Part 5

Nature, life, this is also _religion_, genuine, true religion at least. We have not created it in us yet—this overpowering longing and striving to surrender ourselves to another, a higher. To be sure, we have received it as a heritage from our mother. At first a flood of love and longing flowed through our souls from her eyes and heart. But her gift to us was in turn a gift to her. In that gift all love’s beams focused, gathered together, from all the ends of the earth and the eternities. In that gift all life was wedded to the waking spirit—all life, sleeping and dreaming, found its existence. And as this life awoke in us, we called it “inspiration,” we felt that a Stronger had come upon us, against which we could do nothing; we called it happiness, heart, love, God—the name was noise and sound—and yet it was all feeling, veiled in heavenly glow.

Then the name became everything. On this name scribes exercised their wits. They wrote it in their books and taught it in their schools. Then the schoolmasters became the lords of faith. What was once original life was now to be taught and learned—forgetting that while the psychology, or history, or philosophy of religion can be taught, _religion_ cannot be, any more than you can teach grass to grow, or flowers to bloom, or birds to sing, or lovers to love. So, religion came to be a thing of grades, like the “grades” of a school—the more grades, the more religion! At last the scholar in turn becomes a master! Verily, nowhere in the world has schoolmasterism done so much harm as in religion. No scoff of the scoffer, and no sword of the executioner, has dealt so deep and deadly wounds upon the religious life, as has the folly of the wise and the understanding who press their school knowledge and their school system upon men as religious faith, and so overspin the entrance to the garden of the heart with their spider-webs that no one can find the path any more to its bloom and fragrance.

To be sure, objections to all this bristle. Is not the blessing of the school—so this or that objector might urge—so manifest that, on account of the blessing, all its evils might be very well put up with? The school makes the unintelligible intelligible. The school widens the bed of the spiritual life, so that its stream no longer devastatingly overflows its banks. The school builds canals everywhere, that the watering of the land of the human may be as extensive as possible, and the spirit of life be universally fertilized with the achievements of civilization and culture. We may thank our schools that all the world today has learned to read and write. And, for him who can read and write, the way is open to all the treasures of the human spirit—and where is there a civilization that equals ours in the effort to provide schools corresponding to all the spheres of life? Ought we not to bless such effort, promote and support it, with all the means in our power?

Now, looking upon life more seriously and profoundly, we shall not be able to show that the censor of these schools is entirely in the wrong, when he declares that the spirit is perverted and corrupted by them. School is model, is a uniform of the spirit which all individuals are to don and wear. Hence as this school business spreads there is a dying-out of spiritual originality, a monotony of manufactured personality.

Everything that belongs to the average is best conserved by school. The most proper average man is always the best scholar. But all that is above or below the average—this is often the best in a man—decays and finds no nourishment. We have but to look at the whole state of our literature in this country, to see what has become of the art of writing, of authorship, in an age bursting with pride over everybody’s being able to read and write. All the nameless insipidity and thoughtlessness written and printed today, all the mendacity and perversity of feeling, which in novels find their way into hut and salon alike might be happily spared us did not everybody think he could read, and especially write! There is no denying it, a serious question stares at us in the name of the school today. This question is above all questions of school-reform, which seem so important to us, for the improved, nay, the best school remains just—school! And something of schoolmasterism and scholasticism cleaves to school! And therefore Nietzsche was its so bitter foe because he would have _men_, men who spoke and thought and felt powerfully and not as the scribes! Nietzsche was its foe because he would have among men, personalities, individualities, diversities, not uniformity and identity of spiritual life.

