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The
Merry-Go-Round

[Illustration]




_BOOKS BY_
_CARL VAN VECHTEN_

MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR              1915

MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS                  1916

INTERPRETERS AND INTERPRETATIONS       1917

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND                     1918

THE MUSIC OF SPAIN                     1918




The
Merry-Go-Round

_Carl Van Vechten_


_"Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,
  Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,
  Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
  Tournez, tournez au sons de hautbois."_
                      PAUL VERLAINE


[Illustration]

New York   Alfred A. Knopf

MCMXVIII




COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




Contents


                                                     PAGE

IN DEFENCE OF BAD TASTE                                11

MUSIC AND SUPERMUSIC                                   23

EDGAR SALTUS                                           37

THE NEW ART OF THE SINGER                              93

_Au Bal Musette_                                      125

MUSIC AND COOKING                                     149

AN INTERRUPTED CONVERSATION                           179

THE AUTHORITATIVE WORK ON AMERICAN MUSIC              197

OLD DAYS AND NEW                                      215

TWO YOUNG AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS                        227

_De Senectute Cantorum_                               245

IMPRESSIONS IN THE THEATRE

    I _The Land of Joy_                               281

    II A Note on Mimi Aguglia                         298

    III The New Isadora                               307

    IV Margaret Anglin Produces _As You Like It_      318

THE MODERN COMPOSERS AT A GLANCE                      329

FOOTNOTES                                             330

INDEX                                                 331




     Some of these essays have appeared in "The Smart Set,"
     "Reedy's Mirror," "Vanity Fair," "The Chronicle," "The
     Theatre," "The Bellman," "The Musical Quarterly," "Rogue,"
     "The New York Press," and "The New York Globe." In their
     present form, however, they have undergone considerable
     redressing.




In Defence of Bad Taste


     "_It is a painful thing, at best, to live up to one's
     bricabric, if one has any; but to live up to the bricabric
     of many lands and of many centuries is a strain which no
     wise man would dream of inflicting upon his constitution._"

                        Agnes Repplier.




In Defence of Bad Taste


In America, where men are supposed to know nothing about matters of
taste and where women have their dresses planned for them, the
household decorator has become an important factor in domestic life.
Out of an even hundred rich men how many can say that they have had
anything to do with the selection or arrangement of the furnishings
for their homes? In theatre programs these matters are regulated and
due credit is given to the various firms who have supplied the myriad
appeals to the eye; one knows who thought out the combinations of
shoes, hats, and parasols, and one knows where each separate article
was purchased. Why could not some similar plan of appreciation be
followed in the houses of our very rich? Why not, for instance, a card
in the hall something like the following:

    _This house was furnished and decorated according
      to the taste of Marcel of the Dilly-Billy Shop_

or

    _We are living in the kind of house Miss Simone
        O'Kelly thought we should live in. The
          decorations are pure Louis XV and
             the furniture is authentic._

It is not difficult, of course, to differentiate the personal from the
impersonal. Nothing clings so ill to the back as borrowed finery and I
have yet to find the family which has settled itself fondly and
comfortably in chairs which were a part of some one else's aesthetic
plan. As a matter of fact many of our millionaires would be more at
home in an atmosphere concocted from the ingredients of plain pine
tables and blanket-covered mattresses than they are surrounded by the
frippery of China and the frivolity of France. If these gentlemen were
fortunate enough to enjoy sufficient confidence in their own taste to
give it a thorough test it is not safe to think of the extreme burden
that would be put on the working capacity of the factories of the
Grand Rapids furniture companies. We might find a few emancipated
souls scouring the town for heavy refectory tables and divans into
which one could sink, reclining or upright, with a perfect sense of
ease, but these would be as rare as Steinway pianos in Coney Island.

For Americans are meek in such matters. They credit themselves with no
taste. They fear comparison. If the very much sought-after Simone
O'Kelly has decorated Mr. B.'s house Mr. M. does not dare to struggle
along with merely his own ideas in furnishing his. He calls in an
expert who begins, rather inauspiciously, by painting the dining-room
salmon pink. The tables and chairs will be made by somebody on Tenth
Street, exact copies of a set to be found in the Musée Carnavalet. The
legs under the table are awkwardly arranged for diners but they look
very well when the table is unclothed. The decorator plans to hang Mr.
M.'s personal bedroom in pale plum colour. Mr. M. rebels at this. "I
detest," he remarks mildly, "all variants of purple." "Very well,"
acquiesces the decorator, "we will make it green." In the end Mr. M.'s
worst premonitions are realized: the walls are resplendent in a
striking shade of magenta. Along the edge of each panel of Chinese
brocade a narrow band of absinthe velvet ribbon gives the necessary
contrast. The furniture is painted in dull ivory with touches of gold
and beryl and the bed cover is peacock blue. Four round cushions of a
similar shade repose on the floor at the foot of the bed. The fat
manufacturer's wife as she enters this triumph of decoration which
might satisfy Louise de la Vallière or please Doris Keane, is an
anachronistic figure and she is aware of it. She prefers, on the
whole, the brass bedsteads of the summer hotels. Mr. M. himself feels
ridiculous. He never enters the room without a groan and a remark on
the order of "Good God, what a colour!" His personal taste finds its
supreme enjoyment in the Circassian walnut panelling, desk, and tables
of the directors' room in the Millionaire's Trust and Savings Bank.
"Rich and tasteful": how many times he has used this phrase to express
his approval! In the mid-Victorian red plush of his club, too, he is
comfortable. "Waiter, another whiskey and soda!"

Mildred is expected home after her first year in boarding school. Her
mother wishes to environ her, so to speak. Mildred is delicate in her
tastes, so delicate that she scarcely ever expresses herself. Her mind
and body are pure; her heart beats faster when she learns of distress.
Voluptuousness, Venus, and Vice are all merely words to her. Mother
does not explain this to the decorator. "My daughter is returning from
school," she says, "I want her room done." "What style of room?"
"After all you are supposed to know that. I am engaging you to arrange
it for me." "Your daughter, I take it, is a modern girl?" "You may
assume as much." In despair for a hint the decorator steals a look at
a photograph of the miss, full-lipped, melting dark eyes, and
blue-black hair. Sensing an houri he hangs the walls with a deep shade
of Persian orange, over which flit tropical birds of emerald and
azure; strange pomegranates bleed their seeds at regular intervals.
The couch is an adaptation, in colour, of the celebrated _Sumurun_
bed. The dressing table and the _chaise-longue_ are of Chinese
lacquer. A heavy bronze incense burner pours forth fumes of Bichara's
_Scheherazade_. From the window frames, stifling the light, depend
flame-coloured brocaded curtains embroidered in Egyptian enamelled
beads. It is a triumph, this chamber, of _style Ballet Russe_. Diana
is banished ... and shrinking Mildred, returning from school, finds
her demure soul at variance with her surroundings.

A man's house should be the expression of the man himself. All the
books on the subject and even the household decorators themselves will
tell you that. But, if the decoration of a house is to express its
owner, it is necessary that he himself inspire it, which implies, of
course, the possession of ideas, even though they be bad. And men in
these United States are not expected to display mental anguish or
pleasure when confronted by colour combinations. In America one is
constantly hearing young ladies say, "He's a man and so, of course,
knows nothing about colour," or "Of course a man never looks at
clothes." It does not seem to be necessary to argue this point. One
has only to remember that Veronese was a man; so was Velasquez. Even
Paul Poiret and Leon Bakst belong to the sex of Adam. Nevertheless
most Americans still consider it a little _efféminé_, a trifle
_declassé_, for a business man (allowances are sometimes made for
poets, musicians, actors, and people who live in Greenwich Village),
to make any references to colour or form. He may admire, with obvious
emphasis on the women they lightly enclose, the costumes of the
_Follies_ but he is not permitted to exhibit knowledge of materials
and any suddenly expressed desire on his part to rush into a shop and
hug some bit of colour from the show window to his heart would be
regarded as a symptom of madness.

The audience which gives the final verdict on a farce makes allowances
for the author; permits him the use of certain conventions. For
example, he is given leave to introduce a hotel corridor into his last
act with seven doors opening on a common hallway so that his
characters may conveniently and persistently enter the wrong rooms.
It may be supposed that I ask for some such license from my audience.
"How ridiculous," you may be saying, "I know of interior decorators
who spend weeks in reading out the secrets of their clients' souls in
order to provide their proper settings." There doubtless are interior
decorators who succeed in giving a home the appearance of a well-kept
hotel where guests may mingle comfortably and freely. I should not
wish to deny this. But I do deny that soul-study is a requirement for
the profession. If a man (or a woman) has a soul it will not be a
decorator who will discover its fitting housing. Others may object,
"But bad taste is rampant. Surely it is better to be guided by some
one who knows than to surround oneself with rocking chairs, plaster
casts of the Winged Victory, and photographs of various madonnas." I
say that it is _not_ better. It is better for each man to express
himself, through his taste, as well as through his tongue or his pen,
as he may. And it is only through such expression that he will finally
arrive (if he ever can) at a condition of household furnishing which
will say something to his neighbour as well as to himself. It is a
pleasure when one leaves a dinner party to be able to observe "That is
_his_ house," just as it is a pleasure when one leaves a concert to
remember that a composer has expressed himself and not the result of
seven years study in Berlin or Paris.

But Americans have little aptitude for self-expression. They prefer to
huddle, like cattle, under unspeakable whips when matters of art are
under discussion. They fear ridicule. As a consequence many of the
richest men in this country never really live in their own homes,
never are comfortable for a moment, although the walls are hung double
with Fragonards and hawthorne vases stand so deep upon the tables that
no space remains for the "Saturday Review" or "le Temps." And they
never, never, never, will know the pleasure which comes while
stumbling down a side street in London, or in the mouldy corners of
the Venetian ghetto, or in the Marché du Temple in Paris, or, heaven
knows, in New York, on lower Fourth Avenue, or in Chinatown, or in a
Russian brass shop on Allen Street, or in a big department store (as
often there as anywhere) in finding just the lamp for just the table
in just the corner, or in discovering a bit of brocade, perhaps the
ragged remnant of a waistcoat belonging to an aristocrat of the
Directorate, which will lighten the depths of a certain room, or a
chair which goes miraculously with a desk already possessed, or a
Chinese mirror which one had almost decided did not exist. Nor will
they ever experience the joy of sudden decision in front of a picture
by Matisse, which ends in the sale of a Delacroix. Nor can they feel
the thrill which is part of the replacing of a make-shift rug by _the_
rug of rugs (let us hope it was Solomon's!).

I know a lady in Paris whose salon presents a different aspect each
summer. Do her Picassos go, a new Spanish painter has replaced them.
Have you missed the Gibbons carving? Spanish church carving has taken
its place. "And where are your Venetian embroideries?" "I sold them to
the Marquise de V.... The money served to buy these Persian
miniatures." This lady has travelled far. She is not experimenting in
doubtful taste or bad art; she is not even experimenting in her own
taste: she is simply enjoying different epochs, different artists,
different forms of art, each in its turn, for so long as it says
anything to her. Her house is not a museum. Space and comfort demand
exclusion but she excludes nothing forever that she desires.... She
exchanges.

Taste at best is relative. It is an axiom that anybody else's taste
can never say anything to you although you may feel perfectly certain
that it is better than your own. If more of the money of the rich
were spent in encouraging children to develop their own ideas in
furnishing their own rooms it would serve a better purpose than it
does now when it is dropped into the ample pockets of the professional
decorators. Oscar Wilde wrote, "A colour sense is more important in
the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong."
Any young boy or girl can learn something about such matters; most of
them, if not shamed out of it, take a natural interest in their
surroundings. You will see how true this is if you attempt to
rearrange a child's room. Those who have bad taste, relatively, should
literally be allowed to make their own beds. On the whole it is
preferable to be comfortable in red and green velvet upholstery than
to be beautiful and unhappy in a household decorator's gilded cage.

  _September 3, 1915._




Music and Supermusic


     "_To know whether you are enjoying a piece of music or not
     you must see whether you find yourself looking at the
     advertisements of Pears' soap at the end of the program._"

                        Samuel Butler.




Music and Supermusic


What is the distinction in the mind of Everycritic between good music
and bad music, in the mind of Everyman between popular music and
"classical" music? What is the essential difference between an air by
Mozart and an air by Jerome Kern? Why is Chopin's _G minor nocturne_
better music than Thécla Badarzewska's _La Prière d'une Vierge_? Why
is a music drama by Richard Wagner preferable to a music drama by
Horatio W. Parker? What makes a melody distinguished? What makes a
melody commonplace or cheap? Why do some melodies ring in our ears
generation after generation while others enjoy but a brief popularity?
Why do certain composers, such as Raff and Mendelssohn, hailed as
geniuses while they were yet alive, soon sink into semi-obscurity,
while others, such as Robert Franz and Moussorgsky, almost
unrecognized by their contemporaries, grow in popularity? Are there no
answers to these conundrums and the thousand others that might be
asked by a person with a slight attack of curiosity?... No one _does_
ask and assuredly no one answers. These riddles, it would seem, are
included among the forbidden mysteries of the sphynx. The critics
assert with authority and some show of erudition that the Spohrs, the
Mendelssohns, the Humperdincks, and the Montemezzis are great
composers. They usually admire the grandchildren of Old Lady Tradition
but they neglect to justify this partiality. Nor can we trust the
public with its favourite Piccinnis and Puccinis.... What then is the
test of supermusic?

For we know, as well as we can know anything, that there is music and
supermusic. Rubinstein wrote music; Beethoven wrote supermusic (Mr.
Finck may contradict this statement). Bellini wrote operas; Mozart
wrote superoperas. Jensen wrote songs; Schubert wrote supersongs. The
superiority of _Voi che sapete_ as a vocal melody over _Ah! non
giunge_ is not generally contested; neither can we hesitate very long
over the question whether or not _Der Leiermann_ is a better song than
_Lehn' deine Wang'_. Probably even Mr. Finck will admit that the
_Sonata Appassionata_ is finer music than the most familiar portrait
(I think it is No. 22) in the _Kamennoi-Ostrow_ set. But, if we agree
to put Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and a few others on
marmorean pedestals in a special Hall of Fame (and this is a
compromise on my part, at any rate, as I consider much of the music
written by even these men to be below any moderately high standard),
what about the rest? Mr. Finck prefers Johann Strauss to Brahms, nay
more to Richard himself! He has written a whole book for no other
reason, it would seem, than to prove that the author of _Tod und
Verklärung_ is a very much over-rated individual. At times sitting
despondently in Carnegie Hall, I am secretly inclined to agree with
him. Personally I can say that I prefer Irving Berlin's music to that
of Edward MacDowell and I would like to have some one prove to me that
this position is untenable.

What is the test of supermusic? I have read that fashionable music,
music composed in a style welcomed and appreciated by its contemporary
hearers is seldom supermusic. Yet Handel wrote fashionable music, and
so much other of the music of that epoch is Handelian that it is often
difficult to be sure where George Frederick left off and somebody else
began. Bellini wrote fashionable music and _Norma_ and _La Sonnambula_
sound a trifle faded although they are still occasionally performed,
but Rossini, whose only desire was to please his public, (Liszt once
observed "Rossini and Co. always close with 'I remain your very
humble servant'"), wrote melodies in _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_ which
sound as fresh to us today as they did when they were first composed.
And when this prodigiously gifted musician-cook turned his back to the
public to write _Guillaume Tell_ he penned a work which critics have
consistently told us is a masterpiece, but which is as seldom
performed today as any opera of the early Nineteenth Century which
occasionally gains a hearing at all. Therefor we must be wary of the
old men who tell us that we shall soon tire of the music of Puccini
because it is fashionable.

Popularity is scarcely a test. I have mentioned Mendelssohn. Never was
there a more popular composer, and yet aside from the violin concerto
what work of his has maintained its place in the concert repertory?
Yet Chopin, whose name is seldom absent from the program of a pianist,
was a god in his own time and the most brilliant woman of his epoch
fell in love with him, as Philip Moeller has recently reminded us in
his very amusing play. On the other hand there is the case of Robert
Franz whose songs never achieved real popularity during his lifetime,
but which are frequently, almost invariably indeed, to be found on
song recital programs today and which are more and more appreciated.
The critics are praising him, the public likes him: they buy his
songs. And there is also the case of Max Reger who was not popular, is
not popular, and never will be popular.

Can we judge music by academic standards? Certainly not. Even the
hoary old academicians themselves can answer this question correctly
if you put it in relation to any composer born before 1820. The
greatest composers have seldom respected the rules. Beethoven in his
last sonatas and string quartets slapped all the pedants in the ears;
yet I believe you will find astonishingly few rules broken by Mozart,
one of the gods in the mythology of art music, and Berlioz, who broke
all the rules, is more interesting to us today as a writer of prose
than as a writer of music.

Is simple music supermusic? Certainly not invariably. _Vedrai Carino_
is a simple tune, almost as simple as a folk-song and we set great
store by it; yet Michael William Balfe wrote twenty-seven operas
filled with similarly simple tunes and in a selective draft of
composers his number would probably be 9,768. The _Ave Maria_ of
Schubert is a simple tune; so is the _Meditation_ from _Thais_. Why do
we say that one is better than the other.

Or is supermusic always grand, sad, noble, or emotional? There must be
another violent head shaking here. The air from _Oberon, Ocean, thou
mighty monster_, is so grand that scarcely a singer can be found today
capable of interpreting it, although many sopranos puff and steam
through it, for all the world like pinguid gentlemen climbing the
stairs to the towers of Notre Dame. The _Fifth Symphony_ of Beethoven
is both grand and noble; probably no one will be found who will deny
that it is supermusic, but Mahler's _Symphony of the Thousand_ is
likewise grand and noble, and futile and bombastic to boot. _Or sai
chi l'onore_ is a grand air, but _Robert je t'aime_ is equally grand
in intention, at least. _Der Tod und das Mädchen_ is sad; so is _Les
Larmes_ in _Werther_.... But a very great deal of supermusic is
neither grand nor sad. Haydn's symphonies are usually as light-hearted
and as light-waisted as possible. Mozart's _Figaro_ scarcely seems to
have a care. Listen to Beethoven's _Fourth_ and _Eighth Symphonies_,
_Il Barbiere_ again, _Die Meistersinger_.... But do not be misled:
Massenet's _Don Quichotte_ is light music; so is Mascagni's
_Lodoletta_....

Is music to be prized and taken to our hearts because it is
contrapuntal and complex? We frequently hear it urged that Bach (who
was more or less forgotten for a hundred years, by the way) was the
greatest of composers and his music is especially intricate. He is the
one composer, indeed, who can _never_ be played with one finger! But
poor unimportant forgotten Max Reger also wrote in the most
complicated forms; the great Gluck in the simplest. Gluck, indeed, has
even been considered weak in counterpoint and fugue. Meyerbeer, it is
said, was also weak in counterpoint and fugue. Is he therefor to be
regarded as the peer of Gluck? Is Mozart's _G minor Symphony_ more
important (because it is more complicated) than the same composer's,
_Batti, Batti_?

We learn from some sources that music stands or falls by its melody
but what is good melody? According to his contemporaries Wagner's
music dramas were lacking in melody. _Sweet Marie_ is certainly a
melody; why is it not as good a melody as _The Old Folks at Home_? Why
is Musetta's waltz more popular than Gretel's? It is no better as
melody. As a matter of fact there is, has been, and for ever will be
war over this question of melody, because the point of view on the
subject is continually changing. As Cyril Scott puts it in his book,
"The Philosophy of Modernism": "at one time it (melody) extended over
a few bars and then came to a close, being, as it were, a kind of
sentence, which, after running for the moment, arrived at a full stop,
or semicolon. Take this and compare it with the modern tendency: for
that modern tendency is to argue that a melody might go on
indefinitely almost; there is no reason why it should come to a full
stop, for it is not a sentence, but more a line, which, like the
rambling incurvations of a frieze, requires no rule to stop it, but
alone the will and taste of its engenderer."

Or is harmonization the important factor? Folk-songs are not
harmonized at all, and yet certain musicians, Cecil Sharp for example,
devote their lives to collecting them, while others, like Percy
Grainger, base their compositions on them. On the other hand such
music as Debussy's _Iberia_ depends for its very existence on its
beautiful harmonies. The harmonies of Gluck are extremely simple,
those of Richard Strauss extremely complex.

H. T. Finck says somewhere that one of the greatest charms of music is
modulation but the old church composers who wrote in the "modes" never
modulated at all. Erik Satie seldom avails himself of this modern
device. It is a question whether Leo Ornstein modulates. If we may
take him at his word Arnold Schoenberg has a system of modulation. At
least it is his very own.

Are long compositions better than short ones? This may seem a silly
question but I have read criticisms based on a theory that they were.
Listen, for example, to de Quincy: "A song, an air, a tune,--that is,
a short succession of notes revolving rapidly upon itself,--how could
that by possibility offer a field of compass sufficient for the
development of great musical effects? The preparation pregnant with
the future, the remote correspondence, the questions, as it were,
which to a deep musical sense are asked in one passage, and answered
in another; the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving
through subtile variations that sometimes disguise the theme,
sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it out tumultuously to
the daylight,--these and ten thousand forms of self-conflicting
musical passion--what room could they find, what opening, for
utterance, in so limited a field as an air or song?" After this
broadside permit me to quote a verse of Gérard de Nerval:

    _"Il est un air pour qui je donnerais
      Tout Rossini, tout Mozart, et tout Weber,
      Un air très-vieux, languissant et funèbre,
      Qui pour moi seul a des charmes secrets."_

And now let us dispassionately, if possible, regard the evidence.
Richard Strauss's _Alpine Symphony_, admittedly one of his weakest
works and considered very tiresome even by ardent Straussians, plays
for nearly an hour while any one can sing _Der Erlkönig_ in three
minutes. Are short compositions better than long ones? Answer: _Love
me and the World is Mine_ is a short song (although it seldom sounds
so) while Schubert's _C major Symphony_ is called the "symphony of
heavenly length."

Is what is new better than what is old? Is what is old better than
what is new? Schoenberg is new; is he therefor to be considered better
than Beethoven? Stravinsky is new; is he therefor to be considered
worse than Liszt?

Is an opera better than a song? Compare _Pagliacci_ and Strauss's
_Ständchen_. Is a string quartet better than a piece for the piano?
But I grow weary.... Under the circumstances it would seem that if you
have any strong opinions about music you are perfectly entitled to
them, for the critics do not agree and you will find many of them
basing their criticism on some of the various hypotheses I have
advanced. H. T. Finck tells us that the sonata form is illogical,
forgetting perhaps that once it served its purpose; Jean Marnold
dubbed _Armide_ an _oeuvre bâtarde_; John F. Runciman called
_Parsifal_ "decrepit stuff," while Ernest Newman assures us that it
is "marvellous"; Pierre Lalo and Philip Hale disagree on the subject
of Debussy's _La Mer_ while W. J. Henderson and James Huneker wrangle
over Richard Strauss's _Don Quixote_.

The clue to the whole matter lies in a short phrase: Imitative work is
always bad. Music that tries to be something that something else has
been may be thrown aside as worthless. It will not endure although it
may sometimes please the zanies and jackoclocks of a generation. The
critic, therefor, who comes nearest to the heart of the matter, is he
who, either through instinct or familiarity with the various phenomena
of music, is able to judge of a work's originality. There must be
individuality in new music to make it worthy of our attention, and
that, after all is all that matters. For the tiniest folk-song often
persists in the hearts and minds of the people, often stirs the pulse
of a musician, pursuing its tuneful way through two centuries, while a
mighty thundering symphony of the same period may lie dead and
rotting, food for the Niptus Hololencus and the Blatta Germanica. We
still sing _The Old Folks At Home_ and _Le Cycle du Vin_ but we have
laid aside _Di Tanti Palpiti_. Any piece of music possessing the
certain magic power of individuality is of value, it matters not
whether it be symphony or song, opera or dance. What most critics
have forgotten is that in Music matter, form, and idea are one. In
painting, in poetry the idea, the words, the form, may be separated;
each may play its part, but in music there is no idea without form, no
form without idea. That is what makes musical criticism difficult.

  _January 24, 1918._




Edgar Saltus

    _"O no, we never mention him,
      His name is never heard!"_

                        Old Ballad.




Edgar Saltus


To write about Edgar Saltus should be _vieux jeu_. The man is an
American; he was born in 1858; he accomplished some of his best work
in the Eighties and the Nineties, in the days when mutton-legged
sleeves, whatnots, Rogers groups, cat-tails, peacock feathers,
Japanese fans, musk-mellon seed collars, and big-wheeled bicycles were
in vogue. He has written history, fiction, poetry, literary criticism,
and philosophy, and to all these forms he has brought sympathy,
erudition, a fresh point of view, and a radiant style. He has
imagination and he understands the gentle art of arranging facts in
kaleidoscopic patterns so that they may attract and not repel the
reader. America, indeed, has not produced a round dozen authors who
equal him as a brilliant stylist with a great deal to say. And yet
this man, who wrote some of his best books in the Eighties and who is
still alive, has been allowed to drift into comparative oblivion. Even
his early reviewers shoved him impatiently aside or ignored him
altogether; a writer in "Belford's Magazine" for July, 1888, says:
"Edgar Saltus should have his name changed to Edgar Assaulted." Soon
he became a literary leper. The doctors and professors would have none
of him. To most of them, nowadays, I suppose, he is only a name. Many
of them have never read any of his books. I do not even remember to
have seen him mentioned in the works of James Huneker and you will not
find his name in Barrett Wendell's "A History of American Literature"
(1901), "A Reader's History of American Literature" by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson and Henry Walcott Boynton (1903), Katherine Lee
Bates's "American Literature" (1898), "A Manual of American
Literature," edited by Theodore Stanton (1909), William B. Cairns's "A
History of American Literature" (1912), William Edward Simonds's "A
Student's History of American Literature" (1909), Fred Lewis Pattee's
"A History of American Literature Since 1870" (1915), John Macy's "The
Spirit of American Literature" (1913), or William Lyon Phelps's "The
Advance of the English Novel" (1916). The third volume of "The
Cambridge History of American Literature," bringing the subject up to
1900, has not yet appeared but I should be amazed to discover that the
editors had decided to include Saltus therein. Curiously enough he is
mentioned in Oscar Fay Adams's "A Dictionary of American Authors"
(1901 edition) and, of all places, I have found a reference to him in
one of Agnes Repplier's books.

You will find few essays about the man or his work in current or
anterior periodicals. There is, to be sure, the article by Ramsay
Colles, entitled "A Publicist: Edgar Saltus," published in the
"Westminster Magazine" for October, 1904, but this essay could have
won our author no adherents. If any one had the courage to wade
through its muddy paragraphs he doubtless emerged vowing never to read
Saltus. Besides only the novels are touched on. In 1903 G. F.
Monkshood and George Gamble arranged a compilation from Saltus's work
which they entitled "Wit and Wisdom from Edgar Saltus" (Greening and
Co., London). The work is done without sense or sensitiveness and the
prefatory essay is without salt or flavour of any sort. An anonymous
writer in "Current Literature" for July, 1907, asks plaintively why
this author has been permitted to remain in obscurity and quotes from
some of the reviews. In "The Philistine" for October, 1907, Elbert
Hubbard takes a hand in the game. He says, "Edgar Saltus is the best
writer in America--with a few insignificant exceptions," but he
deplores the fact that Saltus knows nothing about the cows and
chickens; only cities and gods seem to interest him. Still there is
some atmosphere in this study, which is devoted to one book, "The
Lords of the Ghostland." In the New York Public Library four of
Saltus's books and one of his translations (about one-sixth of his
published work) are listed. You may also find there in a series of
volumes entitled "Nations of the World" his supplementary chapters
bringing the books up to date. That is all.

All these years, of course, Saltus has had his admiring circle,[1]
people of intelligence, of whom, unfortunately, I cannot say that I
was one. These, who have been content to read and admire without
spreading the news, may well be inclined to regard my performance as
repetitive and impertinent. Of these I must crave indulgence and of
Saltus himself too. For he, knowing how well he has done his work,
must sit like Buddha, ironic and indulgent, smiling on the poor
benighted who have yet to approach his altars. Once, at least, he
spoke: "A book that pleases no one may be poor. The book that pleases
every one is detestable."

I seem to remember to have heard his name all my life, but until
recently I have not read one line concerning or by him. I find that my
friends, many of whom are extensive readers, are in the same sad state
of ignorance. There is an exception and that exception is responsible
for my conversion. For six years, no less, Edna Kenton has been urging
me to read Edgar Saltus. She has been gently insinuating but firm.
None of us can struggle forever against fate or a determined woman. In
the end I capitulated, purchased a book by Edgar Saltus at random, and
read it ... at one sitting. I sought for more. As most of his books
are out of print and as the list in the Public Library conspicuously
omits all but one of his best _opera_ the matter presented
difficulties. However, a little diligent search in the old book shops
accomplished wonders. In less than two weeks I had dug up twenty-two
titles and in less than two weeks I had read twenty-four; since then I
have consumed the other four. There are few writers in American or any
other literature who can survive such a test; there are few writers
who have given me such keen pleasure.

The events of his life, mostly remain shrouded in mystery. His comings
and goings are not reported in the newspapers; he does not make
public speeches; and his name is seldom, if ever, mentioned "among
those present." That he has been married and has one daughter "Who's
Who" proclaims, together with the few biographical details mentioned
below. That is all. May we not herein find some small explanation for
his apparent neglect? Many thousands of lesser men have lifted
themselves to "literary" prominence by blowing their own tubas and
striking their own crotals. Even in the case of a man of such manifest
genius as George Bernard Shaw we may be permitted to doubt if he would
be so well known, had he not taken the trouble to erect monuments to
himself on every possible occasion in every possible location. Fame is
a quaint old-fashioned body, who loves to be pursued. She seldom, if
ever, runs after anybody except in her well-known rôle of necrophile.

Edgar Evertson Saltus was born in New York City June 8, 1858. He is a
lineal descendant of Admiral Kornelis Evertson, the commander of the
Dutch fleet, who captured New York from the English, August 9, 1673.
Francis Saltus, the poet, was his brother. He enjoyed a cosmopolitan
education which may be regarded as an important factor in the
development of his tastes and ideas. From St. Paul's School in Concord
he migrated to the Sorbonne in Paris, and thence to Heidelberg and
Munich, where he bathed in the newer Germanic philosophies. Finally he
took a course of law at Columbia University. The influence of this
somewhat heterogeneous seminary life is manifest in all his future
writing. Beginning, no doubt, as a disciple of Emerson in New England,
he fell under the spell of Balzac in Paris, of Schopenhauer and von
Hartmann in Germany. Pages might be brought forward as evidence that
he had a thorough classical education. His knowledge of languages made
it easy for him to drink deeply at many fountain heads. If Oscar Wilde
found his chief inspiration in Huysmans's "A Rebours," it is certain
that Saltus also quaffed intoxicating draughts at this source. Indeed
in one of his books he refers to Huysmans as his friend. It is further
apparent that he is acquainted with the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly,
Josephin Péladan,[2] Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud,
Catulle Mendès, and Jules Laforgue, especially the Laforgue of the
"Moralités Legendaires." His kinship with these writers is near, but
through this mixed blood run strains inherited from the early pagans,
the mediaeval monks, the Germanic philosophers, and London of the
Eighteen Nineties (although there is not one word about Saltus in
Holbrook Jackson's book of the period), and perhaps, after all, his
nearest literary relative was an American, Edgar Allan Poe, who
bequeathed to him a garret full of strange odds and ends. But Saltus
surpasses Poe in almost every respect save as a poet.

Joseph Hergesheimer has expressed a theory to the effect that great
art is always provincial, never cosmopolitan; that only provincial art
is universal in its appeal. Like every other theory this one is to a
large extent true, but Hergesheimer in his arbitrary summing up, has
forgotten the fantastic. The fantastic in literature, in art of any
kind, can never be provincial. The work of Poe is not provincial; nor
is that of Gustave Moreau, an artist with whom Edgar Saltus can very
readily be compared. If you have visited the Musée Moreau in Paris
where, in the studio of the dead painter, is gathered together the
most complete collection of his works, which lend themselves to
endless inspection, you can, in a sense, reconstruct for yourself an
idea of the works of Edgar Saltus. One finds therein the same
unicorns, the same fabulous monsters, the same virgins on the rocks,
the same exotic and undreamed of flora and fauna, the same mystic
paganism, the same exquisitely jewelled workmanship. One can find
further analogies in the Aubrey Beardsley of "Under the Hill," in the
elaborate stylized irony of Max Beerbohm. Surely not provincials
these, but just as surely artists.

Moreover Saltus's style may be said to possess American
characteristics. It is dashing and rapid, and as clear as the water in
Southern seas. The man has a penchant for short and nervous sentences,
but they are never jerky. They explode like so many firecrackers and
remind one of the great national holiday!... Nevertheless Edgar Saltus
should have been born in France.

His essays, whether they deal with literary criticism, history,
religion (which is almost an obsession with this writer),
devil-worship, or cooking, are pervaded by that rare quality, charm.
Somewhere he quotes a French aphorism:

    _"Etre riche n'est pas l'affaire,
      Toute l'affaire est de charmer,"_

which might be applied to his own work. There is a deep and beneficent
guile in the simplicity of his style, as limpid as a brook, and yet,
as over a brook, in its overtones hover a myriad of sparkling
dragon-flies and butterflies; in its depths lie a plethora of trout.
He deals with the most obstruse and abstract subjects with such ease
and grace, without for one moment laying aside the badge of authority,
that they assume a mysterious fascination to catch the eye of the
passerby. In his fictions he has sometimes cultivated a more hectic
style, but that in itself constitutes one of the bases of its
richness. Scarcely a word but evokes an image, a strange, bizarre
image, often a complication of images. He is never afraid of the
colloquial, never afraid of slang even, and he often weaves lovely
patterns with obsolete or technical words. These lines, in which
Saltus paid tribute to Gautier, he might, with equal justice, have
applied to himself: "No one could torment a fancy more delicately than
he; he had the gift of adjective; he scented a new one afar like a
truffle; and from the Morgue of the dictionary he dragged forgotten
beauties. He dowered the language of his day with every tint of dawn
and every convulsion of sunset; he invented metaphors that were worth
a king's ransom, and figures of speech that deserve the Prix Montyon.
Then reviewing his work, he formulated an axiom which will go down
with a nimbus through time: Whomsoever a thought however complex, a
vision however apocalyptic, surprises without words to convey it, is
not a writer. The inexpressible does not exist." It is impossible to
taste at this man's table. One must eat the whole dinner to appreciate
its opulent inevitability. Still I may offer a few olives, a branch or
two of succulent celery to those who have not as yet been invited to
sit down. One of his ladies walks the Avenue in a gown the "color of
fried smelts." Such figurative phrases as "Her eyes were of that
green-grey which is caught in an icicle held over grass," "The sand is
as fine as face powder, _nuance_ Rachel, packed hard," "Death, it may
be, is not merely a law but a place, perhaps a garage which the
traveller reaches on a demolished motor, but whence none can proceed
until all old scores are paid," "The ocean resembled nothing so much
as an immense blue syrup," "She was a pale freckled girl, with hair
the shade of Bavarian beer," "The sun rose from the ocean like an
indolent girl from her bath," "Night, that queen who reigns only when
she falls, shook out the shroud she wears for gown," are to be found
on every page. Certain phrases sound good to him and are re-used:
"Disappearances are deceptive," "ruedelapaixian" (to describe a
dress), "toilet of the ring" (lifted from the bull-fight in "Mr.
Incoul's Misadventure" to do service in an account of the arena games
under Nero in "Imperial Purple"), but repetition of this kind is
infrequent in his works and seemingly unnecessary. Ideas and phrases,
endless chains of them, spurt from the point of his ardent pen.
Standing on his magic carpet he shakes new sins out of his sleeve as a
conjurer shakes out white rabbits and juggles words with an exquisite
dexterity. He is, indeed, the _jongleur de notre âme_!

From the beginning, his style has attracted the attention of the few
and no one, I am sure, has ever written a three line review of a book
by Saltus without referring to it. Mme. Amélie Rives has quoted Oscar
Wilde as saying to her one night at dinner, "In Edgar Saltus's work
passion struggles with grammar on every page!" Percival Pollard has
dubbed him a "prose paranoiac," and Elbert Hubbard says, "He writes so
well that he grows enamoured of his own style and is subdued like the
dyer's hand; he becomes intoxicated on the lure of lines and the roll
of phrases. He is woozy on words--locoed by syntax and prosody. The
libation he pours is flavoured with euphues. It is all like a cherry
in a morning Martini." A phrase which Remy de Gourmont uses to
describe Villiers de l'Isle Adam might be applied with equal success
to the author of "The Lords of the Ghostland": "_L'idéalisme de
Villiers était un véritable idéalisme verbal, c'est-à-dire qu'il
croyait vraiment à la puissance évocatrice des mots, à leur vertu
magique._" And we may listen to Saltus's own testimony in the matter:
"It may be noted that in literature only three things count, style,
style polished, style repolished; these imagination and the art of
transition aid, but do not enhance. As for style, it may be defined as
the sorcery of syllables, the fall of sentences, the use of the exact
term, the pursuit of a repetition even unto the thirtieth and fortieth
line. Grammar is an adjunct but not an obligation. No grammarian ever
wrote a thing that was fit to read."

At his worst--and his worst can be monstrous!--garbed fantastically in
purple patches and gaudy rags, he wallows in muddy puddles of Burgundy
and gold dust; even then he is unflagging and holds the attention in a
vise. His women have eyes which are purple pools, their hair is bitten
by combs, their lips are scarlet threads. Even the names of his
characters, Roanoke Raritan, Ruis Ixar, Tancred Ennever, Erastus
Varick, Gulian Verplank, Melancthon Orr, Justine Dunnellen, Roland
Mistrial, Giselle Oppensheim, Yoda Jones, Stella Sixmuth, Violet
Silverstairs, Sallie Malakoff, Shane Wyvell, Dugald Maule, Eden
Menemon (it will be observed that he has a persistent, balefully
procacious, perhaps, indeed, Freudian predilection for the letters U,
V, and X),[3] are fantastic and fabulous ... sometimes almost
frivolous. And here we may find our paradox. His sense of humour is
abnormal, sometimes expressed directly by way of epigram or sly
wording but may it not also occasionally express itself indirectly in
these purple towers of painted velvet words, extravagant fables, and
unbelievable characters he is so fond of erecting? Some of his work
almost approaches the burlesque in form. He carries his manner to a
point where he seems to laugh at it himself, and then, with a touch of
poignant realism or a poetic phrase, he confounds the reader's
judgment. The virtuosity of the performance is breath-taking!

He is always the snob (somewhere he defends the snob in an essay):
rich food ("half-mourning" [artichoke hearts and truffles], "filet of
reindeer," a cygnet in its plumage bearing an orchid in its beak,
"heron's eggs whipped with wine into an amber foam," "mashed
grasshoppers baked in saffron"), rich clothes, rich people interest
him. There is no poverty in his books. His creatures do not toil. They
cut coupons off bonds. Sometimes they write or paint, but for the most
part they are free to devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit of
emotional experience, eating, reading, and travelling the while. And
when they have finished dining they wipe their hands, wetted in a
golden bowl, in the curly hair of a tiny serving boy. A character in
"Madam Sapphira" explains this tendency: "A writer, if he happens to
be worth his syndicate, never chooses a subject. The subject chooses
him. He writes what he must, not what he might. That's the thing the
public can't understand."

There is always a preoccupation with ancient life, sometimes freely
expressed as in "Imperial Purple," but more often suggested by plot,
phrase, or scene. He kills more people than Caligula killed during the
whole course of his bloody reign. Murders, suicides, and other forms
of sudden death flash their sensations across his pages. Webster and
the other Elizabethans never steeped themselves so completely in gore.
In almost every book there is an orgy of death and he has been
ingenious in varying its forms. The poisons of rafflesia, muscarine,
and orsere are introduced in his fictions; somewhere he devotes an
essay to toxicology. Daggers with blades like needles, pistols,
drownings, asphyxiations, play their rôles ... and in one book there
is a crucifixion!

Again I find that Mr. Saltus has said his word on the subject: "In
fiction as in history it is the shudder that tells. Hugo could find no
higher compliment for Baudelaire than to announce that the latter had
discovered a new one. For new shudders are as rare as new vices;
antiquity has made them all seem trite. The apt commingling of the
horrible and the trivial, pathos and ferocity, is yet the one secret
of enduring work--a secret, parenthetically, which Hugo knew as no one
else."

His fables depend in most instances upon sexual abberrations, curious
coincidences, fantastic happenings. Rapes and incests decorate his
pages. He does not ask us to believe his monstrous stories; he compels
us to. He carries us by means of the careless expenditure of many
passages of somewhat ribald beauty, along with him, captive to his
pervasive charm. We are constantly reminded, in endless, almost
wearisome, imagery, of gold and purple, foreign languages, esoteric
philosophies, foods the names of which strike the ear as graciously
as they themselves might strike the tongue. From Huysmans he has
learned the formula for ravishing all our senses. Words are often used
for their own sakes to call up images, colour flits across every page,
across, indeed, every line. We taste, we smell, we see. There is the
pomp and circumstance of the Roman Catholic ritual in these pages, the
Roman Catholic ritual well supplied with mythical monsters, singing
flowers, and blooming women. Strange scarlet and mulberry threads form
the woof of these tapestries, threads pulled with great labour from
all the art of the past. There is, in much of his work, an
undercurrent of subtle sensuous erotic poison; in one of her stories
Edna Kenton tells us that _chartreuse jaune_ and bananas form such a
poison. There is a suggestion of _chartreuse jaune_ and bananas in
much of the work of Edgar Saltus.

