\/ s\ BY JAMES HUNEKER MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899) CHOPIN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (1900) MELOMANIACS (1902) OVERTONES (1904) ICONOCLASTS: A BOOK OP DRAMATISTS (i VISIONARIES (1905) EGOISTS: A BOOK OF SUPERMEN (1909) PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST (191$? FRANZ LISZT. ILLUSTRATED (1911) THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE (1912) NEW COSMOPOLIS (1915) WORT APES AND PEACOCKS (1915) CJNICORNS (1917) BEDOUINS (192Q) BTEEPLEJACK (1920) VARIATIONS (1921) LETTERS (1922) CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS STEEPLEJACK (/ STEEPLEJAC BY JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKEH **/ find no swtettrfat than sticks to my own bones" WALT WHITMAN. Two VOLUMES IN ONE NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNF STEEPLEJACK BY JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER "I find no swfftfrfat than sticks to my own bones." WALT WHITMAN. Two VOLUMES IN ONE NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS Printed in the United States of America -3 nzc THIS BOOK OF VANITY, DREAMS, AND AVOWALS IS INSCRIBED TO MY DEAR FRIEND ALDEN MARCH EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE " PHILADELPHIA PRESS" (In whose columns the following pages appeared daily from June gth to November gth, 1918.) And now when the Great Noon had come Steeple jack touched the tip of the spire where instead of a cross he found a vane which swung as the wind listeth. Thereat he marvelled and rejoiced. " Behold ! " he cried, " thou glowing symbol of the New Man. A weathercock and a mighty twirling. This then shall be the sign set in the sky for Immoralists: A cool brain and a wicked heart. Nothing is true. All is permitted, for all is necessary." Thug gpake Steeplejack . "I am not what I am." "Othello. 98535$ CONTENTS VOLUME I PAGE APOLOGY I 3 PART I IN OLD PHILADELPHIA CHAPTER I. I AM BORN . ...-. . * . . . . . . 13 II. MY GRANDFATHERS . . . 18 III. FAMILY LIFE . . 34 IV. MY MOTHER . ....;. 51 V. I Go TO SCHOOL . ... V . 62 VI. THE PLAYERS 68 VII. THE OLD TOWN 74 VIII. I AM A PENMAN 86 IX. THE GOSSIP OF THE DAY "... 94 X. MAGIC . . ... . . . 102 XI. A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST . 107 XII. LAW MY NEW MISTRESS . . , . . . . . 118 XIII. MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA . .,.. . : ., .... 140 XIV. MY FRIENDS THE JEWS 162 XV. THE GIRLS . . .- 173 XVI. MUSIC-MADNESS . .- . . -\ Y . . . . 184 XVII. JIM THE PENMAN . . . V r i . ; . . . 194 PART II PARIS FORTY YEARS AGO I. I M AFLOAT . .* . * ." I . . . 213 II. IN PARIS AT LAST .* . .*. . .T .... 218 III. THE MAISON BERNARD . . . ... . . . 224 IV. MADAME BEEFSTEAK . . 2 3 l V. THE WHIRL OF THE TOWN ........ 236 VI. BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST . . ." 244 VII. AT MAXIM S . . 280 VIII. I INTERVIEW THE POPE . . .. ... . . 290 IX. ON THE TRAIL OF THE EARTHQUAKE ..... 300 vii VIII CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE X. I TREAT A KING . , . 305 XI. HOME AGAIN 308 XII. ETERNITY AND THE TOWN PUMP 315 VOLUME II PART III NEW YORK (1877-1917) I. I CAPTURE THE CITY 3 II. MUSICAL JOURNALISM 16 III. IN THE MAELSTROM 26 IV. THE DE RESZKES AND PADEREWSKI .... 53 V. NORDICA AND FREMSTAD 57 VI. OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN . 61 VII. ANTONIN DVORAK , 65 VIII. STEINWAY HALL . 70 IX. A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 72 X. NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES 88 XI. MONTSALVAT 99 XII. I AM A FREE-LANCE ......... 109 XIII. CRITICISM . . 122 XIV. WITH JOSEPH CONRAD 128 XV. BRANDES IN NEW YORK 134 XVI. THE COLONEL 141 XVII. DRAMATIC CRITICS ......... 144 XVIII. EARLY IBSEN 159 XIX. PICTURES 162 XX. NEW YORK IN FICTION 169 XXL A VOCAL ABELARD . , 179 XXII. "M LLE NEW YORK" 189 XXIII. MY DREAM-BARN 198 XXIV. MY Zoo . . .....* - . 213 XXV. MY BEST FRIEND . 217 XXVI. AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 224 XXVII. MID- VICTORIAN MAX 251 XXVIII. G. B. S 257 XXIX. His LETTERS ........... 264 XXX. A HALF-HAMLET 277 INDEX .... 313 ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME I James Gibbons Huneker Frontispiece FACING PAGE John Huneker 22 Elizabeth Bowman Huneker 22 Mary Gibbons Huneker 154 John Huneker 154 VOLUME II James Gibbons Huneker, 1890 90 My Maiden Flight 214 APOLOGY APOLOGY The avowals of a Steeplejack! Why shouldn t a steeplejack make avowals? It is a dangerous occupa tion and, oddly enough, one in which the higher you mount the lower you fall, socially. Yet a steeplejack, humble as is his calling, may be a dreamer of daring dreams, a poet, even a hero. I, who write these words, am no poet, but I have been a steeplejack. I have climbed to the very top of many steeples the world over, and dreamed like the rest of my fellow beings the dreams that accompany the promenade of pure blood through young arteries, and now after a half century, I shall re port these dreams and their awakenings; for the differ ence between the dream-world and what we are pleased to call reality is something which no poet, philosopher, or psychologist has yet explained. Whether we dream at night when our body vegetates, or our dreams overflow into our waking hours does not much matter. To dream is to exist. I dream therefore I am, might be the form ula of a second Descartes. And who enjoys loftier dreams than a steeplejack? But alas ! he must always return to earth, else perish aloft from the cold. When a boy I was called a Johnny-Iook-in-the-air, be cause of my reckless habit of rambling into obstacles, from moving locomotives to immovable lamp-posts. I suppose I was dreaming; at least I was walking in that pleasing haze we call egotism. Now a large dosage of self-love is a necessary ingredient in the formation of 3 4 STEEPLEJACK character, character called by the Greeks a man s des tiny; that character which leads to success only when followed no matter the cost. Chamfort said this, but the fog-fed owls, to whose care our tenderest and most susceptible years are usually confided, cry anathema. Cynical ! they say. Well, what if it be? A cynic like a pessimist, is only a man who tells unpleasant truths, while your optimist spins pleasing lies, therefore, is the more popular of the pair. Nothing succeeds like insincerity. A steeplejack never lies. His truth is the truth. At least I thought so years before I encountered this aphor ism in the book of Max Stirner, an anarch. I tried to climb always in the azure but my muscles were unde veloped and wings I had none to speak of; the conse quences may be well imagined. Many a tumble, broken bones, and what sentimentalists would describe as shat tered illusions. Really, no illusions were dissipated. Fifty years have passed and I am still the incorrigible dreamer (with one eye on earthly banquets) and a steeple jack. So endure my childish egotism, doubled by the garrulity of an elderly person who ever carries his um brella abroad even when the sun bathes in the blue bowl of the firmament. An egotistical steeplejack, then, but not a spinner of yarns; that is, I hope, not incredible yarns; though lying is like a forest the deeper in you go the more difficult it is to escape. The narration, on whose road I am starting out so gaily, may puzzle but it need not alarm you. It is the story of an unquiet soul who voyaged from city to city, country to country, in search of some thing, he knew not what. The golden grapes of desire were never plucked, the marvellous mirage of the Seven Arts never overtaken, the antique and beautiful porches APOLOGY of philosophy, the solemn temples of religion never pene trated. Life has been the Barmecide s feast to me you remember the Arabian Nights no sooner did I covet a rare dish than fate whisked it out of my reach. I love painting and sculpture. I may only look but never own either pictures or marbles. I would fain be a pianist, a composer of music. I am neither. Nor a poet. Nor a novelist, actor, playwright. I have written of many things from architecture to zoology, without grasping their inner substance. I am Jack of the Seven Arts, master of none. A steeplejack of the arts. An egotist who is not ashamed to avow it. Everyone for himself in this desert of egotism called life, cried Stendhal. George Moore has said that "self-esteem is synono- mous to genius," a delightful concept which suddenly peoples our ark of mediocrity with wild genius. The Russian proverb sounds a deeper note: Egotism is the salt of life. Of pride we cannot have too much, wrote poor Nietzsche, who has been unjustly abused for /iis pride, he the humblest among men. This dictum of his was but a counsel of self-perfection. Zola called attention to the egotism of the English, because, as he naively re marked, their personal pronoun is capitalised while the French write "je," unless beginning a sentence. This is a slap at what Pascal described as the "hateful I." I best like old Walt Whitman s declaration of personal independence: "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." . . . Let us admit, strictly between our selves, that we are all egotists, as we are all snobs, ac cording to Thackeray. Some won t acknowledge this. But it is true. A world without egotism would cease to exist; every grain of sand is self-centred, every monad has its day. Therefore, bear with me if I talk of my 6 STEEPLEJACK petty personal affairs, bear with my "thunder and small beer," especially the chronicling thereof. A critic should confess his limitations, draw up at the beginning of a book a formal scenario of his temperament, prejudices, his likes and dislikes. A French critic, Hennequin did this, and has since served as an exemplar for the English writer, John M. Robertson. Then your readers would know what to expect, would discount radical utterances on hearing that your grandfather had been a Fenian or that your aunt was opposed to female suffrage. This is no Apologia, but an illuminating diagram. He who runs may see, may read. To be quite frank, I had rather echo the piteous prayer of Charles Baudelaire: "Oh! Lord ! God ! Give me the force and courage to contem plate my heart and body without disgust." To which we should, all of us, heartily reply: "Amen." Taking it for granted that I am an egotist, a profes sional egotist, for I write to make my living (he who lives by the pen shall perish by the pen); that I am a newspaper man (not a "journalist," of whom the late Joseph Howard, Jr., said: "Newspaper men usually sub scribe to pay the funerals of journalists"), why shouldn t I write my memoirs, relate my adventures among medi ocrities? Benvenuto Cellini said that the writing of his autobiography was the duty of every eminent man and also those not eminent, slyly adds Leslie Stephen, who was probably thinking of Pepys. It is my belief that every man on the threshold of life should write both his memoirs and his obituary so as to match them with the assembled mature patterns of his career. All is relative even our poor relatives, as metaphysicians have observed so it doesn t matter what you gossip about, whether it be the stars or clam-chowder. The APOLOGY important matter lies in the manner of gossiping. The style oft proclaims the man. (This is a medley of Buf- fon and Shakespeare.) In his charming essay on Auto biography, Leslie Stephen declared that "Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography " and continuing said that "it is always curious to see how a man contrives to pre sent a false testimonial to himself. It is pleasant to be admitted behind the scenes and trace the growth of that singular phantom, which, like the Spectre of the Brocken, is the man s own shadow cast upon the coloured and distorting mists of memory." Instead of ponderous philosophies what wouldn t we give for more personalia from the ancient world, another Petronius, another Sue tonius, those wicked old gossips. Dame Quickly or Jus tice Shallow are as vital and important as Hamlet or Lear. Mediocrity, too, is the salt of existence. Didn t Mirabeau cry: "Mon Dieu, donnez-moi la mediocrite! " No man or woman likes to be classed among medi ocrities. I wonder why? We are middle-class there is no "lower" or "upper" class in our country, that, William Jennings Bryan decided several years ago; our ancestors were for the most part proletarian when they were not criminals dumped over here by England in the early eighteenth century labourers, runaways, "patriots," the poor, the dissatisfied, and recently the very dregs of southeastern Europe; of whom should we be particularly proud? We should not assume either the airs of "fash ionable folk" or of supermen. We are neither; though the Eternal Snob is always with us like the politician. Max Beerbohm summed up the future of socialism in a memorable epigram: " If he would have his ideas realised the socialist must first kill the snob." Why shouldn t we enjoy hearing ourselves called medi- 8 STEEPLEJACK ocre? It is our ingrained Bovarysme the attempt to seem otherwise than we are. Thackeray when he wrote his Book of Snobs was not aware of the underlying phi losophy in his subject. Since his day a young French philosopher, Jules Gaultier, has set forth with abundant testimony his doctrine that all life aspires to appear other than it is; the Eternal Camouflage, the Everlasting Mas querade. The snob is only a tiny manifestation of the cosmical lie that permeates all sentient beings. It is, in brief, an Evolution developed under the aspect of eternity; this clear thinking of Young France outweighs the sub tle but sterile and scholastic philosophy of Henri Berg- son. I have often wondered why, armed with such a viable theory as this of M. Gaultier some essayist has not made a plea for mediocrity. Supermen, superrogues, sentimental humbugs, are done to the death, yet not a word of praise is given the garden variety of the human plant. Like the "average sensual man" and "the man in the street" he is taken for granted. Mediocrity is the backbone of our country. The man in the street whose collective opinion, whose vote rules, whose fight ing spirit protects us, isn t this chap, this "fellowe and his wife," worth studying? A majority of "exalted" souls would transform America into a howling wilder ness. The word "mediocrity" has become debased in meaning. It formerly stood for the happy equilibrium of our mental and physical forces. The golden medi ocrity of the Latin poet. To its possessor it spelled con tent, and, as long as the wolf was kept from the door, contentment reigned. That is the precise word con tentment not happiness, which is too ecstatic to last without burning up nerve-tissue or without insanity supervening. To be contented was once a gift of the APOLOGY gods; nowadays it means that you are commonplace, without social ambitions. And this is not well. Notwithstanding that we are a nation of one hundred million humans (mostly busybodies and politicians, as Carlyle would say) we are each in his own fashion en deavouring to escape the imputation of mediocrity. In vain. Number is mediocrity. We think to order, vote as we are bidden, and wear the clothes we are ordered to wear by destroyers of taste. Why then this mad de sire to be exceptional, whence this cowardice that shud ders before genuine art, and espouses the mediocre be cause it is more soothing to fat nerves? Let us hear the truth. It is because, happily for us, mediocrity is the normal condition of mankind, and genius is not. We pretend that we are not mediocre Ah ! Bovarysme in escapable yet we proudly point to our national pros perity. Says Emerson: "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be reckoned one character, not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned by the gross, in the hundreds of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographi cally, or the north or the south?" I confess however I like to saunter from my own bailiwick and watch my neighbour. Anything human or inhuman interests. Not that I am a Paul Pry, but because curiosity assuaged is a prime condiment in the cuisine of life. We are all hypo crites, whether we call ourselves idealists or pragmatists. There is no such thing as altruism, only certain souls who, self-illuded, believe themselves to be disinterested. Be frank. Be egotists, like myself, and the rest of men and women and children the supreme egotists. Con fess in your narrow, timorous souls that there is nothing io STEEPLEJACK so interesting as yourself. You confess in prayer, to the most personal of gods. Yourself. The world is your dream. The world is my dream. I have only to die and it no longer exists. In telling you of my experi ences I am not bound to consider your prejudices or compelled to apply a poultice to your vanity. If you don t care to take the excursion to the other side of the moon you need not. It strays away from my beloved Philadelphia, and as all roads lead to Rome, it returns to Philadelphia. A half century later. The loop is large, it includes many people, many customs, many lands. Come, let us be off! And I hope my bark of dreams headed in a trice for a remote and exquisite Cythera, does not bump into some paludian wharf at morose and melancholy Camden. Pray accept me as a steeplejack of dreams, an egotist, a mediocrity, and these Avowals merely as the chemistry of saturation and precipitation. In an old book a char acter crys: "Five minutes more and I confess every thing." Wise Mother Church was aware of one of our profoundest instincts when she instituted the sacrament of Confession. After this discursive prelude, I promise to tell you everything, even though it blisters the paper on which it is printed, which Edgar Allan Poe asserted would happen if a man wrote his inmost thoughts. Autobiography is but fiction disguised, from St. Augus tine to Huysmans. If I bore you which is sure to happen I am not altogether to blame. Like the nai ve old Frenchman who was living unknown during the most brilliant period of French literature, I desperately cry: "Even if nothing else, I am, at least, a contem porary." PART I IN OLD PHILADELPHIA I I AM BORN Let us begin at the beginning. I am the second son of my parents, and was born under the sign of Aquarius, symbol of inconstancy, literally, before my time, for I am a seventh months child; not, however, born with a caul like David Copperfield; yet an object of curiosity to the neighbours, and a cause of extreme solicitude to my parents. I was told by my old nurse, a devoted Irish servant, with us over a quarter of a century where are such servants to be found in 1919? that I reposed in a little box heavily wadded with wool, and on the mantelpiece, which in the houses of those days was broad and commodious. A queer way to begin life, the top of a hearth. No doubt I would have figured in an incubator if there had been such an institution. The fact of my premature birth is not of national im portance, but it is a fact that has solved several puzzling questions for me. The health of my mother had been delicate for a year and the death of an infant sister brought much sorrow into her life. Naturally, such mental and physical conditions reacted unfavourably on my organism. I was what boys contemptuously call a cry-baby. That unfortunate cotton-wool pursued me for years. I was not only a cry-baby but a child that always kept close to its mother s skirts. I had, still have, the mother-cult. In early childhood it was an obsession. Mother s boys seldom fight back, and I was no exception. I am not an unqualified believer in 13 i 4 STEEPLEJACK heredity, because of the disconcerting slap in the face so often given the investigator by data. Weismann has asserted that acquired traits are not transmitted. This must be true as neither my father nor mother were tearful persons; if they were sentimental it was normal, and it belonged to their period, sometimes called the Mid-Victorian. Let us call it Before the War, that liberating war of 1861 which well-nigh disrupted the Union. My morbid sensibility may be set down to my unexpected appearance in the vale of sorrows, and I long suffered from shyness, absurd sentimentality and a hor ror of the actual. Need I add that I have bravely out lived this youthful bashfulness? In everyone s memory there is at least one glittering peak around which cluster or swirl the mists of minor happenings peculiar to childhood. Naturally, I can t recall the outbreak of the war, but I remember as sharply as if it were yesterday a walk down Chestnut Street, clinging to my mother s hand, scared but curious. The entire world was out in holiday mood. Independence Hall was decorated with flags. People were cheering. Bands playing. The most vivid recollection, the high light of the moment was the deafening sound of bells. There were the bells on the old-fashioned hose-carts, and they were rung by red-shirted firemen. Confused by the clangour, the crowds, I asked my mother what it all meant. She answered: "Richmond has fallen." I didn t understand. What could Richmond mean to a boy still in skirts? Although I was reading Dickens at the age of seven, it was years before I appreciated the significance of that phrase, the first one that I can recall from my mother s lips: "Richmond has fallen." The next high-light was the excitement over the assas- I AM BORN 15 sination of President Lincoln. Philadelphia, no matter her Tory leanings during the war of the Revolution, is an intensely patriotic city, and that patriotism reached my infantile sensorium despite the fact I had no com prehension of the tragic event. The way it was fixed in my brain-cells came about in this fashion. An image is more lasting than an idea, and the image was the result of a picture, a living one, framed by either side of lower Chestnut Street. Night-time. Torches illuminated a vast and solemn procession which moved at a funereal pace. It had seemed to me years, before this mournful column passed the printing-office of my grandfather Gibbons, at No. 333 Chestnut. From my mother s arms I was permitted to peep from time to time through a window on the third floor. The windows were crowded. Our family must have been there. I fell asleep. I was awakened by the words: "Here comes General Han cock." Another mystery. Dazzled by the moving lights I made out a huge dark object, but didn t understand its meaning. Nevertheless, I was unconsciously assisting at the obsequies of the greatest man since George Wash ington to whom the United States has given birth- Abraham Lincoln. His remains lay in state at Inde pendence Hall, April 22, 1865, of that I remember nothing. But the flare of the torches, the moving catafalque, and the rumours of a people in mourning I shall never forget. The third high-light found me older and, for my age, an omnivorous reader. Anything from Shakespeare to the weather reports in the Daily Ledger were welcome. Stendhal Henry Beyle boasted that his brain de manded a thousand cubic feet of ideas daily to stoke up the cerebral system (a steamboat brain), but I needed 1 6 STEEPLEJACK more; if not ideas, then words. The rather uncertain science of meteorology in its infancy, enthralled my imagination. The clouds were my constant preoccupa tion. A pillar of fire by night the stars and moon the clouds in daylight. "J aime les nuages. ... la has. ..." I could have cried with my adored poet, Baudelaire. But the sad, bad, mad, and unhappy Frenchman didn t bother me in 1870. I was too busy on the roof of our house at 1434 North Seventh Street it still stands, this house, between Master and Jefferson, although the trolley-car conductors have not begun to point it out as my birthplace watching for storms. Well, one came, and for years I didn t wish to see an other. It was on a certain Sunday afternoon, in May, warm, sultry, threatening, stormy. From my observa tory a barrel in the garret, my head popping out of an aperture in the roof, I noted with joy and fear a tre mendous disturbance in the western sky beyond the Schuylkill River. Two clouds, of greenish-yellow hue rushed towards each other, interlocked, and after a brief struggle, melted into one ominous funnel-shaped appari tion. The classic tornado shape, though evidently on a miniature scale if contrasted with a Kansas "twister." But size wasn t the quality that scared me, it was the terrific speed and scream of the approaching monster. I hurriedly closed the trapdoor and almost fell down stairs yelling: "Whirlwind, whirlwind!" Midnight blackness had settled upon the city by the time our win dows were tightly closed. The wind was terrifying, the lightning and thunder made me hide under pillows. That storm was accompanied by hail that broke more windows and ruined more crops than any storm in or around Philadelphia since then. The Camden tornado I AM BORN 17 of August 3, 1885, did much more harm to life and prop erty. The exact year of this great hailstorm? I don t know. I ve read Hazen s study, The Tornado, but this storm is not mentioned. I fancy, it must have been in 1870 or 1871, about the epoch of the Franco-Prussian War. It was some years after the installation of the horse-car line on Seventh Street, which I remember, be cause as car sixty-six went by I was told that the year was 1866. The Franco- Prussian War I can recall as my mother, an ardent lover of France and all things French, argued the case with a neighbour, a German, and always lost her temper. From this dates my precocious interest in French art and literature, and I lay the blame on the Centennial Exposition of 1879 f r m y subsequent running away to Paris. I mention these three high-lights: war, assassination, and tornadoes, as proof that I was predestined, willy-nilly, to become a newspaper writer. II MY GRANDFATHERS I come of an old-fashioned, middle-class family on both sides, notwithstanding the radical Celtic strain. My father, John Huneker, was the son of a John Hun- eker, organist of St. Mary s Roman Catholic Church on South Fourth Street. Somewhere in the old church yard is my grandfather s tomb. I have not succeeded in finding it. The elder Huneker was organist in the year 1806, and the reason I know is a letter in my hand which is dated "Philada., December 22nd, 1806" and quaintly addressed "To the clergy and managers of St. Mary s Church." In this letter my grandfather, true to type, protests that since he is appointed organist of the said church he "proposed to be choir-director or else !" The usual choir row. A certain the name looks like Mr. Ansan, but is hardly legible had hitherto directed and instructed the choir. This didn t suit the plans of the old gentleman, hence the protest. It is characteristic of the Huneker tribe, as well as of the musical profession. All or nothing Either Or. No happy medium for them. Steeple jacks. Dreamers. Only hard knocks from experience made them come to earth. How the dispute was set tled deponent saith not, but as my grandfather was or ganist of St. Mary s many years, I fancy he had his way. At this juncture I have a painful duty to perform. Far be from me to betray a lack of piety in the matter of such a forebear (I never saw him). His daguerreotype shows him to have been a well-set-up man with regular 18 MY GRANDFATHERS 19 features, and evidently of a florid complexion. He com posed a sacred anthem for voice and organ in 1826. Worse remains. He actually published the composition. It is entitled, "The Vale of the Cross," words by Roscoe. It is distinctly bad, not mediocre, but stupid, indiffer ently written there are false progressions, banal har monies and I regret that after so many years my con science forces me to criticise adversely the work of an ancestor. I shan t speak of the open-fifths and parallel octaves; to-day the new men in music violate every rule of the old masters; need I refer to Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky? But my grandfather did not possess the brilliant gifts of these modern composers. If his blood didn t flow in my veins, I should be con strained to add that his creative gifts were not much in evidence in this composition, no matter his executive ability in the handling of organ manuals and treading the pedals; otherwise he is said to have been a kindly gentleman. With you, I also breathe a sigh of relief at accomplishing my duty. Later I fear I shall be com pelled by the same motive to criticise my maternal grand father for his manipulation of the anapestic measure, also for writing sonnets of thirteen lines, though Sydney Dobell did the same afterwards. In New York you ask a man what will he take; in Boston, who is his favourite composer; in Chicago, how many he has killed that day; but in my dear old town the question always resolves itself into were you born above or below Market Street? Anyhow, this street was the social Rubicon when I was a boy. On this side of the Pyrenees Truth; on the other side Error. I was born in No Man s Land, a barbarian in the outer wilderness. But while the Hunekers were not of an 20 STEEPLEJACK aristocratic strain we were not newcomers in the land. I wonder how many fashionable folk in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia can trace their family back to the year 1700? It doesn t matter much, but the blare of social trumpets still deafen me when I visit my "home town," so that I feel like querying: "Did your family come over before or after the centennial? I used to ask my father who vtere his ancestors. His whimsical reply was: "Pudding-weavers down at the Neck," which made me laugh, but left me wondering. What s a pudding- weaver? I know where the Neck is, or was. Hog Island has an affinity with such puddings. Produce farmers, perhaps Oh! Chopin, Oh! Verlaine perhaps my grandfather s father made blood-sausages. I refuse to believe it, only that subtle allusion to the weaving of black pudding ! Martin I. J. Griffin, an authority on historical research, a genealogist, particularly interested in old American Catholic families, wrote my brother, John Huneker, that "Mark Honyker, in 1782, gave twenty-five pounds to enlarge St. Mary s Church. He was an uncle of John Huneker. Your family in Phila delphia goes back to 1700, and were among the earliest Catholic settlers." A tradition is that the family orig inally stemmed from Hungary, then an autonomous state. An old Viennese Bible, dated 1750, spells the name Hunykyr, though we can t claim alliance with the noblest among Hungarian families, Janos Hunyadi. Well I recollect the fear this bible aroused with its pictures of the damned in hell; indeed, I conceived my first prej udice against the theological hell because of those cruel illustrations. There are various strains in our blood in the paternal line: Hungarian, English, and, no doubt, sturdy Pennsyl- MY GRANDFATHERS 21 vania Dutch; the Irish blood we derive from the distaff side; Gibbons and Duffy. But my father s mother was a Bowman and related to the Coopers. From data furnished by our second cousin, George E. Walton, I learn that Charles Bowman, while a theological student fled to America because of political opinions, and on June 13, 1777, took the oath of allegiance to the State of Pennsylvania. He was prominent in business as in civil and religious affairs later, and with Messrs. Oellers, Drexel, Reufner, and others, Charles Bowman became responsible for the building of the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, at Sixth and Spruce Streets, of which he was a trustee. His associates withdrew their names and support, and unfortunately left Bowman to complete the church, which resulted in his mental and financial breakdown. He died, broken-hearted, about 1820, and was buried in Holy Trinity Churchyard. There is a book of the Bowman genealogy published at Harrisburg, 1886, but it seems that the Philadelphia branch is separate from others of the same name. Charles Bowman married first Miss Faunce, by whom he had three daughters: Mary Bowman, who married Harry Voigt; Elizabeth Bowman, who married my grandfather, John Huneker; Frances Bowman, who married Francis Cooper, Jr., the maternal grandfather of George E. Walton. After the death of his first wife, Charles Bow man married a widow, Mrs. Fox, who had a son, John Fox, the father of the late Hon. Daniel M. Fox, formerly a Mayor of Philadelphia. With Daniel M. Fox I studied law and conveyancing at No. 508 Walnut Street, in 1876 or w r ent through the motions of studying. His sons are Henry Korn Fox, well known in that city, and William Henry Fox, at present Director of Art at the museum on 22 STEEPLEJACK the Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. The Coopers and Bowmans were patriotic, and participated in the Revo lutionary War, as well as the War of 1812. Even if we were not F. F. V. s, we could belong to the sons and daughters of the Revolution. Some of us do. Since the recent happy recrudescence of patriotic sentiment in this country it is consoling to know that your family stock is so deeply rooted in the native soil. But the Gibbons side is another story. That once told we shall quickly get afloat on the stream of memories. The acute sensitiveness, the instability of tempera ment, the alternations of timidity and rashness, the mor bid exaltation and depression which were, and still are, the stigmata of my personal "case" as the psychiatrists put it come from the Irish side of my house. To be sure, the two months shortage in normal gestation played the role of a dissolvent in my character. Every human is a colony of cells. His personality is not a unit, but an aggregation of units. Duple, triple, sex tuple personalities have been noted by psychologists in abnormal cases. Yet I firmly believe this dissociation is commoner than psychologists would have us believe. When President Woodrow Wilson spoke of his " single- track mind," he merely proved that by powerful concen tration he was able to canalise one idea, to focus it, and thus dispose of it. This inhibitory power is not possessed by everyone. I, for example, have a polyphonic mind. I enjoy the simultaneous flight of a half-dozen trains of ideas, which run on parallel tracks for a certain distance, then disappear, arriving nowhere. This accounts for my half-mad worship of the Seven Arts which have always seemed one single art; when I first read Walter Pater s suggestion that all the other arts aspire to the condition c , o SI W 2 i ^ MY GRANDFATHERS 23 of music, I said: "That s it," and at once proceeded to write of painting in terms of tone, of literature as if it were only form and color, and of life as if it is a prom enade of flavours. Now, I admit that this method apart from its being confusing to the reader, is also aesthetically false. It didn t require Professor Babbitt to tell us that in his New Laocoon. The respective substance of each art is different, and not even the extraordinary genius of Richard Wagner could fuse disparate dissimilarities. The musician in him dominated the poet, dramatist, and scene-painter. And in this paragraph I am precisely demonstrating what I spoke of my polyphonic habit of thinking, if thinking it may be thus called. I often suffer from a "split" or dissociated personalities, hence my discursiveness to call such a fugitive ideation by so mild a name. But I started to tell you of my maternal grandfather and I am winding up on Wagner. Talk about "free fantasy" in a modern tone-poem, or a five- voiced fugue, or a juggler spinning six plates at once ! James Gibbons was born in 1801 in Donegal, the "far down," the "black north" as they say in Ireland. Not finding the politics of his land to his taste he did what millions of his countrymen have done, he emi grated to America. This was in 1820. He married Sarah Duffy and settled in Philadelphia. I knew him slightly but never had very strong affection for him. When he died in 1873, I was J ust m mv teens. The man was reserved, haughty, and to my younger brother, Paul, and me he seemed needlessly harsh. My first dislike was born of his admonishment that if we misbehaved or worried our mother he would cut off our fingers. There was something peculiarly Celtic in this cruel threat, not 24 STEEPLEJACK that the Irish are bloody-minded or treat their children roughly, but the race is imaginative. It deals in the hyperbolical. Its temperament keeps it oscillating twixt hell and heaven. Above all, the gift or curse of expres siveness has never been denied the Irish. They love highly coloured phrases. They are born rhetoricians, from a Dublin jaunting-car driver to Edmund Burke. My grandfather was an orator. He dealt in superlatives. To hear him declaim his own patriotic verse it was patriotic or nothing to proclaim the wrongs of Emerald Isle, to denounce the enemy, the Sassenach Ah ! where would George Moore have been with his Erse and his aristocratic condescension to the men of County Mayo ! My relative was seldom so exuberant. His hatred for Eng land and the English is historical among his sympathisers. Probably the gravest defect in my character is my in ability to hate anyone, or anything for more than five minutes, except hypocrisy and noise. They say a man who can t hate can t love ! I don t subscribe to that. Probably I come by my indifferent temperament from my father, who would curse like a sea-pilot and in a change of breath caress the cat. "Here, Pussy!" he would say, after consigning to the demnition bow-wows one of his workmen. But I can love, intensely love an idea or an art. I am a Yes-Sayer. The fulminations of my granddaddy never got under my skin. Occasionally he would take me on his knees bony they were, and hurt me and thus adjure me: "James, you are my grandson, and named after me. Never forget the accursed enemies of your country." Meaning the English. I promised him, naturally, and ever since have bravely battled with the English lan guage, the charmed tongue of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and MY GRANDFATHERS 25 Swinburne, and I am always defeated in the verbal fray. A martyr to English literature and Irish patriotism. I recall certain long summer afternoons the babble of men s voices, the cigar smoke, and the clinking of glasses when a Fenian pow-wow was held in our dining- room. I also remember the cynical smile of my father, who detested Fenianism with its blow, brag, and bluster. He knew. I have since discovered that the sincerity of my grandfather couldn t be challenged. But my father distrusted some of the "patriots" who surrounded James Gibbons. And justly so. Joseph Conrad has said that in every revolution the bad characters come first to the surface. This is particularly true of the Fenian move ment of the sixties. As to the validity of the cause I may say nothing. But the patriotic motives of such men as James Gibbons, Patrick J. Meehan (editor of The Irish -American), James Stephens, the Head-Centre of the European Fenian Brotherhood (he died about 1901), of General Sweeney, Charles Roberts, John O Neill, and many others, no one could impugn. James Gibbons was the vice-president of the American branch of the Brother hood, and while he was not a rich man, he had an abun dant income from his printing-press on Chestnut Street. That thriving business was swallowed up by the "patri ots," who did not then disdain, as they do not disdain to day, the humble savings of the servant-girl. I speak by the card, for I have often heard my grandfather savagely attack these blood-suckers who, with the flag of the Emer ald Isle how often I have been dazzled by that golden sunburst in one hand, outstretched the other greedily grasping the pennies of the deluded Irish lads and lassies whose hearts were bigger than their brainpans. James Gibbons sacrificed his money, his family, him- 26 STEEPLEJACK self in the vain pursuit of patriotism. He was called the Irish Poet, Patriot and Printer, and while his powers as a poet are not considerable he put such vehement passion into his utterances that one must overlook his limping and monotonous verse. I hold in my hand a small, unbound book, bearing the title: Miscellaneous and Pa triotic Poems by James Gibbons. Printed for private circulation, 1870. A harp decorates the green cover. Also a quatrain beginning: "Oh! harp of my country, the pride of her sages." and the last line, "Thy music still lives in each Irishman s soul." On the fly-leaf is the following, written in an abominable scrawl I know from whom I inherited my handwriting: "To my dear grand son, Master James Huneker, with the affectionate re gards of his grandfather." Rather touching, isn t it, from a man who never considered his family, friends, or self-interest when confronted by his duty to the cause, who dreamed, Ireland Free, ate, drank, and lived with the idea. Only Erin the devil take the hindmost! His was a fanaticism that would have ennobled a baser cause, and the Lord only knows the Quid Sod has its grievances. But to capture the British Empire via Canada has also seemed to me, as it did to my father, the maddest of dreams. The Irish and the Polish are of spiritual kin patriotically. Individualists, they are never happy under any form of government. However, James Gibbons and his associates did not think this, nor were they discouraged after the first dis astrous battle in Canada. England was not the only object of my grandfather s abhorrence. He was a vio lent, nay, a virulent prohibitionist; they called them selves Temperance Advocates in those days, but they nowise differed as to intemperate speech from the pro- MY GRANDFATHERS 27 hibitfonfsts of 1919. All fanatics are alike. The truth is seldom their aim. They become propagandists no matter the silliness, inutility, or the positive evil of their cause. Consider the anti-vivisectionists, the opponents to vac cination, or any such baleful cults. James Gibbons, as his obituaries tell me, and as I know by word of mouth from my mother, was largely instrumental in bringing Father Matthew to this country about the middle of the last century. Our family has, or had, many letters from that great apostle of temperance, Father Matthew, also from Archbishop McHale to James Gibbons, who was a member of St. Augustine s Church a half century, and an active and zealous worker in St. Vincent de Paul s Society, for an equal period. He was devoted to the succour of poor orphans, and I often heard his poem, "The Lament of the Orphan Boy," recited or sung. The rind of the man was sometimes forbidding; he had suffered from many disillusionments; but his heart was as sentimental as an Irishman s only can be. I have seen his eyes fill at the mention of a child s sorrow, or of Ireland. At his funeral the organist of St. Augus tine s, Henry Thunder the father of the present con ductor and organist, Henry Gordon Thunder played "The Exile of Erin." He was an exile his life long, and if he had remained in Ireland he would have died either from disgust or on the gallows. There was short shrift for "traitors" in 1820. But to these poems: they are dedicated to his daugh ter, Mary Gibbons Huneker. The author calls them "fugitive pieces," and they are. Most of them are dog gerel, though the best are marked by unfeigned pathos and burning sincerity. Those are musical to the ear, written in the simpler forms, and strongly influenced 28 STEEPLEJACK by Tom Moore, Campbell, and Byron. " Tis sad to say farewell, love, Thy absence gives me pain," was once upon a time a popular song. It has a tuneful jingle that is pleasing, if not too original. I like the image, "When the stars hung out their silver lamps above the dark blue sea," even if h is since faded to fatuity. There is a poem dedicated to ex-President Tyler we were intimate with the Tyler family but the "gem" of the collection is "A Dream," which appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Journal, April 22, 1863. I wonder why they didn t hang the poet from a lamp-post. It was during the Civil War, and a year of red-hot partisan ship. The Copperhead was an outcast. Abraham Lin coln had not been canonised by martyrdom. Nor had he been idealised. He was plain Old Abe, and half- mockingly, half-affectionately called "The Rail-Splitter." He was caricatured, abused in print, and fathered with many a doubtful joke. But he was also the "Old Abe" who penned the Emancipation Proclamation, the "Old Abe" who delivered the Gettysburg speech the English of which has not been bettered by any one of his suc cessors in the White House; an English which came from the Bible and Bunyan, and hot from the heart of the great man who wrote it. Therefore, my astonishment is all the greater that punishment, swift, condign, did not follow the publication of the vitriolic verses signed by James Gibbons, and doubtless inspired by that other James S. Gibbons, a Quaker, who composed the once famous lines beginning: "We are coming, Father Abram." My grandfather s amended version began: "We are coming, Abram Lincoln, with the ghosts of murdered men." I repeat, I wonder how he escaped death or imprisonment. Both were summarily dealt to MY GRANDFATHERS 29 men for a less offence. That was the time when Secre tary of War Stanton is reported to have made his speech : "When I tap this little bell, I can send a man to a place where he will never hear the dogs bark." I quote from an exceptionally treacherous memory. But if a noncon formist, James Gibbons was a loyal citizen and not against our government. I fancy the fact that he was a poet saved Mr. Gib bons from punishment. The other verse in his little book is harmless enough. "A National Temperance Song," dedicated to Francis Cooper, Esq., a relative, the music by B. Cross, the father of the late Michall Hurley Cross, fills my cup to overflowing. A Gibbons a poet, even a poetaster, is credible enough, but a Gibbons a prohibitionist is flying in the very face of probability. Yet it was so. Before the Fenian movement netted him he was often on the temperance platform, sometimes in company with Father Matthew. It is the only blot in our scutcheon a reformer among the Gibbons and Hunekers. And a temperance reformer. The pity of it! I much prefer the admirable attitude of James, Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, a connection of my grandfather s, who has pointed out that true temperance is to be found in moderation, not in total prohibition. So fierce were the sentiments of James Gibbons on his darling themes of temperance and patriotism, that at a meeting of Irish-Americans in Buffalo, while he was ad dressing his audience the floor fell in, carrying with it the concourse of patriots. But the orator, undismayed, hung on to a window-sill and continued his passionate address on the wrongs of Ireland. This anecdote may be apocryphal. I never heard how many were wounded STEEPLEJACK in the affair. It was said afterwards that to kill a Gib bons, the only sure way was to heave a brick at his head when one of the tribe was caught praying. This is an oM Donegal superstition. But though the family can boost several ecclesiastics, not one has been over taken in prayer by an enemy. Nor by the same token have any of the Hunekers. Among my grandfather s papers I found a copy of a letter, dated November 8, 1867, and addressed to "His Excellency, Andrew Johnson, President of the United State*/ The handwriting is that of my mother, who wrote many a "State paper" for her father. In this letter the writer airs his usual grievance: "Prominent Republicans have left nothing undone to seduce by flattery and fair promises the Fenian or Irish vote from its allegiance to the constitutional party of the country; how far they have been successful the late elections will answer/ Gibbons then makes an appeal to crush the enemies of Ireland in the country and stop the "insidious tyranny of England." ... "I need not remind your Excellency that England has never acknowledged citizen ship in an Irishman, when her interest or her hate stood in the way." Toujours England. Whether President "Andy," as he was endearingly called by an ungrateful constituency, ever took action in the matter I can t say. I play Bach fugues every morning after breakfast, but my technique in American history still leaves much to be desired. Another letter which throws light on the man and contemporary events came to me from Richard McCIoud, aUorm:y-at-J,v.v, Duranr o, Colorado, ft is dated May 7, 1909, and runs thus: "In reading the Bookman for May, 1909, I came across your portrait and learned that MY GRANDFATHERS 31 you were born in Philadelphia, and that one of your grandfathers was an Irishman, a poet, and also vice- president of the