Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 7

How, asks Mr. Worldly Wiseman, can that fellow Admirable Crichton do so many things so well when it takes all my time to do one thing badly? Therefore he must be regarded suspiciously. Now, there are no short cuts in the domain of the arts; Gradus ad Parna.s.sum is always steep. But, given by nature a certain kind of temperament in which curiosity is doubled by mental energy, and you may achieve versatility. Versatility is often mainly an affair of energy, of prolonged industry. The majority of artists do one thing well, and for the remainder of their career repeat themselves. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary his admirers demanded a replica and were disappointed with Salammbo, with Sentimental Education, above all, with The Temptation of St. Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet. Being a creative genius, Flaubert taught himself to be versatile. Only through self-discipline, did he achieve his scheme, beside which the writing of the Human Comedy cannot be compared. There is more thought-stuff packed in his five masterpieces, apart from the supreme art, than in whole libraries: quality triumphing over quant.i.ty.

Greatly endowed by nature, by reason of his racial origin, and because of his liberal education, Liebermann was bound to become a versatile artist. That doesn't mean he is a perfectionist in many things, that he etches as well as he paints, that he composes as well as he draws.

As a matter of fact he is not as accomplished a master of the medium as is Anders Zorn; many a smaller man, artistically speaking, handles the needle with more deftness than Liebermann. But as a general impression counts as much as technique, your little etcher is soon forgotten when you are confronted with such plates as the self-portraits, the various beer-gardens, the houses on the dunes (with a hint of the Rembrandt magic), or the bathing boys. His skill in black and white is best seen when he holds a pencil, charcoal, or pen in his hand. The lightness, swiftness, elasticity of his line, the precise effect attained and the clarity of the design prove the master at his best and unhampered by the slower technical processes of etching or lithography.

I studied Liebermann's work from Amsterdam to Vienna, and out of the variety of styles set forth I endeavoured to disentangle several leading characteristics. The son of a well-known Berlin family, his father a comfortably situated manufacturer, the young Max was brought up in an atmosphere of culture and family affection. His love for art was so p.r.o.nounced that his father, like the father of Mendelssohn, let him follow his bent, and at fourteen he was placed under the tutelage of Steff.e.c.k, an old-timer, whose pictures nowadays seem a relic from some nightmare of art. Steff.e.c.k had studied under Schadow, another of the prehistoric Dinosaurs of Germany, and boasted of it. He once told Liebermann that Adolf Menzel only made caricatures, not portraits. You rub your eyes and wonder. Liebermann has said that this rigid training did him good. But he soon forgot it in actual practice. Some good angel must have protected him, for he came under the influence of Munkaczy and, luckily for him, escaped the evil paint of that overrated mediocrity. But perhaps the Hungarian helped him to build a bridge between the antique formula of Steff.e.c.k and the modern French--that is, the Impressionists. Max had to burn many bridges behind him before he formed a style of his own. Individuality is not always born, it is sometimes made, despite what the copy-books a.s.sure us to the contrary. The wit and irony of the man and painter come both from Berlin and from his Jewish ancestry. He looks like a benevolent Mephistopheles, and is kindness personified to young artists.

Subjecting himself to the influence of Courbet, Millet, Rousseau, Corot, Troyon, he went to Holland, and there fell captive to the genius of Rembrandt. The mystic in Liebermann is less p.r.o.nounced than one might expect. His clear picture of the visible world holds few secret, haunted spots. I do not altogether believe in his biblical subjects, in the Samson and Delilah, in the youthful Christ and the Doctors of the Law--the latter is of more interest than the former--they strike one as academic exercises. Nevertheless, the lion's paw of Rembrandt left its impress upon his art. The profounder note which the French painters sometimes miss is not missing in Liebermann. He has avoided both the pomp and rhetoric of the academic school and the sentimentality of the latter-day Germans. Liebermann is never sentimental, though pity for the suffering of life is easily detected in his canvases, particularly in his Old Men's Home, The Orphans, The Widower, and a dozen masterpieces of the sort.