He is constantly obsessed by the mysteries of love and death, the
veils of Isis, the secrets of Moses. While others were delving in the
American soil his soul sped afar; he is not even a cosmopolitan; he is
a Greek, a Brahmin, a worshipper of Ishtar. There is a prodigious and
prodigal display of genius in his work, savannahs of epigrams, forests
of ideas, phrases enough to fill the ocean.[4] There is enough
material in the romances of Edgar Saltus to furnish all the cinema
companies in America with scenarios for a twelve-month.

Early in the Eighties a writer in "The Argus" referred to him as "the
prose laureate of pessimism." His philosophy may be summed up in a few
phrases: Nothing matters, Whatever will be is, Everything is possible,
and Since we live today let us make the best of it and live in Paris.
And through all the _opera_ of Saltus, through the rapes and murders,
the religious, philosophical, and social discussions, rings
Cherubino's still unanswered question, _Che cosa e amor?_ like a
persistent refrain.

After having said so much it seems unnecessary to add that I strongly
advise the reader to go out and buy all the books of Edgar Saltus he
can find (and to find many will require patience and dexterity, as
most of them are out of print). To further aid him in the matter I
have prepared a short catalogue and with his permission I will guide
him gently through this new land. I have also added a list of
publishers, together with the dates of publication, although I cannot,
in some instances, vouch for their having been the original imprints.
It may be noted that almost all his books have been reprinted in
England.[5]

"Balzac,"[6] signed Edgar Evertson Saltus (for a time he used his full
name) is such good literary criticism and such good personal biography
that one wishes the author had tried the form again. He did not save
in his prefaces to his translations, his essay on Victor Hugo, and his
short study of Oscar Wilde. In its miniature way, for the book is
slight, "Balzac" is as good of its kind as James Huneker's "Chopin,"
Auguste Ehrhard's "Fanny Elssler," and Frank Harris's "Oscar Wilde."
In style it is superior to any of these. It is a very pretty
performance for a début and if it is out of print, as I think it is,
some enterprising publisher should serve it to the public in a new
edition. The two most interesting chapters, largely anecdotal but
continuously illuminating, are entitled "The Vagaries of Genius,"
wherein one may find an infinitude of details concerning the manner
in which Balzac worked, and "The Chase for Gold," but tucked in
somewhere else is a charming digression about realism in fiction and
the bibliography should still be of use to students. Saltus tells us
that Balzac took all his characters' names from life, frequently from
signs which he observed on the street. In this respect Saltus
certainly has not followed him; in another he has been more imitative:
I refer to the Balzacian trick of carrying people from one book to
another.

"The Philosophy of Disenchantment"[7] is an ingratiating account of
the pessimism of Schopenhauer, a philosophy with which it would seem,
Saltus is fully in accord. Two-thirds of the book is allotted to
Schopenhauer, but the remainder is devoted to an exposition of the
teachings of von Hartmann and a final essay, "Is Life an Affliction?"
which query the author seems to answer in the affirmative. One of the
best-known of the Saltus books, "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" is
written in a clear, translucent style without the iridescence which
decorates his later _opera_.

"After-Dinner Stories from Balzac, done into English by Myndart
Verelst (obviously E. S.) with an introduction by Edgar Saltus"[8]
contains four of the Frenchman's tales, "The Red Inn," "Madame
Firmiani," "The 'Grande Bretèche'," and "Madame de Beauséant." The
introduction is written in Saltus's most beguiling manner and may be
referred to as one of the most delightful short essays on Balzac
extant. The dedication is to V. A. B.

"The Anatomy of Negation"[9] is Saltus's best book in his earlier
manner, which is as free from flamboyancy as early Gothic, and one of
his most important contributions to our literature. The work is a
history of antitheism from Kapila to Leconte de Lisle and, while the
writer in a brief prefatory notice disavows all responsibility for the
opinions of others, it can readily be felt that the book is a labour
of love and that his sympathy lies with the iconoclasts through the
centuries. The chapter entitled, "The Convulsions of the Church," a
brief history of Christianity, is one of the most brilliant passages
to be found in any of the works of this very brilliant writer. Indeed,
if you are searching for the soul of Saltus you could not do better
than turn to this chapter. Of Jesus he says, "He was the most
entrancing of nihilists but no innovator." Here is another excerpt:
"Paganism was not dead; it had merely fallen asleep. Isis gave way to
Mary; apotheosis was replaced by canonization; the divinities were
succeeded by saints; and, Africa aiding, the Church surged from
mythology with the Trinity for tiara." Again: "Satan was Jew from horn
to hoof. The registry of his birth is contained in the evolution of
Hebraic thought." Never was any book so full of erudition and ideas so
easy to read, a fascinating _opus_, written by a true sceptic.
Following the Baedeker system, adopted so amusingly by Henry T. Finck
in his "Songs and Song Writers," this book should be triple-starred.

"Tales before Supper, from Théophile Gautier and Prosper Mérimée, told
in English by Myndart Verelst and delayed with a proem by Edgar
Saltus."[10] Translation again. The stories are "Avatar" and "The
Venus of Ille." The essay at the beginning is a very charming
performance. This book is dedicated to E. C. R.

"Mr. Incoul's Misadventure,"[11] Saltus's first novel, is also the
best of his numerous fictions. It, too, should be triple-starred in
any guide book through this _opus_-land. In it will be found,
super-distilled, the very essence of all the best qualities of this
writer. It is written with fine reserve; the story holds; the
characters are unusually well observed, felt, and expressed. Irony
shines through the pages and the final cadence includes a murder and a
suicide. For the former, bromide of potassium and gas are utilized in
combination; for the latter laudanum, taken hypodermically, suffices.
There are scenes in Biarritz and Northern Spain which include a
thrilling picture of a bull-fight. There is an interesting glimpse of
the Paris Opéra. There is a description of an epithumetic library
which embraces many forbidden titles, (How that "baron of moral
endeavour ... the professional hound of heaven," Anthony Comstock,
would have gloated over these shelves!), a vibrant page about Goya,
and another about a Thibetian cat. Many passages could be brought
forward as evidence that Mr. Saltus loves the fire-side sphynx. The
Mr. Incoul of the title gives one a very excellent idea of how inhuman
a just man can be. There is not a single slip in the skilful
delineation of this monster. The beautiful heroine vaguely shambles
into a tapestried background. She is _moyen age_ in her appealing
weakness. The _jeune premier_, Lenox Leigh, is well drawn and
lighted. Time after time the author strikes subtle harmonies which
must have delighted Henry James. Why is this book not dedicated to
author of "The Turn of the Screw" rather than to "E. A. S."? The pages
are permeated with suspense, horror, information, irony, and charm,
about evenly distributed, all of which qualities are expressed in the
astounding title (astounding after you have read the book). There is a
white marriage in this tale, stipulated in the hymeneal bond. In 1877
Tschaikovsky made a similar agreement with the woman he married.

"The Truth About Tristrem Varick"[12] is written with the same
restraint which characterizes the style of "Mr. Incoul's
Misadventure," a restraint seldom to be encountered in Saltus's later
fictions. One of the angles of the plot in which an irate father
attempts to suppress a marriage by suggesting incest, bobs up twice
again in his stories, for the last time nearly thirty years later in
"The Monster." Irony is the keynote of the work, a keynote sounded in
the dedication, "To my master, the philosopher of the unconscious,
Eduard von Hartmann, this attempt in ornamental disenchantment is
dutifully inscribed." The heroine, as frequently happens with Saltus
heroines, is veiled with the mysteries of Isis; we do not see the
workings of her mind and so we can sympathize with Varick, who pursues
her with persistent misunderstanding and arduous devotion through 240
pages. He attributes her aloofness to his father's unfounded charge
against his mother and her father. When he learns that she has borne a
child he suspects rape and, with a needle-like dagger that leaves no
sign, he kills the man he believes to have seduced her. Then he goes
to the lady to receive her thanks, only to learn that she loved the
man he has killed. Varick gives himself into the hands of the police,
confesses, and is delivered to justice, the lady gloating. A
strikingly pessimistic tale, only less good than "Mr. Incoul." There
is superb writing in these pages, many delightful passages. _La
Cenerentola_ and _Lucrezia Borgia_ are mentioned in passing. Saltus
has (or had) an exuberant fondness for Donizetti and Rossini. Here is
a telling bit of art criticism (attributed to a character) descriptive
of the Paris Salon: "There was a Manet or two, a Moreau and a dozen
excellent landscapes, but the rest represented the apotheosis of
mediocrity. The pictures which Gerome, Cabanel, Bouguereau, and the
acolytes of these pastry-cooks exposed were stupid and sterile as
church doors." This required courage in 1888. One wonders where Kenyon
Cox was at the time! Give this book at least two stars.

"Eden"[13] is the third of Saltus's fictions and possibly the poorest
of the three. Eden is the name of the heroine whose further name is
Menemon. Stuyvesant Square is her original habitat but she migrates to
Fifth Avenue. The tide is flowing South again nowadays. Her husband is
almost too good, but nevertheless appearances seem against him until
he explains that the lady with whom he has been seen in a cab is his
daughter by a former marriage, and the young man who seems to have
been making love to Eden is his son. Characteristic of Saltus is the
use of the Spanish word for nightingale. There are no deaths, no
suicides, no murders in these pages: a very eunuch of a book! A motto
from Tasso, "_Perdute e tutto il tempo che in amor non si spende_"
adorns the title page and the work is dedicated to "E----H
Amicissima."

With "The Pace that Kills"[14] Saltus doffs his old coat and dons a
new and gaudier garment. Possibly he owed this change in style to the
influence of the London movement so interestingly described in
Holbrook Jackson's "The Eighteen-Nineties." The book begins with
abortion and ends with a drop over a ferry-boat into the icy East
River. There is an averted strangulation of a baby and for the second
time in a Saltus _opus_ a dying millionaire leaves his fortune to the
St. Nicholas Hospital. Was Saltus ballyhooing for this institution?
The hero is a modern Don Juan. Alphabet Jones appears occasionally, as
he does in many of the other novels. This Balzacian trick obsessed the
author for a time. The book is dedicated to John S. Rutherford and
bears as a motto on its title page this quotation from Rabusson:
"_Pourquoi la mort? Dites, plutôt, pourquoi la vie?_"

In "A Transaction in Hearts"[15] the Reverend Christopher Gonfallon
falls in love with his wife's sister, Claire. A New England countess,
a subsidiary figure, suggests d'Aurevilly. This story originally
appeared in "Lippincott's Magazine" and the editor who accepted it was
dismissed. A year or so later a new editor published "The Picture of
Dorian Gray." Still later Saltus tells me he met Oscar Wilde in London
and the Irish poet asked him for news of the new editor. "He's quite
well," answered Saltus. Wilde did not seem to be pleased: "When your
story appeared the editor was removed; when mine appeared I supposed
he would be hanged. Now you tell me he is quite well. It is most
disheartening." Saltus then asked Wilde why Dorian Gray was cut by his
friends. Wilde turned it over. "I fancy they saw him eating fish with
his knife."

"A Transient Guest and other Episodes"[16] contains three short tales
besides the title story: "The Grand Duke's Riches," an account of an
ingenious robbery at the Brevoort, "A Maid of Athens," and "Fausta," a
story of love, revenge, and death in Cuba. If the final cadence of the
book is a dagger thrust the prelude is a subtle poison, rafflesia, a
Sumatran plant, intended for the hero, Tancred Ennever, but consumed
with fatal results by his faithful fox terrier, Zut Alors. The story
is arresting and, as frequently happens in Saltus romances, a man
finds himself no match for a woman. "A Transient Guest" is dedicated
to K. J. M.

The slender volume entitled "Love and Lore"[17] contains a short
series of slight essays, interrupted by slighter sonnets, on subjects
which, for the most part, Saltus has treated at greater length and
with greater effect elsewhere. He makes a whimsical plea for a modern
revival of the Court of Love and in "Morality in Fiction" he derides
that Puritanism in American letters whose dark scourge H. L. Mencken
still pursues with a cat-o'-nine-tails and a hand grenade. He gives us
a fanciful set of rules for a novelist which, happily, he has ignored
in his own fictions. The most interesting, personal, and charming
chapter, although palpably derived from "The Philosophy of
Disenchantment," is that entitled "What Pessimism Is Not"; here again
we are in the heart of the author's philosophy. Those who like to read
books about the Iberian Peninsula can scarcely afford to miss
"Fabulous Andalucia," in which an able brief for the race of Othello
is presented: "Under the Moors, Cordova surpassed Baghdad. They wrote
more poetry than all the other nations put together. It was they who
invented rhyme; they wrote everything in it, contracts, challenges,
treaties, treatises, diplomatic notes and messages of love. From the
earliest khalyf down to Boabdil, the courts of Granada, of Cordova and
of Seville were peopled with poets, or, as they were termed, with
makers of Ghazels. It was they who gave us the dulcimer, the hautbois
and the guitar; it was they who invented the serenade. We are
indebted to them for algebra and for the canons of chivalry as
well.... It was from them that came the first threads of light which
preceded the Renaissance. Throughout mediaeval Europe they were the
only people that thought." The book is dedicated to Edgar Fawcett,
"perfect poet--perfect friend" and is embellished with a portrait of
its author.

"The Story Without a Name"[18] is a translation of "Une Histoire Sans
Nom" of Barbey d'Aurevilly, and is preceded by one of Saltus's
charming and atmospheric literary essays, the best on d'Aurevilly to
be found in English. When this book first appeared, Mr. Saltus informs
me, a reviewer, "who contrived to be both amusing and complimentary,"
said that Barbey d'Aurevilly was a fictitious person and that this
vile story was Saltus's own vile work!

"Mary Magdalen,"[19] on the whole disappointing, is nevertheless one
of the important Saltus _opera_. The opening chapters, like Oscar
Wilde's _Salome_ (published two years later than "Mary Magdalen") owe
much to Flaubert's "Hérodias." The dance on the hands is a detail
from Flaubert, a detail which Tissot followed in his painting of
Salome.... From the later chapters it is possible that Paul Heyse
filched an idea. The turning point of his drama, _Maria von Magdala_,
hinges on Judas's love for Mary and his jealousy of Jesus. Saltus
develops exactly this situation. Heyse's play appeared in 1899, eight
years after Saltus's novel. However, Saltus has protested to me that
it is an idea that might have occurred to any one. "I put it in," he
added, "to make the action more nervous." The book begins well with a
description of Herod's court and Rome in Judea, but as a whole it is
unsatisfactory. Once the plot develops Saltus seems to lose interest.
He lazily quotes whole scenes from the Bible (George Moore very
cleverly avoided this pitfall in "The Brook Kerith"). The early
chapters suggest "Imperial Purple," which appeared a year later and
upon which he may well have been at work at this time. There is a
foreshadowing, too, of "The Lords of the Ghostland" in a very amusing
and slightly cynical passage in which Mary as a child listens to
Sephorah the sorceress tell legends and myths of Assyria and Egypt.
Mary interrupts with "Why you mean Moses! You mean Noah!" just as a
child of today, if confronted with the situations in the Greek dramas
would attribute them to Bayard Veiller or Eugene Walter. Saltus is too
much of a scholar to find much novelty in Christianity. But aside from
this passage cynicism is lacking from this book, a quality which makes
another story on the same theme, "Le Procurateur de Judée," one of the
greatest short stories in any language. Mary's sins are quickly passed
over and we come almost immediately to her conversion. Herod Antipas,
with his "fan-shaped beard" and vacillating Pilate, quite comparable
to a modern politician, are the most human and best-realized
characters in a book which should have been greater than it is. "Mary
Magdalen" is dedicated to Henry James.

"The facts in the Curious Case of H. Hyrtl, esq."[20] is a slight yarn
in the mellow Stevenson manner, with a kindly old gentleman as the
messenger of the supernatural who provides the wherewithal for a
marriage between an impoverished artist, who is painting
Heliogabolus's feast of roses, and his sweet young thing. Quite a
departure this from the usual Saltus manner; nevertheless there are
two deaths, one by shock, the other in a railway accident. The plot
depends on as many impossible entrances and exits as a Palais Royal
farce and the reader is asked to believe in many coincidences. The
book is dedicated to Lorillard Ronalds who, the author explains in a
few French phrases, asked him to write something "_de très pure et de
très chaste, pour une jeunesse, sans doute_." He adds that the story
is a rewriting of a tale which had appeared twenty years earlier.

"Imperial Purple"[21] marks the high-tide of Saltus's peculiar genius.
The emperors of imperial decadent Rome are led by the chains of art
behind the chariot wheels of the poet: Julius Cæsar, whom Cato called
"that woman," Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, the wicked Agrippina, for
whom Agnes Repplier named her cat, Claudius, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian,
down to the incredible Heliogabolus. Saltus, who has given us many
vivid details concerning the lives of his predecessors, seemingly
falters at this dread name, but only seemingly. More can be found
about this extraordinary and perverse emperor in Lombard's "L'Agonie"
and in Franz Blei's "The Powder Puff," but, although Saltus is brief,
he evokes an atmosphere and a picture in a few short paragraphs. The
sheer lyric quality of this book has remained unsurpassed by this
author. Indeed it is rare in all literature. Page after page that
Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, or J. K. Huysmans might have been glad to
sign might be set before you. The man writes with invention, with sap,
with urge. Our eyes are not clogged with foot-notes and references. It
is plain that our author has delved in the "Scriptores Historiæ
Augustæ," that he has read Lampridius, Suetonius, and the others, but
he does not strive to make us aware of it. The historical form has at
last found a poet to render it supportable. Blood runs across the
pages; gore and booty are the principal themes; and yet Beauty struts
supreme through the horror. The author's sympathy is his password, a
sympathy which he occasionally exposes, for he is not above pinning
his heart to his sleeve, as, for example, when he says, "In spite of
Augustus's boast, the city was not by any means of marble. It was
filled with crooked little streets, with the atrocities of the
Tarquins, with houses unsightly and perilous, with the moss and dust
of ages; it compared with Alexandria as London compares with Paris; it
had a splendour of its own, but a splendour that could be heightened."
Here is a picture of squalid Rome: "In the subura, where at night
women sat in high chairs, ogling the passer with painted eyes, there
was still plenty of brick; tall tenements, soiled linen, the odor of
Whitechapel and St. Giles. The streets were noisy with match-pedlars,
with vendors of cake and tripe and coke; there were touts there too,
altars to unimportant divinities, lying Jews who dealt in old clothes,
in obscene pictures and unmentionable wares; at the crossings there
were thimbleriggers, clowns and jugglers, who made glass balls appear
and disappear surprisingly; there were doorways decorated with curious
invitations, gossipy barber shops, where, through the liberality of
politicians, the scum of a great city was shaved, curled and painted
free; and there were public houses, where vagabond slaves and sexless
priests drank the mulled wine of Crete, supped on the flesh of beasts
slaughtered in the arena, or watched the Syrian women twist to the
click of castanets." The account of the arena under Nero should not be
missed, but it is too long to quote here. The book, which we give
three stars, is dedicated to Edwin Albert Schroeder. Fortunately, of
all Saltus's works, it is the most readily procurable.

"Imperial Purple" has had a curious history. Belford, Clarke and Co.,
who hid their identity behind the "Morrill, Higgins" imprint, failed
shortly after they had issued the book. "Presently," Mr. Saltus writes
me, "a Chicago bibliofilou brought it out as the work of some one else
and called it 'The Sins of Nero.'" Meanwhile Greening published it in
London and finally Mitchell Kennerley reprinted it in New York. In
1911 Macmillan in London brought out "The Amazing Emperor
Heliogabolus" by the Reverend John Stuart Hay of Oxford. In the
preface to this book I found the following: "I have also the
permission of Mr. E. E. Saltus of Harvard University (_sic_) to quote
his vivid and beautiful studies on the Roman Empire and her customs. I
am also deeply indebted to Mr. Walter Pater, Mr. J. A. Symonds, and
Mr. Saltus for many a _tournure de phrase_ and picturesque rendering
of Tacitus, Suetonious, Lampridius, and the rest." The Reverend Doctor
certainly helped himself to "Imperial Purple." Words, sentences, nay
whole paragraphs appear without the formality of quotation marks,
without any indication, indeed, save these lines in the preface, that
they are not part of the Doctor's own imagination, unless one compares
them with the style in which the rest of the book is written. "In one
instance," Mr. Saltus writes me, "he gave a paragraph of mine as his
own. Later on he added, 'as we have already said' and repeated the
paragraph. The plural struck me as singular."

"Madam Sapphira"[22] is a vivid study in unchastened womanhood. We see
but little of the lady in the 251 pages of this "Fifth Avenue Story";
her character is exposed to us through the experiences of her poor
fool husband, who colloquially would be called a simp, by denizens of
the Low World a boob. He redeems himself to some extent by sending
Madam Sapphira a belated bouquet of cyanide of potassium. On the
whole, though characters and phrases in his work might be brought
forward to prove the contrary, Mr. Saltus obviously has a low opinion
of women and thinks that men do better without them. The greater part
of the time he appears to agree with Posthumus:

    "Could I find out
    The woman's part in me! For there's no motion
    That tends to vice in man but I affirm
    It is the woman's part; be it lying, note it
    The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
    Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
    Ambitions, covetings, changes of prides, disdain,
    Nice longings, slanders, mutability,
    All faults that may be named, nay that hell knows,
    Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all;
    For even to vice
    They are not constant, but are changing still
    One vice of a minute old for one
    Not half so old as that. I'll write against them,
    Detest them, curse them.--Yet 'tis greater skill
    In a true hate, to pray they have their will:
    The very devils cannot plague them better."

"Enthralled, a story of international life setting forth the curious
circumstances concerning Lord Cloden and Oswald Quain":[23] a mad
_opus_ this, an insane phantasmagoria of crime, avarice, and murder.
For the second time in this author's novels incest plays a rôle. This
time it is real. Quain is indeed the half-brother of the lady who
desires to marry him. He is as vile and virulent a villain as any who
stalks through the pages of Ann Ker, Eliza Bromley, or Mrs. Radcliffe.
A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde motive is sounded. An ugly man comes back
from London a handsome fellow after visits to a certain doctor who
rearranges the lines of his face. The transformation is effected every
day now (some of our prominent actresses are said to have benefited
by this operation), but in 1894 the mechanism of the trick must have
been appallingly creaky. This story, indeed, borders on the burlesque
and has almost as much claim to the title as "The Green Carnation."
Was the author laughing at the Eighteen Nineties? The period is subtly
evoked in one detail, constantly reiterated in Saltus's early books:
ladies and gentlemen when they leave a room "push aside the
portieres." Sometimes the "rings jingle." He has in most instances
mercifully spared us further descriptions of the interiors of New York
houses at this epoch.... At a dinner party one of the guests refers to
Howells as the "foremost novelist who is never read." The book is
dedicated to "Cherubina, _dulcissime rerum_." Saltus returned to the
central theme of "Enthralled" in a story called "The Impostor,"
printed in "Ainslee's" for May, 1917.

"When Dreams Come True"[24] again brings us in touch with Tancred
Ennever, the stupid hero of "The Transient Guest." In the meantime he
has become an almost intolerable prig. It is probable that Saltus
meant more by this fable than he has let appear. The roar of the waves
on the coast of Lesbos is distinctly audible for a time and the
dénoûment seems to belong to quite another story.... Ennever has
turned author. We are informed that he has completed studies on
Huysmans and Leconte de Lisle; he is also engaged on a "Historia
Amoris." There is an interesting passage relating to the names of
great writers. Alphabet Jones assures us that they are always "in two
syllables with the accent on the first. Oyez: Homer, Sappho, Horace,
Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Shakespeare, Hugo, Swinburne ... Balzac,
Flaubert, Huysmans, Michelet, Renan." The reader is permitted to add
... "Saltus"!

"Purple and Fine Women"[25] is a misnamed book. It should be called
"Philosophic Fables." The first two stories are French in form. Paul
Bourget himself is the hero of one of them! In "The Princess of the
Sun" we are offered a new and fantastic version of the Coppelia story.
"The Dear Departed" finds Saltus in a murderous amorous mood again. In
"The Princess of the Golden Isles" a new poison is introduced,
muscarine. Alchemy furnishes the theme for one tale; the protagonist
seeks an alcahest, a human victim for his crucible. We are left in
doubt as to whether he chooses his wife, who wears a diamond set in
one of her teeth, or a gorilla. There are dramas of dual personality
and of death. Metaphysics and spiritualism rise dimly out of the charm
of this book. There is a duchess who mews like a cat and somewhere we
are assured that _Perche non posso odiarte_ from _La Sonnnambula_ is
the most beautiful aria in the Italian repertory. Here is a true and
soul-revealing epigram: "The best way to master a subject of which you
are ignorant is to write it up." Certainly not Saltus at his best,
this _opus_, but far from his worst.

"The Perfume of Eros"[26] is frenzied fiction again; amnesia,
drunkenness, white slavery, sex, are its mingled themes. There is a
pretty picture, recognizable in any smart community, of a witty woman
of fashion, and a full-length portrait of a bounder. "The Yellow Fay,"
Saltus's _cliché_ for the Demon Rum, was the original title of this
"Fifth Avenue Incident." Romance and Realism consort lovingly together
in its pages. There is an unforgetable passage descriptive of a young
man ridding himself of his mistress. He interrupts his flow of
explanation to hand her a card case, which she promptly throws out of
the window.

"'That is an agreeable way of getting rid of twelve thousand dollars,'
he remarked.

"Yet, however lightly he affected to speak, the action annoyed him.
Like all men of large means he was close. It seemed to him beastly to
lose such a sum. He got up, went to the window and looked down. He
could not see the case and he much wanted to go and look for it. But
that for the moment Marie prevented."

"The Pomps of Satan"[27] is replete with grace and graciousness, and
full of charm, a quality more valuable to its possessor than
juvenility, our author tells us in a chapter concerning the lost
elixir of youth. Neither form nor matter assume ponderous shape in
this volume, which in the quality of its contents reminds one faintly
of Franz Blei's lady's breviary, "The Powder Puff," but Saltus's book
is the more ingratiating of the two. Satan's pomps are varied; the
author exposes his whims, his ideas, images the past, forecasts the
future, deplores the present. There is a chapter on cooking and we
learn that Saltus does not care for food prepared in the German style
... nor yet in the American. He forbids us champagne: "Champagne is
not a wine. It is a beverage, lighter indeed than brandy and soda,
but, like cologne, fit only for demi-reps." But he seems untrue to
himself in an essay condemning the use of perfumes. His own books are
heavily scented. With the rare prescience and clairvoyance of an
artist he includes the German Kaiser in a chapter on hyenas (in
1906!); therein stalk the blood-stained shadows of Caligula,
Caracalla, Atilla, Tamerlane, Cesare Borgia, Philip II, and Ivan the
Terrible. The paragraph is worth quoting: "Power consists in having a
million bayonets behind you. Its diffusion is not general. But there
are people who possess it. For one, the German Kaiser. Not long since
somebody or other diagnosed in him the habitual criminal. We doubt
that he is that. But we suspect that, were it not for the press, he
would show more of primitive man than he has thus far thought
judicious." Has Mme. de Thèbes done better? Saltus also foresaw
Gertrude Stein. Peering into the future he wrote: "When that day comes
the models of literary excellence will not be the long and windy
sentences of accredited bores, but ample brevities, such as the 'N' on
Napoleon's tomb, in which, in less than a syllable, an epoch, and the
glory of it, is resumed." Saltus forsakes his previous choice from
Bellini and installs _Tu che a Dio_ as his favourite Italian opera
air. Here is another flash of self-revealment: "Byzance is rumoured
to have been the sewer of every sin, yet such was its beauty that it
is the canker of our heart we could not have lived there." Always this
turning to the far past, this delving in rosetta stones and
palimpsests, this preoccupation with the sights and sins of the
ancient gods and kings. A chapter on poisons, another on Gille de
Retz, which probably owes something to "La Bas," betray this
preference. He playfully suggests that the Academy of Arts and Letters
be filled up with young nobodies: "They have, indeed, done nothing
yet. But therein is their charm. An academy composed of young people
who have done nothing yet would be more alluring than one made up of
fossils who are unable to do anything more." Herein are contained
enough aphorisms and epigrams to make up a new book of Solomonic
wisdom. Hardly as evenly inspired as "Imperial Purple," "The Pomps of
Satan" is more dashing and more varied. It is also more tired.

"Vanity Square"[28] in Stella Sixmuth boasts such a "vampire" as even
Theda Bara is seldom called upon to portray. Not until the final
chapters of this mystery story do we discover that this lady has been
poisoning a rich man's wife, with an eye on the rich man's heart and
hand. Oraere is this slow and subtle poison which leaves no subsequent
trace. She is thwarted but in a subsequent attempt she is successful.
Robert Hichens has used this theme in "Bella Donna." There is a
suicide by pistol. An exciting story but little else, this book
contains fewer references to the gods and the cæsars than is usual
with Saltus. To compensate there are long discussions about phobias,
dual personalities (a girl with six is described) and theories about
future existence. Vanity Square, we are told, is bounded by Central
Park, Madison Avenue, Seventy-second Street and the Plaza.

It will be remembered that Tancred Ennever was at work on "Historia
Amoris"[29] in 1895, which would seem to indicate that Saltus had
begun to collect material for it himself at that time. The title is a
literal description of the contents of the book: it is a history of
love. Such a work might have been made purely anecdotal or scientific,
but Saltus's purpose has been at once more serious and more graceful,
to show how the love currents flowed through the centuries, to show
what effect period life had on love and what effect love had on period
life. Beginning with Babylon and passing on through the "Song of
Songs" we meet Helen of Troy, Scheherazade (though but briefly),
Sappho (to whom an entire chapter is devoted), Cleopatra (whom Heine
called "_cette reine entretenue_"), Mary Magdalen, Héloïse.... The
Courts of Love are described and deductions are drawn as to the effect
of the Renaissance on the Gay Science. "Historia Amoris" is concluded
by a Schopenhauerian essay on "The Law of Attraction." Cicisbeism is
not treated in extenso, as it should be, and I also missed the
fragrant name of Sophie Arnould. Readers of "Love and Lore," "The
Pomps of Satan," "Imperial Purple," and "The Lords of the Ghostland"
will find much of their material adjusted to the purposes of this
History of Love, which, nevertheless, no one interested in Saltus can
afford to miss.

In "The Lords of the Ghostland, a history of the ideal,"[30] Saltus
returns to the theme of "The Anatomy of Negation." The newer work is
both more cynical and more charming. It is, of course, a history and a
comparison of religions. With Reinach Saltus believes that
Christianity owes much to its ancestors. Brahma, Ormuzd, Amon-Râ,
Bel-Marduk, Jehovah, Zeus, Jupiter, and many lesser deities parade
before us in defile. Prejudice, intolerance, tolerance even are
lacking from this book, as they were from "Imperial Purple." "The
Lords of the Ghostland" is neither reverent nor irreverent, it is
unreverent. Mr. Saltus finds joy in writing about the gods, the joy of
a poet, and if his chiefest pleasure is to extol the gods of Greece
that is only what might be expected of this truly pagan spirit.
Students of comparative theology can learn much from these pages, but
they will learn it unwittingly, for the poet supersedes the teacher.
Saltus is never professorial. The scientific spirit is never to the
fore; no marshalling of dull facts for their own sakes. Nevertheless I
suspect that the book contains more absorbing information than any
similar volume on the subject. With a fascinating and guileful style
this divine devil of an author leads us on to the spot where he can
point out to us that the only original feature of Christianity is the
crucifixion, and even that is foreshadowed in Hindoo legend, in which
Krishna dies, nailed by arrows to a tree. This book should be required
reading for the first class in isogogies.

Most of the scenes of "Daughters of the Rich"[31] are laid in Paris.
The plot hinges on mistaken identity and the whole is a very
ingenious detective story. The book begins rather than ends with a
murder, but that is because the tale is told backward. Through lies,
deceit, and treachery the woman in the case, one Sallie Malakoff,
betrays the hero into marriage with her. When he discovers her perfidy
he cheerfully cuts her throat from ear to ear and goes to join the
lady from whom he has been estranged. She receives him with open arms
and suggests wedding bells. No woman, she asserts, could resist a man
who has killed another woman for her sake. This is decidedly a Roman
point of view! Some of the action takes place in a house on the Avenue
Malakoff, which must have been near the _hôtel_ of the Princesse de
Sagan and the apartment occupied by Miss Mary Garden.... A fat
manufacturer's wife confronts the proposal of a mercenary duke with an
epic rejoinder: "Pay a man a million dollars to sleep with my
daughter! Never!"... Again Saltus demonstrates how completely he is
master of the story-telling gift, how surely he possesses the power to
compel breathless attention.

"The Monster"[32] is fiction, incredible, insane fiction. The monster
is incest, in this instance _inceste manqué_ because it doesn't come
off. On the eve of a runaway marriage Leilah Ogsten is informed by
her father that her intended husband is her own brother (he inculpates
her mother in the scandal). Leilah disappears and to put barriers
between her and the man she loves becomes the bride of another.
Verplank pursues. There are two fabulous duels and a scene in which
our hero is mangled by dogs. The stage (for we are always in some
extravagant theatre) is frequently set in Paris and the familiar
scenes of the capital are in turn exposed to our view. It is all mad,
full of purple patches and crimson splotches and yet, once opened, it
is impossible to lay the book down until it is completed. From this
novel Mr. Saltus fashioned his only play, _The Gates of Life_, which
he sent to Charles Frohman and which Mr. Frohman returned. The piece
has neither been produced nor published.

Last year (1917) the Brothers of the Book in Chicago published
privately an extremely limited edition (474 copies) of a book by Edgar
Saltus entitled, "Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression," which contains
only twenty-six pages, but those twenty-six pages are very beautiful.
They evoke a spirit from the dead. Indeed, I doubt if even Saltus has
done better than his description of a strange occurrence in a Regent
Street Restaurant on a certain night when he was supping with Wilde
and Wilde was reading _Salome_ to him: "apropos of nothing, or rather
with what to me at the time was curious irrelevance, Oscar, while
tossing off glass after glass of liquor, spoke of Phémé, a goddess
rare even in mythology, who after appearing twice in Homer, flashed
through a verse of Hesiod and vanished behind a page of Herodotus. In
telling of her, suddenly his eyes lifted, his mouth contracted, a
spasm of pain--or was it dread?--had gripped him. A moment only. His
face relaxed. It had gone.

"I have since wondered, could he have evoked the goddess then? For
Phémé typified what modern occultism terms the impact--the premonition
that surges and warns. It was Wilde's fate to die three times--to die
in the dock, to die in prison, to die all along the boulevards of
Paris. Often since I have wondered could the goddess have been
lifting, however slightly, some fringe of the crimson curtain, behind
which, in all its horror, his destiny crouched. If so, he braved it.

"I had looked away. I looked again. Before me was a fat pauper, florid
and over-dressed, who, in the voice of an immortal, was reading the
fantasies of the damned. In his hand was a manuscript, and we were
supping on _Salome_."

Edgar Saltus began with Balzac in 1884 and he has reached Oscar Wilde
in 1917. His other literary essays, on Gautier and Mérimée in "Tales
Before Supper," on Barbey d'Aurevilly in "The Story Without a Name,"
and on Victor Hugo in "The Forum" (June, 1912,) all display the finest
qualities of his genius. Pervaded with his rare charm they are
clairvoyant and illuminating, more than that arresting. They should be
brought together in one volume, especially as they are at present
absolutely inaccessible, terrifyingly so, every one of them. And if
they are to be thus collected may we not hope for one or two new
essays with, say, for subjects, Flaubert and Huysmans?

It is, you may perceive, as an essayist, a historian, an amateur
philosopher that Saltus excels, but his fiction should not be
underrated on that account. His novels indeed are half essays, just as
his essays are half novels. Even the worst of them contains charming
pages, delightful and unexpected interruptions. His series of fables
suggests a vast _Comédie Inhumaine_ but this statement must not be
regarded as dispraise: it is merely description. You will find
something of the same quality in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but
Saltus has more grace and charm than Poe, if less intensity. After one
dip into realism ("Mr. Incoul's Misadventure") Saltus became an
incorrigible romantic. All his characters are the inventions of an
errant fancy; scarcely one of them suggests a human being, but they
are none the less creations of art. This, perhaps, was a daring
procedure in an era devoted to the exploitation in fiction of the
facts of hearth and home.... After all, however, his way may be the
better way. Personally I may say that my passion for realism is on the
wane.

In these strange tales we pass through the familiar haunts of
metropolitan life, but the creatures are amazingly unfamiliar. They
have horns and hoofs, halos and wings, or fins and tails. An esoteric
band of fabulous monsters these: harpies and vampires take tea at
Sherry's; succubi and incubbi are observed buying opal rings at
Tiffany's; fairies, angels, dwarfs, and elves, bearing branches of
asphodel, trip lightly down Waverly Place; peris, amshaspahands, æsir,
izeds, and goblins sleep at the Brevoort; seraphim and cherubim
decorate drawing rooms on Irving Place; griffons, chimeras, and
sphynxes take courses in philosophy at Harvard; willis and sylphs sing
airs from _Lucia di Lammermoor_ and _Le Nozze di Figaro_; naiads and
mermaids embark on the Cunard Line; centaurs and amazons drive in the
Florentine Cascine; kobolds, gnomes, and trolls stab, shoot, and
poison one another; and a satyr meets the martichoras in Gramercy
Park. No such pictures of monstrous, diverting, sensuous existence can
be found elsewhere save in the paintings of Arnold Böcklin, Franz von
Stuck, and above all those of Gustave Moreau. If he had done nothing
else Edgar Saltus should be famous for having given New York a
mythology of its own!

  _January 12, 1918._




The New Art of the Singer

     "_It's the law of life that nothing new can come into the
     world without pain._"

                        Karen Borneman.




The New Art of the Singer


The art of vocalization is retarding the progress of the modern music
drama. That is the simple fact although, doubtless, you are as
accustomed as I am to hearing it expressed _à rebours_. How many times
have we read that the art of singing is in its decadence, that soon
there would not be one artist left fitted to deliver vocal music in
public. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe wrote something of the sort in 1825
for he found the great Catalani but a sorry travesty of his early
favourites, Pacchierotti and Banti. I protest against this
misconception. Any one who asserts that there are laws which govern
singing, physical, scientific laws, must pay court to other ears than
mine. I have heard this same man for twenty years shouting in the
market place that a piece without action was not a play (usually the
drama he referred to had more real action than that which decorates
the progress of _Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model_), that a
composition without melody (meaning something by Richard Wagner,
Robert Franz, or even Edvard Grieg) was not music, that verse without
rhyme was not poetry. This same type of brilliant mind will go on to
aver (forgetting the Scot) that men who wear skirts are not men,
(forgetting the Spaniards) that women who smoke cigars are not women,
and to settle numberless other matters in so silly a manner that a ten
year old, half-witted school boy, after three minutes light thinking,
could be depended upon to do better.

The rules for the art of singing, laid down in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, have become obsolete. How could it be otherwise?
They were contrived to fit a certain style of composition. We have but
the briefest knowledge, indeed, of how people sang before 1700,
although records exist praising the performances of Archilei and
others. If a different standard for the criticism of vocalization
existed before 1600 there is no reason why there should not after
1917. As a matter of fact, maugre much authoritative opinion to the
contrary, a different standard does exist. In certain respects the new
standard is taken for granted. We do not, for example, expect to hear
male sopranos at the opera. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe admired this
artificial form of voice almost to the exclusion of all others. His
favourite singer, indeed, Pacchierotti, was a male soprano. But other
breaks have been made with tradition, breaks which are not yet taken
for granted. When you find that all but one or two of the singers in
every opera house in the world are ignoring the rules in some respect
or other you may be certain, in spite of the protests of the
professors, that the rules are dead. Their excuse has disappeared and
they remain only as silly commandments made to fit an old religion. A
singer in Handel's day was accustomed to stand in one spot on the
stage and sing; nothing else was required of him. He was not asked to
walk about or to act; even expression in his singing was limited to
pathos. The singers of this period, Nicolini, Senesino, Cuzzoni,
Faustina, Caffarelli, Farinelli, Carestini, Gizziello, and
Pacchierotti, devoted their study years to preparing their voices for
the display of a certain definite kind of florid music. They had
nothing else to learn. As a consequence they were expected to be
particularly efficient. Porpora, Caffarelli's teacher, is said to have
spent six years on his pupil before he sent him forth to be "the
greatest singer in the world." Contemporary critics appear to have
been highly pleased with the result but there is some excuse for H. T.
Finck's impatience, expressed in "Songs and Song Writers": "The
favourites of the eighteenth-century Italian audiences were artificial
male sopranos, like Farinelli, who was frantically applauded for such
circus tricks as beating a trumpeter in holding on to a note, or
racing with an orchestra and getting ahead of it; or Caffarelli, who
entertained his audiences by singing, _in one breath_, a chromatic
chain of trills up and down two octaves. Caffarelli was a pupil of the
famous vocal teacher Porpora, who wrote operas consisting chiefly of
monotonous successions of florid arias resembling the music that is
now written for flutes and violins." All very well for the day, no
doubt, but could Cuzzoni sing Isolde? Could Faustina sing Mélisande?
And what modern parts would be allotted to the Julian Eltinges of the
Eighteenth Century?

