Chapter III: Part 3

Yonder, above a huge bin, in which are stored rare prints, hangs the Moses of Philippe de Champaigne, engraved by Edelinck. It is a largely moulded composition. The Hebrew lawgiver, on whose noble features linger the reflections of Jehovah’s divine illumination, the horns of light emanating from Mount Sinai, holds the rod in one hand, supporting with the other the table of the laws. A picture in the grand manner. Therefore, to be passed by in favor of some cryptic scratches on a small plate, a signed proof by an artistic nobody, who designs and etches in a mediocre fashion. Yet his work is eagerly snapped up, while the rhythmic line of Edelinck is not even looked at, rich as it is as an interpretation or artistic performance. “Engraving is so mechanical, don’t you think so!” is the usual reason advanced for the neglect of this branch of black-and-white. But, by the same token, no more mechanical than the myriads of fussy little plates of the etchers, for the most part without distinction in style or technique. Nevertheless, etching is a swifter method for registering illusion, and in all the arts—George Moore says there are nine, not seven—the chief thing is to create illusion.

Etching rules. Why? Because an artist of overwhelming genius set upon the art his seal. Because it is a consummate medium for expressing personality, and in all the arts personality is the slogan of the hour. We must bare our souls in our work, cry young folk; the rest, art included, can go hang! But the question is whether these same souls are worth the bother of such exposure. When Rembrandt or Méryon, Whistler, or Pennell exhibited their personalities on their plates the result was: primo, art; secundo, personalities. In a word, not even the perky, cantankerous side of Whistler intervened between his art and his public; the nobler phases of his character, and there were many, shone clear and truthfully. The massive bulk of Rembrandt’s personality is reflected in his work with the needle; yet what magnificent art is his! Also a dangerous beacon in a stormy sea for lesser etchers. We love etching. It is the most concise and delicate of all artistic stenography. The scratched line, its symbol, is less complex than the convention of the so-called “steel” engraver, who works in a denser, richer medium, despite the allegation that his is a chilly art. So is sculpture chilly. All depends on the man handling the chisel, or in engraving the wielder of the burin. The richest of the mediums is copper mezzotinted, or scraped plate. It sometimes gives muddy results. Etching has more personal charm; line-engraving is chaster, loftier in style, because more objective.

If a certain formal rigidity or hardness may be urged against the less personal art of line-engraving, what cannot be said of the thin, facile, shallow impressionism of the etched plate? Above all else, structure is lacking, and it is too often a vehicle for piffling anecdote, or the stamping-ground of the superficial dauber. Mezzotint is not always a satisfactory means of expression. It too is mainly reproductive, while its seductive, velvety surfaces may easily degenerate into monotonous formulas. Between Valentine Green and his interpretations of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Richard Earlom’s evocation of an incandescent forge, and the apocalyptic visions of a John Martin, there is the wide and ineluctable gulf of technical mastery. Martin may have been half-mad, like William Blake—as are most mystics viewed in the cold light of worldly reason—but he possessed vision; while Green and Earlom, accomplished copper-scrapers as they were, only saw the superficies of things eternal. To-day John Martin’s crude prints may be had for a penny, and the fantastic Piranesi is a drug in the shops. Neither this mezzotinter nor etcher reveals that mysterious “quality” essential in the arts.

It is quality, then, that appeals in etching and mezzotint. It was quality that appealed when the specimen plates of the master engravers were in vogue. Well and good. But why doesn’t that quality continue to make the same appeal now to our fastidious taste as it did a half century ago? Naturally enough, the answer is Fashion, which has decreed that the grand old line-engravings be hung in crepuscular hallways. To be sure, there is a corridor in the Pitti Palace, Florence, a sun-flooded hallway upon which sing the marvels of lyric line-engravings. Fashion says: admire the signed etching, coddle the impertinent remarque proof; Fashion has set top-notch figures for the English mezzotinters of English portraiture. By leaps and bounds the prices of Green and a few of his contemporaries have been mounting, so that to own a Gainsborough or a Sir Joshua portrait in mezzotint is to proclaim yourself a person of means. Nor should there be a protest against these exalted prices. Rare art can never be high enough; besides, the domain of mezzotinting will soon be as bare of practitioners as that of line-engraving. S. Arlent Edwards is a name that occurs to us in mezzotinting. Joseph Pennell’s essays in that medium reveal his mastery; while the artist that is Timothy Cole, stands solitary as probably the last of distinguished wood-engravers, as Mandel may be said to have been the last of famous European line-engravers.

The once haughty elder sister of the arts graphic is now become their Cinderella. Who but an anonymous minority cares for the stately engraved pictures of the past? How their dignified style reproaches the heedless haste of latter-day photographic reproductions! Yet, what modern mechanical process can match the slowly executed plates of Mantegna, Marc Antonio Ramondi, Albrecht Dürer, or Nanteuil—who engraved after his own designs? From the finesse of the Behams to the majestic sweep of Bervic, or the virtuosity of Antoine Masson—consider his head of Brisacier, the Gray-Haired Man—has not every manner, every mood, every technique been reproduced—rather, let us say, interpreted—in the terms of line-engraving? The engraved plate can state as succinctly as the etched the linear fretwork and silhouette of forms. Among other resources, the engraved plate is a method of the disposing of mass. It is more subtle than mezzotint in the indication of character, and is seldom so monotonous; while to the impressionism and often insignificant patterns of etching it opposes a static quality, opposes with its synthetic qualities of the permanent, the majestic, the gracious, and the powerful. As a medium it is as supple as either etching or scraped copper, though in this attribute it yields to wood-engraving.