In Frans Hals Liebermann found a congenial spirit and made many copies of his pictures to train his hand and eye. His portraits reveal the broad brush work of Hals. They are also psychological doc.u.ments.

a.s.sociated with Josef Israels, he was in sympathy with him, but never as sentimental as the Dutchman. Both reverenced Rembrandt and interpreted him, each after his own temperament. When Liebermann first knew Manet, Monet, p.i.s.sarro, Renoir, and Degas (particularly Degas) he had experimented in every key. Master of his materials, master of himself, a cultured man of the world and a sincere artist, the French group showed him the way to liberty, to a deliverance from the ruddy tones of Munich, from the dulness of Dusseldorf, from the bitter angularities of German draughtsmanship and its navete which is supposed to stand for innocence of spirit--really the reverse, a complete poverty of spirit--and with it all the romantic mythology of German art, the bloated fighting fauns, leering satyrs, frogmen, fishwomen, monkeys, and fairies, imps, dryads, and nymphs. Liebermann discovered the glories of light, of s.p.a.cing, of pure colour, and comprehended the various combinations by which tonalities could be dissociated and synthesised anew. He went back to Germany a painter of the first rank and an ardent colourist, and he must have felt lonely there--there were no others like him. Menzel was a master draughtsman, Leibl an admirable delineator of character, and to name these three is to name all. Henceforward, Liebermann's life task was to correlate his cosmopolitan art with German spirit, and he has n.o.bly succeeded.

To-day he is still the commanding figure in German art. No one can compete with him in maestria, in range, or as a colourist. And at last I have reached the goal of my discourse.

II

A visit to the National Gallery of Berlin makes me gnash my teeth. The sight of so much misspent labour, of the acres of canvases deluged with dirty, bad paint, raises my bile. We know that all things are relative, and because Germany has produced few painters worthy of the name that after all it doesn't much matter--there is Italy and Holland to fall back on; not to mention the Spain of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, and the great Frenchmen. But there is something singularly exasperating in German painting, whether old or new, that sets us to wondering whether such museums as the National Gallery, Berlin; the new Pinakothek, Munich, and other repositories of ugly colour and absurd mythologies do not cause a deterioration in public taste. It is almost pathetic to see not only the general visitor but also students gazing admiringly at the monstrous art of Kaulbach, Schadow, Cornelius (the Nazarene school), or at the puerilities of the Swiss, Arnold Boecklin and his follower, Franz von Stuck, of Munich, who has simply brutalised the eternal Boecklin themes. It is all very well to say that these galleries, like the modern collection upstairs in the Dresden gallery (with its wonderful Rembrandts and Vermeers down-stairs) serve to preserve the historical art chain. But bad art should have no significance, history or no history--let such history appeal to the professors of aesthetics and other twaddlers.

Furthermore, the evil example of Boecklin and the rest, shows in German contemporary painting. I don't mean the Cubists and other freaks, but in current art, the art that sells, that receives respectful critical treatment. We are continually forced to look at the menagerie, mermaids, and frogs, and fauns, painted in imitation of the hard, violent tones of Boecklin, himself a scene-painter, but not a great painter.

The critics in Germany don't bother themselves over paint quality, beautiful surfaces, or handling, but with books about the philosophy of the painter, his "weltanschauung," his ethics; you all the while wondering why he uses such muddy paints, why he is blind to the loveliness of atmosphere, pure colours, and sheer pictorial quality.

Style and quality are, I believe, suspected in Germany as evidences of superficiality, of a desire to add ornament where plain speech should suffice. Like German prose and German singing--oh, how acrid is the Teutonic tone-production, a lemon in the larynx!--German painting limps heavily. Nietzsche is right; in certain matters the Germans are the Chinese of Europe; they refuse to see the light of modern discoveries in art.

Here is a violent instance: On the top floor of the National Gallery, Berlin, there is a room with fourteen masterpieces on its walls.

