Unicorns Part 7

I could no longer contain myself, and, bursting with curiosity, I cried:

"Pardon me, dear masters, for interrupting such a luminous altercation, but, notwithstanding the queerness of the situation, may I not say that I meet in the flesh, Jonathan Swift and Henry Beyle-Stendhal?"

"Discovered, by the eternal Jehovah!" roared Swift, adding an obscene phrase, which I discreetly omit. Stendhal took the incident coolly.

"As I am rediscovered about every decade by ambitious young critics anxious to achieve reputations, I am not disturbed by our young friend here. Your apology, monsieur, is accepted. Pray, join us in a fresh drink and conversation." But I was only thirsty for more talk, oceans of talk. I eagerly asked Stendhal, who regarded me with cynical eyes, all the while fingering his little whisker: "Did you ever hear Chopin play?"

"Who," he solemnly asked in turn, "is Chopin?"

"He was at his best in the forties, and as you didn't die till----"

"Pardon me, monsieur. I never died. Your Chopin may have died, but I am immortal."

"You venerable Struldbrug," giggled Swift. I was disagreeably impressed, yet held my ground:

"You must have met him. He was a friend of Balzac--his music was then in vogue at Paris--" I stumbled in my speech.

"He probably means that little Polish piano-player who dangled at the petticoats of George Sand," interpolated Swift.

"I knew Cimarosa, Rossini I saw, but I never heard of Chopin. As for the Sand woman, that cow who chewed and rechewed her literary cud--don't mention her name to me, please. She is the village pump of fiction; water, wet water. Balzac was bad enough." My heart sank. Chopin not even remembered by a contemporary! This then is fame. But the immortality of Stendhal, of Swift--what of that? Its reality was patent to me. Perhaps Balzac, Sand, Flaubert were still alive. I propounded the question. Swift answered it.

"Yes, they are alive. My Struldbrugs are meant to symbolise the immortality of genius. Only stupid people die. Sand is a barmaid in London. Balzac is on the road selling knit-goods, and a mighty good drummer he is sure to be; but poor Flaubert has had hard luck. He was the reader to a publishing house, and forced to pa.s.s judgment on the novels of the day--favourable judgment, mind you, on the popular stuff. He nearly burst a blood-vessel when they gave him a Marie Corelli ma.n.u.script to correct--to correct the style, mind you, he, Flaubert! The G.o.ds are certainly capricious. Now the old chap--he has aged since 1880--is in New York reading proof at a daily newspaper office. He sits at the same desk with Ben de Ca.s.seres, and every time he mutters over the rhythm of a sentence Ben raps him on the knuckles, and says:

"'You are an old-fashioned bourgeois, Pop Flaubert! Some night I'll take you over to Jack's and recite my Sermon on Suicide, to teach you what brilliance and Bovarysme really mean.'" I was shocked at this blasphemy, and said so. Stendhal calmly bade me to keep my temper.

"But isn't Mr. Swift joking?"

"Mr. Swift is always joking," was the far from rea.s.suring reply. To fill in the interval I called for the waiter. The ghosts again demanded cognac. Stendhal looked like the caricature by Felicien Rops, in which his little pot-bellied figure, broad face, snub nose, and protuberant eyes are shown dominating some strange Cosmopolis of 1932. In life--or death--he seemed supremely self-satisfied. He glowered at the name of Flaubert, rejoicing in the sad existence of the mighty prose master, but he smiled superciliously when I reproached him with not knowing Chopin. Heine's poetic fantasy of the G.o.ds of Greece, alive, and still in hiding, was not precisely convincing in the present reincarnation. A feeling of repulsion ensued, and finally I arose and said good night to my very new and very old friends. Swift's picture of the Struldbrugs was realised, and it was an unpleasant one. Men of genius should never be seen; in their works alone they live. Swift, with his nasty, sly, constipated humour; Stendhal, with his overwhelming air of arrogance and superiority, did not win my sympathy. They evidently noted my dismay.

"You're disappointed. So sorry!" said Swift ironically. "At first I was vastly intrigued at the opportunity of talking with one of you modern persons, but I see I'm mistaken--ha! Beyle, what d'ye say?"