When composers began to set dramatic texts to music trouble
immediately appeared at the door. For example, the contemporaries of
Sophie Arnould, the "creator" of _Iphigénie en Aulide_, are agreed
that she was greater as an actress than she was as a singer. David
Garrick, indeed, pronounced her a finer actress than Clairon. From
that day to this there has been a continual triangular conflict
between critic, composer, and singer, which up to date, it must be
admitted, has been won by the academic pundits, for, although the
singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the
critical knout, thereby holding the lyric drama more or less in the
state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every
composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to
the laws of _bel canto_ and enough singers exist, unfortunately, to
justify this assertion) save that the music is not so well sung,
according to the old standards, as it was then. No singer has had
quite the courage to entirely defy tradition, to refuse to study with
a teacher, to embody her own natural ideas in the performance of
music, to found a new school ... but there have been many rebells.

The operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, as a whole, do
not demand great histrionic exertion from their interpreters and for a
time singers trained in the old Handelian tradition met every
requirement of these composers and their audiences. If more action was
demanded than in Handel's day the newer music, in compensation, was
easier to sing. But even early in the Nineteenth Century we observe
that those artists who strove to be actors as well as singers lost
something in vocal facility (really they were pushing on to the new
technique). I need only speak of Ronconi and Mme. Pasta. The lady was
admittedly the greatest lyric artist of her day although it is
recorded that her slips from true intonation were frequent. When she
could no longer command a steady tone the _beaux restes_ of her art
and her authoritative style caused Pauline Viardot, who was hearing
her then for the first time, to burst into tears. Ronconi's voice,
according to Chorley, barely exceeded an octave; it was weak and
habitually out of tune. This baritone was not gifted with vocal
agility and he was monotonous in his use of ornament. Nevertheless
this same Chorley admits that Ronconi afforded him more pleasure in
the theatre than almost any other singer he ever heard! If this critic
did not rise to the occasion here and point the way to the future in
another place he had a faint glimmering of the coming revolution:
"There might, there _should_ be yet, a new _Medea_ as an opera.
Nothing can be grander, more antique, more Greek, than Cherubini's
setting of the 'grand fiendish part' (to quote the words of Mrs.
Siddons on Lady Macbeth). But, as music, it becomes simply impossible
to be executed, so frightful is the strain on the energies of her who
is to present the heroine. Compared with this character, Beethoven's
Leonora, Weber's Euryanthe, are only so much child's play." This is
topsy-turvy reasoning, of course, but at the same time it is
suggestive.

The modern orchestra dug a deeper breach between the two schools.
Wagner called upon the singer to express powerful emotion, passionate
feeling, over a great body of sound, nay, in many instances, _against_
a great body of sound. (It is significant that Wagner himself admitted
that it was a singer [Madame Schroeder-Devrient] who revealed to him
the possibilities of dramatic singing. He boasted that he was the only
one to learn the lesson. "She was the first artist," writes H. T.
Finck, "who fully revealed the fact that in a dramatic opera there may
be situations where _characteristic_ singing is of more importance
than _beautiful_ singing.") It is small occasion for wonder that
singers began to bark. Indeed they nearly expired under the strain of
trying successfully to mingle Porpora and passion. According to W. F.
Apthorp, Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional
intensity of music and situations, the constant co-operation of the
surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of the
reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go
stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like
Tristan or Siegfried.... The critics, however, were inexorable; they
stood by their guns. There was but one way to sing the new music and
that was the way of Bernacchi and Pistocchi. In time, by dint of
persevering, talking night and day, writing day and night, they
convinced the singer. The music drama developed but the singer was
held in his place. Some artists, great geniuses, of course, made the
compromise successfully.... Jean de Reszke, for example, and Lilli
Lehmann, who said to H. E. Krehbiel ("Chapters of Opera"): "It is
easier to sing all three Brünnhildes than one Norma. You are so
carried away by the dramatic emotion, the action, and the scene, that
you do not have to think how to sing the words. That comes of itself"
... but they made the further progress of the composer more difficult
thereby; music remained merely pretty. The successors of these supple
singers even learned to sing Richard Strauss with broad cantilena
effects. As for Puccini! At a performance of _Madama Butterfly_ a
Japanese once asked why the singers were producing those nice round
tones in moments of passion; why not ugly sounds?

Will any composer arise with the courage to write an opera which
_cannot_ be sung? Stravinsky almost did this in _The Nightingale_ but
the break must be more complete. Think of the range of sounds made by
the Japanese, the gipsy, the Chinese, the Spanish folk-singers. The
newest composer may ask for shrieks, squeaks, groans, screams, a
thousand delicate shades of guttural and falsetto vocal tones from his
interpreters. Why should the gamut of expression on our opera stage be
so much more limited than it is in our music halls? Why should the
Hottentots be able to make so many delightful noises that we are
incapable of producing? Composers up to date have taken into account a
singer's apparent inability to bridge difficult intervals. It is only
by ignoring all such limitations that the new music will definitely
emerge, the new art of the singer be born. What marvellous effects
might be achieved by skipping from octave to octave in the human
voice! When will the obfusc pundits stop shouting for what Avery
Hopwood calls "ascending and descending tetrarchs!"

But, some one will argue, with the passing of _bel canto_ what will
become of the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti? Who
will sing them? Fear not, lover of the golden age of song, _bel canto_
is not passing as swiftly as that. Singers will continue to be born
into this world who are able to cope with the floridity of this music,
for they are born, not made. Amelita Galli-Curci will have her
successors, just as Adelina Patti had hers. Singers of this kind begin
to sing naturally in their infancy and they continue to sing, just
sing.... One touch of drama or emotion and their voices disappear.
Remember Nellie Melba's sad experience with _Siegfried_. The great
Mario had scarcely studied singing (one authority says that he had
taken a few lessons of Meyerbeer!) when he made his début in _Robert,
le Diable_ and there is no evidence that he studied very much
afterwards. Melba, herself, spent less than a year with Mme. Marchesi
in preparation for her opera career. Mme. Galli-Curci asserts that she
has had very little to do with professors and I do not think Mme.
Tetrazzini passed her youth in mastering _vocalizzi_. As a matter of
fact she studied singing only six months. Adelina Patti told Dr.
Hanslick that she had sung _Una voce poco fà_ at the age of seven with
the same embellishments which she used later when she appeared in the
opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are freaks of nature
like tortoise-shell cats and like those rare felines they are usually
females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind
us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But when this
type of singer finally becomes extinct naturally the operas which
depend on it will disappear too for the same reason that the works of
Monteverde and Handel have dropped out of the repertory, that the
Greek tragedies and the Elizabethan interludes are no longer current
on our stage. None of our actors understands the style of Chinese
plays; consequently it would be impossible to present one of them in
our theatre. As Deirdre says in Synge's great play, "It's a heartbreak
to the wise that it's for a short space we have the same things only."
We cannot, indeed, have everything. No one doubts that the plays of
Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are great dramas; the operas I have
just referred to can also be admired in the closet and probably they
will be. Even today no more than two works of Rossini, the most
popular composer of the early Nineteenth Century, are to be heard.
What has become of _Semiramide_, _La Cenerentola_, and the others?
There are no singers to sing them and so they have been dropped from
the repertory without being missed. Can any of our young misses hum
_Di Tanti Palpiti_? You know they cannot. I doubt if you can find two
girls in New York (and I mean girls with a musical education) who can
tell you in what opera the air belongs and yet in the early Twenties
this tune was as popular as _Un Bel Di_ is today.

Coloratura singing has been called heartless, not altogether without
reason. At one time its exemplars fired composers to their best
efforts. That day has passed. That day passed seventy years ago. It
may occur to you that there is something wrong when singers of a
certain type can only find the proper means to exploit their voices in
works of the past, operas which are dead. It is to be noted that
Nellie Melba and Amelita Galli-Curci are absolutely unfitted to sing
in music dramas even so early as those of Richard Wagner; Dukas,
Strauss, and Stravinsky are utterly beyond them. Even Adelina Patti
and Marcella Sembrich appeared in few, if any, new works of
importance. They had no bearing on the march of musical history. Here
is an entirely paradoxical situation; a set of interpreters who exist,
it would seem, only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the
past. What would we think of an actor who could make no effect save in
the tragedies of Corneille? It is such as these who have kept Leo
Ornstein from writing an opera. Berlioz forewarned us in his
"Memoirs." He was one of the first to foresee the coming day: "We
shall always find a fair number of female singers, popular from their
brilliant singing of brilliant trifles, and odious to the great
masters because utterly incapable of properly interpreting them. They
have voices, a certain knowledge of music, and flexible throats: they
are lacking in soul, brain, and heart. Such women are regular monsters
and all the more formidable to composers because they are often
charming monsters. This explains the weakness of certain masters in
writing falsely sentimental parts, which attract the public by their
brilliancy. It also explains the number of degenerate works, the
gradual degradation of style, the destruction of all sense of
expression, the neglect of dramatic properties, the contempt for the
true, the grand, and the beautiful, and the cynicism and decrepitude
of art in certain countries."

So, even if, as the ponderous criticasters are continually pointing
out, the age of _bel canto_ is really passing there is no actual
occasion for grief. All fashions in art pass and what is known as _bel
canto_ is just as much a fashion as the bombastic style of acting that
prevailed in Victor Hugo's day or the "realistic" style of acting we
prefer today. All interpretative art is based primarily on the
material with which it deals and with contemporary public taste. This
kind of singing is a direct derivative of a certain school of opera
and as that school of opera is fading more expressive methods of
singing are coming to the fore. The very first principle of _bel
canto_, an equalized scale, is a false one. With an equalized scale a
singer can produce a perfectly ordered series of notes, a charming
string of matched pearls, but nothing else. It is worthy of note that
it is impossible to sing Spanish or negro folk-songs with an equalized
scale. Almost all folk-music, indeed, exacts a vocal method of its
interpreter quite distinct from that of the art song.

We know now that true beauty lies deeper than in the emission of
"perfect tone." Beauty is truth and expressiveness. The new art of the
singer should develop to the highest degree the significance of the
text. Calvé once said that she did not become a real artist until she
forgot that she had a beautiful voice and thought only of the proper
expression the music demanded.

Of the old method of singing only one quality will persist in the late
Twentieth Century (mind you, this is deliberate prophecy but it is
about as safe as it would be to predict that Sarah Bernhardt will live
to give several hundred more performances of _La Dame aux Camélias_)
and that is style. The performance of any work demands a knowledge of
and a feeling for its style but style is about the last thing a singer
ever studies. When, however, you find a singer who understands style,
there you have an artist!

Style is the quality which endures long after the singer has lost the
power to produce a pure tone or to contrive accurate phrasing and so
makes it possible for artists to hold their places on the stage long
after their voices have become partially defective or, indeed, have
actually departed. It is knowledge of style that accounts for the long
careers of Marcella Sembrich and Lilli Lehmann or of Yvette Guilbert
and Maggie Cline for that matter. It is knowledge of style that makes
De Wolf Hopper a great artist in his interpretation of the music of
Sullivan and the words of Gilbert. Some artists, indeed, with barely a
shred of voice, have managed to maintain their positions on the stage
for many years through a knowledge of style. I might mention Victor
Maurel, Max Heinrich (not on the opera stage, of course), Antonio
Scotti, and Maurice Renaud.

A singer may be born with the ability to produce pure tones (I doubt
if Mme. Melba learned much about tone production from her teachers),
she may even phrase naturally, although this is more doubtful, but the
acquirement of style is a long and tedious process and one which
generally requires specialization. For style is elusive. An auditor, a
critic, will recognize it at once but very few can tell of what it
consists. Nevertheless it is fairly obvious to the casual listener
that Olive Fremstad is more at home in the music dramas of Gluck and
Wagner than she is in _Carmen_ and _Tosca_, and that Marcella Sembrich
is happier when she is singing Zerlina (as a Mozart singer she has had
no equal in the past three decades) than when she is singing _Lakmé_.
Mme. Melba sings _Lucia_ in excellent style but she probably could not
convince us that she knows how to sing a Brahms song. So far as I know
she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria
Marco, the Spanish soprano, who sings music of her own country in her
own language with absolutely irresistible effect, but on one occasion
when she attempted _Vissi d'Arte_ she was transformed immediately into
a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily fully of
grace and meaning, had become conventionalized.

If this quality of style (which after all means an understanding of
both the surface manner and underlying purpose of a composition and an
ability to transmit this understanding across the footlights) is of
such manifest importance in the field of art music it is doubly so in
the field of popular or folk-music. A foreigner had best think twice
before attempting to sing a Swedish song, a Hungarian song, or a
Polish song, popular or folk. (According to no less an authority than
Cecil J. Sharp, the peasants themselves differentiate between the two
and devote to each a _special vocal method_. Here are his words
["English Folk-Song"]: "But, it must be remembered that the vocal
method of the folk-singer is inseparable from the folk-song. It is a
cult which has grown up side by side with the folk-song, and is, no
doubt, part and parcel of the same tradition. When, for instance, an
old singing man sings a modern popular song, he will sing it in quite
another way. The tone of his voice will change and he will slur his
intervals, after the approved manner of the street-singer. Indeed, it
is usually quite possible to detect a genuine folk-song simply by
paying attention to the way in which it is sung.") Strangers as a rule
do not attempt such matters although we have before us at the present
time the very interesting case of Ratan Devi. It is a question,
however, if Ratan Devi would be so much admired if her songs or their
traditional manner of performance were more familiar to us.

On our music hall stage there are not more than ten singers who
understand how to sing American popular songs (and these, as I have
said elsewhere at some length,[33] constitute America's best claim in
the art of music). It is very difficult to sing them well. Tone and
phrasing have nothing to do with the matter; it is all a question of
style (leaving aside for the moment the important matter of
personality which enters into an accounting for any artist's
popularity or standing). Elsie Janis, a very clever mimic, a
delightful dancer, and perhaps the most deservedly popular artist on
our music hall stage, is not a good interpreter of popular songs. She
cannot be compared in this respect with Bert Williams, Blanche Ring,
Stella Mayhew, Al Jolson, May Irwin, Ethel Levey, Nora Bayes, Fannie
Brice, or Marie Cahill. I have named nearly all the good ones. The
spirit, the very conscious liberties taken with the text (the
vaudeville singer must elaborate his own syncopations as the singer of
early opera embroidered on the score of the composer) are not matters
that just happen. They require any amount of work and experience with
audiences. None of the singers I have named is a novice. Nor will you
find novices who are able to sing Schumann and Franz _lieder_,
although they may be blessed with well-nigh perfect vocal organs.

Still the music critics with strange persistence continue to adjudge a
singer by the old formulæ and standards: has she an equalized scale?
Has she taste in ornament? Does she overdo the use of _portamento_,
_messa di voce_, and such devices? How is her shake? etc., etc. But
how false, how ridiculous, this is! Fancy the result if new writers
and composers were criticized by the old laws (so they are, my son,
but not for long)! Creative artists always smash the old tablets of
commandments and it does not seem to me that interpretative artists
need be more unprogressive. Acting changes. Judged by the standards by
which Edwin Booth was assessed John Drew is not an actor. But we know
now that it is a different kind of acting. Acting has been flamboyant,
extravagant, and intensely emotional, something quite different from
real life. The present craze for counterfeiting the semblance of
ordinary existence on the stage will also die out for the stage is not
life and representing life on the stage (except in a conventionalized
or decorative form) is not art. Our new actors (with our new
playwrights) will develop a new and fantastic mode of expression
which will supersede the present fashion.... Rubinstein certainly did
not play the piano like Chopin. Presently a _virtuoso_ will appear who
will refuse to play the piano at all and a new instrument without a
tempered scale will be invented so that he may indulge in all the
subtleties between half-tones which are denied to the pianist.

It's all very well to cry, "Halt!" and "Who goes there?" but you can't
stop progress any more than you can stop the passing of time. The old
technique of the singer breaks down before the new technique of the
composer and the musician with daring will go still further if the
singer will but follow. Would that some singer would have the complete
courage to lead! But do not misunderstand me. The road to Parnassus is
no shorter because it has been newly paved. Indeed I think it is
longer. Caffarelli studied six years before he made his début as "the
greatest singer in the world" but I imagine that Waslav Nijinsky
studied ten before he set foot on the stage. The new music drama,
combining as it does principles from all the arts is all-demanding of
its interpreters. The new singer must learn how to move gracefully and
awkwardly, how to make both fantastic and realistic gestures, always
unconventional gestures, because conventions stamp the imitator. She
must peer into every period, glance at every nation. Every nerve
centre must be prepared to express any adumbration of plasticity. Many
of the new operas, _Carmen_, _La Dolores_, _Salome_, _Elektra_, to
name a few, call for interpretative dancing of the first order.
_Madama Butterfly_ and _Lakmé_ demand a knowledge of national
characteristics. _Pelléas et Mélisande_ and _Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_
require of the interpreter absolutely distinct enunciation. In
Handel's operas the phrases were repeated so many times that the
singer was excused if he proclaimed the meaning of the line once.
After that he could alter the vowels and consonants to suit his vocal
convenience. _Monna Vanna_ and _Tristan und Isolde_ exact of their
interpreters acting of the highest poetic and imaginative scope....

It is a question whether certain singers of our day have not solved
these problems with greater success than that for which they are given
credit.... Yvette Guilbert has announced publicly that she never had a
teacher, that she would not trust her voice to a teacher. The
enchanting Yvette practises a sound by herself until she is able to
make it; she repeats a phrase until she can deliver it without an
interrupting breath, and is there a singer on the stage more
expressive than Yvette Guilbert? She sings a little tenor, a little
baritone, and a little bass. She can succeed almost invariably in
making the effect she sets out to make. And Yvette Guilbert is the
answer to the statement often made that unorthodox methods of singing
ruin the voice. Ruin it for performances of _Linda di Chaminoux_ and
_La Sonnambula_ very possibly, but if young singers sit about saving
their voices for performances of these operas they are more than
likely to die unheard. It is a fact that good singing in the
old-fashioned sense will help nobody out in _Elektra_, _Ariane et
Barbe-Bleue_, _Pelléas et Mélisande_, or _The Nightingale_. These
works are written in new styles and they demand a new technique. Put
Mme. Melba, Mme. Destinn, Mme. Sembrich, or Mme. Galli-Curci to work
on these scores and you will simply have a sad mess.

We have, I think, but a faint glimmering of what vocal expressiveness
may become. Such torch-bearers as Mariette Mazarin and Feodor
Chaliapine have been procaciously excoriated by the critics. Until
recently Mary Garden, who of all artists on the lyric stage, is the
most nearly in touch with the singing of the future, has been treated
as a charlatan and a fraud. W. J. Henderson once called her the "Queen
of Unsong." Well, perhaps she is, but she is certainly better able to
cope artistically with the problems of the modern music drama than
such Queens of Song as Marcella Sembrich and Adelina Patti would be.
Perhaps Unsong is the name of the new art.

I do not think I have ever been backward in expressing my appreciation
of this artist. My essay devoted to her in "Interpreters and
Interpretations" will certainly testify eloquently as to my previous
attitude in regard to her. But it has not always been so with some of
my colleagues. Since she has been away from us they have learned
something; they have watched and listened to others and so when Mary
Garden came back to New York in _Monna Vanna_ in January, 1918, they
were ready to sing choruses of praise in her honour. They have been
encomiastic even in regard to her voice and her manner of singing.

Even my own opinion of this artist's work has undergone a change. I
have always regarded her as one of the few great interpreters, but in
the light of recent experience I now feel assured that she is the
greatest artist on the contemporary lyric stage. It is not, I would
insist, Mary Garden that has changed so much as we ourselves. She has,
it is true, polished her interpretations until they seem incredibly
perfect, but has there ever been a time when she gave anything but
perfect impersonations of Mélisande or Thais? Has she ever been
careless before the public? I doubt it.

The fact of the matter is that when Mary Garden first came to New York
only a few of us were ready to receive her at anywhere near her true
worth. In a field where mediocrity and brainlessness, lack of
theatrical instinct and vocal insipidity are fairly the rule her
dominant personality, her unerring search for novelty of expression,
the very completeness of her dramatic and vocal pictures, annoyed the
philistines, the professors, and the academicians. They had been
accustomed to taking their opera quietly with their after-dinner
coffee and, on the whole, they preferred it that way.

But the main obstacle in the way of her complete success lay in the
matter of her voice, of her singing. Of the quality of any voice there
can always exist a thousand different opinions. To me the great beauty
of the middle register of Mary Garden's voice has always been
apparent. But what was not so evident at first was the absolute
fitness of this voice and her method of using it for the dramatic
style of the artist and for the artistic demands of the works in
which she appeared. Thoroughly musical, Miss Garden has often puzzled
her critical hearers by singing _Faust_ in one vocal style and _Thais_
in another. But she was right and they were wrong. She might, indeed,
have experimented still further with a new vocal technique if she had
been given any encouragement but encouragement is seldom offered to
any innovator. As Edgar Saltus puts it, "The number of people who
regard a new idea or a fresh theory as a personal insult is curiously
large; indeed they are more frequent today than when Socrates quaffed
the hemlock." It must, therefore, be a source of ironic amusement to
her to find herself now appreciated not alone by her public, which has
always been loyal and adoring, but also by the professors themselves.

It would do no harm to any singer to study the multitude of vocal
effects this artist achieves. I can think of nobody who could not
learn something from her. How, for example, she gives her voice the
hue and colour of a _jeune fille_ in _Pelléas et Mélisande_, for
although Mélisande had been the bride of Barbe-Bleue before Golaud
discovered her in the forest she had never learned to be anything else
than innocent and distraught, unhappy and mysterious. Her treatment of
certain important phrases in this work is so electrifying in its
effect that the heart of every auditor is pierced. Remember, for
example, her question to Pelléas at the end of the first act,
"_Pourquoi partez-vous?_" to which she imparts a kind of dreamy
intuitive longing; recall the amazement shining through her grief at
Golaud's command that she ask Pelléas to accompany her on her search
for the lost ring: "_Pelléas!--Avec Pelléas!--Mais Pelléas ne voudra
pas_..."; and do not forget the terrified cry which signals the
discovery of the hidden Golaud in the park, "_Il y a quelqu'un
derrière nous!_"

In _Monna Vanna_ her most magnificent vocal gesture rested on the
single word _Si_ in reply to Guido's "_Tu ne reviendras pas?_" Her
performance of this work, however, offers many examples of just such
instinctive intonations. One more, I must mention, her answer to
Guido's insistent, "_Cet homme t'a-t-il prise_?"... "_J'ai dit la
vérité.... Il ne m'a pas touchée_," sung with dignity, with force,
with womanliness, and yet with growing impatience and a touch of
sadness.

Let me quote Pitts Sanborn: "It is easy to be flippant about Miss
Garden's singing. Her faults of voice and technique are patent to a
child, though he might not name them. One who has become a man can
ponder the greatness of her singing. I do not mean exclusively in
Debussy, though we all know that as a singer of Debussy ... she has
scarce a rival. Take her _mezza voce_ and her phrasing in the second
act of _Monna Vanna_, take them and bow down before them. Ponder a
moment her singing in _Thais_. The converted Thais, about to betake
herself desertward with the insistent monk, has a solo to sing. The
solo is Massenet, simon-pure Massenet, the idol of the Paris
_midinette_. Miss Garden, with a defective voice, a defective
technique, exalts and magnifies that passage till it might be the
noblest air of Handel or of Mozart. By a sheer and unashamed reliance
on her command of style, Miss Garden works that miracle, transfigures
Massenet into something superearthly, overpowering. Will you rise up
to deny that is singing?"

As for her acting, there can scarcely be two opinions about that! She
is one of the few possessors of that rare gift of imparting atmosphere
and mood to a characterization. Some exceptional actors and singers
accomplish this feat occasionally. Mary Garden has scarcely ever
failed to do so. The moment Mélisande is disclosed to our view, for
example, she seems to be surrounded by an aura entirely distinct from
the aura which surrounds Monna Vanna, Jean, Thais, Salome, or Sapho.
She becomes, indeed, so much a part of the character she assumes that
the spectator finds great difficulty in dissociating her from that
character, and I have found those who, having seen Mary Garden in only
one part, were quite ready to generalize about her own personality
from the impression they had received.

One of the tests of great acting is whether or not an artist remains
in the picture when she is not singing or speaking. Mary Garden knows
how to listen on the stage. She does not need to move or speak to make
herself a part of the action and she is never guilty of such an
offence against artistry as that committed by Tamagno, who, according
to Victor Maurel, allowed a scene in _Otello_ to drop to nothing while
he prepared himself to emit a high B.

Watching her magnificent performance of Monna Vanna it struck me that
she would make an incomparable Isolde. At the present moment I cannot
imagine Mary Garden learning Boche or singing in it even if she knew
it, but if some one will present us Wagner's (who hated the Germans as
much as Theodore Roosevelt does) music drama in French or English with
Mary Garden as Isolde, I think the public will thank me for having
suggested it.

Or it would be even better if Schoenberg, or Stravinsky, or Leo
Ornstein, inspired by the new light the example of such a singer has
cast over our lyric stage, would write a music drama, ignoring the
technique and the conventions of the past, as Debussy did when he
wrote _Pelléas et Mélisande_ (creating opportunities which any
opera-goer of the last decade knows how gloriously Miss Garden
realized). It is thus that the new order will gradually become
established. And then the new art ... the new art of the singer....

  _April 18, 1918._




Au Bal Musette

    _"Auprès de ma blonde
      Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, bon, bon...."_

                        Old French Song.




Au Bal Musette


It has often been remarked by philosophers and philistines alike that
the commonest facts of existence escape our attention until they are
impressed upon it in some unusual way. For example I knew nothing of
the sovereign powers of citronella as a mosquito dispatcher until a
plague of the insects drove me to make enquiries of a chemist. For
years I believed that knocking the necks off bottles, lacking an
opener, was the only alternative. A friend who caught me in this
predicament showed me the other use to which the handles of high-boy
drawers could be put. It was long my habit to quickly dispose of
trousers which had been disfigured by cigarette burns, but that was
before I had heard of _stoppage_, a process by which the original
weave is cleverly counterfeited. And, wishing to dance, in Paris, I
have been guilty of visits to the great dance halls and to the small
smart places where champagne is oppressively the only listed beverage.
But that was before I discovered the _bal musette_.

One July night in Paris I had dinner with a certain lady at the
Cou-Cou, followed by cognac at the Savoyarde. I find nothing strange
in this program; it seems to me that I must have dined at the Cou-Cou
with every one I have known in Paris from time to time, a range of
acquaintanceship including Fernand, the _apache_, and the Comtesse de
J----, and cognac at the Savoyarde usually followed the dinner. This
evening at the Cou-Cou then resembled any other evening. Do you know
how to go there? You must take a taxi-cab to the foot of the hill of
Montmartre and then be drawn up in the _finiculaire_ to the top where
the church of Sacré-Coeur squats proudly, for all the world like a
mammoth Buddha (of course you may ride all the way up the mountain in
your taxi if you like). From Sacré-Coeur one turns to the left around
the board fence which, it would seem, will always hedge in this
unfinished monument of pious Catholics; still turning to the left,
through the Place du Tertre, in which one must not be stayed by the
pleasant sight of the _Montmartroises bourgeoises_ eating _petite
marmite_ in the open air, one arrives at the Place du Calvaire. The
tables of the Restaurant Cou-Cou occupy nearly the whole of this tiny
square, to which there are only two means of approach, one up the
stairs from the city below, and the other from the Place du Tertre. An
artist's house disturbs the view on the side towards Paris; opposite
is the restaurant, flanked on the right by a row of modest apartment
houses, to which one gains entrance through a high wall by means of a
small gate. Sundry visitors to these houses, some on bicycles, make
occasional interruptions in the dinner.... From over this wall, too,
comes the huge Cheshire cat (much bigger than Alice's, a beautiful
animal), which lounges about in the hope, frequently realized, that
some one will give him a chicken bone.... Conterminous to the
restaurant, on the right, is a tiny cottage, fronted by a still tinier
garden, fenced in and gated. Many of the visitors to the Cou-Cou hang
their hats and sticks on this fence and its gate. I have never seen
the occupants of the cottage in any of my numerous visits to this open
air restaurant, but once, towards eleven o'clock the crowd in the
square becoming too noisy, the upper windows were suddenly thrown up
and a pailful of water descended.... "_Per Baccho!_" quoth the
inn-keeper for, it must be known, the Restaurant Cou-Cou is Italian by
nature of its _patron_ and its cooking.

This night, I say, had been as the others. The Cou-Cou is (and in this
respect it is not exceptional in Paris) safe to return to if you have
found it to your liking in years gone by. Perhaps some day the small
boy of the place will be grown up. He is a real _enfant terrible_. It
is his pleasure to _tutoyer_ the guests, to amuse himself by
pretending to serve them, only to bring the wrong dishes, or none at
all. If you call to him he is deaf. Any hope of _revanche_ is
abandoned in the reflection of the super-retaliations he himself
conceives. One young man who expresses himself freely on the subject
of Pietro receives a plate of hot soup down the back of his neck,
followed immediately by a "_Pardon, Monsieur_," said not without
respect. But where might Pietro's father be? He is in the kitchen
cooking and if you find your dinner coming too slowly at the hands of
the distracted maid servants, who also have to put up with Pietro, go
into the kitchen, passing under the little vine-clad porch wherein you
may discover a pair of lovers, and help yourself. And if you find some
one else's dinner more to your liking than your own take that off the
stove instead. At the Cou-Cou you pay for what you eat, not for what
you order. And the Signora, Pietro's mother? That unhappy woman
usually stands in front of the door, where she interferes with the
passage of the girls going for food. She wrings her hands and moans,
"_Mon Dieu, quel monde!_" with the idea that she is helping vastly in
the manipulation of the machinery of the place.

And the _monde_; who goes there? It is not too _chic_, this _monde_,
and yet it is surely not _bourgeois_; if one does not recognize M.
Rodin or M. Georges Feydeau, yet there are compensations.... The girls
who come attended by bearded companions, are unusually pretty; one
sees them afterwards at the bars and _bals_ if one does not go to the
Abbaye or Pagés.... It makes a very pleasant picture, the Place du
Calvaire towards nine o'clock on a summer night when tiny lights with
pink globes are placed on the tables. The little square twinkles with
them and the couples at the tables become very gay, and sometimes
sentimental. And when the pink lights appear a small boy in blue
trousers comes along to light the street lamp. Then the urchins gather
on the wall which hedges in the garden on the fourth side of the
square and chatter, chatter, chatter, about all the things that French
boys chatter about. Naturally they have a good deal to say about the
people who are eating.

I have described the Cou-Cou as it was this night and as it has been
all the nights during the past eight summers that I have been there.
The dinner too is always the same. It is served _à la carte_, but one
is not given much choice. There is always a _potage_, always
_spaghetti_, always chicken and a salad, always a lobster, and
_zabaglione_ if one wants it. The wine--it is called _chianti_--is
tolerable. And the _addition_ is made upon a slate with a piece of
white chalk. "_Qu'est-ce que monsieur a mangé?_" Sometimes it is very
difficult to remember, but it is necessary. Such honesty compels an
exertion. It is all added up and for the two of us on this evening, or
any other evening, it may come to nine _francs_, which is not much to
pay for a good dinner.

Then, on this evening, and every other evening, we went on, back as we
had come, round past the other side of Sacré-Coeur, past the statue of
the Chevalier who was martyred for refusing to salute a procession
(why he refused I have never found out, although I have asked
everybody who has ever dined with me at the Cou-Cou) to the Café
Savoyarde, the broad windows of which look out over pretty much all
the Northeast of Paris, over a glittering labyrinth of lights set in
an obscure sea of darkness. It was not far from here that Louise and
Julien kept house when they were interrupted by Louise's mother, and
it was looking down over these lights that they swore those eternal
vows, ending with Louise's "_C'est une Féerie!_" and Julien's "_Non,
c'est la vie!_" One always remembers these things and feels them at
the Savoyarde as keenly as one did sometime in the remote past
watching Mary Garden and Léon Beyle from the topmost gallery of the
Opéra-Comique after an hour and a half wait in the _queue_ for one
_franc_ tickets (there were always people turned away from
performances of _Louise_ and so it was necessary to be there early;
some other operas did not demand such punctuality). There is a terrace
outside the Savoyarde, a tiny terrace, with just room for one man, who
griddles _gaufrettes_, and three or four tiny tables with chairs. At
one of these we sat that night (just as I had sat so many times
before) and sipped our cognac.

It is difficult in an adventure to remember just when the departure
comes, when one leaves the past and strides into the future, but I
think that moment befell me in this café ... for it was the first time
I had ever seen a cat there. He was a lazy, splendid animal. In New
York he would have been an oddity, but in Paris there are many such
beasts. Tawny he was and soft to the touch and of a hugeness. He was
lying on the bar and as I stroked his coat he purred melifluously....
I stroked his warm fur and thought how I belonged to the mystic band
(Gautier, Baudelaire, Mérimée, all knew the secrets) of those who are
acquainted with cats; it is a feeling of pride we have that
differentiates us from the dog lovers, the pride of the appreciation
of indifference or of conscious preference. And it was, I think, as I
was stroking the cat that my past was smote away from me and I was
projected into the adventure for, as I lifted the animal into my arms,
the better to feel its warmth and softness, it sprang with strength
and unsheathed claws out of my embrace, and soon was back on the bar
again, "just as if nothing had happened." There was blood on my face.
Madame, behind the bar, was apologetic but not chastening. "_Il avait
peur_," she said. "_Il n'est pas méchant._" The wound was not deep,
and as I bent to pet the cat again he again purred. I had interfered
with his habits and, as I discovered later, he had interfered with
mine.

We decided to walk down the hill instead of riding down in the
_finiculaire_, down the stairs which form another of the pictures in
_Louise_, with the abutting houses, into the rooms of which one looks,
conscious of prying. And you see the old in these interiors, making
shoes, or preparing dinner, or the middle-aged going to bed, but the
young one never sees in the houses in the summer.... It was early and
we decided to dance; I thought of the Moulin de la Galette, which I
had visited twice before. The Moulin de la Galette waves its gaunt
arms in the air half way up the _butte_ of Montmartre; it serves its
purpose as a dance hall of the quarter. One meets the pretty little
_Montmartroises_ there and the young artists; the entrance fee is not
exorbitant and one may drink a bock. And when I have been there,
sitting at a small table facing the somewhat vivid mural decoration
which runs the length of one wall, drinking my brown _bock_, I have
remembered the story which Mary Garden once told me, how Albert Carré
to celebrate the hundredth--or was it the twenty-fifth?--performance
of _Louise_, gave a dinner there--so near to the scenes he had
conceived--to Charpentier and how, surrounded by some of the most
notable musicians and poets of France, the composer had suddenly
fallen from the table, face downwards; he had starved himself so long
to complete his masterpiece that food did not seem to nourish him. It
was the end of a brilliant dinner. He was carried away ... to the
Riviera; some said that he had lost his mind; some said that he was
dying. Mary Garden herself did not know, at the time she first sang
_Louise_ in America, what had happened to him. But a little later the
rumour that he was writing a trilogy was spread about and soon it was
a known fact that at least one other part of the trilogy had been
written, _Julien_; that lyric drama was produced and everybody knows
the story of its failure. Charpentier, the natural philosopher and the
poet of Montmartre, had said everything he had to say in _Louise_. As
for the third play, one has heard nothing about that yet.

But on this evening the Moulin de la Galette was closed and then I
remembered that it was open on Thursday and this was Wednesday. Is it
Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday that the Moulin de la Galette is open?
I think so. By this time we were determined to dance; but where? We
had no desire to go to some stupid place, common to tourists, no such
place as the Bal Tabarin lured us; nor did the Grelot in the Place
Blanche, for we had been there a night or two before. The Elysée
Montmartre (celebrated by George Moore) would be closed. Its _patron_
followed the schedule of days adopted for the Galette.... To chance I
turn in such dilemmas.... I consulted a small boy, who, with his
companion, had been good enough to guide us through many winding
streets to the Moulin. Certainly he knew of a _bal_. Would _monsieur_
care to visit a _bal musette_? His companion was horrified. I caught
the phrase "_mal frequenté_." Our curiosity was aroused and we gave
the signal to advance.

There were two grounds for my personal curiosity beyond the more
obvious ones. I seemed to remember to have read somewhere that the
ladies of the court of Louis XIV played the _musette_, which is French
for bag-pipe. It was the fashionable instrument of an epoch and the
_musettes_ played by the _grandes dames_ were elaborately decorated.
The word in time slunk into the dictionaries of musical terms as
descriptive of a drone bass. Many of Gluck's ballet airs bear the
title, _Musette_. Perhaps the bass was even performed on a
bag-pipe.... "_Mal frequenté_" in Parisian _argot_ has a variety of
significations; in this particular instance it suggested _apaches_ to
me. A _bal_, for instance, attended by _cocottes_, _mannequins_, or
_modèles_, could not be described as _mal frequenté_ unless one were
speaking to a boarding school miss, for all the public _bals_ in Paris
are so attended. No, the words spoken to me, in this connection, could
only mean _apaches_. The confusion of epochs began to invite my
interest and I wondered, in my mind's eye, how a Louis XIV _apache_
would dress, how he would be represented at a costume ball, and a
picture of a ragged silk-betrousered person, flaunting a plaid-bellied
instrument came to mind. An imagination often leads one violently
astray.

The two urchins were marching us through street after street, one of
them whistling that pleasing tune, _Le lendemain elle était
souriante_. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our
destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were
not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the
Place Vendôme.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on
the way. They could have made our speed walking on their hands, and
they accomplished at least a third of the journey this way. Of course,
I deluged them with large round five and ten _centimes_ pieces.

We arrived at last before a door in a short street near the Gare du
Nord. Was it the Rue Jessaint? I do not know, for when, a year later,
I attempted to re-find this _bal_ it had disappeared.... We could hear
the hum of the pipes for some paces before we turned the corner into
the street, and never have pipes sounded in my ears with such a shrill
significance of being somewhere they ought not to be, never but once,
and that was when I had heard the piper who accompanies the dinner of
the Governor of the Bahamas in Nassau. Marching round the porch of the
Governor's Villa he played _The Blue Bells of Scotland_ and _God Save
the King_, but, hearing the sound from a distance through the
interstices of the cocoa-palm fronds in the hot tropical night, I
could only think of a Hindoo blowing the pipes in India, the charming
of snakes.... So, as we turned the corner into the Rue Jessaint, I
seemed to catch a faint glimpse of a scene on the lawn at
Versailles.... Louis XIV--it was the epoch of Cinderella!

But it wasn't a bag-pipe at all. That we discovered when we entered
the room, after passing through the bar in the front. The _bal_ was
conducted in a large hall at the back of the _maison_. In the doorway
lounged an _agent de service_, always a guest at one of these
functions, I found out later. There were rows of tables, long tables,
with long wooden benches placed between them. One corner of the floor
was cleared--not so large a corner either--for dancing, and on a small
platform sat the strangest looking youth, like Peter Pan never to grow
old, like the _Monna Lisa_ a boy of a thousand years, without emotion
or expression of any sort. He was playing an accordion; the bag-pipe,
symbol of the _bal_, hung disused on the wall over his head. His
accordion, manipulated with great skill, was augmented by sleigh-bells
attached to his ankles in such a manner that a minimum of movement
produced a maximum of effect; he further added to the complexity of
sound and rhythm by striking a cymbal occasionally with one of his
feet. The music was both rhythmic and ordered, now a waltz, now a tune
in two-four time, but never faster or slower, and never ending ...
except in the middle of each dance, for a brief few seconds, while the
_patronne_ collected a _sou_ from each dancer, after which the dance
proceeded. All the time we remained never did the musician smile,
except twice, once briefly when I sent word to him by the waiter to
order a _consommation_ and once, at some length, when we departed. On
these occasions the effect was almost emotionally illuminating, so
inexpressive was the ordinary cast of his features. A strange lad; I
like to think of him always sitting there, passively, playing the
accordion and shaking his sleigh-bells. He suggested a static picture,
a thing of always, but I know it is not so, for even the next summer
he had disappeared along with the _bal_ and now he may have been shot
in the Battle of the Marne or he may have murdered his _gigolette_ and
been transported to one of the French penal colonies.... An _apache,
en musicien!_ ... black cloth around his throat, hair parted in the
middle, _velours_ trousers; a _vrai apache_ I tell you, a cool,
cunning creature, shredded with cocaine and absinthe, monotonous in
his virtuosity, playing the accordion. He had begun before we arrived
and he continued after we left. I like to think of him as always
playing, but it is not so....