What cannot line-engraving do in the way of interpretation? Think of the variety of technical styles and artistic individualities. Ambushed behind every laboriously engraved “steel” plate—steel is only in use since 1820—there lurks a personality. Think of Mantegna, a master of line in his painting; of Lucas, of the quaint Martin Schongauer, of Altdorfer, Wierix—who aped Rembrandt in his version of The Three Trees—of Sadeler and Goltzius; of Caracci, Wille, Nanteuil, Raphael Morghen, Visscher, with his Sleeping Cat and his Rat-Catcher; of the Drevets, of William Sharp, Robert Strange, and Woolet, the English trio; and George Friedrich Schmidt is still a name to conjure with. A litany of names might be recited of engravers who have made masterpieces. To-day, when we are in such a hurry to go nowhere to see nothing, the lenten and aristocratic art of line-engraving has lost its glamour, its significance. Nevertheless, a beautiful art it will always remain, beautiful notwithstanding the fluctuations of fashion. We feel that the pendulum of popular taste will surely swing back to this method of black-and-white, despite its slow, painful process of production. After an optical debauch in color, line is regaining its old supremacy. What else meant the apparition of cubism but a revolt against a too fluid impressionism! If this be true of easel-paintings it will come truer of line-engraving. The Sisters Five should walk abreast, not processionally—line, mezzotint, etching, wood-cutting and lithography are their names. And no one of this family is handsomer, more stately, more decorative, less “spotty” on a wall than the classics of line-engraving.

NEW RUSSIA FOR OLD

A distinguished Russian diplomat, a visitor now in America, has asked us not to judge Russia too hastily; above all, not to abandon hopes for her future. The deposition of the Romanovs could not be accomplished without a social cataclysm and the presence of what Nicholas Murray Butler has so happily called “an inverted autocracy,” that is to say, contemporary Bolshevikism. But the newcomers, after tumbling over thrones and dynasties, cannot be expected to halt at any half-way house of outworn political expediency. Their slogan is: All or Nothing. Everything is permitted. Precisely the device on the victorious standards of that strange Old Man of the Mountain, from whose followers we derive the sinister word “Assassin.” Yet we are fain to believe that, as nothing long endures, the tremendous Russian muddle will be straightened out sometime. In the bad old days when the Russian moujik was not singing songs saturated with vodka, he spun legends shot through with the fantastic or grim with the pain of life. In the European concert his formidable bass voice made the voices of his neighbors seem thin and piping. Napoleon prophesied that before the end of the nineteenth century Europe would be either republican or cossack, and a Moscow journal has proclaimed that the “twentieth century belongs to us.” One need not be a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of a Russian for his country is a veritable passion. And from lips parched by the desire of liberty, though the Russian be persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, and murdered, this passion is ever voiced with unabated intensity. What eloquent apostrophes have their great writers made to their native land! The youngest among the great nations, herself a nation with genius, she must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. How Turgénieff praised her noble tongue: “O! mighty Russian language!”...

Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a sojourner among English ideas. Ivan Turgénieff, a Muscovite doubled by a Greek artist, was called a cosmopolitan by Dostoievsky—that profound and sombre soul—and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was not sufficiently national; whereas to western ears it once smacked too much of the Kalmuck. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered from the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. The case of Modeste Moussorgsky is altogether different. If Russian music, the organized musical speech of the nation, owes much to Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, nevertheless Michael Glinka was its father. Like Weber, he lovingly plucked from his native soil its wild flowers of melody, and gave them an operatic setting in his Ruslan and Life for the Czar. In his turn and representing the elder school are Darjomisky and Serov, while with New Russia blazoned on their banners follow César Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balikirev, Glazounov, Stcherbatchev, Rachmaninov, Arensky, Moussorgsky, and, last not least, Scriabin.

It might prove interesting to compare the cosmopolitanism of Tschaikovsky with Turgénieff’s. George Moore insists with Celtic obstinacy that Turgénieff is the greatest master of fiction, greater even than Flaubert, because his art is effortless. Certainly, the Russian is the most artistic among novelists. Tschaikovsky was suspiciously regarded by the lesser native choir, while the big men, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, and Tolstoy had an army of imitators, who wore their blouses untucked in their trousers. It was a symbol. Their watchword was: We are going to the People! From the Intelligentsia, the students, to the peasant himself, this ominous cry was heard. It is still sounded. Its echoes are in Western ears. The Great White Czar would not heed the warning. Going to the People is a phrase indicating a savage reaction against cosmopolitan influences; Russia had successively suffered from the invasions of English, French, and German ideas, customs, manners, costumes. The rabid Slavophilist would have none of these. He disliked Italian pictures, loathed German philosophy, despised French literature, and hated English politics. Yet, from these seemingly disparate elements was born a national consciousness, a national culture. Its eclecticism caused its disintegration.

To comprehend latter-day Russian music we should remember that the national spirit pervades its masterpieces. And that spirit is not in a special compartment separated from the seven arts, but waters their roots. With us art is a tender flower, isolated as if in a hothouse. The artist in America lives in a vacuum, or else creates his own atmosphere. In Russia, “barbarous” Russia, as we condescendingly refer to her, an artist is first a patriot. The English critic, John M. Robertson, wrote in 1891: “In that strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in the production of truthful literary art, ... for justice of perception, soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in England with all our freedom, can offer no parallel.” Tyranny, then, may be forcing ground for genius! From Gogol to Artzibachev Russian literature achieved its spiritual freedom despite the Czar and Siberia. The reason we speak of these writers and composers is because to know them is to grasp the psychology of Russian music, which is so often inspired by the poems, novels, and dramas of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Turgénieff, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Gorky, Andreyev, Artzibachev, and by the paintings of Repin, Perov, Verestchagin, and, in the case of Prokofieff, by Boris Anisfeld.

