[smygo] Anarchs of Art
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[This article scanned from _Overtones: A Book of
Temperaments_ (1904), by James Gibbons Huneker. So far as I
know, never before on the Net.--DC]
Anarchs of Art
by James Gibbons Huneker
A Sonnet by Campanella
The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;
One kick would be enough to break the chain.
But the beast fears, and what the child demands
It does; nor its own terror understands,
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties
And gags itself-gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not; and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
--Translated by John Addington Symonds.
HAVE not all great composers been anarchs--from Bach to
Strauss? At first blush the hard-plodding Johann Sebastian
of the Well-tempered Clavichord seems a doubtful figure to
drape with the black flag of revolt. He grew a forest of
children, he worked early and late, and he played the organ
in church of Sundays; but he was a musical revolutionist
nevertheless. His music proves it. And he quarrelled with
his surroundings like any good social democrat. He even went
out for a drink during a prosy sermon, and came near being
discharged for returning late. If Lombroso were cognizant of
this suspicious fact, he might build a terrifying structure
of theories, with all sorts of inferential subcellars.
However, it is Bach's music that still remains
revolutionary. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on
aristocratic patronage to play the rt1e of Solitaries. But
many tales are related of their refusal to lick the boots of
the rich, to curve the spine of the suppliant. Both were by
nature gentle men, and both occasionally arose to the
situation and snubbed their patrons outrageously. Handel! A
fighter, a born revolutionist, a hater of rulers. John
Runciman--himself an anarchistic critic--calls Handel the
most magnificent man that ever lived. He was certainly the
most virile among musicians.
I recall the story of Beethoven refusing to uncover in the
presence of royalty, though his companion, Goethe, doffed
his hat. Theoretically I admire Beethoven's independence,
yet there is no denying that the great poet was the politer
of the two, and doubtless a pleasanter man to consort with.
The mythic William Tell and his contempt for Gessler's hat
were translated into action by the composer.
Handel, despite the fact that he could not boast Beethoven's
peasant ancestry, had a contempt for rank and its entailed
snobberies, that was remarkable. And his music is like a
blow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He
was henpecked, and for the same reason as was Socrates. The
Croatian composer's wife told some strange stories of that
merry little blade, her chamber-music husband. As I do not
class Mendelssohn among the great composers, he need not be
discussed. His music was Bach watered for general
consumption. Schubert was an anarch all his short life. He
is said to have loved an Esterhazy girl, and being snubbed
he turned sour-souled. He drank "far more than was good for
him," and he placed on paper the loveliest melodies the
world has ever heard. Beethoven was the supreme anarch of
art, and put into daily practice the radicalism of his
music.
Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has
ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most
profound truths, the most blasphemous things, the most
terrible ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a
symphony, and the police be none the wiser. Suppose that
some Russian professional supervisor of artistic anarchy
really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaokowsky preached! It
is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that
makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard
Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty,
preaches anarchy, puts into tone, words, gestures, lath,
plaster, paint, and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated
from the convention of authority, from what Bernard Shaw
would call the Old Man of the Mountain, the Government.
I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another
revolutionist like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt,
bitten by the Socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, a rank
hater of conventions in art, though in life a silken
courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker; and
Tschaokowsy, who buried more bombs in his work than ever
Chopin with his cannon among roses or Bakounine [Bakunin]
with his terrible prose of a nihilist. Years ago I read and
doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis's interesting "1849," with its
fallacious denial of Wagner's revolutionary behavior. Wagner
may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden
uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime
inspirer. His very ringing of the church bells during the
row is a symbol of his attitude. And then he ran away,
luckily enough for the world of music, while his companions,
Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured and imprisoned. Wagner
might be called the [Pierre-]Joseph Proudhon of
composers--his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate
like the sad and logical music we find in the great
Frenchman's Philosophy of Misery (a subtitle, by the way).
And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors,
prosateurs, journalists, and musicians might not be included
under the roof of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium,
whose powerful bass hurls imprecations at the present order;
Georges Eckhoud, Maurice Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier,
whose eloquent bronzes are a protest against the misery of
the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin, William Blake,
William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrhs, the late Stiphane
Mallarmi, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Felicien Rops,
the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose
men and women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to
discern across the frame of his pictures febrile visions of
terror; and the great Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and
Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon, Huysmans, Heine,
Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,--is not the art of
these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal
expression of anarchic revolt?
Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves
with history; if they did, they would know that decadence
has always existed ; that it is not decadence at all, but
merely a phase of development as important as normality:
Normality is stupidity, decadence is genius! Is there, he
asks, a more notable case of the abnormal than the prophet
of Protestantism, Martin Luther?
They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones
who for the sake of the idea sacrifice the peace of
thousands, as Alexander and Napoleon; or those who spoil the
dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who
venture into the depths and love sin because only sin has
depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of
pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and
Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first
anarchist; and pain is at the bottom of all art, and with
Satan, the father of illusions! It is wise to stop here,
else might we become entangled in a Miltonic genealogy of
the angels. I give the foregoing list to show how easy it is
to twist a theory to one's own point of view. The decadence
theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski's idea
that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but
normal or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg
style; formerly he lectured on Chopin, and played the F
sharp minor polonaise--he was possessed by the key of F
sharp minor, and saw "soul-states" whenever a composer wrote
in that tonality! _Audition colorie_ ["colored hearing"],
this?