If, now, we have rightly comprehended the force of this censure against the school and its master, we are already in the way to overcome and to heal this school malady. The malady does not inhere in the school as such, but in the false evaluation which we of today attribute to it, and in the dominion which the school exercises over human spirits, by virtue of this false appraisal. We think we can read if we have learned to read in school. But this learning to read has yet to begin! Whoever does not begin it his own self, will never truly learn it at all. We call our schools educational institutions and yet they are altogether _imitational_ institutions, _after_ which the true human education first begins. We do not think of this, that this man whose knowledge still tastes of his school, whose art shows his school, is still stuck in his school, and has not made proper use of his school—which is to apply it; especially to overcome it! Or, rather we think still less! We rest on the laurels of our school, and if we won them we think that we have carried off the warrior’s prize of life. But it is _our_ fault, not the school’s, if the school narrows rather than broadens our vision; if it binds us to its rules instead of releasing us from them. Where are the men who still learn after school, nay, who first begin then to learn what after all is the main thing of all learning—how they can become greater, freer men, independent personalities? How does it come that all stirring and moving of the modern spirit is at the same time an insurrection against some kind of school? How does it come that all creative, path-breaking spirits can begin to create, to live, only when they have snapped the fetters of some school? And how does it come that great discoveries of unknown islands of the human have never been made within, but only without, the schools? Most of all, how does it come that a Christ can speak with power only when he has learned not to speak as the scribes and schoolmasters? The answer in every case is that we are accustomed to expect of the school what, according to its very nature, it cannot do, namely: to give life, to create life. Therefore, it is all-important that we keep the path open, wide open, to the fountain of life in the abyss of the human heart, in the unfathomableness of the world, so that we too may learn to speak with power and not as the scribes; so that our schools may not be diseases to be overcome, for many never overcome during an entire life—but a staff with which we may learn to walk until we shall need staff no more, because our feet have grown strong to bear us on our way during the brief years of our pilgrimage.

My Friend, the Incurable

VI.

CHOLERIC COMMENTS ON CACOPHONIES

_On the G String_

We are sailing in a gondola along exotic shores. Crystal castles, dewy meadows, weeping cypresses, glowing craters.... We pass through the dreamy regions of Shelley and Keats, we envisage the gigantic cosmos of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Milton, of Goethe, we perceive in a haze the purple-crimson crucifixion of Nietzsche, the cruel gloom of Dostoyevsky, the dizzy abysses of Poe, the all-human chaos of Whitman....

We sail on—but ah, our picturesque gondolier! He is so excited, so restless, so loud—we are forced to turn our eyes from the grandiose landscape and follow bewildered our conscientious cicerone. In his anxiety lest we fail to notice the passing “places of importance,” our industrious guide shrieks and yells, wriggles and gesticulates, beats upon our senses, pricks and tickles, and all this he performs to the accompaniment of a mellow mandolin, so sweet, so touching, so exasperating.

We are weary.

* * * * *

With some apprehension I looked forward to Mr. Powys’s book of “Literary Devotions,”[4] for I had the good luck of listening to his lectures. They are unforgettable, those bewitched moments in the darkened Little Theater, where we sat hypnotized by “the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light of the stage,” invoking the spirits of the Great. How will those invocations appear, I worried, when congealed in the static book-form, minus the catacomb-atmosphere, minus the serpent-like, mesmerizing cant of the meteoric sorcerer, minus Raymond Johnson’s light-effects? “And, ah! sweet, tender reader,” to use Mr. Powys’s style, my fears came true: the book is a libretto, sans orchestra, sans singer. I know that many of the lecturer’s devotees, especially the worshipping young ladies, will find little difficulty in mentally supplying the libretto with the dynamic personality of the performer; but my imagination is dewinged at the sight of the motionless symmetric lines, and I fail to vocalize the legions of exclamation-marks, the innumerable capital-letters, the profuse superlatives. With a kaleidoscopic velocity the author displays his personal reflections upon the greatest minds of the world; he bends them, he liquifies them, he moulds them, recreates them according to his whim—good, bravissimo! I am the last person to depreciate subjective criticism; I am tolerant enough to digest even such a statement as that Goethe was typically and intrinsically German, or that Nietzsche was thoroughly Christian. It is not Mr. Powys’s What that nauseates me, but his How, his butaforial Grand Style, his monotonous tremolo, his constant air of discovering new planets, his Pateresque worship of beauty which lacks Pater’s aristocratic calm and reservedness, his Oscaresque paradoxicalness deprived of Wilde’s chiselled wit, his continuous ruminating of a limited stock of long, high words, of dizzying adjectives, of saccharine adverbs.