Nothing in the galleries below--not even Zorn's Maja--nothing in all Berlin, excepting the old masters in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, can be mentioned in the same breath with these beautiful compositions, condemned to perpetual twilight. They were secured by the late and lamented Von Tschudi, who left the National Gallery after their purchase and retired to Munich, where he bought a great example of El Greco for the old Pinakothek, the Laoc.o.o.n, a service, I fancy, not quite appreciated by the burghers of Munich. The masters who have thus fallen under the ban of official displeasure are Manet, Monet, p.i.s.sarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cezanne--the latter represented by two of the most veracious fruit-pieces I ever saw. The Manet is the famous Hothouse, and in the semi-darkness (not a ray of artificial light is permitted) I noted that the canvas had mellowed with the years. The Monets are of rare quality. Altogether a magnificent object-lesson for young Germany, in which tender colour, an exquisite vision (poetic without being sloppy-sentimental) of the animate and inanimate world.

What a lesson for those rough daubers who growl at the dandyism of the Frenchmen, whose landscapes look like diagrams, surveyors' maps, or what-not; painters who, if they were told that they are not knee-high to a gra.s.shopper when their pictures are set side by side with American landscapists, would roar as if at a good joke; and a lesson that will never be learned by the present generation, which believes that Max Klinger is a great etcher, a great sculptor (only think of that terrifying Beethoven statue in Leipsic), that Boecklin is a great poet as well as a marvellous painter, that--oh, what's the use! The nation that produced such world masters as Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, and the German Primitives has seemingly lost its lien in sound art.

Remember, I am not arguing with you, as Jemmy Whistler puts it, I'm just telling you; these things are not a matter of taste, but a matter of fact, of rotten bad paint. What Royal Cortissoz wrote of the German Exhibition and of the Scandinavians when in New York fits into this s.p.a.ce with appositeness: "... an insensitiveness to the genius of their medium. They do not love paint and caress it with a sensuous instinct for its exquisite potentialities. They know nothing of the beauty of surface. Nor, by the same token, have they awakened to the lesson which Manet so admirably enforced of the magic that lies in pure colour for those who really know how to use it." I can hear our German friend discoursing on the subject of surface beauty! For him the underlying philosophic "idea," whatever that has to do with paint, is his shibboleth, and behold the result. Moreover, the German has not naturally a colour sense. It is only such a man as Reinhardt, with the Oriental feeling for sumptuous hues, that has succeeded in emanc.i.p.ating the German theatre from its garish taste. Some day the Richard Wagner music-drama will be renovated on the scenic side--Roller in Vienna has made a decided step in the right direction--and the old Munich travesties, which Wagner thought he wanted, will be relegated to the limbo of meretricious art.

III

Fancying, perhaps, that I had not been quite fair to modern German painters--later I may consider the ghastly sculpture which, like that cemetery of stone dolls and idols, the Siegesallee in the Berlin Tiergarten, has paralysed plastic art in that country--I determined early in the autumn of 1912 to visit again the princ.i.p.al cities, going as far down as Vienna and Budapest. I do not mind confessing that the thought of the glorious Jan Vermeer in the National Museum in the Magyar capital greatly tempted me. And to get an abiding pictorial flavour in my mind I began visiting The Hague, Haarlem, and Amsterdam.

Any one who can admire modern German art after a course of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Josef Israels, and the brothers Maris (all three melting colourists), must have the powerful if somewhat uncritical stomach of an ostrich.

Leaving Holland, I found myself in London, and there, to add further to my distraction, I spent weeks at the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection. So I was ripe for revolt when I began at Stuttgart. While still in the rich tonal meshes of the Richard Strauss music, I wandered one grey afternoon into an exhibition of the Stuttgarter Kunstlerbund. There were plenty of new names, but, alas!

no new talent, only a sea of muddy paint, without nuance, clumsy drawing, harsh flesh-tints, and landscapes of chemical greens. Why mention names? Not even mediocrity was attained, though the next day I read in the papers that Professor This and Professor That were exhibiting masterpieces full of profound ideas. Ah! these paint professors, these philosophy-soaked critics, and that profound idea!

Not, however, a word about the pictorial image.

