Part 4

Since, then, we may not have a wise authority, why not frankly face the situation? We blame the police, and justly, for their cruelties; yet upon them American society has imposed an impossible task. We have demanded free speech and free assemblage by our fundamental law, and privately we have told the police not to obey the constitution. Who’s at fault? New York knows. Last winter at Madison Square Garden the same sort of folly was enacted as that which disgraced Chicago on Sunday, January 17. Then Arthur Woods, police commissioner, saw a great light. He made an experiment in freedom. It worked hugely to his credit and, parenthetically, to the discredit of some of those most noisy in demanding the right. The emptiness of many of the speakers was exhibited and that was all. The existing order was unruffled.

As a result of his enlightenment Commissioner Woods made a request at the conference on the old freedoms held at Princeton: “Policemen are entitled to definite orders,” said the commissioner. “People in this country have the constitutional right to freedom of assemblage and freedom of speech. The police have not only the responsibility to permit it—but to protect them in its exercise, and the police should be so instructed.”

The police should be so instructed; the welfare of the race demands it. But they won’t get instructions until powerful organized groups of citizens find expression. Upon this organization rests the future.

A Hymn to Nature

(_This fragment, a “Hymn to Nature,” unknown to us in the published works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin, and translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose lives and whose creations have served the ideals of all humanity in a way that will gain deeper and deeper appreciation._)

Nature!

We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and powerless to penetrate deeper.

Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her Dance and sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from her Arms.

She creates ever new Forms; what is, was never before; what was, comes never again—everything is New and yet ever the Old.

We live in the midst of her and are Strangers to her.

She speaks incessantly with us and never betrays her Secret to us.

We have unceasing Effect upon her and yet have no Power over her.

She appears to have committed everything to Individuality and is indifferent to the Individual.

She builds ever and ever destroys and her Workshop is inaccessible.

She is the very Children—and the Mother—where is she?

* * * * *

She is the only Artist.

With the simplest Materials she arrives at the most sublime Contrasts.

Without Appearance of Effort she attains utmost Perfection—the most exact Precision veiled always in exquisite Delicacy.

Each of her Works has its own individual Being—each of her Phenomena the most isolated Conception, yet all is Unity.

She plays a Drama.

Whether or no she sees it herself we do not know and yet she plays it for us who stand in the Corner.

There is an eternal Life, Growth and Motion in her and yet she does not advance.

She changes ever, no Moment is stationary with her.

She has no Conception of Rest and has fixed her Curse upon Inaction.

She is Firm.

Her Step is measured, her Exceptions rare, her Laws immutable.

She has reflected and meditated perpetually; not however as Man but as Nature.

She has reserved for herself a specific all-embracing Thought which none may learn from her.

* * * * *

Mankind is all in her and she in all.

With all she indulges in a friendly Game and rejoices the more one wins from her.

She practices it with many, so occultly that she plays it to the End before they are aware of it.

And most unnatural is Nature.

Whoever does not see her on every side, nowhere sees her rightly.

She loves herself and ever draws to herself Eyes and Hearts without number.

She has set herself apart in order to enjoy herself.

Ever she lets new Admirers arise, insatiable, to open her Heart to them.

In Illusion she delights.

Whoever destroys this in himself and others, him she punishes like the most severe Tyrant.

Whoever follows her confidently—him she presses as a child to her Breast.

Her Children are Countless.

To none is she everywhere niggardly but she has Favorites upon whom she lavishes much and to whom she sacrifices much.

Upon Greatness she has fixed her Protection.

She pours forth her Creations out of Nothingness and tells them not whence they came nor whither they go; they are only to go; the Road she knows.

She has few Motive Impulses—never worn out, always effective, always manifold.

Her Drama is ever New because she ever creates new Spectators.

Life is her most beautiful Invention and Death her Ruse that she may have much life.

She envelops Mankind in Obscurity and spurs him ever toward the Light.

She makes him dependent upon the Earth, inert and heavy; and ever shakes him off again.

She gives Needs because she loves Action.

It is marvelous how she attains all this Movement with so little.

Every Need is a blessing, quickly satisfied, as quickly awakened again.

If she gives another Need—then it is a new source of Desire; but soon she comes to Equipoise.