Stendhal pondered. "Cimarosa, Rossini, and Haydn I knew. Correggio I admire, but who was Chopin?"

Stung to anger, I retorted: "Yours is the loss, not Chopin's."

Whereat Michael, the bartender, merrily laughed, and the company joined him. I was the sacrificial goat. My head was on the chopping-block, and Stendhal was the executioner. Forgetting the respect due to such ill.u.s.trious shades, I shook my finger under Stendhal's upturned nostrils: "You may be a couple of impostors for all I know, but even if you are not, I wish to tell you how heartily I dislike your petty carping criticisms. Better oblivion than immortality for your lean and sinister souls." Again hysterical laughter. As I left I overheard Swift say in reproachful accents, as if his vanity had been wounded:

"This saucy Yahoo reads our books and believes in them, but when we talk he doubts us. As Sam Johnson used to say, 'The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.'"

Stendhal boomed out: "He is dead himself but doesn't know it yet.

All critics are stillborn. But _we_ live on for ever. Garcon! some more brandy."

Out on crowded, expressive Broadway I stood, dazed and irritated.

After all the palaver of authors, it is the critic who has the last word, like a woman. Rejoicing over the originality of the idea, I went my wooden way.

CHAPTER XIII

ON REREADING MALLOCK

It seems the "dark backward and abysm of time" when writing the name of William Hurrell Mallock, yet not forty years ago he was the most discussed author of his day. The old conundrum, Is Life Worth Living? he revived, and newly orchestrated with particular reference to the spiritual needs of the hour. And A Romance of the Nineteenth Century was denounced as immoral as Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was read then and Swinburne's lilting paganism quite filled the lyric sky. Mr. Mallock's role was that of a philosophical novelist and essayist who reproved the golden materialism of his age, not with fuliginous menace, as did Carlyle, nor with melodious indignation, like Ruskin, but with a more subtle instrument of castigation, irony. He laughed at the G.o.ds of the new scientific dispensation, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, and he put them in the pages of his New Republic for the delectation of the world, and most appealing foolery it was; this and the sheer burlesque of The New Paul and Virginia. Mr. Mallock was an individualist. The influence of John Stuart Mill had not yet waned in the seventies--he occupied then a place midway between Bentham and Spencer. His birth, breeding, and temperament made Mallock a foe to socialism, to the promiscuous in politics, religion, society, therefore an apostle of culture, not missing its precious side; witness Mr. Rose in The New Republic, and one who abhorred the cra.s.s and the irreverent in the New Learning. He enjoyed vogue. His ideas were boldly seized and transformed by the men of the nineties, yet to-day it is difficult to get a book of his. They are mostly out of print--which is equivalent to saying, out of mind.

With what personal charm he invested his romances! He is the literary progenitor of a long line of young men, artistic in taste, a trifle sceptical as to final causes, wealthy, worldly, widely cultured, and aristocratic. The staler art of Oscar Wilde gives the individual of Mallock petrified into a rather unpleasant type.

Walter Pater's fear that the word "hedonist" would be suspected as immoral came true in Wilde's books. The heroes of A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Tristram Lacy and The New Republic have a strong family resemblance. They were supermen before Nietzsche was discovered. They are prepossessed by theological problems, they love the seven arts, and are a trifle decadent; though when action is demanded they do not fail to respond. As stories go, A Romance is the best of Mallock's; the canvas of Tristram Lacy is larger, the intrigue less intense, and the characterisation more human. The unhappy girl, Cynthia Walters, who so shocked our mothers, is not duplicated in Tristram. Mr. Mallock wrote a preface to the second edition of A Romance, a superfluous one, for the book needs no apology. It never did. It is as moral as Madame Bovary, though not as pleasant. The Triangle is a revered convention in French fiction, but the naturalistic photographs in A Romance are not agreeable, and Cynthia's epitaph, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see G.o.d," leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. It is in the mode ironical almost projected to the key of cynicism. No doubt the leisurely gait of these fictions would be old-fashioned to the present generation, with its preference for staccato English, morbid sensationalism, and lack of grace and scholarship. Mr. Mallock is a scholar and a gentleman who writes a prose of distinction, and he is also a thinker, reactionary, to be sure, but a tilter at sham philosophies and sham religions. Last, but not least, he has abundant humour and a most engaging wit. Possibly all these qualities would make him unpopular in our present century.