As for the dancers, they were of various kinds and sorts. The women
had that air which gave them the stamp of a quarter; they wore loose
_blouses_, tucked in plaid skirts, or dark blue skirts, or
multi-coloured calico skirts (if you have seen the lithographs of
Steinlen you may reconstruct the picture with no difficulty) and they
danced in that peculiar fashion so much in vogue in the Northern
outskirts of Paris. The men seized them tightly and they whirled to
the inexorable music when it was a waltz, whirled and whirled, until
one thought of the Viennese and how they become as dervishes and
Japanese mice when one plays Johann Strauss. But in the dances in
two-four time their way was more our way, something between a
one-step, a mattchiche, and a tango, with strange fascinating steps of
their own devising, a folk-dance manner.... Yes, under their feet, the
dance became a real dance of the people and, when we entered into it,
our feet seemed heavy and our steps conventional, although we tried
to do what they did. (How they did laugh at us!) And the strange
youth emphasized the effect of folk-dancing by playing old _chansons
de France_ which he mingled with his repertory of _café-concert_ airs.
And there was achieved that wonderful thing (to an artist) a mixture
of _genres_--intriguing one's curiosity, awakening the most dormant
interest, and inspiring the dullest imagination.

This was my first night at a _bal musette_ and my last in that year,
for shortly afterwards I left for Italy and in Italy one does not
dance. But the next season found me anxious to renew the adventure, to
again enjoy the pleasures of the _bal musette_. I have said I was
perhaps wrong in recalling the street as the Rue Jessaint, or perhaps
the old _maison_ had disappeared. At any rate, when I searched I could
not find the _bal_, not even the bar. So again I appealed for help,
this time to a chauffeur, who drove me to the opposite side of the
city, to the _quartier_ of the _Halles_.... And I was beginning to
think that the man had misunderstood me, or was stupid. "He will take
me to a cabaret, l'Ange Gabriel or"--and I rapidly revolved in my mind
the possibilities of this quarter where the _apaches_ come to the
surface to feel the purse of the tourist, who buys drinks as he
listens to stories of murders, some of which have been committed, for
it is true that some of the real _apaches_ go there (I know because my
friend Fernand did and it was in l'Ange Gabriel that he knocked all
the teeth down the throat of Angélique, _sa gigolette_. You may find
the life of these creatures vividly and amusingly described in that
amazing book of Charles-Henry Hirsch, "Le Tigre et Coquelicot" It is
the only book I have read about the _apaches_ of modern Paris that is
worth its pages). But the idea of l'Ange Gabriel was not amusing to me
this evening and I leaned forward to ask my chauffeur if he had it in
mind to substitute another attraction for my desired _bal musette_.
His reply was reassuring; it took the form of a gesture, the waving of
a hand towards a small lighted globe depending over the door of a
little _marchand de vin_. On this globe was painted in black letters
the single word, _bal_. We were in the narrow Rue des Gravilliers--I
was there for the first time--and the _bal_ was the Bal des
Gravilliers.

The bar is so small, when one enters, that there is no intimation of
the really splendid aspect of the dancing room. For here there are two
rooms separated by the dancing floor, two halls filled with tables,
with long wooden benches between them. Benches also line the walls,
which are white with a grey-blue frieze; the lighting is brilliant.
The musicians play in a little balcony, and here there are two of
them, an accordionist and a guitarist. The performer on the accordion
is a _virtuoso_; he takes delight in winding florid ornament, after
the manner of some brilliant singer impersonating Rosina in _Il
Barbiere_, around the melodies he performs. As in the Rue Jessaint a
_sou_ is demanded in the middle of each dance. But there comparison
must cease, for the life here is gayer, more of a character. The types
are of the _Halles_.... There are strange exits....

A short woman enters; "_elle s'avance en se balançant sur ses hanches
comme une pouliche du haras de Cordoue_"; she suggests an operatic
Carmen in her swagger. She is slender, with short, dark hair, cropped
_à la_ Boutet de Monvel, and she flourishes a cigarette, the smoke
from which wreathes upward and obscures--nay makes more subtle--the
strange poignancy of her deep blue eyes. Her nose is of a snubness. It
is the _môme_ Estelle, and as she passes down the narrow aisle,
between the tables, there is a stir of excitement.... The men raise
their eyes.... Edouard, _le petit_, flicks a _louis_ carelessly
between his thumb and fore-finger, with the long dirty nails, and
then passes it back into his pocket. Do not mistake the gesture; it
is not made to entice the _môme_, nor is it a sign of affluence; it is
Edouard's means of demanding another _louis_ before the night is up,
if it be only a "_louis de dix francs_." Estelle looks at him boldly;
there is no fear in her eyes; you can see that she would face death
with Carmen's calm if the Fates cut the thread to that effect.... The
music begins and Estelle dances with Carmella, _l'Arabe_. Edouard
glowers and pulls his little grey cap down tower.... It is a waltz....
Suddenly he is on the floor and Estelle is pressed close to his
body.... Carmella sits down. She smiles, and presently she is dancing
with Jean-Baptiste.... Estelle and Edouard are now whirling, whirling,
and all the while his dark eyes look down piercingly into her blue
eyes. The music stops. Estelle fumbles in her stocking for two _sous_.
Edouard lights a _Maryland_.

There is a newcomer tonight. (I am talking to the _agent de service_.)
She is of a youth and she is certainly from Brittany. I see her
sitting in a corner, waiting for something, trying to know. "She will
learn," says my friend, "She will learn to pay like the others." That
is the _gros_ Pierre who regards her. He twirls his moustache and
considers, and in the end he lumbers to her and asks her to dance.
She is willing to do so, but the intensity of Pierre frightens her,
frightens and intrigues.... There is a sign on the wall that one must
not stamp one's feet, but no other prohibition.... He twists her
finger purposely as they whirl ... and whirl. She cowers. _Gros_
Pierre is very big and strong. "_T'es bath, môme_," I hear him say, as
they pass me by.... The dance over, he towers above her for a brief
second before he swaggers out.... Estelle smiles. Her lips move and
she speaks quickly to Edouard, _le petit_.... He does not listen. Why
should he listen to his _gigolette_? She is wasting her time here
anyway. He becomes impatient.... Carmella smiles across the room in a
brief second of chance and Estelle answers the smile. Carmella holds
up three fingers (it is now 1.30). Estelle nods her head quickly. The
musicians are always playing, except in the middle of the dance when
_madame, la patronne_, gathers in the _sous_.... Only from one she
takes nothing.... He is twenty and very blonde and he is dancing with
_Madame_.... Between dances she pays his _consommations_.... Estelle
rises slowly and walks out while Carmella, _l'Arabe_, follows her with
his eyes. Edouard, _le petit_, lights a _Maryland_ and poises a
_louis_ between his thumb and fore-finger, the nails of which are
long and dirty.... The music is always playing.... The little girl
from Brittany is again alone in the corner. There is fear in her face.
She is beginning to know. She summons her courage and walks to the
door, on through.... The _agent de service_ twirls his moustache and
points after her. "She soon will know." I follow. She hesitates for a
second at the street door and then starts towards the corner.... She
reaches the corner and passes around it.... I hear a scream ... the
sound of running footsteps ... the beat of a horse's hoofs ... the
rolling of wheels on the cobble stones....


  _November 11, 1915._




Music and Cooking

    _"Give me some music,--music, moody food
      Of us that trade in love."_

                        Shakespeare's _Cleopatra_.




Music and Cooking


It is my firm belief that there is an intimate relationship between
the stomach and the ear, the saucepan and the crotchet, the mysteries
of Mrs. Rorer and the mysteries of Mme. Marchesi. It has even occurred
to me that one of the reasons our American composers are so barren in
ideas is because as a race we are not interested in cooking and
eating. Those countries in which music plays the greater part in the
national life are precisely those which are the most interested in the
culinary art. The food of Italy, the cooking, is celebrated; every
peasant in that sunny land sings, and the voices of some Italians have
reverberated around the world. The very melodies of Verdi and Rossini
are inextricably twined in our minds around memories of _ravioli_ and
_zabaglione_. _Vesti la Giubba_ is _spaghetti_. The composers of these
melodies and their interpreters alike cooked, ate, and drank with joy,
and so they composed and sang with joy too. Men with indigestion may
be able to write novels, but they cannot compose great music.... The
Germans spend more time eating than the people of any other country
(at least they did once). It is small occasion for wonder, therefore,
that they produce so many musicians. They are always eating, mammoth
plates heaped high with Bavarian cabbage, _Koenigsberger Klopps_,
_Hasenpfeffer_, noodles, sauerkraut, _Wiener Schnitzel_ ... drinking
seidels of beer. They escort sausages with them to the opera. All the
women have their skirts honeycombed with capacious pockets, in which
they carry substantial lunches to eat while Isolde is deceiving King
Mark. Why, the very principle of German music is based on a theory of
well-fed auditors. The voluptuous scores of Richard Wagner, Richard
Strauss, Max Schillings and Co. were not written for skinny,
ill-nourished wights. Even Beethoven demands flesh and bone of his
hearers. The music of Bach is directly aimed against the doctrine of
asceticism. "The German capacity for feeling emotion in music has
developed to the same extent as the capacity of the German stomach for
containing food," writes Ernest Newman, "but in neither the one case
nor the other has there been a corresponding development in refinement
of perceptions. German sentimental music is not quite as gross as
German food and German feeding, but it comes very near to it
sometimes.... 'The Germans do not taste,' said Montaigne, 'they gulp.'
As with their food, so with the emotions of their music. So long as
they get them in sufficient mass, of the traditional quality, and with
the traditional pungent seasoning, they are content to leave piquancy
and variety of effect to others."... Once in Munich in a second
storey window of the Bayerischebank I saw a small boy, about ten years
old, sitting outside on the sill, washing the panes of glass. Opposite
him on the same sill a dachshund reposed on her paws, regarding her
master affectionately. Between the two stood a half-filled toby of
foaming Löwenbrau, which, from time to time, the lad raised to his
lips, quaffing deep draughts. And when he set the pot down he whistled
the first subject of Beethoven's _Fifth Symphony_. On Sunday
afternoons, in the gardens which invariably surround the Munich
breweries, the happy mothers, who gather to listen to the band play
while they drink beer, frequently replenish the empty nursing bottles
of their offspring at the taps from which flows the deep brown
beverage.... The food of the French is highly artificial, delicately
prepared and served, and flavoured with infinite art: _vol au vent à
la reine_ and Massenet, _petits pois à l'etuvée_ and Gounod, _oeuf
Ste. Clotilde_ and César Franck, all strike the tongue and the ear
quite pleasantly. Des Esseintes and his liqueur symphony were the
inventions of a Frenchman.... Hungarian goulash and Hungarian
rhapsodies are certainly designed to be taken in conjunction....
Russian music tastes of _kascha_ and _bortsch_ and vodka. The happy,
hearty eaters of Russia, the drunken, sodden drinkers of Russia are
reflected in the scores of _Boris Godunow_ and _Petrouchka_.... In
England we find that the great English meat pasties and puddings
appeared in the same century with the immortal Purcell.... But in
America we import our cooks ... and our music. As a race we do not
like to cook. We scarcely like to eat. We certainly do not enjoy
eating. We will never have a national music until we have national
dishes and national drinks and until we like good food. It is
significant that our national drinks at present are mixed drinks, the
ingredients of which are foreign. It is doubly significant that that
section of the country which produces chicken _à la Maryland_, corn
bread, beaten biscuit, mint juleps, and New Orleans fizzes has
furnished us with the best of such music as we can boast. Maine has
offered us no _Suwanee River_; we owe no _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_ to
Nebraska. The best of our ragtime composers are Jews, a race which
regards eating and cooking of sufficient importance to include rules
for the preparation and disposition of food in its religious tenets.

Most musicians and those who enjoy listening to music, like to eat
(this does not mean that people who like to eat always desire to
listen to music at the same time, but nowadays one has little choice
in the matter); what is more pregnant, most of them like to cook. We
may include even the music critics, one of whom (Henry T. Finck) has
written a book about such matters. The others eat ... and expand.
James Huneker devotes sixteen pages of "The New Cosmopolis" to the
"maw of the monster." And as H. L. Mencken has pointed out, "The
Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover." Dinners are
constantly being given for the musicians and critics to meet and talk
over thirteen courses with wine. You may read Mr. Krehbiel's glowing
accounts of the dinner given to Adelina Patti (a dinner referred to in
Joseph Hergesheimer's lyric novel, "The Three Black Pennys") on the
occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as a singer, of the dinner to
Marcella Sembrich to mark her retirement from the opera stage, and of
a dinner to Teresa Carreño when she proposed a toast to her three
husbands.... Go to the opera house and observe the lady singers, with
their ample bosoms and their broad hips, the men with their expansive
paunches ... and use your imagination. Why is it, when a singer is
interviewed for a newspaper, that she invariably finds herself tired
of hotel food and wants an apartment of her own, where she can cook to
her stomach's content? Why are the musical journals and the Sunday
supplements of the newspapers always publishing pictures of contralti
with their sleeves rolled back to the elbows, their Poiret gowns
(cunningly and carefully exhibited nevertheless) covered with aprons,
baking bread, turning omelettes, or preparing clam broth Uncle Sam?
You, my reader, have surely seen these pictures, but it has perhaps
not occurred to you to conjure up a reason for them.

Edgar Saltus says: "A perfect dinner should resemble a concert. As the
_morceaux_ succeed each other, so, too, should the names of the
composers." Few dinners in New York may be regarded as concerts and
still fewer restaurants may be looked upon as concert halls, except,
unfortunately, in the literal sense. However, if you can find a
restaurant where opera singers and conductors eat you may be sure it
is a good one. Huneker describes the old Lienau's, where William
Steinway, Anton Seidl, Theodore Thomas, Scharwenka, Joseffy, Lilli
Lehmann, Max Heinrich, and Victor Herbert used to gather. Follow
Alfred Hertz and you will be in excellent company in a double sense.
Then watch him consume a plateful of Viennese pastry. If you have ever
seen Emmy Destinn or Feodor Chaliapine eat you will feel that justice
has been done to a meal. I once sat with the Russian bass for twelve
hours, all of which time he was eating or drinking. He began with six
plates of steaming onion soup (cooked with cheese and toast). The old
New Year's eve festivities at the Gadski-Tauschers' resembled the
storied banquets of the middle ages.... Boars' heads, meat pies,
_salade macédoine_, _coeur de palmier_, _hollandaise_ were washed down
with magnums and quarts of Irroy brut, 1900, Pol Roger, Chambertin,
graceful Bohemian crystal goblets of Liebfraumilch and Johannisberger
Schloss-Auslese. Mary Garden once sent a jewelled gift to the _chef_
at the Ritz-Carlton in return for a superb fish sauce which he had
contrived for her. H. E. Krehbiel says that Brignoli "probably ate as
no tenor ever ate before or since--ravenously as a Prussian dragoon
after a fast." _Pêche Melba_ has become a stable article on many menus
in many cities in many lands. Agnes G. Murphy, in her biography of
Mme. Melba, says that one day the singer, Joachim, and a party of
friends stopped at a peasant's cottage near Bergamo, where they were
regaled with such delicious macaroni that Melba persuaded her friends
to return another day and wait while the peasant taught her the exact
method of preparing the dish. In at least one New York restaurant
_oeuf Toscanini_ is to be found on the bill. I have heard Olive
Fremstad complain of the cooking in this hotel in Paris, or that hotel
in New York, or the other hotel in Munich, and when she found herself
in an apartment of her own she immediately set about to cook a few
special dishes for herself.

Two musicians I know not only keep restaurants in New York, but
actually prepare the dinners themselves. One of them is at the same
time a singer in the Metropolitan Opera Company. Have you seen Bernard
Bégué standing before his cook stove preparing food for his patrons?
His huge form, clad in white, viewed through the open doorway
connecting the dining room with the kitchen, almost conceals the great
stove, but occasionally you can catch sight of the pots and pans, the
_casseroles_ of _pot-au-feu_, the roasting chicken, the filets of
sole, all the ingredients of a dinner, _cuisine bourgeoise_ ... and
after dining, you can hear Bégué sing the Uncle-priest in _Madama
Butterfly_ at the Opera House.

Or have you seen Giacomo (and have not Meyerbeer and Puccini been
bearers of this name?) Pogliani turning from the _spaghetti_ theme
chromatically to that of the _risotto_, the most succulent and
appetizing _risotto_ to be tasted this side of Bonvecchiati's in
Venice ... or the _polenta_ with _funghi_.... But, best of all, the
roasts, and were it not that the Prince Troubetskoy is a vegetarian
you would fancy that he came to Pogliani's for these viands. And it
must not be forgotten that this supreme cook is--or was--a bassoon
player of the first rank, that he is a graduate of the Milan
Conservatory. The bassoon is a difficult instrument. It is sometimes
called the "comedian of the orchestra," but there are few who can play
it at all, still fewer who can play it well. Bassoonists are highly
paid and they are in demand. Walter Damrosch used to say that when he
was engaging a bassoon player he would ask him to play a passage from
the bassoon part in _Scheherazade_. If he could play that, he could
play anything else written for his instrument. Pogliani gave up the
bassoon for the fork, spoon, and saucepan. Like Prospero he buried his
magic wand and in Viafora's cartoon the instrument lies idle in the
cobwebs.

Charles Santley's "Reminiscences" and "Student and Singer" are full of
references to food: "ox-hearts, stuffed with onions," "a joint of
meat, well cooked, with a bright brown crust which prevented the
juices escaping," "a splendid shoulder of mutton, a picture to behold,
and a _peas pudding_," and "whaffles" are a few of the dishes referred
to with enthusiasm. In America a newspaper gravely informed its
readers that "Santley says squash pie is the best thing to sing on he
knows!" Santley was a true pantophagist, but he was worsted in his
first encounter with the American oyster: "I had often heard of the
celebrated American oyster, which half a dozen people had tried to
swallow without success, and was anxious to learn if the story were
founded on fact. Cummings conducted me to a cellar in Broadway, where,
upon his order, a waiter produced two plates, on which were half a
dozen objects, about the size and shape of the sole of an ordinary
lady's shoe, on each of which lay what appeared to me to be a very
bilious tongue, accompanied by smaller plates containing shredded
white cabbage raw. I did not admire the look of the repast, but I
never discard food on account of looks. I took up an oyster and tried
to get it into my mouth, but it was of no use; I tried to ram it in
with the butt-end of the fork, but all to no purpose, and I had to
drop it, and, to the great indignation of the waiter, paid and left
the oysters for him to dispose of as he might like best. I presume
those oysters are eaten, but I cannot imagine by whom; I have rarely
seen a mouth capable of the necessary expansion. I soon found out that
there were plenty of delicious oysters in the States within the
compass of ordinary jaws."

J. H. Mapleson says in his "Memoirs" that at the Opera at Lodi, where
he made his début as a tenor, refreshments of all kinds were served to
the audience between the acts and every box was furnished with a
little kitchen for cooking macaroni and baking or frying pastry. The
wine of the country was drunk freely, not out of glasses, but "in
classical fashion--from bowls." Mapleson also tells us that Del Puente
was a "very tolerable cook." On one trying occasion he prepared
macaroni for his impressario. Michael Kelly declares that the sight of
Signor St. Giorgio entering a fruit shop to eat peaches, nectarines,
and a pineapple, was really what stimulated him to study for a career
on the stage. "While my mouth watered, I asked myself why, if I
assiduously studied music, I should not be able to earn money enough
to lounge about in fruit-shops, and eat peaches and pineapples as
well as Signor St. Giorgio...."

Lillian Russell is a good cook. I can recommend her recipe for the
preparation of mushrooms: "Put a lump of butter in a chafing dish (or
a saucepan) and a slice of Spanish onion and the mushrooms minus the
stems; let them simmer until they are all deliciously tender and the
juice has run from them--about twenty minutes should be enough--then
add a cupful of cream and let this boil. As a last touch squeeze in
the juice of a lemon." When Luisa Tetrazzini was going mad with a
flute in our vicinity she varied the monotony of her life by sending
pages of her favourite recipes to the Sunday yellow press.
Unfortunately, I neglected to make a collection of this series. A
passion for cooking caused the death of Naldi, a buffo singer of the
early Nineteenth Century. Michael Kelly tells the story: "His ill
stars took him to Paris, where, one day, just before dinner, at his
friend Garcia's house, in the year 1821, he was showing the method of
cooking by steam, with a portable apparatus for that purpose;
unfortunately, in consequence of some derangement of the machinery, an
explosion took place, by which he was instantaneously killed." Almost
everybody knows some story or other about a _virtuoso_, trapped into
dining and asked to perform after dinner by his host. Kelly relates
one of the first: "Fischer, the great oboe player, whose minuet was
then all the rage ... being very much pressed by a nobleman to sup
with him after the opera, declined the invitation, saying that he was
usually much fatigued, and made it a rule never to go out after the
evening's performance. The noble lord would, however, take no denial,
and assured Fischer that he did not ask him professionally, but merely
for the gratification of his society and conversation. Thus urged and
encouraged, he went; he had not, however, been many minutes in the
house of the consistent nobleman, before his lordship approached him,
and said, 'I hope, Mr. Fischer, you have brought your oboe in your
pocket.'--'No, my Lord,' said Fischer, 'my oboe never sups.' He turned
on his heel, and instantly left the house, and no persuasion could
ever induce him to return to it." You perhaps have heard rumours that
Giuseppe Campanari prefers _spaghetti_ to Mozart, especially when he
cooks it himself. When this baritone was a member of the Metropolitan
Opera Company his paraphernalia for preparing his favourite food went
everywhere with him on tour. Heinrich Conried (or was it Maurice
Grau?) once tried to take advantage of this weakness, according to a
story often related by the late Algernon St. John Brenon. Campanari
was to appear as Kothner in _Die Meistersinger_, a character with no
singing to do after the first act, although he appears in the
procession in the third act. The singer told his impressario that he
saw no reason why he should remain to the end and explained that he
would leave his costume for a chorus man to don to represent him in
the final episode. "What would the Master say?" demanded Conried,
wringing his hands. "Would he approve of such a proceeding? No. That
would not be truth! That would not be art!" Campanari was obdurate.
The Herr Direktor became reflective. He was silent for a moment and
then he continued: "If you will stay for the last act you will find in
your room a little supper, a bottle of wine, and a box of cigars,
which you may consume while you are waiting." In sooth when Campanari
entered his dressing room after the first act of Wagner's comic opera
he found that his director had kept his word.... The baritone ate the
supper, drank the wine, put the cigars in his pocket ... and went
home!

If some singers are good cooks it does not follow that all good cooks
are singers. Benjamin Lumley, in his "Reminiscences of the Opera,"
tells the sad story of the Countess of Cannazaro's cook, which should
serve as a lesson to housemaids who are desirous of becoming moving
picture stars. "This worthy man, excellent no doubt as a _chef_, took
it into his head that he was a vocalist of the highest order, and that
he only wanted opportunity to earn musical distinction. His strange
fancy came to the knowledge of Rubini, and it was arranged that a
performance should take place in the morning, in which the cook's
talent should be fairly tested. Certainly every chance was afforded
him. Not only was he encouraged by Rubini and Lablache (whose gravity
on the occasion was wonderful), but by a few others, Costa included,
as instrumentalists. The failure was miserable, ridiculous, as
everybody expected." Frederick Crowest describes a certain Count
Castel de Maria who had a spit that played tunes, "and so regulated
and indicated the condition of whatever was hung upon it to roast. By
a singular mechanical contrivance this wonderful spit would strike up
an appropriate tune whenever a joint had hung sufficiently long on its
particular roast. Thus, _Oh! the roast beef of Old England_, when a
sirloin had turned and hung its appointed time. At another air, a leg
of mutton, _à l'Anglaise_ would be found excellent; while some other
tune would indicate that a fowl _à la Flamande_ was cooked to a nicety
and needed removal from the fowl roast."

To Crowest, too, I am indebted for a list of beverages and eatables
which certain singers held in superstitious awe as capable of
refreshing their voices. Formes swore by a pot of good porter and
Wachtel is said to have trusted to the yolk of an egg beaten up with
sugar to make sure of his high Cs. The Swedish tenor, Labatt, declared
that two salted cucumbers gave the voice the true metallic ring.
Walter drank cold black coffee during a performance; Southeim took
snuff and cold lemonade; Steger, beer; Niemann, champagne, slightly
warmed, (Huneker once saw Niemann drinking cocktails from a beer
glass; he sang Siegmund at the opera the next night); Tichatschek,
mulled claret; Rübgam drank mead; Nachbaur ate bonbons; Arabanek
believed in Gampoldskirchner wine. Mlle. Brann-Brini took beer and
_cafe au lait_, but she also firmly believed in champagne and would
never dare venture the great duet in the fourth act of _Les Huguenots_
without a bottle of Moët Crémant Rose. Giardini being asked his
opinion of Banti, previous to her arrival in England, said: "She is
the first singer in Italy and drinks a bottle of wine every day."
Malibran believed in the efficacy of porter. She made her last
appearances in opera in Balfe's _Maid of Artois_ during the fall of
1836 in London. On the first night she was in anything but good
physical condition and the author of "Musical Recollections of the
Last Half-Century" tells how she pulled herself through: "She
remembered that an immense trial awaited her in the finale of the
third act; and finding her strength giving way, she sent for Mr. Balfe
and Mr. Bunn, and told them that unless they did as they were bid,
after all the previous success, the end might result in failure; but
she said, 'Manage to let me have a pot of porter somehow or other
before I have to sing, and I will get you an encore which will bring
down the house.' How to manage this was difficult; for the scene was
so set that it seemed scarcely possible to hand her up 'the pewter'
without its being witnessed by the audience. After much consultation,
Malibran having been assured that her wish should be fulfilled, it was
arranged that the pot of porter should be handed up to her through a
trap in the stage at the moment when Jules had thrown himself on her
body, supposing that life had fled; and Mr. Templeton was drilled into
the manner in which he should so manage to conceal the necessary
arrangement, that the audience would never suspect what was going on.
At the right moment a friendly hand put the foaming pewter through the
stage, to be swallowed at a draught, and success was won!... Malibran,
however, had not overestimated her own strength. She knew that it
wanted but this fillip to carry her through. She had resolved to have
an encore, and she had it, in such a fashion as made the roof of 'Old
Drury' ring as it had never rung before. On the repetition of the
opera and afterwards, a different arrangement of the stage was made,
and a property calabash containing a pot of porter was used; but
although the same result was constantly won, Malibran always said it
was not half so 'nice,' nor did her anything like the good it would
have done if she could only have had it out of the pewter." Clara
Louise Kellogg in her very lively "Memoirs" publishes a similar tale
of another singer: "It was told of Grisi that when she was growing old
and severe exertion told on her she always, after her fall as Lucrezia
Borgia, drank a glass of beer sent up to her through the floor, lying
with her back half turned to the audience." Miss Kellogg complains of
the breaths of the tenors she sang with: "Stigelli usually exhaled an
aroma of lager beer; while the good Mazzoleni invariably ate from one
to two pounds of cheese the day he was to sing. He said it
strengthened his voice. Many of them affected garlic." It is
necessary, of course, that a singer should know what foods agree with
him. He must keep himself in excellent physical condition: small
wonder that many artists are superstitious in this regard.

Charles Santley, who was so fond of eating and drinking himself,
offers some excellent advice on the subject in "Student and Singer":
"How the voice is produced or where, except that it is through the
passage of the throat, is unimportant; it is reasonable to say that
the passage must be kept clear, otherwise the sound proceeding from it
will not be clear. I have known many instances of singers undergoing
very disagreeable operations on their throats for chronic diseases of
various descriptions; now, my observation and experience assure me
that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the root of the evil is
chronic inattention to food and raiment. It is a common thing to hear
a singer say, 'I never touch such-and-such food on the days I sing.'
My dear young friend, unless you are an absolute idiot, you would not
partake of anything on the days you sing which might disagree with
you, or over-tax your digestive powers; it is on the days you do not
sing you ought more particularly to exercise your judgment and
self-denial. I do not offer the pinched-up pilgarlic who dines off a
wizened apple and a crust of bread as a model for imitation; at the
same time, I warn you seriously against following the example of the
gobbling glutton who swallows every dish that tempts his palate."

Rossini, after he had composed _Guillaume Tell_, retired. He was
thirty-seven, a man in perfect health, and he lived thirty-nine years
longer, to the age of seventy-six, yet he never wrote another opera,
hardly indeed did he dip his pen in ink at all. These facts have
seriously disconcerted his biographers, who are at a loss to assign
reasons for his actions. W. F. Apthorp gives us an ingenious
explanation in "The Opera Past and Present." He says that after _Tell_
Rossini's pride would not allow him to return to his earlier Italian
manner, while the hard work needed to produce more _Tells_ was more
than his laziness could stomach.... Perhaps, but it must be remembered
that Rossini did not retire to his library or his music room, but to
his kitchen. The simple explanation is that he preferred cooking to
composing, a fact easy to believe (I myself vastly prefer cooking to
writing). He could cook _risotto_ better than any one else he knew. He
was dubbed a "hippopotamus in trousers," and for six years before he
died he could not see his toes, he was so fat. Sir Arthur Sullivan
relates an anecdote which shows that Rossini was conscious of his
grossness. Once in Paris Sullivan introduced Chorley to Rossini, when
the Italian said, "_Je vois, avec plaisir, que monsieur n'a pas de
ventre_." Chorley indeed was noticeably slender. Rossini could write
more easily, so his biographers tell us, when he was under the
influence of champagne or some light wine. His provision merchant once
begged him for an autographed portrait. The composer gave it to him
with the inscription, "To my stomach's best friend." The tradesman
used this souvenir as an advertisement and largely increased his
business thereby, as such a testimonial from such an acknowledged
epicure had a very definite value. J. B. Weckerlin asserts that when
Rossini dined at the Rothschild's he first went to the kitchen to pay
his respects to the _chef_, to look over the menu, and even to discuss
the various dishes, after which he ascended to the drawing room to
greet the family of the rich banker. Mme. Alboni told Weckerlin that
Rossini had dedicated a piece of music to the Rothschild's _chef_.

Anfossi, we are informed, could compose only when he was surrounded by
smoking fowls and Bologna sausages; their fumes seemed to inflame his
imagination, to feed his muse; his brain was stimulated first through
his nose and then through his stomach. When Gluck wrote music he
betook himself to the open fields, accompanied by at least two bottles
of champagne. Salieri told Michael Kelly that a comic opera of Gluck's
being performed at the Elector Palatine's theatre, at Schwetzingen,
his Electoral Highness was struck with the music, and inquired who had
composed it; on being informed that he was an honest German who loved
_old wine_, his Highness immediately ordered him a tun of Hock.
Beethoven, on the contrary, seems to have fed on his thoughts
occasionally, although there is evidence that he was not only a good
eater but also a good cook (the mothers of both Beethoven and Schubert
were cooks in domestic service). There is a story related of him that
about the time he was composing the _Sixth Symphony_ he walked into a
Viennese restaurant and ordered dinner. While it was being prepared,
he became involved in thought, and when the waiter returned to serve
him, he said: "Thank you, I have dined!" laid the price of the dinner
on the table, and took his departure. Grétry, too, lost his appetite
when he was composing. There are numerous references to eating and
drinking in Mendelssohn's letters. His particular preferences,
according to Sir George Grove, were for rice milk and cherry pie.
Dussek was a famous eater, and it is said that his ruling passion
eventually killed him. His patron, the Prince of Benevento, paid the
composer eight hundred napoleons a year, with a free table for three
persons, at which, as a matter of fact, one person usually presided. A
musical historian tells us that in the summer of 1797 he was dining
with three friends at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, when the waiter
came and laid a cloth for one person at the next table, placing
thereon a dish of boiled eels, one of fried flounders, a bowled fowl,
a dish of veal cutlets, and a couple of tarts. Then Dussek entered and
made away with the lot, leaving but the bones! In W. T. Parke's
"Musical Memoirs" justice is done to the appetite of one C. F.
Baumgarten, for many years leader of the band and composer at Covent
Garden Theatre. Once at supper after the play he and a friend ate a
full-grown hare between them. He would never condescend to drink out
of anything but a quart pot. On one occasion, at the request of his
friends, Baumgarten was weighed before and after dinner. There was
eight pounds difference! William Shield, the composer who wrote many
operas for Covent Garden Theatre, beginning aptly enough with one
called _The Flitch of Bacon_, was something of an eater. Parke tells
how at a dinner one evening there was a brace of partridges. The
hostess handed Shield one of these to carve and absent-mindedly he set
to and finished it, while the other guests were forced to make shift
with the other partridge. Handel was a great eater. He was called the
"Saxon Giant," as a tribute to his genius, but the phrase might have
had a satirical reference to his enormous bulk. Intending to dine one
day at a certain tavern, he ordered beforehand a dinner for three. At
the hour appointed he sat down to the table and expressed astonishment
that the dinner was not brought up. The waiter explained that he would
begin serving when the company arrived. "Den pring up de tinner
brestissimo," replied Handel, "I am de gombany." Lulli never forsook
the _casserole_. Paganini was as good a cook as he was a violinist.
Parke tells a story of Weichsell, not too celebrated a musician, but
the father of Mrs. Billington and Charles Weichsell, the violinist:
"He would occasionally supersede the labours of his cook, and pass a
whole day in preparing his favourite dish, rump-steaks, for the
stewing pan; and after the delicious viand had been placed on the
dinner-table, together with early green peas of high price, if it
happened that the sauce was not to his liking he has been known to
throw rump-steaks, and green peas, and all, out of the window, whilst
his wife and children thought themselves fortunate in not being thrown
after them."

Is there a cooking theme in _Siegfried_ to describe Mime's brewing?
Lavignac and others, who have listed the _Ring motive_, have neglected
to catalogue it, but it is mentioned by Old Fogy. Practically a whole
act is taken up in _Louise_ with the preparation for and consumption
of a dinner. Scarpia eats in _Tosca_ and the heroine kills him with a
table knife. There is much talk of food in _Hänsel und Gretel_ and
there is a supper in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. There are drinking
songs in _Don Giovanni_, _Lucrezia Borgia_, _Hamlet_, _La Traviata_,
_Giroflé-Girofla_.... The reference to whiskey and soda in _Madama
Butterfly_ is celebrated. J. E. Cox, the author of "Musical
Recollections," describes Herr Pischek in the supper scene of _Don
Giovanni_ as "out-heroding Herod by swallowing glass after glass of
champagne like a sot, and gnawing the drumstick of a fowl, which he
held across his mouth with his fingers, just as any of his own
middle-class countrymen may be seen any day of the week all the year
round at the _mit-tag_ or _abend-essen_ feeding at one of their
largely frequented _tables-d'hôte_." Eating or drinking on the stage
is always fraught with danger, as Charles Santley once discovered
during Papageno's supper scene in _The Magic Flute_: "The supper which
Tamino commands for the hungry Papageno consisted of pasteboard
imitations of good things, but the cup contained real wine, a small
draught of which I found refreshing on a hot night in July, amid the
dust and heat of the stage. On the occasion in question I was putting
the cup to lips, when I heard somebody call to me from the wings; I
felt very angry at the interruption, and was just about to swallow the
wine when I heard an anxious call not to drink. Suspecting something
was wrong, I pretended to drink, and deposited the cup on the table.
Immediately after the scene I made inquiries about the reason for the
caution I received, and was informed that as each night the
carpenters, who had no right to it, finished what remained of the wine
before the property men, whose perquisite it was, could lay hold of
the cup, the latter, to give their despoilers a lesson, had mingled
castor-oil with my drink!"

A young husband of my acquaintance once bemoaned to me the fact that
his wife seemed destined to become a great singer. "She is such a
remarkable cook!" he explained to account for his despondency. I
reassured him: "She will cook with renewed energy when she begins to
sing _Sieglinde_ and _Tosca_.... She will practise _Vissi d'Arte_ over
the gumbo soup and _Du herstes Wunder_! while the Frankfurters are
sizzling. Her trills, her chromatic scales, and her _messa di voce_
will come right in the kitchen; she will equalize her scale and learn
to breathe correctly bending over the oven. It is even likely that she
will improve her knowledge of _portamento_ while she is washing
dishes. When she can prepare a succulent roast suckling pig she will
be able to sing _Ocean, thou mighty monster_! and she will understand
_Abscheulicher_ when she understands the mysteries of old-fashioned
strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking _Suicidio_! invoking
Agamemnon, or appealing to the _Casta Diva_ among the kettles and pots
be not alarmed.... For the love you bear of good food, man, do not
discourage your wife's ambition. The more she loves to sing, the
better she will cook!"

  _July 17, 1917._




An Interrupted Conversation

    _"We can never depend upon any right adjustment of emotion to
    circumstance."_

                        Max Beerbohm.




An Interrupted Conversation


Ordinarily one does not learn things about oneself from Edmund Gosse,
but my discovery that I am a Pyrrhonist is due to that literary man. A
Pyrrhonist, says Mr. Gosse, is "one who doubts whether it is worth
while to struggle against the trend of things. The man who continues
to cross the road leisurely, although the cyclists' bells are ringing,
is a Pyrrhonist--and in a very special sense, for the ancient
philosopher who gives his name to the class made himself conspicuous
by refusing to get out of the way of careering chariots." Now the most
unfamiliar friend I have ever walked with knows my extreme impassivity
at the corners of streets, remembers the careless attitude with which
I saunter from kerb to kerb, whether it be across the Grand Boulevard,
Piccadilly, or Fifth Avenue. Only once has this nonchalant defiance of
traffic caused me to come to even temporary grief; that was on the
last night of the year 1913, when, in crossing Broadway, I became
entangled, God knows how, in the wheels of a swiftly passing vehicle,
and found myself, top hat and all, in the most ignominious position
before I was well aware of what had really happened. Then a policeman
stooped over me, book and pencil in hand, and another held the
chauffeur of the victorious taxi-cab at bay some yards further up the
street. But I was not hurt and I waved them all away with a
magnanimous gesture.... It is owing to this habit of mine that I often
make interesting _rencontres_ in the middle of streets. It accounts,
in fact, for my running, quite absent-mindedly, plump into Dickinson
Sitgreaves, who is more American than his name sounds, one August day
in Paris.

It was one of those charming days which make August perhaps the most
delightful month to spend in Paris, although the facts are not known
to tourists. Many a sly French pair, however, bored with Trouville, or
the season at Aix, take advantage of the allurements of a Paris August
to return surreptitiously to the boulevards. On this particular day
almost all the seduction of an October day was in the air, a splendid
dull warm-cool crispness, which filtered down through the faded
chestnut leaves from the sunlight, and left pale splotches of purple
and orange on the _trottoirs_ ... a really marvellous day, which I was
spending in that most excellent occupation in Paris of gazing into
shops and, passing cafés, staring into the faces of those who sat on
the _terrasses_.... But this is an occupation for one alone; so, when
I met Sitgreaves, we joined a _terrasse_ ourselves. We were near the
Napolitain and there he and I sat down and began to talk as only we
two can talk together after long separation. He explained in the
beginning how I had interrupted him.... There was a _fille_, some
little Polish beauty who had captivated his senses a day or so before,
brought to him quite by accident in an hotel where the _patron_
furnished his clients with such pleasure as the town and his address
book afforded.... I knew the _patron_ myself, a fluent, amusing sort
of person, who had been a _cuirassier_ and who resembled Mayol ... a
_café-concert_ proprietor of an hotel.... It was his boast that he had
never disappointed a client and it is certain that he would promise
anything. Some have said that his stock in trade was one pretty girl,
who assumed costumes, ages, hair, and accents, to please whatever
demand was made upon her, but this I do not believe. There must have
been at least two of them. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, it was
rumoured, had dined with Marcel at one time, in his little hotel, and
certainly one king had been seen to go there, and one member of the
English royal family, but Marcel remained simple and obliging.

"When will you look up the little _Polonaise_?" I asked, as we sipped
_Amer Picon_ and stared with fresh interest at each new boot and ankle
that passed. Paris in August is like another place in May.

"Why don't you come along?" queried Sitgreaves in reply, "and we could
go at once.... Oh, I know that you are in no mood for pleasure. You
see the point is that I shall have to wait. Marcel will have to send
for the _fille_. It is a bore to wait in a room with red curtains and
a picture of _Amour et Psyche_ on the walls.... What have you been
doing?" He paid the _consommation_ and started to leave without
waiting for a reply, because he knew of my complaisance. I rose with
him and we walked down the boulevard.

"What is there to do in Paris in August but to enjoy oneself?" I
asked. "I have made friends with an _apache_ and his _gigolette_. We
eat bread and cheese and drink bad wine on the fortifications.... In
the afternoon I walk. Sometimes I go to the Luxembourg gardens to hear
the band bray sad music, or to watch the little boys play _diavolo_,
or sail their tiny boats about the fountain pond; sometimes I walk
quite silently up the Avenue Gabriel, with its _triste_ line of trees,
and dream that I am a Grand Duke; in the evening there are again the
_terrasses_ of the cafés, dinner in Montmartre at the Clou, or the
Cou-Cou, a _revue_ at La Cigale, but it is all governed, my day and my
night, by what happens and by whom I meet.... Have you seen Jacques
Blanche's portrait of Nijinsky?"

"I think it is Picasso that interests me now," Sitgreaves was saying.
"He puts wood and pieces of paper into his composition; architecture,
that's what it is.... I don't go to Blanche's any more. It's too
delightfully perfect, the atmosphere there.... The books are by all
the famous writers, and they are all dedicated to Blanche; the
pictures are all of the great men of today, and they are all painted
by Blanche; the music is played by the best musicians.... Do you know,
I think Blanche is the one man who has made a successful profession of
being an amateur--unless one excepts Robert de la Condamine.... You
can scarcely call a man who does so much a dilettante. Yes, I think he
is an amateur in the best sense."

