Red/Variations on a Theme by Havelock Ellis

by Carl Van Vechten

Variations on a Theme by Havelock Ellis

I

The note-books of an artist always make interesting reading. These ideas, incidents, descriptions, these jottings down against the treachery of memory, which some day may fall into their proper places, often exhibit, when published naked, a more spontaneous grace than finished work. The later books of Arthur Symons are little more than note-books, fugitive impressions, shadows of ideas. Therein lies the secret of their charm. Samuel Butler's Note-Book, which has been published since his death, is a treasure house of thought and wisdom. One day it occurred to Havelock Ellis that he had collected more notes than he could ever conveniently find occasion to use, and he filled a book with them, Impressions and Comments, a delightfully stimulating volume, one of this author's best, brimming over with pictures and running commentary.^[1] Herein one may find discussions of Sir Richard Burton, Romanesque architecture, vegetarianism and vivisection, the significance of the body, William Blake, Jacobean furniture, obscurity in style, Jules de Gaultier, crowd psychology, Bovarism, the symbolism of the apple, the Bayeux tapestry, flowers, the decline in the birth rate, and Granville Barker. Here is indeed a book which rewards any chance reader who flips open the pages. Picking it up for five minutes or an hour, I have never failed to discover enjoyment in it.

Recently, I came upon the following passage: "I have often noticed . . . that when an artist in design, whether line or colour or clay, takes up a pen and writes, he generally writes well, sometimes even superbly well. Again and again it has happened that a man who spent his life with a brush in his hand has beaten the best penmen at their own weapon. . . . It is hard indeed to think of any artist in design who has been a bad writer. The painter may never write, but when he writes, it would almost seem without an effort, he writes well. . . . And then, for contrast, think of that other art, which yet seems to be so much nearer to words; think of musicians!"

II

Why is it that musicians cannot write? I asked myself, for it needed only a half-moment's reflection to convince me that Mr. Ellis was right, although he does not attempt to explain the phenomenon. . . . Wagner is the first musician-writer to come to mind, for whether he could or not, Wagner certainly did write. He wrote not only the texts for his lyric dramas, but also countless papers, manifestoes, explanations, arguments, etc., most of which have been carefully collected and which Mr. William Ashton Ellis has rendered to us in eight volumes of faithful, if not very distinguished, English prose. Several collections of letters and the posthumous Life make a formidable total. Indubitably, priceless facts, brilliant ideas, withal somewhat incoherently and contradictorily expressed, lie buried in this mass of matter. Biographers have found this material useful; music critics occasionally turn to it for information; others generally leave it alone. Wagner, indeed, was always at a disadvantage when he wrote in words. Even the plays rise to no inspired heights without the music. Compare the direct and moving music of the love scene in the second act of Tristan with the metaphysical sentiments which flow from the lips of the guilty pair. Wagner's prose works, with their equivocations, their ponderous and opaque phraseology, their individual and very bad German, would seemingly resist translation, but Mr. Ellis wrestled with the task, accomplished it, and even emerged to praise Wagner's style, praise which has found no echo. The Life, of course, should have been a masterpiece; as a matter of fact, it is far from being a failure. Autobiography, even at its worst, is possibly the most enthralling form of literature. But compare the sparkling chapters of Benvenuto Cellini with the halting, obscure, and deliberately untruthful pages in Richard Wagner's account of his life and you will feel, somehow, that you have been cheated. And yet Wagner probably had more to tell than Cellini. The frank account of the Wesendonck affair, the full details of his ménage with the virgin king, a glowing narrative of his capture of Cosima von Bülow, in themselves would have supplied the material for a remarkable triptych in the manner of George Moore's Hail and Farewell, but Wagner could not put it down. He did not know how to write, and there was too much that he desired to conceal or gloss. James Huneker, Catulle Mendes, and a dozen others have done it better.