Fenian Brotherhood some time in the early seventies. That grandfather and I were great friends. I was one of the Senators of the Fenian Brother hood, and one Sunday in 1870, a short time before the last raid on Canada the Senators had a meeting in Philadelphia at the house of your grandfather. He was a good speaker on many subjects. I lived in New York and had a desk in the Custom House, and was a student in the Columbia College Law School. James Gibbons and I made a trip from New York to Chicago in 1870 to attend a Fenian convention called by the Senators to stop the second raid on Canada proposed by President John O Neill of the Brotherhood. I got passes for Mr. Gibbons and myself from New York to Chicago on the New York Central Road through Canada to Detroit, etc. I had two small tin boxes containing all the Fenian papers for the convention, brought from headquarters in New York. Mr. Gibbons and I sat together in the train. After we crossed Suspension Bridge at Niagara Falls, the Custom House officers were coming through the cars and Mr. Gibbons became uneasy and said to me that we would be arrested because of the Fenian papers. I quieted him by showing him that my passes were granted because of the New York Custom House, and that the boxes would not be examined. And so it hap pened, when the Canadian officers reached our seat. However, on our return, we did not pass through Canada as we were watched by Pinkerton detectives from Chi cago, as we learned from private sources. James Gib bons was a true Irish patriot, and sacrificed bis printing business for the cause of Ireland. I was married in 1870, 32 STEEPLEJACK after the second raid on Canada, and my best man was Joseph I. C. Clarke, of New York city, who has since made a reputation as a literary man. My father-in-law is still living, and he was a great friend of James Gibbons, who was frequently entertained at his residence in Norwich, Conn. His name is Michael McQuirk. Excuse this screed. Yours, Richard McCIoud." A brave old friend. I hope he still lives. The Clarke alluded to is no less a personage than J. I. C. Clarke, formerly editor of the New York Journal, poet, orator, and patriot. James Gibbons was of medium height, as lithe and swift as an Indian, swarthy of skin, his eyes grey-blue, his hair white and primly parted, his expres sion stern, yet his glance was the glance of a visionary. He was a visionary. Another steeplejack. A dreamer of that wildest of dreams, the political separation of Ireland from England. He spoke with eloquence. He was logical. His familiar pose was that of a statesman, his right hand thrust in his frock coat. I think about his only weakness was his belief that he resembled his politi cal idol, Henry Clay. There was sufficient resemblance to justify this belief. He was a man of character and intellect. No Celtic instability there. He was as stub born and unyielding in his faiths, religious and patriotic, as the rock of Gibraltar. With his brains and iron will he should have risen to eminence in any profession, whether the law, politics, or the church. I think that he would have made a model bishop. But he preferred to follow his dream, a beautiful unselfish dream, all the more beautiful because it was unrealised. He was ex ploited by a conscienceless crew. With his imagination he was doomed to be a leader of forlorn hopes. Ah ! the Wild Goose, which George Moore calls the symbol of MY GRANDFATHERS 33 the restless Irish temperament. Despite his occasional chilliness I revere the memory of the man, though I shall never forget the cruel image evoked by him. My hands were my petty vanity. I was called a " fingersmith " good old Northern Liberty word and to chop off those fingers seemed the acme of the horrible. He didn t mean it. It was his heightened and Celtic way of say ing things. James Gibbons was a fighter born; till the day of his death he fought windmills, and like the noble Spanish Don, of Cervantes, he never knew they were windmills. He thought it was for humanity s sake. And it was for suffering humanity that he fought with out a thought of self, or ultimate success. Of such rare and heroic stuff was he fashioned. Ill FAMILY LIFE These retrospective hallucinations would be incom plete without an account of my parents; not of over whelming interest to you, but it is to me, hence its in clusion in these pages. Stendhal has said that a man s first enemies are his parents, and there is just enough truth in the paradox to lend it wings. We are the product of inherited tendencies, to give to an unknown quantity a word; we are usually brought up to believe what our fathers and mothers believed. They are our pacemakers in life. Their religious faith is thrust upon us without our asking. Their prejudices, social, political, are ours. It is a man or woman of character who breaks away early from the yoke, supposing that it is a yoke and that our beliefs are sincere. But the profound im pressions of childhood are seldom erased. You may fight your life long against them, and uselessly. I, who am not of what is euphemistically called the religious temperament, cannot pass a church without saluting, and often entering. Two rituals fascinate me. The Hebrew and the Roman Catholic. In Paris I went to the Greek church, and occasionally in New York. The liturgical chants first sung when mankind was in its infancy, before Egypt was, and perhaps during the Atlantean golden age, are echoed in the KoI-Nidrei of the Day of Atonement and in the Dies Irse of Passion Week. The call of the Muezzin from the minaret of the Ma- 34 FAMILY LIFE 35 hometan mosque is a cry that has sounded down the corridor of time from immemorial days and lands that vanished in the last glacial epoch. The soul of man is older than his handiwork, and his soul has always aspired after the vision. Totem and fetish, tabu, magic, animism, and idols are incorporated in the solemn church services of to-day. Religious emotion is as old as humanity. Baudelaire would not permit his friends to mock his gro tesque wooden idol, because, as he whispered, a god might be concealed in it. The idea of divinity lurking every where was one of the charms of the pagan world. Man was accomplice in the eternal mysteries. Religion, that most ancient and jealous thing, was a forest peopled by gods, pluralistic deities. Some men outlive this feeling. I cannot. And the aesthetic symbolism of the Mass is alluring. But suppose that it would have been pos sible to have consulted me at the age of understand ing. Would I have subscribed to the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church? Or, to take a commoner example, was I asked whether I preferred being a Democrat or Republican? Stendhal is not so far wrong in his as sumption, though in his personal case he was the victim of a cruel, illiberal father, and a nasty-tempered, nagging aunt. This was his Aunt Seraphina, made famous in his journals. For his mother he entertained a feeling that edged the idolatrous. I was luckier than Henry Beyle of Grenoble. My parents were not my enemies. To them I owe everything. My love of pictorial art was fostered at home, my passion for music stimulated in a musical atmosphere. My father was an easy-going man with a waggish dis position and a large fund of dry humour, which found expression in pithy, if not always parliamentary expres- 36 STEEPLEJACK sions. He called a cat a cat, as they say in Paris, and sometimes the names of his cats evoked a shudder, but the shudder always resolved itself into laughter. Those shrewd, crisp vocables born somewhere in old Kensing ton hurt our ear when they impinged too sharply on the tympani. Yet they usually disposed of a variety of upstart pretension, of false sentiment. This John Hun- eker hated humbug. His hatred was not of the bilious, corroding kind, but gay, sometimes too broad in speech, and ever salutary. He had a barytone voice, rich, vi brant, and, like little Galli-Curci, he occasionally sang off the pitch. It wasn t as much, I fear, lack of method as some aural defect. Nevertheless, he was in great demand at social gatherings where he won applause by his imitations of Italian opera singers. My memory cells can still recall his singing of buffo arias, side-splitting in their innocent fun-making. Also many old-fashioned English ballads. "The White Squall/ "My Boyhood s Home," "The Ivy Green." His "Down Among the Dead Men" was justly esteemed. It would have won favour from Colonel Newcome in any Cave of Har mony. And those caves were prevalent in the early forties of the past century. Philadelphia boasted a dozen, a combination of chop-house, tavern, and concert- room. There was a chairman, usually some well-known "booze-fighter" and all-round "genial" with a resonant voice, or else some actor. Billy Burton, among the great est of Falstaffs, like the elder Hackett, and Edgar Poe s employer on Burton s Magazine, was an admirable host. The convivial gentlemen damned the King and drank toasts to the memory of Washington. "Black-Eyed Susan" was their favourite theatrical entertainment, though, when it came to "heavy" tragedy, then the FAMILY LIFE 37 phalanx turned out to welcome Edmund as well as the younger Kean or the elder Booth. Many a time I have listened to my father s stirring stories of the Macready-Forrest row. He espoused the cause of the English actor, principally because of his love of fair play. Macready was badly treated. All that Dickens wrote of our intolerance and rough manners was exemplified in the Macready affair. Feeling never ran so high in Philadelphia as it did in New York witness the Astor Place riots; but it was pretty bad. In reality, my father considered Edwin Forrest the more powerful actor of the pair. Macready, he said, was cold, his art cerebral. If Forrest had not the polish, he possessed dramatic temperament. How he could thunder in the index, whether in Othello, Lear, or Metamora. He tore passions to shreds, but he communicated thrills to his audience. He was before my time as an actor, but I saw him once at his home in North Broad Street. With a lot of boys I sat on his brownstone steps of a warm Sunday af ternoon. No doubt Mr. Forrest was long-suffering in the matter, for suddenly, to our dismay, the door opened and a terrible-appearing old ogre with disordered hair shouted in a voice that might have been heard on Girard Avenue: "Get out of here, you blankety, blank, blank, blank !" We "got out of there/ and swiftly. Richelieu was never more wrathful, Lear more tragic. Of the elder Booth my father related that one Sunday morning on Walnut Street, opposite the now historical theatre, his attention was arrested by the clattering of hoofs and the sound of many footsteps. A crowd swept around Ninth Street following a horse upon which sat, or rather crouched, old Booth, who faced backward, holding on literally for dear life to the tail of the animal. 38 STEEPLEJACK It was one of the accustomed outbursts of the great actor, a "uric-acid storm," the specialists now call it. The following Monday evening he played a Shakesperian character, none the worse for his experience. There were giants in those days. Music, while never a profession of my father s, as it was of my grandfather, played a pleasant role in his life. His voice and amiable personality brought him into the best company of the town. He belonged to the Poe circle: Judge Conrad, William Burton, John Sartain, the engraver who has written of the men at these gather ings Poe himself, Booth, and Pierce Butler. Judge Conrad would recite the Lord s Prayer in a way that moved Booth to tears. My father would sing "As I View Now Those Scenes so Charming," from "Sonnam- bula" the battle-horse of the barytone Badiali. And if Poe was not too sullen or melancholy he would recite "The Raven," and freeze the spines of the company. As I have told elsewhere, my father confessed that he never saw Poe the worse for liquor except once, and then it was a thimbleful of brandy that disturbed his equilib rium. A handsome, dapper little man, reported my father of Poe s person, and a sad reticent man, with the fixed glance of one immersed in doleful memories, and an eye that was beautiful in colour and the saddest that he ever saw. When Edwin Booth played Hamlet, he looked like Poe, I was informed; not a physical but a spiritual resemblance, my father probably meant. My father entertained all the visiting musical celeb rities. He knew Thalberg, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Vieuxtemps, and a host of others. Ole Bull went around our dining-table on his thumbs, his feet free from the floor. He was an athlete, this grand old Norwegian FAMILY LIFE 39 violinist, who looked like Liszt or the enchanted Merlin as pictured by Burne-Jones. He was a bit of a char latan in his old age, and played all sorts of tricks on his magic fiddle. But he touched the hearts of his audiences with "Home Sweet Home," "Way Down Upon the Suwanee River," "Old Dan Tucker," with his reels, jigs, and once in a while a Paganini caprice. He never, to use a homely expression, played over the heads of the people. There was his secret. Art could go hang. My father heartily approved of this attitude. Naturally I did not. Art for me was cryptic, else it was not art. Many the battle we had on this not very subtle question in aesthetics. Thalberg, in company with Madame Lagrange, played with unqualified success. He knew his public and tickled the ears of the groundlings with his fantasias and variations on popular operatic airs. The prayer from Rossini s "Moses in Egypt" was a favourite, and as played by the greatest singer on the keyboard Thalberg had the mellowest touch among his contemporaries and with his lyric thumbs he in toned the melody. He had studied with the harpist, Parrish Alvars, who, like Bochsa, also a harpist, was a visitor to America. Arpeggios, coupled with a lovely touch in cantilena and an impeccable technique made this virtuoso the sensation of his time. A natural son of Prince Dietrichstein, an Austrian magnate, by a cele brated Italian opera singer, Sigismund Thalberg was not only rich but an aristocrat born. When he appeared my mother sat in the audience an interested spectator for the reason that her husband was on the stage and figured in the programme. "Why, there s John!" she exclaimed as the pianist emerged. The resemblance is striking. I have the old photographs of both men. 40 STEEPLEJACK Mutton - chop whiskers were in vogue with high neck cloths, and watch chains that wound serpentine fashion about the wearer s waistcoat. And like Thalberg, my father was slightly bald, ox-eyed, and aquiline of visage. At one concert Gottschalk, fresh from Paris, a pupil of Camille Stamaty (he never studied with Chopin, as bi ographers say, but he played for Chopin and heard that marvellous Pole play; the reason I speak by the card is because I asked a pupil of Chopin s, Georges Mathias, in Paris, and he assured me that Gottschalk, then con sidered a brilliant talent, was never under the tuition of Chopin), with Thalberg played the elder pianist s fantasia on themes from "Nor ma" arranged for two pianos, and my father remembered the difference of the scale-passages; Thalberg s scales were a string of pearls, the scales of the New Orleans virtuoso were glittering star-dust. Louis Gottschalk, with whose family I was intimate, had a more dramatic temperament than Thal berg, who was impassive, and a believer in Baudelaire s line: "Je hais le mouvement, qui deplace les lignes." Linear his art, rather than colourful, yet his touch was golden. In Gottschalk s playing there was something Lisztian and diabolic. I was taken to many concerts and operas by my father, and when he didn t take me I sneaked away and paid a quarter of a dollar to hear singers and pianists and violinists who, by any reasonable standard of com parison, would be worth ten dollars to listen to in 1919. There is no Carlotta Patti; there may be equals of Vieuxtemps, but not in grace or finesse, and I defy you to find me a second Anton Rubinstein. In 1869, I think, Carlotta Patti sang the "Queen of the Night" in Mozart s "Magic Flute" at the Academy. In the cast were FAMILY LIFE 41 Formes, Hablemann, and the formidable basso Herr- man. The opera was sung in Italian. Never shall I forget the prima donna who limped down a "practicable" staircase to the footlights and then showered on our delighted ears a cascade of dazzling roulades. There was no doubt about her F in altissimo, clear, round, and frosty. She was a cold singer, the very timbre of her voice was icy when compared with the warmer, richer or gan of her more celebrated sister, Adelina. But Carlotta was the more brilliant of the two, an incomparable coloratura singer, whose memory has not been dis turbed even by lima di Murska, Sembrich, or Melba. Carlotta visited us later with Theodore Ritter, a polished pianist, and for the last time in company with her hus band, a violoncellist, De Munck, by name. This was during the decade of the eighties. The third sister, Amalia Patti-Strakosch was a contralto. I never heard her sing. The only son by Caterina Barili s marriage with Salvatore Patti was Carlo Patti, a violinist, who married in 1859 the actress, Effie Germon. My father praised Caterina Barili as a dramatic soprano. By her first marriage she had the two Barilis, Antonio and Ettore, both operatic singers, the last named a famous Rigoletto. He became choir-master of St. John s Church, and taught many singers. His son, Alfredo Barili, went to Cologne, where he studied under Ferdinand Hiller, the composer-pianist (oh ! Hiller s F sharp minor Concerto, how I loathe your smug Mendelssohnian melodies, your prim passage-work); and in Paris with Theodore Ritter, then a friend of his Aunt Carlotta s (once at a Turkish bath the frolicsome Alfredo turned a hose on his pre ceptor with consequences too awful to relate. I think his aunt stopped his spending-money for a month). He 42 STEEPLEJACK is now in Atlanta. A younger brother, Henry, is a singing teacher. Alfredo Barili was patient and friendly enough to give me piano lessons, and made a prediction that came true when he assured me that I would never become a pianist worth hearing. The Academy of Music has not changed much since the days of Carlotta Patti, Brignoli, Annie Louise Gary now Mrs. Raymond, and with few exceptions the greatest contralto of them all Minnie Hauk my first Carmen Clara Louise Kellogg, Nilsson, Adelina Patti, and Campanini. Colonel Bonnafon was kind enough to show me the green room where hang portraits of Carlotta Patti, Brignoli, Christine Nilsson, Campanini, Salvini, Charlotte Cushman, and others. The old chandelier still hangs in the auditorium, though the frescoes are new. Only the ventilation-plant and the tablets in the lobby, to the memory of Michael Cross, Charles Jar- vis, and Fritz Scheel, made me conscious of the pass ing years. A half century before I had declaimed with schoolboy fervour from the historical stage, some piece or other at the commencement exercises of my school, Roth s Military Academy. I then and there made a blighting failure as an incipient elocutionist and a bud ding actor. But when I came out in Locust Street last year and saw Sautter s where as a lad I doted on the ice cream and cake, the illusion of the stability of youth was renewed. In New York a week suffices to destroy a landmark; in Philadelphia the tone of time longer endures. FAMILY LIFE 43 BLACK AND WHITE When in 1 894 my father s collection of black and white was sold at New York the catalogue enumerated several thousand pieces: mezzotints, line-engravings, etchings, and lithographs. It was not a large, but an important gathering. AH schools were represented. Quality ruled. Knowing that with his means he could not indulge in the luxury of a gallery of paintings, he wisely "went in for" engravings. That collection not only educated my eye, educated me in the various schools, but it gave me the first aesthetic thrill of my life. The walls of our house were hung with choice specimens of the gravers art. I ate my meals facing an old mezzotint of John Martin, "The Fall of Nineveh," a huge plate, coarse as to tech nique, disorderly in composition, yet revealing an imagi nation monstrous, perhaps, though none the less stirring. Both Charles Lamb and Macaulay have commented upon the grandiose visions of the eccentric English mez- zotinter. Melodramatic, violent, morbid, these same visions gripped all England for a brief period during the early Victorian days. Not a colourist, the designs of John Martin show him to have been a Turner, a rebours. His predilection for biblical and Miltonic subjects was the outcome of a mind deeply saturated by religion. His vast temples, his multitudes in sackcloth and ashes, the horrific happenings must have endeared him to Poe as they did to Wordsworth. However, he was not a first-class mezzotinter. In none of his work is to be found the velvety tone of Richard Earlom, or the rich col our suggestions of Valentine Green. Bituminous blacks and glaring whites, his mezzotints are not unlike his paint ings. But their glory is their vivid dream-architecture as is the same in Piranesi s plates. 44 STEEPLEJACK In our living-room, then called the sitting-room, there was a cabinet devoted to the collection, a small chamber filled with numerous portfolios, and carefully arranged as to schools. It was my father s principal pleasure to look through his plates, rearranging them, weeding out mediocre specimens, while vaunting to me the beauties of a Goltzius, an Edelinck, or Drevet, a J. R. Smith copperplate, a Sharpe, or a WooIIett. Stately examples of the French and English schools were framed, and were literally "lived with." No especial school was favoured. Lucas Van Leyden and Albrecht Diirer were to be found, as was the grey-haired Man, or the large Bervic plate of Louis XVI. Landscapes after Claude, fruit and flower pieces by Huysums were there. Better training for the student s eye I don t know than a col lection of black and white. The emotional glamour of colour is absent, though its symbols are suggested; the very skeleton of composition is bared, and the art of design, abstract and concrete, may be learned. What long happy summer afternoons we spent, my father and I, as remote from the actual as if we had been in the moon. At least once a week old man Bonfield, as he was familiarly called, would drop in and salute us in his bluff English manner. Bonfield was a marine painter of excellent talent and training. He patterned after the Dutch marine painters, Vandervelde, in particular. He loved Constable and Turner. He could render with a broad, flowing brush the rhythms of water and clouds. He helped to form my father s taste in engraving. Kep- pel was another. He carried prints from New York to his various clients in Philadelphia. About 1850 mezzo tints and steel plates were easier to buy than now; also etchings, for then there was no craze over signed exam- FAMILY LIFE 45 pies. That phase evolved later. The consequence was that at what would be ridiculous prices to-day, my father acquired all sorts of plates, brilliant, bad, and indifferent. As his knowledge increased he became wary, and would ac cept only proofs, before-all-Ietters. His etchings were his pride. Rembrandt largely figured, but not Whistler, for the good reason that he was not then an etcher. I doubt if he ever appreciated the subtle needle of James the Butterfly, although he had acquired some splendid plates of Whistler s brother-in-law, then known as Dr. Seymour Haden. When this accomplished craftsman visited Philadelphia and lectured in the small hall of the Academy of the Fine Arts, I attended the affair and re member the florid complexion of the artist rather than his words of wisdom. This was about the time that Fortuny s "Gamblers" was shown at the Union League Club, and its price, seventeen thousand dollars, was mentioned with awe. Henry C. Gibson was buying Cabanel and Bouguereau then, and I don t suppose he had eyes for the superior art of the great Spaniard. Luckily the Academy owns one sterling picture, "View in a Spanish City, Sevilla." A few years afterwards I saw the Fortunys of the Stewart collection at Paris, especially the almost miraculous "Choice of a Model" which in this decadent epoch of muddy colour, lumpy modelling, and freakish design would be patronised by myopic youth. I have paid a tiny tribute to his genius in "Promenades of an Impres sionist." "The Gamblers," to be truthful, didn t make as much of an impression on me at that time as Benjamin West s apocalyptic "Death on the Pale Horse," still hung in the Academy. I realise now the overwhelming su periority of John Martin in the matter of invention 46 STEEPLEJACK when compared with the more successful Quaker medi ocrity. Those summer afternoons spent with our collection set my mind wandering on a dozen different roads. It was the hub of the wheel, of which the spokes were arch aeology, architecture, history, foreign languages, music, and what-not, all growing out of the numerous subjects dealt with by the artists. I verily believe my first longing for foreign lands and travel was born among these etched and engraved plates. The Centennial Ex position of 1876 completed the victory over my inborn timidity and aversion from strangers. The wheel came full circle in 1878, when I ran away with my parents connivance to Paris. But I mustn t forget that other collection of prints around the corner on Logan Square, the truly imposing gallery of James L. Claghorn. Sunday afternoon was the chosen time for the gathering of the clans. Then Mr. Claghorn was in his glory. An enormous man with abundant white hair, a smooth-shaven face, ecclesiastical in its mixture of benignity and shrewdness, large blue eyes and a cordial manner, made the personality of this con noisseur an agreeable one. To me, a slender half-scared boy, he was very cordial. I helped to shift portfolios, lift out prints for his inspection, and doing this for some years, I gained more than a glimpse of this magnificent collection, which, when compared to our modest portfo lios was as the sun is to a star of the tenth magnitude. AH the world worth knowing in Philadelphia passed through the Claghorn galleries, and also many foreign celebrities. James Claghorn was that rare and rapidly vanishing specimen of humanity, a merchant-prince. The collection was sold after his death to Mr. Garrett, of Bal- FAMILY LIFE 47 timore, and is now housed at Princeton College. Our plates when sold did not fetch a big price owing to va rious reasons. My father s ventures in oil pictures were confined entirely to the American school, Philadelphians preferred. Peter F. RothermePs " Trial of Fabiola"- after Cardinal Newman s novel portraits by William Hewitt, and Isaac Williams, marines by George Bonfield, snow-pieces by his son, Van Bonfield, a fruit-piece by George Ord, then a well-known still-life painter, a head by Thomas Sully, a supposed Gilbert Stuart, a contested Teniers which I own and a dozen other paintings by men of minor talent all testified to my parent s faith in native talent. Some of the artists were constant visitors : Peter F. Rothermel, well known for his " Battle of Gettys burg," the elder Waugh, W. T. Richards, Hamilton, the marine painter, William Hewitt, Bonfield, and Isaac Williams, Peter Moran, John Sartain, Dr. W. P. Baker, these with William Dougherty, of Girard Avenue, a col lector of prints and a man of taste, usually figured at our Sunday-night gatherings. Thomas Sully, the portrait- painter, was a rarer caller. Hewitt was a born mimic, and I can still hear him with my father sing an old song, "Paul and Silas Went to Jail." It sounded like a travesty of a darky camp-meeting "spiritual." Rothermel, tall and drily sarcastic, seldom opened his thin lips; Isaac Williams was, like Hokusai, an old man mad-about- painting. He was the theoriser of the group. He had a technical treatment ready for every pictorial subject, but it wasn t original. Reynolds for children, Gainsbor ough for young women, for male heads, Rembrandt, for sacred subjects, Raphael or Correggio don t smile. Those were the days of Raphael worship, of Correggio idolatry. Velasquez was unknown, as was Vermeer, but STEEPLEJACK Murillo and Ostade Ah ! What marvellous artists. The pre-Raphaelitic group was not known, and the school of 1830, the Barbizon men, had not come into its own. Realism was abhorred, Sully, Peale, and Gilbert Stuart most admired. The growing vogue of Bouguereau, Cab- anel, Lefebvre was deplored; too much nudity for the prudish public; but Gerome was applauded to the skies, Gerome and Meissonier. "The Duel in the Snow," litho graphed by Gerome, after his own design, was popular. And there was a rumour from Parisian ateliers that two portraitists, Carolus Duran and Leon Bonnat, were con sidered promising. It all sounds before the deluge, doesn t it? Yet I have heard fierce discussions over chiaro scuro, as it was called then; over the disposition of the model usually a studio mannikin over complementary colours, over the arrangement of a palette, yes, the very problems that were agitating a certain small circle in Paris; the Impressionists, Manet who was not, strictly speaking, one of the group, though in the revolt against the Institute Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and the rest. In 1867 the Salon of the Refused was opened through the influence of the Emperor Napoleon III. That was about the period when the new and heretical theories had been wafted across to the United States. Not one of the art ists I mention had a good word for the innovators, but they discussed them, not by name, but their theories, and you don t discuss a corpse. Impressionism is no new thing. Nevertheless, the Philadelphia artists based their theories on a sound foundation; what they didn t see was that tradition often proves a traitor, when you don t play off your own bat. For them the fact that Rem brandt handled lights and shadows in a masterful way FAMILY LIFE 49 meant complete surrender to his personal methods. Any deviation spelled anarchy. I was allowed to "stay up" a little later than custom ary on Sunday nights. As vividly as this morning I remember sitting on William Hewitt s knee, and after he had crooned some quaint tune, the conversation touched on lighthouses; of all subjects in the world. Finally the Eddystone light was reached. What was the secret of its resistance to the sea and storms after several failures in building, no one knew. Full of the subject, for I had been reading the history of Plymouth, I boldly spoke up: "I know." My father looked at me as if at a crazy person. "You know? How do you know?" he asked. "Let the boy alone," said Bill Hewitt. "How do you come to know, Jim, about the Eddystone lighthouse?" I needed no further encour agement: "I know, because John Smeaton dovetailed the stones when he rebuilt it." A roar of approbation greeted this tour-de-force of memory I wasn t more than seven and my father s eyes twinkled. He was evidently proud and pleased. Polonius-Iike he remarked: "Dovetailed is good." The word enchanted me. I repeated it for days: dovetailed, dovetailed. I was as bad as Flaubert with his infernal "Taprabona," or as the old woman with her blessed word, "Mesopotamia." I can t hear "dovetailed" pronounced to-day without seeing the smoke-filled room, its walls plastered with engravings, the cheery voices of old friends, my father s kindly, bearded ruddy face. Dovetailed; dovetailed. Even at that early age I was spouting words of whose meanings I was often ignorant. And how many did I 50 STEEPLEJACK not mispronounce ! I loved yEsop s Fables and once I quoted to my sister: "The mountains that were in labour"; but I pronounced the last word with the accent on the last syllable, and was rewarded with shrieks of laughter. I had fancied that "labour," like Labrador, was a land somewhere in the Arctic Zone. That the phrase indicated the birth of a mouse did not seem so interesting nor exotic. IV MY MOTHER Tell me of your mother and I ll tell you of yourself. As a man speaks of his mother so you may estimate his character. Arthur Schopenhauer was right when he said that from his father a man derived his will, but from his mother he inherited his intellect. The exception proves the case; and while we have traversed many psychological leagues since Schopenhauer, in the main we adhere to his theory. He only wrote of genius, but his idea holds good for the average man and woman. The few wits I possess came to me from my mother, who was a woman of brains, above all, of character. Before twenty she was the principal of a high school somewhere in Kensington. She saw men shot in the streets during the Know-Nothing riots of 1844, and also the burning of St. Augustine s Church on Fourth Street. She always had the faith, but these outrages on the Irish and on her religion crystallised this faith. She was not a theologian in petticoats a more detestable thing than a female politician nor was she a propagandist, like her father, James Gibbons. But she was consistently pious and a practical churchwoman. Her erudition was notable. In matters of theology I never met her superior among her sex. I was inducted into the noble literature of Bossuet and Pere Lacordaire, early in my teens. The Paroles d un Croyant of the unhappy Abbe Lamennais I was not permitted to read at such a tender age, though 51 52 STEEPLEJACK my mother spoke of him in pitying terms. Revolt against Rome meant to her revolt against life. Yet she was not a bigot. She did not condemn to the ever lasting bonfire dissenters from her faith. My Aunt Susan Gibbons, a character who would have intrigued Dickens, made up for my mother s tolerance. "He will roast in hell after death, and the devil will baste his ribs," she would exclaim, to the intense delight of the children. She not only put the enemies of Mother Church into the darkest and deepest circles of the fiery pit, but also the objects of her personal animosity. Like her father she loved politics. A Democrat had a chance for heaven, no matter his habits; a Republican, however, was doomed. No appeal. Irrevocable. And then the dear, irritable spinster would go into the kitchen where she was fervently hated by our two Irish girls as an in terloper and a spoil-sport and fry oysters as appetising as Finelli s, fabricate a chicken-salad which reached our very youthful souls, and Oh ! she baked biscuits which melted on the tongue. What matters a woman s the ology if she cooks like an angel? Aunt Sue did thus cook, but she paddled us like a devil. She made herself our mother, ex-officio. She was not without a touch of spinster acidity, and her occasional cruelties were Celtic. She had native humour. Celtic also the voicing of her sentiments concerning Republicans, Protestants, and people who didn t subscribe to the tenets of Fenianism. She was a family institution, this aunt of ours, and when a nurse was demanded, who could nurse the sick with such tenderness? But when you were safely launched on the route of convalescence she put off all such weak nesses as affection or solicitude for your well-being, and became her old self: witty, sharp of tongue, and the im- MY MOTHER 53 placable antagonist of anyone who dared to combat her prejudices. Forty years she sparred at the table with her brother-in-law, my father, and as her tongue was more nimble, her wit more agile, her vocabulary larger, she generally got the best of him. It was all in a vein of good temper, yet the sparks flew, especially if the old man ventured on any allusion to the clergy s love of even cheer. Then Aunt Sue would bristle. According to her, all priests were ascetic. "Like Father McBIank," would interrupt my father, alluding to a concrete case, a fat, jolly priest, with a healthy appetite and thirst, God bless his memory! What fulminations ensued. "John Huneker, the Old One will surely get your car cass/ My father would hum "Lillibulero," and the incident was closed. But as a teacher of the young she had few rivals. Like my mother, she began as a public- school teacher, and while her intelligence was as acute as her sister s she had not the emotional depth nor the stability of character; nevertheless, she had the art of imparting knowledge, and many girls, now matrons in this city, will recall her school on Spruce Street, where she leased a floor in the house of the late Dr. Brinton. A mother s influence should be like gentle rain on the sandy soil of youthful egotism; a boy at twelve has portioned out the globe in his fancy. Life is before him and it is created for his pleasure alone. Anyone who comes between him and his nascent desires is a rash intruder. Why can t we accept the wisdom of our elders judgment, when we are cautioned not to fly from the nest before our wings are full-fledged? The answer is to be seen in the actions of any girl or boy with a par ticle of self-assertion, and, as a rule, young America has more than its share. Because each soul must traverse 54 STEEPLEJACK the dolorous path of experience for itself. There is life knocking at the doors of our senses bidding us come out and enjoy its multifarious pleasures. Always pleasure, never pain, it matters little if our mother bids us beware. She knows the bitterness of the dregs. She recognises the illusions. And yet we fly in the face of her admoni tions. If we didn t we shouldn t live. My mother who had sounded the heights and depths, knew that children provisionally accept advice. She had mastered the art of holding on and letting go, which is the secret of wisdom. So I had a pretty long rope to hang on. I can t recall a single instance of a blow from my father. He would fume, mildly speak harsh things when I played truant, but in five minutes the sea would be serenely smooth; besides I took advantage of his weakness. Boys are almost as cunning as girls in this respect. My sister Mary had only to play the theme of the A flat Sonata of Beethoven (opus 26) and she could wheedle anything from my male parent. I took a lesson from her book. I discoursed of Raphael Morghen and his engraved Ma donna, or of the joyous landscapes of Claude Lorraine. All was forgiven. But my mother was never trapped by such obvious subterfuges. Her perception of right and wrong had the incisive clarity of an etching by Meryon. Her conscience, safest of monitors in her case, would not allow her to juggle with the moralities. She earnestly wished that I should enter the clerical life. Early she realised the hopelessness of her wish. I hadn t the vocation. Nor did the well-meant promptings of some of the sisters at Broad and Columbia Avenue, deter her from seeing the cold truth. This old convent was my delight on Sunday afternoons. There I was petted by Mother Frances de MY MOTHER 55 Sales, and Mother Augustine, and I always promised, like the meek little humbug I was, to become a priest when I grew up. This valiant declaration was rewarded with candy. I liked candy then. I also liked to play in the nuns garden. The Sisters of Mercy is an order whose rule appealed to me, as did the Jesuit s. I have a weakness for the Jesuit order, not because it is worldly that venerable delusion but because its members are masters of the gentle arts, and, whatever else they may be, they are liberal in spirit. The Sisters of Mercy are, among other things, a teaching order. They know the souls of their pupils. Now I am what an old and very dear priest calls "a hickory Catholic," yet I love the odour of incense, the mystic bells, the music, the atmos phere of the altar, above all the intellectual life of the church. There is a world of thought suspended like Mahomet s coffin above the quotidian existence of re ligion. It is not free to everyone, nor is it an arcanum forbidden all but the few. Its literature had penetrated my very bones when boys of my age were playing mar bles. No wonder some of our ecclesiastical friends saw in me the making of a fervidly pious young priest. But some did not. Father Boudreaux, a French priest and author, did not; nor did the Reverend Dr. Kent Stone, a convert, noted for his unction and oratory. He saw a row of books on my table and shook his head. He had his misgivings when he noted the four volumes of Charles Baudelaire the critic Baudelaire, and there are few to surpass him in clairvoyance, interested me as much as the poet the essays of Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, the poems of Swinburne, Rossetti, of Poe and Gautier. Rabelais, Montaigne, Goethe, Aquinas, and Emerson had their place, and Schopenhauer, and there were sermons 56 STEEPLEJACK by Lacordaire, whose harmonious French I savoured, and Bourdaloue; Madame de Swetchine and Eugenie de Guerin were there. I read the sister before I saw the pantheistic prose-poem of her brother Maurice, "The Centaur." This poet whose sensibility was as exquisite as Chopin s, I still love. But he didn t die a moment too soon for his artistic reputation. My chief offence, how ever, was Walt Whitman, the 1867 edition of his "Poems." Professor George Saintsbury had introduced me to the genius of Baudelaire who waxes in greatness with the waning of the years and Professor Edward Dowden of Dublin, sent me in eager haste to modern French litera ture that is, modern in 1875 or thereabouts. I had in troduced myself to Whitman by securing his volumes and later (1877) by visiting the Bard of Camden in his lair on Mickle Street. But I had seen him for years on Mar ket or Chestnut Streets, a Homeric man, good to gaze upon, with his magnificent head and bare chest. I never saw him without a forlorn pup at his heels. But I have told you all this in Ivory Apes and Peacocks. He is one of the peacocks. Dr. Stone knew that a youth who poisoned himself with such powerful and pernicious toxics as Baudelaire and Whitman had no inner call to religion, though its ritual appealed to his aesthetic sense. I read all day when I had a chance, read everything from editorials in the Public Ledger, which seemed to me masterpieces of common-sense, to Dante and Shakespeare. The Divine Comedy had just appeared with the fantastic illustrations of Gustave Dore. The poem and pictures gripped us, and I see myself playing Lucifer to my brother Paul s Minotaur in our back yard. Every circle in the Inferno MY MOTHER 57 we tried to imitate. Many rows with my old nurse, Maish Finn, ensued. To-day the "terza rima" of that sombre and magnificent poet is as alluring as ever. Pos sibly Dore and his vivid fancy first attracted us. Don Quixote was another magnet. And Bunyan, with his glorious apotheosis of the soul, which we accepted as sheer facts, thanks to his sober, convincing prose, be came a masque of boyhood. But the dream of a sacer dotal dedication was further away than ever. My mother once remarked: "What can you expect in the future if you turn your mind into a sewer for all these vile poets and infidels?" She didn t know that Baudelaire is the Catholic poet par excellence, one whose morose delecta tion would have been congenial to John of the Cross, Ruysbroeck, or any early mystic. Contempt for life is in his words, hatred of self, fiercer hatred for woman, a hatred so cuttingly expressed by the monk, St. Odo of Cluny, "quomodo ipsum steroris saccum amplecti de- sideramus !" truly a judgment on feminine beauty in the manner of the early Church Fathers. (I quote this from Affirmations, by that philosophic and erudite critic, Havelock Ellis, a writer after my own heart.) Or, Arthur Schopenhauer, with his convincing pronouncements of the nothingness of life ! Isn t he in consonance with the wisdom of the church? Not the pellucid style and charm of Cardinal Newman could offset the deadly lessons in pessimism of the poet and philosopher; Walt Whitman and his Bowery Boy Emersonism, his anarchic defiance of the ordinary decencies of life completed the disruption of my character. Hereafter these were the dissonances in my little harmonic scale. The spiritual dichotomy was complete. My mother was right and yet, and yet, life is to be faced, not feared. Prove all things, said the 58 STEEPLEJACK Apostle. I might have made a short cut to salvation if I had listened to my mother. But I didn t. I was wrong. And if I had to go through it all again I should proceed approximately the same. Cowardice is a more fatal spiritual lesion than vainglorious rashness. For each man must weave the web of his own destiny. There is a time to be static and there is a time to be dynamic. The trouble was that I too often played the dynamic at the wrong time. What I most wonder at, and also ad mire, is the tolerant spirit exhibited by my mother. She protested, but she allowed me my intellectual freedom. Once I saw her genuinely indignant. She caught me on the roof reading Strathmore, by Ouida, a novelist she detested. Like Max Beerbohm, I had conceived a pas sion for this extravagantly romantic writer. Not even " Guy Livingstone/ from whom Ouida derived, cured me of her sentimental sensuality. Dickens did, and when I reached, in due course of time, Thackeray, the Ouida measles had quite disappeared. But the school was looming up, school and its odious tasks, its discipline, its convict-like confinement. It was a foregone conclusion that I should be sent to a sectarian establishment, though not to the parish school. I had been taught my catechism by the good nuns, and also at our parish church, St. Malachi s, on Eleventh Street near Jefferson. Gaunt Father Kelly had scared us with his harsh manner, and I soon feared him. It was an adventure, too, the trip from Seventh Street. Gangs of rival boys laid in wait for us and many times I ran homeward, dodging stones and brickbats. The old lawlessness of the fire companies had been abolished, but not altogether. The South Penn Hose Company fought the Cohocksink Hose at every fire. I saw a MY MOTHER 59 building burn down on Marshal Street one bitter cold morning while red-shirted heroes in the old style fire man s hat beat each other with spanners, hose-pipes, and fists. It was magnificent, but it wasn t fair to the house holders. Like their elders, the young "toughs" who played in the Ninth Street lots descended, a horde of savages, on the more civilised purlieus of Franklin or Seventh Streets. "Baste the dudes/ "bang the squirts" were passwords. Any boy who wore a clean collar was considered effeminate; nor did the girls escape. The cotton-dollies wearing sunbonnets from up Kensington way would assault any girl with pretty ribbons or hair carefully combed. On election nights the guerilla war fare was terrifying. Bands of young ruffians some of them I know to-day as distinguished lights on the Bench, at the Bar, also in the Eastern Penitentiary swept down on our bonfires, ruthlessly stamping them out; worse, actually stealing the flaming barrels (so sedulously stolen by our gang earlier in the week) and then dumping them in a cage, which they dragged over the cobble-stones, with yells of triumph. One November evening my father tried conclusions with them. They escaped his slipper, his only weapon of offence, and he limped back, quite forgetful of one foot in a stocking. These affairs deeply impressed me. I was a physical coward, and dodged a fight whenever I could. But one afternoon I was cornered. Then the scared boy became desperate. For weeks that conflict was the subject of gossip and curious comment. I put a bully down and out, but there was much critical asperity over my methods. I was said to have fought unfairly. Why? Simply because I trans formed my left arm into a revolving flail if such a thing could be and knocked the other chap senseless. I 60 STEEPLEJACK won t say that admiration was withheld, but it was quali fied. "You hadn t ought to done it," was the final judgment of a veteran pugilist of ten. And I shouldn t, but I won. Later, on Chancellor Street, down-town, in my famous fight to a finish with bare knuckles, with Jimmy Kelly, my old tactics availed me naught. I had both eyes blackened, swollen lips, one tooth loosened, and an ear magnified to the size and colour of a ripe tomato. After that downfall I abandoned all hopes of the prize-ring. Another time I was rescued by my elder brother at the corner of Eighth and Jefferson Streets. Vacant lots. A covey of vicious lads. The gas-house gang. I only played the witness, incidentally dodging flying missiles. But the enemy didn t count opposed to the skill, strength and courage of my brother. He sailed into them like an armoured cruiser, battered down their defence, and finally chased them from the field. That night a parlour window was broken by a half brick. They never for gave us. I quit the dangerous route, except on Sun days, when protected by my parents. I had been con firmed at St. Malachi s by Bishop Wood, afterwards Archbishop, as I had been dedicated at St. Michael s by Bishop Gibbons, later Cardinal James Gibbons. I was taken by my mother into the Sacristy of St. Michael s and kissed the hand of that distinguished churchman. Furthermore, I had been given in confirmation the name of St. Aloysius of Gonzaga, the patron saint of purity. That was handing over a hostage to fortune. The devil must have smiled when the news reached his apartment in the infernal tropics. He was at my elbow in twenty- four hours, and has never left it since. At three score and ten I hope to rid myself of this particular pest, but MY MOTHER 61 not till then. (Ah! the braggart, I hear him whisper.) After my first communion at the convent this diabolic familiar came in conflict with my guardian angel. I fought with my junior brother over a silver watch, and we punched and cursed till separated. No denying the existence of demons. Again my mother shook her head. My worldly vocation was undeniable. I GO TO SCHOOL The school selected for me was Roth s Military Acad emy at No. 337 South Broad Street. The building still stands, the facade unchanged. From Seventh and Jeffer son Streets to it was a long distance. It seemed unend ing. I took the walk every day in fair weather, usually in company with my brother and sister. We were in timate with several Jewish families; the Aubs, the Eisners, the Bacharachs be still, my heart, one beautiful maid, Bertha by name, with Oriental eyes and tresses won my admiration ! and the chattering crowd would go down Franklin Street to our various schools. I don t know whether customs have changed, but many of my sister s school companions were of Jewish origin. Roman Catholics and Jews got along very well as any Catholic convent list then proved. One morning we were alone, my sister and I, and at the corner of Eighth and Poplar Streets were suddenly attacked by a lot of boys who cried: "Jew, Jew, where s your pork?" It was the first time I had been called a Jew, but not the last. Being liberal in our notions we did not feel insulted, until the fighting blood of the Gibbons was aroused in my sister. I was too puny to be of assistance. She needed none. Firmly grasping the straps of her leather school-bag, she whirled it about as if it were a Zulu club; the same circular tactics that won my first battle. The rout was unques tionable. She banged those boys so badly that there after we were never molested. In my eyes she became 62 I GO TO SCHOOL 63 Boadicea. What made me a peculiar victim was the cadet uniform I was compelled to wear. A torture ! On our caps were the letters B. S. C. : Broad Street Cadets, which was jeeringly transposed to Broad Street Cleaners by the hoodlums. "Envy," said my mother. But I didn t think so. It was the hatred of any boy for an other who is differently dressed. That uniform what unhappy hours it gave me ! How I loathed its grey and black, its buttons, its cap ! Professor Roth, our prin cipal, ranked the soldier only one step below the priest in the social hierarchy. A good soldier makes a good citizen, he declared. A good citizen makes a good hus band, a pious churchman. Obedience was his watch word, and then the health-giving drill, the physical de velopment in the gymnasium ! This military discipline and the Latin language were the two obsessions of the worthy man, for obsessions they were. It was the alphabet and Latin, arithmetic and Latin, grammar and Latin, geography and Latin, history and Latin, mathematics and Latin, the arts and sciences and Latin, and of course, religion and Latin. Before I could parse an English sentence I had Caesar pumped into me. At twelve I had bolted the Latin literature, and to-day I can t read Cicero without mental nausea, though Horace is always at my elbow. Greek literature was then a sealed book, not because Mr. Roth disliked it, he was too much a humanist for that, but that he loved Latin the more. The consequence is that I know little Latin and less Greek. But the solid foundations were laid and aided me in modern literature and in the study of the law. We read Greek in translation from Xenophon s Anabasis to the decadent writers. I had not then any taste for Huysman s favourite fourth and fifth centuries 64 STEEPLEJACK A. D. Latin authors. St. Augustine, however, seemed as romantic as Rousseau or Amiel. But English ! Ah ! That was the weak joint in the Roth educational armour, the three R s I mean. The curriculum was the ordinary one. We ploughed through it in a matter-of-fact way. I m weak on grammar and algebra to-day. But a page of Livy or a quotation from Plutarch would fire the en thusiasm of our chief, and farewell to Prescott or differ ential calculus. French came next in the favour of this remarkable Irishman, and Jules Verne, then fresh on the horizon, he translated for our benefit. It was like a rummage-bag, this system. You put in your hand and at hazard drew forth anything from Aristotle to Plain- Chant. Choral singing was a rule enforced. Leopold Engelke our preceptor. He was an excellent violon cellist, and like so many musicians of the time he taught singing and played the organ. We sang everything, more or less, in tune; we sang the Gloria from Mozart s reputed "Twelfth Mass," and we sang with infinite glee a rollicking air to the words of "Johnny Schmoker." Negro minstrelsy was in its golden prime, and Carncross and Dixey s on Eleventh Street furnished us with a repertory of "nigger" melodies. Happy days? Not a bit of it. I hated them then, and I look back to them with a sense of relief that they are over and done with. It is a com mon error among grown-ups to fancy that childhood is the happiest period of our lives. It is usually the most miserable. Often I wished that my childhood could be abolished. I envied my elders; envied their freedom from constructive criticism, from bullying, from flogging, and a hundred other cruel impediments between my wishes and their fulfilment. There were plenty of boys who thought as I did. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry I GO TO SCHOOL 65 Finn are delightful fairy books for the old, who wish their school-days had been so recklessly vagrant and filled with impossible adventures. I was like boys of my age and enjoyed myself out of school, but study killed the joy of living. Goethe, supposed to be the happiest man in history, confessed at four score that he could remember only four weeks of positive happiness in a long life, and those weeks were scattered, resolving themselves into days, hours, or mere fractions of a minute. Perhaps if the truth be told, few lucky men could boast even four weeks. I can recall one brief blazing second of absolute happiness,when I actually said to myself, " I am happy." It was like the moments of ecstasy that are said to presage an epileptic seizure, when the arterial tension is dangerously high and approaches a cerebral crisis. I was about ten or twelve. It was at the corner of Seventh and Oxford Streets, where the old hay-market stood. Hay in those days was not baled and sent to market as it is now; the hay- wagon was in its glory the hay-wagon with its driver concealed in front, and a string of urchins tagging behind. You may see this hay-wagon in the paintings of John Con stable engraved by Lucas. The day was an early spring one; saturated with sunshine, the air eager and nipping. A feeling of contentment flooded my consciousness. A hay-wagon went by. I was as if transfigured. I mur mured: "I am happy." I fancy it was the sensation superinduced by a perfect balance of body and spirit; that and youth. The Greeks named it ataraxia. I have never experienced the feeling since, not even in the trans ports of calf-love. Only a few years ago, as I looked at the Walnut Street Theatre, a hay-wagon, old-fashioned as ever, moved up Walnut Street and turned into Ninth 66 STEEPLEJACK Street. In a vivid flash a bolt from the blue of my locked memory-chambers came the incident I relate. I saw the old hay-market on Oxford Street and the hay- wagons, felt the cutting sunshine, but I didn t repeat: "I am happy." That seldom comes more than once in a lifetime, and, to be quite philosophical over the matter, it is just as well, for then the reactions are fewer. You may not attain paradise, nor do you tumble into hell. I can conceive of no more awful suffering than the pro longed rapture we call happiness. Human nature can endure misery, but not without peril to its immortal soul can it wallow in happiness. Some cynic has observed that life would be tolerable were it not for its pleasures, and Lord Brassey, traveller and yachtsman, after a long life of enjoyment, has told us that he positively loathed his existence because of its happiness. My school companion and deskmate was Lewis Baker, afterwards on the stage, and John Drew s brother-in-law. His father was Lewis Baker, an excellent comedian, first at the Arch Street Theatre, later with Daly in New York. All I remember of Lewis is that he invariably ate my luncheon, and knowing there was no escaping this expropriation I begged our cook to give me double ra tions, which she did (she always spoiled me). But the appetite of Lewis at once became more ferocious. I, who had been dubbed "hollow-legs" by my satirical father, because of my capacity for a miscellaneous cargo of food, was silenced by Lewis Baker s prowess. So we came to daily blows, and finally Professor Roth conducted us to the death-cell where he slapped our hands with a heavy ferule. Why I should have been punished I couldn t discover. It was my first collision with the inherent injustice of all things mundane. And I revolted. On I GO TO SCHOOL 67 general principles, I became the worst behaved boy in my class. I stopped studying. I played "hookey." I defied my legal guardians. I was "agin" all forms of government. It was only one of those little tempera mental outbreaks which any teacher recognises as inevi table. Mr. Roth was not a tactful man. We were students by compulsion. He took little account of in dividual variations in character. It was the same old mould-theory of education. Dress alike, walk alike, think alike. Nietzsche has defined the Prussian as "long legs and obedience," and Roth s idea of a boy was as a receptacle for the Latin language, and a capacity for re peating "Amo, Amas, Amat" ad nauseam. Automatons, well-drilled but incapable, any one of us, of forming a personal opinion beyond hating our masters. I re spectfully submit that this is the wrong way. Our re ceptive brains are so stuffed with indigestible facts that only lifelong experience frees us from the abominable clogging. I don t know how it was in the upper classes of this school, which I never reached, thanks to my inveterate laziness, but it must have been the same. VI THE PLAYERS John Drew and my brother, John, were classmates, and their friendship continued after their school-days had ended. They joined the Malta Boat Club and often rowed double-sculls on the Schuylkill course. Young Drew was already on the boards, a promising beginner. I saw him make his debut in "Cool as a Cucumber," at the old Arch Street Theatre, then under the management of his mother, that sterling actress and admirable woman, Mrs. John Drew. Later his sister, Georgia Drew, not yet married to brilliant, irresponsible Maurice Barry- more, also made her first bow before the footlights in this theatre. My father decorated the establishment from time to time, and was a friend of Mrs. Drew. After some friendly dispute over the colours I heard him call her "Mother Drew." I was aghast. It seemed as sacri legious as calling Sarah Siddons "Mother." But Mrs. Drew only laughed and shook her forefinger at my father. "Now, John Huneker," she cried, "if this theatre isn t decorated on time, then I ll open it with your scaffolding in it just the same." She could play Lady Gay Spanker, Mrs. Malaprop, the adventuress in "Home," and also remain a shrewd woman of business. She was my first Lady Teazle, Mrs. Malaprop, and Queen Gertrude in "Hamlet," and I worshipped her. When I saw her for the last time on the stage, in "The Rivals" with Joseph Jefferson, she was venerable in years, but her vivacity made the audience oblivious to her age. She was a fine 68 THE PLAYERS 69 comedienne, and her gifted grandchildren, Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore, owe her much, and with her son, John, have much to be proud of their lineage. My chief dissipation was this same Arch Street Theatre. The stock company has always seemed to me to rank in com pleteness with any other, and the visiting "guests" were distinguished. Another of my passions was E. A. Sothern, the father of E. H. Sothern, Lytton, and Sam Sothern. Lytton is dead. I thought him more talented as an actor than his brother, Edward. But who knows? I was very young and impressionable, and perhaps my intimacy later on with Lytton may have influenced my judgment. He was a handsome, winning chap. But one thing is certain: none of the three sons rivalled their father in art or per sonality. Pathos was his weak point, and he knew it; nevertheless, his David Garrick mellowed with the years. I believe his Fitzaltamont in that screaming burlesque, "The Crushed Tragedian," recorded in reverse fashion his aspirations. He had wished to enact tragedy, but nature forbade him. There was a twinkle in his eye, an intonation in his voice that won his audience from the moment he set foot on the boards; but the tragic tem perament he had not. Yet there was one speech, a soliloquy in "The Crushed Tragedian," that he delivered with genuine feeling; it sets forth his ambition to be come the greatest tragedian that ever lived. It always gave the audience pause when spoken by Mr. Sothern, a respite from his laughter-breeding antics. The piece was wretched stuff; nor was Lord Dundreary much better. Laura Keene gave it up in despair. So did John Sleeper Clarke, whose Asa Trenchard was capital. "Our American Cousin," as it was then known, was all 7 o STEEPLEJACK Sothern. Aut Sothern aut nihil. His English " swell" of the day the Ouida and "Guy Livingstone" period was a finely wrought piece of art. Remember, too, that the elder Sothern s Dundreary was far from being an imbecile, caricature as he was of the heavy guardsman type. He had a keen eye for his personal interests, witness his stuttering speech: "I require all my influence for my own family." Not Richard Mansfield as Beau Brum- mel exhibited such polished art as Sothern in this poor play, although it was no worse in quality than Clyde Fitch s travesty. When Sothern played Dundreary at the Walnut Street Theatre, it was with a different cast. Linda Dietz from the Haymarket, London, was the Georgina. Mrs. Walcott, Bailey, Atkins Lawrence who would have been a " movie" idol now with Charles Walcot as Trenchard and Hemple as the valet, not so competent, if I remember aright, as the inimitable Binney of W. H. Chapman. This was years after the original performance of the piece. Amusing as he was in "Brother Sam," with a blond make-up and not appearing over twenty-five years of age, Mr. Sothern was more in his element as David Gar- rick. Only Salvini in "Sullivan," the foreign title effaced our impression of his drunken scene. As Sydney Spoonbill in "A Hornet s Nest," by Byron, this English comedian was vastly entertaining. His native elegance, his personal charm, his handsome features, his lightness of touch, recall what we read of the palmy days of Charles Mathews. He was the best English-speaking comedian I ever saw except Charles Coghlan, and Coghlan was not so lovable as Sothern, who was a gentleman on and off the boards. His son, E. H. Sothern, inherited more than a modicum of his father s deft art, and, while I applaud THE PLAYERS 71 his ambitious efforts as a Shakespeare tragedian, I think the American theatre lost one of its best light comedians because of this vaulting ambition. We remember his early impersonations at the old Lyceum on Fourth Avenue, New York, when he was supported by Virginia Harned, and in "The Highest Bidder." Possibly his high-water mark was in "If I Were King." His Claude, Hamlet, and Macbeth were not convincing, but his Mal- volio had good points. However, it is ungrateful to bear down too heavily on the temperamental shortcomings of an earnest, studious actor, the son of a distinguished sire, who, despite his physical limitations he lacked the necessary inches for tragedy did so much for Shake speare in this .country in conjunction with fascinating Julia Marlowe. Arthur Symons praised the pure dic tion of this artistic pair, when they played in London. The crisp, too-staccato speech of Sothern was counter balanced by the rich, organ-like music of Miss Marlowe s voice. Such a voice I have not heard since Adelaide Neilson s. Sothern was not the only attraction at the Arch Street Theatre. I forgot to add that once I saw him play "opposite" to Mrs. Drew in " L Aventuriere." Edwin Booth, then in his prime, was a visitor there. I hardly lived on earth after his Hamlet and lago. I had seen Charles Fechter s impersonation, blond wig, Soho accent and all; but I was not old enough to mark the differences in the two readings. Fechter had seemed to me superb actor that he was to be a robustious, periwigged fellow, who, all fat and fury, ranted too much. And as it was toward the close of an exceptionally brilliant career, he was too flabby to be an ideal Prince of Denmark. He was then married to Lizzie Price, of the Arch Street Com- 72 STEEPLEJACK pany, and lived at Doylestown. We shuddered at the ex pression of malignity of his Obenreizer in the dramatised version of "No Thoroughfare." His Bertuccio in "The Fool s Revenge" must have been played in the same sinister key. I never saw it, but I saw Edwin Booth as the Jester and was more than satisfied. Only Victor Maurel in "Rigoletto," the operatic version, paralleled Booth in the part; as he did later as lago in Verdi s "Otello." The Arch Street "stock" was excellent. Watching it for years from the family circle (twenty-five cents) I became familiar with a wide repertory of plays; restoration comedy, the classics of the eighteenth cen tury and the entire range of mid- Victorian pieces. Tom Robertson and H. J. Byron were favourites, and "Caste" was considered a test for any theatrical company, as indeed it was, and as indeed it would be nowadays. Just put some of the belauded actors who are drawing full houses in such amusing rubbish as "Oh, Boy," "Oh, Girl," "Hello Bill," "Oh, Rot," into the parts of Old Eccles or Sam Gerridge or Polly Eckles and you would see the muddle they would make of these contrasted characters. I ve often attended performances of the "little theatres" with their bandbox art, and wondered over the rawness of the acting. Want of stock training is the cause. Any fly-by-night company in my youth could, at a few hours notice, give better interpretations of not only Shakespeare, but also modern comedy, than these young men and women, who make a dab at Nora Helmer, agonise over Oswald Alving, wriggle through Hedda Gabler, but can t speak clearly or convincingly, or, for that matter, walk across the stage without sex consciousness. I won t pretend to deny that Ibsen isn t a thousand times superior to Robertson or Byron, Pinero, THE PLAYERS 73 Henry Arthur Jones, or Shaw, but their now conven tionalised drama was once fresh and full of "fat" for the actor. Studying a variety of roles is the best exercise for young people. It is the problem, ethical or otherwise, of the play that now captures their interest when it should be the problem of acting. Think of Barton Hill, Lizzie Price, W. Davidge, Bob Craig, John Drew, Mrs. Drew, the two Walcots, Sam Hemple, Ed. Marble, and others whose names may be found in the annals of the day, and all in "stock" company. Charles Walcott in particular was a versatile actor. And H. E. Meredith. Craig was always comical. Why, any one of these men and women would be stars in comparison with the half- baked professionals of to-day. Nor is this belief the jaundiced expression of a bored old man. It is history. When these stock companies went out, whether in Philadelphia, Boston, or New York, the art of acting deteriorated. The average plays of yester-year were no better than those of the new century. Mediocrity never varies; but the actors have disappeared. And the "movies" have given them the final push over the preci pice into oblivion. P. S. My father made the same complaint circa 1875. VII THE OLD TOWN The Philadelphia of my school-days was a prettier, a more provincial, withal a pleasanter place to live in than the Philadelphia of this year of grace. I was younger, and when one is young the world is seen through en chanted spectacles; nevertheless, there are well-defined criteria by the aid of which I can verify my childish judgments. The city was greener, trees abounded, and flowers, lawns, and gardens; not only in yards, but facing the houses. Fountains were more plentiful. The rural appearance was more pronounced, a grave defect in the eyes of tasteless persons who prefer the ugliness of tall factory-like buildings; the uncouth mobs, and hideous noise of New York. Philadelphia, to be sure, was not cosmopolitan, yet it was more attractive, and at the risk of being paradoxical, more European. Certain sections of The Hague, Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht in Hol land, recall to me the city of my early youth; the rather prim two and three story brick residences, the white marble steps, gardens behind, and the immaculately kept brick pavements, these and a dozen other resemblances came to my mind when I lived in the Dutch cities of whose placid, well-ordered life I am exceedingly fond. Best of all to a musician with sensitive ears was the ab sence of unnecessary noise, for there is unnecessary as well as unavoidable noise. When the horse cars first jogged through Seventh Street, we all exclaimed at their clangour. The market carts which came in from Mont- 74 THE OLD TOWN 75 gomery County at dawn on Wednesday and Saturday, rumbled over the cobble-stones, but they were quiet in comparison with the cars. And now the overhead trolley is deafening. It fills every alley with its buzzing, and the metallic clanking of the cars put Philadelphia on the map as one of the noisiest cities in the Union. No fear any longer of the cruel aspersion of rusticity. The grass does not grow in the streets. The city is be come a metropolis, if it is only the metropolis of Pennsyl vania. Remember, I am not finding fault. I am merely telling you that fifty years ago Philadelphia was a sweet er-smelling, more picturesque, and a less noisy spot than now. The population that of an important town, but not too populous. There were many Germans, few French or Italians, some English, and a rapidly growing influx of Hebrews. But we all mixed well. After the Native American outburst in the early forties the city settled down and until the Civil War its peace and prosperity were practically undisturbed. A comfortable city, with plenty of elbow-room, good cheap markets, superior cookery, service of a sort long since vanished, and a social life, which, while it had its exclusiveness, its snob bish reactions, did not impeach the mass of the people from sanely enjoying life. Yes, I fully admit the pro vinciality. They are still narrow - minded concerning innovation, particularly in the Seven Arts. Philadel phia has always been prudish, and not without a taint of hypocrisy. As to the snobbery, that is the extension of the old Tory spirit. Philadelphia boasted an aristoc racy in the early eighteenth century, still boasts one. Families with a pedigree that go back to the glacial epoch continue to live on side-streets, poor but solemnly proud. It is a flattering illusion, this ancient family tree, and 76 STEEPLEJACK only cruel iconoclasts care to destroy it. In the broader aspects of life, in First and Last Things, Philadelphia has always been pre-eminent: religion, patriotism, the family. For "new-fangled heretical inventions" she has ever shown a distaste. She has been called a village a vil lage, when she boasted a million inhabitants and she is voted "slow" by visitors from the Bronx or Flatbush. But this is another delusion, like the "noiseless" legend. If the truth be told, and it may wound the moral sensi bilities of some, Philadelphia is an extremely "lively" resort, from which strangers hurry to recuperate at ease in Manhattan. The hospitality is occasionally excessive, the civic thirst abundant. I speak nowise in an apolo getic fashion. A great city should live freely, largely, though not loosely. (Ha !) The settlement by the Quakers lent to William Penn s Town a spirit of sobriety. The Quaker bonnets, dove- coloured gowns, shad-bellied coats, and broad-brimmed hats were to be seen everywhere when I was young. The women, old or youthful, were pleasing to gaze upon; demure glances did not detract from the charm of the girls. The graveyard on Race Street, the Meeting House on Fifteenth Street, the silent services, where grace descended without the assistance of brass bands, baboon antics, or newspaper notoriety this Quaker cult was very attractive in its simplicity and sincerity. Down-town the males of the flock drove shrewd bargains. Not even a Rothschild could beat a Quaker in the real-estate game. They said "thee" instead of "thou," but the quaint friendliness of the address excused its incorrectness. Despite the more vivid, garish display of colours and exotic costumes of our streets, the absence of the Quaker garb is a distinct loss. It was a peculiarly personal note THE OLD TOWN 77 in the civic symphony. The Salvation Army costume by no means replaces it. The town was far from being built in 1870. The sub urbs had a disconcerting way of bobbing up after you went further north than Columbia Avenue. We seldom dared West Philadelphia, or the more tremendous neigh bourhood of the Neck. Young rowdies made life unsafe when out of our own bailiwick. I invariably took one route to school. I would leave the house at eight, trav erse Seventh Street to Spring Garden, never forgetting to look at the house where lived Edgar Allan Poe. We then would traverse Spring Garden, a street of delightful shade, till we reached Broad. Down that wide avenue of noise and bustle we went to Pine Street, and there the doors of the school yawned for us. It took exactly one hour for the trip, not a slow record considering the slim- ness of our legs. We hated Seventh Street because of that inordinately long block or square between Girard Avenue and Poplar Street. But before the Baldwin Locomotive Works we stood transported. My passion for machinery became inflamed by the spectacle of a monster locomotive, suspended, its wheels whirling at the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour. It was the final try-out. With full steam the machine stood on a vast truck and ran on imaginary rails, officials and en gineers in the cab. No conjurer s show or transformation scene in pantomime so enthralled me. I had no premoni tion that later I should be a humble member of the great army enrolled under the flag of Mathias Baldwin, Mat thew Baird, Charles Parry, and others of the extraor dinary organisation, with its three thousand employes (now five times the number), and its capacity for turning out daily a locomotive completed. Yes, the shops were 78 STEEPLEJACK a magnet, going and coming from school. Above Cal- lowhill Street, we met a dangerous obstacle, the unpro tected tracks of the Reading Railroad. We had already passed our first on crossing the tracks of the Chestnut Hill and Germantown Railroad, and, as a rule, we avoided these by going west via Spring Garden. The Reading Railroad was another fascination, the shifting of the trains often made us late at school, with the usual penalty of a pensum of a hundred lines after hours a singularly idiotic and gratuitous form of punishment. Another dangerous diversion and temptation, was Penn Square, then in four public parks, railed in, as was years before Union Square in New York. Henry James remembers the latter, but I don t think our greatest master of fiction ever saw Penn Square, upon which now stands the ugliest municipal building in the United States, bar none. Even Camden, Trenton, Brooklyn make more appeal to the aesthetic eye than this clumsy congeries of jumbled architecture surmounted by a statue that bor ders on the blasphemous and burlesque. But at the period of which I am talking the parks with their green, gravelled walks proved a soothing interval in a morning s walk. Perhaps Mr. James would have found these breathing spaces evocative of old London. The dignified residences, the shade trees, the leisurely traffic, the splendid sweep of Broad Street, which one could sur vey north and south, these were more agreeable than the present encumbrance, which might have been so modified as to leave our show street unimpeded from end to end. Were these public buildings erected as an ineluctable barrier to balk the hungry social aspirations of the out casts north of Market Street? Or, were the beautiful parks butchered to make a politicians holiday? Who THE OLD TOWN 79 shall say, I don t know; but I do know that I was repri manded more than once a week for tarrying in this de lectable region. Below Market, Broad Street was lined with homes, although the La Pierre House, then a leading hotel, stood near Chestnut Street. The Academy of Natural Sciences was, if I remember rightly, at the corner of Sansom Street, on the west side of Broad Street. A certain slender, agile, bright-eyed young man was always ready to help us when we sought paleontological mysteries. We craved for the buried bones of what not impossible saurian. If there had been a giant crustacean we should not have been surprised. Everything happens in childhood, even flying-machines and pterodactyls. With a patience that was touching, Dr. Edward J. Nolan took us from case to case, from room to room. Although he may have forgotten this, it is so, and the now distinguished librarian and scientist still occupies, I am happy to say, the same position at the new academy on Logan Square, although he doesn t have the time to pilot around his little friends, for the most part grey-beards. Otherwise, I don t find Broad Street considerably altered as to facades. The old Natatorium is abolished, but the building stands across the street from the Art Club that jewel of archi tecture, hidden in the shadow of the Bellevue-Stratford. In the Natatorium the two Payne brothers taught the young idea how to swim. They were German, one smooth-spoken the other brusque. I can t recall which was Jules, but he taught me my first strokes; as in a dream I hear his guttural: "Ein, zwei, three!" for he mixed languages. We went there daily in the summer time. A season ticket was not costly. You could hire trunks or bring your own. My chief memory of the 8o STEEPLEJACK place, apart from many pleasant hours in the water, was the split skull I got from diving in shallow water. It served me right. I was showing off, and the conse quences might have been fatal. I still carry a part alas ! a widening one with the years in my hair caused by the scar I received. For that trick I was scolded by Mr. Payne and banished eight days. Years before the advent of the Rathskeller above Chestnut Street high buildings are comparatively re cent there was a small but well-known resort on the west side of Broad between Chestnut and Penn Square. It was called "The Keg," and kept by the Gasslein brothers, Joseph and Charles, the sons of old man Gass lein, who had a place fifty years ago further up town on Callowhill or Noble Street. "The Keg," so called be cause of its symbolic barrel over the entrance, enter tained many distinguished visitors. There was a little garden at the rear with rustic tables. The cheer was simple, but pure I wish I could say the same of con temporary brews the company varied and usually in teresting. Joe Gasslein, since dead, was an amiable host. I once saw Edwin Booth there in company with his manager, and to his amusement, as well as sorrow, he heard spouted Hamlet s speech to the players by an old fellow-actor, ruined by drink. A capital fellow and an excellent mime. His first name was Joseph, and when he whispered into the sympathetic ear of Mr. Booth, it was done with the sinister air of lago poisoning Othello s mind. Poor old Joe ! He had supported Booth, Bar rett, John McCuIIough, had been in the company of Adelaide Neilson. A man of ability, educated in the best stock companies, of good presence, he let himself slip THE OLD TOWN 81 down-stream, and because of a love-affair. But usually when a man with an alcoholic breath tells me that a broken heart drove him to rum I suspect him. He would have drunk even if he had married the girl. Women may be blamed for a lot of things, but they are too often a convenient excuse for a thirsty throat. Joe had that in excelsis. He was playing at Wood s Museum, at Ninth and Arch Streets at this time I am years ahead in my narrative and played villains with terrific force. A shocking villain. How we shivered at his curses deep in "Jack Harkaway," when, as Barboni the brigand, he swore to be avenged on jesting Jack. And in "Ruth, or the Curse of Rum," how awful was his remorse, his de lirium tremens and his death. "Father, dear father, come home with me now, the clock in the steeple strikes one"- or was it nine? But that touching verse, which wets my eyes and dries my throat probably association of ideas was spoken in "Ten Nights in a Barroom," not in "Ruth." After either piece Joe would appear at the "Keg" thirstier than ever. No wonder! How few recall the old actor. Perhaps John Gasslein, perhaps Albert J. Hetherington with his miraculous Pepys-Iike memory and myself. The Keg has gone the way of all liquid. If the weather was rainy we rode, generally in the Tenth Street cars, then crossed over Pine to Broad. A favourite return from school was up Ninth Street. There stood above Green Street, near the old depot there were depots in those days, not stations a restaurant where the fish-cakes were ideal. The price, too, was ideal, ten cents, with oyster soup obligingly thrown in by the oysterman. Did they taste? But ten-cent pieces were rare. In this establishment I first heard re- 82 STEEPLEJACK cited, "We don t give bread with one fish-ball," and by a school companion, Philip DoIIard. The appositeness of the recitation lay in the fact that they would not give us bread with our fish-cake. "Ain t potatoes as fillin as bread fer ye?" demanded the guardian. This was about 1871 or 1872; for in the same place we heard the news of Jim Fisk s shooting, and the name of Josie Mansfield. Our curiosity was further piqued on learning that Ed Stokes, the slayer, hailed from our town, and was of Quaker stock. What gossip ensued on upper Franklin Street and the vicinage ! Another vanished landmark was the old Bellevue, at the corner of Broad and Walnut Streets, where now stands the Manufacturers Club. The late George Boldt di rected this hotel, whose cuisine was noted for its quality. It boasted many distinguished guests, not to mention the Clover Club dinners, famous for their witty sessions. Colonel William M. Bunn, one time Governor of Idaho, often presided. I recollect his lithe figure and charac teristic head, steel-grey eyes, and imperturbable bearing. He looked then not unlike Robert Mantell. He still lives. Fred Fotterall, Dick Townsend, Ned Rogers known as Montezuma, and the nephew of Fairman Rogers, the noted driver frequented the Bellevue, which had an atmosphere its stately successor has not duplicated. (Ah ! the pathos of distance.) The younger Rogers was a great swell, and his abundant side-whiskers, called "Piccadilly Weepers" after Lord Dundreary s advent, were the envy of the younger crowd. (This nickname is quite venerable in England, where as a challenge the costers used to plaster a curl of hair on either side of their temples, and call the ornaments "New gate Knockers" in French the "bullies" of the Fau- THE OLD TOWN 83 bourgs call them "Accroche-Coeurs," i. e., heart-hookers.) The blond magnificence of Montezuma Rogers made my heart beat. He seemed to step from a page of Ouida, illustrated by George du Maurier. Incidentally I may remark that I owed him a debt of gratitude for he saved me from a nasty fall down an open trap in front of Lip- pincott s book-shop where I had been staring at titles. He saw me backing towards the trap and rapped over my heedless shoulders his dandy s stick, saying to Dick Townsend : " There s a Johnny Look-in-the-Air for you ! " Dazzled by his "weepers," I didn t have presence of mind enough to blurt out my thanks. A handsome trio, Rogers, Fotterall, and Townsend; all have since crossed the great divide. Another good-looking set was com posed of Stephen Whitman, Emile Perdriaux, and Prince Iturbide, the latter a gay young Mexican, who seemed as if he had just deserted the Paris boulevards. AH these men went to the Bellevue. So did Brooke Dolan, Frank McLaughlin, Frank Ash, Paul Huneker, Burt Lee, and other kindred souls. I never discovered who threw the big and costly crystal punch-bowl of the Bellevue into the middle of Broad Street, and then danced some sort of a savage ritual over the fragments. Whenever I ques tioned Mr. Boldt at the Waldorf-Astoria his memory would become hazy. But he did tell me who footed the by no means insignificant bill. There were ructions and the rumour of ructions for a long time. Here are a few additional names in the old Arch Street stock: Ada Rehan (season 1875-6), F. F. Mackay, Thayer, Adam Everly, the elder Davidge, Charles Thorne, Louis James and Fanny Davenport. Some of these be came famous at Daly s and Palmer s. Bob Craig was the Dick Swiveller to Lotta s Little Nell. His Toodles 84 STEEPLEJACK and Bob Acres only fell short of Clarke s and Jefferson s. Think of Dombey and Son with John Brougham, as Captain Cuttle, supporting Mrs. Drew. Barton Hill was versatile, as his "Rosedale, or The Rifle Ball" and Shake spearean roles demonstrated. Edwin Adams played at the Arch in "Dead Heart," Charles Mathews, too, in "A Dress Rehearsal," though I confess I didn t see him. Lewis Baker and his wife were in the company. The Walnut Street Theatre had a capital stock, the Walcots, Effie Germon sister-in-law of Adelina Patti Roland Reed, Griffith, Annie Ward Tiffany; Roland Reed was "the young man by the name of Guppy," and Mrs. Walcot was the Jo in "Bleak House." Edwin Forrest played his farewell performances at the Walnut, in Cori- olanus and Jack Cade. John Sleeper Clarke as Toodles and Dr. Pangloss was irresistible. At the Chestnut Street Theatre, where I made my debut as a dramatic critic at ten, I saw my first play, or pantomime. What was "The Three Red Men"? Blue fire and heroics probably. Later the stock was composed of such names as Wilbur Lennox, Frank Mordaunt, Josie Orton, in "The Octoroon," put on for a run; then the Gemmill regime; W. E. Sheridan, Lily Glover, Frank Norris, George Hoey, and others I ve forgotten. I do remember, however, the Louis XI of Sheridan, also his Sir Giles Overreach in "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," though he never excelled E. L. Davenport in the role. Charlotte Cushman I saw once, as Meg Merrilees, but she was too old for my young eyes, a hag spouting fire and fury, a terrible creature, who caused me more than one night mare. "Our Boys" at the same theatre in 1876 ran six months, for those times a long run. George Holland was in the cast. E. L. Davenport is one of my choice mem- THE OLD TOWN 85 orics. Next to Salvini s and Booth s I never enjoyed such acting. The summit of intellect and emotion was never quite compassed, hut lo tell the truth, I liked him hotter than I did Henry Irving. Davenport, it has always seemed lo me, never received his critical due. Tor most theatre-goers in I lie nineties he was only the. father ol I anny Davenport not a remarkahle artiste , though she was handsome and intelligent. Davenport had not the "divine spark," hut. he gave his audiences a very lair imitation ol it. lie was schol arly, lie was also poetic- and passionate as Hamlet, while his Richelieu was only topped by Booth s. To sec him play William in "Black-Lycd Susan" and Sir Cilcs at one performance w. is a treat. His Brutus, too, his Othello, and his Bill Sykes could they he matched in artistry and verisimilitude to-day? Ills Bill Sykes was simply nerve-shattering. Prank Mordaunt s assumption paled hy comparison. I 4 . l ; . Maekay was a finished actor. Do you remember his Lceles? I recall the W (. Stern Sisters, Lucille and Helen. Lucille played Last Lynne; Mrs. D. P. Bowers was striking in "Lady Audlcy s Secret." Helen Western was a celebrated Ma/eppa Adah Isaacs Menken, of course, the greatest at the old Continental, Walnut, and Lighl.h Streets. Those were the exciting days of "The French Spy," The Wild Horse of Tarlary," and Count Johannes, a veritable "Crushed Tragedian," who played behind a net, because ol the enthusiastic generosity of his audi ences in I he mall cr ol bilious eggs, onions, and hard sand. And llughcy Dougherty sang, <4 Sweet Mvelina" at Carncross and Dixies. Ah me! I suppose some ol these plays would be hooted oil the boards to-day, but they were good bin forty years ago. VIII I AM A PENMAN To recapture the first careless rapture, as Browning sings, is not easy, if indeed, possible. What the critics call the innocence of the eye is seldom renewed. Some artists possessed the virtue their life long; Titian and Frans Hals, for example. Any one who has visited Haarlem will remember that veracious group of old Dutch ladies painted when the artist was past eighty and the town drunkard ! Well, those were exceptions. Lesser mortals must be contented with only one optical virginity, and if that is sufficiently vivid to accompany him on his progress to the Hollow Vale he should not complain. With me memories of inanimate objects, houses, streets, trees, sounds and scents are in the nature of hallucinations. They appear in puissant relief. But to pin down to paper these waking dreams, that s the rub. For instance, there are bosky avenues on the west drive of Fairmount Park through which I could find my way blindfolded on a dark, stormy night. And a certain bench, just below Strawberry Mansion on which I sat of moonlit summer nights how many years ago? and held hands with a girl who had the golden tresses of the Venetian school; Giorgione, Paris Bordone, Tiziano. (Elaine ! Elaine !) That bench I see in all its enchant ing angularities whenever I close my eyes and ring up my cerebral Central, Fairmount Park, 1880. After I had attained the age of unreason, which sets in with a man at his fifteenth year, or thereabouts, I was 86 I AM A PENMAN 87 discovered as a penman whose handwriting bid fair to outshine in illegibility the classic scrawl of Horace Greeley (you have read Mark Twain?). Since then every news paper office that I worked in has made a rediscovery of this disconcerting fact: The Evening Bulletin, The Re corder, The Morning Advertiser, The Sun, The Times, and The Press chapels recognise my penmanship a block away. There was a standard joke in one composing- room; the compositor who set up my copy, and the proofreader who corrected it poor, dear chaps were always pensioned by the proprietor when they went to the blind asylum. Gallows-humour, this, but it threw some light on my case. My mother realised that my script was impossible I had recovered from the loco motive craze and after discussion I was sent to the writing academy of Samuel Dickson on Dock near Wal nut Street. He was an old acquaintance of my father, and one morning after commending me to his good graces my father left me in anything but a cheerful mood, con fronted by paper and pens, the sight of which then pro duced nausea, as they even now do, only I call it eye- strain; it sounds more important, more pathological, when it is really old-fashioned laziness. To reach Dr. Dickson s Academy a pretentious title for shabby chambers I daily walked down Seventh Street, and turned eastward at Girard Avenue. The old market houses, low, shambling, one-story structures, ran for blocks as far as Eighth Street or Ninth Street the Chest nut Hill Railroad tracks; perhaps they extended further, even as far as Twelfth Street, but I m not sure. They were jolly, bustling resorts for all the housewives in the ward. Walking down the avenue, I would stop at St. Peter s German Church, go in sometimes, not to pray, 88 STEEPLEJACK but to hear old Pop Hertel play the organ, an instrument of which I am fond. There was a candy shop at the corner of Fifth Street, where gingerbread was to be had at fabulously low prices. The beldame who kept the shop was a creature who alternately bullied and wheedled her childish clientele. Her usual expression reminded me of the sour-sweet taste of cream thunder-turned. She was of German origin and the school children said she was a witch, a gingerbread witch. Fiercely she would lean and ask: "Vot ye vant?" to which the inevitable an swer was: "Vot ye got?" "Vot ye want?" she would repeat in menacing tones. "Vot ye got?" was the Irish echo. This silly litany would go on sometimes for five minutes. Her features never changed, her eyes never twinkled, yet I believe she enjoyed the game of question and answer, though once I saw her take off her wooden shoe and chase an irreverent boy who dared to upset her scheme by asking first "Vot ye vant?" This an noyed her; like Sarah Battle at whist, she must have the "rigour of the game," as well as a clean hearth. Slowly sauntering down Fifth Street, I would proceed as if on a visit to the dentist. When I arrived at Fair- mount Avenue, I would gaze across the street at the residence of the Hon. Daniel M. Fox, once Mayor of the city, and would note the window in his bedroom, from which on election night he made a speech to his con stituents. Old York Road achieved I footed down its inviting width. There was at the junction of Fifth Street and the Road the Betz Brewery. Only a year ago I retraced my early footsteps, but my souvenirs were pleasanter than the realities of 1918. Old York Road had well kept residences in my youth; now the entire thoroughfare is sadly down at the heels. Shabby is, I AM A PENMAN 89 perhaps, too complimentary a word for it. I noticed that our East Side is rapidly keeping company with New York s. After a visit to Essex and Grand Streets in 1908, Henry James in his American Scene called the East Side, "Jerusalem Disinfected." He exaggerated slightly, though not as to racial roots. In certain quar ters of our town you feel as if in some foreign ghetto; Vienna, Budapest, Cracow, Warsaw. I was depressed by my walk; the poverty, the absence of foliage, the crowds, all reminded me of the Yiddish belt in New York. I looked in vain for the Italian colony which is elsewhere. Franklin Square had nicely kept residences, but no longer, though the old Fox mansion on Fifth Street is precisely as it was. York Road alone has changed. On Sixth Street my eyes were astonished by the name of Martin Wisler over a furniture wareroom. Impossible ! I went to the door on the sill of which stood a young man with blond curly hair. Again im possible ! In the seventies I often passed this es tablishment and always saluted by his name, young Wisler, cheerful, blond, curly-haired. There he stood, the same lad with the jolly smile, and yet he was differ ent; years bring their changes. I inquired of him his name. He told me. He was a Wisler. "My father s inside at his desk. Go in, he will be glad to see an old friend; you won t find him much changed." I peeped in. Yes, there sat Martin Wisler, and he did look many years younger than he should have, considering that he was my contemporary. But I hadn t the courage to enter. I feared I was the one who had changed, feared that he wouldn t remember me unless I told my name. So I whispered to his son: "Another time, your father is busy. Never mind my name. I ll surprise him again," 90 STEEPLEJACK and I saved myself by flight. I was a moral coward that afternoon. Or was it vanity? I would pass St. Augustine s, with