We have elsewhere made a critical comparison of Dostoievsky with Moussorgsky; no need to refer to it here, except to say that when Dostoievsky wrote, “The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian soul is a dark place,” he accurately plotted his nation’s psychic curve. And let it be said in passing that the author of Crime and Punishment had developed the mystic idea (your Russian is nothing if not mystical) that from Russia must come the salvation of the peoples of the earth—from Russian Christianity. This notion became an obsession of the great-souled writer, in whose Karamasov Brothers and The Possessed (Besi), may be found the leading motives of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the superman, the eternal recurrence, the fantastic idea that eternity may be in a “boxed-in” bathhouse, an idea that Henri Barbusse, who is saturated with Dostoievsky, develops in L’Enfer, that infinity is contained within us. Eternity is Now. Tolstoy, who was best described by Count Melchior de Vogué in his epigram as having “the mind of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist” (“On dirait l’esprit d’un chimiste anglais dans l’âme d’un buddhiste hindou”) has not played as influential a rôle among Russian composers because he was essentially tone-deaf. His Kreutzer Sonata demonstrates how a man ignorant of music, great artist that he is, may write himself down absurdly. In comparison Dostoievsky is a spiritual reservoir of musical certitudes; while in Turgénieff, thanks to a natural sensibility and years of musical cultivation while sojourning in the household of the Viardot-Garcias at Paris—surely the happiest as well as the most artistic “ménage à trois” in history—he wrote of the art with sympathy and understanding.

The further one dives into the Orient the more chromatic become the arts, especially the tonal art. The chromatic scale was once the shibboleth of the Neo-Russian composer, and, being the artistic offspring of Liszt and the Slav, he vainly sought to veil his paternity by painting it over with local color. It was then a trackless and seldom explored country his, full of yawning harmonic precipices, melodies that are at once heavenly and hideous—like the mouth of a pretty woman with missing front teeth; mountainous ideals, bleak surprises, and rugged vistas. To-day matters have changed. The younger generation, headed by the astonishing Alexander Scriabin, has thrown chromaticism to the dogs. The whole-tone scale is monarch. Arnold Schoenberg declared the scale must escape the House of Bondage and be free from scholastic shackles. Modulation is to be as Free Love, which may supersede marriage—according to the recent programme of the Reds. Rebikov, Stravinsky, Serge Prokofieff, and Leo Ornstein have long ago nailed their color to the mast. It is unequivocally scarlet. Notwithstanding the seeming anarchy in all these social and artistic manifestations, we believe that to the Slav is the future. Out of darkest Russia may emerge the next world-composer. Scriabin may be only the Precursor of the new evangel. Dostoievsky is right. There is enough fire of righteousness in the Russians to burn up the world and all its wickedness. Russia is the matrix heavy with unborn genius, and who shall bear down too heavily now on her sorrow and travail? Water seeks its level. A country is no greater than her great men. And how truly great are those we have just named! New lamps for old. A new and glorious Russia for the old. Avos!

CÉZANNE

Cézanne was pre-eminently occupied with the problem of space and its corollaries, bulk, weight, density, and with the still more stupendous problem of getting on a flat surface the suggestion of a third dimension—thickness. To achieve even a suggestion proves him a genius. And he was a genius. His supreme technical qualities are volume, ponderability, and a personal color-scheme. What’s the use of asking whether he is a sound draftsman or not? He is a master of “edges,” a magician of tonalities. Huysmans spoke to me of the defective eyesight of Cézanne; but disease boasts its discoveries as well as health. Possibly his “abnormal” vision gave him glimpses of a reality denied to other painters. He advised students to look for the contrasts and correspondences of tone. He practised what he preached. No painter was so little affected by personal moods, by those variations of temperament dear to the professional artist. Did Cézanne possess the temperament he was always talking about? If he did, his temperament was not precisely decorative or flamboyant.

An unwearying experimenter, he seldom “finished” a picture. His morose landscapes were usually painted from one scene near his home at Aix. I saw the spot. The pictures do not closely resemble it—that is, in the photographic sense—which simply means that Cézanne had the vision and I had not. A few themes with polyphonic variations filled his simple life; art was submerged by its apparatus. His was the centripetal, not the centrifugal, temperament. In the domain of his rigid, intense ignorance there was little space for climate, charm, hardly for sunshine. Recall the blazing blue sky and sun of Provence, the tropical riot of its vegetation, its gamuts of green and scarlet, and then search for this mellow richness and misty, golden air in the pictures of the master. You won’t find them in his dim, muffled surfaces, though a mystic light permeates his landscapes. It is the sallow-sublime in its apotheosis. He did not paint portraits of Provence as did Daudet in Numa Roumestan, or Bizet in L’Arlésienne. Cézanne sought for profounder meanings. The superficial, the facile, the staccato, the merely brilliant repelled him. Not that he was an “abstract” painter—as the self-contradictory atelier jargon goes. He was eminently concrete. He plays a legitimate “trompe-l’œil” on the optic nerve. His is not a pictorial illustration of Provence, but the slow, cruel delineation of a certain hill on old Mother Earth which exposes her bare torso, her bald, rocky pate and gravelled feet. The hallucination is inescapable.