Pray, “sweet, tender reader,” how long could you endure Mischa Elman playing the Minuet in G?

[4] _Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys._ [_G. Arnold Shaw, New York_]

_And Pippa Dances_

Yet there are some who complain about the lack of musical devotion among Americans. Nay, music is getting absolutely too popular—witness the crowded concert-halls, especially the ten-cent-Sunday-concerts arranged by philanthropists for the uplift of the masses. It is significant to observe that the so-called Submerged have learned not only to applaud, but also to hiss, not only to accept with gratitude any sort of “divine” music, but to demand a certain kind of music. And, surely, they well know what they want.

Hauptmann’s Huhn, the personification of the mob, wants the fragile Pippa, the symbol of beauty, to dance for him. She is forced to obey, and is of course crushed to death. And Pippa dances. That omnipotent Huhn who can call down all the muses to come and entertain him, to amuse him, to serve him, to degenerate or to perish! Watch that wonderful creature, the amalgamated American Huhn, making love to music, hugging and caressing her; I shudder at the thought of what will become of gentle Pippa in the choking embrace of her boorish suitor.

Yes, Huhn knows what he wants. He expects of music the same service that he gets from illustrations in popular magazine novels. He comes into an ice-cream parlor and orders Banana-Split plus _William Tell_ on the victrola—so digestible and understandable. Last Sunday I observed a crowd at a ten-cent concert enjoying the _Meditation_, good-humoredly assisting the soloist by humming and whistling the familiar tune, their faces expressing the satisfaction of victors. And the night before I witnessed the thousands at Orchestra Hall, the Huhns in sweaters and in décolleté-gowns and in dress-suits, going mad over that vulgarity, Mr. Carpenter’s precise reproduction of barking dogs and of a policeman’s heavy walk. Huhn demands music which he is capable of interpreting in every-day terms, which transparently reflects his little emotions, his petty joys, his sirupy sorrows, his after-meal dreams. Is it to be wondered that Huhn hisses and grumbles when the conductor hesitatingly smuggles in such a risky novelty as Scriabin’s _Prometheus_? What is to Huhn the Poem in Fire, the emerging of a dazed humanity out of Chaos, the collision of gloom and light, the birth of the Winged Man? What is Hecuba to him! And since Pippa must dance, the obliging conductor hastens to appease the growling Huhn by the taffy of Bruch’s concerto.

In recent years some inspired rebels among painters and sculptors have striven towards the elevating of their arts to the highest level, that of music, the noblest medium for the expression of aesthetic emotions, nobler than words or brush or chisel. Recall Kandinsky’s color-symphonies. Alas, music is not any longer a daughter of Olympus; she has been dragged by Huhn from the pure atmosphere of the mountain summit down into the damp valley. Wagner began the prostitution of music by making it subservient to words; he has won the sanction and acclamation of the crowd. Then followed the orgy of Program-music, those wood-cut illustrations, those rich gravies that were invented to sweeten Mr. Huhn’s meals. Now an enterprising Chicago merchant, Mr. Carpenter, has presented us with an apotheosis of vulgarity to the hilarious triumph of the appreciative crowd, to the delight of our “independent” music-critics—“that strange creature, the American music-critic,” to quote a naive English journal.

And Pippa dances.

IBN GABIROL.

Music

GABRILOWITSCH AND THE NEW STANDARD

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Ideas make their impressions very slowly, but they travel very fast. That is why Gabrilowitsch’s playing of the piano on March 21 was two different kinds of revelation to two different kinds of people. To a great many it was a rich fulfillment of promise; to a few it was the end of something that had had a great beginning.

