ‘moral’ German newspapers take sides against me.”... To-day he is regarded as a reactionary by the Reds. The affections of Brandes have always been bestowed upon the literatures of England and France. Of his Main Currents, Maurice Bigeon has said that Brandes did for the nineteenth century what Sainte-Beuve did for the seventeenth century in his History of Port Royal. What is vital, what makes for progress, what has lasting influence in social life? asks the Dane in his Main Currents. He will remain the archetype of cosmopolitan critics for future generations. A humanist, the mind of Brandes is steel-colored. Ductile, when white-hot, it flows like lava from a volcano in eruption; but always is it steel, whether liquefied or rigid. Pre-eminently it is the fighting mind. He objects to being described as “brilliant.” The model of Brandes as a portrait-painter of ideas and individuals is Velasquez, because “Velasquez is not brilliant, but true.”

Yet he is brilliant and lucid, and steel-like, whether writing of Shakespeare or Lassalle. An ardent upholder of Taine and the psychology of race, he contends that in the individual, not in the people, lies the only hope for progress. He is altogether for the psychology of the individual. Like Carlyle, he has the cult of the great man. The fundamental question is—can the well-being of the race, which is the end of all effort, be attained without great men? “I say no, and again, no!” he cries. He is a firm believer in the axiom that every tub should stand on its own bottom; and in our earthly pasture, where the sheep think, act, or vote to order, the lesson of Brandes is “writ clear”: To myself be true! that truth set forth with double facets by Ibsen in Peer Gynt and Brand. Also by Emerson. Beware of the Bogy—the cowardly spirit of compromise, with its sneaking prudent advice; Go around! For mobs and mob-made laws Georg Brandes has a mighty hatred. He, too, is a radical aristocrat whose motto might be: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth! With his Hebraic irony he stung to the quick the spiritual sloth of Denmark. His life was made unpleasant at the Copenhagen University; but he had behind him the younger generation. He knew that to write for the intrenched and prejudiced class would be a waste of ink. He exploded his verbal bombs beneath the national ark and blew sky-high stale and false ideals. He became a national figure after he had been recognized as a world critic. Not the polished writer that was Sainte-Beuve, not the possessor of a synthetic intellect like Hippolyte Taine’s, Brandes is the broadest-minded man of the three, and upon his shoulders their critical mantles have fallen. Agitated as he was by the war—his letters to me were full of references to it—he was philosopher enough to plunge into the profoundest work. He has finished two studies on such divergent themes as Goethe and Voltaire. Let us hope both books be given an English garb and speedy publication.

PENNELL TALKS ABOUT ETCHING

When an etcher of Joseph Pennell’s caliber talks about his art it behooves both critic and public to sit up and listen. Mr. Pennell is endowed with a special gift for making people sit up. He loves to startle. He is occasionally choleric, he indulges in righteous indignation over the blindness of critics and fumes betimes because of the indifference of the world at large concerning the finer shades of art. Nevertheless, he always says something pertinent, even when it runs contrary to popular opinion, or sneers at critical canons. He is well within his rights as an artist to attack professional critics, for critics and their criticism are a perpetual nuisance—an incontrovertible statement that will, we are sure, be smilingly indorsed by the majority of the pesky critters. In his newly published and magnificently illustrated Etchers and Etching, Mr. Pennell has rendered a genuine service to students and amateurs, for not only does he reveal the secrets of his prison house, but he also reveals with a frankness that is fascinating his opinions of other etchers as compared with his god, Whistler, and incidentally tells his readers that if they do not agree with him they are unvarnished damphools!

Bully old Joe! He is the joy of honest reviewers and the terror of them that are not firmly grounded in their artistic technique. Herein he puts himself through all his familiar paces. Of all the graphic arts, etching is the most superior! Of all etchers, living or dead, James McNeill Whistler is the greatest! From this supreme judgment there is no appeal. And the curious part is that Mr. Pennell gives you chapter and verse to back up his argument. In all that pertained to the delicate and difficult art of etching, Whistler was the master. Not Rembrandt, who was careless as to the printing of his plates, careless as to finesse, and not given to slicking up his work; not Méryon, who was, according to Pennell, an indifferent etcher, and no artist—should be mentioned in company with the peerless Whistler. There is but one Allah in etching, and Pennell is his prophet. Salaam alaiekum! Rembrandt and Whistler? The Apocalypse and the Butterfly!

There is no denying the enthusiasm of an expert. And there is no denial of the proposition that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing in etching as in criticism. Yet there is something to be said for the much-abused critics. Artists who discuss their art are sometimes biassed, to put it mildly. The principal critical pronouncements that have endured were not made by professionals; on the contrary, such writers as Winckelmann, Goethe, Diderot, Blanc, Gautier, Baudelaire—especially Baudelaire—Zola (rather negligible), Goncourt, Roger Marx, Geoffroy, Huysmans, Mauclair, Charles Morice, Octave Mirbeau, R. A. M. Stevenson, George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Sturge Moore, Bernhard Berenson, John Van Dyke, W. C. Brownell, Royal Cortissoz, and others, have contributed more to the right understanding of the plastic arts than any opposing list of painters, sculptors and engravers you may assemble. Sift names and opinions, and for one Fromentin, one Whistler, one Reynolds, you will find a hundred writers who, non-professional as they were and are, have considerably added to our enlightenment in matters artistic.