As drab as the orchestration of Brahms, as austere in linear economy and as analytical as Stendhal or Ibsen, the art of Cézanne never becomes truly lyric except in his still life. Upon an apple he lavishes his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion to him may be as beautiful as a naked woman. Taste is not one of his marked traits. The chiefest misconception of Cézanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him chief of a school, which he is, but declare him to be the greatest painter since the Byzantines. This assertion I have read in cold type. There is a lot of inutile talk about “significant form” by propagandists—usually rotten bad painters. As if form had not always been “significant.” When the impressionists as a school, now outmoded as the Barbizons, began to issue their prospectuses, the emphasis was laid upon form; form having served its purpose must go—at least become subordinate to color and its decomposition. The suave line of Raphael had degenerated into the insipid arabesques of Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Cabanel. No denying these truths, since become platitudes. Form is again in the ascendant, impressionism having in its turn become deliquescence. No one denies Cézanne’s preoccupation with form, nor Courbet’s, either. Consider the Ornan’s landscapes, with their sombre flux of forest, painted by the crassest realist among French artists, though he seems hopelessly romantic to our sharper, more petulant mode of envisaging the world; yet what better example of “significant form” and solid structural sense than Courbet’s? Nevertheless, Cézanne quite o’ercrows Courbet in his feeling for the massive—sometimes you can’t see the ribs of his landscapes because of the skeleton.

Cézanne’s was a twilight soul. And a humorless one. His early painting was quasi-structural, well-nigh modelling. Always the architectural sense. His rhythms are often elliptical. He has a predilection for the asymmetrical. Yet he is a man who lent to an art of two dimensions, the illusion of a third. His tactile values are raised to the nth degree. His color is personal. Huysmans was clairvoyant when, a half century ago, he wrote of Cézanne’s work as containing the prodromes of a new art. The handling of his material alone absorbed him, and not its lyric, dramatic, anecdotic, or rhetorical elements. He despised “literary” painting. His portraits are charged with character. But he sometimes profoundly ponders unimportant matters—loses himself in a desert of sandy theorizing.

The tang of the town is not in his portraits of places. His leaden, metallic landscapes seldom spontaneously arouse to activity the jaded retina fed on Fortuny, Monticelli, or Monet. In his groups of bathing women there is no sex appeal. Merely women in their natural pelt, as heavy flanked as Percheron mares. They are as ugly as the females of Degas, and twice as truthful. With beauty, academic or operatic, he had no traffic. If you don’t care for his graceless nudes, you may console yourself with the axiom that there is no disputing tastes—with the tasteless. We have seen some of his still-life pieces so acid in tonal quality as to suggest that divine dissonance produced on the palate by a stale oyster, or akin to the rancid note of an oboe in a pantomime score by Stravinsky. But what thrice subtle sonorities, what opulent color-chords may be found in his compositions. His fruits savor of the earth. Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; when he paints an onion it reveals a certain grace. Vollon dramatizes it, or embroiders its homely shape with luxuriant decorations. When Cézanne paints an onion you smell it. His apples are—seemingly—falling off the table. How despairing are the efforts of his imitators to get those slanting surfaces covered with fruit and vegetables that have just been brought in by the cook. You say, Miraculous! and make a gesture to prevent the ripe stuff from sliding to the floor. The “representation” abhorred of the Cubists in its most pregnant shapes is there.

Cézanne did not occupy himself, as did Manet, with the ideas, manners and aspects of his generation. With the classic retort of Manet, he could have replied to those who taunted him with not “finishing” his pictures, “Sir, I am not a historical painter.” Nor need we be disconcerted in any estimate of him by the depressing snobbery of collectors who don’t know B from bull’s foot but go off at half-trigger in their enthusiasm when a hint is dropped as to the possibilities of a painter appreciating in a pecuniary sense. Cézanne is the painting idol of the present crowd, as were Manet and Monet a few decades ago. These æsthetic fluctuations should not distract us. Henner, Cabanel, Bourguereau too, were idolized once upon a time and served to make a millionaire’s holiday by hanging in his marble bathroom. It is the undeniable truth that Cézanne has, in the eyes of the younger generation, become a tower of strength which intrigues critical fancy. Cézanne is sincere to the core, yet even stark sincerity does not, of necessity, imply the putting forth of masterpieces. Before he attained his synthetic power he patiently studied Delacroix, Courbet, and the early Italians. At times he achieved the foundational structure of Courbet, though I don’t think he had either the brains or the painting temperament of his elder contemporary, whose portée was at times tremendous. Hostile critics declare that the canvases of St. Paul of Provence are sans composition, sans linear pattern, sans personal charm. However, “popularity is for dolls,” says Emerson.

I saw at the Champs de Mars Salon of 1901 a large picture by Maurice Denis, entitled Hommage à Cézanne, the idea of which was manifestly inspired by Manet’s Hommage à Fantin-Latour, or Fantin’s Batignolle School. The Maurice Denis canvas depicts a still-life by Cézanne on a chevalet, which is surrounded by the figures of certain painters—Bonnard, Denis, Redon, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, Mellério, and Vollard. Cézanne is posed standing and is apparently embarrassed, which was his natural condition. There was a special Cézanne Salle, as there was one devoted to Eugène Carrière, but Cézanne held the place of honor. With all his naïve vanity he was dazzled by the uproarious championship of “les jeunes,” and, to give him credit for a peasant astuteness, he was rather suspicious of the demonstration. But he stolidly accepted the frantic homage of the youngsters, all the while looking like a bourgeois Buddha. To-day a Cézanne of quality is costly. Why not? When juxtaposed with many modern painters his vital art makes other pictures seem linoleum or papier maché. The nervous, shrinking man I saw at Aix and later at Paris would have been astounded at the praise printed since his death; while he yearned for the publicity of the official Salon—as did his school-friend Zola for a seat in the Academy—none the less, he disliked notoriety. He loved hard work. He loved his solitude. With a fresh batch of canvases he trudged every morning to his pet landscape, the Motive, he called it, and it was there that he daily slaved with genuine technical heroism. When I first saw him he was a queer, sardonic old gentleman in ill-fitting clothes, with the shrewd, suspicious gaze of a provincial notary. Like John La Farge, he hated shaking hands. A rare impersonality.