The trouble is that there’s a new standard to reckon with. We used to argue that what a man had to say was more important than the way he said it. Then we reversed that, claiming that a man may say anything provided he say it well. Then the socialistic school tried to go back to the first premise, but what they were really groping for was the new standard—which is simply this: A man may still say anything he wishes and if he says it well it will be art—_provided he really has something to say_. Tennyson knew how to say things well, but he missed being an artist because he had nothing to say. On what basis do we establish such a criterion? Not merely on that of “ideas,” because you may have no ideas at all and yet have profound reactions; and not merely on that of “socialism” or sincerity or ideals; and not—oh well, I mean to get through this discussion without dragging in the artist’s alleged monopoly of the eternal verities. B. Russell Herts got very close to what I mean when he said that Arnold Bennett missed real bigness because he had only a great and mighty skill without having a great and mighty soul.

Well—you can’t make Art, we think now, unless you belong in the great-and-mighty-soul class. And what does that mean, exactly? Perhaps the whole thing can be explained under the term “enlarged consciousness.” I wish Dora Marsden would discuss it in one of those clear-headed articles she writes for _The Egoist_. The confusion in all our discussions of matter and manner, of subject and form, of what determines genius, has come about in two main ways: first, because we have made Taste a synonym for Art—so that if we like Beethoven or Mozart we don’t accept Wagner or Max Reger, or if we like classic rules we call romanticism “bad art”; and second, because we have decided who had great and mighty souls on an ethical basis. We said that Browning and Tennyson had them—chiefly because they talked a great deal about God, I suppose; which only shows how confusing it is to judge that way; it leaves no room for the distinction that Browning had and Tennyson hadn’t. It’s all as silly as insisting that the cubists ought to be considered great if they are sincere. Grant that they are. To be sincere is easy; to say what you believe is simple; but to believe something worth saying is the test of an art. Sincere stupid people are as bad as any other stupid ones—and more boring.

I don’t know what else to say about it; but I know you can recognize that “enlarged consciousness” in the first bars of a pianist’s playing, or in a singer’s beginning of a song. Paderewski has it to such a degree that he can play wrong notes and it doesn’t matter; and Duse has it, and Kreisler, and Isadora Duncan, and Ludwig Wüllner, who breaks your heart with his songs though he hasn’t even a singing voice. And the disappointment in Gabrilowitsch is that he hasn’t.

I went to hear him play Chopin and Schumann with positive excitement. Godowsky, with all his perfectly worked-out theories, always leaves me with the feeling that he would be an artist if he weren’t an empty shell; and Bauer, with all his beautiful work, leaves me with a sense of how he _might_ play if a fire could be started inside him. I expected that fire in Gabrilowitsch—partly because I heard him play ten years ago and partly, I suppose, because he is Russian. But the ten years have left him unstirred. It’s as though the man in him had stood curiously still; as though life had passed him. He is like a poet who has somehow escaped unhurt; or a technician who perfects his expression and then wonders what he shall express. As for his form, he does many exquisite things; for instance, his _Des Abends_, which was extremely poetic and which seems to be the type of thing he likes to play most. And he played the D Flat Prelude with an exquisite perspective—and then a Chopin Waltz without any perspective at all. Technically his worst feature is his chord-work—Bauer’s chords sound like an organ in comparison. But Bauer knows how to touch the piano for deep, “dark” effects, and Gabrilowitsch appears to like “bright” sounds. He takes his chords with a high, tight wrist and brings them out by pounding. These things are not done any more; the piano has shown new tone-capacities since a few of the moderns abandoned, or modified, what is supposed to be the “straight” Letschitizky method.

Well, all this wouldn’t matter so much if Gabrilowitsch had the ultimate inspiration.... Somehow I keep feeling that the world is waiting for its next great pianist.