Not all critics are “men who have failed in literature and art,” as Balzac said. The techniques of the various arts are, naturally enough, best known to the practitioners thereof. Yet Curator Frank Weitenkampf of our Public Library has written one of the most valuable books in the arts graphic, How to Appreciate Prints. Its union of technical insight and catholicity of judgment has been justly praised by all discerning etchers. The Discourses of Sir Joshua are, take them by and large, the best of their kind because most temperate. What wouldn’t we give for the critical writings of Leonardo da Vinci, whose prose, what we have of it, proves him a master. Vasari is an immortal gossip. William Blake was narrow in his outlook. Fancy ruling out from court the pictures of Rubens! Degas was a wit who abominated art critics more than Mr. Pennell. He abused Huysmans, the first to make public his rare genius. Millet, Rousseau, Constable said interesting things of their art, of their contemporaries. “There is no isolated truth,” declared Millet. “A good thing is never done twice,” wrote Constable; or Alfred Stevens’s definition of art as “nature seen through the prism of an emotion,” which epigram evidently Zola remembered in his Experimental Novel. Rodin has also uttered much wisdom. Fromentin’s studies of Dutch masters is a standard book, although he missed Vermeer—probably because the work of that master of masters was attributed to other men, notably to Terburg.

Ruskin did much to muddle public opinion with his intemperate praise of Turner and his purblind estimate of Whistler. Who shall deny that he was a force making for good? Walter Pater painted with words, not only making beautiful phrases but memorable criticism. Philip Gilbert Hamerton often blundered, and Pennell impales him, also abundantly quotes from him. The written and reported words of artists are alike precious to layman and critic. That the artist, Mr. Pennell for example, prefers etching to writing is natural; so might the critic if he had the pictorial gift. Art is art, not nature; and criticism is criticism, not always art. It professes to interpret the artist’s work, and at best it mirrors his art unavoidably intermingled with the personal temperament of the critic. At the worst, the critic lacks temperament, and when this is the case Heaven help artist and public! Walter Raleigh sums up the question in a sentence: “Criticism, after all, is not to legislate nor to classify, but to raise the dead.” The magical art of evocation! Few critics possess the gift, but, then, fewer are the artists who boast it.

That painters—or etchers—can get along without professional criticism we know from history, but that they themselves play the critic successfully is open to doubt. And are they any fairer to younger talent than official criticism? It is an inquiry that should be fraught with significance for professionals. Artists, great and various, have sent forth their pupils into the world. As befits honest criticism, have they at all recognized the pupils of other men; played fair with those whose practice and theory were at the opposite pole to their own? The answer is a decided negative; the examples that might be adduced, legion. Recall what Velasquez said to Salvator Rosa, according to Carl Justi. Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard whether he did not think Raphael the best of all the painters he had seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: “To be plain with you, Raphael does not please me at all.” In art criticism a Robert Schumann is yet to appear; and notwithstanding his catholicity in taste, Schumann missed Wagner, as did Berlioz. Perhaps Stendhal saw the weakness in such criticisms when he remarked: “Difference engenders hatred.”

To leave historical generalities for the particulars of contemporary criticism, let us open a book that has recently appeared, entitled De David à Degas, by Jacques-Emile Blanche, famous portraitist, charming causeur, brilliant penman, sympathetic and sometimes caustic critic. M. Blanche, a painter by “the grace of God,” for his talents are many, considers such diverse artists as Ingres, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Fantin-Latour—a notably fine estimate—Degas—one of the best essays—Aubrey Beardsley—a masterly miniature of a marvellous draftsman—and the redoubtable Whistler. On page 35 M. Blanche writes of the etchings and lithographs of the American artists, that they were not worthy of their reputation; that the Paris series frankly lean on Méryon, recall his work; others are freer, occasionally pretty, though weak, without character in their picturesque quality of vignette, a genre wherein later Mariano Fortuny excelled! We are here far from Pennell’s dictum that Whistler is the greatest etcher that ever lived. What does Jacques Blanche know about etching? probably will be his comment if he reads the critique in question.