Goethe has told us that because of his limitations we may recognize a master. The limitations of Cézanne are patent. An investigator, experimenter, even fumbler, he did not deem it wise to stray from his chosen, if narrow, field. His non-conformism defines his genius. Imagine reversing musical history and finding Johann Sebastian Bach following Richard Strauss. The very notion is monstrous. Yet, figuratively speaking, this order constitutes the case of Cézanne. He arrived on the pictorial scene after the classic, romantic, impressionistic, and symbolic schools. He is a primitive, not made like Puvis de Chavannes, but one born with an unaffected crabbed simplicity. Paul Cézanne will be remembered as a painter who respected his material, also as a painter, pure, without preoccupation in schools or ideas. No man who wields a brush need ask for a more enduring epitaph.

EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI?

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I couldn’t help recalling these words of the Psalmist, these and the opening, “By the rivers of Babylon,” in which is compressed the immemorial melancholy of an enslaved race, when I heard Sophie Braslau intone with her luscious contralto, a touching Hebrew lament, “Eili Eili Lomo Asovtoni?” at a concert last winter. Naturally I believed the melody to be the echo of some tribal chant sung in the days of the Babylonian captivity, and perhaps before that in the days of the prehistoric Sumerians and the epic of Gilgamesh. Others have made the same error. Judge of my surprise when in a copy of _The American Jewish News_ I read that the composer of Eili Eili is living, that his name is Jacob Kopel Sandler, that he wrote the music for a historical drama, Die B’ne Moishe (The Sons of Moses), which deals with the Chinese Jews. Mr. Sandler had written the song for Sophie Carp, a Yiddish actress and singer. The Sons of Moses was a failure, and a new piece, Brocha, the Jewish King of Poland, was prepared. (Not alluding to Pan Dmowski.) It was produced at the Windsor Theatre in the Bowery. The song, not the play, was a success. Then the music drifted into queer company, for music is a living organism and wanders when it is not controlled. Finally Sophie Braslau got hold of it, and the composer, who was directing a choir in a Bronx synagogue, was astounded to hear of the acclamations of a Metropolitan Opera House Sunday night audience. His daughter has listened to Eili Eili and brought home the good news. After troublesome preliminaries “Meyer Beer,” the pen name of the musical editor of _The American Jewish News_, was able to prove beyond peradventure of a doubt the artistic parentage of the song, and Jacob Sandler is in a fair way of being idolized in his community, as he should be.

Eili Eili lomo asovtoni? may be found in Psalm 22, the first line of the second verse in Hebrew. In the English version the words of David are in the first verse: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And in the St. Mark’s Gospel we read: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is, being interpreted: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Chapter 15, verse 34.) The exegetists and apologists, as well as sciolists, have made of this immortal phrase a bone of theological contention. Schmiedel, who with Harnack believes the words to have been uttered by our Saviour, nevertheless points out various details which prefigure the same things in the crucifix—the just man hanging on the stake, the perforated hands and feet, the mocking crowd, the soldiers gambling for the clothes, everything takes place as described in the Psalm. Lublinski (in Dogma, p. 93) and Arthur Drews (in The Historicity of Jesus, p. 150) demur to the orthodox Christian conclusions of Harnack and Schmiedel. A beloved master, the late Solomon Schechter, disposed of the question in his usual open style. “The world is big enough,” he has said to me, for both Jehovah and Jesus, “for two such grand faiths as the Hebrew and the Christian.” But he saw Christianity only in its historical sequence, and not as a continuator of Judaism; rather, a branching away from the main trunk. If it had not been for Constantine, the world might be worshipping Mithra to-day, was the erudite and worthy man’s belief. Enveloped in the mists of the first two centuries Christianity seems to have had a narrow escape from the doctrines of Mithraism. That Salomon Reinach practically admits in his Orpheus, a most significant study of comparative religions from the pen of this French savant.

Once upon a time I played the organ in a “shool,” a reformed, not an orthodox, synagogue; played indifferently well. But my acquaintance with the Jewish liturgy dates back to my boyhood in Philadelphia, where I studied Hebrew, in company with Latin. The reason? My mother fondly hoped that I might become a priest—the very thought of which makes me shudder now. The religious in me found vent in music, and my love of change was gratified by playing the Hebrew service on Shabbas (Saturday) and the Roman Catholic on our Sabbath. Probably that is why I was affected by Sophie Braslau’s singing of Eili Eili. Rosa Raisa has put the song in her repertory, and only on Easter Sunday last did Sarah Borni sing it, although it appeared on the programme as a composition of Kurt Schindler’s, an error quickly rectified by Miss Borni, who did not know the authorship till too late. “Such songs,” commented this soprano, “come but once in a man’s lifetime.” Dorothy Jardon will no doubt sing Eili Eili, as she sang for the first time a Jahrzeit, a Kaddish by Rhea Silberta, at the Hippodrome last Sunday. Mr. Sandler has come into his own, and it is gratifying to record that the credit is largely due to Meyer Beer and _The American Jewish News_.