In Munich, beside the standard galleries, I visited the Secession Gallery, and there I saw pictures by Becker-Gundhal, Louis Corinth, Paul Crodel, Josef Damberger, Julius Diez, Eichfeld, Von Habermann (a portraitist of distinction), Herterich (with much decorative ability), Von Heyden (deceased, and a capital delineator of chickens), Von Keller, Landenberger, Arthur Langhammer (deceased), Pietzsch, Bruno Piglhein (also deceased, I am sorry to say, for he had genuine ability), Leo Samberger (an interesting portraitist, monotonous in his colour-gamut), Schramm-Zitau, the inevitable Von Stuck (whose productions look like melodramatic posters), the late Fritz von Uhde, W. Volz, and others, mostly dead, and but recently. The portrait of Conrad Ansorge, a former Liszt pupil, by Louis Corinth, was not without character, the tempo slow, as is the tempo of Ansorge himself.

Corinth, like Von Uhde, Leopold von Kalckreuth, O. H. Engel, Skarbina, Bantzer, Slevogt, Waldemar Rosler, is a follower of Max Liebermann, whose influence is easily discernible in the work of these younger men. To be sure, there are no landscapists in Germany, such as Davies, Ernest Lawson, Alden Weir, Childe Ha.s.sam, Metcalf--I mention a few at random--but the younger chaps are getting away from the sentimental panoramas of Hans Thoma and other "idealists" who ought to be writing verse or music, not painting, as too many ideas, like too many cooks, spoil the pictorial broth.

Grant the Germans fertility of fancy, invention, science in building up a figure, force, humour, sentiment, philosophy, and artistic ability generally, yet they have a deficiency in the colour sense and an absence of a marked personal style. An exhibition of new art on the Odeonplatz, Munich, did not give me much hope. There were some pictures so bad as to be humorous; a dancer by the Holland-Parisian, Kees van Dongen, had the merit at least of sincerity. Erbsloh has joined the extremists, Kirchner, Guimi, Kanoldt, Kandinsky, Utrello--a good street effect; Werefkin and several Frenchmen were in evidence.

The modelling was both grotesque and indecent. The human figure as an arabesque is well within the comprehension of the average observer, but obscenity is not art--great art is never obscene. The blacks and whites that I saw in Munich at this particular show were not clever, only b.e.s.t.i.a.l. I only wish that German art of the last decade had not gone over, bag and baggage, to the side of vulgar license. Certainly Matthew Arnold could say of it, as he once said of Paris, that the great G.o.ddess Lubricity reigned in state.

In the Moderne Galerie--I am still in Munich--I was rea.s.sured; I saw Israels, Gauguin, Van Gogh--what masters!--Trubner, Hodler, Zugel, Von Uhde, Max Slevogt--a fine view of Frankfort--and some children at the seash.o.r.e by my favourite, Max Liebermann. Then there were Langhammer and Reumaini, the clever Max Mayrshofer, Bechler of the snow scenes, Obwald, Tooby, Leibl, Marees, and a very strongly conceived and soundly modelled nude by the Munich artist, Ernest Liebermann, one of the most gifted of the younger men and no relation of Meister Max of the same name. Local art in Vienna did not give me a thrill. I attended a retrospective exhibition of two half-forgotten mediocrities, Carl Rahl and Josef Ha.s.slwander, and also the autumn exhibition in the Kunstlerhaus. There, amid miles of glittering, shiny, hot paint, I found the best manipulator of paint to be a man bearing the slightly American name of John Quincy Adams, whose residence is given in the catalogue as Vienna. He has studied John Sargent to advantage and knows how to handle his medium, knows values, an unknown art in Germany and Austria except to a few painters. The glory of Vienna art is in her museums and in the private collections of Prince Liechtenstein and Count Czernin.

Despite his patchwork of colour, Ignacio Zuloaga's exhibition at Dresden (on the Pragerstra.s.se) gave me the modern thrill I missed both at Vienna and Prague (though in the Bohemian city I saw some remarkable engravings by the native engraver Wencelaus Hollar).

Several of the Zuloagas have been seen in New York when Archer M.

Huntington invited the Spanish artist to exhibit at the Hispanic Museum. Not, however, his La.s.situde, two half-nudes, nor his powerful but unpleasant Bleeding Christ. What a giant Zuloaga seems when matched against the insipidity and coa.r.s.eness of modern German art.

The recent art of Arthur Kampf, who is a painter of more force than distinction, a one-man show in Unter den Linden, Berlin, did not impress me; nor did the third jury-free art show in Rudolph Lepkes's new galleries in the Potsdamerstra.s.se, except that it was much less objectionable than the one in 1911, then held across the street.