"I met the Countess of Jena there the other day," I responded. "She
had scarcely left the room before three people volunteered, _sans
rancune_, to tell her story. She is a devout Catholic, and her husband
contrived in some way to substitute a spy for the priest in the
confessional. He acquired an infinite amount of information, but it
didn't do him any good. She is so witty that every one invites her
everywhere in spite of her reputation, and he is left to dine alone at
the Meurice. Dull men simply are not tolerated in Paris.

"It was at Blanche's last year that I met George Moore," I continued.
"You know I have just seen him in London. He is at work on _The
Apostle_, making a novel of it, to be called 'The Brook Kerith.'...
For a time he thought of finishing it up as a play because a novel
meant a visit to Palestine and that was distasteful to him, but it
finally became a novel. He went to Palestine and stayed six weeks,
just long enough to find a monastery and to study the lay of the
country. For he says, truly enough, that one cannot imagine
landscapes; one does not know whether there is a high or low horizon.
There may be a brook which all the characters must cross. It is
necessary to see these things. Besides he had to find a monastery....
He told me of his thrill when he discovered an order of monks living
on a narrow ledge of cliff, with 500 feet sheer rise and descent above
and below it ... and when he had found this his work was done and he
returned to England to write the book, a reaction, for he told me that
he was getting tired of being personal in literature. The book will
exhibit a conflict between two types: Christ, the disappointed mystic,
and Paul; Christ, who sees that there is no good to be served in
saving the world by his death, and Paul, full of hope, idealism, and
illusions. It is the drama of the conflict between the nature which is
affected by externals and that which is not, he told me."

"It's a subject for Anatole France," said Sitgreaves. "Moore, in my
opinion, is not a novelist. His great achievements are his memoirs. I
was interested in 'Evelyn Innes' and 'Esther Waters,' but something
was lacking. There is nothing lacking in the three volumes of 'Hail
and Farewell.' They grow in interest. Moore has found his _métier_."

"But he insists," I explained, before the door of the little hotel,
"that 'Hail and Farewell' is a novel. He is infuriated when some one
suggests that it is a book after the manner of, say, 'The
Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill.'..."

We entered and walked up the little staircase.

"Do you mean that the incidents are untrue?"

We were at the door of the _concierge_ and there stood Marcel, his
apron spread neatly over his ample paunch. It was early in the
afternoon and the room beyond him, sometimes filled with possibilities
for customers, was empty.

"_Ah, monsieur est revenu!_" he exclaimed in his piping voice. "_C'est
pour la petite Polonaise sans doute que monsieur revient?_"

"_Oui_," answered Sitgreaves, "_faut-il attendre longtemps?_"

"_Mais non, monsieur, un petit moment. Elle habite en face. Je vais
envoyer le garçon la chercher tout de suite. Et pour monsieur, votre
ami?_"

"_Je ne desire rien_," I replied.

Marcel bowed humbly.... "_Comme monsieur voudra._" Then a doubt
assailed him. "_Peut-être que la petite Polonaise vous suffira à tous
les deux?_"

"_Jamais de la vie!_" I shouted, "_Flûte, Mercure, allez! Je suis
puceau!_"

Marcel was equal to this. "_Et ta soeur?_" he demanded as he
disappeared down the staircase.

He had put us meanwhile in the very chamber with the red curtains and
the picture of Cupid and Psyche that Sitgreaves had described. Perhaps
all the rooms were similarly decorated. I lounged on the bed while
Sitgreaves sat on a chair and smoked....

I answered his last question, "No, they are true, but there is
selection and form."

"While other memoirs have neither selection nor form and usually are
not altogether accurate in the bargain...."

"Especially Madame Melba's...."

"Especially," agreed Sitgreaves delightedly, "Madame Melba's."

"Moore is really right," I went on. "He says that some people insist
that Balzac was greater than Turgeniev, because the Frenchman took his
characters from imagination, the Russian his from life. You will
remember, however, that Edgar Saltus says, 'The manufacture of fiction
from facts was begun by Balzac.' Moore's point is that all great
writers write from observation. There is no other way. A character may
have more or less resemblance to the original; it may be derived and
bear a different name; still there must have been something.... In a
letter which Moore once wrote me stands the phrase, 'Memory is the
mother of the Muses.' 'Hail and Farewell' is just as much a work of
imagination, according to Moore, as 'A Nest of Noblemen' or 'Les
Illusions Perdues.'"

"Of course," admitted Sitgreaves. "No writer but what has suffered
from the recognition of his characters. Dickens got into trouble.
Oscar Wilde is said to have done himself in 'Dorian Gray,' and
Meredith's models for 'The Tragic Comedians' and 'Diana of the
Crossways' are well known."

"All Moore has done is to call his characters by their real names and
he has reported their conversations as he remembered them, but, mind
you, he has not put into the book all their conversations, or even all
the people he knew at that period. Arthur Symons, for instance, a
great friend of Moore's at that time, is scarcely mentioned, and with
reason: he has no part in the form of the book; its plot is not
concerned with him.

"All artists create only in the image of the things they have seen,
reduced to terms of art through their imagination. The paintings of
Mina Loy seem to the beholder the strange creations of a vagrant
fancy. I remember one picture of hers in which an Indian girl stands
poised before an oriental palace, the most fantastic of palaces, it
would seem. But the artist explained to me that it was simply the
façade of Hagenbeck's menagerie in Hamburg, seen with an imaginative
eye. The girl was a model.... One day on the beach at the Lido she saw
a young man in a bathing suit lying stretched on the sand with his
head in the lap of a beautiful woman. Other women surrounded the two.
The group immediately suggested a composition to her. She went home
and painted. She took the young man's bathing suit off and gave him
wings; the women she dressed in lovely floating robes, and she called
the picture, _l'Amour Dorloté par les Belles Dames_.

"And once I asked Frank Harris to explain to me the origin of his
vivid story, 'Montes the Matador.' 'It's too simple,' he said, 'the
model for Montes was a little Mexican greaser whom I met in Kansas. He
was one of many in charge of cattle shipped up from Mexico and down
from the States. All the white cattle men, the gringos, held him in
great contempt. But,' continued Harris, speaking deliberately with his
beautifully modulated voice, and his eyes twinkling with the memory of
the thing, 'I soon found that the greaser's contempt for the gringos
was immeasureably greater than their's for him. "Bah," he would say,
"they know nothing." And it was so. He could go into a cattle car on a
pitch dark night and make the bulls stand up, a feat that none of the
white men would have attempted. I asked him how he did this and he
told me the answer in three words, "I know them." He could go into a
herd of cattle just let loose together and pick out their leader
immediately, pick him out before the cattle themselves had! There was
the origin of "Montes the Matador." He was named, of course, after
the famous _torero_ described by Gautier in his "Voyage en Espagne."
When I was in Madrid sometime later I went to a number of bull-fights
before I put the story together.' 'But,' I asked Harris, 'Is it
possible for an _espada_ to stand in the bull ring with his back to
the bull, during a charge, as you have made him do frequently in the
story?' 'Of course not,' he answered me at once, smiling his frankly
malevolent smile, 'Of course not. That part was put in to show how
much the public will stand for in a work of fiction. I believe one of
the _espadas_ tried it some time after the book appeared and was
immediately killed.'

"Fiction, history, poetry, criticism, at their best, are all the same
thing. When they inflame the imagination and stir the pulse they are
identical: all creative work. It does not matter what a man writes
about. It matters how he writes it. Subject is nothing. Should we
regard Velasquez as less important than Murillo because the former
painted portraits of contemporaries, whom in his fashion he
criticized, while the Spanish Bouguereau disguised his models as the
Virgin? Walter Pater's description of the _Monna Lisa_ would live if
the picture disappeared. Indeed it has created a factitious interest
in da Vinci's masterwork. Even more might be said for Huysmans's
description of Moreau's _Salomé_, which actually puts the figures in
the picture in motion! The critic, the historian at their best are
creative artists as the writers of fiction are creative artists.
Should we regard, for example, 'Imperial Purple' less a work of
creative art than 'The Rise of Silas Lapham'?"

"I am getting your meaning more and more," said Sitgreaves. "And it
occurs to me that perhaps I have been unjust in rating Moore low as a
novelist. Perhaps I should have said that he is more successful in
those books which depend more on his memory and less on his
imaginative instinct. He cannot, after all, have known Jesus and
Paul...."

"You are quite wrong," I said. "At least from his point of view. He
says that he knows Paul better than he has ever known any one else. He
even finds hair on Paul's chest. He can describe Paul, I believe, to
the last mole. He knows his favourite colours, and whether he prefers
artichokes to alligator pears. As for Christ, everybody professes to
know Christ these days. Since the world has become distinctly
un-Christian it has become comparatively easy to discuss Christ. He
is regarded as an historical character, and a much more simple one
than Napoleon. I have heard anarchists in bar-rooms talk about him by
the hour, sometimes very graphically and always with a certain amount
of wit. No, it is all the same.... Moore, now that he has been to
Palestine and read the gospels, feels as well acquainted with Christ
and Paul as he does with Edward Martyn and Yeats and Lady Gregory."

"I must fall back on the personal then," said Sitgreaves, now really
at bay, "and say that I am less moved and interested when Moore is
describing Evelyn Innes, than when he tells of his affair with Doris
at Orelay."

"I am glad that you mentioned 'Evelyn Innes' again," I said, "because
it is in this very book that he is said to have painted so many of his
friends. Ulick Dean is undoubtedly Yeats. It has been suggested that
Arnold Dolmetsch posed for the portrait of Evelyn's father.
Dolmetsch's testimony on this point goes farther. He says that he
dictated certain passages in the book...."

"What is it, then? What is the difference? There is some difference,
of that I am sure...."

"The difference is--" I began when the door opened and Marcel entered,
the most amazingly comprehensive smile on his countenance.
"_Mademoiselle vous attend_," he said, and he looked the question.
"Shall I bring her in here?"

Sitgreaves answered it immediately, "_Je viens_." And then to me,
"Wait," as he vanished through the doorway.... I walked to the window,
drew aside the red curtains, and looked out into the fountain-splashed
court below....

       *       *       *       *       *

"What is the difference?"

"I suppose it is that you prefer the new Moore to the old Moore, the
author of the later and better written books to the author of the
earlier ones. 'Evelyn Innes' was many times rewritten. Moore has said
that he could never get it to suit him, but he has also said,
recently, that he would never rewrite another book (a resolution he
has not kept). 'Memoirs of My Dead Life' and 'Hail and Farewell' do
not need rewriting. They are written to stand. 'The Brook Kerith,'
perhaps, you will find equally to your taste. It will be the newest
Moore...."

"You have explained to me," said Sitgreaves, "the difference: it is
one of development. Now that I think of it I don't believe that
Anatole France could write 'The Brook Kerith.'... It would be too
symbolical, too cynical, in his hands. Moore will perhaps make it
more human, by knowing the characters. I wonder," he continued
musingly, as we left the room, and descended the stairs, "if he told
you whether that hair on Paul's chest was red or black...."

  _February 1, 1915._




The Authoritative Work on
American Music




The Authoritative Work on American Music


H. L. Mencken pointed out to me recently, in his most earnest and
persuasive manner, that it was my duty to write a book about the
American composers, exposing their futile pretensions and describing
their flaccid _opera_, stave by stave. It was in vain that I urged
that this would be but a sleeveless errand, arguing that I could not
fight men of straw, that these our composers had no real standing in
the concert halls, and that pushing them over would be an easy
exercise for a child of ten. On the contrary, he retorted, they
belonged to the academies; certain people believed that they were
important; it was necessary to dislodge this belief. I suggested, with
a not too heavily assumed humility, that I had already done something
of the sort in an essay entitled "The Great American Composer." "A
good beginning," asserted Col. Mencken, "but not long enough. I won't
be satisfied with anything less than a book." "But if I wrote a book
about Professors Parker, Chadwick, Hadley, and the others I could find
nothing different to say about them; they are all alike. Neither
their lives nor their music offer opportunities for variations." "An
excellent idea!" cried Major Mencken, enthusiastically, "Write one
chapter and then repeat it verbatim throughout the book, changing only
the name of the principal character. Then clap on a preface,
explaining your reason for this procedure." My last protest was the
feeblest of all: "I can't spend a year or a month or a week poring
over the scores of these fellows; I can't go to concerts to hear their
music. I might as well go to work in a coal mine." "I'll do it for
you!" triumphantly checkmated General Mencken. "I'll read the scores
and you shall write the book!" And so he left me, as on a similar
occasion the fiend, having exhibited his prospectus, vanished from the
eyes of our Lord. And I returned to my home sorely troubled, finding
that the words of the man were running about in my head like so many
little Japanese waltzing mice.

And, after much cogitation, I went to such and such a book case and
took down a certain volume written by Louis Charles Elson (a very
large red tome) and another by Rupert Hughes, to see if their words of
praise for our weak musical brothers would stir me to action. I found
that they did not. My heart action remained normal; no film covered
my eyes; foam did not issue from my mouth. Indeed I read, quite
calmly, in Mr. Hughes's "American Composers" that A. J. Goodrich is
"recognized among scholars abroad as one of the leading spirits of our
time"; that "(Henry Holden) Huss has ransacked the piano and pillaged
almost every imaginable fabric of high colour.... The result is
gorgeous and purple"; that "The thing we are all waiting for is that
American grand opera, _The Woman of Marblehead_ (by Louis Adolphe
Coerne). It is predicted that it will not receive the marble heart";
that "I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting
the fires that burn in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes (than
Arthur Foote). His two gavottes are to me away the best since Bach";
that "the song (_Israfel_ by Edgar Stillman-Kelley) is in my fervent
belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the very greatest
lyrics in the world's music"; and in "The History of American Music"
by Louis C. Elson that "Music has made even more rapid strides than
literature among us," and that "he (George W. Chadwick) has reconciled
the symmetrical (sonata) form with modern passion." But it was in the
fourth volume of "The Art of Music," published by the National Society
of Music, that I found the supreme examples of this kind of writing.
The volume was edited by Arthur Farwell and W. Dermot Darby. Therein I
read with a sort of awed astonishment that one of the songs of
Frederick Ayres "reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception
and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer." I learned
that T. Carl Whitmer has a "spiritual kinship" with Arthur Shepherd,
Hans Pfitzner, and Vincent d'Indy. His music is "psychologically
subtle and spiritually rarefied: in colour it corresponds to the
violet end of the spectrum." I turned the pages until I came to the
name of Miss Gena Branscombe: "Inexhaustible buoyancy, a superlative
emotional wealth, and wholly singular gift of musical intuition are
the qualities which have shaped the composer's musical personality
(without much effort of the imagination we might say that they are the
qualities that shaped Beethoven's musical personality).... Her
impatient melodies leap and dash with youthful life, while her
accompaniments abound in harmonic hairbreadth escapes." Before he
became acquainted with the later French idiom Harvey W. Loomis
"spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now
recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel."

Curiously enough, however, these statements did not annoy me. I found
no desire arising in me to deny them and doubtless, though mayhap with
a guilty conscience, I should have ditched the undertaking, consigned
it to that heap of undone duties, where already lie notes on a
comparison of Andalusian mules with the mules of Liane de Pougy, a few
scribbled memoranda for a treatise on the love habits of the mole, and
a half-finished biography of the talented gentleman who signed his
works, "Nick Carter," if my by this time quite roving eye had not
alighted, entirely fortuitously, on one of the forgotten glories of my
library, a slender volume entitled "Popular American Composers."

I recalled how I had bought this book. Happening into a modest
second-hand bookshop on lower Third Avenue, maintained chiefly for the
laudable purpose of redistributing paper novels of the Seaside and
kindred libraries, of which, alas, we hear very little nowadays, I
asked the proprietor if by chance he possessed any literature relating
to the art of music. By way of answer, he retired to the very back of
his little room, searched for a space in a litter on the floor, and
then returned with a pile of nine volumes or so in his arms. The
titles, such as "Great Violinists," "Harmony in Thirteen Lessons,"
and "How to Sing," did not intrigue me, but in idly turning the pages
of this "Popular American Composers" I came across a half-tone
reproduction of a photograph of Paul Dresser, the only less celebrated
brother of Theodore Dreiser, with a short biography of the composer of
_On the Banks of the Wabash_. As Sir George Grove in his excellent
dictionary neglected to mention this portentous name in American Art
and Letters (although he devoted sixty-seven pages, printed in double
columns, to Mendelssohn) I saw the advantage of adding the little book
to my collection. The bookseller, when questioned, offered to
relinquish the volume for a total of fifteen cents, and I carried it
away with me. Once I had become more thoroughly acquainted with its
pages I realized that I would willingly have paid fifteen dollars for
it.

This book, indeed, cannot fail to delight General Mencken. There is no
reference in its pages to Edgar Stillman-Kelley, Miss Gena Branscombe,
Louis Adolphe Coerne, Henry Holden Huss, T. Carl Whitmer, Arthur
Farwell, Arthur Foote, or A. J. Goodrich. In fact, if we overlook
brief notices of John Philip Sousa, Harry von Tilzer, Paul Dresser,
Charles K. Harris, and Hattie Starr (whom you will immediately recall
as the composer of _Little Alabama Coon_), the author, Frank L.
Boyden, has not hesitated to go to the roots of his subject, pushing
aside the college professors and their dictums, and has turned his
attention to figures in the art life of America, from whom, Mencken
himself, I feel sure, would not take a single paragraph of praise, so
richly is it deserved. I am unfamiliar with the causes contributing to
this book's comparative obscurity; perhaps, indeed, they are similar
to those responsible for the early failure of "Sister Carrie." May not
we even suspect that the odium cast by the Doubledays on the author of
that romance might have been actively transferred in some degree to a
work which contained a biographical notice and a picture of his
brother? At any rate, "Popular American Composers," published in 1902,
fell into undeserved oblivion and so I make no apology for inviting my
readers to peruse its pages with me.

Opening the book, then, at random, I discover on page 96 a biography
of Lottie A. Kellow (her photograph graces the reverse of this page).
In a few well-chosen words (almost indeed in "gipsy phrases") Mr.
Boyden gives us the salient details of her career. Mrs. Kellow is a
resident of Cresco, Iowa, a church singer of note, and the possessor
of a contralto voice of great volume. As a composer she has to her
credit "marches, cakewalks, schottisches, and other styles of
instrumental music." We are given a picture of Mrs. Kellow at work:
"Mrs. Kellow's best efforts are made in the evening, and in darkness,
save the light of the moonbeams on the keys of her piano." We are also
told that "she is happy in her inspirations and a sincere lover of
music. All of her compositions show a decided talent and possess
musical elements which are only to be found in the works of an artist.
Mrs. Kellow's musical friends are confident of her success as a
composer and predict for her a brilliant future."

Let us turn to the somewhat more extensive biography of W. T. Mullin
on Page 4 (his photograph faces this page). Almost in the first line
the author rewards our attention: "To him may be applied the simplest
and grandest eulogy Shakespeare ever pronounced: 'He was a man.'" We
are also informed that he was born of a cultured family, that his
inherited nobility of character has been carefully fostered by a
thorough education, and told that one finds in him the unusual
combination of genius wedded to sound common sense and practical
business capacity. His family moved to Colorado, Texas, while he was
still a lad and here his musical talent began to display itself. "The
inventive faculties of the small boy, and the innate harmony of the
musician, combined to improvise a crude instrument which emitted the
notes of the scale. Successful at drawing forth a concord of sweet
sounds, he continued to experiment upon everything which would emit
musical vibrations. (Even the pigs, I take it, did not escape.) He
consequently discovered the laws of vibrating chords before he had
mastered the intricacies of the multiplication table. Yet strange as
it may seem, his musical education was neglected. A four months'
course in piano instruction was interrupted and then resumed for two
months more. Upon this meagre foundation rested his subsequent
phenomenal progress." I pause to point out to the astonished and
breathless reader that even Mozart and Schubert, infant prodigies that
they were, received more training than this.

I continue to quote: "At the age of thirteen he joined The Colorado
(Texas) Cornet Band as a charter member. The youngest member of the
band, he soon outstripped his comrades by virtue of his superior
natural ability. His position was that of second tenor. Wearying of
the monotony of playing, he determined to venture on solo work. The
boy felt the impetus of restless power and the following incident
illustrates his remarkable originality. Taking the piano score of a
favourite melody he transposed it within the compass of the second
tenor. This feat evoked admiring applause because of his extreme youth
and untrained abilities. The band-master remarked that elderly and
experienced heads could hardly have accomplished this.

"From boyhood to manhood he has remained with the Colorado (Texas)
band as one of its most efficient members, composing in his leisure
moments, marches, ragtimes, waltzes, song and dance schottisches, etc.
Of his many meritorious compositions only one has so far been given to
the public:--_The West Texas Fair March_, composed for and dedicated
to the management of the West Texas Fair and Round-up. This
institution holds its annual meetings at Abilene, Texas. There the
march was played for the first time at their October, 1899, meet with
great success, and again at their September, 1900, meet by the
Stockman band of Colorado, Texas, which has furnished music for the
West Texas Fair during their 1899 and 1900 meetings. Mr. Mullin's
position in the Stockman band is that of euphonium soloist. He is a
proficient performer upon all band instruments from cornet to tuba,
including slide trombone, his favourites being the baritone and the
trombone.

"He plays many stringed instruments, as well as the piano and organ.
He is the proud possessor of a genuine Stradivarius violin--a family
heirloom--which he naturally prizes beyond the intrinsic value. The
feat of playing on several instruments at once presents no difficulty
to him.

"This briefly sketches Mr. Mullin's life, character and ability as a
musician. His accompanying photograph reveals his superb physique.
Personally he possesses charming, agreeable manners and Chesterfieldan
courteousness, which vastly contributes to his popularity. Sincere
devotion to his art has been rewarded by that elevating nobility of
soul, which alone can penetrate the blue expanse of space and revel in
the music of the spheres."

What more is there to say? I can only assure the reader that Mullin
stands unique among all musicians, creative and interpretative, in
being able to play the organ, many stringed instruments, and all the
instruments in a brass band (several of them simultaneously; it would
be interesting to know which and how) after studying the piano for six
months. I sincerely hope that the mistake he made in withholding all
his compositions, save one, from the public, has been rectified.

Helen Kelsey Fox, like so many of our talented men and women, has a
European strain in her blood. She is a lineal descendant on her
mother's side of a French nobleman and a German princess. Nevertheless
she continues to reside in Vermilion, Ohio. She is of a "decided
poetic nature and lives in an atmosphere of her own. She dwells in a
world of thought peopled by the creations of an active and lyric
mentality." She is so imbued with the poetic spark that, as she
expresses it, she "speaks in rhyme half the time."

John Z. Macdonald, strictly speaking, is not an American composer. He
was born in Scotland and came to America in 1881 at the age of 21, but
as he is one of the very few composers since Nero to enter public
political life he well deserves a place in this collection. In 1890 he
was elected city clerk of Brazil, Indiana, a position which he held
for seven years. In 1898 he was elected treasurer of Clay County,
Indiana. This county is democratic "by between five and six hundred"
but Mr. Macdonald was elected on the republican ticket by a majority
of 133. He was the only republican elected. Among the best known of
Mr. Macdonald's compositions is his famous "expansion" song, in which
he predicted the fate of Aguinaldo. He has autograph letters, praising
this song, from the late President McKinley, Col. Roosevelt, General
Harrison, Admiral Schley, John Philip Sousa and other "eminent
gentlemen."

Edward Dyer, born in Washington, was the son of a marble cutter who
"helped to erect the U. S. Treasury, Patent Office, and Capitol.... In
the majority of his compositions there is a tinge of sadness which
appeals to his auditors.... Mr. Dyer never descends to coarseness or
vulgarity in his productions; he writes pure, clean words, something
that can be sung in the home, school and on the stage to refined
respectable people."

We learn much of the study years of Mrs. Lucy L. Taggart: "From
earliest childhood she received valuable musical instruction from her
father (Mr. Longsdon) who, coming from England in 1835, purchased the
first piano that came to Chicago, an elegant hand-carved instrument
that is still treasured in the old home." Later "she studied under
Prof. C. E. Brown, of Owego, N. Y., Prof. Heimburger, of San Francisco
and Herr Chas. Goffrie. Mrs. Taggart was also for five years a pupil
of Senor Arevalo, the famous guitar soloist of Los Angeles.... Mrs.
Taggart has in preparation (1902) _Methought He Touched the Strings_,
an idyl for piano in memory of the late Senor M. S. Arevalo."

David Weidley, born in Philadelphia, is the composer of the following
songs, _Old Spooney Spooppalay_, _Jennie Ree_, _Autumn Leaves_,
_Hannah Glue_, and _Uncle Reuben and Aunt Lucinda_. "He has done much
to create and elevate a taste for music in the community where he
resides and where he is known as 'Dave.' Even the little children call
him 'Dave' as freely and innocently as those who have known him for
years, and there can be no greater compliment for any man than that he
is known and loved by the children. Mr. Weidley is by profession a
sheet metal worker. He is a P. G. of the I. O. O. F., and a P. C. in
the Knights of Pythias. He is not identified with any church, but
loves and serves his fellow-men."

In the biography of Delmer G. Palmer we are assured that "Versatility
is a trait with which musical composers are not excessively burdened.
There are few performers who can include _The Moonlight Sonata_ and
Schubert's _Serenade_ with selections from _The Merry-go-round_, and
do justice to the expression of each, much less would such
adaptability be looked for among composers. As most rules have
exceptions, in this there is one who stands in a class occupied by no
one else, Mr. Delmer G. Palmer, the 'Green Mountain Composer,' who at
present resides in Kansas City.

"As recently as 1899 Mr. Palmer wrote a song in the popular 'ragtime,'
_My Sweetheart is a Midnight Coon_ and almost in the same breath also
wrote the heavy sacred solo, _Christ in Gethsemane_. The first is of
the usual light order characteristic of this class of music. The
latter is as far removed to the contrary as is comedy from tragedy.
The 'coon' song entered the bubbling effervescing cauldron of what is
termed 'ragtime' music among the multitudinous others, and soon was
seen peeping through at the surface among the lightest and most
catchy.... The sacred solo found its level among the heavier in its
class, and if the term may be here applied, it was also a hit."

S. Duncan Baker, born August 25, 1855, still lives (1902) in the old
family residence at Natchez, Miss. "In this house is located the den
where he has spent many hours with his collection of banjos and
pictures and in writing for and playing on the instrument which he
adopted as a favourite during its dark days (about 1871)." We are told
that he composed an "artistic banjo solo," entitled, _Memories of
Farland_. "Had this production or its companion piece, _Thoughts of
the Cadenza_, been written by an old master for some other instrument
and later have been adapted by a modern composer to the banjo, either
or both of them would have been pronounced classic, barring some
slight defects in form."

I cannot stop to quote from the delightful accounts offered us of the
lives and works of Albert Matson, George D. Tufts, D. O. Loy, Lavinia
Pascoe Oblad, and forty or fifty other American singers, but it seems
to me that I have done enough, Mencken, to prove to you that the great
book on American music has been written. Without one single mention of
the names of Horatio Parker, George W. Chadwick, Frederick Converse,
or Henry Hadley, by a transference of the emphasis to the place where
it belongs, the author of this undying book has answered your prayer.

  _December 11, 1917._




Old Days and New




Old Days and New


Some toothless old sentimentalist or other periodically sets up a
melancholy howl for "the good old days of comic opera," whatever or
whenever they were. Perhaps none of us, once past forty, is guiltless
in this respect. Nothing, not even the smell of an apple-blossom from
the old homestead, the sight of a daguerreotype of a miss one kissed
at the age of ten, or a taste of a piece of the kind of pie that
"mother used to make" so arouses the sensibility of a man of middle
age as the memory of some musical show which he saw in his budding
manhood. That is why revivals of these venerable institutions are
frequently projected and, some of them, very successfully
accomplished. When a manager revives an old drama he must appeal to
the interest of his audience; it may not be the identical interest
which held the original spectators of the piece spell-bound, but, none
the less, it must be an interest. When a manager revives an old
musical comedy he appeals directly to sentiment.

Of course, the exact date of the good old days is a variable quantity.
I have known a vain regretter to turn no further back than to the
nights of _The Merry Widow_, _The Waltz Dream_, _The Chocolate
Soldier_, _The Girl in the Train_, and _The Dollar Princess_, in other
words to the Viennese renaissance; another, in using the phrase, is
subconsciously conjuring up pictures of _La Belle Hélène_, _Orphée aux
Enfers_, or _La Fille de Madame Angot_, good fodder for memory to feed
on here; a third will instinctively revert to the Johann Strauss
operetta period, the era of _The Queen's Lace Handkerchief_ and _Die
Fledermaus_; a fourth cries, "Give us Gilbert and Sullivan!" A fifth,
when his ideas are chased to their lair, will rhapsodize endlessly
over the charms of the London Gaiety when _The Geisha_, _The Country
Girl_, and _The Circus Girl_ were in favour; a sixth, it seems, finds
his pleasure in Americana, _Robin Hood_, _Wang_, _The Babes in
Toyland_, and _El Capitan_; a seventh becomes maudlin to the most
utter degree when you mention _Les Cloches de Corneville_, or _La
Mascotte_, products of a decadent stage in the history of French
opéra-bouffe. Not long ago I heard a man speak of the cadet operas in
Boston (did a man named Barnet write them?) as the last of the great
musical pieces; and every one of you who reads this essay will have a
brother, or a son, or a friend who went to see _Sybil_ forty-three
times and _The Girl from Utah_ seventy-six. Twenty years from now, as
he sits before the open fire, the mere mention of _They Wouldn't
Believe Me_ will cause the tears to course down his cheeks as he pats
the pate of his infant son or daughter and weepingly describes the
never-to-be-forgotten fascination of Julia Sanderson, the (in the then
days) unattainable agility of Donald Brian.

In no other form of theatrical entertainment is the appeal to softness
so direct. The man who attends a performance of a musical farce goes
in a good mood, usually with a couple of friends, or possibly with
_the_ girl. If he has dined well and his digestion is in working order
and he is young enough, the spell of the lights and the music is
irresistible to his receptive and impressionable nature. There are
those young men, of course, who are constant attendants because of the
altogether too wonderful hair of the third girl from the right in the
front row. Others succumb to the dental perfection of the prima donna
or to the shapely legs of the soubrette. All of us, I am almost proud
to admit, at some time or other, are subject to the contagion. I well
remember the year in which I considered myself as a possible suitor
for the hand of Della Fox. Photographs and posters of this deity
adorned my walls. I was an assiduous collector of newspaper clippings
referring to her profoundly interesting activities, although my
sophistication had not reached the stage where I might appeal to
Romeike for assistance. The mere mention of Miss Fox's name was
sufficient cause to make me blush profusely. Eventually my father was
forced to take steps in the matter when I began, in a valiant effort
to summon up the spirit of the lady's presence, to disturb the early
morning air with vocal assaults on _She Was a Daisy_, which, you will
surely remember, was the musical gem of _The Little Trooper_. Here are
the words of the refrain:

    "She was a daisy, daisy, daisy!
    Driving me crazy, crazy, crazy!
    Helen of Troy and Venus were to her cross-eyed crones!
    She was dimpled and rosy, rosy, rosy!
    Sweet as a posy, posy, posy!
    How I doted upon her, my Ann Jane Jones!"

You will admit, I think, at first glance, the superior literary
quality of these lines; you will perceive at once to what immeasurably
higher class of art they belong than the lyrics that librettists forge
for us today.

Wall Street broker, poet, green grocer, soldier, banker, lawyer,
whatever you are, confess the facts to yourself: you were once as I.
You have suffered the same feelings that I suffered. Perhaps with you
it was not Della Fox.... Who then? Did saucy Marie Jansen awaken your
admiration? Was pert Lulu Glaser the object of your secret but
persistent attention? How many times did you go to see Marie Tempest
in _The Fencing Master_, or Alice Nielsen in _The Serenade_? Was
Virginia Earle in _The Circus Girl_ the idol of your youth or was it
Mabel Barrison in _The Babes in Toyland_? Theresa Vaughn in _1492_,
May Yohe in _The Lady Slavey_, Hilda Hollins in _The Magic Kiss_, or
Nancy McIntosh in _His Excellency_? Madge Lessing in _Jack and the
Beanstalk_, Edna May in _The Belle of New York_, Phyllis Rankin in
_The Rounders_, or Gertrude Quinlan in _King Dodo_?

What do you whistle in your bathtub when you are in a reminiscent
mood? Is it _The Typical Tune of Zanzibar_, or _Baby, Baby, Dance My
Darling Baby_, or _Starlight, Starbright_, or _Tell Me, Pretty
Maiden_, or _A Simple Little String_, or _J'aime les Militaires_ (if
you whistle this, ten to one your next door neighbour thinks you have
been to an orchestra concert and heard Beethoven's _Seventh
Symphony_), or _Sister Mary Jane's Top Note_, or _A Wandering
Minstrel I_, or _See How It Sparkles_, or the _Lullaby_ from
_Erminie_, which Pauline Hall used to sing as if she herself were
asleep, and which Emma Abbott interpolated in _The Mikado_, or _A
Pretty Girl, A Summer Night_, or the _Policeman's Chorus_ from _The
Pirates of Penzance_, or _The Soldiers in the Park_, or _My Angeline_,
or the _Letter Song_ from _The Chocolate Soldier_, or _I'm Little
Buttercup_, or the _Gobble Song_ from _The Mascot_, or the _Anna Song_
from _Nanon_, or the march from _Fatinitza_, or _I'm All the Way from
Gay Paree_, or _Love Comes Like a Summer Sigh_, or _In the North Sea
Lived a Whale_, or _Jusqu'là_, or _The Harmless Little Girlie With the
Downcast Eyes_, or _They All Follow Me_, or _The Amorous Goldfish_, or
_Don't Be Cross_, or _Slumber On, My Little Gypsy Sweetheart_, or
_Good-bye Flo_, or _La Légende de la Mère Angot_, or _My Alamo Love_?

There is a very subtle and fragrant charm about these old
recollections which the sight or sound of a score, a view of an old
photograph of Lillian Russell or Judic, or a dip in the _Théâtre
Complet_ of Meilhac and Halévy will reawaken. But it is only at a
revival of one of our old favourites that we can really bathe in
sentimentality, drink in draughts of joy from the past, allow memory
full away. You whose hair is turning white will be in Row A, Seat No.
1 for the first performance of a revival of _Robin Hood_. You will not
hear Edwin Hoff in his original rôle; Jessie Bartlett Davis is dead
and, alas, Henry Clay Barnabee is no longer on the boards, but the
newcomers, possibly, are respectable substitutes and the airs and
lines remain. You can walk about in the lobby and say proudly that you
attended the _first_ performance of the opera ever so long ago when
operettas had tune and reason. "Yes sir, there were plots in those
days, and composers, and the singers could _act_. Times have certainly
changed, sir. Come to the corner and have a Manhattan.... There were
no cocktails in those days.... There is no singer like Mrs. Davis
today!"

Well the poor souls who cannot feel tenderly about a past they have
not yet experienced have their recompenses. For one thing I am certain
that the revivals of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to which De
Wolf Hopper devoted his best talents were better, in many respects,
than the original London productions; just as I am equally certain
that the representations of _Aida_ at the Metropolitan Opera House are
way ahead of the original performance of that work given at Cairo
before the Khedive of Egypt.

Then there is the musical revue, a form which we have borrowed from
the French, but which we have vastly improved upon and into which we
have poured some of our most national feeling and expression. The
interpretation of these frivolities is a new art. Gaby Deslys may be
only half a loaf compared to Marie Jansen, but I am sure that Elsie
Janis is more than three-quarters. Frank Tinney and Al Jolson can, in
their humble way, efface memories of Digby Bell and Dan Daly. Adele
Rowland and Marie Dressler have their points (and curves). Irving
Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, and Jerome Kern are not to be sniffed at.
Neither is P. G. Wodehouse. Harry B. Smith we have always with us: he
is the Sarah Bernhardt of librettists.

Joseph Urban has wrought a revolution in stage settings for this form
of entertainment. Louis Sherwin has offered us convincing evidence to
support his theory that the new staging in America is coming to us by
way of the revue and not through the serious drama. Melville Ellis,
Lady Duff-Gordon, and Paul Poiret have done their bit for the dresses.
In fact, my dear young man--who are reading this article--you will
feel just as tenderly in twenty years about the _Follies of 1917_ as
your father does now about _Wang_. Only, and this is a very big ONLY,
the _Follies of 1917_, depending as it does entirely on topical
subjects and dimpled knees, cannot be revived. Fervid and enlivening
as its immediate impression may be it cannot be lasting. You can never
recapture the thrills of this summer by sitting in Row A, Seat No. 1
at any 1937 _reprise_. There can never be anything of the sort. The
revue, like the firefly, is for a night only. We take it in with the
daily papers ... and the next season, already old-fashioned, it goes
forth to show Grinnell and Davenport how Mlle. Manhattan deported
herself the year before.

So if the youth of these days chooses to be sentimental in the years
to come over the good old days of Urban scenery and Olive Thomas, the
Balloon Girls of the Midnight Frolic and the chorus of the Winter
Garden, he will be obliged to give way to the mood at home in front of
the fire, see the pictures in the smoke, and hear the tunes in the
dropping of the coals. Which is perhaps as it should be. For in 1937
the youth of that epoch can sit in Row A, Seat No. 1 himself and not
be ousted from his place by a sentimental gentleman of middle age who
longs to hear _Poor Butterfly_ again.

  _April 25, 1917._




Two Young American Playwrights

     _"Gautier had a theory to the effect that to be a member of
     the Academy was simply and solely a matter of
     predestination. 'There is no need to do anything,' he would
     say, 'and so far as the writing of books is concerned that
     is entirely useless. A man is born an Academician as he is
     born a bishop or a cook. He can abuse the Academy in a dozen
     pamphlets if it amuses him, and be elected all the same; but
     if he is not predestined, three hundred volumes and ten
     masterpieces, recognized as such by the genuflections of an
     adoring universe, will not aid him to open its doors.'
     Evidently Balzac was not predestined but then neither was
     Molière, and there must have been some consolation for him
     in that."_

                        Edgar Saltus.




Two Young American Playwrights


In the newspaper reports relating to the death of Auguste Rodin I read
with some astonishment that if the venerable sculptor, who lacked
three years of being eighty when he died, had lived two weeks longer
he would have been admitted to the French Academy! In other words, the
greatest stone-poet since Michael Angelo, internationally famous and
powerful, the most striking artist figure, indeed, of the last half
century, was to be permitted, in the extremity of old age, to inscribe
his name on a scroll, which bore the signatures of many inoffensive
nobodies. I could not have been more amused if the newspapers, in
publishing the obituary notices of John Jacob Astor, had announced
that if the millionaire had not perished in the sinking of the
_Titanic_, his chances of being invited to join the Elks were good; or
if "Variety" or some other tradespaper of the music halls, had
proclaimed, just before Sarah Bernhardt's début at the Palace Theatre,
that if her appearances there were successful she might expect an
invitation to membership in the White Rats.... These hypothetical
instances would seem ridiculous ... but they are not. The Rodin case
puts a by no means seldom-recurring phenomenon in the centre of the
stage under a calcium light. The ironclad dreadnaughts of the academic
world, the reactionary artists, the dry-as-dust lecturers are
constantly ignoring the most vital, the most real, the most important
artists while they sing polyphonic, antiphonal, Palestrinian motets in
praise of men who have learned to imitate comfortably and efficiently
the work of their predecessors.

       *       *       *       *       *

If there are other contemporary French sculptors than Rodin their
names elude me at the moment; yet I have no doubt that some ten or
fifteen of these hackmen have their names emblazoned in the books of
all the so-called "honour" societies in Paris. It is a comfort, on the
whole, to realize that America is not the only country in which such
things happen. As a matter of fact, they happen nowhere more often
than in France.

If some one should ask you suddenly for a list of the important
playwrights of France today, what names would you let roll off your
tongue, primed by the best punditic and docile French critics? Henry
Bataille, Paul Hervieu, and Henry Bernstein. Possibly Rostand. Don't
deny this; you know it is true, unless it happens you have been doing
some thinking for yourself. For even in the works of Remy de Gourmont
(to be sure this very clairvoyant mind did not often occupy itself
with dramatic literature) you will find little or nothing relating to
Octave Mirbeau and Georges Feydeau. True, Mirbeau did not do his best
work in the theatre. That stinging, cynical attack on the courts of
Justice (?) of France (nay, the world!), "Le Jardin de Supplice" is
not a play and it is probably Mirbeau's masterpiece and the best piece
of critical fiction written in France (or anywhere else) in the last
fifty years. However Mirbeau shook the pillars of society even in the
playhouse. _Le Foyer_ was hissed repeatedly at the Théâtre Français.
Night after night the proceedings ended in the ejection and arrest of
forty or fifty spectators. Even to a mere outsider, an idle bystander
of the boulevards, this complete exposure of the social, moral, and
political hypocricies of a nation seemed exceptionally brutal. _Le
Foyer_ and "Le Jardin" could only have been written by a man
passionately devoted to the human ideal ("each as she may," as
Gertrude Stein so beautifully puts it). _Les Affaires sont les
Affaires_ is pure theatre, perhaps, but it might be considered the
best play produced in France between Becque's _La Parisienne_ and
Brieux's _Les Hannetons_.