I have always entertained a peculiar admiration for the Jews and Judaism. It began with the study of Semitic literature of the Talmud, above all of Hebrew poetry, the most sublime in our language, as Matthew Arnold asserts in his comparative estimate of Greek and Hebraic cultures. My dearest friends have been, still are, of that race. Prejudice, social or political, against the Jew, I not only detest, but I have never been able to comprehend. My early playmates were Jewish boys and girls. I have stood under the “Choopah” (marriage canopy), and have seen many a Bar-Mitzvah; even sat “Shivah” for the dead father of intimate friends. From Rafael Joseffy to Georg Brandes; from the brilliant Hungarian virtuoso that was Joseffy—whose father, a learned rabbi, I visited at Budapest—in Pest-Ofen—in 1903, when he was eighty-four, an Orientalist, a linguist with twenty-six languages, ancient and modern, at the tip of his tongue—to Professor Brandes, the Danish scholar, an intellectual giant, and a critic in the direct line of Sainte-Beuve and Taine—both men I knew and loved. Whether the Jew has attained the summits as a creator in the seven arts I cannot speak authoritatively, although the Old Testament furnishes abundant evidences that he has in poetry. Disraeli (Beaconsfield), who liked to tease Gladstone by calling him “Frohstein” and pointing to his rugged Jewish prophet’s features, has written of his race most eloquently. I should like to quote a passage in its entirety, but time and space forbid. But an excerpt I permit myself the luxury of reproduction: “The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, the inspiration fervid with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus, and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which the ancients recognized as most divine and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation....” He goes on: “There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded with our children under feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust....”

Lord Beaconsfield mentions Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn as Jewish composers, and Pasta and Grisi among the singers. Probably he had not heard Rossini’s witticism uttered on his deathbed: “For heaven’s sake, don’t bury me in the Jewish cemetery!” Nor did Beaconsfield look far enough ahead when he wrote “dark aversion”—which is wonderful. To-day the boot is on the other leg. It may be Gentiles who will be forced to change their names to Jewish. I could easily sign myself “Shamus Hanuchah”—leaving out the “lichts”—or pattern after the name Paderewski jokingly wrote on his photograph: “For Jacob Hunekerstein.”

And I am ashamed to confess that I know Jews who themselves are ashamed of having been born Jews. Incredible! In Vienna I have seen St. Stefan’s Cathedral crowded at the 11 o’clock high mass by most fervent worshippers, the majority of whom seemed Semitic, which prompted me to propound the riddle: When is a Jew not a Jew? Answer: When he is a Roman Catholic in Vienna. But you never can tell. As Joseffy used to say when some musician with a nose like the Ten Commandments was introduced, as, for example, Monsieur Fontaine, “He means Brunnen, or, in Hebrew, Pischa. He is not a Jew, but his grandmother wore a ‘scheitel’” (the wig still worn by orthodox Jewish women). The truth is that among the virtuosi, singers, actors, the Jew holds first place. Liszt and Paganini are the exceptions, and Paganini could easily pass in an east side crowd as Jehudah. As to the Wagner controversy, not started by Nietzsche, but by Rossini and Meyerbeer, who referred to Wagner as Jewish, that was settled by O. G. Sonneck in his little book, Was Wagner a Jew? but only after I had introduced to the columns of the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_ in 1913, a book by Otto Bournot, entitled Ludwig Geyer. Geyer was, as you may remember, the stepfather of Richard Wagner. Bournot had access to the Baireuth archives and delved into the newspapers of Geyer’s days. August Böttiger’s Necrology had hitherto been the chief source. Mary Burrell’s Life of Wagner was the first to give the true spelling of the name of Wagner’s mother, which was Bertz, which may be Jewish or German, as you like.

The Geyers as far back as 1700 were pious folk. The first of the family mentioned in local history was a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a trombone player and organist. Indeed, the Geyers were largely connected with the evangelical church. Ludwig Geyer, virtually acknowledged by Baireuth as the real father of Richard Wagner, looked Jewish (which proves nothing, as I have seen dark, Semitic fisher-folk on the coast of Galway) and displayed Jewish versatility. For that matter the composer von Weber looked like a Jew, as does Camille Saint-Saëns. When I ventured to write of this racial trait—much more marked in his youth—the French composer sent me a denial, sarcastically asking how a man with such a “holy” name as “Saint-Saëns” could be Jewish. But Leopold Godowsky, who was intimate with him, has told me that he took his mother’s name. As to Wagner, a little story may suffice. In 1896 I attended the Wagner festival at Baireuth. Between performances I tramped the Franconian hills. My toes hurt me. Looking for a corn-cutter, I found one not far from the Wagner house. The old chap seated me in his doorway, probably to get better light, and as he crouched over my feet in the street I asked him if he had known Richard Wagner. “Know Wagner!” he irascibly replied. “He passed my shop every day. Many the times I cut his corns. Oh, no! not here; over yonder”—he jerked his head in the direction of Wahnfried. I inquired what kind of a looking man was Wagner. “He was a little bow-legged Jew, and he always wore a long cloak to hide his crooked legs.” Enfin! the truth from the mouth of babes. This beats Nietzsche and his “Vulture” Geyer.

Not religion, not nationality, but race, counts in the individual. Wagner looked like a Jew. And there are many red-haired Jews with pug noses and light blue eyes. Renan in Le Judaisme has shown us how non-Jewish elements were in the course of time incorporated within the race. The Chazars of eastern Europe are Jews, only a thousand years old. Dr. Brandes in a confession of his views on the subject has said—in _The Journal for Jewish History and Literature_, published at Stockholm (_Teldscript for Judisk Historia_), and quoted by Bernard G. Richards in a capital study of Brandes—“from the fifteenth to the sixteenth year of my life I regarded Judaism purely as a religion.” But when he was abused as a Jew then Georg Brandes felt himself a genuine Jew. Many a man has found himself in a similar position. Atavistic impulses, submerged in subconsciousness, may explain why certain men, Gentiles, scholars, by nature noncombatants, have left their peaceful study, jeopardized their life, ruined their reputation, to battle for an obscure Jew Dreyfus. Zola, of Greek-Levantine origin, perhaps Italian and Jew, was one of those valiant souls who fought for the truth. Anatole France, born Thibault, another. Count Thibault, at the time of the Dreyfus uproar, challenged the great writer who signs himself Anatole France to prove his right to that distinguished Roman Catholic name. That the gentle Anatole is the very spit and spawn of a Jew, so far as appearance goes; that since Heine (baptized a Christian) no such union of mocking irony and tender, poetic emotion can be noted in the work of any writer, are alike valueless as testimony. Nevertheless, many believe in this Hebraic strain; just as they feel it in the subtlety of Cardinal Newman’s writing—he was of Dutch stock—and in the humor of Charles Lamb. Both Englishmen are credited with the “precious quintessence,” as Du Maurier would say.