Gluck's preface to Alceste scarcely gives him claim to serious consideration as a writer. Mozart's letters, which are best perused in the volume of excerpts compiled by Friedrich Kerst, contain many passages of interest to the music student, but they cannot be regarded as literature. Their style, the translator assures us, is "careless, contradictory, and sprawling." Beethoven certainly knew nothing of literary art. Schubert and Weber remained ignorant of it. Poor Chopin knew enough to stick to music. Paul de Musset replied to George Sand's Elle et Lui with another roman à clef defending his brother, but when Lucrezia Floriani appeared, Chopin contented himself by answering it on the piano. Mendelssohn's prose, exposed to us in his numerous published letters, is as sentimental as his music, and not nearly so pretty.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, composer and inventor of the system of the "fundamental bass," wrote several books: Traite de l'harmonie reduite a ses principes naturels (Paris, 1722), Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris, 1726), Génération harmonique (Paris, 1737), and Code de musique practique (Paris, 1760). I have not attempted to read these books, but J. E. Matthew^[2] says of them: "It must be admitted that the style of Rameau is greatly wanting in clearness, so that some resolution is called for in reading his works." Grétry's Mémoires, published in Paris in 1797, make more amusing reading, but scarcely rank as literature.

Offenbach's account of his trip to America is the work of a fifth-rate journalistic hack, certainly not worthy of a man whose music has been compared to champagne. Saint-Saëns is ponderous enough in prose; his books remind me of the bassoon figure in the middle of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Gounod is insufferably sentimental. Anton Rubinstein was a great pianist and an indifferent composer, but his autobiography is even worse than his music. Rimsky-Korsakoff, in his Chronicle of My Musical Life, exhibits himself as utterly unskilled in the practice of writing; his book owes its position to the fact that he had something to write about. We see very little of the artist who created Carmen in the letters of Bizet. Alfred Bruneau, a composer of the second class, is a music critic of the third. Vincent d'Indy's César Franck is a scholarly piece of work which serves its purpose, but it is in no respect a literary masterpiece. It could be read only by a musician. What an opportunity Massenet missed in his Souvenirs! What a career the man had! The book, however, is noteworthy neither for revelations of character nor for inclusion of pertinent incident. It is written in very mediocre French; even the spelling is bad. I recall Geraldine "Farar." Hugo Wolf, in 1884, and for the following three years, acted as music critic for the Vienna Salonblatt. Ernest Newman says, "He wrote singularly well," but the excerpts and summaries that he offers us in evidence of this prowess are not very convincing. If Wolf's skill as a song writer is not as great as Mr. Newman would have us believe (he places him above Schubert) it may be said without fear of contradiction that as a writer of prose he is little read even by musicians.

Cyril Scott is a facile composer of pretty music, the importance of which it would be a mistake to overestimate. Scott has also published five volumes of poetry and a volume of translations from Stefan George and Baudelaire. The titles of his books are: The Shadows of Silence and the Songs of Yesterday, The Grave of Eros and the Book of Mournful Melodies with Dreams from the East, The Voice of the Ancient, The Vales of Unity, and The Celestial Aftermath, A Springtide of the Heart, and Far-Away Songs. A. Eaglefield Hull, in his somewhat emotional book on Cyril Scott, devotes an entire chapter to this poetry, as he explains that Scott at times believes himself to be greater as poet than as composer. We learn via Mr. Hull that in The Garden of Soul-Sympathy the composer rhapsodizes "in soul-knit 'gladness,' and harmonious visions of wondrous colour move majestically over the ear." Um, perhaps. Here is an example of Mr. Scott's "poetry":

"Sounds of colourless dreams, of strange vagueness telling:
 Immaculate music, heralding the life of sighs,
Bells across the lone lassitude, rising, rolling, endlessly swelling
Over the wasteland—solitude lost in the clear chaotic skies."^[3]

It may be noted that Mr. Scott is troubled with a mania for alliteration. Such other instances as "mournful melodies," "shadows of silence," "a far-off flute has faded," "dreamful daffodil," "ambient arms," "future fiends," dribble through his work. It is perhaps a coincidence that Mr. Scott's alphabetical position on the poetry shelf lies half-way between that of Laurence Hope and that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