its dramatic history how often has my mother told of the wild night when it burned down to the drunken howls of frenzied "native" Americans. Finally, at Walnut where it debouches into Dock, I could see my goal, my "jail" I called it. Dock Street and its surroundings have changed surprisingly little. The house where lived my writing-master still stands, and still needs a coat of paint. When I would enter on the second floor there sat a portly, middle-aged gentleman of negro strain. His broad face, flat nose, eyes showing plenty of white, were unmistakably negroid, which his shining, coffee-coloured skin did not deny. He always wore his hat, indoors and out, as Walt Whitman would say. I was told the reason. His hair was kinky; hence the hat. It was a tall stovepipe of ancient lineage, and was almost covered by a deep mourning-band. He was probably a native of an English-speaking West Indian Island. His speech was excellent English, yet softly streaked by something exotic. He used big words. He wrote formidable phrases. His handwriting was, in my eyes, extraordinary. A master of all styles from the conventional Spencerian to the ornamental letters used in addresses, testimonials, and the like; he was a first- class craftsman. "A clear round hand, my boy," he would say to me, though his kindly expression would be replaced by a vexed one after he watched my futile at tempts. He would then sigh, remove his owlish horn spectacles, wipe his vast forehead without removing that eternal hat, and then, without modulation whatsoever, would exclaim: "Ah! James, the Magorians, James. If it wasn t for those Magorians, life would be all skittles I AM A PENMAN 91 and beer." And I, thinking this a quotation, would en courage him with a wan smile. The Magorians ! What the deuce were Magorians? I often puzzled over this enigma of the Dock Street sphinx. The Magorians ! Were they the Babylonish scarlet-women from the Seven Hills? I never encountered painted Jezebels on Dock Street, unless the limber-hipped, unkempt fishwives who paraded after dark in quest of fresh air, not human bait. What did old man Dickson mean by the Magorians? I did not dare ask him because he was a Turveydrop in deportment, a Turveydrop of the ink-well that Dickens would have appreciated. I asked my elders but they all leaned heavily on the scarlet-woman theory, especially William Hewitt, the portraitist. "He means the girls," he would mutter. If so, why then the British symbol of skittles and beer? Even at that ingenuous age girls, and skittles, and beer formed an indissoluble trinity. And why precisely Magorians a lurid, suggestive word, a planetary word. I remembered having read a tale by Douglas Jerrold, its title forgotten, which described a fashionable soiree in London. At the height of the fes tivities, as the society reporter would say, a little fusty old fellow attired as a cobbler appeared in the drawing- room. He made his way to the hostess, blazing in her diamonds, arrayed like a queen. Squatting before her in true shoemaker pose, he shook his forefinger at her: " Now Sue," he said, " now Sue, this will never do. Put on your clothes and come home." (Or words to that effect.) The denouement? There was none. She quickly left the room, returning in a few minutes en veloped in a shawl (1850), and white- faced and with staring eyes went away with the mysterious stranger. Her husband? Or did she owe him a hopeless bill for 92 STEEPLEJACK cobbling? Jerrold doesn t explain. The story left a queer taste in my memory. So did the Magorians. In the meantime my handwriting steadily became worse. It s as bad now as it was four decades ago, and as I can t use a clanking typewriter, and won t dictate, I have been forced to write millions of words. And yet I call myself lazy. Basta ! Despite the talk about living in the open air and active sports, I think the boys of my day were hardier and less spoiled. Of the girls I can t speak with au thority. No doubt they were more coddled, more pro tected then, and the voice of the chaperone was heard in the land. For a young woman to go alone with her young man to a theatre or a ball would have hopelessly riddled her reputation. The young ladies of various fash ionable boarding-schools were given their morning and afternoon walk up and down Walnut Street, or around Rittenhouse Square, which like Logan, was railed in. These processions with the girls paired-off were events for the young chaps. What pretty girls they were ! (Dostoievsky has written: there are no old women; an old woman is younger than an old man.) Anyhow, the girls were pretty then. The Chegaray Institute in par ticular piqued our juvenile gallants. This choir of Iambs were fleecier, softer-eyed, plumper and comelier than other flocks. They had the innocence of the ser pent, the wisdom of the dove. They never flirted. They only looked at you. And then your aggressive mas culinity crumpled before the idol. Occasionally, in the spring of the year, when the moon was full, they be trayed a disposition to throw their little bonnets over the windmill, which was natural; but Madame Chegaray, who was an experienced tactician, knew how to handle I AM A PENMAN 93 the situation. She grimly told any mother that when the crisis became acute she dosed her refractory patients with a good, old-fashioner 1 remedy, brimstone and molasses. The rest is silence. IX THE GOSSIP OF THE DAY The startling sensations of the day such as the Fisk- Stokes shooting, the James Gordon Bennett- Fred-May duel, the cataclysmic earthquake and tidal wave in Peru (1868) when an American battleship was safely landed in the hills among the trees far from the water, Colonel Bob IngersoIPs lectures, temperance revivals, the Keeley motor, the "new" dietary of Dio Lewis, bustles, chignons, and the divorce of Adelina Patti from her rake, Marquis de Caux, the Beecher-Tilton case, Lydia Thompson s Blondes, these and a thousand others fluttered our ex citable young brains. I regret now not having kept a commonplace-book. It would prove a guide for a rapidly failing memory. I do, however, remember that after Fred May cowhided Bennett on the sidewalk of the Union Club, there was a challenge, and the duel came off somewhere in Maryland. This was denied the other day when Bennett died. He had been engaged to Miss Caroline May, the sister of the aggressor, who only did what any other brother should have done. James Gor don Bennett, as a young man, was heroic in his cups; that is, his capacity was that of a hero. Byron or Landor said that brandy was fit for heroes. It was really old Sam Johnson who said it first. He didn t know the proprietor of the Herald who was heroic with champagne as well as brandy. Bennett often repeated, and accord ing to the newspapers of the period I read the Phila delphia Times 9 account he told Fred May he was sorry, 94 THE GOSSIP OF THE DAY 95 that he wasn t worthy of his sister; but later said "that he would give any man one hundred thousand dollars to take her off his hands" (Times ). He was cowhided for this, and the duel followed a French duel, I suppose, as the participants lived many years. This was one episode in the extraordinary career of that extraordinary man, "Commodore" Bennett, who was surely made to figure in fiction or drama. The Peruvian earthquake at Arica caused as much excitement as the one in San Francisco. As for "Bob" IngersoII and his warmed-over Voltaire and Huxley, I can only speak by repute. He raised an awful rumpus, more of a rumpus than even Darwin, Tyndall, and Hux ley combined. Those were the days of Star - course lectures. T. B. Pugh, or Major Pond managed them. We had Gough, the temperance agitator, Proctor, the English astronomer, the beautiful Mrs. Scott-Siddons, lustrous-eyed, but lacking dramatic temperament, the South American pianiste, Teresita Carreno, another beauty, Seraphael, the boy-wonder (really Henry Waller, the English pianist, said to be a scion of royalty; the "son of the P-e of W-s," as the society journals subtly put it), Leopold Lichtenberg, the biggest violin talent of the country, the elder Bellew in Shakespearean read ings and scholarly readings they proved and how many others? I remember at one of these affairs not quite so ghastly as Chautauqua lyceum courses a pro hibition humbug drank water all evening, and at the close of his speech he was so "het up" by enthusiasm for the cause that he stumbled and fell as he left the stage. The curtain was quickly rung down. Gin, like water, is colourless. Father "Tom" Burke filled us with joy by his attacks on the "Sassenach." Ireland is always 96 STEEPLEJACK about to be, but never is free. We went to the circus, then Adam Forepaugh s, on North Broad Street, and Smith s Island, in the Delaware, was a haven of happi ness. A Coney Island in miniature, without its dis agreeable drawbacks, we swam and were at peace with the world. But the island was a menace to navigation, and it, too, disappeared, like so many other pleasant things. Nor should I forget the excursions on the little Schuylkill River steamboats. Fairmount Park, after Independence Hall, the crown ing glory of Philadelphia, was then as now a wonderful playground. The approaches to it were not imposing, as they will be when the new boulevard is completed. The entrance at Callowhill Street was distinctly depress ing; dark, damp, dirty; but the old waterworks, the mysterious wheels, above all, the smell of brackish water, stirred our childish imaginations. What a pretty walk was that along the river till the last boat-clubhouse was passed. Trotting horses attached to modish traps, buggies, and the selfish sulky, with its solitary driver, flew by, harness shining, the metal on the spokes glitter ing in the sunshine, which seemed more suave than now. Philadelphia summers are trying because of their per sistent sultriness. There is no salty sea-breeze at sun down to relieve the heated atmosphere, as in luckier Gotham. Yet we never suffered. Children seldom do. We jumped and romped, rolled hoops, shot our marbles, kept our nurses shivering with fright when we fell over board in the park fountains, and at the end of "a perfect day," we would run home all the way from Lemon Hill, eat till our tiny waists would bloat, go to bed and sleep the untroubled sleep of little devils. The park seemed more umbrageous then; I say THE GOSSIP OF THE DAY 97 "seemed" for it is precisely the same, probably plus more trees, and if I seem to make unfavourable com parison it is only "seeming." Sans teeth, sans hair, sans strength and spirits, his youth to an old man is overflowing with honey and sap. The wild locusts and the seamy side of disillusionment come later. We pic nicked on Lemon Hill, we trooped to Strawberry Man sion when Levy played his golden-toned cornet. We ate catfish and waffles on the picturesque banks of Wissa- hickon Creek, and gorged planked shad at Gloucester. To fish in the Wissahickon was a joy, with Manayunk across the ocean. The annual regattas on the Schuylkill were religiously followed. Didn t I have a brother a referee on the judges boat or in the singles; two brothers in fact? With what nervous anticipation we would stand at the end of the course and watch for the winner ! When the Malta boys won, our throats automatically released a yell, a rebel yell, at that. The Centennial re gatta especially appealed to us, for a home crew I ve forgotten the club beat the British visitors. From Schuylkill Falls to Rockland Bridge, the course was black with people. But the London Rowing Club beat Yale by a second, and there was gloom in the camp. For baseball I never entertained the same admiration. It was too violent, but I was mildly interested in the Red Sox and similar organisations. As the population of the city was so much less than to-day s you could go for miles in the park and meet but few folk. Picnics were quite the thing. There were no trolleys; as the park was near, and we usually walked. I notice now that a regrettable puritanical spirit has turned this leafy paradise into a thirsty desert. That s the way to do it. Make people uncomfortable. Tell 98 STEEPLEJACK them if they are thirsty to drink lemonade or gassy soda water. Muzzle them with good advice, but for bid them burgundy and terrapin, or pretzels and beer. As for beer, poor, vulgar, despised beverage, that is being chased off thu globe. Yet Philadelphia was famous throughout the world for its brews. Old Brewerytown may go but not its memories. There was a certain little garden attached to Conrad s brewery on West Poplar Street, long since disappeared, where of Sunday afternoons you fancied yourself in Europe. I maintain that simple pleasures of this sort react more favourably on civic life than despotic measures. You can t sup press legitimate thirst, but you can follow the example of continental nations and canalise it; make it sociable and enjoyable. Catfish and waffles without light wine or beer is like Wissahickon without its historical creek. Oh ! America ! Happy hunting-ground for humbug, hys teria, and hypocrisy. Vacations were sometimes spent at Chestnut Hill, at Squan River, or Atlantic City preferably the latter. We usually victimised our Aunt Eliza, who lived on Atlantic Avenue Pacific Avenue was a mere sketch. You could see the ocean from your back porch on Atlantic Avenue. When, a few years ago, I flew over the Island in Beryl Kendrick s hydroplane, I noted the changes in the coast-line. The Thoroughfare is hardly the same; Brigantine Beach is slowly being brought closer by sand bars. But the boardwalk is unique. It was a poor affair fifty years ago for it is a half-century since I climbed the tower of the lighthouse. Cape May, on the other hand, has changed, but not for the better. It was " Queen of the watering-places" on this New Jersey coast when Atlantic City was a modest fishing resort. However, our favourite playground was THE GOSSIP OF THE DAY 99 Fair-mount Park, "annihilating all that s made, to a green thought in a green shade," as old Andrew Marvell sang. (Young Kendrick fell last June and was killed.) In a word, life in Philadelphia ran on oiled wheels. Even to-day, after the huge clatter of New York, and despite its own contribution to the Moloch of Noise, there is something mellow and human about the drowsy hum of Chestnut, the genteel reaches of Walnut, the neat frontage of Spruce Streets. The stranger is at the first bored, then lulled, at last amused by our intimate life. London or The Hague recalls Philadelphia to some of us. The fine disdainful air of Locust Street, the curi ously constrained attitude of the brick houses on side streets as if deferentially listening to the snobbish back yard remarks of their statelier neighbours, the brown- stone fagades these things demand the descriptive genius of a Dickens to make them real; Dickens who discerned human expression in door-knockers, and on the faces of lean, lonely, twilight-haunted houses. The water-fronts fascinated me. Port Richmond on a misty day would recall London, which city I had never seen, but secretly worshipped. I have since wondered at this curious mental transposition of cities and the sensations aroused by them; particularly the slightly perverse wish to be at home when in Europe. Philadelphia never seemed so desirable as when I lived in Paris. Nostalgia? Perhaps. But an absurd one. I longed for Paris when I returned to Philadelphia, and I perpetually saw "European" in the most ordinary and domestic things. That way lies cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitanism has played the devil with my life making me a wanderer when I was happier at home, making me think Brussels beer was ioo STEEPLEJACK better than the brew I drank at old Pop Kemper s place on Sansom Street, forcing me to deny, I blush to say, that Fairmoimt Park was superior to the Prater, the Bois de Boulogne, or the Thiergarten. It is. But an inverted snobbery made me say the opposite. In matters spiritual and artistic it is the same. To be sure I never denied that Mark Twain wasn t our most American of writers, one who would outlive the pallid philosophy of Emerson, the swaggering humbuggery of Walt Whit man, or the sonorous platitudes of Longfellow; that sort of snobbery I never cultivated. I adored Poe, and sadly wonder over the certain condescension among our native critics when speaking of him. He drank. So did Gen eral Grant. He drugged. So did Coleridge, De Quincey, and Charles Baudelaire. He was inconstant. So were Byron, Shelley, Swinburne oh ! billions of humans; what man some time or other hasn t carried a harem under his hat? Or dreamed of houris never seen on sea or land ! But European poets could live recklessly while this un happy American was hunted to his grave for his tempera mental variations; and once buried was quickly exhumed by the moral buzzards. As Baudelaire, who gave Poe European fame by translating him, wrote: "Since when are the jackals permitted to defile the graves of genius in the United States?" Why don t critics and public alike pose the important question : Is the work good? Is the work bad? Do this and the moral will take care of it self that misery-breeding moral, varying like a weather- vane according to clime, time, and circumstance. But restless bones, and the fear that home-keeping youths have homely wits, drove me across seas and back again. Even as a lad when I stood at Market Street ferry, I wished to be in Camden. I would stay on a car THE GOSSIP OF- THE DA\ 101 long after the point was passed where 1 should have alighted. These were only growing pains, I know, yet showed, like straws, which way the breeze would blow later on. Girls, when maturing sometimes nibble at slate pencils or sip vinegar; this doesn t impeach them from becoming the happy mothers of twins, or joining the suffragette brigade. I remember a terrible story of ab normal passion manifested by an up-State Judge, from Reading, or Lancaster, or Harrisburg? Once a year he would disappear, and visit the Quaker city. Then at the Girard House in the secrecy of a locked room he would let loose his worst instinct, and for a week wallow in debauchery. But here is the odd part of the story, one vouched for by the best authority, the man himself. His degrading obsession was oatmeal and cream. Fear ing the accusation of gluttony in his native town, he would come here and stuff himself till miserably ill with oatmeal, then, pale, his soul at peace, he would return home meekly accepting the suspicious glances of his wife and the broad jests of his friends. But his morbid crav ing had been satisfied, and without peril to his immortal soul; besides he was considered a slily wicked chap, a "deevil amang the wimmen." What man, vain or other wise, could resist such flattering implications? X MAGIC A new mania invaded my consciousness about this time, and captured me in the very citadel of my being. Magic, black and white. As was so often the case the spark that set me afire came from a book, the Memoirs of Robert Houdin, most amiable of Frenchmen, most in genious of conjurers. He was the first to utilise elec tricity as an aid to his magical mechanisms; he literallj invented so-called Second Sight; and while his magic is quite out of date, he may be fairly called the Columbus of his profession, the modern Columbus, because magic is as old as the Atlanteans, and every religious mythology has its legends of the art. Before I read Houdin, old Signor Blitz had made our young eyes stare with his tricks and his ventriloquism. And Heller, magician and piano- virtuoso, had linked in my imagination the two arts. Heller, whose real name was Palmer, and an English man, was an excellent pianist. A grand piano always stood on the stage surrounded by his infernal apparatus; cones and cabinets, glittering brass, and the complete paraphernalia of the successful prestidigitator. Heller played the operatic fantasias of Thalberg then con sidered extremely difficult with technical finish and musical taste. He had evidently studied in a good school and his touch sang on the keyboard. What he accom plished in the other craft I have forgotten. But he was a degree higher than Signor Blitz. Hermann was defter at card tricks; I mean the original of that name, not his MAGIC 103 nephew. Houdin I missed in Paris though I attended a seance at the Houdin Theatre, somewhere down the grand boulevard and conducted by his son. Maskelyne and Cook at Egyptian Hall, London, were, in my opinion, the most remarkable of all the illusionists I had seen, and I saw all I could from Blitz and Perry to Keller and Harry Houdini. Exposing the spiritualistic humbug- gery was another sensation of the day, for after the toe- cracking exploits of the Fox Sisters of Rochester, came messages red-hot from spirit-land with cabinets and tam bourines, banjos, and apparitions. Need I add that the recent death of Eusapia Palladino, the Italian medium, with the newspaper accounts of her curious career, only prove that victims still abound. Think of such a great scientist as Professor Crookes being fooled by the Katie King materialisation ! Poor old Professor Zoellner went mad over the fourth-dimension, and it was because of this charlatanry that Pepper invented his famous ghost. We saw it at the Academy how many years ago? and after that only imbeciles could be convinced that me diums had supernatural communication with alleged "spirits." Supernormal these women are, and their catalepsies have proved of value to psychiatrists. But it is all of the earth earthy. Then there was the plump nymph who slumbered in mid-air, her elbow resting on an iron upright. She, too, has gone the way of things inutile. No one believes in her nowadays. The crystal clock-dial suspended by a wire, one of Houdin s inventions, was a novelty in the seventies. But these elaborate mechanisms did not tease my fancy as did the personal address displayed in pure sleight-of-hand. To make vanish a solid ball, to throw a pack of cards in the air and with a magic dagger 104 STEEPLEJACK transfix the card chosen in the audience by a confeder ate, or else "forced" to stand before a table and with mystic gabble make eggs open and become bouquets, or pull rabbits, and water-filled glass globets from a silk hat ah ! how my heart beat in the presence of those marvels. I had read of the mango-tree, of the disap pearing rope-ladders, of East Indian Yogis, yet none appealed so much to my fancy as nimble finger-tricks. I became an adept and a nuisance to the family. I would dazzle the servants by juggling with apples, po tatoes, plates. From my unhappy aunt I would pluck oranges, and finally I became so mad over the thing that I gave exhibitions in our nursery to gaping boys and girls collected from the neighbourhood (admission five pins per person). These affairs always broke up in a fight, free to all comers; either my brother Paul would become a recalcitrant confederate, and forget to return to its owner the real handkerchief, or else some inquisi tive urchin in the audience would force his way behind the curtain just as I was cooking up some dark enchant ment. I was really suffering from virtuoso fever the inclination that drives deluded people on a concert plat form there to sing or play and make a show of themselves. Deeper rooted still was the desire to illude. The escape from the actual. The yearning for the miracle. It found its account with me later in music, at once the most sensuous and spiritual of the Seven Arts; the one art which extends partially over the line into the unex plored fourth dimension of mystical mathematics. Music, mathematics, mysticism. The oldest of triune sub stances. Mysticism didn t bother me as a boy. It was the Will-to-Deceive, as the psychologists would say, that made its appeal. The Great Adventure then was to MAGIC 105 bamboozle my little public, and to this very day I re tain a certain finger ability in palming coins or hand kerchiefs. Alas ! the vanishing globe full of gold-fish is beyond my present capacity, but I can play in a re spectable style HandePs fire fugue and keep its complex web of four voices distinct. Music, executive music, is also prestidigitation but allied to beautiful sounding patterns. And music is an order of mystic sensuous mathematics, as I wrote in my study of Chopin. To complete the ruin of my regular habits my prin cipal, Professor Roth, fetched from London an illustrated catalogue of Bland, whose magic shop somewhere in Soho was a resort of the profession. I longed for appa ratus. I went to great lengths to secure the coveted articles, and at the shop of Yost on Ninth near Arch Street, I met my Waterloo. The proprietor was a little, dark-skinned man, whose large black eyes would hypno tise you as he performed inexplicable passes, removing out of time and space a weighty object. I literally sat at the feet of this Yost the Yogi. I must have had the shining brow of the neophyte. Perry, the magician, was a visitor at the shop and could handle a pack of cards with skill. I neglected my books. I was become a weekly truant. The grand debacle was at hand. For merly it had been Wood s Museum that deranged my studies; the Lauris, Harry Hawk, the leading lady, Lily Hinton, and the stock company, not to speak of old Joe Nagle, these had all contributed in turn to divert me from the straight and narrow path of scholarly recti tude. Magic finished me, and there was irony in the gift of Professor Roth, for that Bland catalogue lost him a pupil. After a brief but very intense interview with my father, my magical toys were returned to the original 106 STEEPLEJACK owner. I was removed from school an expensive one, by the way why waste time there when I wouldn t study? I became an old man overnight, a senile dotard of twelve. Another dream smashed ! What my future? XI A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST My parents were surprised when I boldly suggested that I study to become a mechanical engineer. What I thought of in the recesses of my idiotic skull was the realisation of an old dream: to become a locomotive engineer, and make daily runs between the depot at Ninth and Green Streets and Chestnut Hill. Had I not been found by an agonised nurse beneath a locomo tive at Chestnut Hill picking the cylinder? Had I not pushed the controlling lever of a machine and set it spinning down the steel grooves through the narrow cut below the Hill, and if it had not been for a fireman the engineer had gone away in the coal tender I should have come to grief as I couldn t stop the locomotive? My bias towards machinery was unquestionable. At last my vocation. Finally, yielding, it was decided that I should learn the trade from cellar to garret, and to that end I was apprenticed to the Baldwin Locomotive Works, before the steam-hammer shop of which I had so many times been ravished by the spectacle of sooty giants, flying sparks, the clash of metal, and the fierce blaze of the furnaces. I was suddenly lifted from the ditch of depression. I forgot my magic, and only had a vision of that locomotive test, its wheels a few feet off the ground, revolving at a superhuman speed amid the hissing of steam and the anxiety of the judges above in the cab. My ultimate goal was s the job as engineer on the railroad. Other boys longed to be policemen or sol- 107 io8 STEEPLEJACK diers or engineers, and I recall one queer little chap who confessed that he wished he had been born a girl (how we hooted him one afternoon for this admission, the brevet in our eyes of a coward). But a locomotive and fifty miles an hour for me. To-day I hate motor-cars, speed, dusty roads, and the honk of the horns. Why? The great day came and early one sultry September morning (I have kept the date, September 17, 1872), 1 went in company with my patient father to the works, to the machine-shop at the corner of Seventeenth and a little street I have forgotten (isn t it Hamilton?). There we met William Parry, a member of the firm, and whose family had intermarried with a cousin of ours, a Baird. Mr. Parry had been a workman and was the most active and practical of the great Baldwin-Baird corporation. He was amiable to me and seemed to think it natural that I should yearn to become an engineer. We entered a vast, gloomy shop. The noise deafened me. Men, half-naked, hammered on anvils; machinery spun around; the place was damp and smelled of smoke. A thin, stooped man in middle years, and wearing spectacles, saluted my father: "Hello, John," and my father an swered: "Hello, Pete." I was told that he was Peter Farnum, an old Northern Liberty friend of his. He was a kind man but, oh, my! his face and bare arms were greasy. The idea of physical impurity had always re volted me. I was soon to shed such girl-like nonsense. After Mr. Parry had said a few words to Mr. Farnum, he shook our hands, saying: "We ll make a man of your boy, John," and left us. His departure was as if the sun had hid behind a cloud. With my father he was one of the last links with the outside world. Already, I was repenting of my determination to become an engineer, A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST 109 already I suffered from homesickness. The practical Farnum told me to come next morning ten minutes be fore seven, and bring a pair of jumpers, overalls, he called them; then he would set me to work. I arose at five A. M. the following day and ate breakfast with my father, who, as an old workman, had never cured himself of his early-rising neurosis. I ate a rare beefsteak, so as "to put hair on my chest" as my father realistically phrased it. Then a bundle under my arm, a full dinner-pail in the other hand, cap on head, and my heart a cinder in my bosom, I walked down the street in a hazy dawn and reached the shop a half-hour too soon. But the men began to straggle in, coughing, grunting, some smoking pipes, all wearing the resigned yet resentful expression of humans about to begin another day of hateful slavery. Talk about the "dignity of labour" to working men and watch their incredulous sneers. Dignity be hanged ! they used to say to me at the dinner-hour, it s the grind ing misery of long hours ten hours in those times the poor pay and the risks of the job, and after my short experience I heartily agree with their views, and I m neither a socialist nor an anarchist, much less a senti mental agitator, parlour rebel, nor amateur busybody fomenting trouble among the proletariat to whom the world will presently belong, the bourgeois having had his fling since Napoleon I. But I have lived with these men, seen their futile attempts to make both ends meet, to avoid the temptations of drink, good-fellowship, and the natural desire for a little relaxation after so many hours of blinding toil. To-day steel-workers occasion ally end as multi-millionaires. Wages are higher. The workman is better housed, and hygienic conditions im proved. Nevertheless, labour is not always ennobling. i io STEEPLEJACK Since my experience at the Baldwin shops, I have seen the coal-miners of Belgium in the "black lands," and look back at Baldwin s as an earthly paradise in com parison. Whenever anyone tells me that we should all remain in the position God placed us, I wonder what this particular moralist would say if he found himself in the cold dawn of a drizzling autumn morning ham mering screws amidst a hell of fire, fury, and noise; or in a boiler-shop chipping with a chisel? It s no fun, hard work, and as I was born constitutionally lazy, I loathe it. To be driven like stupid sheep or angry goats, into an enclosure, and there work or starve ha ! just try it once yourself Mr. Universal Panacea ! I know that the labour party makes mistakes, that it is as tyrannical in its essence as trust combinations, mo nopolies, and other oppressive institutions; yet I can t help sympathising with the workman, and that much I learned from hard experience, something my kind father never allowed me to see at home. No wonder. Later I read Proudhon, Marx, Lassalle, Stirner, and Mackay to find the same arguments. But I had only set foot on the first rung of the lad der of torture. Pete Farnum showed where I could stow my kit, a locker with a key which he bade me use if I expected to keep intact my copious luncheon of cold meat and buttered bread. Workmen are as honest as any other class, but borrowed food doesn t come under any rubric of the decalogue. I put on my new and coarse overalls, too large by half for me. I stood waiting for further orders, a picture of scared sickly youth. How I wished myself out of it all ! Then there surged into my view another face. It belonged to Woody Menden- hall, the superintendent, a small, wiry, terribly active A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST m man, with blond hair and an imperious way with him that sent my heart into my boots. The boss ! But he proved a pleasant boss, only he was in such a hurry, and his oaths were so crisply blurted out that I feared him. He told Mr. Farnum to send me out into the yard to get the pedestals that support the piston-box of the locomotive. Each shop in this enormous hive has its particular part of the machine to produce and perfect. In our shop it was the cylinders. My initial task was to knock off with a hammer and a chisel the roughness of the casting on the pedestals; rust and bubbles were thus removed. But first I had to get my pedestals. They lay in the yard, and after a snow it wasn t pleasant to dig them up. Then lugging the ugly casting into the shop I would put it in a vise at my work-bench and pro ceed to maul my thumb with a twelve-pound steel ham mer. How heavy it was ! I discovered that technique is demanded in such a prosaic occupation as hitting a chisel squarely on the head. A light, elastic wrist, econ omy of movement, a shrewd eye, and bang ! Again on the first knuckle of my right-hand thumb. How ever, practice improved my stroke, its speed and preci sion, and after a week I began to touch the chisel. But my colleagues, otherwise the gang, wouldn t let me alone. I was called "the dude" because there was a rumour that Mr. Parry, a boss among bosses, had me under his wing; then, too, Pete Farnum was nice to me; worst of all, my white hands and slender fingers damned me in the eyes of my new acquaintances. I think I might have been forgiven my "pull," but that my hands were against me; "skinny fingers," as one fellow derisively said, fingers that never did, never would, do a day s hard work. He wasn t a bad prophet, this same Harry, ii2 STEEPLEJACK whose family name I shall never know. The work was hard, the workmen not sympathetic. But at the end of the first week came pay-day, that magical word which sesame-like opens all doors. I had rather swaggered at home, patronising my younger brother, and forcing the proletarian note, especially rejoicing in my grimy personal condition. I believed it the real thing to appear as dirty as I could. I even went so far as to smear my self with soot and grease. It seemed quite in the key of the toiler with his hands. But that pay envelope ! That settled my social status. It was my first attack on capitalistic reserves. I was earning my living by the sweat of my brow, and the sum was precisely five dollars and twenty-five cents piece-work. I wasn t appren ticed as I had expected. The system of apprenticeship was no longer in vogue at Baldwin s. My wages looked large in my eyes, for they were all mine. However, I didn t buy a private yacht at once, though I cast eyes on a small sailboat for sale, second-hand. As soon as I manifested a friendly disposition my mates returned it with interest. They were decent chaps, few dissipated, and admirers of men like William Parry, Peter Farnum, and Woody Mendenhall, who had once worked with their hands. When they learned that my father, too, had used his hands to earn his daily bread, their respect for me was not decreased. I told them that my grandfather worked with his hands, but pressing down organ keys didn t impress them as genuine labour. It was playing. Their fetish was the human hand, the true tool of humanity. And they were right. Carlyle couldn t have put the case more clearly than Andy, a Scotchman with whom I chummed: : Ye see, A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST 113 lad, it s this way. If ye don t use your hands to earn your bread, you re a softy. No good. You re living off the working man. You re an aristocrat. That s my belief." Otherwise Andy was not very radical. He read Hugh Miller s Old Red Sandstone after luncheon and hummed hymn-tunes. From him I learned to re spect the hand as the mightiest lever of civilisation. My own hands were the dirtiest in the shop, and I gloried in them. Besides Andy, who was tall, thin, dark, there was another chum, Tommy, and as we became insep arable, we were usually saluted in mock Scotch dialect: "Wha s cooming the noo? Tommy, Jemmy, Andy!!" Tommy was a reddish blond Englishman with a broad Northumberland brogue. I knew it was Northumber land accent because he told me so. He was a steady worker, his leisure hours he spent with his books. On clear Sundays he took fatiguingly long walks with Andy. I accompanied them only once; that sufficed. He held that the American workman would be fresher if he walked more; he hated saloons and was a teetotaller, but not rabid when it came to another man s drinking. Live and let live was his motto, though I did hear him giving Andy a blowing up on Blue Mondays. Andy liked his little drink, and on Sundays it was always a large one. But he never missed a day at his job. My dinner-pail was an object of much curiosity. When my mates saw it the first day they gasped. Our cook, who spoiled me from my birth, would fill it with several pounds of cold meat and other items in propor tion. There was enough to satisfy the stomachs of two hungry men. I look back with envy on my assumed capacity, for I never finished the portions. My friends helped me, and would then stare at me as if I were ii 4 STEEPLEJACK prize-cattle. The appellation of "hollow-legs" pursued me from my father s dining-table to my humble work bench. I was positively embarrassed by the rough, good-humoured remarks passed on my appetite. I ap preciated David Copperfield s feelings after his encoun ter with the ferocious waiter at the inn, and the land lady s obvious worriment when she whispered to the coachmen: "Take care of that boy, George, he is wisibly swelling" (I quote from memory). As cold food didn t agree with me, I ate a hot dinner in company with Tommy and Andy, at a boarding-house somewhere on Hamilton Street. The change, and the fresh air were tonics. I consumed more than ever. In the meantime my pay-envelope did not grow. I have since consoled myself with the knowledge that I earned more as a me chanic than I did at any time later when engaged in the practice of the law or conveyancing. But my hour was at hand. I was about to come to grips with a superior force. Our shop was full of whirl ing monsters that from time to time would seize a man and tear him to pieces. There was an organised hos pital service in the establishment, not to speak of acci dent-insurance for the employes. I had been warned from the beginning to avoid the drills, lathes, and other scoopers of lives. My jumper was too full in the sleeves. Tommy begged me to have them altered. I promised this. The holidays were at hand. Night work gave me a chance to earn some extra money. I was running a drill-press by this time; that is, I bored screw holes in an iron beam for the pedestals aforesaid. It was a job that needed no particular skill or judgment. The spot for the hole was indicated by a chalk mark. I enjoyed the play of the machine and was fairly industrious until A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST 115 one unlucky December night I turned to answer a neigh bour when bang ! I felt my sleeve caught in the rapidly revolving drill and the room, machines, and men turned around me as in a dream. I cried out, but couldn t hear my voice, and then my head was knocked against the iron table. I heard music singing in my ears and went to sleep without pain. It was a pleasant death. When I came to myself the voice of the sardonic Harry fell on my ears, and it smarted more than the balsam apple which they poured over my skinned arms and chest. "He swung around the circle like General Grant." It must have been the time of General Grant s world- tour as the expression "swinging around the circle" was in everyone s mouth. But it did seem cruelly in appropriate. Andy had proved my saviour; with the quickly operating wits of a practical workman he didn t seek to drag me from the dangerous drill, but simply pushed the belting off the lower wheel, the machine came to a standstill, and I fell to the floor. All the same it was a narrow squeak. There was a compensation; Emerson insists that always there is one. In this instance it proved to be the official ambulance, with a driver, a surgeon, red lights, and a gong. My mother s feelings may be imagined when this terrifying apparatus halted at our house, and good-hearted Peter Farnum went in to break the news. I can see my mother, white-faced but cool, helping me up-stairs. I wasn t much damaged. Skinned alive was the sensation, yet no bones were broken, and my case was considered a mere accident compared with the swift, horrid entanglements of unhappy men in a belt, there to be dragged to the ceiling and mangled. How ever, I had become a hero without heroism. I hadn t ii6 STEEPLEJACK cried, though there were tears of agony in my eyes when that infernal juice of the balsam apple was sprinkled over my raw flesh. Even the nervous shock failed to register. I was of tougher material than anyone sus pected, for I had always played on the belief of my mother that I was delicate because of premature birth. My nurse had predicted that seventh-month children never came to maturity. Therefore, my speedy return to normal health surprised. My mother kept the hand ful of rags that had been torn and twisted by the drill. I signified my intention of returning to the shop. I suspect it was more from a spirit of bragging than any love of the job. Of machinery I had my bellyful. But I wanted to go back and back to Baldwin s I went. There were Tommy and Andy to see, and there was Boss Farnum to thank for his kindness. I was called General Grant by Harry, who didn t like me, and re ceived with mild wonder by my two chums who said they had given me up; they praised my pluck, but ad vised me to get a lighter job. You will never make a workman, Jemmy," added Tommy. Thenceforth I trans ferred my friendship to an engineer in the big boiler-room on the Eighteenth Street side. With him I shared my copious dinners, and was rewarded by a chain of scalp- freezing stories. He told me that one day when he had run out for a wet of ale he had forgotten the water-cock and the boilers ran low. On his return he was aghast. u The boilers were foaming, my boy. Foaming. All was lost. I expected a blow-up every second. I had turned on the water, but it was too late." Breathlessly I exclaimed: "Did she blow up?" (Every machinist knows a boiler is female?) "No, she didn t, but it was a close call," he grumblingly acquiesced. "I ran out A YOUTHFUL MACHINIST 117 and shouted to the shop that she was foaming." That "foaming" caught my fancy as much as Mrs. Joe Gar- gery and her rampages. Despite my good intentions with which to pave Hades, nature intervened. A bone-breaking cold kept me in bed for a week, and the New Year found me tired of the glittering mirage of locomotive engineer. This time my father had something to say. He had observed my reading and scribbling, also my too glib tongue and a marked capacity for idling, and, naturally enough, he jumped to the conclusion that I would make a lawyer. I have read elsewhere that early in life I had my con science extracted by a psychical surgeon; perhaps my father thought of this, too; anyhow, I said farewell to Baldwin s, which had done me some good; early hours, hard work, and the association with what Walt Whit man calls: "Powerful uneducated persons." I found in them, as I still find, more strength of character, less in sipidity, and sincerer traits among workmen than I do in other strata of social life. And also a solid education, the education of life, not books. Having little time, a serious workman only reads the best. Without effusion my old comrades wished me well. Harry I didn t see, but Tommy and Andy I hated to leave. I promised to visit them every Sunday, and never did. I was become an idler with clean hands, a dude, living on other men s labour. I knew that Tommy and Andy had disowned me, so I promptly forgot them. XII LAW MY NEW MISTRESS My superficial education soon betrayed itself. No arithmetic, little writing, less grammar, and a plentiful lack of history, would these deficiencies bar me from the study of the law? My Latin and French, said my father, "might be of use." My mother was sceptical. So was I. However, on a cold, cloudy Monday, January 13, 1873, I was a g am a sullen Iamb led to the slaughter. Dr. Ellwood Wilson, who had brought most of the family into the world, had a son, a promising young lawyer, Ellwood Wilson, Jr. His offices and residence were at No. 1 1 12 Walnut Street. The house, a double one, is intact to-day. Across the street was the home of old Dr. Gross, and many a time I saw young Haller Gross come down the steps in gorgeous raiment, for he was as great a dandy then as Fred Fotterall, Dick Townsend, Ned Rogers, Louis Beylard, John King, or any of the Philadelphia Club and City Troop men. Mr. Wilson consented to take me as a law student, although I said nothing that would indicate even a fairly reasonable desire to study. I simply did as I was told. My ad venture as an engineer in quest of a locomotive had left me rather shame-faced. The daily life of a law student was apparently a lazy one. There was no salary attached, hence I didn t kill myself. Mr. Wilson was amiability personified. We began with Blackstone, Justice Shars- wood s Commentaries. Dry reading? I didn t find the work dry, as its English was an antidote for the inevi- 118 LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 119 table barrenness of the theme. The intricacies of com mon law were disclosed and explained. What racy old English wrote the worthy Blackstone. In my father s engraving cabinet there was an engraved portrait of the great man, robes and all. Yet, I invariably deserted him for Wharton and Stille s Medical Jurisprudence. There was metal more attractive. The horrors of crim inology had never been set down so attractively since I had devoured Eugene Sue s Mysteries of Paris. Natur ally, I didn t make perceptible progress in the law. I absorbed the curriculum as a sponge absorbs liquid. My preceptor examined me at intervals, and it was then I first noted what I call my mechanical memory. I memorised as would a parrot. I repeated pages without knowing their meaning. The big technical phrases I gobetted as a dog does a bone. Terminology of any sort always appealed to me. I became proficient in phrases. With medical, or scientific terminology, it is the same, whether anatomy, geology, astronomy, or cookery, the technical verbalisms were easy to remember. My judg ment centres were not much exercised, so that when I underwent regulation examinations at the Law School, or during the law course at the University I had no trouble in reeling off page after page, because I simply let my memory prompt and turn over in my mind each page as it was finished. But put me to writing out opin ions on a possible case, and my vaunted memory col lapsed. Not taking the slightest interest necessarily I had nothing to say. Later in life I met pianists who . \/ could play hundreds of pieces. I have questioned them and in nine instances out of ten I found the same me chanical memory as mine. They saw the note-groups and the pages, but the musical idea, or its emotional ex- 120 STEEPLEJACK pression, did not much concern them. Ideas were then not my shibboleth. I soon hated the law as only rep resenting conventional usage, and musty precedent filled me with disgust. I had no need of reading the diction ary, the writer s keyboard, for the reason urged by Theophile Gautier, to increase one s vocabulary; I rather studied it for Walter Pater s reason: to know what words to avoid. So is it in music. The supreme virtuoso conquers because he understands and feels. His memory is filled by the larger designs, the greater emotional curves