I have had to stand a lot of good-natured fun poked at me for my Jewish propensity. I can stand it, as I have a solid substratum of history for my speculations. Some years ago _The Contemporary Review_ printed an article entitled “The Jew in Music,” with this motto from Oscar Wilde’s Salome: “The Jews believe only in what they cannot see.” The writer’s name was signed: A. E. Keeton. Not even the assertion that Beethoven was a Belgian is half so iconoclastic as some of the assumptions made in this study. When Mozart first appeared as a prodigy before the future Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, she announced that ‘a genius must not be a Jew.’ The original name, Ozart, was changed. Mozart was baptized! Which anecdote makes the scalp to freeze, though not because of its verisimilitude. Beethoven and Rubinstein looked alike; ergo! But then they didn’t. In the case of Chopin he was certainly Jewish-looking, especially in the Winterhalter and Kwiatowski portraits. His father came from Nancy, in Lorraine, thickly populated by Jews. The original name, Szopen, or Szop, is Jewish. His music, especially the first Scherzo in B minor, has a Heine-like irony, and irony is a prime characteristic of the Chosen (or Choosing as Zangwill puts it) race! But all this is in the key of wildest surmise. Wagner was born in the ghetto at Leipsic; yet that didn’t make him Jewish, any more than the baptism of Mendelssohn made him Christian. Georges Bizet was of Jewish origin, he looked Jewish; but the fact that he married the daughter of Halévy (Ha-Levi), the composer of La Juive, didn’t make the composer of Carmen a Jew. Neither religion nor nationality are any more than superficial factors in the nature of men and women. Race alone counts.

Once upon a time I wrote a Jewish story, The Shofar Blew at Sunset. Maggie Cline liked it; so did Israel Zangwill. I preserve a letter from Mr. Zangwill telling me of his liking. The story appeared in M’lle New York, now defunct. It was afterward translated into Yiddish, though it did not give general satisfaction in either camp, Jewish or Christian. It revelled in the cantillations and employed as leading motive the Shofar, or ram’s-horn blown in the synagogues on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. The scroll of the Torah also appeared. But these liturgical references didn’t offend; it was my surprising denunciation of Jewish materialism in New York that was the rock of offence. I say surprising, for what is a Christian-born doing in another field and finding fault? I’m sure I can’t say why, unless that in writing the tale I unconsciously dramatized myself as a reproaching voice. There was much in my strictures of that son of Hanan who prowled through the streets of the Holy City in the year A. D. 62, crying aloud: “Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!” I remember that I predicted because of the luxury of the American Jew the lofty Jewish idealism might be submerged in a flood of indifference and disbelief. Prosperity would prove the snag. In the heart of the Jew is the true Zion, not in success nor in some far-away land. Naturally, that didn’t please the Zionists. One professional Jewish publication, no longer in existence, said that I preached like a Rabbi (Reb), but thought like a goi. The word “Chutzpah” was also used. Yet, wasn’t I right? It is the spiritual Ark of the Covenant, the spirit of the law, and not the letter that killeth, which should be enshrined in the heart of the Jew. He may dream of Palestine, of its skies of the “few large stars,” a land overflowing with milk and honey; but in the depths of his soul it is the living God to whom he must go for spiritual sustenance. God the eternal reservoir of our earthly certitudes! Schma’ Ysroel!

SOCIALISM AND MEDIOCRITY

In these piping times of peace when the body politic is afflicted with socialism, bolshevism, and other cutaneous disorders, it is a pleasing and a profitable task to reread Socialistic Fallacies, by M. Yves Guyot, who for years has been a determined and consistent opponent of the bleak and dismal “science” and the author of a number of books on the subject. Luckily for those who can’t read French, Socialistic Fallacies has been translated and should prove a manual to combat and confute the sophistries of socialism with the writer’s arsenal of arguments. M. Guyot has been a deputy, a municipal councillor, minister of public works. He advocated the revision of the Dreyfus case, and he was political editor of _Le Siècle_ (1892-1903). He is also editor of _Journal des Economistes_ (since 1909) and editor of _L’Agence Economique et Financières_ (since 1911). He has written much about the great war and its causes (also translated) and kindred themes. Therefore a man who knows what he is talking about.

In his drastic attack on socialistic fallacies he thus concludes: “There are three words which socialism must erase from the façades of our public buildings, the three words of the republican motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Liberty, because socialism is a rule of tyranny; equality, because it is a rule of class; fraternity, because its policy is that of class war.” M. Guyot might have quoted Napoleon, a realist, a cynic in politics, for he knew its seamy side, who said: “Tell men they are equal and they won’t bother about liberty.” And in this matter men may change, mankind never.