In prose Mr. Scott has written a book called The Philosophy of Modernism. For a chapter or two he presents some interesting ideas, though clothed in a style which in no sense could be described as literature. His essay on Percy Grainger is really significant. Then he maunders through an attack on the critics, which is neither clearly thought nor clearly expressed, containing such gems of opinion as this: "All the same, it is a noteworthy fact that the great spiritual geniuses and adepts of the world have never condemned and denounced their fellow-creatures or the works of their fellow-creatures: and to take one sublime instance—Jesus of Nazareth," etc., etc., etc. Cyril Scott is not one of the great composers and I would not have lingered so long over his case were it not for the fact that he offers one of the most typical examples of the musician as writer.

William Wallace, the composer of Villon and other tone-poems for orchestra, has written a book called The Threshold of Music which, I have been assured, is a good book, but, although it has been lying around my garret within easy reach for at least two years, I have never been able to read it.^[4] Edward MacDowell's lectures, delivered at Columbia University, collected in a volume entitled Critical and Historical Essays, might best be described by the convenient epithet piffle, pedantic piffle at that. It is only fair to state that MacDowell himself was not responsible for their publication, and probably would have been violently opposed to it.^[5]

There are, however, certain notable exceptions to my theorem. Berlioz was a good writer. He might have emerged a famous figure if he had simply given us his Memoires, and his criticism is stylized and expert, sparkling with biting phrases and trenchant words. In A Travers Chants, Les Grotesques de la Musique, Les Soirées de l'Orchestre, his collected journalism in short, he wielded a delightfully nervous pen. His prose, indeed, is better on the whole than his music. Perhaps this is the explanation of his power in this direction. It is really a pity he turned to tone. Schumann, too, was far from being a bad writer, although he by no means stands in a class with Berlioz in this respect. Still his writing is simple and natural, radiating a certain happy enchantment. Occasionally, indeed, the man lights on a sublime phrase. Nevertheless, even his Träumerei is better than all of the two volumes of his collected prose works. The indefatigable Liszt found time for many matters in his long life: love affairs, piano playing, composing, transcribing, pushing Wagner towards success, producing Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini at Weimar, and even for the writing of a number of books. None of these can be considered a literary masterpiece, but the Life of Chopin^[6] contains passages of great charm. To James Huneker the most eloquent page describes "an evening in the Chaussée d'Antin, for it demonstrates the Hungarian's literary gifts and feeling for the right phrase. This description of Chopin's apartment 'invaded by surprise' has a hypnotizing effect on me. The very furnishings of the chamber seem vocal under Liszt's fanciful pen." Personally, I prefer the pages devoted to the polonaise. Liszt's book on the Gipsies, too, is engaging, although one is permitted to disagree with the facts.

And now we come down to a modern musician-writer, Claude-Achille Debussy. Curiously enough, this French composer was rather an adept with the pen. He had a penetrating sense of irony and he was not above epigram. In 1901 he became music critic for the Revue Blanche. Two years later he held the same position on Gil Blas. In 1903 he went to London to write his impressions of Wagner's Tetralogy for this paper. Passages from his reviews have become bywords. Witness the following: "How insufferable these people in helmets and wild-beast skins become by the time the fourth evening comes round. Remember that at each and every appearance they are accompanied by their damned leit-motive. There are some who even sing it themselves. It is as if a harmless lunatic were to present you with his visiting card while he declaimed lyrically what was inscribed thereon." This was one of the earliest pricks in the weaknesses of the Wagner bubble. Here is more Debussy iconoclasm: he calls Gluck a "pedant," Bach "that worthy man," Beethoven "a deaf old man," Berlioz "a monster," César Franck "a Belgian," Massenet "our most notorious master." Of the songs of Schubert he says, "They are inoffensive; they have the odour of bureau drawers of provincial old maids, ends of faded ribbon, flowers for ever faded and dried, out of date photographs! Only they repeat the same effect for interminable stanzas and at the end of the third one wonders if one could not set to music our national Paul Delmet." "One stumbles on Mendelssohn" in Schumann's Faust; Grieg's music gives Debussy "the charming and bizarre sensation of eating a pink bonbon stuffed with snow;" Saint-Saëns's Henry VIII is "a grand historical opera." All this is witty and some of it is sound. However, according to J. G. Prod'homme, Debussy did not write everything he signed. This critic ascribes an article entitled Effin Seuls! which appeared in 1915 in S.I.M. under Debussy's name, to a disciple, and he also informs us that the score for d'Annunzio's Martyre de Saint Sébastien was only finished on the day agreed upon by the collaboration of other disciples, very familiar with the Debussy manner.