Nor is there cause for alarm in the word anarchy, which
means in its ideal state unfettered self-government. If we
all were self-governed governments would be sinecures.
Anarchy often expresses itself in rebellion against
conventional art forms--the only kind of anarchy that
interests me. A most signal example is Henry James.
Surprising it is to find this fastidious artist classed
among the anarchs of art, is it not? He is one, as surely as
was Turginieff, the de Goncourts, or Flaubert. The novels of
his later period,--What Maisie Knew, The Wings of a Dove,
The Ambassadors, The Better Sort, The Sacred Fount, The
Awkward Age, and the rest,--do they not all betray the
revolution of Henry James from the army of the conventional?
He will be no dull realist or flamboyant romantic or
desiccated idealist. Every book he has written, from The
Lesson of the Master and The Pattern in the Carpet, is at
once a personal confession and a declaration of artistic
independence. Subtle Henry James among the revolutionists!
Yes, it is even so. He has seceded forever from the army of
English tradition, from Brontk, Eliot, Dickens, and
Thackeray. He may be the discoverer of the fiction of the
future.
The fiction of the future! It is an idea that propounds
itself after reading The Wings of the Dove. Here at last is
companion work to the modern movement in music, sculpture,
painting. Why prose should lag behind its sister arts I do
not know; possibly because every drayman and pothouse
politician is supposed to speak it. But any one who has
dipped into that well of English undefiled, the
seventeenth-century literature, must realize that to-day we
write parlous and bastard prose. It is not, however,
splendid, stately, rhythmic prose that Mr. James essays or
ever has essayed. For him the "steam-dried style" of Pater,
as Brander Matthews cruelly calls it, has never offered
attractions. The son of a metaphysician and moralist,--I
once fed full on Henry James, senior,--the brother of that
most brilliant psychologist, William James, of Harvard, it
need hardly be said that character problems are of more
interest to this novelist than are the external qualities of
rhetorical sonority, the glow and fascination of surfaces.
Reared upon the minor moralities of Hawthorne, and ever an
interested, curious observer of manners, the youth-ful James
wrote books which pictured in his own exquisite orchestra of
discreet tints and delicate grays the gestures, movements,
and thoughts of many persons, principally those of travelled
Americans. He pinned to the printed page a pronounced type
in his Daisy Miller, and shall we ever forget his Portrait
of a Lady, the Princess Casimassima,--the latter not without
a touch of one of Turginieff's bewilderingly capricious
heroines. It is from the great, effortless art of the
Russian master that Mr. James mainly derives. But Turginieff
represented only one form of influence, and not a continuing
one. Hawthorne it was in whom Mr. James first planted his
faith; the feeling that Hawthorne's love of the moral
problem still obsesses the living artist is not missed in
his newer books. The Puritan lurks in James, though a
Puritan tempered by culture, by a humanism only possible in
this age. Mr. James has made the odious word, and still more
odious quality of cosmopolitanism, a thing of rare delight.
In his newer manner, be it never so cryptic, his Americans
abroad suffer a rich sea change, and from Daisy Miller to
Milly Theale is the chasm of many years of temperamental
culture. We wonder if the American girl has so changed, or
whether the difference lies with the author; whether he has
readjusted his point of vantage with the flight of time; or
if Daisy Miller was but a bit of literary illusion, the _pia
fraus_ ["pious fraud"] of an artist's brain. Perhaps it is
her latest sister, Milly, whose dovelike wings hover about
the selfish souls of her circle, that is the purer
embodiment of an artistic dream.
The question that most interests me is the one I posed at
the outset: Is this to be the fiction of the future, are The
Wings of a Dove or The Ambassadors--the latter is a
marvellous illusion--and studies of the like to be
considered as prose equivalents of such moderns as Whistler,
Monet, Munch, Debussy, Rodin, Richard Strauss, and the rest?