It is not surprising, on the whole, to find the critical tribe turning
for relief from this somewhat unpleasant display of Gallic closet
skeletons to the discreet exhibition of a few carefully chosen bones
in the plays of Bernstein and Bataille, direct descendants of Scribe,
Sardou, _et Cie_, but I may be permitted to indulge in a slight
snicker of polite amazement when I discover these gentlemen applying
their fingers to their noses in no very pretty-meaning gesture,
directed at a grandson of Molière. For such is Georges Feydeau. His
method is not that of the Seventeenth Century master, nor yet that of
Mirbeau; nevertheless, aside from these two figures, Beaumarchais,
Marivaux, Becque, Brieux at his best, and Maurice Donnay occasionally,
there has not been a single writer in the history of the French
theatre so inevitably _au courant_ with human nature. His form is
frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as
_good shows_ that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the
playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the
political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the
French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the
aforementioned Mirbeau. In _On Purge Bébé_ he has written saucy
variations on a theme which Rabelais, Boccaccio, George Moore, and
Molière in collaboration would have found difficult to handle. It is
as successful an experiment in bravado and bravura as Mr. Henry
James's "The Turn of the Screw." And he has accomplished this feat
with nimbleness, variety, authority, even (granting the subject)
delicacy. Seeing it for the first time you will be so submerged in
gales of uncontrollable laughter that you will perhaps not recognize
at once how every line reveals character, how every situation springs
from the foibles of human nature. Indeed in this one-act farce
Feydeau, with about as much trouble as Zeus took in transforming his
godship into the semblance of a swan, has given you a well-rounded
picture of middle-class life in France with its external and internal
implications.... And how he understands the buoyant French _grue_,
unselfconscious and undismayed in any situation. I sometimes think
that _Occupe-toi d'Amélie_ is the most satisfactory play I have ever
seen; it is certainly the most delightful. I do not think you can see
it in Paris again. The Nouveautés, where it was presented for over a
year, has been torn down; an English translation would be an insult
to Feydeau; nor will you find essays about it in the yellow volumes in
which the French critics tenderly embalm their _feuilletons_; nor do I
think Arthur Symons or George Moore, those indefatigable diggers in
Parisian graveyards, have discovered it for their English readers.
Reading the play is to miss half its pleasure; so you must take my
word in the matter unless you have been lucky enough to see it
yourself, in which case ten to one you will agree with me that one
such play is worth a kettleful of boiled-over drama like _Le Voleur_,
_Le Secret_, _Samson_, _La Vierge Folle_, _et cetera_, _et cetera_. In
the pieces I have mentioned Feydeau, in representation, had the
priceless assistance of a great comic artist, Armande Cassive. If we
are to take Mr. Symons's assurance in regard to de Pachmann that he is
the world's greatest pianist because he does one thing more perfectly
than any one else, by a train of similar reasoning we might
confidently assert that Mlle. Cassive is the world's greatest actress.

When you ask a Frenchman to explain why he does not like Mirbeau (and
you will find that Frenchmen invariably do not like him) he will shrug
his shoulders and begin to tell you that Mirbeau was not good to his
mother, or that he drank to excess, or that he did not wear a red,
white, and blue coat on the Fourteenth of July, or that he did not
stand for the French spirit as exemplified in the eating of snails on
Christmas. In other words, he will immediately place himself in a
position in which you may be excused for regarding him as a person
whose opinion is worth nothing, whereas his ratiocinatory powers on
subjects with which he is more in sympathy may be excellent. I know
why he does not like Mirbeau. Mirbeau is the reason. In his life he
was not accustomed to making compromises nor was he accustomed to
making friends (which comes after all to the same thing). He did what
he pleased, said what he pleased, wrote what he pleased. His armorial
bearings might have been a cat upsetting a cream jug with the motto,
"_Je m'en fous_." The author of "Le Jardin de Supplice" would not be
in high favour anywhere; nevertheless I would willingly relinquish any
claims I might have to future popularity for the privilege of having
been permitted to sign this book.

Feydeau is distinctly another story; his plays are more successful
than any others given in Paris. They are so amusing that even while he
is pointing the finger at your own particular method of living you are
laughing so hard that you haven't time to see the application.... So
the French critics have set him down as another popular figure, only a
nobody born to entertain the boulevards, just as the American critics
regard the performances of Irving Berlin with a steely supercilious
impervious eye. The Viennese scorned Mozart because he entertained
them. "A gay population," wrote the late John F. Runciman, "always a
heartless master, holds none in such contempt as the servants who
provide it with amusement."

The same condition has prevailed in England until recently. A few
seasons ago you might have found the critics pouring out their glad
songs about Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. Bernard Shaw
has, in a measure, restored the balance to the British theatre. He is
not only a brilliant playwright; he is a brilliant critic as well.
Foreseeing the fate of the under man in such a struggle he became his
own literary huckster and by outcriticizing the other critics he
easily established himself as the first English (or Irish) playwright.
When he thus rose to the top, by dint of his own exertions, he had
strength enough to carry along with him a number of other important
authors. As a consequence we may regard the Pinero incident closed and
in ten years his theatre will be considered as old-fashioned and as
inadept as that of Robertson or Bulwer-Lytton.

Having no Shaw in America, no man who can write brilliant prefaces and
essays about his own plays until the man in the street is obliged
perforce to regard them as literature, we find ourselves in the
condition of benighted France. Dulness is mistaken for literary
flavour; the injection of a little learning, of a little poetry
(so-called) into a theatrical hackpiece, is the signal for a good deal
of enthusiasm on the part of the journalists (there are two brilliant
exceptions). Which of our playwrights are taken seriously by the
pundits? Augustus Thomas and Percy MacKaye: Thomas the dean, and
MacKaye the poet laureate. I have no intention of wrenching the laurel
wreathes from these august brows. Let them remain. Each of these
gentlemen has a long and honourable career in the theatre behind him,
from which he should be allowed to reap what financial and honourary
rewards he may be able. But I would not add one leaf to these
wreathes, nor one crotchet to the songs of praise which vibrate around
them. I turn aside from their plays in the theatre and in the library
as I turn aside from the fictions of Pierre de Coulevain and Arnold
Bennett.

I love to fashion wreathes of my own and if two young men will now
step forward to the lecturer's bench I will take delight in crowning
them with my own hands. Will the young man at the back of the hall
please page Avery Hopwood and Philip Moeller?... No response! They
seem to have retreated modestly into the night. Nevertheless they
shall not escape me!

I speak of Mr. Hopwood first because he has been writing for our
theatre for a longer period than has Mr. Moeller, and because his
position, such as it is, is assured. Like Feydeau in France he has a
large popular following; he has probably made more money in a few
years than Mr. Thomas has made during his whole lifetime and the
managers are always after him to furnish them with more plays with
which to fill their theatres. For his plays do fill the theatres.
_Fair and Warmer_, _Nobody's Widow_, _Clothes_, and _Seven Days_,
would be included in any list of the successful pieces produced in New
York within the past ten years. Two of these pieces would be near the
very top of such a list. An utterly absurd allotment of actors is
sufficient to explain the failures of _Sadie Love_ and _Our Little
Wife_ and it might be well if some one should attempt a revival of one
of his three serious plays, _This Woman and This Man_, in which
Carlotta Nillson appeared for a brief space.

This author, mainly through the beneficent offices of a gift of
supernal charm, contrives to do in English very much what Feydeau does
in French. It is his contention that you can smite the Puritans, even
in the American theatre, squarely on the cheek, provided you are
sagacious in your choice of weapon. In _Fair and Warmer_ he provokes
the most boisterous and at the same time the most innocent laughter
with a scene which might have been made insupportably vulgar. A
perfectly respectable young married woman gets very drunk with the
equally respectable husband of one of her friends. The scene is the
mainstay, the _raison d'être_, of the play, and it furnishes the
material for the better part of one act; yet young and old, rich and
poor, philistine and superman alike, delight in it. To make such a
situation irresistible and universal in its appeal is, it seems to me,
undoubtedly the work of genius. What might, indeed should, have been
disgusting, was not only in intention but in performance very funny.
Let those who do not appreciate the virtuosity of this undertaking
attempt to write as successful a scene in a similar vein. Even if they
are able to do so, and I do not for a moment believe that there is
another dramatic author in America who can, they will be the first to
grant the difficulty of the achievement. With an apparently
inexhaustible fund of fantasy and wit Mr. Hopwood passes his wand over
certain phases of so-called smart life, almost always with the
happiest results. With a complete realization of the independence of
his medium he often ignores the realistic conventions and the
traditional technique of the stage, but his touch is so light and
joyous, his wit so free from pose, that he rarely fails to establish
his effect. His pen has seldom faltered. Occasionally, however, the
heavy hand of an uncomprehending stage director or of an aggressive
actor has played havoc with the delicate texture of his fabric. There
is no need here for the use of hammer or trowel; if an actress must
seek aid in implements, let her rather rely on a soft brush, a lacy
handkerchief, or a sparkling spangled fan.

Philip Moeller has achieved distinction in another field, that of
elegant burlesque, of sublimated caricature. His stage men and women
are as adroitly distorted (the better to expose their comic
possibilities) as the drawings of Max Beerbohm. Beginning with the
Bible and the Odyssey (_Helena's Husband_ and _Sisters of Susannah_
for the Washington Square Players) he has at length, by way of
Shakespeare and Bacon (_The Roadhouse in Arden_) arrived at the
Romantic Period in French literature and in _Madame Sand_, his first
three-act play, he has established himself at once as a dangerous
rival of the authors of _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ and _The Importance of
Being Earnest_, both plays in the same _genre_ as Mr. Moeller's latest
contribution to the stage. The author has thrown a very high light on
the sentimental adventures of the writing lady of the early Nineteenth
Century, has indeed advised us and convinced us that they were
somewhat ridiculous. So they must have appeared even to her
contemporaries, however seriously George took herself, her romances,
her passions, her petty tragedies. A less adult, a less seriously
trained mind might have fallen into the error of making a sentimental
play out of George's affairs with Alfred de Musset, Dr. Pagello, and
Chopin (Mr. Moeller contents himself with these three passions,
selected from the somewhat more extensive list offered to us by
history). Such an author would doubtless have written _Great
Catherine_ in the style of _Disraeli_ and _Androcles and the Lion_
after the manner of _Ben Hur_! Whether love itself is always a comic
subject, as Bernard Shaw would have us believe, is a matter for
dispute, but there can be no alternative opinion about the loves of
George Sand. A rehearsal of them offers only laughter to any one but a
sentimental school girl.

The piece is conceived on a true literary level; it abounds in wit, in
fantasy, in delightful situations, but there is nothing precious about
its progress. Mr. Moeller has carefully avoided the traps expressly
laid for writers of such plays. For example, the enjoyment of _Madame
Sand_ is in no way dependent upon a knowledge of the books of that
authoress, De Musset, and Heine, nor yet upon an acquaintance with the
music of Liszt and Chopin. Such matters are pleasantly and lightly
referred to when they seem pertinent, but no insistence is laid upon
them. Occasionally our author has appropriated some phrase originally
spoken or written by one of the real characters, but for that he can
scarcely be blamed. Indeed, when one takes into consideration the
wealth of such material which lay in books waiting for him, it is
surprising that he did not take more advantage of it. In the main he
has relied on his own cleverness to delight our ears for two hours
with brilliant conversation.

There is, it should be noted, in conclusion, nothing essentially
American about either of these young authors. Both Mr. Hopwood and
Mr. Moeller might have written for the foreign stage. Several of Mr.
Hopwood's pieces, indeed, have already been transported to foreign
climes and there seems every reason for belief that Mr. Moeller's
comedy will meet a similarly happy fate.

  _November 29, 1917._




De Senectute Cantorum

    _"All'età di settanta
      Non si ama, nè si canta."_

                        Italian proverb.




De Senectute Cantorum


"I am not sure," writes Arthur Symons in his admirable essay on Sarah
Bernhardt, "that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment
of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone;
what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone
one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the
principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, after the heat of
the blood has cooled, and the divine accidents have ceased to happen,
is precisely all that was consciously skilful in the performance of an
art. To see all this mechanism left bare, as the form of a skeleton is
left bare when age thins the flesh upon it is to learn more easily all
that is to be learnt of structure, the art which not art but nature
has hitherto concealed with its merciful covering."

Mr. Symons, of course, had an actress in mind, but his argument can be
applied to singers as well, although it is safest to remember that
much of the true beauty of the human voice inevitably departs with the
youth of its owner. Still style in singing is not noticeably affected
by age and an artist who possesses or who has acquired this quality
very often can afford to make lewd gestures at Father Time. If good
singing depended upon a full and sensuous tone, such artists as
Ronconi, Victor Maurel, Max Heinrich, Ludwig Wüllner, and Maurice
Renaud would never have had any careers at all. It is obvious that any
true estimate of their contribution to the lyric stage would put the
chief emphasis on style, and this is usually the explanation for
extended success on the opera or concert stage, although occasionally
an extraordinary and exceptional singer may continue to give pleasure
to her auditors, despite the fact that she has left middle age behind
her, by the mere lovely quality of the tone she produces.

In the history of opera there may be found the names of many singers
who have maintained their popularity and, indeed, a good deal of their
art, long past fifty, and there is recorded at least one instance in
which a singer, after a long absence from the theatre, returned to the
scene of her earlier triumphs with her powers unimpaired, even
augmented. I refer, of course, to Henrietta Sontag, born in 1805, who
retired from the stage of the King's Theatre in London in 1830 in her
twenty-fifth year and who returned twenty years later in 1849. She
had, in the meantime, become the Countess Rossi, but although she had
abandoned the stage her reappearance proved that she had not remained
idle during her period of retirement. For she was one of those artists
in whom early "inspiration" counted for little and "method" for much.
She was, indeed, a mistress of style. She came back to the public in
_Linda di Chaminoux_ and H. F. Chorley ("Thirty Years' Musical
Recollections") tells us that "all went wondrously well. No magic
could restore to her voice an upper note or two which Time had taken;
but the skill, grace, and precision with which she turned to account
every atom of power she still possessed,--the incomparable steadiness
with which she wrought out her composer's intentions--she carried
through the part, from first to last, without the slightest failure,
or sign of weariness--seemed a triumph. She was greeted--as she
deserved to be--as a beloved old friend come home again in the late
sunnier days.

"But it was not at the moment of Madame Sontag's reappearance that we
could advert to all the difficulty which added to the honour of its
success.--She came back under musical conditions entirely changed
since she left the stage--to an orchestra far stronger than that which
had supported her voice when it was younger; and to a new world of
operas.--Into this she ventured with an intrepid industry not to be
overpraised--with every new part enhancing the respect of every real
lover of music.--During the short period of these new performances at
Her Majesty's Theatre, which was not equivalent to two complete Opera
seasons, not merely did Madame Sontag go through the range of her old
characters--Susanna, Rosina, Desdemona, Donna Anna, and the like--but
she presented herself in seven or eight operas which had not existed
when she left the stage--Bellini's _Sonnambula_, Donizetti's _Linda_,
_La Figlia del Reggimento_, _Don Pasquale_; _Le Tre Nozze_, of Signor
Alary, _La Tempesta_, by M. Halévy--the last two works involving what
the French call 'creation,' otherwise the production of a part never
before represented.--In one of the favourite characters of her
predecessor, the elder artist beat the younger one hollow.--This was
as Maria, in Donizetti's _La Figlia_, which Mdlle. Lind may be said to
have brought to England, and considered as her special property....
With myself, the real value of Madame Sontag grew, night after
night--as her variety, her conscientious steadiness, and her adroit
use of diminished powers were thus mercilessly tested. In one respect,
compared with every one who had been in my time, she was alone, in
right, perhaps of the studies of her early days--as a singer of
Mozart's music."

It was after these last London seasons that Mme. Sontag undertook an
American tour. She died in Mexico.

The great Mme. Pasta's ill-advised return to the stage in 1850 (when
she made two belated appearances in London) is matter for sadder
comment. Chorley, indeed, is at his best when he writes of it, his pen
dipped in tears, for none had admired this artist in her prime more
passionately than he. Here was a particularly good opportunity to
study the bare skeleton of interpretative art; the result is one of
the most striking passages in all literature:

"Her voice, which at its best, had required ceaseless watching and
practice, had been long ago given up by her. Its state of utter ruin
on the night in question passes description.--She had been neglected
by those who, at least, should have presented her person to the best
advantage admitted by Time.--Her queenly robes (she was to sing some
scenes from _Anna Bolena_) in nowise suited or disguised her figure.
Her hair-dresser had done some tremendous thing or other with her
head--or rather had left everything undone. A more painful and
disastrous spectacle could hardly be looked on.--There were artists
present, who had then, for the first time, to derive some impression
of a renowned artist--perhaps, with the natural feeling that her
reputation had been exaggerated.--Among these was Rachel--whose bitter
ridicule of the entire sad show made itself heard throughout the whole
theatre, and drew attention to the place where she sat--one might even
say, sarcastically enjoying the scene. Among the audience, however,
was another gifted woman, who might far more legitimately have been
shocked at the utter wreck of every musical means of expression in the
singer--who might have been more naturally forgiven, if some humour of
self-glorification had made her severely just--not worse--to an old
_prima donna_;--I mean Madame Viardot.--Then, and not till then, she
was hearing Madame Pasta.--But Truth will always answer to the appeal
of Truth. Dismal as was the spectacle--broken, hoarse, and destroyed
as was the voice--the great style of the singer spoke to the great
singer. The first scene was Ann Boleyn's duet with Jane Seymour. The
old spirit was heard and seen in Madame Pasta's _Sorgi!_ and the
gesture with which she signed to her penitent rival to rise. Later,
she attempted the final mad scene of the opera--that most complicated
and brilliant among the mad scenes on the modern musical stage--with
its two _cantabile_ movements, its snatches of recitative, and its
_bravura_ of despair, which may be appealed to as an example of vocal
display, till then unparagoned, when turned to the account of frenzy,
not frivolity--perhaps as such commissioned by the superb creative
artist.--By that time, tired, unprepared, in ruin as she was, she had
rallied a little. When--on Ann Boleyn's hearing the coronation music
of her rival, the heroine searches for her own crown on her
brow--Madame Pasta turned in the direction of the festive sounds, the
old irresistible charm broke out;--nay, even in the final song, with
its _roulades_, and its scales of shakes, ascending by a semi-tone,
the consummate vocalist and tragedian, able to combine form with
meaning--the moment of the situation, with such personal and musical
display as form an integral part of operatic art--was indicated: at
least to the apprehension of a younger artist.--'You are right!' was
Madame Viardot's quick and heartfelt response (her eyes were full of
tears) to a friend beside her--'You are right! It is like the
_Cenacolo_ of Da Vinci at Milan--a wreck of a picture, but the
picture is the greatest picture in the world!'"

The great Mme. Viardot herself, whose intractable voice and noble
stage presence inevitably remind one of Mme. Pasta, took no chances
with fate. The friend of Alfred de Musset, the model for George Sand's
"Consuelo," the "creator" of Fidès in _Le Prophète_, and the singer
who, in the revival of _Orphée_ at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1859,
resuscitated Gluck's popularity in Paris, retired from the opera stage
in 1863 at the age of 43, shortly after she had appeared in _Alceste!_
(She sang in concert occasionally until 1870 or later.) Thereafter she
divided her time principally between Baden and Paris and became the
great friend of Turgeniev. His very delightful letters to her have
been published. Idleness was abhorrent to this fine woman and in her
middle and old age she gave lessons, while singers, composers, and
conductors alike came to her for help and advice. She died in 1910 at
the age of 89. Her less celebrated brother, Manuel Garcia (less
celebrated as a singer; as a teacher he is given the credit for having
restored Jenny Lind's voice. Among his other pupils Mathilde Marchesi
and Marie Tempest may be mentioned), had died in 1906 at the age of
101. Her sister, Mme. Malibran, died very young, in the early
Nineteenth Century, before, in fact, Mme. Viardot had made her début.

Few singers have had the wisdom to follow Mme. Viardot's excellent
example. The great Jenny Lind, long after her voice had lost its
quality, continued to sing in oratorio and concert. So did Adelina
Patti. Muriel Starr once told me of a parrot she encountered in
Australia. The poor bird had arrived at the noble age of 117 and was
entirely bereft of feathers. Flapping his stumpy wings he cried
incessantly, "I'll fly, by God, I'll fly!" So, many singers, having
lost their voices, continue to croak, "I'll sing, by God, I'll sing!"
The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, himself a man of considerable years when
he published his highly diverting "Musical Reminiscences," gives us
some extraordinary pictures of senility on the stage at the close of
the Eighteenth Century. There was, for example, the case of Cecilia
Davis, the first Englishwoman to sustain the part of prima donna and
in that situation was second only to Gabrielli, whom she even rivalled
in neatness of execution. Mount Edgcumbe found Miss Davies in
Florence, unengaged and poor. A concert was arranged at which she
appeared with her sister. Later she returned to England ... too old to
secure an engagement. "This unfortunate woman is now (in 1834) living
in London, in the extreme of old age, disease, and poverty," writes
the Earl. He also speaks of a Signora Galli, of large and masculine
figure and contralto voice, who frequently filled the part of second
man at the Opera. She had been a principal singer in Handel's
oratorios when conducted by himself. She afterwards fell into extreme
poverty, and at the age of about seventy (!!!!), was induced to come
forward to sing again at the oratorios. "I had the curiosity to go,
and heard her sing _He was despised and rejected of men_ in _The
Messiah_. Of course her voice was cracked and trembling, but it was
easy to see her school was good; and it was a pleasure to observe the
kindness with which she was received and listened to; and to mark the
animation and delight with which she seemed to hear again the music in
which she had formerly been a distinguished performer. The poor old
woman had been in the habit of coming to me annually for a trifling
present; and she told me on that occasion that nothing but the
severest distress should have compelled her so to expose herself,
which after all, did not answer to its end, as she was not paid
according to her agreement. She died shortly after." In 1783 the Earl
heard a singer named Allegranti in Dresden, then at the height of her
powers. Later she returned to England and reappeared in Cimarosa's
_Matrimonio Segreto_. "Never was there a more pitiable attempt: she
had scarcely a thread of voice remaining, nor the power to sing a note
in tune: her figure and acting were equally altered for the worse, and
after a few nights she was obliged to retire and quit the stage
altogether." The celebrated Madame Mara, after a long sojourn in
Russia, suddenly returned to England and was announced for a benefit
performance at the King's Theatre after everybody had forgotten her
existence. "She must have been at least seventy; but it was said that
her voice had miraculously returned, and was as good as ever. But when
she displayed those wonderfully revived powers, they proved, as might
have been expected, lamentably deficient, and the tones she produced
were compared to those of a _penny trumpet_. Curiosity was so little
excited that the concert was ill attended ... and Madame Mara was
heard no more. I was not so lucky (or so unlucky) as to hear these her
last notes, as it was early in the winter, and I was not in town. She
returned to Russia, and was a great sufferer by the burning of Moscow.
After that she lived at Mitlau, or some other town near the Baltic,
where she died at a great age, not many years ago."

Here is Michael Kelly's account of the same event: "With all her great
skill and knowledge of the world, Madame Mara was induced, by the
advice of some of her mistaken friends, to give a public concert at
the King's Theatre, in her seventy-second year, when, in the course of
nature her powers had failed her. It was truly grievous to see such
transcendent talents as she once possessed, so sunk--so fallen. I used
every effort in my power to prevent her committing herself, but in
vain. Among other arguments to draw her from her purpose, I told her
what happened to Monbelli, one of the first tenors of his day, who
lost all his well-earned reputation and fame, by rashly performing the
part of a lover, at the Pergola Theatre, at Florence, in his
seventieth year, having totally lost his voice. On the stage, he was
hissed; and the following lines, lampooning his attempt, were chalked
on his house-door, as well as upon the walls of the city:--

    _'All' età di settanta
      Non si ama, nè si canta.'"_

W. T. Parke, forty years principal oboe player at Covent Garden
Theatre, is kinder to Madame Mara in his "Musical Memoirs," but it
must be taken into account that he is kinder to every one else, too.
There is little of the acrimonious or the fault-finding note in his
pages. This is his version of the affair: "That extraordinary singer
of former days, Madame Mara, who had passed the last eighteen years in
Russia, and who had lately arrived in England, gave a concert at the
King's Theatre on the 6th of March (1820), which highly excited the
curiosity of the musical public. On that occasion she sang some of her
best airs; and though her powers were greatly inferior to what they
were in her zenith, yet the same pure taste pervaded her performance.
Whether vanity or interest stimulated Mara at her time of life to that
undertaking, it would be difficult to determine; but whichsoever had
the ascendency, her reign was short; for by singing one night
afterwards at the vocal concert, the veil which had obscured her
judgment was removed, and she retired to enjoy in private life those
comforts which her rare talent had procured for her."

Parke also speaks of a Mrs. Pinto, "the once celebrated Miss Brent,
the original Mandane in Arne's _Artaxerxes_," who appeared in 1785 at
the age of nearly seventy in Milton's _Mask of Comus_ at a benefit for
a Mr. Hull, "the respectable stage-manager of Covent Garden Theatre."
She was to sing the song of Sweet Echo and as Parke was to play the
responses to her voice on the oboe he repaired to her house for
rehearsal. "Although nearly seventy years old, her voice possessed the
remains of those qualities for which it had been so much
celebrated,--power, flexibility, and sweetness. On the night _Comus_
was performed she sung with an unexpected degree of excellence, and
was loudly applauded. This old lady, as a singer, gave me the idea of
a fine piece of ruins, which though considerably dilapidated, still
displayed some of its original beauties."

The celebrated Faustina, whose quarrel with Cuzzoni is as famous in
the history of music as the war between Gluck and Piccinni, was less
daring. Dr. Burney visited her when she was seventy-two years old and
asked her to sing. "Alas, I cannot," she replied, "I have lost all my
faculties."

La Camargo, the favourite dancer of Paris in the early Eighteenth
Century, the inventor, indeed of the short ballet skirt, and the
possessor of many lovers, retired from the stage in 1751 with a large
fortune, besides a pension of fifteen hundred francs. Thenceforth she
led a secluded life. She was an assiduous visitor to the poor of her
parish and she kept a dozen dogs and an angora cat which she
overwhelmed with affection. In that quaint book, "The Powder Puff," by
Franz Blei, you may find a most charming description of a call paid to
the lady in 1768 in her little old house in the Rue St. Thomas du
Louvre, by Duclos, Grimm, and Helvetius, who had come in bantering
mood to ask her whom, in her past life, she had loved best. Her reply
touched these men, who took their leave. "Helvetius told Camargo's
story to his wife; Grimm made a note of it for his Court Journal; and
as for Duclos, it suggested some moral reflections to him, for when,
two years later, Mlle. Marianne Camargo was carried to her grave, he
remarked: 'It is quite fitting to give her a white pall like a
virgin.'"

Sophie Arnould, one of the most celebrated actresses and singers of
the Eighteenth Century, died in poverty at the age of 63 and there is
no record of her burial place. She had been the friend of Voltaire,
Rousseau, d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and the Baron d'Holbach. She
had "created" Gluck's _Iphigénie en Aulide_ and the composer had said
of her, "If it had not been for the voice and elocution of Mlle.
Arnould, my _Iphigénie_ would never have been performed in France." In
her youth she had interested not only Marie Antoinette but also the
King, and she had been the object of Mme. de Pompadour's suspicion
and Mme. du Barry's rage. Garrick declared her a better actress than
Clairon. She was as famous for her wit as for her singing and acting.
When Mme. Laguerre appeared drunk in _Iphigénie en Tauride_ she
exclaimed, "Why this is _Iphigénie en Champagne_!" Indeed, she made so
many remarks worthy of preservation that shortly after her death in
1802, a book called "Arnoldiana," devoted to her epigrams, was
issued.... Nevertheless, this lady was hissed at the age of 36, when,
after a short absence from the stage she reappeared as Iphigénie in
1776. She was neither old nor ugly and if her voice may have lost
something her nineteen years of stage life in Paris might have weighed
against that. On one occasion, according to La Harpe, when she had the
line to sing, "You long for me to be gone," the audience applauded
vociferously. To protect Sophie, Marie Antoinette sat in a box on
several nights and stemmed the storm of disapproval, but in the end
even the presence of the queen herself was insufficient to quell the
hissing. One sad story completes the picture. In 1785, when her
financial troubles were beginning, her two sons, who bore her no love,
called for money. She had none to give them. "There are two horses
left in the stable," she said. "Take those." They rode away on the
horses.

Latin audiences are notoriously unfaithful to their stage favourites.
In "The Innocents Abroad" Mark Twain tells us of the bad manners of an
Italian audience. The singer he mentions is Erminia Frezzolini, born
at Orvieto in 1818. She sang both in England and America. Chorley said
of her: "She was an elegant, tall woman, born with a lovely voice, and
bred with great vocal skill (of a certain order); but she was the
first who arrived of the 'young Italians'--of those who fancy that
driving the voice to its extremities can stand in the stead of
passion. But she was, nevertheless, a real singer, and her art stood
her in stead for some years after nature broke down. When she had left
her scarce a note of her rich and real soprano voice to scream with,
Madame Frezzolini was still charming." She died in Paris, November 5,
1884. Now for Mark Twain:

"I said I knew nothing against the upper classes from personal
observation. I must recall it. I had forgotten. What I saw their
bravest and their fairest do last night, the lowest multitude that
could be scraped out of the purlieus of Christendom would blush to do,
I think. They assembled by hundreds, and even thousands, in the great
Theatre of San Carlo to do--what? Why simply to make fun of an old
woman--to deride, to hiss, to jeer at an actress they once worshipped,
but whose beauty is faded now, and whose voice has lost its former
richness. Everybody spoke of the rare sport there was to be. They said
the theatre would be crammed because Frezzolini was going to sing. It
was said she could not sing well now, but then the people liked to see
her, anyhow. And so we went. And every time the woman sang they hissed
and laughed--the whole magnificent house--and as soon as she left the
stage they called her on again with applause. Once or twice she was
encored five and six times in succession, and received with hisses
when she appeared, and discharged with hisses and laughter when she
had finished--then instantly encored and insulted again! And how the
high-born knaves enjoyed it! White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed
till the tears came, and clapped their hands in very ecstasy when that
unhappy old woman would come meekly out for the sixth time, with
uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of hisses! It was the
cruellest exhibition--the most wanton, the most unfeeling. The singer
would have conquered an audience of American rowdies by her brave,
unflinching tranquillity (for she answered encore after encore, and
smiled and bowed pleasantly, and sang the best she possibly could, and
went bowing off, through all the jeers and hisses, without ever losing
countenance or temper); and surely in any other land than Italy her
sex and her helplessness must have been an ample protection for
her--she could have needed no other. Think what a multitude of small
souls were crowded into that theatre last night!"

English audiences, on the other hand, are notoriously friendly to
their old favourites. When Dr. Hanslick, the Viennese critic, visited
England and heard Sims Reeves singing before crowded houses as he had
been doing for forty or fifty years, he remarked, "It is not easy to
win the favour of the English public; to lose it is quite impossible."

Mme. Grisi made her last appearance in London in 1866 at the theatre
she had left twenty years previously, Her Majesty's. The opera was
_Lucrezia Borgia_. At the end of the first act she miscalculated the
depth of the apron and the descending curtain left her outside on her
knees. She had stiffness in her joints and was unable to rise without
assistance.... This situation must have been very embarassing to a
singer who previously had been an idol of the public. In the
passionate duet with the tenor she made an unsuccessful attempt to
reach the A natural. Notwithstanding the fact that she was well
received and that she got through with the greater part of the opera
with credit, her impressario, J. H. Mapleson, relates in his "Memoirs"
that after the final curtain had fallen she rushed to tell him that it
was all over and that she would never appear again. In "Student and
Singer" Charles Santley writes of the occasion: "I had been singing at
the Crystal Palace concert in the afternoon, and after dining there I
went up to the theatre to see a little of the performance. I felt very
sorry for Grisi that she had been induced to appear again; it was a
sad sight for any one who had known her in her prime, and even long
past it."

However, even English audiences can be cold. John E. Cox, in his
"Musical Recollections," recalls an earlier occasion when Grisi sang
at the Crystal Palace without much success (July 31, 1861): "On
retiring from the orchestra, after a peculiarly cold reception--as
unkind as it was inconsiderate, seeing what the career of this
remarkable woman had been--there was not a single person at the foot
of the orchestra to receive or to accompany her to her retiring room!
I could imagine what her feelings at that moment must have been--she
who had in former years been accustomed to be thronged, wherever she
appeared, and to be the recipient of adulation--often as exaggerated
as it was fulsome--but who was now literally deserted. With
Grisi--although I had been once or twice introduced to her--I never
had any personal acquaintance. I could not, however, resist the
impulse of preceding her, without obtruding myself on her notice, and
opening the door of the retiring room for her, which was situated at
some considerable distance from the orchestra. Her look as I did this,
and she passed out of sight, is amongst the most painful of my
'Recollections.'"

German audiences are usually kind to their favourites. In America we
adopt neither the attitude of the English and Germans, nor yet that of
the Italians and French. We simply stay away from the theatre. Mark
Twain has put it succinctly, "When a singer has lost his voice and a
jumper his legs, those parties fail to draw."

Benjamin Lumley in his "Reminiscences of the Opera," quoting an
anonymous friend, relates a touching story regarding Catalani, who was
born in 1779 and who retired from the stage in 1831. When Jenny Lind
visited Paris in the spring of 1849 she learned to her astonishment
that Catalani was in the French capital. The old singer, who resided
habitually in Florence, had come to Paris with her daughter who, as
the widow of a Frenchman, was obliged to go through certain legal
forms before taking possession of her share of her husband's property.
Through a friend of both ladies it was arranged that the two should
meet at a dinner at the home of the Marquis of Normansby, the English
ambassador to the Tuscan court, but the Swedish singer could not
restrain her impatience and before that event she set out one forenoon
for Mme. Catalani's apartment in the Rue de la Paix and sent in her
name by a servant. The old singer hastened out to greet her
distinguished visitor with obvious delight. She had known nothing of
Mlle. Lind's presence in Paris and had feared that such a chance would
never befall her, much as she had longed to see the celebrated singer
who had excited the English public in a way which recalled her own
past triumphs and who rivalled her in her purity and her charity. They
talked together for an hour.... At the dinner the Marchioness of
Normansby considerately refrained from asking Jenny Lind to sing,
because no one is allowed to refuse such an invitation made by a
representative of royalty. Catalani, however, had no such scruples.
She went up to the Nightingale and begged her to sing, adding,
"_C'est la vieille Catalini qui desire vous entendre chanter, avant de
mourir!_" This appeal was irresistible. Jenny Lind sat down to the
piano and sang _Non credea mirarti_ and one or two other airs,
including _Ah! non giunge_. Catalani is described as sitting on an
ottoman in the centre of the room, rocking her body to and fro with
delight and sympathy, murmuring, "_Ah la bella cosa che la musica,
quando si fà di quella maniera!_" and again "_Ah! la carissima! quanto
bellissima!_" A dinner at Catalani's apartment followed, but a few
days later it became known that the old singer was ill, an illness
which proved fatal. She had, however, heard the Swedish Nightingale
sing "_avant de mourir_."

William Gardiner visited Madame Catalani in 1846. "I was surprised at
the vigour of Madame Catalani," he says, "and how little she has
altered since I saw her in Derby in 1828. I paid her a compliment on
her good looks. 'Ah,' said she, 'I'm sixty-six!' She has lost none of
that commanding expression which gave her such dignity on the stage.
She is without a wrinkle, and appears to be no more than forty. Her
breadth of chest is still remarkable: it is this which endowed her
with the finest voice that ever sang. Her speaking voice and dramatic
air are still charming, and not in the least impaired."

Is Christine Nilsson still alive? I think so. She was born August 20,
1843. In Clara Louise Kellogg's very entertaining, but not always
trustworthy, "Memoirs" there is an interesting reference to this
singer in her later career. Dates, unfortunately, are not furnished.
"I was present," declares Mme. Kellogg, "on the night ... when she
practically murdered the high register of her voice. She had five
upper notes the quality of which was unlike any other I ever heard and
that possessed a peculiar charm. The tragedy happened during a
performance of _The Magic Flute_ in London.... Nilsson was the Queen
of the Night, one of her most successful early rôles. The second aria
in _The Magic Flute_ is more famous and less difficult than the first
aria, and also, more effective. Nilsson knew well the ineffectiveness
of the ending of the first aria in the two weakest notes of a
soprano's voice, A natural and B flat. I never could understand why a
master like Mozart should have chosen to use them as he did. There is
no climax to the song. One has to climb up hard and fast and then stop
short in the middle. It is an appalling thing to do and that night
Nilsson took those two notes at the last in _chest tones_. 'Great
heavens!' I gasped, 'what is she doing? What is the woman thinking
of!' Of course I knew she was doing it to get volume and vibration and
to give that trying climax some character. But to say that it was a
fatal attempt is to put it mildly. She absolutely killed a certain
quality in her voice there and then and she _never recovered it_. Even
that night she had to cut out the second great aria. Her beautiful
high notes were gone forever." As I have said, the date of this
incident, which, so far as I know, is not recorded elsewhere, is not
mentioned, but Christine Nilsson sang in New York in the early
Eighties and continued to sing until 1891, the year of her final
appearance in London.

Adelina Patti, born the same year as Nilsson but six months before
(February 10, 1843; according to some records, which by no means go
undisputed, a quartet of famous singers came into the world this year.
The other two were Ilma de Murska and Pauline Lucca) made many
farewell tours of this country ... one too many in 1903-4, when she
displayed the _beaux restes_ of her voice. She is living at present in
retirement at Craig-y-Nos in Wales. Her greatest rival, Etelka
Gerster, too, is alive, I believe.

Lilli Lehmann, one of the oldest of the living great singers, was
born May 13, 1848. She was a member of the famous casts which
introduced many of the Wagner works to New York. Her last appearances
in opera here were made, I think, in the late Nineties, but she has
sung here since in concert and in Germany she has frequently assisted
at the performances of the Mozart festivals at Salzburg and has even
sung in _Norma_ and _Götterdämmerung_ within recent years! Her head is
now crowned with white hair and her noble appearance and magnificent
style in singing have doubtless stood her in good stead at these
belated performances, which probably were disappointing, judged as
vocal exhibitions.

Lillian Nordica had a long career. She was born May 12, 1859, and made
her operatic début in Brescia in _La Traviata_ in 1879. She continued
to sing up to the time of her death in Batavia, Java, May 10, 1914.
Indeed she was then undertaking a concert tour of the world at the age
of 55! But the artist, who in the Nineties had held the Metropolitan
Opera House stage with honour in the great dramatic rôles, had very
little to offer in her last years. Never a great musician, defects in
style began to make themselves evident as her vocal powers decreased.
Her season at the Manhattan Opera House in 1907-8 was quickly and
unpleasantly terminated. A subsequent single appearance as Isolde at
the Metropolitan in the winter of 1909-10 was even less successful.
The voice had lost its resonance, the singer her appeal. Her
magnificent courage and indomitable ambition urged her on to the end.

Two singers whose voices have been miraculously preserved, who have
indeed suffered little from the ravages of time, are Marcella Sembrich
and Nellie Melba. Both of these singers, however, have consistently
refrained from misusing their voices (if one may except the one
occasion on which Mme. Melba attempted to sing Brünnhilde in
_Siegfried_ with disastrous results). Mme. Melba (according to Grove's
Dictionary, which, like all other books devoted to the subject of
music, is frequently inaccurate) was born in Australia, May 19, 1859.
Therefore she was 28 years old when she made her début in Brussels as
Gilda on October 12, 1887. She has used her voice carefully and well
and still sings in concert and opera at the age of 59. With the
advance of age, indeed, her voice began to take on colour. When she
sang here in opera at the Manhattan Opera House in 1906-7 she was in
her best vocal estate. Her voice, originally rather pale, had become
mellow and rich, although it is possible it had lost some of its old
remarkable agility. When last I listened to her in concert, a few
years ago at the Hippodrome, it seemed to me that I had never before
heard so beautiful a voice, and yet Mme. Melba sang in the first
performance of opera I ever attended (Chicago Auditorium; _Faust_,
February 22, 1899).

According to H. T. Finck, Caruso once said, "When you hear that an
artist is going to retire, don't you believe it, for as long as he
keeps his voice he will sing. You may depend upon that." Sometimes,
indeed, longer. Mme. Melba made a belated and unfortunate attempt to
sing Marguerite in _Faust_ with the Chicago Opera Company, Monday
evening, February 4, 1918, at the Lexington Theatre, New York. She
sang with some art and style; her tone was still pure and her
wonderful enunciation still remained a feature of her performance but
scarcely a shadow of the beautiful voice I can remember so well was
left. As if to atone for vocal deficiencies the singer made histrionic
efforts such as she had never deemed necessary during the height of
her career. Her meeting with Faust in the Kermesse scene was
accomplished with modesty that almost became fright. She nearly danced
the jewel song and embraced the tenor with passion in the love duet.
In the church scene, overcome with terror at the sight of
Méphistophélès, she flung her prayer book across the stage.... Her
appearance was almost shocking and the first lines of the part of
Marguerite, "_Non monsieur, je ne suis demoiselle, ni belle_" had a
merciless application. However, the audience received her with
kindness, more with a certain sort of enthusiasm. She reappeared again
in the same opera on Thursday evening, February 14, 1918, but on this
occasion I did not hear her.