On these four men^[7] any case for musicians as writers of prose must be rested. Berlioz, it must be admitted, stands the test. Schumann and Liszt as authors would be completely forgotten (are, indeed, more or less forgotten) were it not for their music. Debussy's criticisms have not even been collected in book form, although doubtless they will be.^[8]

III

And now let us pass on to the painters. Mr. Ellis himself reminds us that "Leonardo, who was indeed great in everything, is among the few great writers of Italian prose. Blake was first and above all an artist in design, but at the best he had so magnificent a mastery of words that beside it all but the rare best of his work in design looks thin and artificial. Rossetti was drawing and painting all his life, and yet, as has now become clear, it is only in language, verse and prose alike, that he is a supreme master. Fromentin was a painter far his contemporaries, yet his paintings are now quite uninteresting, while the few books he wrote belong to great literature, to linger over with perpetual delight. Poetry seemed to play but a small part in the life of Michelangelo, yet his sonnets stand today by the side of his drawings and marbles. Rodin has all his life been passionately immersed in plastic art; he has never written and seldom talks; yet whenever his more intimate disciples, a Judith Cladel or a Paul Gsell, have set down the things he utters, they are found to be among the most vital, fascinating, and profound sayings in the world.

"Even a bad artist with the brush may be on the road to become a good artist with the pen. Euripides was not only a soldier, he had tried to be a painter before he became a supreme tragic dramatist, and to come down to modern times, Hazlitt and Thackeray, both fine artists with the pen, had first been poor artists with the brush. . . . The list of good artists and bad artists who have been masters of words, from Vasari and earlier onward, is long. One sets down at random the names of Reynolds, Northcote, Delacroix, Woolner, Carrière, Leighton, Gauguin, Beardsley, Du Maurier, Besnard, to which doubtless it might be easy to add a host of others."

Quite easy; that of Whistler, for example, of whom Max Beerbohm writes in Yet Again: "He was a born writer. He wrote, in his way, perfectly; and his way was his own, and the secret of it died with him. . . . His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear vocal cadence. . . . Read any page of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies and you will hear a voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures in it. . . . There are in England, at this moment, a few people to whom prose appeals as an art; but none of them, I think, has yet done justice to Whistler's prose. None has taken it with the seriousness it deserves. I am not surprised. When a man can express himself through two media, people tend to take him lightly in his use of the medium to which he devotes the lesser time and energy, even though he use that medium not less admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care about it more than they care about the other. . . . Had Rossetti not been primarily a poet the expert in painting would have acquired long ago his present penetration into the peculiar value of Rossetti's painting."