of a composition, and not merely by a succession of notes. But this obvious truth I was to discover years afterwards. I loafed and invited my soul to reading and staring from the large window on the north side of the house. I became acquainted with the green bags of legal lumi naries. I knew them all by name and fame. I saw Richard McMurtrie go quietly by in earnest converse, or Daniel Dougherty, a household name and friend of my parents with his characteristic stride and flowing locks. Richard Dale, then a student at the Law School, would wave his hand and swing on as if the universe depended on his getting to Washington Square before 10 o clock. Lewis C. Cassidy or George Tucker Bispham would pass, or old Judge Sharswood would move along, preoccupied with his eternal legal problems. (Is there anything under the stars more sterile than the law? Rabelais doesn t exaggerate.) But my chief delight was to watch G. Heide Norris march by in all the splendour of very, very baggy trousers, and very, very high collars, accompanied by a friendly male echo likewise attired. From Mr. Norris I imbibed a passion for expensive col lars. As with Victor Maurel, the collar became a cult. LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 121 At 1 1 o clock, rain or shine, the British consul, Mr. Kortright, would heave into view; portly, choleric, pink-skinned, eyes of porcelain-china blue, and dressed as if for Pall Mall, this pleasant old gentleman was tre mendously admired by me. If I saw Dickens types everywhere, in Mr. Kortright I found the ideal Thack eray clubman. It was what Henry James calls "the emotion of recognition," and the exercise of this emotion became an overmastering one. It was that memory of mine beginning to seek analogies. I hadn t then read Hegel, but, when I did, his identification of opposites was an easy metaphysical morsel to swallow. I was always matching patterns men, women, ideas, sounds, sights, and smells. Mr. Wilson possessed an excellent library, and while I neglected Somebody or other on Contracts, Kent s Commentaries, or Coke on Littleton, I read De Foe, Smollett, Richardson, Fielding. Ah ! what bliss. Cla rissa Harlowe I mixed up with Tom Jones, and mistook Mrs. Booth for Roxana. Launcelot Greaves and the Knight of the Burning Pestle were the same, and I en joyed Moll Singleton more than I did Robinson Crusoe. I had outlived my dime-novel and Jack Harkaway days, though I confess when the author of that famous series for boys, Bracebridge Hemynge, visited America, I went to see him with more pleasure than I experienced when I squeezed the chilly hand of Matthew Arnold in Asso ciation Hall some years later. My reading was not con fined to English. French had been a master passion; all things French, painting, sculpture, and literature. Horizons widened. The world was not contained in Philadelphia. With the Centennial Exposition I suf fered my first severe attack of cosmopolitanism. That 122 STEEPLEJACK tropical summer of 1876, shall I ever forget it? The heat was so sustained and exhausting that I did not visit the exhibition grounds till the autumn. The city was gay. Jacques Offenbach conducted at his garden, Broad and Cherry Streets; Theodore Thomas gave open- air concerts in the old Forrest mansion. The streets were tinted by a hundred exotic costumes, and Finelli fried his oysters in oil. Our town was put on the map of Cosmopolis overnight. General Grant had started the machinery on the opening day he was feeble on that occasion, and had to be supported and half the world closed it. I heard Richard Wagner s five thousand dollar Centennial March played by the Thomas Or chestra, and wondered how so much money could have been wasted on such commonplace music. But the Baireuth Music Festival was in progress and I eagerly read the account in the Times. Wagner was still a dark horse, his theories those of a madman, his music un- melodious. Think of it! And "Tristran and Isolde" one prolonged melody from the prelude to the death-song. My interest in the law languished. I was otherwise occupied. The 4th of July, 1876, was not only the most memorable day in the century, but also the hottest. In a temperature of 105 degrees in my bedroom under the roof I wrote a short story, The Comet, and I don t doubt that the temperature stimulated me to lurid de scription. It was my first fiction. A comet visits our planetary system, and with dire results. Poe wrote in a more exalted vein his Colloquy of Monos and Una, and Jules Verne was at his best in his Off on a Comet. I had the temerity to sell my story for five dollars, and it duly appeared, ten years later, in a West Philadelphia journal, The Telephone. I have it in my desk with other LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 123 disjecta membra. When The Star, by Herbert Wells, appeared I realised how clumsy was my pitiable inven tion. The English author puts Poe and Verne in the shade with The Star, the supreme cosmical tale. But anyone who could write fiction on a day when the hinges of the nethermost abode were singed had the call of the inkpot. I hadn t. I disliked writing principally be cause of the pothooks and hangers involved. Invention least of all troubled me. My handwriting had become "standardised." I indited leases, wills, and engrossed mortgages and real-estate deeds. Mr. Wilson was a notary public and conveyancer, and the old-fashioned methods of searching for clear titles in the Recorder of Deeds office prevailed. I had lots of fun in the Re corder s office, over which presided a jolly stout gentle man named F. Theodore Walton. His son, lovingly known as "Pud Walton," belonged to our gang of young sters, lawyers "en herbe" and statesmen in embryo. Many mornings I spent over big leather-bound tomes bearing the cryptic letters F. T. W. (F. Theodore Wal ton s initials). Now, a title insurance gives you a title while you wait. This shoe-black part of the profession as we called it no longer exists. I grew accustomed to the smell of parchment and carried a green baize bag (full of sandwiches and fruit). It looked so professional. Occasionally, not often, I was admitted within the charmed circle of a court-room and watched the legal wheels go round. Years before I saw Twitchell, the murderer, at the bar, and also Probst a farm-hand, who had slaughtered an entire family of nine or ten. The Police Gazette was proscribed read ing, but we contrived to see it. I remember "Bill" Mann, the public prosecutor, also General Charles H. i2 4 STEEPLEJACK T. CoIIis. I became familiar with the procedure of gen- ral practice. I asked Judges for a delay, and my voice buzzed and thundered in my ears. My prime achieve ment was the day of the great Jay Cooke failure, when apparently the heavens of finance were tumbling into the Delaware River. Ellwood Wilson, Jr., contrary to the advice of his associates, precipitated that historical bankruptcy by setting off a tiny squib. A town and building association, of which he was part parent, had deposited its entire funds with Jay Cooke and Company. This was during the year 1873, *f I am no t mistaken. Armed with a subpoena I boldly entered the office of Pitt Cooke, a brother of Jay, and presented him with a summons to show why the five hundred dollars of the Freehold Mutual Company or some such title should not be returned to that important corporation. I was told that this subpoena set off the mine that blew up the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company. How true this is I can t say. I only know that I was scared blue and shivered in my skin even when the dignified banker thanked me as he accepted service. But I felt myself the guilty one, not he. Mr. Wilson s associate was Henry Galbraith Ward, a handsome young lawyer from New York, where he is to-day on the bench of the Supreme Court Appellate Division. Judge Ward took me in hand at once. Daily he put me through my paces, and my sleight-of-hand memory didn t deceive him. He would say: "Define!" and I was forced to define or be sent back to the neglected page. I realise now he was studying me. He was the willing recipient of my half-baked enthusiasms, and one day he advised me to become a musician. But LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 125 steady piano practice was abhorrent to me. Yes, dazzle an audience, but to prepare for that pleasing event ah the shoe pinched too hard. And then a new crisis had declared itself fine clothes. What Carlyle called the "dandiacal" spirit inflamed my very bones. Those pernicious collars of Heide Norris had undermined my Spartan soul. I became a dandy. No pattern in colour or design could be exaggerated enough. Finally one morning when I appeared in a snuff-coloured suit, baggy as to trousers, and preposterously cut away in the coat, Mr. Ward spoke to me paternally I don t think he was more than twenty-two years old. He argued the case of taste vs. tastelessness. Clothes, like manners, should be unobtrusive. It was Walter Pater s "tact of omis sion" in the concrete (a phrase, by the way, that Oscar Wilde calmly appropriated). I listened and my mood was chastened. I have often thought of Judge Henry Galbraith Ward when I revelled in a purple prose-panel. My temperament has always inclined to the excessive, the full-blown, the flamboyant. That clothes crisis is common to hobbydehoys. I was infatuated with Ouida, the heavy swells in Punch. Anthony TroIIope filled me with pangs of envy. His longest novel, The Way We Live Now, and the young aristocrats of the Bear Garden Club, Dolly Longstaffe, and the others, seemed ideal. Those fleshpots of Egypt were not subtle, yet they flooded my little firmament. With a chum, Charles Sloan, I contemplated setting up a trap, a dog-cart, and even the price, six hundred dollars, for a second-hand affair, didn t daunt us. Chestnut Street was transformed to Piccadilly, the Park to Rotten Row. I was badly bitten. I only read English fiction, preferably Guy Livingstone. I recovered from this attack of snobbish measles by the 126 STEEPLEJACK aid of music that universal solvent, as Henry James calls it. But London was my dream-city then. Paris came later. Dickens had fed my fancy until I saw a Dickens character behind every tree. My favourite promenade was along the Delaware River water-front, as far north as Port Richmond. How I revelled in the ships, the smell of tar and cordage, not to speak of the brackish water ! It was all in the tonality of London, and, need I add, that when I first visited that mighty city in 1878 I was disillusioned? Continued residence brought back the enchantment. I still see London through the spectacles of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trol- lope. In the nineties George Moore gave us a new pair of spectacles, though much of the old charm had gone. Boston and Philadelphia are the two American cities that remind me of London; certain localities, be it un derstood. New York is so original that it is monstrous. A new cosmopolis, one that Stendhal, greatest of cos mopolitans and promenaders of souls, would have reviled. About this period I laid the keel for a course of study upon which, if the ship had been built, I could have straightway sailed to the Blessed Isles of Knowledge. The faded red copy-book I still treasure wherein I wrote yes, with legible hand a scheme of reading that would have staggered Lord Acton, and a more omnivorous reader than he I do not know. AH English, American, Ital ian, Spanish, French, German, and classical literatures were included in this vast undertaking. The mere tran scription of the authors names covered many pages, and, remember, I only selected the best. In English I was satisfied to begin with Chaucer, ending with Ruskin and Pater. Poets, dramatists, essayists, novelists were there, LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 127 and subdivisions devoted to writers on special subjects: art, music, science. It was a five-hundred-feet book shelf, this of mine, and at least five hundred and more authors figured on it; a Rabelaisian feast, a gluttonous and greedy absorption of all the world has thought and written. When I read of Lord Acton s proposed History of Ideas the plan seemed perfectly feasible to me. My ignorance was on a par with my ambitions, which were immeasurable. It is a glorious, if foolish, time when a young man feels that the earth and the adjacent planets are his oyster; that he must make love to every pretty girl; that he will be rich, famous, happy, immortal phew ! what moral headaches after this autointoxicated nightmare. What cruel awakenings at cold, drab dawn. Ah ! Steeplejack, descend rung by rung your shaky ladder and bury in the darkest recesses of your heart the clouded visions seen from the spire of your church of dreams. The epical list would edify even such a supercritic as Paul Elmer More. It properly began with ^Eschylus or, was it GEsop? I followed the alphabetical order and ended with Xenophon. I purged all the lists as time rolled on, reading all the while, as if some devil would catch the hindmost; technical books multiplied apace. Music and art predominated. It was my fate to enter many gardens of art and only by traversing the avenues of critical literature. The great epics were my constant companions thanks to the judgment of my mother. She knew and loved the best, and if her passion for the life of the spiritual drove her to the reading of mediocre religious literature, her taste was never for a mo ment led astray. This trait she had in common with Huysmans she esteemed the piety of an author while de- 128 STEEPLEJACK testing his style. Mrs. Craven bored and so did Eugenie de Guerin. Thus it was that I read and liked St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and St. Catharine of Emmerich. It wasn t a wide step from Dante s Inferno to John of the Cross s Dark Night of the Soul. I remember a friend of my mother s, an invalid, Mrs. Joliffe, long since in some paradise, I hope, so fervently did she long for it; she was a Second Adventist, and once when the "Second Coming" seemed nigh she put on her best night-gown, and in company with a band of pious geese she went on the housetop to be nearer the sky. She caught a bad cold, but her belief remained unshaken. She had a chart of tremendous significance over which I was allowed to pore. It showed the swarming hosts of Anti christ, which were to swoop down from the impenetrable wilds of Russia, devils with high cheek-bones, a la Tar- tare, though hardly a pleasing sauce. Most of us be lieve to-day that Antichrist didn t come from unhappy Russia, but then the Russian was an unknown factor, his country still a mystery. What fun that map of Armageddon was. My mother cautioned me against its apocalyptic denunciations, yet she admitted that some day the world would be bathed in blood, but the cross of Christ would conquer. The curious part of my study-book is that I lived long enough to read and reread every book in the list. The original project was a five-year course an impossible project; fifty years it has taken me. Once in a while I refresh my memory by reading my half-crazy programme. When music had gripped my vitals I did the same thing. I calmly played every piano study that I could lay my hands on, and lived to write a long chapter about my experiences. Now, I realise that while life is too vast to LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 129 be compressed into any single formula, whether religious, philosophical, or artistic, universal wisdom has been dis tilled into certain books. All Christianity is in The Imitation of Christ, and the quintessence of secular wis dom may be found in Montaigne. No better gymnastic for the spirit is there than Plato, and woe to him that reads not the Bible not alone for the style or the "quo tations," but for the sake of his miserable soul. The classics, Greek and Latin, are what Bach and Beethoven are to musicians. Throw metaphysics to the dogs unless you like a tortoise pace in a labyrinth and leading nowhere. Lock the door of your ivory tower and drop the key into the moat. But I am boasting. All those books did not make me wise. The lucid folly of love is more illuminating. George Moore once told me it was at Baireuth that after such writing as Flaubert s the young pretender to pen-victories had better sit on a fence and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine. I believed that the better part of wisdom was to stand on the side walk of life and regard the changing spectacle, the pass ing show, in a word, the disinterested attitude of an artist, enamoured of appearances, and the bravery of surfaces. It is the Hedonistic pose. But the street overflowed my tiny pavement, and I was swept into the moving currents, and that is a salutary happening for all save the elect, who may compass the life contemplative with out becoming spiritually sterile. Bacon w r rote that "In this world, God only and the angels may be spectators." In the meantime my law studies were on the shelf. In despair I had been transferred by my parents to the law and conveyancing offices of the Hon. Daniel M. Fox, a distant cousin of my father. These offices were 1 30 STEEPLEJACK at No. 508 Walnut Street, facing Independence Square. I chummed with a young lawyer, Harry Hazlehurst, and began to keep professional hours. Mr. Fox saw to it that I was given much conveyancing work which I had to copy in a clerkly hand, and his son, H. K. Fox, helped in my studies. I frequented the Law School and listened to young Dick Dale who was to become a brilliant advocate plead a fictitious case before Judge Sharswood, the great man himself, who was kind enough to further the cause of our education. He was a modest, reticent man, whose judgments were well-nigh infallible. The younger men worshipped, yet stood in awe of him. His influence was profound. I almost took an interest, in the abstract questions which he posed. A friendship with a young man about this time made the law more human for me. His name was Wicker- sham; Samuel George Woodward Wickersham. He lived across the street from our house we had moved down-town to Race Street before the Centennial with his grandfather, George Woodward, a retired publisher. From the windows of that house came the sound of music-making. It was a cultivated family. Aubertine Woodward played the piano like an artiste; George Woodward, her brother, spouted Swinburne, the Poems and Ballads, and from his lips the insidious music of " Dolores" first fell upon my enraptured ears. Young Wickersham had a hard row to hoe. His grandfather was wealthy, but he believed that a young man should be self-supporting. So his grandson, after graduating from Lehigh University, proposed to study law. "Well and good," said this shrewd old ancestor, "but how do you propose to live in the meanwhile?" George or Sam, as we called him knew that he had a roof over his LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 131 head, but as he was of a singularly independent disposi tion, he settled the question by mastering telegraphy, reading law during his leisure hours. I can see him in his little telegraph office at the general post-office, Chest nut Street, tapping the key, studying Spanish, German, and French. Carefully apportioning his time, he con trived to work twenty-five hours a day; at least, that is what we told him. His punctuality became notorious. As the evening Angelus rang at the Cathedral on Logan Square my father would take out his watch and say: "Sammy is due," and sure enough he would turn the cor ner of Race and Seventeenth Streets before the bells ceased. As he didn t smoke or drink he had leisure when needed. He was my first example in the concrete of that awful word, efficiency. I didn t pattern after him, but I admired the manner in which he organised his life. If ever a man went straight to his goal it was young Wickersham. He had Herbert Spencer at his tongue-tip when other boys were reading Beadle s dime- novels. One day I went to see him for a chat during the luncheon hour, and I found him elated over the arrest and conviction of a swindler named Seaver. He had handled the case alone, tracing the operations of the fellow through the telegrams, and landed his man to the great relief of the postal authorities, who had despaired of the task. The subsequent career of Wickersham is history, political and otherwise. He passed his last examinations, went to New York, engaged in practice, a corporation lawyer, now of the first rank, and onetime United States Attorney General during the Taft admin istration. We wrangled like all young men, and I often heard him declare that for him the law would only be a stepping-stone to political power. He was not of a 132 STEEPLEJACK religious turn, but he espoused the cause of the Quaker, telling me that it was the one truly spiritual religion, without dogmas, superstitions, or sacerdotal flummeries, and invariably, I would reply: "A religion without dogma is a body without a skeleton, it won t stand upright." Now, the position is reversed. Mr. Wickersham is a good churchman, an Episcopalian, and I admire the Quakers. He reproached me for my faineant attitude towards life. Be up and doing ! was his policy, and I would smile indulgently at his robust will and tremendous capacity for taking pains; above all, his intellect, which could assimilate the toughest problems, pulverise cob blestones, and macerate the arguments of his legal opponents; all those qualifications for a successful career seemed to me so much waste of time and energy. I must have been an annoying person to sensible men. I have wondered how all the kind people, who advised me then and since, had so much patience; their advice I could not, or would not, act upon. The other side of George Woodward Wickersham is rather astonishing. He has a well-developed aesthetic culture. He learned to love Black and White from studying my father s col lection, and to-day he buys mezzotints and engravings. By his music he came naturally. I don t think he plays on any instrument, but he knows the tone-language after a long apprenticeship at his home. He looks the same to me as he did four decades ago, barring a greyer head. He is the picture of a grave Spaniard, an illusion that is not dispelled when he speaks the language, though he has the vivacity of an Italian. A traveller, linguist, man of the world, rich, famous, and erudite, I think Philadelphia has reason to be proud of her son, even if he was born in Pittsburgh. LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 133 Again I changed my law preceptor. New Year, 1878, I went to the office of Attorney William Ernst, No. 727 Walnut Street. The building has not changed a bit. Across the street were the offices of Benjamin Harris Brewster and John G. Johnson. Again I became a window-watcher of other people s doings, instead of poking my nose into my own business, which was sup posed to be the law. It was my last chance. Pernicious were my activities otherwise. Another crisis had super vened, music, and I never got over the attack, never shall until I die. A book had decided my vocation, St. Martin s Summer, by Annie Hampton Brewster, sister or half-sister of Attorney General Brewster. I had the courage to speak to him about this book, and he was pleased, I could see that. "Burnt-face Brewster," as he was so charitably nicknamed, was a charming man with a high, fluting voice, polished manners, and a flow of profanity that stirred my young manhood to its centre. I heard him curse an absent member of his family in the form of a syllogism that made my spine freeze. He ad mired his brilliant, cultured sister as a matter of course; all the Brewsters were brilliant and cultured. Doubtless his deformity, a face from which fire had burnt nearly all semblance of humanity, made his blasphemy more impressive. He reminded me of a ghastly illustration in Tom Moore s Lalla Rookh, a fanciful portrait of the false prophet (Query: What is the difference between a false or true prophet? Aren t they both fakirs?) Like Wilkes, said to have been the ugliest man in Eng land, Benjamin Harris Brewster used to boast that after five minutes had elapsed he could make any woman for get his hideous mask. True, but they must have been shuddering minutes. I was attracted by his ugliness. 134 STEEPLEJACK As a pleader before a jury he was very convincing, though I doubt if he had the acumen of his next-door neigh bour, John G. Johnson, or the persuasiveness of Daniel Dougherty. Mr. Johnson was a heavy-appearing man, with seal- like mustaches, sullen expression, and slow but pene trating glance, who had a way of winning cases that made him the envy of his colleagues. He was not ad mired by his staff. I disliked his personality. Years later, I told him how he rather scared us, with his grim- ness, and he smiled. In reality he was very human. After I saw his pictures I forgot the bogie of Walnut Street. Boys are a queer lot. There was Mr. Brewster, a demon of irritability, but a born wheedler when he willed, and Mr. Johnson, never choleric, impassive, if anything, yet we young chaps gave our admiration to the uglier man. Mr. Wayne MacVeagh had an office in the same building as Mr. Brewster. I knew by sight all the heavy swells of the profession. I wonder whether they were as great men as people believed? Public men, like actors, live in an artificial illumination. I recall what Richard Wagner said of Bismarck and Van Buest; the latter had pursued the composer for his political opinions with unabated rancour; for Wagner was a political refugee since 1849. Political great men, so- called statesmen, are not great, they usually have medi ocre intelligences, but are crafty, and flatter the people who are always greedy for praise, like collar-wearing dogs, averred the musician. They do more harm than good; in a few years they are forgotten, while a master- painter, poet, musician, lives on forever. The coin out lasts Caesar, as Theophile Gautier properly observed. Not a novel assertion, this of the greatest composer of LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 135 music-drama, but it contains more than a moiety of the truth. The great men of my day I ve forgotten, Lin coln, excepted. But the busy little lawyers, the grave and learned judges, the pestiferous politicians with their incessant clamourings, their raising of false, stupid, dangerous issues where are they all? Not a book, not a picture, not a melody did they bequeath to us, and so they are irretrievably dead. (This is extremely hard on those humbugs, the reformers.) My restlessness increased, spiritually, physically. One might fancy that after all these seismic manifestations that at least a mouse would crawl out from my moun tain in parturition. Nary a mouse. Only dissatisfac tion with the universe, and not a finger lifted to set it right. I was the square peg in the round hole, that s all. According to ridiculous custom of the country I had been taken to a phrenologist, Professor Fowler, to have my bumps felt, my genius proclaimed, my share on the globe staked out. Phrenology, thanks to the labours of Spurzheim and Gall, was once believed in; its true relation to our knowledge of the brain being what astrology is to astronomy. But the superstition pre vailed. Solemnly my expectant mother was assured that I had a capacity for anything if I could be per suaded to apply myself seriously which I never could; furthermore, I had the centrifugal temperamant, not the centripetal. President Wilson has the centripetal tem perament, or as he puts it, a "one-track mind." So has my friend, Mr. Wickersham. Both men concentrate. Colonel Roosevelt had the centrifugal cast of mind; evidently I have the same. I fly off with ease on any tempting tangent, also off my handle. The aptitude dis- 136 STEEPLEJACK played by the Yankee for a half-dozen pursuits is the sign-manual of the centrifugal soul. It is pleasant to hear the whirring of its wheels though they serve no particular purpose. Thrashing the sea, eating the air promise-crammed, filling the belly with the east wind, fighting windmills these are a few attributes of the cen- trifugalist. He is nothing if not versatile. His intensity lasts ten minutes. He is focal in consciousness, as the psychologists say, but his marginal subconsciousness is strongly obtruded. The sensory periphery is more mas terful than the hub of his being. When Professor Fowler was told that my birthday occurred on the last day of January, he exclaimed: "The Water-Carrier," and seemed relieved. Sons of Aquarius, fickle, thirsty not water for knowledge, are the rolling stones that gather no moss. Now, that had always appealed to me the non- gathering of moss. Precisely for that reason the roll ing stone is more successful than its stationary brother who accumulates the moss of decadence. The centrifugal- ist is usually an optimist. All is for the best in this best of demi-mondes. The flowers of evil that blossom in the hothouse of hell become pretty pansies when plucked by a centrifugal poet. There are a lot more things I could tell you in defense of this nature, but these arguments made no impression on my parents, who were beginning to suspect that I was a shirker. I was, though my wak ing hours were stuffed with febrile gestures. If I had been a poet I might have replied to my critics that I was beat ing my luminous wings in the void, but, being neither Shelley nor Arnold, I shrugged my shoulders and watched the sky, hoping roast larks would fall into my expectant mouth. Daniel Dougherty w r as consulted. "Mary," he said to my mother, and I, sulking in the background, "the LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 137 law is a jealous mistress, and if the boy doesn t like it set him to something he does like." I mentally ap plauded this decision, though I wondered at the banality of the quotation. I was at the hypercritical age, believ ing that no phrase should be repeated, an insane notion that often afflicts "stylists." Mr. Dougherty was then in the flower of his reputation, though he hadn t yet made his famous speech nominating Grover Cleveland. His trump card was oratory. He held most juries in the hollow of his hand. His devotion to the Irish cause, to my grandfather, James Gibbons, who had encouraged his youthful ambitions, was unquestionable, although he was worldly enough, as are all lawyers, to foresee that the Fenian cause was a forlorn hope. As he possessed tact he knew how to carry water on both shoulders, but as a churchman his sincerity could not be challenged. His relations with my parents were cordial, and despite the changing years he was always "Dan" to them. From what I have been told his legal erudition was hardly profound; rhetoric, flowery and forcible, was his forte. However, they never called him "Judge Neces sity," as they did Judge Allison, or was it old Judge Finletter? because "Necessity knows no law" a vener able epigram that was moss-grown when I first heard it. Daniel Dougherty, like so many men of Irish blood, had the head and features of a Roman Senator. You looked for the toga. Handsome, eloquent, scornful, his reso nant voice still rolls and rings in the chambers of my memory. His wife, his sons, his daughters are, like himself, gone. The boys were school friends. Charlie Dougherty was a long time at the Roman Embassy, and in Paris beloved of newspaper men. For years he was a correspondent from Paris. My father s card parties were well attended. Mark 138 STEEPLEJACK Wilcox, Michael Dohan, John and William Lucas, Gen eral Ruff, General Walker, Ferdinand Fetherston, editor of The Evening Bulletin, and other well-known men would play whist, old-fashioned whist, till the lights burned blue. Occasionally my father played a rubber at the Philadelphia Club, with General Meade, General Ruff, and General Walker the latter a Rebel officer, and one time adversary of Meade. I can see the old gentleman in high spirits preparing for these reunions, his wide- spreading collar, setting off a singularly attractive head. Rafael Joseffy after seeing him whispered to me: "He looks like a Magyar Magnate." I never saw one, but he did. Editor L. Clark Davis was a visitor. My mother admired his wife, Rebecca Harding Davis, a novelist, and mother of Richard Harding and Charles Belmont Davis. The Davis boys were friends of John Ruff, the son of the general. Many times we played together in the yard of the Ruff mansion on Filbert above Sixteenth Street. There would be John Ruff, Dick and Charlie Davis, my brother Paul, and, at intervals, Sam Wicker- sham. The Davis boys were then freckle-faced. Later Dick became a newspaper reporter, and, need I add, a figure in the field of fiction. I wonder if Charlie Davis ever recalls the Ruff yard and the fierce games in which pirates were heroes ! Sam Wickersham didn t believe in pirates; he only believed in lawyers. But the clearest call of my life was sounding. Music began to fill my ears with its sweet importunings and I hopelessly suc cumbed. At last, that abominable inhibitory sign, "No Thoroughfare" vanished from my foreground and the pathway was shining. If I had known what I now know but don t let us waste time in regrets. Music, the Conqueror, beckoned to me and up the stairway of art I LAW MY NEW MISTRESS 139 have pursued the apparition ever since up, a steep stairway, like one in a Piranesi etching, the last stair always falling into space as you mount, I have toiled, the dream waving me on. I shall never overtake this dream, but with Sadak seeking the waters of oblivion, in John Martin s design, I must mount till poor old Steeplejack falls earthward (much to the relief of my neighbours who have heard me trying to play the A minor section of Chopin s Second Ballade for the last forty years). XIII MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA Philadelphia is a music-loving city. Its history proves the assertion. Opera in Italian has always had a vogue, and, like opera elsewhere, it is first fashionable, then artistic. Real music that means orchestral has a fol lowing there which is gratifying, though a local symphony orchestra they have not had so many years. Visiting orchestras with solo singers, pianists, violinists, and other instrumentalists, supplied our early deficiency. Honour is due to such pioneers as Michael H. Cross and Charles H. Jarvis whose portraits in bronze adorn the lobby of the Academy. The Cross and Jarvis symphony con certs in Musical Fund Hall were in existence before the advent of Theodore Thomas and his orchestra. They were not financially successful, but much good came from them. Young folk enjoyed the classical repertory: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, and were well grounded when Thomas introduced mod ern music. And this was as it should be. At Michael Cross s string quartet parties on Saturday nights I heard the entire quartet literature. I was only a youngster, but I could hum the themes from any of the numerous Haydn quartets, and at one time, urged thereto by Louis Gaertner, I began to fiddle, hoping to master the viola parts. The original Cross quartet consisted of Carl Gaertner, Sr. alternating with William StoII Simon Stern, second, Roggenberger, viola, Michael Cross, violoncello. At the age of forty, Mr. Cross took up the 140 MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 141 cello and played it in quartet. His teacher was Leopold Engelke, our vocal director at the Roth Academy. When Engelke or Charles Schmitz, a professional, took the cello part, then Cross played the viola. Sam Mur ray often played second, or else Billy Ware, an incred ibly fat man who sported a linen duster Summer and Winter, indoors and out. A lovable personality his. Those were jolly nights of music-making. I usually stayed all night in Summer; the Cross home was empty. Mr. Cross undertook my musical education. He was rather cynical on the subject, advising me to stick to the law, for, said he, the musician s life is a dog s life. He was truly a cynical man in all his views. His versatility was marked. I best liked his piano playing, though his technique was limited, but he had a singing touch, his taste was sound, his style clear and musical. He played Mozart in a limpid manner, and the Field Nocturne was his battle-horse. His organ-playing leaned heavily on improvisation. He was not a virtuoso on any instru ment. He taught all; a chorus conductor of the Orpheus and the St. Cecilia, and organist at the Cathedral for many years. An all-round musician of the old school, disdaining specialists and virtuosi. Chopin composed music in a cellar he said and he preferred Kalkbrenner. But once in my presence, he called Sterndale Bennet "small potatoes," and I began to hope for his conver sion to modern music. The truth is that in Philadelphia then Mendelssohn was first and the others somewhere out in the field. His rival for there was concealed rivalry between the two men was Charles H. Jarvis, a piano virtuoso of the first rank that is, in a school of playing long since obsolete. He had been technically grounded in Hummel, i 4 2 STEEPLEJACK and his delicate touch, pearly scales, and finished style were unimpeachable. His musicianship was not so broad in scope as Cross s but it was more thorough. He was master of the keyboard, nothing else; he didn t compose, conduct, or play on a stringed instrument; as an organist he was merely a salary earner, but his knowledge of the piano repertory from Alkan to Zaremb- ski, if we put the matter alphabetically, or, say, from the early Italians to Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, was aston ishing. As a prima- vista reader he could have challenged Saint-Saens, though not of orchestral scores. He never played without notes, telling me that some day von Billow or Rubinstein would break down in public. He had not a musical memory, that was the reason. De Pachmann never played concerto with orchestra with out notes; he once had a bad smash-up in public. Jarvis was not so musical as Cross. He was an intellectual artist, not an emotional one. Tonal monotony was felt by his audience before the end of his lengthy programmes. The illuminating phrase never came, but there was infallible technique and a flowing style. One Summer he gave twenty private recitals at his residence on North Nineteenth Street, devoted to the historical development of piano music, and not only solo but chamber-music, duos, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, and octets Onslow, Hummel, Fesca, Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn. Carl Gaertner fiddled first, as usual, and made up for uncouth method and scratching by his enthusiasm and genuine musical understanding. It was positively fascinating for me to see Charlie Jarvis in his shirt sleeves, like his confreres, ploughing through a mass of antiquated compositions fancy Onslow or KaJkbrenner, or the Ries piano concerto in C sharp minor ! and with a vim that was stimulating. MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 143 At the Cross parties I heard the old string-quartet litera ture, the piano was seldom used; at the Jarvis recitals all piano concertos with string quartet accompanying from the Bach D minor to Henselt s in F minor, were given in a finished manner, though profound interpre tations were absent. Von Billow was the piano god of Jarvis, for Cross it was only Rubinstein. And Cross was right. Years later, and shortly before his sudden and lamentable death, Charles Jarvis visited me at the office of the Musical Courier, then on Union Square. His opinions of music and musicians had little changed. He had spent several years abroad. He complained that modern piano virtuosi banged too much, and he didn t hesitate to condemn the so-called "orchestral" style. Liszt and Rubinstein were to blame; the latter had a marvellous touch, but he couldn t hold a candle to Thai- berg in the art of singing on the keyboard. I heard the same judgment from the lips of Georges Mathias of the Paris Conservatoire, a pupil of Chopin, who declared that Rubinstein butchered the exquisite music of Chopin. Back to Hummel ! cried Jarvis. With all my heart, I said, but to play in the colourless, withal chaste manner of Hummel, and to pass over as non-existent the modern palette of tone-colour, with its varied range, its nuances, its atmospheric pedalling no, that would be impossi ble. You may set the clock back an hour but you can t fool the sun. As a matter of history we have heard three pianists who combined the purity of the Hummel school with the iridescent colour-scheme of the moderns need I mention the names of Vladimir de Pachmann, Rafael Joseffy, and Leopold Godowsky? The violinist, Carl Gaertner (there was no "von" as a handle to his name then) was an eccentric man, of vio- 144 STEEPLEJACK lent temper, his heart, however, in the right place, but he was as vain as a peacock. He was a perfect example of the popular conception of a musician. He acted in a crazy fashion whenever he had an audience of even two; but he wasn t crazy, far from it. My mother, who heartily disliked his rude pranks, admitted his brains, Jewish brains she called them. Gaertner came to America about the same time as Carl Sentz, and was a drummer in the band. He studied the violin after set tling here, and never mastered it. He often played out of tune, and his style lacked tonal suavity and facile technique. His vanity as a musician was only topped by his masculine conceit. A preposterous dandy, he thought he was irresistible with the unfair sex. When he strutted down Chestnut Street, he was, literally, the observed of all observers. No wonder. A waist pinched in he undoubtedly wore a corset his shoulders pad ded, a low-cut collar revealing too much neck, long floating hair, elaborately curled, surmounted by a grace less chimney-pot, invariably a crimson necktie, yellow kid gloves, trousers painfully tight, lacquered boots with straps he was simply wonderful. Through narrowed eyes he disdainfully regarded the passing crowd. His contempt for Americans was true to type. Because Philadelphians refused to admire his scraping of the classics, though good-humouredly, mocked his affecta tions, therefore, we were pigs, blind to finer issues. So he fought on, and in the end did accomplish something. His zeal for good music found expression in his concerts given as a rule in the Foyer of the Academy of Music. I don t believe they were lucrative, any more than the Jarvis Soirees at Natatormm Hall, across the street, But they served their purpose. There, a small nucleus of MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 145 music-lovers were introduced to the best in musical literature. To be sure, the terrible old man fiddled like a demon, but a virile demon oh ! how he hated Sarasate and the whole tribe of "sugar- water violinists" and stamped his foot so loudly that one night Rudolph Hennig, a true artist on the violoncello, warned him if he didn t stop, he would quit the quartet. It is a fact that in the Gaertner music studio there were three busts : Mozart, Beethoven and Carl Gaertner s. How pain ful were our lessons. In company with Franz Schubert, already an excellent violinist, I stood a weekly brow beating that would have discouraged a Joachim. "Hein ! you think you play the viola some day. Hein ! A toy fiddle is what you ought to get, hein!" all this in a raging voice and with an accent that would have made him a hero at Weber and Fields . He bullied poor Schu bert who finally rebelled, though in a mildly sarcastic way. He told the old man: "When you learn to play in tune then I may learn something from you." We fled at once after this, pursued by stormy vows of vengeance. My father was informed that I played like five pigs, that I had better study that tin pan, the piano. The two sons of Gaertner were musical; Carl, Jr., on the cello, Louis, the violin, a pupil of Joachim and a far better artist than his father. When Wilhelmj came to Philadelphia in 1880 he had as accompanists Max Vogrich, Hungarian pianist and composer, and Constantine Sternberg, a Russian piano virtuoso and I think a composer of piano music worthy enough to be ranked in the same class with Scharwenka and Moszkowski. Perhaps he remembers the scene in the green room of the Academy, when Carl Gaertner pompously entered, gave his card to the giant August 146 STEEPLEJACK Wilhelmj, and politely remarked: "If I played the Mendelssohn concerto as you did to-night, I would be hissed off the stage, as you should have been." All this in German. Wilhelmj, who had played like a god, re mained impassive, called to his secretary: "Hans, show this gentleman the door." After that Wilhelmj could not play at all, according to his irate critic. But Gaert- ner met his match in Eduard Remenyi, who was the Liszt of the fiddle, technically. This little bald Hungarian Jew, who looked like a fat unfrocked priest, came to see us, on Sunday nights. A linguist, a travelled man of culture, he was always interesting. He was playing at the time at Mannerchor Garden, at Franklin Street and Fairmount Avenue, kept by Robert Tagg, and I think down on his luck. Carl Sentz led these open-air concerts. Remenyi abused Brahms, in a public address, for steal ing a Hungarian dance of his. We heard lots about Liszt and Wagner from him. It was true that he played in concert with both Liszt and Brahms. His real name, he told us, was Hoffman; Remenyi is Hoffman translated into Hungarian. "I am a born Roman Catholic, an Abbe," he avowed to my mother, and then winked at my father, adding in an undertone: "a Kosher Abbe." He looked it. He always fetched with him to any musical reunions two violins, a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius. He called one of them the Princess, which one, I forget. His tone was full, his style supple. With what head-wagging he would play his fiery version of the Rackoczy March or with what a sliding technique he would fiddle the D flat Valse of Chopin, a difficult feat, not alone because of the treacherous double-thirds, sixths, octaves, and tenths, but because of the dizzy speed and the ungrateful key of D flat. He was a MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 147 master of masters, Remenyi; and his charlatanism was only a copy of Paganini s and Liszt s. A member of an old Hungarian noble house, the De Vay a distinguished prelate of the same family visited America later turned up in the city, playing the violin in superlative fashion, and gambling away every dollar he earned in concert-giving. This Leonard de Vay had studied with Remenyi; and when he encountered his master he was embarrassed. He, too, had his violin, and with him was an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso, the E flat clarinet, a Hungarian named Matrai Pista (that is Peter Matus or Matrai). When my father saw De Vay face Remenyi, not shaking his hand, he whispered to me: "Look out, the fur will fly!" Luckily it didn t. Rem enyi bowed and said a few welcoming words in Hun garian, but De Vay did not take his fiddle from its case. Matus opened the evening with a cascade of notes, a richly embroidered Hungarian Czardas, unac companied, which he naively confessed he had "made up" after hearing some gypsies play on their native Putzta. Remenyi was interested. He complimented the clarinetist who was later with the Gilmore band and as he had coached me in the piano parts of Wieniawski s "Legende," and Prume s "Melancholia," I was forced to accompany this very great artist. Remenyi played with passion and poesy. The climax of the evening was his tender interpretation of Schubert s "Ser enade" which he delivered on his knees before my mother, who took his homage in good temper. My father was greatly annoyed, why, I can t understand, for Remenyi was all smiles, his tongue in his cheek. "Parcel of fools," was the governor s verdict when the party left. That night must have been one of wild revelry according to 148 STEEPLEJACK the report of Matus. They went to some cafe and at seven in the morning were quarrelling over a question of technique. But in the evening Remenyi played in his accustomed form at the Garden, while De Vay eloquently held forth at a garden on Girard Avenue be low Seventh Street. As I said, old man Gaertner came off second best in the tilt he had with Remenyi. (Remenyi was a bit of a charlatan, but Gaertner was the bigger of the pair.) One night, after the Hungarian virtuoso had finished a Bach Sonata, unaccompanied oh, yes ! we listened to Bach at open-air concerts in those benighted days when a hissing was heard. Remenyi bowed. "Will the critic who hissed my Bach please make himself known?" he said in his ironic manner. Immediately the only Carl Gaertner arose, anxious to vindicate the musical taste of the town: "You play Bach like a fool!" he roared. Remenyi smiled. Then in a burst of gener osity he tendered his violin to Gaertner, adding: "Per haps I do, but will my critic show me how not to play Bach like a fool?" He underlined "not," and the other shrugged his shoulders and stalked out of the garden followed by howls and jeers. Remenyi won that time. The occurrence got into the newspapers, but Carl Gaert ner never turned a hair. The only man who did succeed in taking the starch out of his ludicrous dignity was a young barytone, Max Heinrich by name, afterwards to become a significant figure in the musical world. One night, a wet night, after much music-making at the Cross house, the party went in search of more refresh ment, solid and liquid. An old hostelry stood at the corner of Race and Sixteenth Streets and was kept by a MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 149 publican named Dunn. The place was noted for its fish cakes and musty ale. There, a certain convocation took place, and during its progress, Gaertner said something in praise of Germany. At once, Max Heinrich went up into the air. He had escaped military duty in Saxony and had become an ardent lover of our democracy. He cursed the old Kaiser, he cursed Bismarck, and he made so much noise that the lobby was broken up by Pop Dunn, who didn t like rows on his premises early Sun day morning. Squabbling, the violinist and singer went to the sidewalk to settle their differences. Although the elder, Carl Gaertner was a powerful, deep-chested man with muscles like steel, he would have made mince-meat of the slender Heinrich if he could have reached him. But Max knew better. Taking a glittering weapon from his back pocket he pointed it at Gaertner crying: "Go down on your knees and say To H-II with Bismarck ! or Til shoot you through the gizzard." Scared, the old man did as he was told and renounced Bismarck and all his works. Then Heinrich shrieked with laughter. It was only a metal shoe-buttoner, that pistol. In the fracas some one lost his false teeth and there was much rummaging and lighting of matches before they were restored to the owner. But after that affair, Gaertner hid his patriotism under a bushel. In 1916, when Heinrich died, he was as implacable a foe to his Fatherland, politically considered, as in the middle seventies. He was as well-known in London as in San Francisco as a singer of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. With few exceptions I never met a man so completely an artist as he. His voice was not remarkable; a barytone with a low range; a "basso cantante," he called himself. His tone was often hard, hollow, "gum- 150 STEEPLEJACK my," is the exact word, and his enunciation guttural. He never mastered English, his pronunciation after many years residence here and in England, leaving much to be desired, yet his musical intelligence, the emotional temperament, carried his hearers away, literally "on the wings of song." In his best estate his work in "Elijah" or any of the classical oratorios was unapproachable, and he had plenty of rivals in that field with more sonorous voices, Franz Remmertz, among the rest. But Heinrich outshone them all musically; the intensity of his dra matic nature transfigured his rather commonplace vocal resources. His versatility was best expressed in song interpretations. Such an emotional range and feeling for swiftly changing moods I have never heard with the exception of Marcella Sembrich and Lilli Lehmann. And remember that he had no personal glamour, in the sense of good looks, as had these women singers; his bold hawk-like profile, and too narrow face, were not par ticularly attractive, had he not such brilliant eyes which mirrored his evanescent moods. He was magnetic, light- hearted, generous, and I fear that he hung his fiddle outside the door, as they say in Ireland. Yet he was not only the "joy of the street and the sorrow of the house hold" but also a joy at home. A more loving and quick tempered father I never saw. Happily married to a musical wife, Anna Schubert Heinrich, he lived every minute he could spare from his professional duties and a game of pinochle within his own four walls. In 1876 his little house with a garden in front was on Cherry below Twentieth Street. It is there to-day, Max, who was the father of at least eight or ten children, led the life of an artistic sybarite. His versatility was not con- MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 151 fined to his music he played his own accompaniments in an incomparable style but manifested itself in painting. He was mad over landscape and animals. In the house, besides babies which sprawled everywhere, you would encounter a wind-hound, a flute on four legs, puppies of various breeds and a formidable Russian mastiff, broad of chest, with a baying voice that sent policemen scurrying round the block. A cruel beast. I often saw it jump from a second-story window to the lawn and nab a cat by the neck. Crunch ! The cat s spine was broken. Max named the brute Bismarck. I asked him why, for I knew he hated the Iron Chancellor. "Because he kills so many cats/ was the cryptic reply, followed by peals of sarcastic laughter. There was a Mephisto concealed in Heinrich. And the birds. They were uncaged and owned the house. A spectacle for the gods was Max Heinrich, as stark as the day he was born, pipe in mouth, palette in one hand, brush in the other sitting in his half-filled bathtub painting an imaginary landscape, the easel stretched across the tub. "It s cool!" he would say, on one of those sweltering August mornings when other people s vitality would be depleted by such sultry con ditions; he, on the contrary, was more noisy, more vig orous than ever. The joy of life ! That he had as few have it. He tingled with vitality. He imparted his high spirits to his companions. The babies sat up and gurgled when he passed, the birds flew to his shoulder, the dogs barked. A happy household. His nervous wife would sometimes go outdoors to escape this trucu lent happiness. She was blonde, charming, possessing a divine patience, not only as a mother but as an artiste. 