Therefore I don't think I exaggerate the claims of Max Liebermann, who is, for me, the most important of living German artists, and one of the few great painters of to-day in any land. His boys bathing, his peaceful Holland interiors, his sympathetic presentment of poor folk, superannuated survivals awaiting death, his spirited horses and hors.e.m.e.n, polo pony players, race-course, his vivid transcription of Berlin out-of-door life, the concert gardens, the Zoo, the crowded streets, his children, his portraits, his sonorous, sparkling colour, his etchings and drawings--the list is large; all these various aspects of the world he has recorded with a fresh, unfailing touch.

His horses are not as rhythmic as those of Degas, his landscapes are not as sun-flooded as those of Monet, nor are his Holland bits so charged with homely sentiment as those of Josef Israels. But Liebermann is Liebermann, with a supple, flowing, pregnant line, his condensed style a versatile conception, a cynical, at times, outlook upon the life about him; enfin--a colourist.

My admiration for Liebermann's draughtsmanship shown in the Berlin Secession Gallery in the Kurfurstdam was reproved by a German friend, who remarked that Anselm Feuerbach was a "sounder" draughtsman. No doubt, but I prefer Liebermann's more nervous graphic line, also more eloquent, for Feuerbach, who is still called a master in Munich--he made grey cartoons--is as frigid and academic as a painted nude in a blizzard.

X

A MUSICAL PRIMITIVE: MODESTE MOUSSORGSKY

One need not be a Slavophile to admire Russian patriotism. The love of the Russian for his country is a pa.s.sion. And from lips parched by the desire of liberty--though persecuted, exiled, imprisoned--this pa.s.sion is still voiced with unabated intensity. What eloquent apostrophes have been addressed Russia by her great writers! How Turgenieff praised her n.o.ble tongue! The youngest among the European nations, herself a nation with genius, must possess a mighty power thus to arouse the souls of her children. Russia right or wrong! seems to be the slogan, even of those whom injustice and cruelty have driven to desperation. It is the land of neuroses, and the form that patriotism a.s.sumes there may be one other specimen. Yet the Russian is a cosmopolitan man; he is more French than the Parisian, and a willing dweller in the depths of German thought. The most artistic of Russia's novelists, Turgenieff, was cosmopolitan; and it was a frequent reproach made during his lifetime that the music of Tschaikovsky was too European, not sufficiently national. Naturally, Anton Rubinstein suffered the same criticism; too German for the Russians, too Russian for the Germans. It was altogether different in the case of Modeste Moussorgsky.

To enter into sympathy with Russian music we must remember one thing: that the national spirit pervades its masterpieces. Even the so-called "cosmopolitanism" of Peter Ilitch Tschaikovsky is superficial. To be sure, he leaned on Liszt and the French, but booming melancholy and orgiastic frenzy may be found in some of his symphonies. According to the judgment of the Rubinsteins he was too much the Kalmuck; Nicolas Rubinstein severely criticised him for this trait. But of all the little group that gathered about Mila Balakirev fifty years ago there was no one so Russian as a certain young officer named Modeste Petrovitch Moussorgsky (born 1839, died 1881). Not Rimsky-Korsakof, Borodine, Cesar Cui were so deeply saturated with love of the Russian soil and folk-lore as this pleasant young man. He played the piano skilfully, but as amateur, not virtuoso. He came of good family, "little n.o.bles," and received an excellent but conventional education.

A bit of a dandy, he was the last person from whom to expect a revolution, but in Russia anything may happen. Moussorgsky was like other well-nurtured youths who went to Siberia for a mere gesture of dissent. With Emerson he might have agreed that "whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." With him rebellion against law and order revealed itself in an abhorrence of text-books, harmony, and scholastic training. He wished to achieve originality without the monotonous climb to the peak of Parna.s.sus, and this was his misfortune. Two anarchs of music, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, reached their goals after marching successfully through the established forms: and the prose versicles of Walt Whitman were achieved only after he had practised the ordinary rules of prosody.