In latter-day art the tendency to throw overboard
superfluous baggage is a marked one. The James novel is one
of grand simplifications. As the symphony has been modified
by Berlioz and Liszt until it assumed the shape of the
symphonic poem, and was finally made, over into the guise of
the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners of
the future must stem from Flaubert's Sentimental Education
or else remain an academic imitation, a replica of Thackeray
or of George Eliot's inelastic moulds. Despite its
length--"heavenly," as Schumann would say--Sentimental
Education contains in solution all that the newer novelists
have since accomplished. Zola has clumsily patterned after
it, Daudet found there his impressionism anticipated. All
the new men, Maupassant, Huysmans, Loti, Barrhs, Mirbeau,
and others, discovered in this cyclopfdic man what they
needed; for if Flaubert is the father of realism he is also
a parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with
style and his attaching esoteric significance to his words
sound the note of symbolism. Mr. James dislikes Sentimental
Education, yet he has not failed to benefit by the radical
formal changes Flaubert introduced in his novel, changes
more revolutionary than Wagner's in the music-drama. I call
the James novel a simplification. All the conventional
chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended
cadences. All barren modulations from event to event are
swept away--unprepared dissonances are of continual
occurrence. There is no descriptive padding--that bane of
second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of
a character's name. The elliptical method James has absorbed
from Flaubert; his oblique psychology is his own. All this
makes difficult reading for the reader accustomed to the
cheap hypnotic passes of fiction mediums. Nothing is
forestalled, nothing is obvious, and one is forever turning
the curve of the unexpected; yet while the story is trying
in its bareness, the situations are not abnormal. You rub
your eyes when you finish, for with all your attention,
painful in its intensity, you have witnessed a pictorial
evocation; both picture and evocation wear magic in their
misty attenuations. And there is always the triumph of
poetic feeling over mere sentiment. Surely Milly Theale is
the most exquisite portrait in his gallery of exquisite
portraiture. Her life is a miracle, and her ending supreme
art. The entire book is filled with the faintly audible
patter of destiny's tread behind the arras of life, of
microphonic reverberations, of a crescendo that sets your
soul shivering long before the climax. It is all art in the
superlative, the art of Jane Austen raised to the _n_th
degree, superadded to Mr. James's implacable curiosity about
causes final. The question whether his story is worth
telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered: what
most concerns us is his manner in the telling.
The style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions,
repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations,
neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives gaze
despairingly and from afar at verbs that come thundering in
Teutonic fashion at the close of sentences leagues long. It
is all very bewildering, but more bewildering is the result
when you draft out in smooth, journalistic style this
peculiarly individual style. Nothing remains; Mr. James has
not spoken; his dissonances cannot be resolved except by his
own matchless art. In a word, his meanings evaporate when
phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating
things and it may not. Either way it is not to the point.
And yet the James novels may be the fiction of the future; a
precursor of the book our children and grandchildren will
enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, of cheap
historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings
shall have vanished. A deeper notation, a wider synthesis
will, I hope, be practised. In an illuminating essay Arthur
Symons places Meredith among the decadents, the dissolvers
of their mother speech, the men who shatter syntax to serve
their artistic purposes. Henry James has be-longed to this
group for a longer time than any of his critics have
suspected; French influences, purely formal, however, have
modified his work into what it now is, what the critical men
call his "third manner." In his ruthless disregard for the
niceties and conventionalities of sentence structure I see,
or seem to see, the effect of the Goncourts, notably in
Madame Gervaisais. No matter how involved and crabbed
appears his page, a character emerges from the smoke of
muttered enchantments. The chiefest fault is that his
characters always speak in purest Jamesian. So do Balzac's
people. So do Dickens's and Meredith's. It is the fault, or
virtue, of all subjective genius. Yet in his obliteration of
self James recalls Flaubert; like the wind upon the troubled
waters, his power is sensed rather than seen.
I have left Berlioz and Strauss for the last. The former all
his life long was a flaming individualist. His books, his
utterances, his conduct, prove it. Hector of the Flaming
Locks, fiery speech, and crimson scores, would have made a
picturesque figure on the barricades waving a red flag or
casting bombs. His Fantastic Symphony is full of the tonal
commandments of anarchic revolt. As Strauss is a living
issue, the only one,-- Dvorak, Saint-Sakns, Grieg,
Gold-mark, and the neo-Russians are only rewriting musical
history,--it is best that his theme is separately
considered. But I have written so much of Strauss that it is
beginning to be a fascination, as is the parrot in
Flaubert's Un Cur Simple--and this is not well. Sufficient
to add that as in politics he is a Social Democrat, so in
his vast and memorial art he is the anarch of anarchs. Not
as big a fellow in theme-making as Beethoven, he far
transcends Beethoven in harmonic originality. His very
scheme of harmonization is the sign of a soul insurgent.
In The Anarchists, with its just motto, "A hundred fanatics
are found to support a theological or metaphysical
statement, but not one for a geometric theorem," it cannot
be denied that Lombroso has worked in futile veins. His
conclusions are rash; indeed, his whole philosophy of
Degeneration and Madness has a literary color rather than a
sound scientific basis. But he has contrived to throw up
many fertile ideas; and secretly the reading world likes to
believe that its writers, artists, composers, are more or
less crazy. Hence the neat little formula of artistic
Mattoids, gifted men whose brains are tinged with insanity.
Hazlitt, in one of his clear, strongly fibred essays,
disposed of the very idea a century back, and with words of
stinging scorn. Yet it is fanaticism that has given the
world its artistic beauty, given it those dreams that
overflow into our life, as Arthur Symons so finely said of
Girard de Nerval. And the most incomplete and unconvincing
chapter of the Lombroso book is that devoted to sane men of
genius. At the risk of inconsistency I feel like asserting
that there are no sane men of genius.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
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Said Smygo, the iconoclast of Zothique: "Bear a hammer with
thee always, and break down any terminus on which is
written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
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