152 STEEPLEJACK She sang musically. At Concordia Hall I saw her as Marguerite to her husband s Mephisto. She looked the part without make-up. It was as a guitar virtuosa, however, that she made her reputation. She mastered that difficult and "ungrateful" instrument, making it something more than mere string strumming. I have heard her play the A flat study of Chopin, the "Aeolian Harp" most effectively. The little menage didn t al ways run on oiled wheels, for Heinrich was a bohemian to whom regular hours were destructive of his own per sonal rhythms which were many. He earned plenty of money and spent it, though his family came first. He sang at the Cathedral, where my mother had introduced him to Father Elcock, and on Saturdays he sang at the Hebrew Synagogue on Broad Street. He had all the brilliancy and versatility of the Jewish temperament; also a choleric nature. His theory was that if you couldn t do a thing at first throw out of the box it was his own dicing simile then you would never do it; which is pure nonsense. When he allowed me to play an accom paniment to his singing, if the slightest slip or stumble occurred on my part, he would slap my neck, not softly, and curse me for a sloven. He got over this irritable precipitancy with the passage of the years, and his art gained thereby in repose and mellowness. During the last decade of his life his singing was a thing of beauty be cause of its profound interpretative power and pene trating intensity. A dynamic man. He was the first artist I saw who borrowed from a music-critic; the other way round is the popular belief. Max asked H. E. Krehbiel, critic of the New York Tribune, for a five- dollar bill. He got it. His Cherry Street landlord was Joshua Gregg, the wool-man. Heinrich owed a month s MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 153 rent. Gregg came to collect it. Max sang "The Heart bowed down by weight of woe," and the rent was re mitted by Gregg, with tears in his eyes. Oddly enough, he was only a Mendelssohn singer when I first knew him; and the old barytone repertory: Lort- zing, Mozart, Marschner, and Abt, yes "Swallows Homeward Fly" Abt. We fought about the merits of Schubert and Schumann till he took them up, and it wasn t long before he was in love with the entire song literatures. At a time when Brahms and Robert Franz were rather patronised by critics, he sang both with sympathy. I always liked him better than I did George Henschel who also played the piano or the operatic Franz Wtillner. Heinrich, on a bet, studied and played Chopin s E flat Polonaise, at that time so exquisitely delivered by the crystalline fingers of Rafael Joseffy; and he also took up the violin for a year and played the second violin in Haydn s D minor string quartet. This, too, on a wager. Naturally, I was lost in the penumbra of this irresistible artist. Older by ten years, neverthe less he made a companion of me, calling me a "pale face" and reproaching me for not being man enough to take a drink once in a while (every ten minutes). But I was then austere. I had mapped out a plan of study from which plan I never swerved at least for an hour or two. I was a bit of a prig. I didn t dissolve in the warm bath of these ill-assorted personalities. I pre ferred the companionship of Franz Schubert a living human, not the composer who was the brother of Mrs. Heinrich. The musical furore sounded in my skull. I had heard Rubinstein and couldn t appreciate him (1873), k ut his Calmuck features, Beethoven-like head, 154 STEEPLEJACK and extravagant gestures fascinated me. His playing was velvet-thunder; that s the fantastic way I described it to myself. Twenty years later, when I heard this giant at his seven historical piano recitals in Europe, I took his true measure a heaven-storming one. Von Billow at the Academy and Annette Essipova at As sociation Hall, both during the season of 1875-1876, filled me with joy. The magic brew began its work. Never had the law seemed a drearier mistress. I thought of nothing but piano technique; my experiments in prestidigitation were transposed from cards and coins and the blossoming of conjurer s flowers, to the key board, to Mozart, Haydn, yes, even to Carl Czerny, the indefatigable chemist who distilled studies to grease weak fingers. Max Heinrich encouraged me. My father did not. As an experienced amateur he foresaw loose company, irregular hours, and the drudgery of teaching. He foresaw clearly. My mother, who had given up all hope for my priestly vocation, thought I might become an organist and play the Cathloic service "Ad majorem Dei gloriam." I had studied piano with little result when a child, and with an old German named Carl Rudolph, a hornist who had a marked sense of rhythm, a clear touch but no technique to speak of on the pianoforte. He could play dance music well, the old-fashioned kind: Strauss, the elder, Lanner, Diabelli, but Chopin was a sealed book to him. Once when I presumptuously played "at" the "Military Polonaise" the grey-haired teacher shook his head, saying: "I don t call that music." Later I went to another pedagogue, but he stiffened my wrists and fingers, and I quit him; besides, magic held my in terest then. But in 1875 ^ was different. I heard the call and obeyed it, and have regretted doing so ever since that is, when I look at my bank-book. a 3 MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 155 With Franz Schubert I traversed the entire land of literature for violin and piano; but my ambition excelled my technical ability. I was a "fmgersmith," to be sure, but I needed a solid grounding in the essentials of the art, also fundamental brainwork, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti used to say. In my predicament I went to Michael Cross and frankly asked him to help me, telling him that later I would pay him for his in struction. My mother joined the conspiracy, my father being kept in ignorance and soon I was launched in mid stream as a student of the piano. My music copy-book tells me the date, number of lessons, also the list of pieces undertaken. September 25, 1875, I began; I ended May, 1878. My first Sonata was the Mozart in D, the last Beethoven s opus 31, No. 3. To take lessons I had to be at the Cross piano at six A. M. He was an early riser. I sneaked out of the house, my music hidden in my coat, for fear of meeting my father usually gone on his busi ness before that hour. He was no doubt surprised at my activity but never suspected the cause. At nine A. M. I was at my desk in the office of Daniel M. Fox ready for the transcription of some dull will or deed of real estate. My leisure hours were devoted to music- study. I got along fairly well, though I had to unlearn lots when I went to other masters. Michael Cross was not modern in his treatment of the piano; furthermore, he gave his pupils more Mozart than Bach; he believed more in the lyric than the polyphonic. He played Bach, though I never heard his Bach on the organ; Mozart was his passion, and an admirable passion it is; but his pupils suffered for want of variety, just as the Roth scholars suffered from too much Latin. Jarvis should have been my teacher. He began with Hummel and 156 STEEPLEJACK Bach. He believed in a sound technical apparatus, then the music (if you had any in you) would take care of itself. Cross practised the reverse. Music first, tech nique afterwards all very well for a finished artist but hampering to a student. Once, when I had played Men delssohn s "Rondo Capriccioso" too glibly, he put me on a simpler diet and banished finger-studies. Since then I have gone to the opposite extreme and swallowed too many technical studies with consequent digital indiges tion. When you study piano, study with a pianist. Michael was not a specialist. I remember Theodore Thomas telling me years later that he found the choral bodies trained by Cross remiss as to attack, intonation, and rhythmic sense; all of which may have been an ill- tempered slur of the great conductor. Time fugued by. I became a slacker as far as the law was concerned. I was always at the heels of Max Hein- rich, or playing the bass in piano duos, Mrs. Heinrich taking the treble. Musically, I owe much to that amia ble and estimable woman. And I closely hugged the neighbourhood where I might hear Mr. Jarvis play, or the Cross string quartet. There were summer nights when I leaned out of my window longing for music. I could hear the soft strains from the back garden we were removed from the Cross music room by two houses and I dreamed and yearned, as only a lad love-sick with art can yearn. Life stretched like a lyric ray of moonlight paving the silvery waters of the future. Nothing seemed impossible. All was permitted. I felt an invincible force within my veins the swelling sap ! Ah ! Youth is immortal. But youth can t always foot the bills. My father had to. The secret came out, and MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 157 he promptly paid my three years tuition without grum bling. Michael was a life-long friend, a lover of engrav ings, too, and on his walls hung several masterpieces, gifts from my father. A cultivated man, Mr. Cross, the owner of a well-assorted library, in which I browsed for years, and a man who attracted friends; indeed, he was the object of friendships rather than friendly him self. He was self-contained, frigid at times, but could unbutton in the seclusion of his music-study. A high liver, he held the championship for disposing of edibles and liquids. The late Dennis McGowan, then at San- som and Fifteenth Streets, told me that when Michael Cross was in his prime he would open a hundred and odd oysters for him at a sitting, and saw them washed down with tankards and tankards of "musty." But it should not be forgotten that he was a huge man physically, not so monstrous in size as Billy Ware, but of a Brobding- nagian presence and capacity. I envied him then; I envy him now. Apart from his annual attack of gout no one ever saw him the worse for all this. With a punc tuality that was chronic he occupied his organ bench in the choir of the Cathedral and often played so expres sively after High Mass that my mother would say to me: " Michael played as if inspired to-day," and when I repeated this he would reply, his eye twinkling: "Yes, at Van Hook s last night." He didn t mean to be cynical nor was he a materialist; but he knew the law of metabol ism. He knew that rich food and fermented drink was a nourishment that might be transmuted into beautiful sounds by accomplished musicians. Plain living and high thinking is well enough for saints or philosophers but not for sinners or singers. The Van Hook he referred to had a restaurant at the 1 58 STEEPLEJACK northeast corner of Twentieth and Tower Streets. It had a wide vogue. The proprietor was a handsome blond man, hospitable as the night was long, and a famous contriver of mixed drinks. But the glory of the place was the cooking of Mrs. "Billy" Van Hook, then a fair-haired, blue-eyed young matron with a fried- oyster technique only second to Finelli s down Chestnut Street. There were some connoisseurs who preferred the Van Hook interpretation. Her chicken and lobster salads, her deviled crabs were masterpieces in miniature. It was not alone the artistic and musical crowd that patronised the Van Hooks; club men from Walnut Street found their way to the little restaurant, those dashing young bucks, Jack McFadden and AI Hether- ington, among the rest. But the Cross, Jarvis, Gaert- ner, Billy Ware a marvellous virtuoso with the oyster- fork Max Heinrich party went to Van Hook s as to a church. Max called it "St. Billy s" and Billy would re tort: "Not for too many bills"; he was easy in money matters and when in hard luck he helped a fellow through. He never had the reputation for terrapin enjoyed by McGowan or Augustine, but Michael Cross always swore that his most malignant gout was developed by Mrs. Van Hook s terrapin. You must not suppose that Schubert and I were intimately admitted in the sacred circle; we were happy witnesses, contemporaries. I, as a pupil of Cross, Franz as a brother-in-law of Heinrich. But it was no Barmecide s feast for us. We swallowed real food and drink while our seniors swallowed theirs, and we saw some strange doings. Proving that time oc casionally halts, I may add that the same Mrs. Van Hook more power to her elbow still lives, cooks, and has her being, in a restaurant, bearing her name, behind MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 159 the Custom House, where the oysters are fried under her surveillance and where (tell it not in Gath or Gotham) they taste as they did forty years ago. After that, don t speak to me about time, its whirligigs and caprices. Strange to say, despite his marked dramatic aptitude and personality, Max Heinrich was not a success as an operatic singer. He was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company, New York, for several seasons. I think 1887-1888, perhaps earlier, but with the exception of a fairly good characterisation of the Night Watch man in The Mastersingers, and other minor roles, he did not shine in comparison with such acting-singers as Emil Fischer, Robinson, von Milde, or the mighty Albert Niemann. His art was essentially intimate, and destined for the smaller spaces of the concert stage, and not for the broader key of fresco-painting, which is the operatic. But give him a grand piano, a sympathetic audience, and he could make you forget all the gauds and chicaneries of opera, and the inartistic bellowing of opera-singers. He was a rare artist, Heinrich, and it is a peculiar satis faction to his friends that his mantle has fallen on the shoulders of his daughter, Julia Heinrich, soprano, born in Philadelphia, educated by her father, an opera-singer in New York, as well as on the continent, but a concert- singer born. She is vocally better equipped than was her father, she has his musical memory and the special art of accompaniment. In the latter art, he drilled me for years, and even to-day when I support a singer at the piano I have a freezing sensation on the nape of my neck. It is the functioning of my memory-cells through association of ideas. My neck remembers the slaps ad ministered by Max, as he sang, making an occasional parenthesis such as: "Chim, verdammte Esel! why 160 STEEPLEJACK don t you keep time?" And the "damnable ass" would bow his head to the anticipated blow. It never failed to register. I have taken some pains to describe the man and my admiration for him. Yet, such is the irony of the years, the last time I saw him, several months before his death, and in company with Julia Heinrich, we disputed like a pair of old fools over trifling data. He had the rather unusual weakness of pretending to be older than he was, and he persisted in treating me as a child no older than I was in 1876; childish, withal, we called each other familiar, though not complimentary names. I was again "Chim" the "Esel," and secretly I was scared. There was fire in the eye of the old war-horse. The extinct volcano spouted again. I was glad to see such vitality. He said he was seventy-two years of age; he was only sixty-six. I told him so. He called me a liar. The joke was that his New York friends and admirers gave him an elaborate dinner on his seventieth birthday. I asked him why. He couldn t help smiling. His daughter smiled. We all smiled. And that s the last I saw of Max Heinrich in the flesh. He was one of the formative in fluences in my irregular life. Wild as he was, he steadied me, not because I took him as an example to be avoided as my mother said I should; and as I did in the case of George Woodward Wickersham, whose concentration had something inhuman about it ("If Sam would only take a drink or smoke a pipe," his uncle would despair ingly exclaim); but because Heinrich embodied all I admired as an interpretative artist. I dissociated the man from the singer. He dragged me with him every where; to the choir of the Cathedral, to the Broad Street "Shool," where I first heard the magnificent Hebrew MUSICAL PHILADELPHIA 161 cantillations, which, coming from an antique civilisa tion, Egypt, filtered through the ages to the ritual of Mother Church; an echo may be found in our Plain- Chant. XIV MY FRIENDS THE JEWS "How shall we sing the Lord s song in a strange land?" I couldn t help recalling these words of the Psalmist, these and the opening, "By the rivers of Babylon," in which is compressed the immemorial melancholy of an enslaved race, when I heard Sophie Braslau intone with her luscious contralto a touching Hebrew lament, "Eili Eili lomo asovtoni?" at a con cert. Naturally I believed the melody to be the echo of some tribal chant sung in the days of the Babylonian captivity, and perhaps before that in the time of the prehistoric Sumerians and the epic of Gilgamesh. Others have made the same error. Judge of my surprise when in a copy of The American Jewish News I read that the composer of "Eili Eili" is living, that his name is Jacob Kopel Sandier, that he wrote the music for a historical drama, "Die B ne Moishe" ("The Sons of Moses"), which deals with the Chinese Jews. Mr. Sandier had composed the song for Sophie Carp, a Yiddish actress and singer. The "Sons of Moses" was a failure, and a new piece, "Broche, the Jewish King of Poland," was pre pared. (Not alluding to Pan Dmowski.) It was pro duced at the Windsor Theatre in the Bowery. The song, not the play, was a success. Then the music drifted into queer company, for music is a living organism and wanders when it is not controlled. Finally Sophie Bras lau got hold of it, and the composer, who was directing 162 MY FRIENDS THE JEWS 163 a choir in a Bronx synagogue, was astounded to hear of the acclamations of a Metropolitan Opera House Sunday night audience. His daughter had listened to "Eili Eili" and brought home the good news. After troublesome preliminaries " Meyer Beer," the pen-name of the musical editor of The American Jewish News, was able to prove beyond peradventure of a doubt the ar tistic parentage of the song, and Jacob Sandier is in a fair way of being idolised in his community, as he should be. "Eili Eili lomo asovtoni?" may be found in Psalm 22, the first line of the second verse in Hebrew. In the English version the words of David are in the first verse : "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" And in St. Mark s gospel we read: "And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? >:> (chapter 15, verse 34.) The exegetists and apologists, as well as sciolists, have made of this immortal phrase a bone of theological contention. Schmiedel, who with Harnack believes the words to have been uttered by our Saviour, nevertheless points out various details which prefigure the same things in the crucifixion the just man hanging on the stake, the perforated hands and feet, the mocking crowd, the sol diers gambling for the clothes, everything takes place as described in the Psalm. Lublinski (in Dogma, p. 93) and Arthur Drews (in The Historicity of Jesus, p. 150) demur at the orthodox Christian conclusions of Harnack and Schmiedel. A beloved master, the late Solomon Schechter, disposed of the question in his usual open style. "The world is big enough," he has said to me, for both Jehovah and Jesus, "for two such 164 STEEPLEJACK grand faiths as the Hebrew and the Christian." But he saw Christianity only in its historical sequence, and not as a continuator of Judaism; rather, a branching away from the main trunk. If it had not been for Constan- tine, the world might be worshipping Mithra to-day, was the erudite and worthy man s belief. Enveloped in the mists of the first two centuries Christianity seems to have had a narrow escape from the doctrines of Mithraism. That Salomon Reinach practically admits in his Or pheus, a most significant study of comparative relig ions from the pen of this French savant. Once upon a time I played the organ in a "shool," a reformed, not an orthodox, synagogue; played indiffer ently well. But my acquaintance with the Jewish liturgy dates back to my boyhood in Philadelphia, where I studied Hebrew, in company with Latin. The reason? My mother fondly hoped that I might become a priest the very thought of which makes me shudder now. The religious in me found vent in music and my love of change was gratified by playing the Hebrew service on Shabbas (Saturday) and the Roman Catholic on our Sabbath. Probably that is why I was affected by Sophie Braslau s singing of "Eili Eili." I have always entertained a peculiar admiration for the Jews and Judaism. It began with the study of Semitic literature of the Talmud, above all of Hebrew poetry, the most sublime in any language, as Matthew Arnold asserts in his comparative estimate of Greek and Hebraic cultures. My dearest friends have been, still are, of that race. Prejudice, social or political, against the Jew I not only detest, but I have never been able to comprehend. My early playmates were Jewish boys and girls. I have stood under the "Choopah" (mar- MY FRIENDS THE JEWS 165 riage canopy) and have seen many a Bar-Mitzvah; even sat "Shivah" for the dead father of intimate friends. From Rafael Joseffy to Georg Brandes; from the bril liant Hungarian virtuoso that was Joseffy whose father, a learned rabbi, I visited at Budapest in Pest-Ofen in 1903, when he was eighty -four, an Orientalist, a linguist with twenty-six languages, ancient and modern, at the tip of his tongue to Professor Brandes, the Danish scholar, an intellectual giant, and a critic in the direct line of Sainte-Beuve and Taine both men I knew and loved. Whether the Jew has attained the summits as a creator in the Seven Arts I cannot speak authoritatively, although the Old Testament furnishes abundant evidences that he has in poetry. Disraeli (Beaconsfield), who liked to tease Gladstone by calling him "Frohstein" and pointing to his rugged Jewish prophet s features, has written of his race most eloquently. I should like to quote a pas sage in its entirety; time and space forbid. But an excerpt I permit myself the luxury of reproducing: "The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combina tions, the inspiration fervid with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus, and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which the ancients recognise as most divine and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation. . . ." He goes on: "There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded with our children under feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust. . . ." Lord Beaconsfield mentions Rossini, Meyerbeer, Men delssohn as Jewish composers, and Pasta and Grisi among 1 66 STEEPLEJACK the singers. Probably he had not heard Rossini s witti cism uttered on his deathbed: "For heaven s sake, don t bury me in the Jewish cemetery!" Nor did Beacons- field look far enough ahead when he wrote "dark aver sion" which phrase is wonderful. To-day the boot is on the other leg. It may be Gentiles who will be forced to change their names to Jewish. I could easily sign my self "Shamus Hanuchah "- leaving out the "lichts" or pattern after the name Paderewski jokingly wrote on his photograph: "For Jacob Hunekerstein." And I am ashamed to confess that I know Jews who themselves are ashamed of having been born Jews. Incredible ! In Vienna I have seen St. Stefan s Cathedral crowded at the u o clock High Mass by most fervent worshippers, the majority of whom seemed Semitic, which prompted me to propound the riddle: When is a Jew not a Jew? Answer: When he is a Roman Catholic in Vienna. But you never can tell. As Joseffy used to say when some musician with a nose like the Ten Com mandments was introduced, as, for example, Monsieur Fontaine. "He means Brunnen, or, in Hebrew, Pischa. He is not a Jew, but his grandmother wore a scheitel," (the wig still worn by orthodox Jewish women). The truth is that among the virtuosi, singers, actors, the Jew holds first place. Liszt and Paganini are the exceptions, and Paganini could easily pass in an east-side crowd as Jehudah. As to the Wagner controversy, not started by Nietzsche, but by Rossini and Meyerbeer, who referred to Wagner as Jewish, that was settled by O. G. Sonneck in his little book, Was Wagner a Jew? but only after I had introduced to the columns of The New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1913 a book by Otto Bournot, en titled, Ludwig Geyer. Geyer was, as you may remem- MY FRIENDS THE JEWS 167 her, the stepfather of Richard Wagner. Bournot had access to the Baireuth archives and delved into the newspapers of Geyer s days. August Bottiger s Nec rology had hitherto been the chief source. Mary Bur- rell s Life of Wagner was the first to give the true spelling of the name of Wagner s mother, which was Bertz, which may be Jewish or German, as you like. The Geyers as far back as 1700 were pious folk. The first of the family mentioned in local history was a cer tain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a trombone player and organist. Indeed, the Geyers were largely connected with the Evangelical Church. Ludwig Geyer, virtually acknowledged by Baireuth as the real father of Richard Wagner, looked Jewish (which proves nothing, as I have seen dark, Semitic fisher-folk on the coast of Galway) and displayed Jewish versatility. For that matter the composer von Weber looked like a Jew, as does Camille Saint-Saens. When I ventured to write of this racial trait much more marked in his youth the French composer sent me a denial, sarcastically ask ing how a man with such a "holy 51 name as "Saint- Saens" could be Jewish. But Leopold Godowsky, who was intimate with him, told me that he took his mother s name. As to Wagner, a little story may suffice. In 1896 I attended the Wagner festival at Baireuth. Between performances I tramped the Franconian hills. My toes hurt. Looking for a corn-cutter, I found one not far from the Wagner house. The old chap seated me in his doorway, probably to get better light, and as he crouched over my feet in the street I asked him if he had known Richard Wagner. "Know Wag ner!" he irascibly replied. "He passed my shop every day. Many the times I cut his corns. Oh, no ! not here, 1 68 STEEPLEJACK over yonder" he jerked his head in the direction of Wahnfried. I inquired what kind of a looking man was Wagner. "He was a little bow-legged Jew, and he always wore a long cloak to hide his crooked legs." Enfm ! the truth from the mouth of babes. This beats Nietzsche and his "Vulture" Geyer. Not religion, not nationality, but race, counts in the individual. Wagner looked like a Jew. And there are many red-haired Jews with pug noses and light blue eyes. Renan in Le Judaisme has shown us how non- Jewish elements were in the course of time incorporated within the race. The Chazars of Eastern Europe are Jews only a thousand years old. Dr. Brandes in a confession of his views on the subject has said in The Journal Jor Jewish History and Literature, published at Stockholm (Tei dscript for Judisk Historia), and quoted by Bernard G. Richards in a capital study of Brandes "from the fifteenth to the sixteenth year of my life I regarded Judaism purely as a religion." But when he was abused as a Jew then Georg Brandes felt himself a genuine Jew. Many a man has found himself in a similar position. Atavistic impulses, submerged, may explain why certain men, Gentiles, scholars, by nature noncombatants, have left their peaceful study, jeopardised their life, ruined their reputation, to battle for an obscure Jew, Dreyfus. Zola, of Greek-Levantine origin, perhaps Italian and Jew, was one of those valiant souls who fought for the truth. Ana- tole France, born Thibault, another. Count Thibault, at the time of the Dreyfus uproar, challenged the great writer who signs himself Anatole France to prove his right to that distinguished Roman Catholic name. That the gentle Anatole is the very spit and spawn of a Jew, as appear ance goes; that since Heine (baptised a Christian) MY FRIENDS THE JEWS 169 no such union of mocking irony and tender, poetic emo tion can be noted in the work of any writer, are alike valueless as testimony. Nevertheless, many believe in this Hebraic strain; just as they feel it in the subtlety of Cardinal Newman s writing he was of Dutch stock and in the humour of Charles Lamb. Both Englishmen are authoritatively accredited with the "precious quintes sence," as Du Maurier would say. I have stood a lot of good-natured fun poked at me for my Jewish propensity. I can stand it, as there is a solid substratum of history for my speculations. Some years ago The Contemporary Review printed an article entitled "The Jew in Music," with this motto from Oscar Wilde s Salome: "The Jews believe only in what they cannot see." The writer s name was signed: A. E. Keeton. Not even the assertion that Beethoven was a Belgian is half so iconoclastic as some of the as sumptions made in this study. "When Mozart first appeared as a prodigy before the future Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, she announced that a genius must not be a Jew." The original name Ozart was changed. Mozart was baptised. Which anecdote makes the scalp to freeze, though not because of its verisimilitude. Bee thoven and Rubinstein looked alike; ergo ! But then they didn t. In the case of Chopin he was certainly Jewish-looking, especially in the Winterhalter and Kwiatowski portraits. His father came from Nancy, in Lorraine, thickly populated by Jews. The original name, Szopen, or Szop, is Jewish. His music, especially the first Scherzo in B minor, has a Heine-like irony, and irony is a prime characteristic of the Chosen (or Choosing, as Zangwill puts it) race. But all this is in the key of wildest surmise. Wagner was born in the ghetto at i 7 o STEEPLEJACK Leipsic; yet that didn t make him Jewish, any more than the baptism of Mendelssohn made him Christian. Georges Bizet was of Jewish origin, he looked Jewish; but the fact that he married the daughter of Halevy (Ha-Levi), the composer of La Juive, didn t make the composer of Carmen a Jew. Neither religion nor na tionality are more than superficial factors in the na ture of men and women. Race alone counts. Once upon a time I wrote a Jewish story, The Shofar Blew at Sunset. Maggie Cline liked it; so did Israel Zangwill. I preserve a letter from Mr. Zangwill telling me of his liking. The story appeared in M lie New York, now defunct. It was afterwards translated into Yid dish, though it did not give general satisfaction in either camp, Jewish or Christian. It revelled in the cantilla- tions and employed as leading - motive the Shofar, or ram s-horn blown in the synagogues on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. The scroll of the Torah also appeared. But these liturgical references didn t offend; it was my surprising denunciation of Jewish materialism in New York that proved the rock of offence. I say sur prising, for what is a Christian-born doing in another field and finding fault? I m sure I can t say why, un less that in writing the tale I unconsciously dramatised myself as a reproaching voice. There was much in my strictures of that son of Hanan who prowled through the streets of the Holy City in the year A. D. 62, crying aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!" I remember that I predicted because of the luxury of the American Jew lofty Jewish idealism might be submerged in a flood of indifference and disbelief. Prosperity would prove the snag. In the heart of the Jew is the true Zion, not in success nor in some far-away land. Naturally, that MY FRIENDS THE JEWS 171 didn t please the Zionists. One professional Jewish jour nal said that I preached like a rabbi (Reb), but thought like a goi. The word "Chutzpah" was also used. Yet, wasn t I right? It is the spiritual Ark of the Covenant, the spirit of the law, and not the letter that killeth, which should be enshrined in the heart of the Jew. He may dream of Palestine, of its skies of the "few large stars," a land overflowing with milk and honey; but in the depths of his soul it is the living God to whom he must go for spiritual sustenance. God the eternal reservoir of our earthly certitudes ! Schma Ysroel! And now for fear that all this sounds more like a ser mon than a sonnet and I m in earnest, not forgetting that the lofty ethics of the Old Testament apply quite as much to Christians as to Jews I ll conclude with the statement that the most Jewish composer I know of, bar none, is Ernest Bloch, a Swiss musician residing in New York City. He has great gifts, abundant science, and an inborn sense of orchestral colour and rhythms. I heard him conduct a concert at Philadelphia entirely devoted to his own works. I shall not soon forget the emotional impression created by his "Solomon" for violoncello solo and orchestra, interpreted on the solo instrument by that splendid young artist, Hans Kindler, the first cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is a masterpiece. But the concert was too long; there were colour and sentiment that cloyed, and the beat of the composer-conductor was not propulsive. With Leopold Stokowski things would have gone at a brisker tempo and would have been charged with more vitality. As the final note was sounded a well-known wit and jurist, a Hebrew if I say more, Philadelphia will surely recognise the man passed into 1 72 STEEPLEJACK the lobby of the Academy of Music. He sighed. He said, with the self-mocking irony of his race: "Beautiful music, but another afternoon like this and I ll turn anti- Semite!" Selah! XV THE GIRLS Race or religion never troubled me. Music was be come my sole passion. I even ceased to envy Heide Norris his tailor, Williams Carter his good looks. I fre quented places where musicians gathered, much to my mother s disdain. Not that I was dissipated. I had to sow my wild-oats after my own fashion. My liquid measure, as they say at the grocer s, was the envy of the gaugers. My father, who refused to see me in any but a humorous light, had called me "hollow-legs," changed that title for "copper-lined." He classed me as a human armoured tank. It was not flattering to a young man with a thirst for the infinite. I was always thirsty, and moistened my clay and my wits with equal facility. I asked him whether whisky wasn t more harmful than beer. His reply was prompt: "Beer is bellywash" dear old Kensington phrase "and in my day gentlemen didn t drink whisky, they drank brandy." I shuddered. It was true. During the first half of the last century, cognac was preferred to corn-whisky by people of taste. But to my way of thinking both are poisonous. I have mentioned Williams Carter as one of the beaux; I must not forget those other beauty-men, Dr. John Taylor or Dr. Thomas H. Fenton; Greek of profile and admired of the belles who promenaded Spruce and Walnut Streets. Ernest Law was considered by feminine judges to be a model of manly form, and later Barclay Warburton 173 i 7 4 STEEPLEJACK entered the "Greek God" class. And there were " danc ing" Willie White, Charlie Sloan, and how many Binneys and Biddies ! The girls ! I was an onlooker with an eye on the Burton girls, Sallie and Carrie, the Junoesque Bessie Tunison, and the much-admired Eloise Conover, or the handsome Burrows sisters, our cousins. The Carter girls were distinguished-looking in the indolent Italian style, and there was the gypsy beauty, Lizzie Evans, on Walnut Street below Tenth; and a slender girl with large unfathomable eyes ("incessant eyes," as poet Vance Thompson calls them), hair that Titian would have gloated over, and features that may be seen in a Greek medallion. I only remember that her last name was English, and that I worshipped her from afar; the desire of the stone for the star. (If I could remember her first name I might give vent to another of my emotional shrieks: Bertha! Elaine! Molly Bawn ! and the rest.) La crise juponniere had definitely declared itself. Music was but an accomplice of the petticoats, and during my seventeenth year not sweet but simply seventeen the female planet arose on the rim of my soul and shone serenely into my agitated consciousness. Calf-love had begun its silly sway. I have said that love is lucid folly, but it is fascinating folly in the first quarter of its honey noon. And no matter the fun poked at the awkward age there is no denying the single-heartedness of a boy s first love. A girl is a madonna in his eyes. A jest made about her turns his little sky black. Nor does it have to be a girl; a married woman will do; married women are usually the target for boyish adoration. I remember one wedded lady whom I had honoured with my timid attentions (I could never follow Stendhal s advice, a trooper s motto, THE GIRLS 175 and make love to every woman I happened to find alone). She was mysterious Ah ! how youth enjoys mystery and she impressed me as having married her husband as an accomplice in some dark enterprise. Perhaps she had. He was far from being the hateful husband brute of fiction. To me he was quite affable, till one after noon, as we drank tea I heard him ask the housemaid if "that lightning-bug" was with his wife. I never went back to her. I don t mind abuse, but the implication of the lantern and its location you have studied en tomology ! was too much. But there were plenty of consolations: Bessie and Sallie and Adele, sweetest of girls, who taught me how to walk, talk, but not to dance. I was born with a Quaker foot. I often wonder what girls see in hobbledehoys. They are, I know, a continual source of amusement. I was. My dancing gave great pleasure to the children; but as I could tinkle pretty tunes for others to foot the mazy dance I was occasionally rewarded with a bright look. Kissing was never at tempted. I contend that a boy s mind at a certain period is as pure as a girl s. (A pure girl, of course.) Youth is pure just because it is youth, says Dostoievsky. Vague desires assail him, at which he blushes, but for unadul terated chivalry, give me the average lad who blushes when his mother tells him "Mamie is coming over to-night, Jack, hurry, wash your face and don t forget to change your collar." Forget to change his collar ! Wash his face, forsooth ! With a Byronic scowl, which is not missed by his sympathetic mother and sneered at by his cynical aunt he stalks out of the room, and for a full hour faces his glass, alternately admiring and dis trusting his pulchritude. The boy who doesn t make an ass of himself over a girl is apt to miss out later in his 176 STEEPLEJACK manhood. It meant something, the toga virilis of the Romans; at once a symbol of virility and sex-initiation. But no love is comparable to the first love of a boy for his mother. It is the greatest romance in the world. It comes earlier with some lads than others, and it lasts till his death. My affection took a peculiar turn. I realised that the end of mankind was death. We are all condemned, as Victor Hugo said ; but not our mothers. I was sure that my mother would never die. She was something so exquisite that she was deathless, and like the child in Wordsworth s poem, I could have obstinately repeated "We are seven," when I argued the matter with boys of my age. Their mothers might die, mine never. The illusion long endured. I shall never forget the afternoon that I climbed to the base of the dome of the Cathedral on Logan Square. From a window I saw my mother s terrified face, as I triumphantly waved a handkerchief. I felt like Ibsen s Master Builder in the tragic play. I was true Steeplejack. In the mean time my brother, John, without any fuss or feathers, calmly ascended the dome by a small ladder, invisible from the street, to the gilded globe and cross at the very top. He had a contract to fresco the church and re- gild the cross. It was all in the day s work for him, to me a victory; but when I descended and realised what a shock I had inflicted on the loving woman my conceit was dampened for the nonce. Another picture. Evening in the nuns flower garden at Emmitsburg, Maryland. "L heure exquise," as the poet so charmingly phrases it. In the soft slanting light of a westering sun, I see my mother slowly walking under a trellised path, her rosary in her hand, on her head a mantilla that transformed her into a Spanish dame of high degree. I was not more than THE GIRLS 177 eight or nine years old, but it was the first time that I consciously realised that she was my mother. She was the most beautiful creature on earth. The gentle nuns who moved along this enchanted garden were only phantoms. The one great fact was my mother and her calm intellectual features. It is the most vivid memory I have of her. With difficulty I summon up to my recol lection meeting there the poet, George Miles, and hear ing him discourse on his Pontius Pilate, his Truce of God, and of his theory as to the cause of Hamlet s ir resolution. This theory he afterwards published, and the essay contains some plausible arguments; among the rest, that Hamlet, being a Roman Catholic, and a fervent believer, despite his surface scepticism, could not kill the King unshriven without doing violence to his conscience. As Hamletic theories go it is worth while. I must add that while we had Jewish friends, I did not fail to associate with boys and girls of our own race and religion; the Barrys, the Raleighs, the SuIIivans, Dohans, Wilcoxes, McGIenseys, Doughertys, and other Americans of Irish stock. Will Sullivan, the brother of John and James, was one of the handsomest young men of our set and possessed a nature transparent and lova ble. Yet, when it came to spooning, I sought pasture elsewhere than among our crowd. My first grand passion was a cousin, but she jilted me for my younger brother. Then a certain Annie and a Theresa loomed large. Annie was short, plump, materialistic; Theresa wore long curls, had large eyes, an empty gaze, and a saccharine smile; in short, she was a girl of the sort that girls detest. Sly, was the epithet applied to her by Annie. Neither i 7 8 STEEPLEJACK one cared a rap for me, but