There can be no personal plaint in this essay, although Max Beerbohm himself is "a man who can express himself through two media," for no one, I dare say, has attempted to imply dissatisfaction in this case with either form of expression. Max's delicate and fantastic sense of caricature plays as happily through The Happy Hypocrite, A Christmas Garland, and Zuleika Dobson as it does through his drawings of the Rentrée of Mr. George Moore into Chelsea, Mr. Thomas Hardy composing a lyric, and Mr. Joseph Pennell thinking of the old 'un. He turns from one art to the other with equal facility. Like Blake and Rossetti he has made his two careers run parallel. Du Maurier, also, was sib to these. To be sure, he began to write late in life and after he had produced Peter Ibbetson he devoted less attention to the social drawings on which he had founded so brilliant a career in Punch. Nevertheless, he illustrated his own novels, and who can think of Peter, of Trilby, of Svengali, without thinking of Du Maurier's drawings, so close was the intimacy between his two pens? Aubrey Beardsley, too, ran his twin talents side by side, although he gave himself more whole-heartedly to his drawing. Yet the fragment Under the Hill indicates a sure genius for a special kind of fantastic writing, as special in its way as his painting, and wholly analogous to it in spirit. Jacques Blanche since his youth has been both a prolific writer and a prolific painter. His fame as a painter has perhaps outdistanced his fame as a writer because of the celebrity of his models. He has painted very nearly every person of importance who has visited Paris during the past thirty years from George Moore to Nijinsky. Probably the best of his paintings are the self-portrait in the Uffizi at Florence and the picture of the artist Thaulow and his family which hangs in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris. On the whole Blanche writes better than he draws; his essay on Degas is probably the best yet written. Wyndham Lewis, too, turns from canvas to copy-paper with infinite ease; so does Gordon Craig, while Santiago Rusiñol, the Spaniard, divides his time between painting and writing plays.^[9]

Often, however, as Mr. Ellis has suggested was the case with Thackeray and Hazlitt, the bad painter takes to writing. Thomas Hardy, for example, began his career as an architect, an allied art, and he has used his knowledge of the technique of this art very concretely in his books. This author even went so far as to illustrate his own Wessex Poems.^[10] George Moore was a painter in his youth, and it was while he was studying art in Paris that he imbibed much of the atmosphere that is so essential a part of his books. To this phase of his life we owe such works as The Confessions of a Young Man and Memoirs of My Dead Life, but could such a passage as the description of the trees in A Story-Teller's Holiday have been written by any one but a painter? I hardly think so. Holbrook Jackson tells us that Bernard Shaw as a boy never wanted to write. He wished to draw, and Michelangelo was his boyish ideal. Gautier had the intention of becoming a painter when he first went to Paris. He entered the studio of Rioult for a period. "He had the painter's eye," writes Huneker, "the quick retentive vision, the colour sense, above all the sense of composition." The creator of Une Nuit de Cléopâtre was certainly a painter, and when Fokine arranged this picture-poem as a Russian ballet he had but to follow the suggestion of the painter-poet. Huysmans was a descendant of a long line of Dutch painters, one of whom, Cornelius Huysmans of Mechlin, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape artists of the great period. Huneker writes: "Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a painter; his indubitable gift for form and colour were by some trick of circumstance transposed to literature." Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. His description of the carcass of a cow hanging outside a butcher shop is certainly the work of a painter: "As in a hot-house, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot out on every side like the trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh." But it seems unnecessary to particularize: A Rebours, La Cathédrale, Là-Bas, all are painted from cover to cover. Octave Mirbeau painted in his moments of leisure, and so great an artist as Claude Monet looked upon his brush-work with favour. He owned a large collection of pictures by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Rodin, and others, which have been sold since his death. Examine again the description of the garden in Le Jardin des Supplices and you will discover how he turned his other talent to account. With some writers, indeed, the analogy between writing and painting becomes perfectly clear. It is so with Gautier and Huysmans. Beerbohm says of Whistler, "Yes, that painting and that writing are marvellously akin; and such differences as you will see in them are superficial merely." It is obvious, too, that Joseph Hergesheimer approaches his task from the point of view of a painter. He selects and describes exactly as an artist in design might select and describe. He turns to his palette for a touch of cobalt blue or yellow ochre exactly as a painter might turn to his palette. This characteristic of Hergesheimer is so marked that several sagacious reviewers have noted that Java Head and The Three Black Pennys are to all intents and purposes painted. The facts in the case are that Hergesheimer began his career as a painter, painted, indeed, for several years before he began to write at all.