She starts every Moment upon the longest Race and every Moment is at the Goal.

She is Futility itself: but not for us for whom she has made herself of the greatest importance.

She lets every Child correct her, every Simpleton pronounce Judgment upon her; she lets thousands pass callous over her seeing nothing and her Joy is in all and she finds in all her Profit.

We obey her Laws even when we most resist them, we work with her even when we wish to work against her.

She turns everything she gives into a Blessing; for she makes it first—indispensable.

She delays that we may long for her, she hastens on that we may not be sated with her.

She has no Speech nor Language; but she creates Tongues and Hearts through which she feels and speaks.

Her Crown is Love.

Only through Love can we approach her.

She creates Gulfs between all Beings and all wish to intertwine.

She has isolated all that she may draw all together.

With a few Draughts from the Beaker of Love she compensates a Life full of Toil.

She is Everything.

She rewards herself and punishes herself, rejoices and torments herself.

She is harsh and gentle, lovely and terrible, powerless and omnipotent.

Everything is ever present in her.

Past and Future she knows not—The Present is her Eternity.

She is generous.

I glorify her with all her Works.

She is wise and calm.

One drags no Explanation from her by Force, wrests no gift from her which she does not freely give.

She is cunning but for a good purpose and it is best not to observe her Craft.

She is complete and yet ever uncomplete; so as she goes on she can ever go on.

To Everyone she appears in special Form.

She conceals herself behind a thousand Names and Terms and yet always is the same.

She has placed me here; she will lead me hence;—

I confide myself to her.

She may do with me what she will: she will not despise her Work.

I speak not of her. No, what is true and what is false; She herself has spoken all;

All the Fault is hers; hers is all the Glory.

My Friend, the Incurable

IV.

Pro domo mea: on the vice of simplicity. John Cowper Powys—a revelation

One of my critics sent me a New Year’s wish and admonition: “You are hectic. Why not see things as they are? You must learn to be simple.”

This is another attempt on the part of my good-wishers to cure me, in defiance of my resolute declaration that I cannot and do not want to be cured. Furthermore, I am in the position of a normal lunatic who considers the whole world, except himself, insane; not only do I refuse to learn the art of being simple, but I regard simplicity as a vice, a defect, a misery.

What is simplicity? I cannot define things; definitions are absurd, limiting, simplifying. In this case perhaps I ought to adopt the method of the school-boy who defined salt as “what makes potatoes nasty when not applied to.” It is an English joke which I have tried with discouraging results on the American sense of humor; it suits my purpose nevertheless. How would this do: “Simplicity is that which makes life dull when applied to?” No; decidedly, I cannot think in Procrustean formulas.

Nothing is simple. What nonsense it is to synonymize this word with “natural,” as if nature were not most complex and complicated! Neither is the primitive savage simple, for he conceives things not “as they are,” but through a veil of awe and mystery. Nor is the child simple, Messrs. and Mesdames Pedagogues; you may instruct it scientifically, tell it “plain truths” and facts, but the not-yet-educated young mind will distrust you and will continue to live in its illusionary, fantastic world. Not even beasts may be accused of that vice: recall Maeterlinck’s subtle dogs and horses.

Nothing is simple, although civilization has attempted to simplify a good deal. We have come to live in accordance with established standards, customs, regulations; inertia and routine have replaced impulse and initiative. Science has endeavored to explain away man’s dreams, to do away with religion, soul, imagination, to prove away our mysteries and wonders. Known stuff. Thus has come to be the matter-of-fact multitude, the simple, the all-knowing, those who act and think and feel “as everybody else does,” as they are taught and trained by the ingenious apparatus of scientific, moral, and social classifications, definitions, simplifications, in a word—the civilized man.

Yet side by side with civilization, machinization, automatonization, there is another powerful force moving the world: culture. Culture _versus_ civilization, this is how I gauge the issue. Do not ask me to define these words: let Professor Herrick do it. We are all civilized, of course; especially the Germans: witness their recent astounding achievements. Now try to apply the term “culture” to the activities of those _Kulturtraeger_ in Belgium and before Rheims—Q. E. D. Michael Bakounin “tried” it in 1848, when he suggested to his fellow-revolutionists in Dresden that they place on the besieged walls Raphael’s Madonna in order to avert the canon of the cultured Prussians; luckily the Saxons knew better their cousins, “the blond beasts.” Pardon this paroxysm of my old disease, Prussophobia. Bakounin, you see, belonged to the few, to the non-simple, to those who had an insight beyond the apparent, the fact, to the hectic, to the abnormal, if you please; “abnormal” is the label given to such individualities by the many, the civilized.