each was determined to beat the other. I played a fatuous Paris to their rivalry, but when I attempted to award the golden apple meaning myself they at once became close friends and gave me the cold shoulder. For weeks I ruminated, not without bitterness, on feminine treachery, and even went so far as to consult my mother. She bade me not put my trust in princes, and quoted Wolsey s speech: "If I had served my God," which seemed to me to be superfluous. It is Lincoln who is credited with the wise and witty axiom: "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can t fool all the people all the time." He might have added: But you can fool yourself every time. Self-illusion is the staff of life, the bread of egotism. I am not precisely a determinist, yet I believe our characters are immutable. I have always fooled myself, and successfully, up to a given point, then the disillusionment is accepted as a necessity. It had to come, I would say, seeking con solation in the shabby snare of fatalism. The petticoat mirage found me easiest of victims. It was years later I discovered that in the land of tone may be found the Elysian Fields. My mother s delicate warning fell on deaf ears, and when my father mocked me "beware of the girls!" I retorted with the elder Weller s advice to his son "beware of the vidders Samivel!" I knew it all before I was out of my teens. The omniscience of youth is both the pride and despair of parents. My craze for the girls was no doubt an illustration of Henry James s "manners observable in the most mimetic depart ment of any great menagerie." But boys weren t mon keys nor girls parrots then, as they seem when life sets such things in truer perspective. THE GIRLS 179 I have never suffered from the Time illusion. The past or future did not exist. It seldom does for the young. I have always had the delusion of free-will. There is only the present. That long shining corridor of Time did not invite me to traverse its eternal leagues. Carpe diem ! When I read in Henri Bergson s phil osophy thrice-subtle French Jew that "Time is both tough and resistant," I rejected the idea, fair as it is to the abused concept Time, always playing a minor role when in company with its brother, Space. Not even meta physical Time is resistant. I can t divest my conscious ness of the notion, naturally an empirical one, that Time is the glittering crest of a moment, not one of a series of beads strung out through eternity. Eternity is Now. Live in the present which passes like a flash of lightning. I suspect that Walter Pater and his famous conclusion to the Studies in the Renaissance had much to do with my crystallisation of this worship of the present. My present didn t mean the actual; far from it. A cuckoo- cloudland was for me the present. I had neither hind sight nor foresight. With David Thoreau I could have cried: "Thank God, they can t cut down the clouds," possibly substituting "girls" for clouds. And petti coats stray in where fools fear to enter. Girls are ever wise; so they appeared to me. At each hour of the day I said, with Faust: "Stay, thou art so fair!" And they stayed, that s the funny part of it. They jeered at me, but they remained companions. I recall a dark-skinned, black-haired girl who was nicknamed Portuguese Annie. She was a nicely behaved miss of seventeen and one of those apathetic flirts. She never regarded you except from a great height, unless another girl became too friendly, then, hawk-like she would swoop down on her i8o STEEPLEJACK innocent prey meaning my Iamb-like self and carry him away to her fastness, there to be dropped into the next nest of her indifference. She piqued, did Portuguese Annie why Portuguese, I never found out; perhaps be cause she was Irish. I met her of rainy nights in Fair- mount Park. We went around the Reservoir. At times we sat on wet benches, an umbrella lifted, her cloak about us. When the guardian of public morals shooed us away we sought another bench, and potential pneu monia. What was our conversation? I ve forgotten. Probably chaste and silly. One night as we walked about Logan Square, a lame man hobbled in front of us, then he limped to our rear. A spy ? A relative ! I warned Annie. She didn t recognise him and he so manoeuvred that I couldn t. At the advanced hour of nine we separated and forever. The reason I never saw her again was a simple one. That lame man was my elder brother playing detective. At home he warned me that I was a sentimental ass. I openly admitted it. There was other balm in Gilead. The charms of Portu guese Annie had begun to pall. The Eternal Feminine led me upward and on. Not far from Logan Square there was a mysterious mansion occupied by two men, possibly brothers, though they did not betray any family resemblance, and one of the most beautiful girls on our perambulating bone-yard of a planet. The entire neighbourhood of boys said she was peerless and I soon chimed in. Through the inter mediary of her brother he turned up from somewhere we were introduced, and I called at discreet intervals every afternoon between five and six. They were for eigners, Swiss, I think, and their drawing-room was decorum personified. I can t tell how it was managed, THE GIRLS 181 but each boy had his solo, or rather duo, interview with the lovely Clarisse. I called her Monna Lisa because of her delicate hands and slow, cold gaze. She could out- stare a wooden Indian or a brass monkey, and when she condescended to drop her disdainful eyelids, we shivered in ecstasy. We adored her, and quarrelled over her like a pack of hungry hounds about a live goose. Our leisure was spent in discussing her mysterious family. No one knew them, knew their business, except that at five o clock their solemn hospitality was bestowed upon the elect. We, the ganders, were the elect. Hot love was made to this madonna. We tried to arrange meetings outside. In vain. I never saw such admirable team work. We were brethren united in a noble cause to carry off Clarisse from her home and marry her, not all of us, only myself and every chap said the same. Boys have monstrous fancies. We believed that girl perse cuted by her loving father and uncle, though she was serenely happy. We made up to her gawky brother, bribing him with cigarettes, fondly hoping for a gleam of light on the dark enigma of the household. He never vouchsafed us this illuminating ray of hope. The plot thickened. Other boys came into the net. Every now and then we were not admitted, though we saw our nut-brown maid in the bay-window on the second floor, presumably leading on another brave knight to destruction. We descended so low in the moral scale as to spy upon the house after dark. By climbing the wall of the Quaker graveyard opposite, we could, at the risk of our unworthy necks, peer into the lighted rooms. We never saw a thing; the curtains were always drawn. Time passed. Clarisse remained the Marble Heart of our despairing fancy. Suddenly her family moved. A sign 1 82 STEEPLEJACK "to let" froze our overheated blood. Where did they go, this charming, mysterious family? Alas ! no one ever discovered. But we discovered ourselves, when, one evening in conclave over pipes and gingerpop, we frankly bared our hearts. Every man Jack present had proposed marriage to Clarisse (not one was more than eighteen), and had been accepted. At least ten of us admitted the soft impeachment. We reviled ourselves at the outlay in engagement rings. Each chap outdid the other in his effort to make himself the king-pin of ridicule. I fear there were unshed drops in our tear-ducts, we were so desperately gay. When I say that we all popped the question, I must omit George Wickersham, who had re mained a critical onlooker. "If I ever marry," he as sured us, "I wish at least to know the lady s last name !" George didn t approve of matrimony in the dark. I fancy the solution of the "mystery" was only a widower, endeavouring to marry his daughter to the best advan tage. That chapter closed I began another one but stay ! These memoirs are not intended to describe my senti mental education. Any man could write a book of many pages and call it My Love-Life (or Vita Sexualis, as the psychiatric jargon goes). It would sell like hot cakes on a wintry night. Consider George Moore s Memoirs of My Dead Life the unexpurgated English edition ! When I anxiously consulted my editor as to the inclusion of the love element, without which existence is like an addled egg, he tersely replied: "Be interesting, and if you can t be interesting, be careful!" But then one can t be careful and interesting at the same time. Many a woman has come to shipwreck in attempting that im- THE GIRLS 183 possible task. You can t have your cake and swallow it. So I shall desist from further recital of my salad loves, except to add that on the boards I had three pas sions: Adelaide Neilson, Mary Scott-Siddons and Tere- sita Carreno, and, as these three women ranked as the most beautiful of their day, I had half the town assisting me in my worship. Carreno, in particular, with her exotic colouring, brilliant eyes, and still more brilliant piano-playing, was like a visitor from another star. One night at a Gaertner concert she wore a scarlet dress, and a rose coquettishly placed in her raven-black hair drove the blood from my heart (probably pumped it too fast). I shall always remember this thrice-charming and thrice-married woman and great artiste, in the scarlet mists of my memory. When I told her later of my folly she nai vely answered: "But you foolish boy, why didn t you send me a bouquet of red roses, then I should have known that you admired me." The worst trick that fate plays on us is to let us know too late how near we grazed happiness. XVI MUSIC-MADNESS Every girl has her day. I couldn t forever feed on sweetmeats. My musical studies were satisfactorily progressing. I knew because I never opened a law book and also because of my debut as a pianist in company with my chum, Franz Schubert. Together we played Grieg s first Sonata for violin and piano (in F, opus 8) and a Sonata by Ries. Franz played the slow movement from the Mendelssohn Concerto and Wieniawski s "Legende," and most musically. He was a skilled fresco-painter, but I think he should have stuck to music. I followed with the "Loreley" by Seeling, and some Schubert pieces. As we were not paid for our services, it being a benefit concert on Franklin Street in a small hall somewhere near Poplar or Parrish Streets we were warmly ap plauded. There were no press-notices, luckily enough. It was my first, and with a solitary appearance in Paris, my last appearance in public as a pianist. The world of music has lost nothing through my resolve not to wear my musical motley on the concert platform. But I have worn it in print too often. We must, all of us, eat our peck of dirt. However, Schubert and I continued to play music in private. At the Academy our seats were in the top gallery, better known as the amphitheatre (entrance, 25 cents). When last season I saw the line stretched along Locust Street patiently waiting for the doors to open, and then a wild rushing up-stairs to be rewarded by the tones of Jascha Heifetz s magic fiddle, it was easy for me to forget the forty odd years when we 184 MUSIC-MADNESS 185 also stood there, good or bad weather, hoping to get a front-row seat, or when Theodore Thomas conducted his wonderful orchestra. With Alfredo Barili I heard Joseffy play, and Theodore Ritter with all three I studied later. My first visit to the Academy began when the Majiltons, or was it the Hanlon-Lees, acrobats extraordinary ? Little America, a Japanese child, astonished with his aerial flights. Ole Bull, Vieuxtemps, Sivori played their fiddles; but it was Thomas that I best loved. The orchestra, the synthesis of instruments, cured me of my operatic mania. The symphony, with its reasoned narrative in tone, is the epitome of music. The Mercantile Library, on Tenth Street, where it is to-day, had me as a daily visitor. It was there I began my browsing in many fields. Like an animal I instinc tively sought the food my system demanded. I was like a horse let out to graze. I must have had an appalling appetite for printed matter. I would, in the absence of an English book, read any foreign language, although I didn t understand it. There was something friendly and inviting in strange letters. Hebrew intrigued my fancy. To-day I can make out the meaning of headlines in a Yiddish newspaper, thanks to that one-eyed ex- rabbi s lessons. I had the good luck to read the "new" English literature of the seventies and eighties. The poets enthralled me. Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Ros- setti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Clough, Patmore, and the Alfred Tennyson of that period, as well as George Meredith as poet, and a host of minor singers such as Gosse his "On Viol and Flute" Arthur O Shaugnessy, Austin Dobson delightful reading and even the ex travagant Theophile Marzials. The essayists, Arnold, Pater, George Saintsbury who first wrote of Baude- 1 86 STEEPLEJACK laire attracted me. But the pre-Raphaelitic movement left me indifferent, especially the painters. I had suffi cient art training to recognise the gimcrack mysticism, preciosity and woful lack of expert brushwork in the productions of the Brotherhood. Think of Woolner as a sculptor! A mediocre modeller who wrote "occasional" verse. Rossetti is a musical poet; as a picture-maker he is an imitator; the hand is his, but the voice is the voice of the Italian Primitives. A pretty colour scheme, a sentimental attitude towards mediaeval religious faith, and drawing that is "papery." His sonnets will be read when his painting is forgotten. A visit to the Grosvenor Gallery is a disillusion. Watts is another mediocrity despite his poetry. His paint is "woolly," his design obviously "eclectic," that is, not original. Edward Burne-Jones has a thin vein of poetry, but his wan alle gories seen in the cruel light of this century are feeble dreams. I like better the honest but uninspired realism of Ford Madox-Brown. Albert Moore is decorative, Leighton pasticcio, and Holman Hunt with his "Light of the World," is a sacred bore. The one strong man, John Millais, didn t long remain in the movement. His artistic lungs were too big to respire in that morbid marsh air of mysticism and faded eroticism. I had begun to enjoy the Barbizons, but the French Impressionists I knew little about, yet there they were, only a few miles across the Channel bringing the pure light of heaven into the dingy, musty atmosphere of Academic art; while the pre-Raphaelites, their faces turned towards the fifteenth century, were indulging in various insincere poses and hysterical contortions, thus thinking to set back the implacable clock of time. London was then artistically as far from Paris as if it were Pekin. MUSIC-MADNESS 187 To catch the first glow of a rising sun is a pleasant experience. Swinburne was new, Wagner was new, Manet, Monet, and Rodin were new. I was happy in being born at such cross-roads of art. I watched all novel manifestations across the water. George Eliot had just published Daniel Deronda, and while the waning of her popularity dated from that fiction, over here she was at her apogee. I admired her, still admire her, but wouldn t give up Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen for her. Indeed, I would rather read the critical writings of her companion, George Henry Lewes, with his lively Jewish imagination, capital memory, and splendid work manship. His Life of Goethe, despite some omissions, is better than the pretentious three-volume biography of Bielochowsky, and where is there a more succinct summing up of the historical aspects of philosophy than Lewes furnished us. His coda, a veritable challenge to idealism and its exponents, still remains unanswerable. On the last page (789) of The Biographical History of Philosophy, he asks: "Have we any ideas independent of experience?" The answer is always a negative. The latest champion of idealistic absolutism despite William James and his Pluralism, it is idealism Henri Bergson may wriggle as metaphysically as he pleases and as a phrase-maker he is an artist, but he can t evade that question of George Henry Lewes without imperilling his shaky lath, plaster, and cobweb edifice. The essay by Lewes on Actors and Acting is a classic. Never theless, George Eliot had a touch of genius and her mate had not. He was supremely clever, nothing more. The Mercantile Library was a trysting spot for enam oured youth. There I saw the girl with the medallion 1 88 STEEPLEJACK features and Titian hair; there we had encounters with the old Cerberus, Donigan, who only did his duty as a doorkeeper in keeping the lobbies clear and suppressing laughter. We thought otherwise. We loved to romp, raise a row, and drop books. I can evoke the absorbed expression of Mr. Edmands, the librarian, which would modulate into pained astonishment when our gang talked too loudly in the reading-room. After we were ejected, which occurred at least once a month, we would shake our fists at Donigan, and go across the street to Dooner s, there to swagger before the bar and sip soda-cocktails, as harmless as buttermilk. What men around town we were ! Popular concerts conducted by Sentz, or Mark Hassler, or Wolsieffer always saw us. I made the ac quaintance, through a school companion, young Shaw, of his brother-in-law, Siegfried Behrens, an admirable conductor of opera, as well as a scholarly musician. I think the Shaws lived on Locust Street. A Sunday morning treat was to go in company with my father to High Mass at St. Augustine s Church, to the choir, there to hear Henry Thunder, Sr., play the organ of which he was a master. His pedalling made me forget the divine service. There was a bass in the choir named Winter- bottom, a friend of my father s, who always saluted him as Summertop. The association of Thunder and Winter- bottom set me to speculation. With Laurence Sterne s Slawkenbergius I believed in the fitness of names. I have mentioned Alfredo Barili. He taught me. He was a finished pianist of the French school. When he first played Chopin s B minor Scherzo for me, it acted like catnip on a feline. I rolled over the floor. The music made my nerves naked. I play the tragic, morbid com position now yet can never rid myself of the initial MUSIC-MADNESS 189 impression. Later S. L. Hermann and Anthony Stanko- witch guided my musical studies. What these three young men thought of me I never knew, but I do know that they were exceedingly forbearing. The sad sequel is that with all my striving I only attained mediocrity as a pianist. Any young conservatory miss can out play me in glib fingering. Yet, music is a consolation, an anodyne, like religion. It keeps off the deadliest beast that lurks in the jungle of life, the beast I stand most in fear of ennui. Many are driven to monotonous labor by ennui. Its presence is a pathological symptom. If this be true then all animal creation from man to beetles, is sick in spirit. I ve seen dogs yawn from bore dom; yea, even the flowers droop when weary of life. Art has been my escape, and my native laziness was surmounted by the terror bred of ennui. Making money, love, playing games, are but so many forms by which to escape the oppressive monster, and also to create the illusion of progress. To fill in the seemingly intermina ble interval from womb to tomb, man invented politics, money, wine, cards, war, love, and religion. (Satan Mekatrig is personally interested in several of these in ventions.) A certain Christmas, I ve forgotten the year, I was con sidered, by such inexpert authority as my parents, to be capable of handling a church organ. My nervousness was pooh-poohed as stage fright. Finally I ceded, but only after severe pressure. Midnight Mass at Christmas Eve had been temporarily abolished by Archbishop Wood; a Mass with music at 6 A. M. taking its place. Without a day s warning, I was asked to "substitute" for the organist at the church near Moyamensing Prison. I went to bed early, spent a sleepless night, anticipating 1 90 STEEPLEJACK a breakdown at the organ, and of being chased from the choir. Shivering, I arose at four o clock, swallowed a pot of coffee to keep up my courage (and to prevent the heart leaping out of my bosom) and proceeded to board a Tenth Street horse-car. It took about an hour to reach the church I can t recollect its name, though I shall never forget its interior and when I arrived in the choir it must have been a half-hour too soon. The place was chilly. I "gloomed" around, tried the little organ and its two banks of keys, and was wondering what Mass I was expected to play without rehearsal, when the soprano appeared. It was Madame Sauvan, a friend of my mother s, who proved my saviour. She picked out either Concone s or Bordone s Mass (?) very easy to read, and she gave me a welcome hint about the voice of the celebrant priest, who sometimes deviated from pitch. The worshippers straggled in, the choir arrived, the Mass began, and my knees as well as my teeth started to chatter. (Didn t you ever have chattering knees?) I plunged into the music ahead or behind the singers. My tempi were erratic. Madame Sauvan beat time for me and steadied my nerves. There was no pause for a sermon and the solemn service smoothly progressed. I had to accompany the reverend Father. In the "Pater Noster" he intoned the "Et ne nos inducas in tentationem" a half tone flat. I vainly scrambled from the key of G to F sharp. There followed a dis tinct series of dissonances that would have made Richard Strauss or Stravinsky envious. I peeped into the tell tale mirror hung over the organ manuals which enables the organist to watch the movements before the altar. I saw one movement and I grew pale. It was the indignant side glance shot at me by the priest. He blamed me for MUSIC-MADNESS 191 his singing off-key ! If he had shot me I should have died with a martyr s aureole and a heavenly smile on my lips. Cold as was the morning, I sweated. I fled after playing the "Adeste Fidelis," so disconsolate was I over my blundering. It is the prime duty of an organist never to allow the congregation to overhear flat singing on the part of the clergy. To do that is to commit the sin against the holy ghost of music. Madame Sauvan told my mother some weeks later that I did as well as could be expected, which truly feminine expression left me more dubious than ever as to my success. When I wrote a horrible and blasphemous short story though I still can t see the blasphemy entitled, Where the Black Mass was Heard (and translated into French by Remy de Gourmont) I utilised as a background the choir of this church; also the crypt of St. Joseph s Church in Willing s Alley. This tale was not admired by those clergy of the diocese who read it, yet in it I only affirmed in un mistakable terms what is preached from every Roman Catholic pulpit, i. e., the existence of a personal devil, the demon of mid-day who goes abroad like a lion seek ing whom he may devour. I had been reading too much Huysmans and his description of the Black Mass in that astounding novel, La-bas, but my yarn which is not in cluded in my Melomaniacs or Visionaries is individual and devoid of the erotic element. Remy de Gourmont wrote me a letter of congratulation when the story ap peared in M*lle New York, declaring that my invention was as vivid as Huysmans. The mistake I made was merely a matter of taste. I should not have used St. Joseph s as the spot where my particular devil showed himself, horns, hoofs, and hide, although he hangs around churches, as is well known in theological circles. 1 92 STEEPLEJACK I have dwelt on religious matters too much, but only to prove that my vocation, despite my pious environ ment, was not a priestly one. I often follow with my eyes some young priest and shudder at the idea that I might have been persuaded into taking orders and with what doleful consequences ! There but for the grace of God go I John Wesley s words I say. To me the most melancholy apparitions in this vale of Armageddon are a disfrocked priest, an ex-vice-president, an ex- dramatic critic. (There is no such thing as an ex-music- critic; a music-critic never stops criticising. Even on his death-bed he would criticise the tone-production of GabriePs last trump.) Religion has given an emotional colouring to my modes of thought. It has been called a crutch for lame minds by Huxley; it is really a spiritual anodyne. Mankind demands some superstition to give it a Voltaire s name. "Ecrasez rinfame!" he wrote, for getting that belief in the impossible is an organic neces sity, and not sacerdotal dupery. Without vision people perish. Montaigne, Anatole France, made of their scepticism the smiling religion which their souls craved. We all worship something; usually ourselves. There is a wilderness in the heart of every human. And the arch-devil ennui hides behind the trees spying his chance. Mother Church knew this when she devised her elaborate ritual, her consoling sacraments, her future rewards and punishments. The void is filled. Man, ever credulous, spends his life earning a living and dodging the devil. Eternal activity is the price of sleep. I am chronicling all the small-beer of my uneventful life because I am afraid of the twilight that sets in during the lonesome latter years. The personal pronoun which I am forced to use, and abuse, but serves as a peg upon which is MUSIC-MADNESS 193 hung the loop of my narrative. I am not a grandfather, but I have reached the age of dissent. In youth we rebel, in old age, we dissent. Thackeray wrote: "Youth goes to balls, old men to dinners." So please be patient with my anecdotage. Presently we shall be in Paris. XVII JIM THE PENMAN Annie Hampton Brewster wrote the book that set me off on another tangent and helped to decide my future occupations. It is called St. Martin s Summer, and was published by Ticknor & Fields, Boston, 1866. It is out of print, as is her musical novel Compensation, the latter superior to the Charles Auchester kind of musical stories. Miss Brewster was for years Paris Correspondent of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and was succeeded by Lucy Hamilton Hooper. She went to Rome and wrote letters to the same newspaper that revealed her generous culture and critical sensibility. Writers of her calibre were as rare then as they are now. As Havelock Ellis says: "The exquisite things of life are to-day as rare and precious as they ever were." St. Martin s Summer is a book composed of loosely-strung chapters, a mere thread of a story connecting them. There are travel pictures, criticisms of art, literature and music, keen apergus, and a catholicity in taste that is refreshing in this age of specialisation and Gradgrind "efficiency/ The times were more spacious, the dilettante was still in exist ence dead as the dodo bird now and life a pleasanter affair. To be sure, there were wars and rumours of war, and politics and Cad Stanton, Dr. Mary Walker, and the mysterious case of Charlie Ross. There were also cultivated men and women who saw life steadily and as a whole. Miss Brewster was one of them. A convert 194 JIM THE PENMAN 195 to the Roman Catholic faith, her tact saved her from excess in zeal. I admit she was occasionally sentimental, and that her judgments were not always sound; but she introduced me to Stendhal, and to a group of writers, not so cynical as Stendhal, to whom I owe much grati tude, Chateaubriand among others. The Centennial Exposition and the Brewster book set ringing the alarm bells in my conscience. Europe was bound to see me soon. A victim to suggestion the Higher Snobbery, I fancy it should be called I discovered Walt Whitman after reading the admirable essay by Moncure D. Conway the uncle of General Peyton March on the distaff side in The Atlantic (?), and as I followed that grand old iconoclast in many of his views, I became a Whitmaniac about in the same time that Swinburne, William Rossetti the brother of the painter-poet and John Addington Symonds sang the praises of the Camden bard; also at the same time that William Winter, dramatic critic of the New York Tribune, and poet, the "Weeping Willie" of Charlie McCIellan, attacked Leaves of Grass. Walt disposed of Winter thus: "Now, there s Willie Winter, miserable little cuss." Swinburne had penned his dithyrambic praise of Whitman in his study of "William Blake" and compared that master of lyrics to the American yawper. A poor enough comparison, for in Blake there is lovely music, while in Whitman the chaff almost smothers the wheat. Possibly the Prophetic Books of Blake and their windy ramifications suggested the comparison; certainly Swinburne was un happy in that, as later he permitted himself to scold Whitman like a fishwife (that is, the fishwife of Daniel O Connell). He said Whitman wrote poetry as would 196 STEEPLEJACK a drunken apple-woman. (I quote from memory.) Again old Walt "called the turn." As reported by Hor ace Traubel, he remarked of this sudden change in the critical attitude of the poet; "Swinburne ain t he the damnedest simulacrum!" Simulacrum in this case is almost too good to be true. That exquisite poet and prose stylist, Alice Meynell, reached the same conclu sion in her Hearts of Controversy, about Swinburne; she doesn t even believe in his foaming passion. After reading that Shelley lived on fried bread I upset our kitchen by frying bread and writing verse under its greasy inspiration. That, and my short-lived Whitman worship, are indices of my weather-cock tem perament. And with Walt there was a more personal reason. I was in love with a dainty miss who weighed two hundred pounds. She literally oozed health, and was sentimental, withal; most fat girls are. Together we read Children of Adam, and when I showed her photo graph to Walt one hot afternoon in Camden 1877 the good old soul sympathetically said: "She will be a mother of ten, at least," appraising her, as he would a brood-mare. He saw men and women as fathers and mothers, and his preoccupation with sex, above all, with maternity, caused Edmund Clarence Stedman to write in The Century that there are other lights in which to view the beloved than as the mother of one s future children. However, Walt was right. He represented the violent recoil from the New England school in whose veins flowed ink and ice-water. His bombastic patri otism, his delight in cataloguing the various parts of the human body was but a revolt against the nasty-nice puritanism of his day. It s a dull reading for us now, accustomed as we are to the poetry and fiction of ladies JIM THE PENMAN 197 with triple-barrelled names. In the seventies when Moncure D. Conway pleaded for a fair hearing, Walt Wliitman s name was anathema. In company with that same fat girl I took him to all the concerts I could. He usually scribbled, but enjoyed the music as he enjoyed life, seemingly through his pores. He was as receptive as a sponge. And he was one. Then the pen fever seized me. After that Sunday afternoon hailstorm of which I wrote I went into the street and ate my fill, as if it were ice-cream. Pneu monia, coupled with typhoid fever, followed, and it meant one year indoors for me; it spoiled me completely, for I had only to emit a hollow cough and my school was over for the day. Boys are worse humbugs than girls and that is saying a lot. I slipped around the curve of least resistance, and each experiment was only the search after a softer spot to nestle in. I was like a cat. I wanted my place in the sun, and with a Dickens novel and an apple (or ten apples) I was perfectly content to let the world wag on. The vagabond spirit of Whitman fol lowed the trail of the gypsy. Much later, when Walden and A Walk to Wauchusetts fell into my hands, I realised that in David Thoreau a true American is incarnated, and not in Whitman. And the prose of Thoreau. What an artist ! After the word-wallowing of Walt who wrote neither prose nor poetry, the incisive sentences, the swift- moving paragraphs, the nutty Yankee flavour are singu larly convincing. A mystic, he writes not in the clear- obscure style of Emerson, but with the precision, the con cision, and the light, dark from excess of brilliance. " I hear music below; it washes the dust of life, and every thing I look at." "The pine-tree is as immortal as I am, and perchance, go to as high a heaven, there to 198 STEEPLEJACK tower above me still." Walt, who suffered from a mental indigestion, brought on by MacPherson s Ossian, Emer son, and Thoreau R. L. Stevenson first pointed the debt he owed Thoreau never clarified his mental proc esses enough to write as well as the man of Walden Pond. He has no more sex though he loudly advertises his virility by hanging his banner on the outer wall than Thoreau, whose early and unhappy love-affair she married his brother made him a stoic. He is more tonic than Whitman, and I say this, well remembering the fact that in my obituary of Walt I slopped over most uncritically. I repeat, pen and ink and paper beckoned me to that swamp from which no penman ever emerges. My old joke, so old that it is decrepit, that once a newspaper man, always a cocotte, is not without a shade of truth. I had made foolish and extravagant attempts at fiction: The Comet, The Velvet Tree, The V-Shaped Corsage, and criticism had to come next on the roster of my destiny. I needs must write about music or burst. I began with the Charles H. Jarvis Classical Soirees in Natatorium Hall. My friendship with Leander Williamson, who, with his brother, John, was in the editorial department of The Evening Bulletin, led me to make some experiments. I showed them to him. "All right," said Leander, "bring them to me at the office and PII see that they go into type." Ferdinand Fetherston was a friend of my par- , ents and, as publisher of the newspaper, in company with Mr. Peacock, I had my way cleared, though it was Leander who gave me my first lift. The Jarvis concerts invariably took place on Saturday nights. I had free admission because of the Jarvis friendship. I usually reached the hall before he did. On Sundays I laboriously JIM THE PENMAN 199 carved out an article. Dr. Lambdin and Mr. Bunting were then the principal music-critics. I read them with fanatical fervour; but I also read Berlioz, Dr. Ritter, the husband of Fanny Raymond Ritter, and Franz Hueffer. Critically, New York didn t exist for me; Boston did in the shape of Dwight s Journal of Music. I possessed the critical vocabulary before I knew my scales. After passing under the revision of my mother the "story" was ready. How well I recall my halting heart as I climbed the two or three stories to the office of The Bul letin. Leander would ask me if I were ill or only fright ened. "It s those stairs," I would reply. It was stage fright, all the more ridiculous because I was paid nothing for my work. It was worth nothing. On Tuesday, my little pair of paragraphs duly appeared. I, at least, read them; so did Mr. Jarvis. Michael Cross merely smiled, his funny bone being tickled by the idea of this putting the cart before the horse, writing of an art instead of first mastering it. But the method hath precedents. I saved these notices and I find that they read like the regulation bone-dry critique, with its spilth of adjectives and its amateurish omniscience. I had horse-sense enough to avoid too many technical terms, and the criticisms that read the most reasonable are those in which the news element predominates. But the critical values ! Oh ! Moscheles and Kalkbrenner were treated with the same consideration as Beethoven and Schumann. Max Hein- rich often sang, always the best music. Emil Gastel was a frequent "guest," as were Mrs. Darling, Leopold Engelke, Massah Warner, and Richard Zeckwer. I again heard the call. I determined to both play music and write about it. "Qui a bu, boira!" With the emerald of Antoninus I could have said: "Whatever happens I 2OO STEEPLEJACK must be emerald!" I determined to be a musician and a litterateur. "Gosh!" said my boy friends. I went in the Summer to Bryn Mawr, then a sketch of its present prosperity. I remember the day the Wheeler house was finished and with old Sam Clemens, the builder, I put the little tree on the ridge-pole of the roof. I saw Walter Damrosch conduct a chorus in the wings at the concert of his father, Leopold Damrosch, at which "The Damnation of Faust," by Berlioz, was sung. I recall trudging after every parade that I encountered, with Beck s military band at the head. Beck, a German, was then the Sousa of Philadelphia. He was the father of James M. Beck. I began to watch the pageant of life. I asked Leander if I might write of fires, dog- fights, or drunken men. He said yes. Unknown to my father, and absolutely shirking further law study, I began report ing for The Bulletin. Salary nil and unattached. My enthusiasm might have led to a profitable connection if I had stuck to the game. I tried my prentice hand at everything. I reported lectures. I went to spiritual istic seances, and one Sunday night, at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Girard Avenue, I was thrown out bodily by an enraged "medium" whose wrist I held till the lights were turned on. As an amateur magician that kind of foolery was easy to expose, but the duped ones present had other views and I fled down two flights pursued by most unspiritual language. I was congratu lated by Leander Williamson, who told me that if I kept it up a century or so I might become an editor. He jeer- ingly referred to me as the "boy-critic." I taught piano. I went into the house of bondage, where to the click of the metronome, the puling attempts of the pupil, and the JIM THE PENMAN 201 irritable lead-pencil of the teacher was added the fear that no money would be forthcoming at the end of the term. And then my good mother, who thought piano teaching was a gay rigadoon, added to my list of pupils a half-dozen charity patients. I didn t much mind the extra burdens. But I did protest against the lack of talent I found among them. I went to Riverton, N. J., two days a week. That was an agreeable diversion; the trip, the pretty country roads, the cordial pupils ah ! what a nice lot of little girls I had. Their names sound like a rosary; Hattie Hovey, Ellie Earp, Josie Cook, Bertie Bechtel, and other children, who tapped the keys while their mothers complacently listened, occa sionally rewarding me with home-made pie and milk. It was idyllic. I ate the pie and gave the milk to the cat. I must have been a "rotten" teacher, yet my pupils progressed. I had more important ones in the city; Miss Lillie Frismuth, of Chestnut Street, the Misses Lewis, of Pine Street, and Miss Dougherty, of Spruce Street. If I had stayed in the rut, to-day I might have owned a little home near Manayunk and commuted, and contributed to the Musical Banner, and despite the dusti- ness of my intellectuals might have been happy with a galloping gang of grandchildren. Qui sait? About this time I met Theodore Presser, who, as every one knows, has started musical orphan asylums, homes for reformed musicians, and sanatoriums for hands lamed by excessive use of the thumbs on the black keys. Then, Mr. Presser was a lean, hungry-looking man with his head full of haif-crazy schemes; at least, they seemed so to me. He had started a musical monthly whose pulse, temperature, and respiration he watched as if it had been a chick in an incubator. And it was a chick of uncertain 202 STEEPLEJACK health. I wrote paragraphs for it; betimes, I spread my wings and flew to the editorial roost and sounded my little cock-a-doodle-doo. My salary was as ever, nothing; but Theodore let me splash about in his pond and I was contented. Many nights we went to the post- office there anxiously to open letters. What a hurrah of joy when a dollar bill was found for an annual sub scription ! Presser, who is the Henry Ford of Philadel phia sheet-music, saw further ahead than I. The Etude has a subscription list that must make envious even Mr. Bok. Presser did it all with his canny Yankee patience and shrewdness. He knew that the daughter of the plumber, the daughter of the policeman, hankered after music, and he deliberately built a machine to cater to their needs. The curious part of it is that he really improved their taste. The most famous pianists con tribute to The Etude, are read and inwardly digested. I am in hopes that if these "few lines may meet his eye" as they say in manuals of writing made easy for servant-girls that he will give me a bed for my old bones in one of his eleemosynary institutions. You never can tell. A music-teacher, a music-critic, an au thor the very gods fight against them in the heavens. But matters were coming to a climax. If Miss Brew- ster had defined my wishes, given them pith and point, where great writers on whom I leaned did not, it was be cause her book touched responsive chords. This con tinuing explanation of mine must strike you as an apology for my native indecision, and, as Leslie Stephen says: "An apology sometimes is worse than a satire." Further to muddle my affairs was a disinclination to make money. My father often declared that if I saw a ten-dollar bill coming to greet me I would run away. I have changed since then. I like money. Who doesn t? I spend it, JIM THE PENMAN 203 believing that it s bad luck to save. But to pass our interval between two eternities raking in gold is simply absurd to me. I have always worked for leisure to waste time. I know of some families, not bohemian in their habits, who are never more than a few dollars ahead dur ing their lifetime. I am in that class, living from day to day on the industry of my pen. It seems ridiculous, and it is perilous. Life at best is a dangerous adventure, and I think that the modern gladiator should change the old formula and cry in the arena: O Death! those who are about to live, salute thee. Schopenhauer who has been wittily described by Paul Bourget as "Chamfort a la choucroute" argued that philosophers more than other men should have means ample enough to allow them leisure. It is time, not money, that is the true treasure of life. Our sole recompense is to have lived, but to have lived as we elect, not as the other fellow tells us to. Ay ! there s the rub. And, as there is nothing so much to be feared as fear of fear, then money is the sol vent. Without it you fear, yes, fear. I dodged my duties like the moral skulker that I was, not knowing then that the hawthorn must grow with the spirit of the triangle in it, else not be hawthorn; that the "honey-harp," the bee as Thoreau calls it, remains valiantly a bee till its final exit to honey-heaven. But I didn t moralise dur ing the middle seventies. I roared like a serpent, and hissed like a lion a clothes-line; and I avoided every op portunity where money might be acquired. I see now it was because of my absorption in a few ideas, which to-day I repudiate. The leopard does change its spots once in a while despite the adage. Suddenly I decided that life held nothing so precious as Paris. To help matters along, I offered myself as a clerk in a piano house. It was the Chickering piano 204 STEEPLEJACK agency at the corner of Chestnut and Thirteenth Streets, where Wanamaker s now stands. Mr. William D. Dut- ton, still spry and little changed by the passing of forty years, was associated with his father, William H. Dutton, in the business. It was a pleasant wareroom. I arrived at 6 A. M., went to the basement, and two hours later, after my travail with finger exercises and Czerny studies, I was ready for the day s toil. It was light. Young Mr. Dutton, who had a flair for the artistic, played the piano with taste and possessed an excellent technique. His father, a handsome old gentleman with a fresh com plexion, would say as his son played: "He studied the Hummel school. It s the only one." That is true; it is the only one in which to acquire pearly scales, but it is otherwise inadequate. When customers entered I had to accost them. Once I was showing off my paces on a second-hand instrument before a prospective purchaser, a woman, whose face expressed repugnance. Mr. Dut ton supervened: "James," he suggested, "clean that case with the feather-duster. I ll show the lady the piano"; and he began playing Gottschalk s "Cradle Song" with a touch that melted her heart. She bought the piano. After she went away he said to me with a characteristic glance over his eye-glasses, "It all depends on the way it s done, young man. If your touch is too truthful with a shaky old piano you will never sell it." It was a grand lesson in worldly ethics for me. I never forgot it. And when I read Ibsen s statement that all truths grow old or stale after twenty years, I think of Mr. Dutton and his second-hand piano. "Our America is here or nowhere," says the poet. We are the supermen. Why wait for another century JIM THE PENMAN 205 to prove it. u You must live in the present, launch your self on any wave; find your eternity in each moment." I hadn t read Thoreau then, but Irish-like, I determined to take the bull by both the horns of dilemma. I was like the poet s cloud, "which moveth altogether if it moves at all." I actually sickened for Paris. It was in 1878, the year of the first Exposition since the Franco- Prussian War, France was en fete. Best of all, Liszt was named honorary director of the Hungarian section at the Trocadero. An impulse throttled me. Why not steal away between two days, sail to Paris, see Liszt and die? The Liszt cult was strong in our household. For my mother he was the Abbe Liszt, for my father a gro tesque daddy-long-legs, or a centipede. His picture showed us one of those faces that had become hardened in the pitiless glare of the public glance. Nevertheless, he was a cult, and a cult, as has been wisely remarked, is always annoying to those who do not join in it, and generally hurtful to those who do. But, oh ! to see him, to hear him play. I began to manoeuvre. I sold my beloved books. I parted with my pictures. I scraped and saved and stared in the windows of steamship offices. It was to be a stealthy departure, an egotistic elopement, with a melancholy alibi of the soul. At last I was to "Drive a straight furrow and come to the true measure of man" (I had been reading Theocritus, his Hylas). To attain the necessary courage I became reticent, avoided my friends and family. Anyone with a half eye would have noted my nervous behaviour and watched me. That was precisely what happened. I packed my few clothes in a handbag and was caught in the act by my brother, Paul, who, always realistic, asked: "What s her name ? " Art, I might have replied, but with Macchia- 206 STEEPLEJACK vellian casuistry asked him in turn: "Who won the game to-day?" Finally, I boldly marched into the agency of the French line, and bought for $28 a ticket in the fourth class of the Canada, sailing September 25, 1878. There are some dates that are unforgetable. You may forget the name of your divorced wife; but your first ocean trip never ! (That is, if you are a person of sentiment.) I expected to make a "clean getaway," as they say in superior criminal circles, but I was balked, and by my own imprudence. Early in the morning the steamer was to leave New York about 2 P. M. I awoke my parents and told them of my plan. They consented with suspicious alacrity, after interposing the usual objections; my youth, my health (I had, still have, the constitution of an ox; knock wood !). It was settled. Rejoicing, I awoke my brother, who made comments unfit to print. At the Pennsylvania Railroad station, then at Thirty-second and Market Streets, a few friends saw us off I was in the custody of brother John Alfredo Barili among the rest. New York reached, I went on board. Ring down the curtain on old Phila delphia ! I have written enough to give you a fair idea of my mental and physical characteristics, so that you will judge the critic as he should be. This is the method suggested by Hennequin, of which I told you. A moral precis of the critic and a peep at his temperament, then much that is dark becomes light. As for the modesty of the method? Such a monster as a modest author does not exist. Perhaps one is mentioned in history, but he was so morbidly modest that he forgot to write his book. Therefore, accept my chattering as a thing to be expected. I am an optimist at bottom, with a superficial coating