What a gathering of choice spirits in The New Republic: Matthew Arnold, Professor Jowett--a fine character etching--Huxley, Tyndall, Carlyle, Pater--rather cruelly treated--Ruskin, Doctor Pusey, Mrs.

Mark Pattison, W. K. Clifford, Violet Fane--how the author juggles with their personalities, with their ideas. It's the cleverest parody of its kind. Otho Laurence and Robert Leslie are closely related in aspirations to Ralph Vernon, Alie Campbell, and the priest Stanley of A Romance. As portraits, those of the Premier Lord Runcorn in Tristram Lacy, and the faded dandy, poet, and man about town, Lord Surbiton, of A Romance, are difficult to match outside of Disraeli. Epigrams drop like snowflakes. The decor is always gorgeous--Monte Carlo, Provence, Cap de Juan, countries flowing with milk and honey, marble ruins, the ilex, cypress, and palm. Palaces there are, and inhabited by languid, fascinating young men who anxiously examine in the gla.s.s their expressive countenances, asking the Lord whether He is pleased with them. And lovely girls, charming, and in Cynthia Walters's case a lily with a cankered calyx. Then there are the Price-Bousefields and the inimitable Mrs.

Norham, "celebrated auth.o.r.ess and upholder of the people." One of the notable blackguards in fiction is Colonel Stapleton; and the Poodle and the new-rich Helbecksteins--a complete picture-gallery may be found in these interesting novels. Romance rules; poetry, tenderness in the appreciation of the eternal feminine, and a pity for living things. Poor Cynthia Walters, the "dear, dead woman,"

lingers in the memory, as modern as yesterday, and as effaced as a daguerreotype.

But if his heroes sow their oats tamely Mr. Mallock as an antagonist is most vigorous. He went at the scientific men with all the weapons in his armoury. To-day there no longer exists the need of such polemics. In the moral world there are a.n.a.logies to the physical, and particularly in geology, with its prehistoric stratifications, its vast herbarium, its quarries and petrifications, its ossuaries, the bones of vanished forms, ranging from the shadow of a leaf to the flying crocodile, the horrid pterodactyl--now reduced to the exquisite and iridescent dragon-fly; from the monstrous mammoth to the tiny forerunner of the horse. Philosophy and Religion, too, have their mighty dead, their immemorial tombs wherein repose the bones of the buried dead skeletons of obsolete systems. And on the sands of time lie the arch-images of antique thought awaiting the condign catastrophe. There are Kant and his followers, and near the idealists are the materialists; next to Hegel is Buchner, and at the base of the vast structure so patiently reared by Herbert Spencer the mists are already dense, though not as obscuring as the clouds about the mausoleum of Comte. That great charmless woman, George Eliot, smiles a smile of sombre ennui before the Spencer tomb, and the invisible voice of Ernest Haeckel is heard whispering: Where is your Positivism? Where is your Rationalism? What has become of your gaseous invertebrate G.o.d? Surely there is sadly required in the cynical universities of the world a Chair of Irony with subtle Edgar Saltus as its first inc.u.mbent.

Now, Mr. Mallock knows that religion and philosophy may travel on parallel lines, therefore never collide. He took the catch-word "the bankruptcy of science" too seriously. Notwithstanding the persuasive rhetoric of that silken sophist Henri Bergson, a belated visionary metaphysician in a world of realities, the trend of latter-day thought is toward the veritable victories of science. A new world has come into being. And what discoveries: spectral a.n.a.lysis, the modes of force, matter displaced by energy, the relations of atoms in molecules--a renewed geology, astronomy, palaeontology, biology, embryology, wireless telegraphy, the conquest of the air, and, last but not least, the discovery of radium. The slightly war-worn evolution theory is now confronted by the Transformism of Hugo de Vries, who has shown in a most original manner that nature also proceeds by sudden leaps as well as in slow, orderly progress. And the brain, that telephonic centre, according to Bergson, is become another organ. Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish biologist, with his neurons--little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred to motor impulses when a message is sent them from the sensory nerves--has done more for positive knowledge than a wilderness of metaphysicians.