Marcella Sembrich was born February 15, 1858. She made her début in
Athens in _I Puritani_, June 8, 1877, and she made her New York début
in _Lucia_ October 24, 1883, at the beginning of the first season of
the Metropolitan Opera House. After a long absence she returned to New
York in 1898 as Rosina in _Il Barbiere_. After that year she sang
pretty steadily at the Metropolitan until February 6, 1909, when, at
the age of 51 (or lacking nine days of it), she bid farewell to the
New York opera stage in acts from several of her favourite operas. She
subsequently sang in a few performances of opera in Europe and was
heard in song recital in America. When she left the opera house she
had no rival in vocal artistry; and she had so satisfactorily solved
the problems of style in singing certain kinds of songs that she also
surveyed the field of song recital from a mountain top.... But such a
singer as Mme. Sembrich, who made her appeal through the expression of
the milder emotions, who never, indeed, attempted to touch dramatic
depths, even style, in the end, will not assist. Magnificent Lilli
Lehmann might make a certain effect in _Götterdämmerung_ so long as
she had a leg to stand on or a note to croak, but an adequate delivery
of _Der Nussbaum_ or _Wie Melodien_ demands a vocal control which a
singer past middle age is not always sure of possessing.... After a
long retirement, Mme. Sembrich gave a concert at Carnegie Hall,
November 21, 1915. The house was crowded and the applause at the
beginning must almost have unnerved the singer, who walked slowly
towards the front of the platform as the storm burst and then bowed
her head again and again. Her program on this occasion was not one of
her best. She had not chosen familiar songs in which to return to her
public. This may in a measure account for her lack of success in
always calling forth steady tones. However, on the whole, her voice
sounded amazingly fresh. Her high notes especially rang true and
resonant as ever. Her middle voice showed wear. Her style remained
impeccable, unrivalled.... She announced, following this concert, a
series of four recitals in a small hall and actually appeared at one
of them. This time I did not hear her, but I am told that her voice
refused to respond to her wishes. Nor was the hall filled. The
remaining concerts were abandoned. "Mme. Sembrich has never been a
failure and she is too old to begin now!" she is reported to have said
to a friend.

Emma Calvé's date of birth is recorded as 1864 in some of the musical
dictionaries. This would make her 53 years old. Her singing of the
_Marseillaise_ a year ago at the Allies Bazaar at the Grand Central
Palace proved to me that her retirement from the Opera was premature.
Her performances at the Manhattan Opera House in 1906-7 were
memorable, vocally superb. Her Carmen was out of drawing dramatically,
but her Anita and her Santuzza remained triumphs of stage craft.

Emma Eames, born August 13, 1867, is three years younger than Mme.
Calvé. She made her début as Juliette, March 13, 1889. She retired
from the opera stage in 1907-8, although she has sung since then a few
times in concert. Her last appearances at the Opera were made in
dramatic rôles, Donna Anna, Leonora (in _Trovatore_), and Tosca, in
contradistinction to the lyric parts in which she gained her early
fame. That she was entirely successful in compassing the breach cannot
be said in all justice. Yet there was a certain distinction in her
manner, a certain acid quality in her voice, that gave force to these
characterizations. Certainly, however, no one would ever have compared
her Donna Anna favourably with her Countess in _Figaro_. Her
performance of _Or sai chi l'onore_ was deficient in breadth of style
and her lack of breath control at this period gave uncertainty to her
execution.

Life teaches us, through experience, that no rule is infallible, but
insofar as I am able to give a meaning to these rambling biographical
notes, collected, I may as well admit, more to interest my reader than
to prove anything, it is the meaning, sounded with a high note of
truth, by Arthur Symons, in the paragraph quoted at the beginning of
this essay. Style is a rare quality in a singer. With it in his
possession an artist may dare much for a long time. Without it he
exists as long as those qualities which are perfectly natural to him
exist. A voice fades, but a manner of applying that voice (even when
there is practically no voice to apply) to an artistic problem has an
indefinite term of life.

Yvette Guilbert once told me that crossing the Atlantic with Duse on
one occasion she had asked the Italian actress if she were going to
include _La Dame aux Camélias_ in her American repertory. "I am too
old to play Marguerite ..." was the sad response. "She was right,"
said Guilbert, in relating the incident, "she was too old; she was
born too old ... in spirit. Now when I am sixty-three I shall begin to
impersonate children. I grow younger every year!"

  _September 12, 1917._




Impressions in the Theatre




I

The Land of Joy

     _"Dancing is something more than an amusement in Spain. It
     is part of that solemn ritual which enters into the whole
     life of the people. It expresses their very spirit."_

                        Havelock Ellis.


An idle observer of theatrical conditions might derive a certain
ironic pleasure from remarking the contradiction implied in the
professed admiration of the constables of the playhouse for the
unconventional and their almost passionate adoration for the
conventional. We constantly hear it said that the public cries for
novelty, and just as constantly we see the same kind of acting, the
same gestures, the same Julian Mitchellisms and George Marionisms and
Ned Wayburnisms repeated in and out of season, summer and winter.
Indeed, certain conventions (which bore us even now) are so deeply
rooted in the soil of our theatre that I see no hope of their being
eradicated before the year 1999, at which date other conventions will
have supplanted them and will likewise have become tiresome.

In this respect our theatre does not differ materially from the
theatres of other countries except in one particular. In Europe the
juxtaposition of nations makes an interchange of conventions possible,
which brings about slow change or rapid revolution. Paris, for
example, has received visits from the Russian Ballet which almost
assumed the proportions of Tartar invasions. London, too, has been
invaded by the Russians and by the Irish. The Irish playwrights,
indeed, are continually pounding away at British middle-class
complacency. Germany, in turn, has been invaded by England (we regret
that this sentence has only an artistic and figurative significance),
and we find Max Reinhardt well on his way toward giving a complete
cycle of the plays of Shakespeare; a few years ago we might have
observed Deutschland groveling hysterically before Oscar Wilde's
_Salome_, a play which, at least without its musical dress, has not, I
believe, even yet been performed publicly in London. In Italy, of
course, there are no artistic invasions (nobody cares to pay for them)
and even the conventions of the Italian theatre themselves, such as
the _Commedia del' Arte_, are quite dead; so the country remains as
dormant, artistically speaking, as a rag rug, until an enthusiast like
Marinetti arises to take it between his teeth and shake it back into
rags again.

Very often whisperings of art life in the foreign theatre (such as
accounts of Stanislavski's accomplishments in Moscow) cross the
Atlantic. Very often the husks of the realities (as was the case with
the Russian Ballet) are imported. But whispers and husks have about as
much influence as the "New York Times" in a mayoralty campaign, and as
a result we find the American theatre as little aware of world
activities in the drama as a deaf mute living on a pole in the desert
of Sahara would be. Indeed any intrepid foreign investigator who
wishes to study the American drama, American acting, and American
stage decoration will find them in almost as virgin a condition as
they were in the time of Lincoln.

A few rude assaults have been made on this smug eupepsy. I might
mention the coming of Paul Orleneff, who left Alla Nazimova with us to
be eventually swallowed up in the conventional American theatre. Four
or five years ago a company of Negro players at the Lafayette Theatre
gave a performance of a musical revue that boomed like the big bell in
the Kremlin at Moscow. Nobody could be deaf to the sounds. Florenz
Ziegfeld took over as many of the tunes and gestures as he could buy
for his _Follies_ of that season, but he neglected to import the one
essential quality of the entertainment, its style, for the
exploitation of which Negro players were indispensable. For the past
two months Mimi Aguglia, one of the greatest actresses of the world,
has been performing in a succession of classic and modern plays (a
repertory comprising dramas by Shakespeare, d'Annunzio, and Giacosa)
at the Garibaldi Theatre, on East Fourth Street, before very large and
very enthusiastic audiences, but uptown culture and managerial acumen
will not awaken to the importance of this gesture until they read
about it in some book published in 1950....

All of which is merely by way of prelude to what I feel must be
something in the nature of lyric outburst and verbal explosion. A few
nights ago a Spanish company, unheralded, unsung, indeed almost
unwelcomed by such reviewers as had to trudge to the out-of-the-way
Park Theatre, came to New York, in a musical revue entitled _The Land
of Joy_. The score was written by Joaquín Valverde, _fils_, whose
music is not unknown to us, and the company included La Argentina, a
Spanish dancer who had given matinees here in a past season without
arousing more than mild enthusiasm. The theatrical impressarii, the
song publishers, and the Broadway rabble stayed away on the first
night. It was all very well, they might have reasoned, to read about
the goings on in Spain, but they would never do in America. Spanish
dancers had been imported in the past without awakening undue
excitement. Did not the great Carmencita herself visit America twenty
or more years ago? These impressarii had ignored the existence of a
great psychological (or more properly physiological) truth: you cannot
mix Burgundy and Beer! One Spanish dancer surrounded by Americans is
just as much lost as the great Nijinsky himself was in an English
music hall, where he made a complete and dismal failure. And so they
would have been very much astonished (had they been present) on the
opening night to have witnessed all the scenes of uncontrollable
enthusiasm--just as they are described by Havelock Ellis, Richard
Ford, and Chabrier--repeated. The audience, indeed, became hysterical,
and broke into wild cries of _Ole! Ole!_ Hats were thrown on the
stage. The audience became as abandoned as the players, became a part
of the action.

You will find all this described in "The Soul of Spain," in
"Gatherings from Spain," in Chabrier's letters, and it had all been
transplanted to New York almost without a whisper of preparation,
which is fortunate, for if it had been expected, doubtless we would
have found the way to spoil it. Fancy the average New York first-night
audience, stiff and unbending, sceptical and sardonic, welcoming this
exhibition! Havelock Ellis gives an ingenious explanation for the fact
that Spanish dancing has seldom if ever successfully crossed the
border of the Iberian peninsula: "The finest Spanish dancing is at
once killed or degraded by the presence of an indifferent or
unsympathetic public, and that is probably why it cannot be
transplanted, but remains local." Fortunately the Spaniards in the
first-night audience gave the cue, unlocked the lips and loosened the
hands of us cold Americans. For my part, I was soon yelling _Ole!_
louder than anybody else.

The dancer, Doloretes, is indeed extraordinary. The gipsy fascination,
the abandoned, perverse bewitchery of this female devil of the dance
is not to be described by mouth, typewriter, or quilled pen. Heine
would have put her at the head of his dancing temptresses in his
ballet of _Méphistophéla_ (found by Lumley too indecent for
representation at Her Majesty's Theatre, for which it was written; in
spite of which the scenario was published in the respectable "Revue de
Deux Mondes"). In this ballet a series of dancing celebrities are
exhibited by the female Méphistophélès for the entertainment of her
victim. After Salome had twisted her flanks and exploited the prowess
of her abdominal muscles to perfunctory applause, Doloretes would have
heated the blood, not only of Faust, but of the ladies and gentlemen
in the orchestra stalls, with the clicking of her heels, the clacking
of her castanets, now held high over head, now held low behind her
back, the flashing of her ivory teeth, the shrill screaming, electric
magenta of her smile, the wile of her wriggle, the passion of her
performance. And close beside her the sinuous Mazantinita would flaunt
a garish tambourine and wave a shrieking fan. All inanimate objects,
shawls, mantillas, combs, and cymbals, become inflamed with life, once
they are pressed into the service of these señoritas, languorous and
forbidding, indifferent and sensuous. Against these rude gipsies the
refined grace and Goyaesque elegance of La Argentina stand forth in
high relief, La Argentina, in whose hands the castanets become as
potent an instrument for our pleasure as the violin does in the
fingers of Jascha Heifetz. Bilbao, too, with his thundering heels and
his tauromachian gestures, bewilders our highly magnetized senses.
When, in the dance, he pursues, without catching, the elusive
Doloretes, it would seem that the limit of dynamic effects in the
theatre had been reached.

Here are singers! The limpid and lovely soprano of the comparatively
placid Maria Marco, who introduces figurations into the brilliant
music she sings at every turn. One indecent (there is no other word
for it) chromatic oriental phrase is so strange that none of us can
ever recall it or forget it! And the frantically nervous Luisita
Puchol, whose eyelids spring open like the cover of a Jack-in-the-box,
and whose hands flutter like saucy butterflies, sings suggestive
popular ditties just a shade better than any one else I know of.

But _The Land of Joy_ does not rely on one or two principals for its
effect. The organization as a whole is as full of fire and purpose as
the original Russian Ballet; the costumes themselves, in their
blazing, heated colours, constitute the ingredients of an orgy; the
music, now sentimental (the adaptability of Valverde, who has lived in
Paris, is little short of amazing; there is a vocal waltz in the style
of Arditi that Mme. Patti might have introduced into the lesson scene
of _Il Barbiere_; there is another song in the style of George M.
Cohan--these by way of contrast to the Iberian music), now pulsing
with rhythmic life, is the best Spanish music we have yet heard in
this country. The whole entertainment, music, colours, costumes,
songs, dances, and all, is as nicely arranged in its crescendos and
decrescendos, its prestos and adagios as a Mozart finale. The close of
the first act, in which the ladies sweep the stage with long ruffled
trains, suggestive of all the Manet pictures you have ever seen, would
seem to be unapproachable, but the most striking costumes and the
wildest dancing are reserved for the very last scene of all. There
these bewildering señoritas come forth in the splendourous envelope of
embroidered Manila shawls, and such shawls! Prehistoric African roses
of unbelievable measure decorate a texture of turquoise, from which
depends nearly a yard of silken fringe. In others mingle royal purple
and buff, orange and white, black and the kaleidoscope! The revue, a
sublimated form of zarzuela, is calculated, indeed, to hold you in a
dangerous state of nervous excitement during the entire evening, to
keep you awake for the rest of the night, and to entice you to the
theatre the next night and the next. It is as intoxicating as vodka,
as insidious as cocaine, and it is likely to become a habit, like
these stimulants. I have found, indeed, that it appeals to all classes
of taste, from that of a telephone operator, whose usual artistic
debauch is the latest antipyretic novel of Robert W. Chambers, to that
of the frequenter of the concert halls.

I cannot resist further cataloguing; details shake their fists at my
memory; for instance, the intricate rhythms of Valverde's elaborately
syncopated music (not at all like ragtime syncopation), the thrilling
orchestration (I remember one dance which is accompanied by drum taps
and oboe, nothing else!), the utter absence of tangos (which are
Argentine), and habaneras (which are Cuban), most of the music being
written in two-four and three-four time, and the interesting use of
folk-tunes; the casual and very suggestive indifference of the
dancers, while they are not dancing, seemingly models for a dozen
Zuloaga paintings, the apparently inexhaustible skill and variety of
these dancers in action, winding ornaments around the melodies with
their feet and bodies and arms and heads and castanets as coloratura
sopranos do with their voices. Sometimes castanets are not used;
cymbals supplant them, or tambourines, or even fingers. Once, by some
esoteric witchcraft, the dancers seemed to tap upon their arms. The
effect was so stupendous and terrifying that I could not project
myself into that aloof state of mind necessary for a calm dissection
of its technique.

What we have been thinking of all these years in accepting the
imitation and ignoring the actuality I don't know; it has all been
down in black and white. What Richard Ford saw and wrote down in 1846
I am seeing and writing down in 1917. How these devilish Spaniards
have been able to keep it up all this time I can't imagine. Here we
have our paradox. Spain has changed so little that Ford's book is
still the best to be procured on the subject (you may spend many a
delightful half-hour with the charming irony of its pages for
company). Spanish dancing is apparently what it was a hundred years
ago; no wind from the north has disturbed it. Stranger still, it
depends for its effect on the acquirement of a brilliant technique.
Merely to play the castanets requires a severe tutelage. And yet it is
all as spontaneous, as fresh, as unstudied, as vehement in its appeal,
even to Spaniards, as it was in the beginning. Let us hope that Spain
will have no artistic reawakening.

Aristotle and Havelock Ellis and Louis Sherwin have taught us that the
theatre should be an outlet for suppressed desires. So, indeed, the
ideal theatre should. As a matter of fact, in most playhouses (I will
generously refrain from naming the one I visited yesterday) I am
continually suppressing a desire to strangle somebody or other, but
after a visit to the Spaniards I walk out into Columbus Circle
completely purged of pity and fear, love, hate, and all the rest. It
is an experience.

  _November 3, 1917._




II

A Note on Mimi Aguglia

     _"Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it
     be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical
     movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an
     artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who
     composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the
     dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no
     more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be
     preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in
     those forms of art which we have agreed to recognize as of
     equal value."_

                        Arthur Symons.


The only George Jean, "witty, wise, and cruel," and the "amaranthine"
Louis Sherwin, who understands better than anybody else how to plunge
the rapier into the vulnerable spot and twist it in the wound, making
the victim writhe, have been having some fun with the art of acting
lately, or to be exact, with the art of actors. Now actor-baiting is
no new game; as a winter sport it is as popular as making jokes about
mothers-in-law, decrying the art of Bouguereau or Howard Chandler
Christy, or discussing the methods of Mr. Belasco. Ever so long ago
(and George Henry Lewes preceded him) George Moore wrote an article
called "Mummer Worship," holding the players up to ridicule, but
George really adores the theatre and even acting, goes to the
playhouse constantly, and writes a bad play himself every few years.
None of these has achieved success on the stage. The list includes
_Martin Luther_, written with a collaborator, _The Strike at
Arlingford_, _The Bending of the Bough_ (Moore's version of a play by
Edwin Martyn), a dramatization of "Esther Waters," _Elizabeth Cooper_,
and the fragment, _The Apostle_, on which "The Brook Kerith," was
based. Now he is at work turning the novel back into another play....
When the Sunday editor of a newspaper is at his wit's end he
invariably sends a competent reporter to collect data for a symposium
on one of two topics, Is the author or the player more important? or
Does the stage director make the actor? The amount of amusement this
reporter can derive in gathering indignant replies from mountebanks
and scribblers is only limited by his own sense of humour. Even the
late Sir Henry Irving felt compelled on more than one occasion to
defend his "noble calling."

The actor, when he slaps back, usually overlooks the point at issue,
but sometimes he has something to say over which we may well ponder.
Witness, for example, the following passage, quoted from that justly
celebrated compendium of personal opinions and broad-shaft wit called
"Nat Goodwin's Book": "The average author and manager of today are
prone to advertise themselves as conspicuously as the play (as if the
public cared a snap who wrote the play or who 'presents'). I doubt if
five per cent of the public know who wrote 'The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray,' 'In Mizzoura,' or 'Richelieu,' but they know their stage
favourites. I wonder how many mantels are adorned with pictures of the
successful dramatist and those who 'present' and how many there are on
which appear Maude Adams, Dave Warfield, Billie Burke, John Drew,
Bernhardt, Duse, and hundreds of other distinguished players."

It is principally urged against the claims of acting as an art that a
young person without previous experience or training can make an
immediate (and sometimes lasting) effect upon the stage, whereas in
the preparation for any other art (even the interpretative arts) years
of training are necessary. This premise is full of holes; nevertheless
George Moore, and Messrs. Nathan and Sherwin all cling to it. It is
true that almost any young girl, moderately gifted with charm or
comeliness, may make an instantaneous impression on our stage,
especially in the namby-pamby rôles which our playwrights usually give
her to play. But she is soon found out. She may still attract
audiences (as George Barr McCutcheon and Alma Tadema still attract
audiences) but the discerning part of the public will take no joy in
seeing her. Charles Frohman said (and he ought to know) that the
average life of a female star on the American stage was ten years; in
other words, her career continued as long as her youth and physical
charms remained potent.

We have easily accounted for the unimportant actors, the rank and
file, but what about those who immediately claim positions which they
hold in spite of their lack of previous training? These are rarer. At
the moment, indeed, I cannot think of any. For while genius often
manifests itself early in a career, the great actors, as a rule, have
struggled for many years to learn the rudiments of their art before
they have given indisputable proof of their greatness, or before they
have been recognized. "Real acting," according to Percy Fitzgerald,
"is a science, to be studied and mastered, as other sciences are
studied and mastered, by long years of training." They may not have
had the strenuous Conservatoire and Théâtre Français training of Sarah
Bernhardt. As a matter of fact, indeed, the actor may far better learn
to handle his tools by manipulating them before an audience, than by
practicing with them for too long a time in the closet. The technique
of violin playing can best be acquired before the _virtuoso_ appears
in public, although no amount of training in itself will make a great
violinist, but the basic elements of acting, grace, diction, etc., can
just as well be acquired behind the footlights and so many great
actors have acquired them, as many of the greatest have ignored them.
There can be no hard and fast rules laid down for this sort of thing.
Can we thank nine months with Mme. Marchesi for the instantaneous
success and subsequent brilliant career of Mme. Melba? Against this
training offset the years and years of road playing and the more years
of study at home in retirement to account for the career of Mrs.
Fiske. The Australian soprano was born with a naturally-placed and
flexible voice. Her shake is said to have been perfection when she was
a child; her scale was even; her intonation impeccable. She had very
little to learn except the rôles in the operas she was to sing and her
future was very clearly marked from the night she made her début as
Gilda in _Rigolettò_. Mme. Patti was equally gifted. Mme. Pasta and
Mme. Fremstad, on the other hand, toiled very slowly towards fame. The
former singer was an absolute failure when she first appeared in
London and it took several years of hard work to make her the greatest
lyric artist of her day. The great Jenny Lind retired from the stage
completely defeated, only to return as the most popular singer of her
time. Mischa Elman has told me he never practices; Leo Ornstein, on
the other hand, spends hours every day at the piano. Mozart sprang,
full-armed with genius, into the world. He began composing at the age
of four. No training was necessary for him, but Beethoven and Wagner
developed slowly. In the field of writers there are even more happy
examples. Hundreds of boys have spent years in theme and literature
courses in college preparing in vain for a future which was never to
be theirs, while other youths with no educations have taken to writing
as a cat takes to cat-nip. Should we assume that the annual output of
Professor Baker's class at Harvard produces better playwrights than
Molière or Shakespeare, neither of whom enjoyed Professor Baker's
lectures, nor, I think I am safe in conjecturing, anything like them?

What, after all, constitutes training? For a creative or
interpretative genius mere existence seems to be sufficient. Joseph
Conrad, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov, and Patrick MacGill all were sailors
for many years before they began to write. We owe "Youth" and the
first section of _Scheherazade_ to this accident. MacGill also had the
privilege of digging potatoes; he writes about it in "The Rat-pit."
Mrs. Patrick Campbell learned enough about how to move about and how
to speak in the country houses she frequented before she began her
professional career to enable her immediately to take a position of
importance on the stage. It does not seem necessary, indeed, that the
training for any career should be prescribed or systematic. Some men
get their training one way and some another. A school of acting may be
of the greatest benefit to A, while B will not profit by it. Some
actors are ruined by stock companies; others are improved by them. The
geniuses in this interpretative art as in all the other interpretative
and creative arts, seem to rise above obstructions, and to make
themselves felt, whatever difficulties are put in their way.

Some great actors, like some great musicians and authors, create out
of their fulness. They cannot explain; they do not need to study;
they create by instinct. Others, like Beethoven and Olive Fremstad,
work and rework their material in the closet until it approaches
perfection, when they expose it. To say that there are bad actors
following in the footsteps of both these types of geniuses is to be
axiomatic and trite. It would be a foregone conclusion. Just as there
are musicians who write as easily as Mozart but who have nothing to
say, so there are other musicians who write and rewrite, work and
rework, study and restudy, and yet what they finally offer the public
has not the quality or the force or the inspiration of a common
gutter-ballad.

It has also been urged in print that as naturalness is the goal of the
actor he should never have to strive for it. The names of Frank
Reicher and John Drew are often mentioned as those of men who "play
themselves" on the stage. A most difficult thing to do! Also an
unfortunate choice of names. Each of these artists has undergone a
long and arduous apprenticeship in order to achieve the natural method
which has given him eminence in his career. Indeed, of all the
qualities of the actor this is the least easy to acquire.

Actors are often condemned because they are not versatile. Versatility
is undoubtedly an admirable quality in an actor, valuable, especially
to his manager, but hardly an essential one. An artist is not
required to do more than one thing well. Vladimir de Pachmann
specializes in Chopin playing, but Arthur Symons once wrote that "he
is the greatest living pianist, because he can play certain things
better than any other pianist can play anything." Should we not allot
similar approval to the actor or actress who makes a fine effect in
one part or in one kind of part? I should not call Ellen Terry a
versatile actress, but I should call her a great artist. Marie Tempest
is not versatile, unless she should be so designated for having made
equal successes on the lyric and dramatic stages, but she is one of
the most satisfying artists at present appearing before our public.
Mallarmé was not versatile; Cézanne was not versatile; nor was Thomas
Love Peacock. Mascagni, assuredly, is not versatile. The da Vincis and
Wagners are rare figures in the history of creative art just as the
Nijinskys and Rachels are rare in the history of interpretative art.

Someone may say that the great actor dies while the play goes
thundering on through the ages on the stage and in everyman's library.
This very point, indeed, is made by Mr. Lewes. But this, alas, is the
reverse of the truth. We have competent and immensely absorbing
records of the lives and art of David Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Ristori,
Clairon, Rachel, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth, and other prominent
players, while most of the plays in which they appeared are not only
no longer actable, but also no longer readable. The brothers de
Goncourt, for example, wrote an account of Clairon which is a book of
the first interest, while I defy any one to get through two pages of
most of the fustian she was compelled to act! The reason for this is
very easily formulated. Great acting is human and universal. It is
eternal in its appeal and its memory is easily kept alive while
playwrighting is largely a matter of fashion, and appeals to the mob
of men and women who never read and who are more interested in police
news than they are in poetry. George Broadhurst or Henry Bernstein or
Arthur Wing Pinero, or others like them, have always been the popular
playwrights; a few names like Sophocles, Terence, Molière,
Shakespeare, and Ibsen come rolling down to us, but they are precious
and few.

A great actor, indeed, can put life into perfectly wooden material. In
the case of Sarah Bernhardt, who was the creator, the actress or
Sardou? In the case of Henry Irving, who was the creator, the actor or
the authors of _The Bells_ and _Faust_ (not, in this instance,
Goethe)? Is Langdon Mitchell's version of "Vanity Fair" sufficiently
a work of art to exist without the co-operation of Mrs. Fiske? When
Duse electrified her audiences in such plays as _The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray_ and _Fedora_, were the dramatists responsible for the
effect? Arthur Symons says of her in the latter play, "A great
actress, who is also a great intelligence, is seen accepting it, for
its purpose, with contempt, as a thing to exercise her technical skill
upon." One reads of Mrs. Siddone that she could move a roomful of
people to tears merely by repeating the word "hippopotamus" with
varying stress. Should we thank the behemoth for this miracle?

Any one who understands, great acting knows that it is illumination.
There are those who are born to throw light on the creations of the
poets, just as there are others born to be poets. These interpreters
give a new life to the works of the masters, Æschylus, Congreve,
Tchekhov. When, as more frequently happens, they are called upon to
play mediocre parts it is with their own personal force, their
atmospheric aura that they create something more than the author
himself ever intended or dreamed of. How could Joseph Jefferson play
_Rip Van Winkle_ for thirty years (or longer) with scenery in tatters
and a company of mummers which Corse Payton would have scorned? Was
it because of the greatness of the play? If that were true, why is not
some one else performing this drama today to large audiences? Has any
one read the Joseph Jefferson acting version of _Rip Van Winkle_? Who
wrote it? Don't you think it rather extraordinary that a play which
apparently has given so much pleasure, and in which Jefferson was
hailed as a great actor by every contemporary critic of note, as is in
itself so little known? It is not extraordinary. It was Jefferson's
performance of the title rôle which gave vitality to the play.

Of course, there are few actors who have this power, few great actors.
What else could you expect? A critic might prove that playwriting was
not an art on the majority of the evidence. Almost all the music
composed in America could be piled up to prove that music was not an
art. Should we say that there is no art of painting because the
Germans have no great painters?

At present, however, it is quite possible for any one in New York with
car or taxi-cab fare to see one of the greatest of living actresses.
She is not playing on Broadway. This actress has never been to
dramatic school; she has not had the advantages of Alla Nazimova, who
has worked with at least one fine stage director. She was simply born
a genius, that is all; she has perfected her art by appearing in a
great variety of parts, the method of Edwin Booth. Most of these parts
happen to be in masterpieces of the drama. She is not unaccustomed to
playing _Zaza_ one evening and d'Annunzio's _Francesca da Rimini_ the
next. Her repertory further includes _La Dame aux Camélias_, _Hamlet_,
_Romeo and Juliet_, _La Figlia di Iorio_, Giuseppe Giacosa's _Come le
Foglie_, Sicilian folk-plays, and plays by Arturo Giovannitti. When I
first saw Mimi Aguglia she was little more than a crude force, a great
struggling light, that sometimes illuminated, nay often blinded, but
which shone in unequal flashes. Experience has made of her an actress
who is almost unfailing in her effect. If you asked her about the
technique of her art she would probably smile (as Mozart and Schubert
might have done before her); if you asked her about her method she
would not understand you ... but she understands the art of acting.

Watch her, for instance, in the second act of _Zaza_, in the scene in
which the music hall singer discovers that her lover has a wife and
child. No heroics, no shrieks, no conventional posturings and
shruggings and sobbing ... something far worse she exposes to us, a
nameless terror. She stands with her back against a table, nonchalant
and smilingly defiant, unwilling to return to the music hall with her
former partner, but pleasantly jocular in her refusal. Stung into
anger, he hurls his last bomb. Zaza is smoking. As she listens to the
cruel words the corner of her mouth twitches, the cigarette almost
falls. That is all. There is a moment's silence unbroken save by the
heartbeats of her spectators. Even the babies which mothers bring in
abundance to the Italian theatre are quiet. With that esoteric
magnetism with which great artists are possessed she holds the
audience captive by this simple gesture. I could continue to point out
other astounding details in this impersonation, but not one of them,
perhaps, would illustrate Aguglia's art as does this one. If no
training is necessary to produce effects of this kind, I would
pronounce acting the most holy of the arts, for then, surely, it is a
direct gift from God.

  _September 5, 1917._




III

The New Isadora

    _"We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
      Thou art noble and nude and antique;"_

                        Swinburne's "Dolores."


I have a fine memory of a chance description flung off by some one at
a dinner in Paris; a picture of the youthful Isadora Duncan in her
studio in New York developing her ideals through sheer will and
preserving the contour of her feet by wearing carpet slippers. The
latter detail stuck in my memory. It may or may not be true, but it
could have been, _should_ have been true. The incipient dancer keeping
her feet pure for her coming marriage with her art is a subject for
philosophic dissertation or for poetry. There are many poets who would
have seized on this idea for an ode or even a sonnet, had it occurred
to them. Oscar Wilde would have liked this excuse for a poem ... even
Robert Browning, who would have woven many moral strophes from this
text.... It would have furnished Mr. George Moore with material for
another story for the volume called "Celibates." Walter Pater might
have dived into some very beautiful, but very conscious, prose with
this theme as a spring-board. Huysmans would have found this
suggestion sufficient inspiration for a romance the length of
"Clarissa Harlowe." You will remember that the author of "En Route"
meditated writing a novel about a man who left his house to go to his
office. Perceiving that his shoes have not been polished he stops at a
boot-black's and during the operation he reviews his affairs. The
problem was to make 300 pages of this!... Lombroso would have added
the detail to his long catalogue in "The Man of Genius" as another
proof of the insanity of artists. Georges Feydeau would have found
therein enough matter for a three-act farce and d'Annunzio for a
poetic drama which he might have dedicated to "Isadora of the
beautiful feet." Sermons might be preached from the text and many
painters would touch the subject with reverence. Manet might have
painted Isadora with one of the carpet slippers half depending from a
bare, rosy-white foot.

There are many fables concerning the beginning of Isadora's career.
One has it that the original dance in bare feet was an accident....
Isadora was laving her feet in an upper chamber when her hostess
begged her to dance for her other guests. Just as she was she
descended and met with such approval that thenceforth her feet
remained bare. This is a pretty tale, but it has not the fine ring of
truth of the story of the carpet slippers. There had been bare-foot
dancers before Isadora; there had been, I venture to say, discinct
"Greek dancers." Isadora's contribution to her art is spiritual; it is
her feeling for the idea of the dance which isolates her from her
contemporaries. Many have overlooked this essential fact in attempting
to account for her obvious importance. Her imitators (and has any
other interpretative artist ever had so many?) have purloined her
costumes, her gestures, her steps; they have put the music of
Beethoven and Schubert to new uses as she had done before them; they
have unbound their hair and freed their feet; but the essence of her
art, the _spirit_, they have left in her keeping; they could not well
do otherwise.

Inspired perhaps by Greek phrases, by the superb collection of Greek
vases in the old Pinakotheck in Munich, Isadora cast the knowledge she
had gleaned of the dancer's training from her. At least she forced it
to be subservient to her new wishes. She flung aside her memory of the
entrechat and the pirouette, the studied technique of the ballet; but
in so doing she unveiled her own soul. She called her art the
renaissance of the Greek ideal but there was something modern about
it, pagan though it might be in quality. Always it was pure and
sexless ... always abstract emotion has guided her interpretations.

In the beginning she danced to the piano music of Chopin and Schubert.
Eleven years ago I saw her in Munich in a program of Schubert
_impromptus_ and Chopin _preludes_ and _mazurkas_. A year or two later
she was dancing in Paris to the accompaniment of the Colonne
Orchestra, a good deal of the music of Gluck's _Orfeo_ and the very
lovely dances from _Iphigénie en Aulide_. In these she remained
faithful to her original ideal, the beauty of abstract movement, the
rhythm of exquisite gesture. This was not sense echoing sound but
rather a very delightful confusion of her own mood with that of the
music.

So a new grace, a new freedom were added to the dance; in her later
representations she has added a third quality, strength. Too, her
immediate interpretations often suggest concrete images.... A
passionate patriotism for one of her adopted countries is at the root
of her fiery miming of the _Marseillaise_, a patriotism apparently as
deep-rooted, certainly as inflaming, as that which inspired Rachel in
her recitation of this hymn during the Paris revolution of 1848. In
times of civil or international conflagration the dancer, the actress
often play important rôles in world politics. Malvina Cavalazzi, the
Italian _ballerina_ who appeared at the Academy of Music during the
Eighties and who married Charles Mapleson, son of the impressario,
once told me of a part she had played in the making of United Italy.
During the Austrian invasion the Italian flag was _verboten_. One
night, however, during a representation of opera in a town the name of
which I have forgotten, Mme. Cavalazzi wore a costume of green and
white, while her male companion wore red, so that in the _pas de deux_
which concluded the ballet they formed automatically a semblance of
the Italian banner. The audience was raised to a hysterical pitch of
enthusiasm and rushed from the theatre in a violent mood, which
resulted in an immediate encounter with the Austrians and their
eventual expulsion from the city.

Isadora's pantomimic interpretation of the _Marseillaise_, given in
New York before the United States had entered the world war, aroused
as vehement and excited an expression of enthusiasm as it would be
possible for an artist to awaken in our theatre today. The audiences
stood up and scarcely restrained their impatience to cheer. At the
previous performances in Paris, I am told, the effect approached the
incredible.... In a robe the colour of blood she stands enfolded; she
sees the enemy advance; she feels the enemy as it grasps her by the
throat; she kisses her flag; she tastes blood; she is all but crushed
under the weight of the attack; and then she rises, triumphant, with
the terrible cry, _Aux armes, citoyens!_ Part of her effect is gained
by gesture, part by the massing of her body, but the greater part by
facial expression. In the anguished appeal she does not make a sound,
beyond that made by the orchestra, but the hideous din of a hundred
raucous voices seems to ring in our ears. We see Félicien Rops's
_Vengeance_ come to life; we see the _sans-culottes_ following the
carts of the aristocrats on the way to execution ... and finally we
see the superb calm, the majestic flowing strength of the Victory of
Samothrace.... At times, legs, arms, a leg or an arm, the throat, or
the exposed breast assume an importance above that of the rest of the
mass, suggesting the unfinished sculpture of Michael Angelo, an
aposiopesis which, of course, served as Rodin's inspiration.

In the _Marche Slav_ of Tschaikovsky Isadora symbolizes her conception
of the Russian moujik rising from slavery to freedom. With her hands
bound behind her back, groping, stumbling, head-bowed, knees bent, she
struggles forward, clad only in a short red garment that barely covers
her thighs. With furtive glances of extreme despair she peers above
and ahead. When the strains of _God Save the Czar_ are first heard in
the orchestra she falls to her knees and you see the peasant
shuddering under the blows of the knout. The picture is a tragic one,
cumulative in its horrific details. Finally comes the moment of
release and here Isadora makes one of her great effects. She does not
spread her arms apart with a wide gesture. She brings them forward
slowly and we observe with horror that they have practically forgotten
how to move at all! They are crushed, these hands, crushed and
bleeding after their long serfdom; they are not hands at all but
claws, broken, twisted piteous claws! The expression of frightened,
almost uncomprehending, joy with which Isadora concludes the march is
another stroke of her vivid imaginative genius.

In her third number inspired by the Great War, the _Marche Lorraine_
of Louis Ganne, in which is incorporated the celebrated _Chanson
Lorraine_, Isadora with her pupils, symbolizes the gaiety of the
martial spirit. It is the spirit of the cavalry riding gaily with
banners waving in the wind; the infantry marching to an inspired
tune. There is nothing of the horror of war or revolution in this
picture ... only the brilliancy and dash of war ... the power and the
glory!

Of late years Isadora has danced (in the conventional meaning of the
word) less and less. Since her performance at Carnegie Hall several
years ago of the _Liebestod_ from _Tristan_, which Walter Damrosch
hailed as an extremely interesting experiment, she has attempted to
express something more than the joy of melody and rhythm. Indeed on at
least three occasions she has danced a Requiem at the Metropolitan
Opera House.... If the new art at its best is not dancing, neither is
it wholly allied to the art of pantomime. It would seem, indeed, that
Isadora is attempting to express something of the spirit of sculpture,
perhaps what Vachell Lindsay describes as "moving sculpture." Her
medium, of necessity, is still rhythmic gesture, but its development
seems almost dream-like. More than the dance this new art partakes of
the fluid and unending quality of music. Like any other new art it is
not to be understood at first and I confess in the beginning it said
nothing to me but eventually I began to take pleasure in watching it.
Now Isadora's poetic and imaginative interpretation of the symphonic
interlude from César Franck's _Redemption_ is full of beauty and
meaning to me and during the whole course of its performance the
interpreter scarcely rises from her knees. The neck, the throat, the
shoulders, the head and arms are her means of expression. I thought of
Barbey d'Aurevilly's phrase, "_Elle avait l'air de monter vers Dieu
les mains toutes pleines de bonnes oeuvres._"

       *       *       *       *       *

Isadora's teaching has had its results but her influence has been
wider in other directions. Fokine thanks her for the new Russian
Ballet. She did indeed free the Russians from the conventions of the
classic ballet and but for her it is doubtful if we should have seen
_Scheherazade_ and _Cléopâtre_. _Daphnis et Chloe_, _Narcisse_, and
_L'Aprèsmidi d'un Faune_ bear her direct stamp. This then, aside from
her own appearances, has been her great work. Of her celebrated school
of dancing I cannot speak with so much enthusiasm. The defect in her
method of teaching is her insistence (consciously or unconsciously) on
herself as a model. The seven remaining girls of her school dance
delightfully. They are, in addition, young and beautiful, but they are
miniature Isadoras. They add nothing to her style; they make the same
gestures; they take the same steps; they have almost, if not quite,
acquired a semblance of her spirit. They vibrate with intention; they
have force; but constantly they suggest just what they are ...
imitations. When they dance alone they often make a very charming but
scarcely overpowering effect. When they dance with Isadora they are
but a moving row of shadow shapes of Isadora that come and go. Her own
presence suffices to make the effect they all make together.... I have
been told that when Isadora watches her girls dance she often weeps,
for then and then only she can behold herself. One of the griefs of an
actor or a dancer is that he can never see himself. This oversight of
nature Isadora has to some extent overcome.

Those who like to see pretty dancing, pretty girls, pretty things in
general will not find much pleasure in contemplating the art of
Isadora. She is not pretty; her dancing is not pretty. She has been
cast in nobler mould and it is her pleasure to climb higher mountains.
Her gesture is titanic; her mood generally one of imperious grandeur.
She has grown larger with the years--and by this I mean something more
than the physical meaning of the word, for she is indeed heroic in
build. But this is the secret of her power and force. There is no
suggestion of flabbiness about her and so she can impart to us the
soul of the struggling moujik, the spirit of a nation, the figure on
the prow of a Greek bark.... And when she interprets the
_Marseillaise_ she seems indeed to feel the mighty moment.

  _July 14, 1917._




IV

Margaret Anglin Produces
_As You Like It_


Of all the comedies of Shakespeare _As You Like It_ is the one which
has attracted to itself the most attention from actresses. No feminine
star but what at one time or another has a desire to play Rosalind.
Bernard Shaw says, "Who ever failed or could fail as Rosalind?" and I
am inclined to think him right, though opinions differ. It would seem,
however, that Rosalind is to the dramatic stage what Mimi in _La
Bohème_ is to the lyric, a rôle in which a maximum of effect can be
gotten with a minimum of effort.