IV

Inspiration, as it affects the artist, is a subject I do not approach without the proper amount of humility. Either it is something mystic, something entirely beyond human ken, something "ecstatic," as Arthur Machen would have it, or else it must be regarded as a ludicrously practical quality. In The Cream of the Jest, Mr. James Branch Cabell shows us with withering irony how a middle-aged, pudgy, greyish-haired, commonplace sort of man, whose conversation seemingly never rises above the most banal level, derives the inspiration for the most fantastic romance from his equally commonplace wife and the broken cover of a cold-cream jar. The mystery of the procedure is emphasized by the fact that The Cream of the Jest is sufficiently scandent, although in style, manner, and matter it is contradictory to a degree with which no satisfactory comparison comes readily to mind. Mr. Cabell, however, in his own way, possibly comes nearer to solving our present problem than any one else. For here, perhaps, we have our first glimmer of understanding. To put it simply, Mr. Cabell's Felix Kennaston depends on his wife, the cover of the cold-cream jar, and straggling, downright stupid conversation about the weather, for his inspiration. In Arthur Machen's. The Hill of Dreams, the author-hero, Lucian Taylor, evolves a complete and mystic comprehension of all the manifestations of sex from the accidental embrace of a farm girl. The novelist, the painter, are thus reduced to models, however far-fetched and ridiculously inappropriate the models may appear to be in the light cast by the finished work. No doubt George Sand loved all her lovers, but somewhere in the back of her head lurked a realization that their ultimate purpose was to supply copy. Some one once asked Maurice Maeterlinck what had been his inspiration for the creation of Pelléas et Mélisande and his reply was, "I was writing a piece that suited my wife." Cecil Forsythe, in his book, Nationalism in Music, educes the interesting theory that a great sea-power never produces great musicians, but that authors and painters flourish under triumphant mercantile, social, and political régimes.

Painters and writers extract their material from the world. They must mingle with men, see and understand life, no matter how far removed from life their finished art may be. Art, it may be stated categorically, is certainly not a reproduction of nature, and yet without nature, or some human aspect of it, the painter and writer are helpless. Perhaps you have never seen a Monet hay-stack in a real field, but unless such an object as a hay-stack existed, unless the sun had lighted that hay-stack, Monet would have chosen another subject. It is not essential or important that Leonardo's Monna Lisa should exactly reproduce the effect of the model, but if no woman had ever breathed in this world the picture never could have been painted. Machen detects his ideal quality of ecstasy raised to the highest degree in Homer, Rabelais, and Cervantes, all men of action and wide experience. He points out, indeed, that one of the principal reasons The Pickwick Papers is not as great as the Odyssey is because Dickens was brought up in Camden Town. It was not carelessly then that Remy de Gourmont called Huysmans an eye, and his dictum that whatever is deeply thought is well written is certainly just. Havelock Ellis adds that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design, he continues to point out, is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same mystery of nature.

The musician, whose art is the most mystic, the most profound, the most "ecstatic" of any, simply because it deals with clang-tints and not with more definite symbols,^[11] is not, as Cecil Forsythe has shown us, inspired by great deeds, by political confusion, by mercantile progress, by social intercourse. War never inspires great music, and England and America have produced less good music than Finland and Scandinavia, not to speak of Bohemia and Italy! The great Beethoven wandered alone, and he wrote some of his finest music after he became stone-deaf. The musical artist, indeed, shut up in a garret, may derive his masterpiece through an orphic process of introspection. There is no need for him even to read; an illiterate composer is a possible figure. "The song, the fugue, the sonata have absolutely no analogues in the world of Nature," writes W. H. Hadow. "Their basis is psychological, not physical, and in them the artist is in direct touch with his idea, and presents it to us, as it were, first hand. Given sound as the plastic medium, Music asks nothing more: it creates its subjects by the spontaneous activity of the mind." And W. F. Apthorp remarks: "The bonds which hold Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry fast to Nature are far tougher and of more inexorable grip than any connection discoverable between Nature and Music. . . . We may safely assert that, though a certain modicum of Realism, or Truth to Nature, is indispensable to the artistic status of Poetry, Painting, or Sculpture, Music can perfectly well do without it; also that such modicum of Realism—when present in Music—cannot be regarded as any true measure of her artistic status."