Not so with Moussorgsky, and while few youthful composers have been so carefully counselled, he either could not, or would not, take the trouble of mastering the rudiments of his art.

The result almost outweighs the evil--his opera, Boris G.o.dounow. The rest of his music, with a few notable exceptions, is not worth the trouble of resuscitating. I say this although I disagree with the enthusiastic Pierre d'Alheim--whose book first made me acquainted with the Russian's art--and disagree, too, with Colvocoressi, whose study is likely to remain the definitive one. I've played the piano music and found it ba.n.a.l in form and idea, far less individual than the piano pieces of Cui, Liadow, Stcherbatchef, Arensky, or Rachmaninof.

The keyboard did not make special appeal to Moussorgsky. With his songs it is another matter. His lyrics are charming and characteristic. Liszt warmly praised La Chambre des Enfants, one of his most popular compositions. Moussorgsky would not study the elements of orchestration, and one of the penalties he paid was that his friend, Rimsky-Korsakof "edited" Boris G.o.dounow (in 1896 a new edition appeared with changes, purely practical, as Colvocoressi notes, but the orchestration, clumsy as it is, largely remains the work of the composer) and La Khovanchtchina was scored by Rimsky-Korsakof, and no doubt "edited," that is, revised, what picture experts call "restored." So the musical baggage which is carried by Moussorgsky down the corridor of time is not large. But it is significant.

He was much influenced by Dargomyjski, particularly in the matter of realism. "I insist that the tone will directly translate the word,"

was an axiom of this musician. His friend and follower often carries this precept to the point of caricature. There are numerous songs which end in mere mimicry, parody, a pantomime of tone. The realism so much emphasised by the critic Sta.s.sow and others is really an enormous sincerity, and the reduction to an almost bare simplicity of the musical idea. His vigorous rhythmic sense enabled Moussorgsky to express bizarre motions and unusual situations that are at first blush extramusical. Many of his "reforms" are not reforms at all, rather the outcome of his pa.s.sion for simplification. The framework of his opera--Boris G.o.dounow--is rather commonplace, a plethora of choral numbers the most marked feature. In the original draught there was an absence of the feminine element, but after much pressure the composer was persuaded to weave several scenes into the general texture, and let it be said that these are the weakest in the work. The primal power of the composition carries us away, not its form, which, to tell the truth, is rather old-fashioned.

His stubbornness is both a failure and a virtue. His sincerity covers a mult.i.tude of inept.i.tudes, but it is a splendid sincerity. His preference for unrelated tones in his melodic scheme led to the dissociated harmonies of his operatic score, and this same Boris G.o.dounow has much influenced French music,--as I have pointed out earlier in this volume--a source at which Claude Debussy drank--not to mention Dukas, Ravel, and others--whose more sophisticated scores prove this. Of Moussorgsky, Debussy has remarked that he reminded him of a curious savage who at every step traced by his emotions discovers music. And Boris G.o.dounow is virgin soil. That is why I have called its creator a Primitive. He has achieved the nave att.i.tude toward music which in the plastic arts is the very essence of the Flemish Primitives. Nature made him deaf to other men's music. In his savage craving for absolute originality--the most impossible of all "absolutes"--he sought to abstract from the art its chief components.

He would have it in its naked innocence: rhythmic, undefiled by customary treatment, and never swerving from the "truth" of the poem.

His devotion to the verbal text and dramatic action out-Wagners Wagner. Moussorgsky did not approve of Wagner's gigantic orchestral apparatus; he wished to avoid all that would distract the spectator from the stage--for him Wagner was too much "symphonist," not enough dramatist. Action, above all, no thematic development in the academic sense, were the Russian's watchwords. Paul Cezanne is a Primitive among modern painters, inasmuch as he discards the flamboyant rhetoric and familiar points d'appui of the schools and achieves a certain navete. The efforts of Moussorgsky were a.n.a.logous. He employed leading motives charily, and as he disliked intricate polyphony, his music moves in ma.s.sive blocks, following the semi-detached tableaux of the opera.