Opinions differ however. Stung to fury by Mrs. Kendal's playing of the
part, George Moore says somewhere, "Mrs. Kendal nurses children all
day and strives to play Rosalind at night. What infatuation, what
ridiculous endeavour! To realize the beautiful woodland passion and
the idea of the transformation a woman must have sinned, for only
through sin may we learn the charm of innocence. To play Rosalind a
woman must have had more than one lover, and if she has been made to
wait in the rain and has been beaten she will have done a great deal
to qualify herself for the part." Still another critic considers the
rôle a difficult one. He says: "With the exception of Lady Macbeth no
woman in Shakespeare is so much in controversy as Rosalind. The
character is thought to be almost unattainable. An ideal that is lofty
but at the same time vague seems to possess the Shakespeare scholar,
accompanied by the profound conviction that it never can be fulfilled.
Only a few actresses have obtained recognition as Rosalind, chief
among them being Mrs. Pritchard, Peg Woffington, Mrs. Dancer, Dora
Jordan, Louisa Nesbitt, Helen Faucit, Ellen Tree, Adelaide Neilson,
Mrs. Scott-Siddons and Miss Mary Anderson."

Of those who have recently played Rosalind perhaps Mary Anderson, Ada
Rehan, Henrietta Crosman and Julia Marlowe will remain longest in the
memory, although Marie Wainwright, Mary Shaw, Mrs. Langtry and Julia
Neilson are among a long list of those who have tried the part. Miss
Rehan appeared in the rôle when Augustin Daly revived the comedy at
Daly's Theatre, December 17, 1889. We are told that an effort was made
in this production to emphasize the buoyant gaiety of the piece. The
scenery displayed the woods embellished in a springtime green, and
the acting did away as much as possible with any of the underlying
melancholy which flows through the comedy.

William Winter frankly asserts--perhaps not unwittingly giving a
staggering blow to the art of acting in so doing--that the reason
Rosalind is not more often embodied "in a competent and enthralling
manner is that her enchanting quality is something that cannot be
assumed--it must be possessed; it must exist in the fibre of the
individual, and its expression will then be spontaneous. Art can
accomplish much, but it cannot supply the inherent captivation that
constitutes the puissance of Rosalind. Miss Rehan possesses that
quality, and the method of her art was the fluent method of natural
grace."

Fie and a fig for Mr. Moore's theory about being beaten and standing
in the rain, implies Mr. Winter!

To Mr. Winter I am also indebted for a description of Mary Anderson in
_As You Like It_: "Miss Anderson, superbly handsome as Rosalind,
indicated that beneath her pretty swagger, nimble satire and silver
playfulness Rosalind is as earnest of Juliet--though different in
temperament and mind--as fond as Viola and as constant as Imogen."

Miss Marlowe's Rosalind, somewhat along the same lines as Miss
Anderson's, and Miss Crosman's, a hoydenish, tomboy sort of creature,
first cousin to Mistress Nell and the young lady of _The Amazons_,
should be familiar to theatregoers of the last two decades.

Last Monday evening Margaret Anglin exposed her version of the comedy.
As might have been expected, it has met with some unfavourable
criticism. Preconceived notions of Rosalind are as prevalent as
preconceived notions of Hamlet. And yet if _As You Like It_ had been
produced Monday night as a "new fantastic comedy," just as _Prunella_
was, for instance, I am inclined to think that everybody who dissented
would have been at Miss Anglin's charming heels.

The scenery has been given undue prominence both by the management and
by the writers for the newspapers. Its most interesting feature is the
arrangement by which it is speedily changed about. There were no long
waits caused by the settings of scenes during the acts. To say,
however, that it has anything to do with the art of Gordon Craig is to
speak nonsense. The scenes are painted in much the same manner as that
to which we are accustomed and inured. There is a certain haze over
the trees, caused partially by the tints and partially by the
lighting, which produces a rather charming effect, but the outlines of
the trees are quite definite; no impressionism here.

The acting is quite a different matter. _As You Like It_ is one of the
most modern in spirit of the Shakespeare plays. This air of modernity
is still further emphasized by the fact that the play, for the most
part, is written in prose. I feel certain that Bernard Shaw derived
part of his inspiration for _Man and Superman_ from _As You Like It_.
Only in Shakespeare's play Ann Whitefield (Rosalind) pursues Octavius
(Orlando) instead of Jack Tanner. I am inclined to believe that Shaw's
psychology in this instance is the more sound. It seems incredible
that a girl so witty, so beautiful, and so intelligent as Rosalind
should waste so much time on that sentimental, uncomprehending
creature known as Orlando. Every line of Orlando should have sounded
the knell of his fate in her ears. However, it must be remembered that
Orlando was young and good-looking, and that, at least in the play,
men of the right stamp seemed to be scarce. Of course, it is out of
Touchstone that Shaw has evolved his Jack Tanner.

Whether Miss Anglin had this idea in mind or not when she produced the
comedy I have no means of ascertaining. It is not essential to my
point. At least she has emphasized it, and she has done the most
intelligent stage directing that I have observed in the performance of
a Shakespeare play for many a long season. There is consistency in the
acting. Rosalind, Jaques, Touchstone, Celia, Oliver, the dukes,
Charles, Sylvius, the whole lot, in fact, are natural in method and
manner. There is no striving for the fantastic. Let that part of the
comedy take care of itself, undoubtedly suggested Miss Anglin.

Jaques, finely portrayed by Fuller Mellish, delivers that arrant bit
of nonsense "The Seven Ages of Man" in such a manner as a man might
tell a rather serious story in a drawing room. "The Seven Ages of
Man," of course, is just as much of an aria as _La Donna e Mobile_. It
always awakens applause, but this time the applause was deserved. Mr.
Mellish emphasized the cynical side of the rôle. He smiled in and out
of season, and his most "melancholy" remarks were delivered in such a
manner as to indicate that they were not too deeply felt. Jaques was a
little bored with the forest and his companions, but he would have
been quite in his element at Mme. Récamier's. Such was the impression
that Fuller Mellish gave. Bravo, Mr. Mellish, for an impression!

Similarly the Touchstone of Sidney Greenstreet. We are accustomed to
more physically attractive Touchstones, fools with finer bodies, and
yet this keen-minded, stout person spoke his lines with such pertness
and spontaneity that they rarely failed of their proper effect. As for
Orlando, it seemed to me that Pedro de Cordoba was a little too
rhetorical at times to fit in with the spirit of the performance, but
Orlando at times does not fit into the play. For instance, when he
utters those incredible lines:

    "If ever you have looked on better days,
    If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
    If ever sat at any good man's feast,
    If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear...."

I do not know whether Miss Anglin is a disciple of George Moore or
William Winter in her acting of Rosalind. How she acquired her charm
is not for us to seek into. It is only for us to credit her with
having it in great plenty. A charming natural manner which made the
masquerading lady seem more than a fantasy. Her warning to Phebe,

"Sell when you can; you are not for all markets,"

was delicious in its effect. I remember no Rosalind who wooed her
Orlando so delightfully. For Rosalind, as Woman the Pursuer, driven
forward by the Life Force, is convincingly Miss Anglin's conception--a
conception which fits the comedy admirably.

As to the objections which have been raised to Miss Anglin's
assumption of the masculine garments without any attempt at
counterfeiting masculinity, I would ask my reader, if she be a woman,
what she would do if she found it necessary to wear men's clothes. If
she were not an actress she would undoubtedly behave much as she did
in women's, suppressing unnecessary and telltale gestures as much as
possible, but not trying to imitate mannish gestures which would
immediately stamp her an impostor. There is no internal evidence in
Shakespeare's play to prove that Rosalind was an actress. She might
have appeared in private theatricals at the palace, but even that is
doubtful. Consequently when she donned men's clothes it became evident
to her that many men are effeminate in gesture and those that are do
not ordinarily affect mannish movements. Her most obvious concealment
was to be natural--quite herself. This, I think, is one of the most
interesting and well-thought-out points of Miss Anglin's
interpretation.

  _March 20, 1914._




The Modern Composers at a Glance




The Modern Composers at a Glance

An Impertinent Catalogue


IGOR STRAVINSKY: Paul Revere rides in Russia.

CYRIL SCOTT: A young man playing Debussy in a Maidenhead villa.

BALILLA PRATELLA: Pretty noises in funny places.

ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK: His master's voice.

LEO ORNSTEIN: A small boy upsetting a push-cart.

GIACOMO PUCCINI: Pinocchio in a passion.

ERIK SATIE: A mandarin with a toy pistol firing into a wedding cake.

PAUL DUKAS: A giant eating bonbons.

RICCARDO ZANDONAI: Brocade dipped in garlic.

ERICH KORNGOLD: The white hope.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: Six times six is thirty-six--and six is ninety-two!

MAURICE RAVEL: Tomorrow ... and tomorrow ... and tomorrow....

CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Chantecler crows _pianissimo_ in whole tones.

RICHARD STRAUSS: An ostrich _not_ hiding his head.

SIR EDWARD ELGAR: The footman leaves his accordion in the bishop's
carriage.

ITALO MONTEMEZZI: Three Kings--but no aces.

PERCY ALDRIDGE GRAINGER: An effete Australian chewing tobacco.

  _August 8, 1917_.

       *       *       *       *       *




FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: One evidence of this is that his works are eagerly sought
after and treated tenderly by the second-hand book-sellers. Some of
them command fancy prices.]

[Footnote 2: For an account of Péladan see my essay on Erik Satie in
"Interpreters and Interpretations."]

[Footnote 3: You will find an account of Balzac's interesting theory
regarding names and letters, which may well have had a direct
influence on Edgar Saltus, in Saltus's "Balzac," p. 29 _et seq._ For a
precisely contrary theory turn to "The Naming of Streets" in Max
Beerbohm's "Yet Again."]

[Footnote 4: "Wit and Wisdom from Edgar Saltus" by G. F. Monkshood and
George Gamble, and "The Cynic's Posy," a collection of epigrams, the
majority of which are taken from Saltus, may be brought forward in
evidence.]

[Footnote 5: Certain books by Edgar Saltus have been announced from
time to time but have never appeared; these include: "Annochiatura,"
"Immortal Greece," "Our Lady of Beauty," "Cimmeria," "Daughters of
Dream," "Scaffolds and Altars," "Prince Charming," and "The Crimson
Curtain."]

[Footnote 6: Houghton, Mifflin and Co,; 1884. Reprinted 1887 and
1890.]

[Footnote 7: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.; 1885. Reprinted by the Belford
Co.]

[Footnote 8: George J. Coombes; 1886. Reprinted by Brentano's.]

[Footnote 9: Scribner and Welford; 1887. Revised edition, Belford,
Clarke and Co.; 1889.]

[Footnote 10: Brentano's; 1887.]

[Footnote 11: Benjamin and Bell; 1887.]

[Footnote 12: Belford Co.; 1888.]

[Footnote 13: Belford, Clarke and Co.; 1888.]

[Footnote 14: Belford Co.; 1889.]

[Footnote 15: Belford Co.; 1889.]

[Footnote 16: Belford, Clarke and Co.; 1889.]

[Footnote 17: Belford Co.; 1890.]

[Footnote 18: Belford Co.; 1891.]

[Footnote 19: Belford Co.; 1891. Reprinted by Mitchell Kennerley;
1906.]

[Footnote 20: P. F. Collier; 1892; "Written especially for 'Once a
Week Library.'"]

[Footnote 21: Morrill, Higgins and Co;. 1893. Reprinted by Mitchell
Kennerley; 1906.]

[Footnote 22: F. Tennyson Neely; 1893.]

[Footnote 23: Tudor Press: 1894.]

[Footnote 24: The Transatlantic Publishing Co.; 1895.]

[Footnote 25: Ainslee; 1903.]

[Footnote 26: A. Wessels Co.; 1905.]

[Footnote 27: Mitchell Kennerley; 1906.]

[Footnote 28: J. B. Lippincott Co.; 1906.]

[Footnote 29: Mitchell Kennerley; 1907.]

[Footnote 30: Mitchell Kennerley; 1907.]

[Footnote 31: Mitchell Kennerley; 1909.]

[Footnote 32: Pulitzer Publishing Co.; 1912.]

[Footnote 33: In an essay entitled "The Great American Composer" in my
book, "Interpreters and Interpretations."]

       *       *       *       *       *




Index


Abbott, Emma, 220

Academy of Arts and Letters, 80, 225, 227

Acting, 111, 113, 119, 120, 272, 283, 293 _et seq._

Adam, Villiers de l'Isle, 48, 49

Adams, Maude, 295

Adams, Oscar Fay, 38

Æschylus, 103, 303

Agrippina, 69

Aguglia, Mimi, 284, 304, _et seq._

Ainslee's Magazine, 75

Alary, Signor, 248

Alboni, Marietta, 169

Alchemy, 76

Allegranti, Maddalena, 254, 255

Alma Tadema, 296

Alvary, Max, 99

Anderson, Mary, 319, 320

Anfossi, Pasquale, 169

Anglin, Margaret, 321 _et seq._

d'Annunzio, G., 284, 305

Apaches, 126, 135, 138, 140, 141 _et seq._, 182

Apthorp, W. F., 99, 168

Arabanek, 164

Archilei, 94

Arditi, Luigi, 288

Argentina, La, 284, 287

Argus, The, 54

Aristotle, 291

Arne, 257

Arnould, Sophie, 82, 96, 259 _et seq._

Astor, J. J., 227

Atilla, 79

Audran, 216

Augustus, 69, 70

d'Aurevilly, Barbey, 43, 63, 66, 87, 315

Ayres, Frederick, 200


Bach, 24, 28, 150, 199

Badarzewska, Thécla, 23

Baedeker, 58

Bag-pipe, 135, 136, 137

Bahamas, 136

Baker, J. Duncan, 211

Baker, Prof., 298

Bakst, Leon, 16

Bal des Gravilliers, 141 _et seq._

Balfe, Michael William, 27, 165

Bal musette, 125, 134 _et seq._

Balzac, 43, 50, 55, 56, 57, 63, 76, 86, 187, 225

Banti, Brigitta, 93, 164

Bara, Theda, 80

Barnabee, Henry Clay, 221

Barnet, R. A., 216

Barrison, Mabel, 219

Barry, Mme. du, 260

Bassoonists, 157

Bataille, Henry, 228, 230, 232

Bates, Katherine Lee, 38

Battistini, 102

Baudelaire, Charles, 43, 52, 131

Baumgarten, C. F., 171

Bayes, Nora, 110

Beardsley, Aubrey, 45

Becque, Henry, 230

Beerbohm, Max, 45, 50, 177, 238

Beethoven, 24, 27, 28, 32, 98, 150, 151, 170, 175, 200, 219, 298, 300

Bégué, Bernard, 156

Belasco, David, 294

Bel canto, 97, 101, 105

Belford's Magazine, 37

Bell, Digby, 222

Bellini, Vincenzo, 24, 25, 77, 79, 97, 100, 101, 114, 175, 248, 267,
  270, 273

Bel-Marduk, 82

Bergström, Hjalmar, 90

Berlin, Irving, 25, 222, 234

Berlioz, Hector, 27, 104

Bernacchi, Antonio, 99

Bernhardt, Sarah, 106, 222, 227, 245, 295, 297, 302

Bernstein, Henry, 228, 230, 232, 302

Bible, The, 67

Bichara, 15

Bilbao, 287

Billington, Mrs., 172

Bizet, Georges, 108, 113, 275

Blanche, Jacques, 183, 184

Blei, Franz, 69, 78, 259

Böcklin, Arnold, 89

Bonci, Alessandro, 102

Booth, Edwin, 111, 302, 305

Bouguereau, 61, 293

Bourget, Paul, 76

Boyden, Frank L., 203

Boynton, Henry Walcott, 38

Brahma, 82

Brahms, 25, 274

Brann-Brini, Mlle., 164

Branscombe, Gena, 200, 202

Brenon, Algernon St. John, 162

Bretón, Tomás, 113

Brian, Donald, 217

Brice, Fannie, 110

Brieux, 230

Brignoli, Pasquale, 155

Broadhurst, George, 302

Bromley, Eliza, 74

Brothers of the Book, 85

Browning, Robert, 307

Bunn, Alfred, 165

Burke, Billie, 295

Burney, Dr., 258

Butler, Samuel, 21

Byzance, 80


Cabanel, 61

Cæsar, Julius, 69

Caffarelli, 95, 96, 112

Cahill, Marie, 110

Cairns, William B., 38

Caligula, 51, 69, 79

Calvé, Emma, 106, 275

Camargo, 258, 259

Campanari, Giuseppe, 161, 162

Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 299

Caracalla, 79

Carestini, Giovanni, 95, 96

Carmencita, 285

Carnegie Hall, 25

Carré, Albert, 133

Carreño, Teresa, 153

Caruso, Enrico, 272

Cassive, Armande, 232

Catalani, Angelica, 93, 265 _et seq._

Cato, 69

Cats, 59, 69, 77, 102, 127, 131, 132, 233, 258, 259, 298

Cavalazzi, Malvina, 310

Cesare Borgia, 79

Cézanne, 301

Chabrier, Emmanuel, 285

Chadwick, George W., 197, 199, 212

Chambers, Robert W., 290

Chaliapine, Feodor, 114, 155

Charpentier, Gustave, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 173

Cherubini, 98

Cherubino's question, 54

Chinese plays, 103

Chopin, 23, 26, 55, 112, 239, 240, 301, 310

Chorley, Henry Fothergill, 98, 169, 247, 249, 261

Christ, 58, 67, 185, 191, 192

Christianity, 57, 68, 82, 83

Christy, Howard Chandler, 293

Churchill, Lady Randolph, 185

Cimarosa, Domenico, 255

Cinderella, 137

Cicisbeism, 82

Clairon, 96, 260, 302

Classical music, 23

Claudius, 69

Cleopatra, 82

Cline, Maggie, 107

Coerne, L. A., 199, 202

Cohan, George M., 288

Colles, Ramsay, 39

Colonne Orchestra, 310

Coloratura singing, 103, 104

Columbia University, 43

Comstock, Anthony, 59

Condamine, Robert de la, 183

Congreve, 303

Conrad, Joseph, 299

Conried, Henrich, 161, 162

Converse, Frederick, 212

Cooking, 26, 50, 78, 129, 130, 149 _et seq._

Cordoba, Pedro de, 324

Corneille, 104

Costa, Michael, 163

Cou-Cou Restaurant, 125 _et seq._, 183

Courts of Love, 65, 82

Cox, J. E., 165, 173, 264

Cox, Kenyon, 62

Craig, Gordon, 321

Critics, 24, 26, 30, 33, 34, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105, 111, 115, 228, 234

Crosman, Henrietta, 319, 321

Crowest, Frederick, 163, 164

Current Literature, 39

Cushman, Charlotte, 302

Cuzzoni, Francesca, 95, 258


Daly, Augustin, 319

Daly, Dan, 222

Damrosch, Walter, 157, 314

Dancing, 112, 113, 137 _et seq._, 281 _et seq._, 307 _et seq._

Dante, 76

Darby, W. D., 200

Davis, Cecilia, 253

Davis, Jessie Bartlett, 221

Davis, Owen, 93

Debussy, Claude, 30, 33, 96, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 200, 315, 329

Decoration, Interior, 11 _et seq._

Delacroix, 19

Delibes, Léo, 108, 113

Deslys, Gaby, 222

Destinn, Emmy, 114, 155

Devi, Ratan, 109

Dickens, Charles, 187

Dolmetsch, Arnold, 192

Doloretes, 286, 287, 288

Donizetti, Gaetano, 61, 79, 88, 97, 101, 108, 113, 114, 166, 173, 247,
  248, 249, 250, 251, 263

Doubleday, 203

Dreiser, Theodore, 202, 203

Dresser, Paul, 202, 203

Dressler, Marie, 222

Drew, John, 111, 295, 300

Duclos, 259

Duff-Gordon, Lady, 222

Dukas, Paul, 104, 113, 114, 329

Dumas, Alexandre, _fils_, 106, 205

Duncan, Isadora, 307 _et seq._

Duse, Eleanora, 277, 295, 303

Dussek, Johann Ludwig, 171

Dyer, Edward, 209



Eames, Emma, 275

Earle, Virginia, 219

Ehrhard, Auguste, 55

Elgar, Sir Edward, 329

Elizabethan plays, 51, 103

Ellis, Havelock, 281, 285, 286, 291

Ellis, Melville, 222

Elman, Mischa, 298

Elson, L. C., 198, 199

Elssler, Fanny, 55

Eltinge, Julian, 96

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 43

Euripides, 103

Evertson, Admiral Kornelis, 42



Fall, Leo, 216

Fame, 42

Farinelli, 95

Farwell, Arthur, 200, 202

Faustina, 95, 96, 258

Fawcett, Edgar, 66

Février, Henry, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120

Feydeau, Georges, 129, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 237, 308

Finck, H. T., 24, 25, 30, 32, 58, 95, 99, 153, 272

Fischer, Johann Christian, 161

Fiske, Mrs., 297, 303

Fitzgerald, Percy, 296

Flaubert, Gustave, 66, 76, 87

Folk-song, 30, 33, 100, 106, 109, 152

Follies, The, 16, 222, 223

Foote, Arthur, 199, 202

Ford, Richard, 285, 291

Formes, Karl, 164

Forum, The, 87

Foster, Stephen, 29, 33, 152

Fox, Della, 217, 218, 219

Fox, Helen Kelsey, 208

Fragonard, 18

France, Anatole, 68, 185, 193

Franck, César, 151, 315

Franz, Robert, 23, 26, 93, 111

Fremstad, Olive, 108, 156, 298, 300

Freud, 50

Frezzolini, Erminia, 261 _et seq._

Frohman, Charles, 85, 296


Gadski, Johanna, 155

Galli, Signora, 254

Galli-Curci, Amelita, 101, 102, 104, 114

Gamble, George, 39, 54

Ganne, Louis, 313

Garcia, Manuel, 160

Garcia, Manuel, _fils_, 252

Garden, Mary, 84, 114 _et seq._, 131, 133, 155

Gardiner, William, 267

Garrick, David, 96, 260, 302

Gautier, Théophile, 46, 58, 87, 131, 190, 225

German music, 150

Gerome, 61

Gerster, Etelka, 269

Giacosa, 284, 305

Giardini, Felice de, 164

Gibbons, Grinling, 19

Gilbert, W. S., 107, 216, 221

Giovannitti, Arturo, 305

Gipsy, 100, 286

Gizziello, 95

Glaser, Lulu, 219

Gluck, 29, 30, 96, 108, 135, 170, 232, 258, 259, 260, 310

Goncourt, Brothers de, 302

Goodrich, A. J., 199, 202

Goodwin, Nat, 295

Gosse, Edmund, 179

Gounod, 117, 151, 272, 273

Gourmont, Remy de, 48, 229

Goya, 59, 287

Grainger, Percy, 30, 330

Grau, Maurice, 161

Greek Plays, 103

Greenstreet, Sidney, 324

Greenwich Village, 16

Gregory, Lady, 192

Grétry, 170

Grieg, Edvard, 93

Grimm, 259

Grisi, Giulia, 166, 263 _et seq._

Grove, Sir George, 171, 202, 271

Guilbert, Yvette, 107, 113, 114, 277


Hadley, Henry, 197, 212

Hadrian, 69

Hale, Philip, 33

Halévy, Jacques, 248

Hall, Pauline, 219

Handel, George Frederick, 25, 95, 97, 102, 113, 119, 172, 254

Hanslick, Eduard, 102, 263

Harris, Charles K., 202

Harris, Frank, 55, 189, 190

Hartmann, Eduard von, 43, 56, 60

Hawthorne vases, 18

Hay, Reverend John Stuart, 72

Haydn, 28

Heidelberg, 43

Heifetz, Jascha, 287

Heine, Heinrich, 82, 240, 286, 287

Heinrich, Max, 107, 155, 246

Helen of Troy, 82

Heliogabolus, 68, 69, 72

Héloïse, 82

Helvetius, 259

Henderson, W. J., 33, 115

Herbert, Victor, 155, 216

Hergesheimer, Joseph, 44, 153

Herodotus, 86

Hertz, Alfred, 155

Hervieu, Paul, 228

Heyse, Paul, 67

Hichens, Robert, 75, 81

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 38

Hirsch, Charles-Henry, 141

Hirsch, Louis A., 222

Hoff, Edwin, 221

Hollins, Mabel, 219

Homer, 76, 86

Hopper, De Wolf, 107, 221

Hopwood, Avery, 101, 236 _et seq._

Horace, 76

Howells, W. D., 74, 191

Hubbard, Elbert, 39, 48

Hughes, Rupert, 198, 199

Hugo, Victor, 52, 55, 76, 87, 105

Humperdinck, Engelbert, 24, 29, 173, 329

Huneker, James, 33, 38, 55, 153, 154, 164, 173

Huss, Henry Holden, 199, 202

Huysmans, J. K., 43, 53, 70, 76, 80, 87, 151, 191, 308


Ibsen, 302

Incest, 60, 74, 84

d'Indy, Vincent, 200

Irving, Sir Henry, 294, 302

Irwin, May, 110

Ivan the Terrible, 79


Jackson, Holbrook, 44, 63

James, Henry, 59, 68, 231

Janis, Elsie, 110, 222

Jansen, Marie, 219, 222

Jefferson, Joseph, 303, 304

Jehovah, 82

Jensen, Adolph, 24

Jew, 58, 71, 152

Joachim, Joseph, 156

Jolson, Al, 110, 222

Jones, Henry Arthur, 234

Joseffy, Rafael, 155

Judic, 220

Jupiter, 82


Kaiser, The, 79

Kapila, 57

Keane, Doris, 13

Kellogg, Clara Louise, 166, 268, 269

Kellow, Lottie A., 203, 204

Kelly, Michael, 159, 160, 161, 170, 256

Kendal, Mrs., 318

Kenton, Edna, 41, 53

Ker, Ann, 74

Kern, Jerome, 23, 222

Korngold, Erich, 329

Koven, Reginald de, 216, 221

Krehbiel, H. E., 100, 153, 155

Krishna, 83


Labatt, 104

Lablache, Luigi, 163

Laforgue, Jules, 43

Laguerre, Mme., 260

La Harpe, 260

Lalo, Pierre, 33

Lampridius, 70, 72

Lavignac, Albert, 173

Lecocq, Charles, 173, 216

Lehar, Franz, 216

Lehmann, Lilli, 100, 107, 155, 269, 270, 274

Leoncavallo, Ruggiero, 32, 149

Lesbian, 75

Lessing, Madge, 219

Levey, Ethel, 110

Lewes, George Henry, 294, 301

Lienau's, 154

Lind, Jenny, 248, 253, 265 _et seq._, 298

Lindsay, Vachell, 314

Lippincott's Magazine, 63

Lisle, Leconte de, 57, 76

Liszt, 25, 32, 240

Lombard, Jean, 69

Lombroso, 308

Loomis, Harvey W., 200

Louis XIV, 135, 137

Louis XV, 12

Love, 81, 82

Loy, Mina, 188

Lucca, Pauline, 269

Lulli, 172

Lumley, Benjamin, 162, 285, 286


MacDowell, Edward, 25

Macdonald, John Z., 208

MacGill, Patrick, 299

MacKaye, Percy, 235

McCutcheon, George Barr, 296

McIntosh, Nancy, 219

Macy, John, 38

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 117

Mahler, Gustav, 28

Male sopranos, 94

Malibran, Maria, 164, 165, 166, 253

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 43, 301

Manet, 61, 289, 308

Mapleson, J. H., 159, 284

Mara, Gertrude Elisabeth, 255 _et seq._

Marchesi, Mathilde, 102, 149, 252, 297

Marco, Maria, 108, 288

Marie Antoinette, 259, 260

Marinetti, 282

Mario, 102

Marion, George, 28

Marlowe, Julia, 319, 321

Marnold, Jean, 32

Marseillaise, 310 _et seq._

Martyn, Edward, 192, 294

Mary Magdalen, 66, 67, 68

Mascagni, Pietro, 28, 275, 301

Massenet, 27, 28, 116, 117, 119, 120, 151, 275

Matisse, 19

Maurel, Victor, 107, 120, 246

May, Edna, 219

Mayhew, Stella, 110

Mazantinita, 287

Mazarin, Mariette, 114

Mazzoleni, 166

Melba, Nellie, 102, 104, 107, 108, 114, 155, 156, 187, 271 _et seq._,
  297

Mellish, Fuller, 323

Melody, 29, 93

Mencken, H. L., 59, 65, 153, 197, 198, 202, 203, 212

Mendelssohn, 23, 24, 26, 171, 202

Mendès, Catulle, 43

Meredith, George, 187

Mérimée, Prosper, 58, 87, 131, 142

Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 28, 29, 102, 157, 164, 252

Michael Angelo, 227, 312

Michelet, 76

Milton, 257

Mirbeau, Octave, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233

Mitchell, Julian, 281

Mitchell, Langdon, 303

Modern Orchestra, 98

Modulation, 30

Moeller, Philip, 26, 236, 238 _et seq._

Molière, 225, 230, 231, 298, 302

Monbelli, 256

Monkshood, G. F., 39, 54

Montaigne, 150

Montemezzi, Italo, 24, 330

Montes, 189

Monteverde, 102

Montmartre, 126 _et seq._

Monvel, Boutet de, 142

Moore, George, 67, 134, 184 _et seq._, 231, 232, 294, 295, 307, 318,
  320, 324

Moors, The, 65

Moreau, Gustave, 44, 61, 89, 191

"Morrill, Higgins, and Co.," 71

Moulin de la Galette, 133, 134

Mount Edgcumbe, Earl of, 93, 94, 253, 254, 255

Moussorgsky, 23, 152

Mozart, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 54, 88, 97, 101, 108, 119, 161, 173,
  174, 205, 234, 248, 268, 269, 270, 275, 276, 289, 298, 300, 305

Mullin, W. T., 204 _et seq._

Murillo, 190

Murphy, Agnes G., 155

Murska, Ilma de, 269

Musset, Alfred de, 239, 240, 252

Musette, 135


Nachbaur, Franz, 164

Names, Theory of, 49, 50, 56, 76

Napoleon, 79, 192

Naldi, Giuseppe, 160

Nathan, George Jean, 283, 295

Nazimova, Alla, 283, 305

Negro Players, 283

Newman, Ernest, 32, 150

Niemann, Albert, 164

Nero, 69, 71, 72

Nerval, Gérard de, 31

New York Times, The, 233

Nicolai, Carl, 173

Nicolini, 95

Nielsen, Alice, 219

Nijinsky, Waslav, 112, 183, 285, 301

Nillson, Carlotta, 237

Nilsson, Christine, 268, 269

Nordica, Lillian, 270


Offenbach, 216, 219

Opéra-Comique, Paris, 131

Orleneff, Paul, 283, 305

Ornstein, Leo, 30, 104, 121, 298, 329

Oysters, American, 158


Pacchierotti, 93, 94, 95

Pachmann, Vladimir de, 301

Paganini, 172

Palmer, Delmar G., 210, 211

Pan, Peter, 137

Parke, W. T., 171, 172, 256, 257, 258

Parker, Horatio W., 23, 197, 212

Pasta, Giuditta, 97, 249 _et seq._

Pater, Walter, 70, 72, 137, 190, 307

Pattee, Fred Lewis, 38

Patti, Adelina, 101, 102, 104, 115, 153, 253, 269, 288, 298

Payton, Corse, 304

Peacock, Thomas Love, 301

Péladan, Josephin, 43

Persian miniatures, 19

Pessimism, 56, 60, 61, 65

Petrarch, 76

Pfitzner, Hans, 200

Perfumes, 79

Phelps, William Lyon, 38

Phémé, 86

Philip II, 79

Philistine, The, 39

Philosophy of Edgar Saltus, 54, 56

Picasso, Pablo, 19, 183

Piccinni, Niccola, 24, 258

Pinero, Arthur Wing, 234, 295, 302, 303, 321

Pinto, Mrs., 257

Pischek, Johann, 173

Pistocchi, Francesco, 99

Plagiarism, 79

Poe, Edgar Allan, 44, 87

Pogliani, Giacomo, 157

Poiret, Paul, 154, 222

Poisons, 51, 52, 59, 64, 76

Pollard, Percival, 48

Pompadour, Mme. de, 260

Ponchielli, Amilcare, 175

Popular music, 23

Porpora, 95, 96, 99

Pougy, Liane de, 201

Pratella, Balilla, 329

Puccini, Giacomo, 24, 26, 29, 100, 103, 108, 113, 157, 173, 175, 318,
  329

Puchol, Luisita, 288

Puente, del, 159

Purcell, Henry, 152

Puritanism, 65

Pyrrhonist, 179


Quincy, de, 31

Quinlan, Gertrude, 219


Rabusson, 63

Rachel, 250, 301, 302, 310

Radcliffe, Mrs., 74

Raff, Joseph Joachim, 23

Ragtime, 110, 152, 290

Rankin, Phyllis, 219

Ravel, Maurice, 200, 315, 329

Realism in fiction, 56, 77, 88

Realistic acting, 105, 111

Reeves, Sims, 263

Reger, Max, 27, 29

Rehan, Ada, 319, 320

Reicher, Frank, 300

Reinhardt, Max, 282

Renan, 76

Renaud, Maurice, 107, 246

Repplier, Agnes, 9, 38, 69

Reszke, Jean de, 100

Retz, Gille de, 80

Rimbaud, Arthur, 43

Rimsky-Korsakov, 157, 299, 315

Ring, Blanche, 110

Ristori, 302

Rives, Mme. Amélie, 48

Rodin, Auguste, 129, 227, 228, 312

Rome, 70, 71

Ronalds, Lorillard, 69

Ronconi, Giorgio, 97, 98, 246

Ronsard, 76

Roosevelt, Theodore, 120, 209

Rops, Félicien, 312

Rorer, Mrs., 149

Rossini, Gioacchino, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 61, 97, 101, 102, 103, 142,
  149, 168, 169, 248, 273, 288

Rostand, 228

Rowland, Adele, 222

Rübgam, 164

Rubini, Giovanni Battista, 163

Rubinstein, Anton, 24, 112

Runciman, J. F., 32, 234

Russell, Lillian, 160, 220

Russian Ballet, 282, 288, 315

Rutherford, John S., 63


Sacré-Coeur, Church of, 126, 130

Sagan, Princesse de, 84

St. Giorgio, Signor, 159, 160

St. Paul's School, 42

Salieri, Antonio, 170

Salome, 66, 67, 86, 287

Saltus, Edgar, 37 _et seq._, 117, 154, 187, 191, 225

Saltus, Francis, 42

Sanborn, Pitts, 118

Sand, George, 26, 239, 240, 252

Sanderson, Julia, 217

Santley, Charles, 158, 167, 174, 264

Sappho, 76, 82

Sardou, 302, 303

Satan, 58, 78, 286, 287

Satie, Erik, 30, 329

Saturday Review, The, 18

Savoyarde, restaurant, 125, 126, 130, 131

Scharwenka, Xaver, 155

Scheherazade, 82

Schillings, Max, 150

Schoenberg, Arnold, 30, 32, 121, 329

Schopenhauer, 43, 56

Schroeder, Edwin Albert, 71

Schroeder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 99

Schubert, 24, 27, 28, 33, 170, 205, 305, 310

Schumann, 111, 274

Scott, Cyril, 29, 329

Scotti, Antonio, 107

Scriptores Historiæ Augustæ, 70

Seidl, Anton, 155

Sembrich, Marcella, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115, 153, 271, 273 _et seq._

Senesino, 95

Shakespeare, 73, 76, 98, 147, 284, 298, 302, 305, 318 _et seq._

Sharp, Cecil J., 30, 109

Shaw, George Bernard, 42, 234, 235, 239, 318, 322

Shepherd, Arthur, 200

Sherwin, Louis, 222, 291, 293, 295

Shield, William, 171, 172

Siddons, Mrs., 18, 302, 303

Simonds, W. E., 38

Singing, 93 _et seq._

Smith, Harry B., 222

Snob, 50

Socrates, 117

Solomon, 19, 80, 82

Sonata form, 33

Sontag, Henrietta, 246 _et seq._

Sophocles, 103, 302

Sorbonne, 43

Sousa, John Philip, 202, 209, 216

Southeim, 164

Spain, 19, 59, 62, 94, 100, 106, 142, 189, 190, 281 _et seq._

Spiritualism, 43

Spohr, Louis, 24

Stanislavski, 283

Stanton, Theodore, 38

Starr, Hattie, 202

Starr, Muriel, 253

Steger, 164

Stein, Gertrude, 19, 79, 229

Steinlen, 139

Steinway, William, 154

Stevenson, R. L., 58, 74

Stigelli, 166

Stillman-Kelley, Edgar, 199, 202

Straus, Oskar, 216

Strauss, Johann, 25, 139, 216

Strauss, Richard, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 100, 104, 113, 114, 120, 175, 330

Stravinsky, Igor, 32, 100, 104, 114, 121, 152, 329

Stuck, Franz von, 89

Style in Singing, 98, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119,
  245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 270, 273, 274, 276

Style in Writing, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 56

Suetonius, 70, 72

Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 107, 169, 216, 220, 221

Swinburne, 76, 307

Symonds, J. A., 72

Symons, Arthur, 188, 232, 245, 293, 301, 303

Synge, J. M., 103


Tacitus, 72

Taggart, Lucy L., 209

Tamagno, Francesco, 120

Tasso, 62

Taste, 11 _et seq._

Tchekhov, 303

Tempest, Marie, 219, 252, 301

Temps, Le, 18

Terence, 302

Terry, Ellen, 301

Tetrazzini, Luisa, 102, 160

Thèbes, Mme. de, 79

Thomas, Ambroise, 173

Thomas, Augustus, 235, 236, 295

Thomas, Olive, 223

Thomas, Theodore, 155

Tiberius, 69

Tichatschek, Joseph Aloys, 164

Tilzer, Harry von, 202

Tinney, Frank, 222

Tissot, 67

Toscanini, Arturo, 156

Tradition, 24, 97, 281

Troubetskoy, Prince, 157

Tschaikovsky, 59, 312

Turgeniev, 187, 252

Twain, Mark, 261, 265


Urban, Joseph, 222, 223


Vagaries of genius, 55

Vallière, Louise, de la, 13

Valverde, Joaquín, 284 _et seq._

Vaughn, Theresa, 219

Verelst, Myndart, 56, 58

Veiller, Bayard, 68

Velasquez, 16, 190

Verdi, Giuseppe, 120, 149, 173, 221, 270, 275, 298, 323

Verlaine, Paul, 43

Veronese, 16

Versatility in acting, 300

Vespasian, 69

Viafora, 157

Viardot, Pauline, 98, 250, 251, 252, 253

Victory of Samothrace, The, 17, 312

Vinci, Leonardo da, 190, 191, 301


Wachtel, Theodor, 164

Wagner, Richard, 23, 29, 32, 93, 96, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 113, 120,
  150, 162, 173, 175, 270, 271, 274, 298, 301, 314

Walter, Eugene, 68

Walter, Gustav, 164

Warfield, David, 295

Wayburn, Ned, 281

Weber, 27, 31, 98, 175

Webster, 51

Weckerlin, J. B., 169

Weichsell, Carl, 172

Weichsell, Charles, 172

Weidley, David, 210

Wendell, Barrett, 38

Westminster Magazine, 39

Whitmer, T. Carl, 200, 202

Wilde, Oscar, 20, 43, 48, 55, 63, 64, 66, 70, 85, 86, 87, 187, 239,
  282, 307

Winter, William, 320, 324

Wodehouse, P. G., 222

Women, Saltus's opinion of, 73

Wüllner, Ludwig, 246


Yeats, W. B., 192

Yohe, May, 219


Zandonai, Riccardo, 329

Zeus, 82

Ziegfeld, Florenz, 283

Zuloaga, 290

       *       *       *       *       *




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES


Variations in spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been
retained from the original book except for the following changes:

Table of Contents: Added listings for FOOTNOTES and INDEX.

Page 32: Used oe for the oe ligature in "oeuvre bâtarde".

Page 189: Changed "their's" to "theirs".

Page 227: Added "Young" to the chapter title, "Two Young American
Playwrights," to match the Table of Contents and section title.

Page 259: Changed "Eightenth Century" to "Eighteenth Century".

Page 303: "Mrs. Siddone" might be a typo for "Mrs. Siddons". Retained.

Page 320: Capitalized "It" in "As You Like It" for consistency.

Page 331: (Index) Changed "Aeschylus" to "Æschylus" to match text.

Page 332: (Index) The reference for Bergström, Hjalmar, 90 was not found
anywhere in the original book, and page 90 was a blank page.

Page 332: (Index) Changed page ref. 122 to 222 for Bernhardt, Sarah.

Page 332: (Index) Changed "Caesar, Julius," to "Cæsar, Julius," to
match text.

Page 338: (Index) Changed page ref. 176 to 76 for Michelet.

Page 339: (Index) Changed "Péladin, Josephin" to "Péladan, Josephin"
to match text.

Page 341: (Index) Changed "Scriptores Historiae Augustae" to
"Scriptores Historiæ Augustæ" to match text.