And we should quite agree with the etcher if he should make some remark; such one-sided verdict, despite the fact that M. Blanche is to be listened to with respect when he talks of art and artists deserves rebuke! It again confirms the attitude attributed to George Saintsbury that all discussion of contemporaries is conversation, not criticism. Mr. Pennell, who also slaughters the reputations of the living and dead, might put this witticism in his pipe and smoke up. The late William M. Laffan, a practical etcher, one who etched for his bread and butter, as he assured us, wrote in the _Sun_ newspaper, of which he was the proprietor at the time of Whistler’s death, that the plates of the etcher Whistler would outlive Whistler the painter. Mr. Laffan, who possessed a _flair_ for criticism, prophesied aright. He said too that there were no such things as replicas, which is the truth. Many Whistler canvases are sadly deteriorating, critical enthusiasm concerning them is cooling—the artist Whistler is now seen not to be an isolated apparition but a synthesis of his own enthralling self, based on the art of Courbet, Fantin, Albert Moore, the Japanese and the inevitable Velasquez; but the etchings and lithographs of this truly versatile genius, being things of beauty, will be a joy forever. They are his legacy to the elect. And yet, must the “grand manner” of line-engravings irretrievably vanish to make place for the sketchy, fussy etching?

Not only is Brother Pennell—a brother to dragons!—narrow in his estimates of all the great etchers, but he is unjust to workers in other black-and-white mediums. Old-fashioned line-engraving is mechanical, and was so tedious to execute that the process was abandoned for still more mechanical though simpler methods. Not, however, till the patient engravers had bequeathed to art a gallery of stately portraits and landscapes, minutely, if somewhat elaborately, recorded. Etching, be it never so fine, so personal, cannot compete with the masters of line, because etching lacks depth and substance. It is improvisation at the best; at its worst it is almost feline in its scratchings. Mezzotint, too, is a noble art. It is often smudgy, to be sure, but it has tonal splendor, which etching has not, despite the magical suggestion of tone in the Whistler plates. After reading Mr. Pennell’s exposition of the pains and perils consequent upon the production of a perfect etching, the finished plates of Marc Antonio, Richard Earlom or Masson’s gray-haired man, do not seem a whit more mechanical. There are tricks in all trades. Whistler’s supremacy did not alone consist in his virtuosity with the needle, but in his personality as poet and mystic. Rembrandt was greater artist than etcher; in his days the manipulation of material was not so consummate as during the Whistlerian epoch, yet he is by all odds the bigger man. A rude scratch of his and you see the glories of heaven, the gloom of hell. There is a fulness, a richness, a solidity, an architectural quality in Méryon missing in Whistler, Pennell to the contrary notwithstanding. In the evocation of the intangible, the evanescent, of the exquisite, Whistler has never had a rival, and as a technician he is foremost; but George Moore was not far astray when he said that if “Jemmy” had been fifty pounds heavier he might have painted like Velasquez. In the last analysis his work lacks weight, substance, virile power, though not imagination, and that quintessential quality is worth a wilderness of beefy, brilliant, magisterial canvases.

All this is beside the mark, which is the superb Pennell volume. Agree with him or not, he writes with vigor, demolishing shams and humbuggery, and his words, if often intemperate, are prompted by burning sincerity. He is never smug nor self-satisfied. He sees through the hole in our national millstone of art. His ideal is the linear, and at a time when sloppy drawing, barbarous color and grotesque composition have become our shibboleth, his warnings are salutary. His is the cult of beauty for beauty’s sake, the only culture in art. Etching to him is the still small voice of an art abused by amateurs, too often tortured by artists (you think of the big plates of Frank Brangwyn). He is fair to the Bohemian, Wenzel Hollar, who, to be seen at his best, one must go to Prague, to the Hollareum, there in the Rudolphinium, where his amazing work may be studied in its entirety.

Mr. Pennell pays a rather grudging tribute to Seymour Haden, while admitting the beauty of his plate, Sunset in Ireland, and he warmed the cockles of our heart by his discriminating praise of the splendid etcher that was Félicien Rops. At the conclusion he peremptorily exclaims: “I know of no other great etchers.” Oh, yes, you do, Joseph Pennell! You are too modest by half. Demme, sir, as old Joseph Bagstock would say, old Joey B., begad, sir, you know a chap named Pennell who sometimes etches like an angel. And also lithographs. We’ll eat our hat if his scraped mezzotint, Wrens’ City, isn’t a beautiful plate!

IN PRAISE OF PRINTS

(TO JOSEPH PENNELL)

The gallery is rather narrow, but long and lofty; the light is diffused and gentle. A tiny staircase leads to mysterious retreats where, Piranesi-like, may be descried other galleries, though not peopled by the prisoners of the fantastic Italian etcher. A familiar voice welcomes the visitor who, weary of the monotonous mobs on the avenue, finds here a haven where, surrounded by the ingratiating arts of black-and-white—mezzotinting, etching, lithograph and line-engraving—he may soothe his soul and rest his bones. The color-scheme is harmonious. A dark panelling, and for the smaller galleries a more cheerful though neutral tone, is observed. Moving slowly about he sees some black spots on the wall; at close range they resolve themselves into ingenious patterns. Stacked in portfolios are prints. On large tables more of them sprawl. In the rear room there is, perhaps, an exhibition of etchings or mezzotints, but seldom of line-engravings. A young Scotsman shows his mettle—the Scotch take to the needle as ducks do to grass. Why are line-engravings never hung nowadays? You are told that taste has changed since the golden age of engraving ruled our walls. And changed for the worse, thinks the fanatic of pure line.