But a man is never entirely the master of his genius, and while Moussorgsky fought the stars in their courses, he nevertheless poured out upon paper the richest colours and images, created human characters and glorified the "people." He "went to the people," to the folk-melody, and in Pushkin he found the historical story of Czar Boris, neuropathic, criminal, and half crazy, which he manipulated to serve his purpose. The chorus is the protagonist, despite the stirring dramatic scenes allotted to Boris. After all, the "people,"

that mystic quant.i.ty in Russian art, must have a spokesman.

Notwithstanding this every tune to be found in Pratsch's Russian anthology, and utilised by the new men, was composed by an individual man. Art is never democratic, but it is all the stronger when it incarnates the woes and joys of the people--not quite the same thing as being composed by the "people." The tree is rooted in the soil, but the tree stands alone in the forest. The moujik dominates the stage, even after the generous lopping from the part.i.tion of some of the choruses.

The feeling for comedy which is to be found in many of the songs is not missing in the stage work. Moussorgsky loved Gogol, set his Le Mariage to music (only one act) and savoured the salty humour of the great writer. But the composer has his tragic side, and therein he reminds me of Dostoevsky--both men died during the same year--who but Dostoevsky, if he had been a composer, could have written the malediction scene in Boris? As a matter of fact he did write a play on the same historical subject, but it has disappeared. There are many other contacts with Dostoevsky--intense Slavophilism, adoration of Russia; its very soil is sacred; carelessness as to the externals of their art--a Chinese asymmetry is present in their architectonic; they both excel in portraying humour, broad, vulgar, uproarious, outrageous, reckless humour; and also in exposing the profundities of the Russian soul, especially the soul racked by evil and morbid thoughts. Dostoevsky said: "The soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian soul is a dark place...." The obsession of the abnormal is marked in novelist and composer. They are revolutionists, but in the heaven of the insurgent there are many mansions. (Beethoven--a letter to Zmeskell--wrote: "Might is the morality of men who distinguish themselves above others. It is my morality, anyhow.") Dostoevsky and Moussorgsky were not unlike temperamentally. Dostoevsky always repented in haste only to sin again at leisure; with Moussorgsky it was the same. Both men suffered from some sort of moral lesion.

Dostoevsky was an epileptic, and the nature of Moussorgsky's "mysterious nervous ailment" is unknown to me; possibly it was a mild or masked epilepsy. Moussorgsky was said to have been a heavy drinker--his biographer speaks of him as being "ravaged by alcohol"--a failing not rare in Russia. The "insp.i.s.sated gloom" of his work, its tenebrous gulfs and musical vertigoes are true indices of his morbid pathology. He was of a pious nature, as was Dostoevsky; but he might have subscribed to the truth of Remy de Gourmont's epigram: "Religion est l'hopital de l'amour." Love, however, does not play a major role in his life or art, yet it permeates both, in a sultry, sensual manner.

Boris G.o.dounow was successfully produced January 24, 1874, at the St.

Petersburg Opera with a satisfactory cast. At once its native power was felt and its appalling longueurs, technical crudities and minor shortcomings were recognised as the inevitable slag in the profusion of rich ore. A Russian opera, more Russian than Glinka! It was the "high noon," as Nietzsche would say, of the composer--the latter part of whose career was clouded by a morose pessimism and disease. There is much ugly music, but it is always characteristic. Despite the ecclesiastical modes and rare harmonic progressions the score is Muscovite, not Oriental--the latter element is a stumbling-block in the development of so many Russian composers. The melancholy is Russian, the tunes are Russian, and the inn-scene, apart from the difference of historical periods, is as Russian as Gogol. No opera ever penned is less "literary," less "operatic," or more national than this one.