That famous interrogation, "Is life worth living?"

may be viewed to-day from a different angle. Mr. Mallock acknowledged that the question must be answered in the terms of the individual only. Here we encounter a new crux. What is the individual? The family is the unit of society, not the individual.

And the autonomous "I" exists no longer, except as a unit in the colony of cells which are "We." Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations. Society demands the co-operation of its component cells, else relegates to solitude the individual who cannot adapt himself to play a humble part in the cosmical orchestra. That protean theory Socialism has changed its chameleonic hues many times since Mr.

Mallock wrote Is Life Worth Living? His idea is worked out with great clearness in the apprehension of details, but with little feeling for their relations to each other. Sadly considered, we may take it for granted that life has a definite aim. We live, as a modern thinker puts it, because we stand like the rest of cognisable nature under the universal law of causality; this idea is founded not on a metaphysical but a biological basis. Metaphysics is a pleasing diversion, though it doesn't get us to finalities.

Happiness is an absolute. Therefore it has no existence. There never was, there never will be an earthly paradise, no matter what the socialists say. Content is the summum bonum of mankind; the content that comes with sound health and a clear conscience. The wrangling over Free Will is now considered a sign of ghost-worship.

Schopenhauer and his mystic Will-to-Live are both rather amusing survivals of antique animism. The problem is not whether we can do what we want to do, but whether we can will what we want to will.

But the illusion of individual freedom of will is the last illusion to be dissipated in this most deterministic of worlds and most pluralistic of universes. It's a poor conception of eternity that doesn't work both ways. As there will be no end to things, there never was a beginning. Eternity is now. Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott wrote in his brilliant refutation of Bergson that "the feeling we have of a necessity for such an explanation [the attempt to explain the universe] arises from the conformation of our brains, which think by a.s.sociating disjoined ideas; ... no last explanation is possible or perhaps even exists," which will please the relativists and pain the absolutists. But deprive mankind of its dreams and it is like the naughty child in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. A fairy punished this child by giving him dreamless slumber. Without vision, old as well as young limp through life.

Pessimism as a philosophy, it has been pointed out, is the last superst.i.tion of primordial times. It is a form of egomania. From Byron to D'Annunzio pessimism filled poetry; from Werther to Sanine it has ruled fiction. It is less a philosophy than a matter of temperament. It was the mode during the last century, and as an issue is as dead as the humanitarianism that followed. Is life worth living? was properly, if somewhat cynically, answered: It depends on the liver. Pessimism is the pathetic fallacy reduced to medicinal formula. It is now merely in our stock of mental att.i.tudes, usually a pose; when it is not, it's bound to be pathological. Yet Bossuet has spoken of "the inexorable ennui which forms the basis of life."

Mr. Mallock was once accused of dilettanteism, aesthetic and ethical; nevertheless, there is no mistaking his moral earnestness at the close of Is Life Worth Living? Furthermore, he foresaw the muddle the world is making to-day in the conduct of life. All the self-complacent chatter about self-annihilation during the Buddhist upheaval some decades ago has been translated into a veritable annihilation. The holy name of Altruism--social emotion made functional--has vanished into the intense inane. The higher forms of discontent have modulated into the debasing superst.i.tion of universal slaughter. With Bergson the divinity of diving into the subconscious--what else is his intuition?--is set before the lovers of the mystic to worship. Years ago the Sufi doctrine declared that the judging faculty should be abandoned for the intuitive. Don't reason! Just dream! The poet Rogers replied to a lady who asked his religion that his was the religion of all sensible men. "And what is that?" she persisted. "That no sensible men ever tell." But Mr.

Mallock has told, and four decades after his confession he is still worth rereading.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LOST MASTER

"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared.

"You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We sat still, hoping against hope.

"See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not fair." "I didn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown?

Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's Frenhofer--is that the chap's name?--than Browning's Waring. He is the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but it rose afar.'"

"Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter, now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.

The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle.

You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us westward until we reached a warehouse--gloomy, in need of repair, yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway, traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so.