It may be regarded as a significant fact that the four composers whom I previously selected as types of the fairly successful musician-writer all resorted to this "modicum of realism" in their music. Every one of them was what is known as a literary composer. Every one of them wrote program music. Every one of them leaned on nature, books, and painting for his inspiration. Not only was Schumann's Carnaval and a great deal more of his piano music so inspired; at least two of his symphonies had a definite starting point somewhere outside music itself. Berlioz and Liszt^[12] are notorious cases. It is only necessary to recall the titles of Berlioz's symphonies, Fantastique, Romeo and Juliet, Harold in Italy, or of Liszt's tone-poems (a form which he invented), Les Préludes, Tasso, Mazeppa, etc., to realize that although music was the end to these men it was seldom the means. With Debussy it was the same: l'Après midi d'un faune had its foundation in Mallarmé; La Mer, Nocturnes, Ibéria, in nature herself. It may be generally observed, indeed, that musicians who use the pen to write prose or poetry, usually go outside music itself to search for the inspiration for their music. This is as true of Richard Wagner, Cyril Scott, and Edward MacDowell as it is of Liszt and Berlioz.

But what about rhythm? What about the so-called musical quality in good literature? In The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde says: "Since the introduction of printing and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes there has been a tendency to appeal more and more to the eye and less and less to the ear, which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr. Pater . . . is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music. We, in fact, have made writing a definite mode of composition and have located it as a form of design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a means of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its musical and rhetorical relation. The voice was the medium and the ear the critic. . . . When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. Who could match the measures of Comus with the measures of Samson Agonistes or of Paradise Lost or Regained? When he became blind he composed as everybody should compose, with the voice purely. . . ."

This is all very well; perhaps the voice was once the medium of composition; perhaps the Greek musicians could compose in words as well as tone. We know very little about them. Nowadays, in Wilde's own phrase, "we have made writing a definite mode of composition and have located it as a form of design." There are certainly writers of today who make an especial effort to write prose which will read aloud well. I believe that Henry James dictated certain of his novels with this idea in mind. George Moore, too, has taken to dictating. But the rhythmical quality we note in writing is perhaps nearer to the rhythmical quality we note in painting than to that we note in music. Balance and a sense of proportion, light and shade, all these qualities are as instinctive to a writer as they are to a painter. He places a word, as the painter places an object or a point on his canvas, where it may catch the light and offer contrast to another word or phrase. Balance, light and shade, sense of proportion, are all part of the musician's jargon, too. Nevertheless, even if the rhythmical quality we note in music is identical with the rhythmical quality of prose or poetry, it must be remembered that the musician creates rhythm with pure tone, sound, whereas in any good prose or poetry sense and definite meaning must play their part. Most of us are unlike Mme. de Staël who delighted in the melody of verse, demanding nothing more. She would read a favourite specimen and declare, "That is what I call poetry! It is delicious, and so much the more so because it does not convey a single idea to me!"

Probably the best and truest reason, however, why musicians cannot juggle words is definitely a puritanic reason. Of all artists the musician is the only one who can express himself freely. In a casual paper, James Huneker once observed, "Because of its opportunities for the expansion of the soul music has ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. It is, par excellence, the art masculine. The profoundest truths, the most blasphemous ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police none the wiser." The painter even less than the writer can reproduce all that he really sees. Nor can the sculptor do more than the painter. These artists, then, find themselves free, unrestricted in the medium of words, because hitherto they have observed and felt deeply so much more than they could express on canvas or in marble. The musician, on the other hand, feels bound and tied when he is forced to express himself in words. He cannot say as much (nor can he say it as vaguely) as he can in his own music. If a law be passed as a pendent to the now celebrated Eighteenth Amendment (and very probably it will be), making it a criminal offence to mention vodka or absinthe or even beer in a book, or to paint a picture in which people may be seen to be drinking, the musician may still compose bacchanals and brindisi; he may be as abandonedly Dionysiac, as intoxicated and as intoxicating as he desires. Nobody is going to prohibit performances of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Nobody will arrest Vincent d'Indy for disrobing a tune in Istar. The cream of the jest is that our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, was originally a drinking song!

February 21, 1919.