Socialism, that word of so many meanings, has itself become meaningless. Guyot shows us each variety, analyzes its particular fallacy, and though not a victim to the craze for statistics, he furnishes many pages of figures to match those of his adversaries. He attacks Karl Marx on his weakest flank, and, incidentally, proves him not to have been a proletarian, but the son-in-law of a Prussian Junker. The selfishness of Marx, his tyrannical behavior, his unphilosophical wrath when opposed by two such intellectual giants as Bakunine and Lassalle; his jealous attitude toward Ferdinand Lassalle, especially after his tragic death, are all well known. These traits do not reveal a man overflowing with true brotherly love. Able, but frequently unscrupulous, men amuse the idle and attract the multitude—such are the leaders of the cause which has made such headway in Germany, adds Guyot, whose words in the light of contemporaneous history are positively prophetic. These leaders are plagiarists, with some variations, of all the communist romances originally inspired by Plato. Their greatest pundits, Marx and Engels, have built up their theories upon a sentence of Saint-Simon and three phrases of Ricardo’s. Our author gives these examples: “German socialism is derived from two sources: (1) The French doctrine of Saint-Simon, ‘The way to grow rich is to make others work for one,’ which in Proudhon’s mouth becomes ‘the exploitation of man by man.’ (2) Three formulas of Ricardo, viz.: (_a_) labor is the measure of value; (_b_) the price of labor is that which provides the laborer in general with the means of subsistence, and of perpetuating his species without either increase or diminution; (_c_) profits decrease in proportion as wages increase.” Formula (_b_) became the “iron law of wages” enunciated by Lassalle. Inverted dogmatism all these stale subterfuges.

The French doctrines and Ricardo’s three formulas were transformed into the theory of Rodbertus, “the normal time of labor,” and the “surplus labor” theory of Karl Marx and Engels. Guyot calmly demonstrates the fallacies of these sonorous assumptions. He asks the whereabouts of the Utopias of Fourier, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc’s organization of labor, or of Proudhon’s bank of exchange—that Proudhon who has been permanently saddled with Brissot’s famous phrase: “Property is theft.” (Philosophical Examination of Property and Theft, 1780.) No Socialist has succeeded in explaining the conditions for the production, the remuneration, and the distribution of capital in a collectivist system. No Socialist has succeeded in determining the motives for action which an individual would obey. When pressed for an answer, they allege that human nature shall be metamorphosed, but that the individual remains a constant quantity! Rank materialism all this, and absolutely without vision.

Socialism is a hierarchy on a military basis imported from Germany. Karl Marx did not concern himself with the incentives to action which are to be placed before men in communistic society, and his followers carefully evade the question. When they do attempt to deal with it, they fall into grotesque errors, as did the late French leader, Jaurès. Kautsky asks how the workman is to be made to take an interest in his work, and he can find no incentive other than the force of habit. Like mechanical toys, men will do the same thing every day because they did it the day before. This is merely teaching tricks to animals, the organization of reflex action causing the individual mechanically to do to-morrow what he did yesterday. Nor is this a discovery of scientific socialism; the organizers of churches, of armies, discovered the trait long ago, employing it as a means of discipline under the sanctions of allurement and coercion; allurement, by preferments, decorations, and honorary distinction; coercion, by means of more or less cruel and rigorous punishments. Bebel declared that “a man who will not work has not the right to eat.” This is being condemned to death by starvation; and a man who does less work than, in the opinion of the executive, he ought to do, shall be put upon a restricted diet; so, after all, the collectivist ideal ends in servile labor. To replace a king or a president there will be an “executive,” which means several instead of one tyrant. Good old King Log is always a better ruler than King Stork. For one thing, he is not so voracious as the ferociously hungry feathered biped. Socialism, then, is only one more strait-jacket to torture the individual.

It may be said that man is ready for every form of sacrifice save one: nowhere and at no time has he been found to labor voluntarily and constantly from a disinterested love for others. Man is only compelled to productive labor by necessity, by the fear of punishment, or by suitable remuneration. The Socialists of to-day, like those of former times, constantly denounce the waste of competition. Competition involves losses, but biological evolution, as well as humanity, proves that they are largely compensated by gain. Furthermore, there is no question of abolishing competition in socialistic conceptions; the question is merely one of the substitution of political for economic competition. If economic competition leads to waste, and claims its victims, it is none the less productive. Political competition has secured enormous plunder to great conquerors, such as Alexander, Cæsar, Tamerlane, and Napoleon; it always destroys more wealth than it confers upon the victor. The Socialist formulates a theory of robbery and calls it “restitution to the disinherited.” Disinherited by whom? Disinherited of what? Let them produce their title-deeds! They call it expropriation, but that is a misnomer; what they set out to practise is confiscation. Georges Bernard says that “socialism will be a régime of authority.” On this point Guyot grimly agrees with him. In reality it will be the most oppressive spiritual and material system ever invented by man.

Socialist action has a depressing effect on all fixed capital, and, he continues, “in order to carry on a policy of preserving the political equilibrium, of giving a few bones to the demagogues to gnaw, concessions are made to the policy of spoliation.” What, then, remains of socialism when we come to close quarters with it? And what are the prospects of this spoliation and tyranny? The socialistic party cannot balance up a governmental majority without destroying government itself, for it cannot admit that government fulfils the minimum of its duties (this was written before 1914). When a strike breaks out the intention of the strikers is that security of person and property shall not be guaranteed. Socialist policy represents contempt for law, and all men, whether rich or poor, have an interest in liberty, security, and justice, as the private interest of each individual is bound up with these common blessings. But Socialists despise them all. “The socialism of Karl Marx’s disciples betrays a long apprenticeship to servitude,” declares M. Reinach.

A law, the object of which is to protect each man’s property, is supported by all who possess anything, and where is the man in advanced societies who is incapable of being robbed because he possesses nothing?