Rimsky-Korsakof, who died only a few years ago, was the junior of Moussorgsky (born 1844), and proved during the latter's lifetime, and after his death, an unshaken friendship. The pair dwelt together for some time and criticised each other's work. If Balakirev laid the foundation of Moussorgsky's musical education (in composition, not piano-playing) Rimsky-Korsakof completed it; as far as he could. The musical gift of the latter was more lyrical than any of his fellow students' at Balakirev's. Without having a novel "message," he developed as a master-painter in orchestration. He belongs in the category of composers who are more prolific in the coining of images than the creation of ideas. He "played the sedulous ape" to Berlioz and it was natural, with his fanciful imagination and full-blooded temperament, that his themes are clothed in shining orchestration, that his formal sense would work to happier ends within the elastic form of the Liszt symphonic poem. He wrote symphonies and a "symphoniette" on Russian themes, but his genius is best displayed in freer forms. His third symphony, redolent of Haydn, with a delightful scherzo, his fugues, quartet, ballets, operas--he composed fifteen, some of which are still popular in Russia--prove him a past master in his technical medium; but the real engaging and fantastic personality of the man evaporates in his academic work. He is at his top notch in Sadko, with its depiction of both a calm and stormy sea; in Antar, with its evocation of vast, immemorial deserts; in Scheherazade, and its background of Bagdad and the fascinating atmosphere of the Arabian Nights.

The initial Sunday in December, 1878, at Paris, was a memorable afternoon for me. (I was then writing "special" stories to the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_, and the rereading of my article in print has refreshed my memory.) I heard for the first time the music of Rimsky-Korsakof, also the name of Modeste Moussorgsky. The symphonic poem, Sadko, was hissed and applauded at a Pasdeloup concert in the Cirque d'Hiver, for the new music created, on the whole, a disturbing impression. To quiet the rioting in the audience--it came to shouts and fisticuffs--the conductor, Jacques Pasdeloup (whose real name was Jacob Wolfgang) played Weber's Invitation to the Valse, arranged by Berlioz, which tribute to a national composer--neglected when alive, glorified after death--put the huge gathering of musical "chauvinistes" into better humour. Sitting next to me and rather amused, I fancy, because of my enthusiasm for Sadko, was a young Russian, a student at the Sorbonne. He liked Rimsky-Korsakof and understood the new music better than I, and explained to me that Sadko was too French, too much Berlioz, not enough Tartar. I didn't, at the time, take all this in, nor did I place much credence in his declaration that Russia had a young man living in St. Petersburg, its greatest composer, a truly national one, as national as Taras Boulba, or Dead Souls. Moussorgsky was his name, and despite his impoverished circ.u.mstances, or probably because of them, he was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. He had finished his masterpieces before 1878. I was not particularly impressed and I never saw the Russian student again though I often went to the Sorbonne. I was therefore interested in 1896 when Pierre d'Alheim's monograph appeared and I recalled the name of Moussorgsky, but it was only several seasons ago and at Paris I heard for the first time both his operas.

In 1889 Rimsky-Korsakof directed two concerts of Russian music at the Trocadero and Paris fell in love with his compositions. He not only orchestrated the last opera of his friend Moussorgsky, but also Dargomyjski's The Stone Guest, and with the a.s.sistance of his pupil, Glazounow, completed the score of Prince Igor, by Borodine. He was an indefatigable workman, and his fame will endure because of "handling"

of gorgeous orchestral tints. He is an impressionist, a stylist, the reverse of Moussorgsky, and he has the "conscience of the ear" which his friend lacked. Praised by Liszt, admired by Von Bulow, he revealed the influence of the Hungarian. Profound psychologist he was not; an innovator, like Moussorgsky he never would have been; the tragic eloquence vouchsafed Tschaikovsky was denied him. But he wielded a brush of incomparable richness, he spun the most evanescent and iridescent web, previous to the arrival of Debussy: he is the Berlioz of Russia, as Moussorgsky is its greatest nationalist in tone.

I make this discursion because, for a period, the paths of the two composers were parallel. Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus--in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture--I found more "operatic" than Boris G.o.dounow. The Old Believers become as much of a bore as the Anabaptists in Meyerbeer; the intrigue of the second plan not very vital; but as a composition it is more finished than its predecessor.

The women are more attractive, the lyric elements better developed, but the sense of barbaric grandeur of Boris is not evoked; nor is its dark stream of cruelty present. Doubtless the belief that Modeste Moussorgsky is a precursor of much modern music is founded on truth, and while his musical genius is not to be challenged, yet do I believe that he has been given too lofty a position in art. At the best his work is unachieved, truncated, a torso of what might have been a n.o.ble statue. But it will endure. It is difficult to conceive a time when, for Russia, Boris G.o.dounow will cease to thrill.