I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am cultured: this is an _apologia_, a confession of my sins before my critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing things _creatively_, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to be simple?”

Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde, performed by John Cowper Powys.

Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend. What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized, demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment, dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s break-down from the shock of having discovered a heart in himself. The lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of the hovering spirit.

To quote Powys is as impossible as to _tell_ a symphony. It is the How and the What and the stage background that combine in creating the inexpressible charm of that experience. As to Oscar Wilde—well, what does it matter whether we agree with Mr. Powys’s interpretation or not? Wilde was my idol for a long time; I chanted dithyrambs to him and worshiped him fanatically. Later, in the perpetual process of dethroning gods, I observed the halo of the Prince of Paradoxes becoming paler in my eyes. Mr. Powys rekindled in my heart the sacred flame, for a moment at least, and gave me the rare sensation of reliving an old love.

À propos of simplicity: Wilde proclaimed artificiality as the great virtue, and certainly lived up to his theory. Compare his short but italicized life with the last weary years of Tolstoy that were an attempt for “simple life.” Need I tell you which I prefer?

Muck and Music

ALFRED A. KNOPF

(_We disagree with Mr. Knopf in too many respects not to be eager to print his interesting article._)

Dr. Karl Muck resumed charge of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1912. Looking over the twenty-two programs which he has given since then one is forced to admit that his tastes are, to say the least, peculiar. There have been frequent performances of Beethoven and Brahms and occasional classical programs. These, perhaps, serve to keep his feet on solid earth, but at other times he soars into the realm of incomprehensible novelty and one can tell in advance where he will land just about as easily as if he were a German Zeppelin headed for Paris. One thing only seems certain—he cannot resist the virtuoso that is in him; he gluts us with what can only be called virtuosity for its own sake. If he offers a novelty (and when Brahms and Beethoven are taken care of he chooses, for the most part, to offer little else) it is sure to be some outrageously difficult affair—difficult both to play and to listen to. One cannot reasonably object to music merely because it is difficult to understand. The test is whether there is sufficient real beauty in it to repay careful and painstaking attention. And my point is simply that many of us feel that the beauty in Sibelius, Holbrooke, Reger, Lendvai, Mraczek, Loeffler, Mahler, Schmitt and others is disproportionately small.

The reasons for the New Yorker’s peculiar bitterness against Dr. Muck are not difficult to discover. He makes only ten appearances each season: the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony each gives many more concerts. From our point of view, would it not be better if we relied on Stransky and Damrosch (the merits of the one and the fripperies of the other are too apparent to call for comment here) for our first hearings of novelties? Then, if a particular composition seemed to warrant it, the Boston Orchestra could play it for us in its usual masterly manner. Just so long as New York worships the men from Boston in the mad feminine way it does, just that long will it resent Dr. Muck’s playing what it doesn’t want to hear. It was Theodore Thomas, I think, who, discovering that people cared very little for Wagner’s music, played it until they changed their minds. That is all very well when you have a Wagner, but I wonder just how heartily Dr. Muck admires the music he has recently served up to his New York audiences.

To begin with there was Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. Now Sibelius is one of the great living composers. He is a genuine musician—by which I mean that you do not suffer all the agonies of stage fright when you hear a composition of his for the first time. He knows the business of his craft and you usually feel safe in his hands, thanks to three Symphonies and Finlandia. But how rudely this fourth symphony shakes your confidence! Call it musicianly: show how consistently-planned and executed it is: you won’t like it any the more. To be sure, Sibelius is a Finn and an intensely feeling one. He gives expression to the emotions of that curiously unhappy race. But music to appeal must be more universal than this angry symphony of ugly moods. You can’t explain it on cubist grounds—unless the Finns also call it disagreeable. But one ventures the guess that they, perchance, find it richly agreeable, in which case its performance should, by International law (or what is left of it) be confined to Finland.