BAUER AND CASALS

Two sorts of listeners heard the second Bauer-Casals recital at Orchestra Hall: Those who love great music and those who love to babble about great music. Intermediate classes of the mildly interested, the botching amateurs, the self-adoring students, et al., stayed away, for Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Cesar Franck, in sonata form, have nothing for them. Would that the critics and the exuberant school-girls might forever remain away on such occasions, and choose for their frothing something less than the best.

Beethoven was not “dry” for a moment. One suspects that this composer is perpetually slandered by the “traditional” handling of zealous academics; for Bauer and Casals, with their wonted beauty of piano- and violoncello-playing, made his music warm and pleasantly expansive, with no sacrifice of dignity. He sounded almost romantic in the best sense of the word. This was an experience. And Mendelssohn—what is more truly elegant than his musical grace, or more delightful than his delicate humour—a playfulness so seldom discovered by performers! Humour that becomes subtler than a horse-laugh is beyond the ken of “professional” musicians, although first-rank composers never lack a refined sense of fun, a keen relish for jollity, for all that it may be in ethereal realms. In Cesar Franck there is perhaps the very sublimate of humour, the mystic smile of faith. One cannot escape a feeling of the deeply religious in this French master. A new word should be coined to designate his music; it might be formed by transposing the “passionate” of passionate love and the “fervent” of fervent piety, and by some such amalgamation of cool, impersonal, austere love with deepest faith become sensuous, impassioned, and lovely, the characterizing word is secured. Franck’s music, surcharged with intense experience, renders unnecessary any apology for this left-handed use of English. It is but poorly spoken of in orthodox terms, since it embodies strange blendings of emotion, both common and uncommon—emotions unified and crystallized into the expression of a genius. Cesar Franck’s love, apparently, flowed as readily and as warmly toward God as toward ravishing, although possibly abstract, woman.

This is doubtless a considerable, if not impossible, reach for the imagination of the patiently-groping reader, but it would have been less difficult with Bauer and Casals for interpreters. The ’cellist’s playing was at once sane and poetic, clean-cut and well-rounded; it was chaste without chill, voluptuous without a debauch. And Bauer, master-pianist indeed, as his press-agent styles him, brought from the piano more than enough kinds of tone to shame the monochromatic theory about the restricted nature of the piano. The most individual feature of his art is the production of solemn, organ-like chords in the lower register—chords wonderfully sonorous and rich, powerful enough to obliterate the memory of bedlam. Who cares if he smudges a “run?” This god can sound chords. He redeems a host of piano-jolters.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

Book Discussion

AUTUMNAL GORKY

_Tales of Two Countries, by Maxim Gorky._ [_B. W. Huebsch, New York._]

Gorky’s genius was meteoric. It flashed in the nineties for a brief period with an extraordinary brilliance, illuminating a theretofore unknown world of “has beens,” of Nietzschean _Bosyaki_. Gorky’s genius, we may say, was elemental and local; it revealed a great spontaneous force on the part of the writer in a peculiar atmosphere, on “the bottom” of life, in the realm of care-free vagabonds. As soon as Gorky trespassed his circle he fell into the pit of mediocrity and began to produce second rate plays, sermon-novels, political sketches, and similar writings that may serve as excellent material for the propaganda-lecturer. The present volume may be looked upon as Gorky’s swan-song, if we consider his ill health; in fact he outlived himself long ago as an artist, and in these _Tales_ we witness the hectic flush of the autumn of his career. The exotic beauty of Italy appears under the pen of the Capri invalid in a morbid, consumptive aspect; the author is too self-conscious, too much aware of the fact of his moribund existence to see the intrinsic in life. The tendency to preach socialism further augments his artistic daltonism, which is particularly evident in the _Russian Tales_. The doomed man casts a weary glance over his distant native land, and he sees there nothing but dismal black, hopeless pettiness and retrogression. The satire is blunt and fails the mark; the allegories are of the vulgar, wood-cut variety. Gorky has been dead for many years.

BREAKING INTO AN OPEN DOOR

_Plaster Saints, by Israel Zangwill._ [_The Macmillan Company, New York._]