1. In 1921, Mr. Ellis published a second series of Impressions and Comments. Also, had not this paper been written before they were issued, there would have been reference here to George Saintsbury's A Scrap Book and A Second Scrap Book.
2. In The Literature of Music; Elliot Stock; London; 1896.
3. In a paper printed on page 16 of A Musical Motley (John Lane; London; 1919), Ernest Newman makes the interesting statement that "the defects of his poetry are unmistakably those of his later music . . . he commits just the same fallacy in verse that he sometimes commits in his music—he mistakenly imagines that a vision not clearly seen by him in the first place can be imposed upon the reader, in spite of its obscurity and its lack of outline, by means of resonant and parti-coloured diction."
4. Nor have I yet (1924)!
5. Musicians, as a rule, are even satisfied to set bad librettos when they write operas because they have no true appreciation of good poetry or good drama. Most opera books rank very low under the head of literature and some of the greatest operas have been composed to the worst books. Weber, for instance, found inspiration in Oberon, and Mozart made masterpieces of Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, while Verdi lavished some of his best music on the texts of La Forza del Destino and Il Trovatore.
6. Liszt told Frederick Niecks that the enlarged edition of his Chopin was actually written by the Princess Wittgenstein. See Programme Music, page 315.
7. The appearance in 1919 of Ethel Smyth's Impressions That Remained, and a year or so later of her Streaks of Life, makes it almost imperative to put this Englishwoman at the head of the list of the musician-writers. I have never heard any of her music, but as a composer she is not generally awarded an important position.
8. In 1921, after Debussy's death, under the title of Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante, certain of his papers, completely denuded of their malice, were collected and published by Dorbon-Ainé. The publisher avers that the composer saw the first proofs. In that case he must be held responsible for the denaturalization.
9. Many more names might be added to this list; that, for example, of William de Morgan, who turned late in life from the designing and manufacturing of pots and tiles to the writing of fiction. A writer in the London Times has said of him: "In 1922 De Morgan is known as a highly individual author who had been a potter. In 1952 he will be recognized as the greatest ceramic artist Europe has produced and whose books remain to picture the times and places he worked in." Vachel Lindsay illustrated his own book, Going to the Sun. When Mr. Lindsay left college he studied at the Art Institute in Chicago with William M. Chase, and, in New York, with Robert Henri. Robert Louis Stevenson made wood-engravings for an early book of his. Sherwood Anderson and William Vaughan Moody, on the other hand, seem to have taken up painting after they had become known as writers. This was also the case with A.E., who found he could express certain ideas in colour that could not be expressed in words (Imaginations and Reveries, page 60). Other names to be noted are those of Edward Lear, Jean de Bosschère, Arthur Davison Ficke, John Lafarge, Max Weber, Rockwell Kent, E. E. Cummings, Maurice Sterne, John Dos Passos, Oliver Herford, Laurence Housman, Howard Pyle, Philip Thicknesse, Ralph Barton, Kahlil Gibran, Mina Loy, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Lee Simonson.
10. Lucian was apprenticed to a sculptor. Ouida was a painter, withal a bad one. However, she once wrote to her friend, Mrs. Huntington, that she was a better painter than writer. William and Henry James studied painting with Lafarge. Arnold Bennett dabbled in art for five years in Paris. On inspecting his work, Pierre Laprade, the French water-colourist, remarked, "Monsieur, you have three times too much cleverness, and your work is utterly without interest." Nevertheless one of Bennett's paintings was used to illuminate the cover of one of his novels, Booth Tarkington said once to an interviewer, "First I intended to be an artist and not a writer," and O. Henry made a similar remark. Stacy Aumonier was once a painter. W. B. Yeats, originally intending to follow his father's example and become a painter, went to art school in Dublin. Rudyard Kipling illustrated his own Just So Stories. Robert W. Chambers and Roland Pertwee were once painters. Samuel Butler was not only a painter but a composer as well!
11. Every good musician, as a matter of fact, speaks a distinct language of his own.
12. Frederick Niecks writes of Liszt: "Except that it is more logical, his musical style is a pretty exact likeness of his literary style."