Then there was _Schlemihl_—a symphonic biography by one Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek. This was the pièce de resistance at the evening concert. It is scored for one piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, double bassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, contra bass tuba, two trumpets off the stage, kettle drums, snare drums, bass drum and tambourine, Glockenspiel, Cuckoo, Xylophone, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, two harps, celesta, organ, sixteen first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve violas, ten violoncellos, eight double basses, and a tenor voice. This huge orchestra, plus the detailed analysis of his work furnished by the composer, explains _Schlemihl_. It is an attempt to out-Richard Richard Strauss, and, like almost all such attempts, it fails. Reznicek recounts the life and fate of a modern man pursued by misfortune who goes to destruction in the conflict between his ideal and his material existence. A compound essentially of _Tod und Verklärung_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_, but at no time reaching the heights attained by Strauss in all three of these tone poems. Imitators somehow almost always fall down in two ways—they devote far too little attention to what they want to say and far too much to their manner of saying it. And as a not unnatural result of this, they forget, or appear to forget at any rate, that melody is the prime essential in great music. Wagner had melodic genius, as we all realize today, and that Strauss has it is no longer open to very serious questioning. Reznicek hasn’t. His music is all rather good, but none of it good enough to grip you as the finest music does. It has no great moments but only moments of very great sound. The house fairly quaked at some of the fortissimos. And yet _Schlemihl_ would be pleasant enough were it not so pretentiously bombastic and did it not last twice too long. But the mere existence of _Ein Heldenleben_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ deprives _Schlemihl_ of any greater claim than that.

After these two pieces Scheinpflug’s _Overture to a Comedy of Shakespeare_ proved quite simple and enjoyable. It is a musicianly piece of work lacking neither in melodic invention nor in skilful orchestration. The Allegretto Graziosa, in which an old English tune from the Fitz William Virginal Book is introduced, is wholly delightful. And having said that much, one really has said all. The overture can have no possible chance of immortality; it is not great music, it is not intensely interesting or unusually delectable: one feels rather that such compositions as this are the by-products of the daily practice of the art of music by men of no little talent but very little genius. As such, they demand an occasional hearing—today Scheinpflug has the stage: tomorrow someone else—what matter who, since none are really masters.

An occasional performance of Strauss’s early Symphonic Suite, _Aus Italien_, is probably quite justifiable because of his imposing importance among the composers of today. When a musician attains greatness almost everything he ever wrote becomes of interest to his disciples. _Aus Italien_ calls for little comment. First performed in 1887, it is difficult today to realize the great uproar and rage it evoked. Now it seems quite tame. It was indeed Strauss’s “first step towards independence,” and it is interesting as the connecting link between his very early work and _Don Juan_ and its successors. Its first movement “On The Campagna” is probably the most successful, reaching as it does gravely grey and tragic heights. A sense of oppressiveness fairly overwhelms the listener and there are chords that are exquisite. “Amid Rome’s Ruins” is not nearly so sustained and well-knit. The opening of the third movement, “On the Shore of Sorrento,” depicts with wonderful effectiveness the brilliance of an Italian sea under a dazzling sun—a brilliance that no one who has seen it is likely ever to forget. Strauss, for all his reputed blare and noise, handles his orchestra pianissimo in a manner immeasurably more impressive than anyone else of his time. (The opening bars of _Tod und Verklärung_ and the love scene in _Don Juan_ immediately come to mind). And you can measure a generation’s progress in orchestration by the unruffled placidity with which people nowadays listen to the at-one-time “brilliant, tumultuous, audacious, unusual, and bold” finale—“Neapolitan Folk-Life.”

Even the casual concert-goer must notice the amazing duplications that are being offered this season. For two or three seasons a particular composition is neglected; then suddenly it is played five times in half as many weeks. Stransky plays _Don Juan_; a week later Muck, as it were, shows us how it ought to be played. The Symphony Society plays Brahms’s Second Symphony and shortly thereafter Muck administers his reproach to Damrosch. Is there any reason why conductors shouldn’t meet occasionally and plan to avoid such ways? Muck appears the chief offender. His program stated that he was playing Ropartz’s Fourth Symphony for the first time in New York, but Stransky had played it only eight days earlier. When will we hear it again?