of JIM THE PENMAN 207 pessimism, which thaws near a piano, a pretty girl, or a glass of Pilsner. Without hope it is impossible to achieve the hopeless. I believe that anyone who has sung a song of hope has his prayer answered; indeed, William James has said that no prayer is unanswered; when it is uttered the relief (liberation of nervous energy) is instantaneous. But I loathe the fixed grin on the faces of those cheerful humbugs, adherents of cheerful cults, pollyannas, and other bores. These people want you to be happy against your will. Time works prodigies, but the hypocrite never dies. "Les gros bataillons ont tou jours raison," wrote Jomini, and this must be, not alone in the battle field, but in peaceful life charlatans are always in the majority, charlatans and imbeciles. I have spent my life in tilting at them, and at times I am afraid to look at the mirror. Maeterlinck asks: "Are you of those who name or only repeat names?" I fear I am one of the repeaters. No man is a hero to his wife (if they have been married long enough), and I think that no writer should be a hero to his readers. It is an impressive pose that of omniscience, or lofty morals. But a whited sepulchre is soon deprived of its whitewash. If a critic can t be human, then let him become a pedicure or a bugologist. Swinburne said: "I have never been able to see what should attract a man to the profession of criticism but the noble pleasure of praising" and then he went out and slew his enemies (critics and authors) by the hun dreds. He had the most vitriolic pen in England. It sounds magnanimous, but neither praise nor blame should be the goal of the critic. To spill his own soul, that should be his aim. Notwithstanding the talk about objective criticism, no such abstraction is thinkable. A critic re- 208 STEEPLEJACK lates his prejudices, nothing more. It is well to possess prejudices. They lend to life a meaning. For example, consider my eclecticism. In Edgar Quinet s romance, Merlin, we read of a visit made by the magician to Prester John at his abbey. This abbey is an astounding conglomeration of architectures pagoda, mosque, ba silica, Greek temple, synagogue, cathedral, Byzantine and Gothic chapels, minarets, towers, turrets in bewilder ing array. Prester John is a venerable man with a long white beard: "Upon his head he wore a turban with a sapphire cross. At his neck hung a golden crescent, and he supported himself upon a staff after the manner of a Brahmin. Three children followed him, who carried each upon the breast, an open book. The first was the collection of the Vedas, the second was the Bible, the third the Koran. At certain moments Prester John stopped and read a few lines from one of the sacred volumes; after which he continued his walk, his eyes fixed upon the stars." Of course, he stumped his toe against the actual, as do all mystics. Eclectic is my taste in creeds and cultures. And in cultured eclecticism may be found the shallows and depths, defects and virtues of our times. I am the child of my century, and can echo Mallarme: "Helas! J ai lu tous les livres." But I had set my feet upon the trail of Bohemia, the fabulous "sea-coast" that lures most men. You may be as prudish as an oyster, as patient as a prostitute, as sober as a Judge (naturally a Judge who doesn t drink), but you shall not escape a touch of lunar folly when young girls sometimes with the seal of their solitudes see the moon in company with their sweethearts little shocks without words, not by Mendelssohn; but it suffices for the lads to see the girls. My moonshine came JIM THE PENMAN 209 from the Seven Arts; they are indigenous to Bohemia. Where is Bohemia? Is it a state, not of soul, but of the purse? Perhaps, again I was to discover it through disenchanting experience. Later I knew that there is only one way to become a perfect Bohemian; lead the existence of a sober sedentary bourgeois, with cobbler s wax on your chair, grease on your elbow, sweat on your brow, and, what the metaphysicians call the Will-to-Sit- Still. Then you may write a book, master music, or play on your intellectual instrument to perfection as Henry James puts it. But I hear the "all ashore" whistle. All aboard for Paris ! PART II PARIS FORTY YEARS AGO I M AFLOAT Behold me afloat at last on that good old tub, long since sent to the scrap-heap, the Canada of the Com- pagnie Generale Transatlantique, with my heart full of hope, my eyes turned eastward, my wallet not too heavy, and few clothes. My brother John took aside the chief steward of the quatrieme classe and tipped him. A swift survey had told him that I was in for trouble, and perhaps, he thought it would open my eyes all the sooner to realities. That fourth-class on the outward-bound steamship politely masked its true name; it was the steerage, nothing more, nothing less. At the age of thirty I would have revolted at the smells, the dirt, the promiscuity, but youth swallows trouble and I was not disgusted. It was life. And I meant to live. It soon proved to be life, of all sorts. We slept in bunks, not beds, with no protection from the prying gaze of neigh bours. Our steward rigged up a calico curtain for my couch, as if I were a girl. The men made rude com mentaries. We were segregated; the women were across the corridor. When I read Stevenson s Amateur Emi grant I admired his art, though wondered at his dodging of disagreeable details. His description is rose-coloured. But a steerage, even the best, and the French Line was not so bad as the worst, is horrible. I confess when bed time came that I was rather blue about the gills. The smell, a medley of bad tobacco, alcohol, unwashed bodies, vile breaths phew ! I must have been copper-lined and 2i 4 STEEPLEJACK riveted to stand the combination. Every port-hole was closed; we had struck a bit of rough water, and the wind was freshening. The gabbling died away. Lights were out. I clutched my pocketbook and fell into a doze. It didn t last, noises awoke me. The ship was pitching, and oh ! brethren, what followed I shan t record, except one word seasickness. I ve crossed forty odd times and never have I been, in fair weather or foul, seasick. That night tried my nerves. I went on deck to escape nausea, and at once felt better. My nose had nearly proved me coward. Next morning I sought the head steward and asked him why I was covered with little red spots. He at once explained that the salt air affected the blood, that "but," I interrupted "the salt air doesn t run over the bed with legs, does it?" My crudeness made him blush. "Ah, Monsieur," he deprecatingly replied, "some things must be. The fare is cheap, and if you find certain other passengers, well the company doesn t charge extra for their passage." It was now my turn to blush. I was drop-ripe in my verdancy, but the cynicism of this elderly person pained me. What a rascal he was. He plundered me of my five-franc pieces, whether in making change or charging for extras tobacco, coffee. The wine was free. It was also poisonous. I ordered a better vintage a vin bleu that rasped my throat, but I could get it down. When I saw the sea it was as flat as a temperance lecture, I was disappointed because of its wet monotony. I quoted Landor to help me out: "Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?" Like the girl in the Stendhal novel who found love insipid, I felt like asking: "Is that all?" I wished for this same monotony a week later when we nosed into a gale that kept us under cover I M AFLOAT 215 for two days, swept a seaman into the water, and banged things generally. Then I saw my fellow travellers with out their daily posing. A ship is the same all over as far as human nature is concerned. The first day I had walked the decks, and was not held up at the various barriers because I may have been better dressed than my companions; but the second day out I was asked for my ticket and peremptorily bidden to go to the deck below. I resented the manner of the chap, who wasn t precisely rough, but, as I thought, too sharp. Did he take me for the cattle herded forward? I soon learned that when you travel fourth-class you are considered fourth-class, with all its implications. It was my first contact with social distinctions. I didn t like it. The third and fourth class mingled on the same deck, though we ate and slept apart; second-class was almost aristo cratic; first-class in the empyrean. After I had been turned out of first-class I sat down on the second deck; this time I was chased away, much to the satisfaction of my fourth-class contemporaries. I was ignorant of rules, but they thought I was putting on airs, and therefore de served a rebuke, but as I didn t attempt to play the dis guised nobleman or reduced gentleman, I was soon re ceived into the guild of dirt and poverty as if I belonged there. I did. I was presently as unkempt as my asso ciates. I sported a Scotch cap, went collarless, wore a flannel shirt, and my hands and face did not shine from soap. I defy anyone to keep neat in such circumstances. The crowd wasn t a bad one; it was poor, and had neither time nor inclination to wash. "Personal dirti ness is the real and permanent dividing line of classes . . . there is no social equality between the clean and dirty. The question of physical purity lies at the root of the 216 STEEPLEJACK real democratic problem," wrote Havelock Ellis. Clean liness is greater than godliness, and I have always noted that the more superstitious a religion the filthier its fol lowers. What surprises me now is to remember with what ease I reflected the colour (a black and tan) of the society in which I found myself. There was the usual mixture. A dozen black-sheep, some members of good families, who left home in disgrace because of gambling debts or women scandals, and were returning in a still more disgraceful state. Then there were a half-dozen families who had saved enough to retire to their own departments in the provinces and live "en bourgeois," a dream realised. Two theological students on their way to Rome via Paris added variety to the personnel. I must explain that they, like the families I speak of, were in the third-class. Economy was their shibboleth. As I seemed fairly decent (I brushed my hair every day) I was admitted, though not without reservations, into the aristocracy of the steerage. Our voyage was not unpleasant; even in Hades good company counts. The early rising was the worst part of the day, the sleeping- quarters smelled to heaven; but once on deck life became bearable. That first breakfast, a bowl of coffee and a stale roll how it went down ! The waiting between meals was trying to healthy young stomachs. Soup, boiled beef, beans, a litre of wine and bread "at dis cretion" I ate it by the yard comprised the second breakfast; better was the dinner, a function as well as a "feed." We had a roast of some kind, fresh vegetables, and more wine; without that blessed wine the food would have gone begging. The promenade on deck was quite fashionable. I have many times since watched such perambulations from an upper deck; now I was one of I M AFLOAT 217 the dramatis personse. We had no smoking-room, hud dling in the corridors when the weather was unfavourable. Have you noticed that a war, a calamity, brings humanity to a common level? What cared we if the upper-decks looked down at us condescendingly ! We were the real passengers; the others only phantoms. The "life of the ship" was also with us. Above decks he is known as the "joy of the smoking-room"; sometimes he is a "she." Our social hero was a suspicious scamp in rags, a polylinguist, a cultivated man of the world, unshaven, unshorn, with polished manners, and a tongue hung in the middle. He gave himself out as a gold pros pector from the West, where he had staked out a claim, but inevitably had been robbed of it by his evil part ners while he was sick with fever. In fact, the old legend, and related with such authority, such a profusion of details, that he won our respect and was nicknamed the "millionaire." He borrowed our cigarettes, our wine, our loose cash. Had he not an uncle, a wealthy banker in the Rue de Provence? When our passage tickets were collected he disappeared. I fancy he had bribed the steward; certainly he was a stowaway. But he bore a charmed life and only once did I see him discomfited. He had made a jesting remark about religion to the theological students, and found himself sprawling on the deck; one of the pair, a husky Irish lad with a fist of iron, had knocked the farceur down. A sadly black eye kept him quiet for a few hours, and then he sought our sympathy by pointing to the swollen pouch under his eye and gaily declaring that he received it in a worthy cause "pour le bon Jesus-Christ"; but the students were always on the other side of the boat when he ven tured on this sorry witticism. II IN PARIS AT LAST We entered the roads of Havre, October 6, and the next day we were in Paris. Havre detained us because the chief steward, with the "favoris," side whiskers, wished to show us that city. It was my first taste of French life. Everything seemed miraculous. Not only had I the " innocence of the eye" but an innocent palate; the native cuisine opened my eyes as well as my throat. Cookery, too, is one of the Seven Arts. The French have made it an art. We went to a gingerbread fair, an imitation of the fair at Vincennes, and sought our beds in a condition of inflamed sobriety. I remember lean ing from the window of my wretched little bedroom and listening to a woman singing in the back alley. She had tears in her voice, and her voice was riddled by rum. I fell asleep in a fever of contentment which even the awakening in a chilly drab dawn did not dispel. After a bowl of onion soup, the regulation remedy, we boarded our train, third-class compartments. I had gone up in the social scale, had mounted just one rung on the ladder. Drizzling rain fell as we entered the Gare St. Lazare at five o clock in the evening. Paris, after we had passed the bridge of the BatignoIIes, was not very attractive. Those high tenements they seemed so in 1878 as com pared with houses in Philadelphia on either side of the railroad yards are still to be seen; each time I return to them I experience the same sinking of the heart. That first night in Paris left a bad taste in my mouth; perhaps 218 IN PARIS AT LAST 219 Havre had something to do with it. I had attached my self to one of the families, and after patrolling the grand boulevard we found ourselves as far as the Boulevard de Sebastopol. We had passed through the Rue St. Lazare and, naturally, stopped for a " consommation " at some cafe with tables on the street. The lights electricity was coming into use, the Jablochkoff lights on the Avenue dTOpera set the fashion the cleanliness of the establishment, the bustle of the waiters serving thirsty people, who had fresh coloured faces, much im pressed me. Even then I noted that the nation had made eating and drinking human. Sociability was ra tionalised. The drunken man abounds on the globe but less in Europe than elsewhere. Exhausted by the terrible noise, the horns of the big buses, I followed in the wake of my comrades. There were halts, hesitations, and tentative sallies into cheap hotels. We all had an address "highly recommended/ and argued at corners while I, like one of those dogs that follows a mob till it falls, sat on my valise and patiently waited. Gendarmes were consulted and politely showed us various lodging-houses. This amiability on the part of policemen set me to wondering. Not a trace of hos tility or surliness. It was "Monsieur, par ici ! Mon sieur, par la!" as the men of our party wrangled with their wives. My French I had already discovered on shipboard was not the language spoken in France. I understood the general meaning of a phrase, which I persisted answering in a loud voice. Our business was settled by the diplomacy of a hotel proprietor who saw that to a dozen souls he could make concessions. He diplomatically invited us to a drink, claret in bottles this time, and the ladies said that he was "tres gentil." 220 STEEPLEJACK He was. He was also a common or garden variety of swindler when we paid our bills a day later. I, in par ticular, was a Iamb led to the shearing. My wool was depleted. Confused, raging, I said a few things to him that astonished my companions, who understood Ameri can profanity. Come, come, that s too strong ! The game isn t worth the candle. Perhaps we are in the wrong. Paris is much more expensive than in 1860! Thus I was pacified by one of my friends. The French stuck to their countrymen. I had been robbed, petty larceny of the meanest sort, but, after all, what could I expect? I was only a Yankee! Thoroughly disgusted with the crowd and the surroundings, I paid the bill, hailed a fiacre, and drove to Drexel, Harjes & Cie. I had definitely ruptured with the fourth-class and had become a bourgeois overnight. I found letters at the bankers . Well-dressed people read newspapers in the waiting-rooms. The place wore a hospitable air. I was with my own race once more. My letters filled me with joy. Philadelphia became the pivot of the planet. I saw my family through the senti mental haze of years; twelve days absence seemed a century. Best of all, for I was a pragmatist, was the command of the Philadelphia Drexel house to pay me a certain sum, not much, but a "magot" as they say. My mother, I knew, had been active in this matter. I ve forgotten my first evening spent in Paris with the immigrants, but I do know that when alone, I went to the Jardin Mabille, on the boulevard. I can boast that I saw the last of that famous establishment though it was dull diversion. During the Second Empire it had entertained the world with its wickedness. I searched with the ardour and curiosity of a green youth for that IN PARIS AT LAST 221 same wickedness. I only attended its obsequies. A dozen fat, stale, and unfair women pranced around to the noisy music of a band. Offenbach was still in vogue, but it was like corked champagne, this music. The men dancers looked like professionals. The Latin quarter masquerade wouldn t have deceived even a reader of that bogus bohemian romance, Trilby. But Trilby was unwritten, I was young, and presently I was sitting before the buffet drinking expensive vintages in company with an accomplished young lady, of at least forty-five, wear ing a blonde wig and a professional grimace. I paid for the refreshment, "Garcon, deux bocks!" and my accent was so outlandish that M lle Claire her real name, she solemnly assured me forced me to repeat phrases so that the waiter might join in the fun. Wicked ! Why, the dear old aunt wasn t as wicked as a village-pump. She became maternal and confidently told me that as a fool and his money are soon parted, I had better go home to my mamma. My vanity wounded, I took her advice, tipped the waiter, ordered a fresh beer for Claire and, bowing in my best Gallic manner, I hastily went away. I looked back as I turned the corner. The lady, the waiter, the lady cashier at the desk, were staring in my direction. They were not jeering. I must have impressed them as something so indescribably provincial that they held their breath. And I, who fancied myself "rigolo" with my Scotch cap, velveteen coat, flaring necktie, low collar, baggy breeches ! Wasn t I the picture of a Latin quarter student or artist? I had read Henri Murger s Vie de Boheme, and believed myself the real thing. Alas ! Claire and the greedy waiter didn t agree with me, and my guardian angel being "on the job," I went to my hotel in an irritable humour. But I had seen 222 STEEPLEJACK the historical Jardin Mabille, had spoken to one of its houris, and instead of dazzling wickedness, I had been sent away with a sermon in my ear. In this individual case Lecky was right when he called the harlot the pro tector of the home. The next morning not feeling in the least like a "brand plucked from the burning," I went to the friends of my parents. They had made a fortune in Philadelphia, first in the sewing-machine industry, where Mr. Lefevre found himself an associate of George W. Childs. He was one of the early fashionable dressmakers of the town, and his imported Worth gowns brought him fame and money. In 1878 he returned with his wife an adorable Frenchwoman and children to Paris and lived up in the Quarter of Europe, which is at the top of the Rue de Rome, and close to the boulevards, BatignoIIes and Clichy. I was received with open arms. Letters had evidently preceded me. My education was taken in hand and I was not allowed to speak English, so I spent the day mumbling my Broad Street Academy French. Mr. Lefevre, one of those natty Parisians, white-bearded and insouciant, who are gay at four-score he wasn t much over sixty first showed me the town. But he was less interested in the architecture, statues, the Louvre, or Cluny, than in the passing crowd. He was a seasoned inhabitant and registered many nuances for me in moral and physical Paris. I learned not only classes and masses, but salient characteristics of the day and night life. We went all over the city. I became a cockney, a "badaud." I knew both sides of the river, the exterior boulevards, the faubourgs. Above all, I became intimately ac quainted with the interior of churches. The Lefevres were religious. Every day I was trotted to church, and IN PARIS AT LAST 223 as every other day is Saint s day in France, I often went to High Mass. At first it was St. Augustin, then the Trinity. I compromised on a chapel in the vicinity, St. Marie des BatignoIIes. I hadn t come to Paris for its piety. The enforced visits, confessions, and other com mendable practices were irksome, in the end, and I re belled. The Lefevre family moved to the country, and I was left to my own devices, though I gladly visited them at Villiers-Ie-Bel, on the northern railroad. Ma dame Lefevre was solicitous about the state of my soul; she had promised my mother to look after me, when, if the truth be told, my soul wasn t worth the powder to blow it to Halifax. I kicked over the traces and deter mined to "live my own life," as they say in Ibsen plays. And a nice mess I made of matters. Ill THE MAISON BERNARD As I only had a small allowance I could not live where I should have lived. It was Mr. Lefevre who found me lodging in an old barracks on the Rue Puteaux, No. 5, off the BatignoIIes boulevard. It was kept by a dwarf hunchback with flaming eyes and tumbled hair. The house was not inviting in aspect or cleanliness. I was assigned a small chamber on the top floor, fifth story. The room barely accommodated a bed, wash-stand, armoire, the glass of which filled me with pride, my modest clothes, and a tiny upright piano, made by an Alsatian manufacturer, I think Kriegelstein was the name. Later a second-hand stove was bought and I was in daily danger of burning the house down when I made a fire really a big smoke and a roaring sound of flames for ten minutes. I ranged my few precious books on the sill of my solitary window. I looked over a gar den, and the usual array of chimney-pots. The climate was then, as it always is, abominable in Paris. Gay Paris is a figment of fiction writers. The gaiety is in the hearts of the inhabitants, not in the leaden skies. The cold of winter is more penetrating than ours, because it is damp, because the sun seldom shines, because houses are not heated as in America. Rain is the daily programme. Fall and winter are always wet. Spring is the best period, for summer, notwithstanding the popular belief to the contrary, is hot, sticky, and uncomfortable, all the more so since baths are for the well-to-do. Forty years 224 THE MAISON BERNARD 225 ago this was the rule. The old apartments had no con veniences. I paid the munificent sum of fifteen francs a week for my room, and as my income didn t go higher than five francs a day I hadn t much left. Indeed, a period of hardship set in. I was to learn the exact value of five centimes, and how to make that amount go as far as possible. I forgot to say that bed-linen was not included in my weekly rental. The landlord, whose name was Ber nard, was an Alsatian, and lived in the house. He sup plied wine and table-board to his lodgers. At first I ate at cheap restaurants, gargottes, places frequented by coachmen, workmen, or in wine houses where for a fixed price you were given a copious bouillon I don t think the Duval establishments were then in existence boiled beef and carrots, one potato, and a big bottle of cheap wine for the sum of one franc. Those were not expensive times. France was rapidly recovering from the shock of the war with Prussia, and prosperity filled hearts with hope. In my new home there was an old couple, the Grand- jeans, he a retired functionary, living on a small pension, she, after a half century of petty economies and married life, a brave and devoted wife. They had one pleasure left. On Sundays they dined "en ville" with their son and his family. They were very proud of him. He, too, was a government employee, who bid fair to tread in the snail trail of his father. One thing disquieted the worthy pair. Their son had two children, the regulation num ber of a French household; it was the prospect of addi tions that made the grandmother unhappy. "Ah ! Mon sieur," she would say to me on the landing when we got our water-supply, "my daughter-in-law is again a troubled woman." Another mouth to feed. I was duly sympa thetic. On Sundays they would mount the long flight 226 STEEPLEJACK of stairs at nine o clock, and I could tell from their up ward march whether matters had gone awry. Please don t think I was a Paul Pry, "snooping" about my neighbours affairs; the truth is I left my door open to get more liberty, as I was in narrow quarters. I usually finished dressing in the hall. When I played more than ten hours a day on the tinpan piano, I was reminded that other people had their rights by a volley of old shoes, or loud cries of "get out," and such expressions of dis pleasure. I was too superior, too absorbed, to bother with these unmusical persons. The Grandjeans were politer. Madame told me that my practice made her dream of the siege when the Prussians bombarded the city. I thanked her. I went on long walks with her husband, who escorted me to the Pantheon, the Invalides, the Tuileries, all the public buildings and monuments. One afternoon, after I had seen the reparations of the Tuileries, I asked how long it had been before the Prussians evacuated Paris. "Ah ! young man," and he mournfully shook his venera ble hand, "the boches didn t do all that mischief. I re gret to say it was our own people, the communards." Music was my chief pleasure. Hunger was also a focal- point in my consciousness. I was not in actual want, and with the exercise of a little prudence I had enough to keep the wolf from the back door; but he gnawed at my vitals, and not boasting Spartan fortitude, I was usually famished the last week of the month because I spent my allowance too soon. I ate so much at the little wine house that the woman who ran the place insinu atingly said: "Monsieur perhaps is suffering from a tape\vorm." It was merely a delicate hint that I must not exceed my privilege of more than a yard of bread at THE MAISON BERNARD 227 a meal, a thing difficult to do; Paris bread in long sticks is appetising. Those few days of the month, how they tested my stomach ! I could have gone to the Lefevres, but the railway fares cost too much, and then I had a few sparks of pride left in me. I repeated the words of Turenne, but they weren t very filling: "Thou tremblest, carcass!" Many afternoons I remained in bed with a heavy volume of Chopin s music on my stomach. It was a lazy equivalent for the belt strapped in. I had my chocolate, I smoked and I read. An unsatisfactory pro ceeding this one full meal a day, yet I worked, walked, was fairly content. Youth ! The hunchback proprietor was kind. Occasionally, after I had paid my rent with approximate punctuality, he would invite me to dejeuner at noon, a royal feast. I never refused him. At his table I met a queer crew, chiefly Alsatians. German and French were spoken without prejudice, barring the pro vincial accent. There were a half-dozen couples, young people, who, not securing their parents consent, had left home with their sweethearts and lived in Paris until they reached the age of twenty-five, when they could marry. And some of them did. No one was scandalised. They were all hard-working, fairly sober, and the men had the courage of their concubines. "We are too poor to marry," one of them, a house painter, informed me. They were devoted to their partners, and the monotonies of married life were much in evidence. Even in the atmospheric adulteries of the Henry James novels one may trace the platitudes of matrimony. To all intents and purposes these peasants, transplanted in Paris, were as securely bound together as if church and state had been invoked in the matter. But after I had lived a winter with them I detected 228 STEEPLEJACK rifts in their domestic lutes. Papa Bernard was mar ried to a midwife who conducted her establishment across the Seine. She promptly appeared at dinner time, seven o clock, possibly to look the boarders over. She had a ferocious eye for business. Her husband was hen pecked; there was a reason. Every afternoon he had a habit of disappearing. I would keep house, enjoying the snugness and warmth of the dining-room where there was a battered upright piano. After the maid-of-all- work, a disreputable young female, would clear the table and go to her cupboard, there to wash the dishes and troll out some obscene song she had heard in company with her little soldier while walking around the fortifica tions, I would play to drown her voice. Bernard, after enduring the noise, would take off his wooden sabots and in his slippers would steal up-stairs, first placing an index finger on his nose in a significant way, as one should say: Watch, wait, tell my wife I ve gone out! Once the midwife came in unexpectedly. Luckily, I was not there. The row that ensued must have been terrific. One young couple left the house the next morning. I feared to ask the reason. M. Bernard also drank. But I didn t always dine luxuriously. I continued to rove and forage, and as that noble American institution, free-lunch, was unknown, I had little to spare when rent day arrived. One night a fellow-lodger took me to the Halles, the central markets, and after a tour through the labyrinths, which Zola faithfully describes in Le Ventre de Paris, he showed me a trick that I shall never forget. We found ourselves behind one of the halls, with a dozen vagabonds, one in shabby evening dress and top-boots- but bare-headed, mostly human wrecks, THE MAISON BERNARD 229 drunkards and outlaws from society. They were in jolly mood, evidently cognac of the worst sort was in their veins. They were hungry. Like a band of wolves we watched a big cauldron over a fire, in which sim mered a mass of meat and vegetables, the scourings of the butcher s block and huckster s droppings. Fire and water are purifying, and this indescribable olla-podrida fumed and bubbled and sent to our nostrils a most tempt ing odour. A human hog in rags stirred the pot-au-feu with a baton fit for a wash boiler. As he stirred he hoarsely chanted: "One cent a try, one cent only." The trial was this: as the whirling mass tossed up frag ments of flesh, hunks of fat, potatoes, or carrots, you jabbed at them with a long wooden fork, and what you prodded on the prongs was yours. Only one cent. It would have been amusing if it hadn t been horrible. The gambling instinct, as well as hunger, was appealed to, and the low price proved an irresistible combination. I found it so. I speared like my neighbours and had fair luck, a lump of veal, which I ate with good appetite. No bread. No wine. These we found across the street. I never returned to this slop-bucket lottery. It wasn t necessary, my prospects were decidedly brightening. I sent a letter to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and it was printed through the intermediacy of Ferdinand Fetherston. It was dated from Paris, No vember 14, 1878. The banal letter of a young writer, beginning: "Paris! beautiful Paris!" with lots of gasps and exclamation points. These weekly letters lasted till the following summer. They were edited by my mother, who wrote a pure, flowing English, as her writings tell me. I was in the torturing grip of Carlyle then, and my contorted prose shadowed his excesses. My mother 2 3 o STEEPLEJACK warned me against this aping of a great man s style, and, no doubt, would have approved of Matthew Arnold s advice to Frederic Harrison: "Flee Carlylese as the very devil." I didn t and concocted tortuous phrases to my heart s content. Newman was upheld as a model of grace and limpidity, but it was too early for the great cardinal and prose-master. However, there was no great trace of the fuliginous Carlyle in these letters. To be frank, I think I wrote with more simplicity than now. Life has intervened. The same preoccupation with the arts may be found, also the same speed, vocabulary, and lack of sequence. We change less than we think, and the child is sometimes more sincere than the man. The best thing about this new connection was the five dollars it brought with each contribution. Twenty-five francs ! And remember that four decades ago in Paris, this amount almost equalled twenty-five dollars in purchasing power. I was a nabob when my monthly cheque arrived. I would stroll into Drexel s after a glorious banquet con sisting of Chateaubriand beefsteak the French are loyal to their poets and celebrities, not to mention war vic tories; think of La Pompadour, of Madame Recamier, Sauce a la Marengo, Mazagran of coffee this from a siege in Algiers and other soups, gowns, corsets, and desserts washed down with Burgundy, together with radishes and butter, Brussels sprouts, cheese and Mocha. How I swaggered home and boasted of my dejeuner ! I gave up the cheaper restaurants and ate at the liberal table of Papa Bernard, where I was received with the peculiar consideration accorded newly-acquired riches. IV MADAME BEEFSTEAK Then I fell in love. Not a novelty, but each new girl creates that illusion. It was hardly a "grande passion," this infatuation, only the reactions of two young persons thrown together at a common place, a Parisian table d hote. Contiguity breeds familiarity. I sat next to a handsome girl of twenty, a girl who had been a bonne. She wore the white cap of a servant, and behaved with the utmost circumspection. She lived in a hall-room on the floor below me, and had as a companion a nasty yapping dog which she petted and called "P-pauI" after Paul de Cassagnac, then in the public eye as a publicist, politician, and duellist. P-pauI hated me. I loathed the brute, which sat on the lap of his mistress at table. Whenever I spoke to the young woman I heard a growl. Nevertheless, I talked and she listened, fascinated by my fluent and fearful French. An intimacy followed. She was the only unattached female in the house. Of her antecedents I knew little. She told me that her bap tismal name was Coralie; that s all. M. Bernard would slyly smile at us, the boarders took our friendship as a matter of course. Yet we never met except at the mid day-breakfast and at dinner. Even Mother Bernard, with her beak of a bird of prey would regard us with a shrewd eye. Heaven knows why ! She may have been anticipating future events. So platonic was my inter course with Coralie that when I innocently invited her to hear a little music sitting in the hall, be it under- 231 232 STEEPLEJACK stood, as my room wasn t large enough for two she re fused rather testily I thought, telling me that M. Bernard was very strict regarding the morals of his household the infernal hypocrite ! but couldn t we take a little promenade some afternoon? Now, suspicious reader, you must not imagine anything wicked. Those guilty asterisks * * * much admired by novelists and suggest ing naughtiness, I shall not use, for the reason that we never promenaded. It wasn t necessary. I disliked her animal, and the only time she went out of doors was to give P-paul necessary exercise. Her eyes Coralie s were large and like hard-boiled eggs. She had a well- shaped head, regular features, scarlet lips and tiny ears. Small ears are the shepherd s warning morning or even ing. In a woman they spell selfishness, and a selfish man should never marry a woman like himself. This I told myself as I looked at Coralie. Uselessly, for I lost my head and made love to her. My tactics were simple. I had observed her fondness for rare beefsteak, an unusual taste in a Frenchwoman. I treated her every day to beefsteak. It went on my bill, and the bone belonged to the dog. Soon I paid for her dejeuner, but halted there. She hinted at hard luck, at dinners not within the compass of her purse. I was obdurate. Had I not grazed star vation? All went well till spring. Then I experienced a surprise. The family had nicknamed her Madame Bifsteck, be cause of her carnivorous propensity, and by consequence I was called Monsieur Beefsteak. The dog remained plain dog till his next sausage karma. With warmer weather my stove became an impediment; because of it I was forced to put on my shirt in the hall. A burst of MADAME BEEFSTEAK 233 generosity made me offer it to Madame Bifsteck. Her eyes shone like glorious lamps. I was assured that she loved me. I paid for another rare steak. We were almost happy. And then came the disagreeable surprise. One evening, after dinner, as we sipped our liqueurs, a burly coachman entered, whip in hand, and saluted the company. A swift exchange of glances. "It s her hus band," some one whispered to me. "Le mari!" that name consecrated by melodrama. My Coralie s husband ! Horrible. He was nearly seven feet high, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, at least, wore the capes and glazed high hat of his profession, and also the professional red mug. He was drunk, indeed, was never sober, and odd to relate, when he opened his mouth to speak, I expected to hear a rich Irish brogue, so much like a Dublin jaunt ing-car driver did he look. But he spoke French mixed with the argot of the quarter. An awe-inspiring creature. I had been sitting with my arm around the waist of Coralie, having lulled the jealousy of P-paul with a bone. Unostentatiously I withdrew this incriminating arm when I learned the title of the stranger. What ! Had my Coralie Bifsteck fooled me all along? Oh, grass where is thy greenness? Oh, beef where is thy price? I didn t have an opportunity to ponder the situation. The big devil looked at me and to my terror strode yes, he had plenty of stride towards me. "Ah, Monsieur Stove, it s you? Embrace your papa, young man!" He held me in a grip of steel. Mr. Stove! What did he mean? I had been saluted as Beefsteak, never as Stove. His bear-like hug nearly smothered me, I was hopelessly out classed from the start. The audience tittered, but soon became silent. It was to be serious ! Suddenly after a volley of objurgations, I was tripped up and found my- 234 STEEPLEJACK self across his knees, and next to his "wife." She placidly stared, like a cow in a thunder-shower. Then I was ignominiously spanked, spanked as my father never dreamed of spanking me. The family roared with laughter. The Bernards only smiled. It was a joke ! This M. Stove was such a funny fellow ! At the word Stove ("la poele") the gaiety redoubled. I didn t feel much like a hero when I was set on my feet, my hair mussed, my eye blinking. But I hadn t seen how could I, face down? the series of winks bestowed on the spectators. M. Bifsteck, to give him a name, was as jovial a pirate as one could meet cruising about that most adventurous of seas, the streets of Paris. We became friends before the evening ended. I forgave his horse-laugh (also professional) and his coarse unpleasantry, but the attitude of his "wife" dis gusted me. She was no longer Madame Bifsteck, only the slave of the man who paid her lodging. She nestled to him, provocatively staring at me. No use. The spell was broken. All s unfair in love or war; but her unfairness went a step in the wrong direction. Much cheap claret was consumed. The "cocher" kissed me on both cheeks. I preferred the spanking to the odour of onions and bad brandy. The next morning I missed my wallet and one hundred francs. I didn t feel particularly well and this loss sent my heart down into my boots. I raised the roof. I threatened to call in the police. Then it came to me that I had hidden with preposterous caution the money in the closet where I found it. I apologised in customary fashion to Bernard, and over our cordials he told me that the coachman had suspected his partner after my gift of the stove. Beefsteaks didn t count. It was the riotous extravagance manifested by MADAME BEEFSTEAK 235 that cheap stove transaction. I was advised quietly to change my address. This suited me. The city was warm. I was weary of Coralie suddenly and the next day I was en route for the country. Coralie insisted on accompanying me to the Gare du Nord, holding my hand, and at times, when P-paul permitted, tenderly pat ting my head. She had the limpid, luminous eyes of the born liar, yet she was simple and confiding. It wasn t her husband that worried her as much as her jealous dog. Whenever I tried to kiss her he snapped at my nose, did this canine guardian of the household honour. A kill-joy, a hateful hound, he barked to the very last when, with streaming eyes and to the evident appro bation of railroad porters and boys, we kissed our fare well. Dear Coralie ! Dear Madame Bifsteck ! We were once young and loving. Beefless days must have overtaken you ! Perhaps you married your drunken coachman. Adieu ! But I hope that infernal P-paul went to his dogged reward. V THE WHIRL OF THE TOWN Paris is a beautiful book, a book of ivory, gold and irony; a book that stirs the soul as it stirs the senses. Paris is a cloaca, the lupanar of the world where the vilest meets the vile. Paris, like Rome, gives you pre cisely what you bring to it. I have never had patience with the people who call Paris the City of Pleasure, as if it were not also the City of Work. Every aggregation of humans has its so-called pleasures, painful pleasures for the most part. Paris is simply the capital of the civilised world, and must pay the penalty for its pre eminence. It is the modern Scarlet Woman in the eyes of ignorant prudes, and Montmartre is one of the Seven Hills of vice. But on Montmartre is enthroned the Church of the Sacred Heart. God s hired man is work ing without wage in Paris as in London or Pekin. In 1867, in the gardens of the Exposition, when Glory and France were synonymous, and to the music, cynical and voluptuous, of Offenbach and Johann Strauss, the world enjoyed itself, as it enjoyed applauding Renan s latest book, or Theresa s vulgarity; amused by Ponson de TerraiFs fatuous indecencies while speaking in the same breath of the philosophical anarch, Joseph Proudhon. Bismarck and the Prussians seemed far away. Babel or Pompeii? The tower of the Second Empire reached to the clouds; below, the people danced on the edge of the crumbling crater. Jeremiah walked in the gardens. He was a terrible man, with sombre, fatricidal gaze, eyes 236 THE WHIRL OF THE TOWN 237 in which were smothered fires of hatred. His thin hair waved in the wind. He said to his friends: " I come from the Tuileries Palace. It is not yet consumed. The Barbarians delay their coming. What is Attila doing?" He passed. "A madman!" exclaimed a companion to Henri Lasserre. "He is Ernest Hello." It was the im passioned polemist, prophet, and patriot. The disquiet ing figure is evoked of that son of Hanan, who prowled the streets of the Holy City, in the year 62 A. D., crying aloud: "Woe, Woe upon Jerusalem!" The prophecy of Hello was realised. Attila came, Attila went. Seven years later I saw his handiwork, and the handiwork of the Parisian Bolsheviki of 1871, the Communists and those hags of hell, the petroleuses. The Red Virgin, Louise Michel, was still living, and in the faubourgs, memories of the burning and sacking of the city were green, and memories, I am sorry to say, grateful to many. But in 1878 there were compensations for the sadly afflicted people. The Exposition was a rallying-point. It was the first public expression of liberation since the war. Paris breathed. Paris smiled. An enchanted city for me. Each street had its history. Fresh from the Centennial Exposition I could make comparisons. In all that pertained to invention, to machinery, to the arts industrial, Philadelphia led, but in the gracious arts, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, Paris was, as ever, peerless. (I loathe this word, it sounds like a baking-powder advertisement, yet I can think of none better.) Peerless Paris ! I discovered that my patri otism, at best a tender plant in my native hothouse, had suddenly pushed strong sprouts. For the first time I really saw our flag; my heart beat as it blew from the 238 STEEPLEJACK Trocadero. The American Section filled me with pride, but I spent most of my time in the art Salons. In Phila delphia we had raved over the huge panoramic canvas of Hans Markart, "The Triumph of Caterina Cornaro," the art of the theatrical scene-painter. In the Trocadero were assembled all that was exquisite in contemporary art. And at the Louvre I completed my education be gun in Black and White, with colour hitherto sadly neg lected. Jules Grevy was the political idol of the day. His face was to be seen in every shop-window. Gambetta shared honours with him. I remember one cartoon entitled "The End of a Bad Dream," depicting Grevy and Gam betta clasping hands, while in the background Marshal MacMahon and others are seen flying away. Gambetta, one-eyed, as Jewish-looking as a rabbi he had been called Jew, though I noticed that many men from the South are Jewish-looking; Alphonse Daudet, for exam ple, whose real name was David, a true meridional and burly and bourgeois I saw Victor Hugo, who had ascended the final ladder of glory awaiting only the apotheosis of death, which came a few years later. I saw him a half- dozen times, a commonplace old gentleman with a white clipped beard, and the inevitable umbrella of the prudent Parisian citizen. He usually rode on the top of an omni bus, and was always saluted by bared heads. "It s M. Hugo, great poet," whispered a conductor as the great Frenchman nimbly mounted to the imperiale. This fighter, who had helped with his mighty pen the down fall of that stuffed-dummy Emperor and bastard Bona parte, Napoleon III, was not forgotten by his country men. His eyes alone proclaimed the fire of genius. They burnt in his head like lamps. I was not so lucky THE WHIRL OF THE TOWN 239 as George Moore, who shook hands with Turgenev, or as Henry James, who knew the lovable Russian novelist; but I once saw him, as I saw Guy de Maupassant at the Cafe Sylvain across the street from the new opera house. Guy was as burly then as Gambetta. He was sipping a bock. A more uninteresting young man you couldn t encounter in a day s walk. My most cherished recol lection is the glimpse I had of Gustave Flaubert, huge, a veritable Viking, with the long, drooping mustache of a trooper, and big blue eyes in a large red face. A magnificent man. He was hurrying through the Rue Saint-Lazare, possibly on his way to the gare and Rouen. My old friend M. Grandjean, pointed him out, but while I had read Madame Bovary, the sight of Paul de Cassag- nac, swaggering behind Flaubert, arrested my attention. The duellist and notorious politician was surrounded by a flock of sycophants who owned the sidewalk. Soli tary, his brain filled with dreams, Flaubert went his way. The reigning painters in 1878 were Meissonier, Carolus- Duran, Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Cabanel whose Venus painted with a brush dipped in soft soap may be seen smiling on a couch of sea-foam at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts here Leon Bonnat, Paul Baudry, Laurens, Delaunay, Henner, Gerome, and Henri Regnault; all men of the Institute, though the unhappy Regnault, his life lost through a spent bullet during the last days of the war at Buzenval, was considered a violent rebel. However, his " Moorish Execution," and his "Salome" reveal him as a conventional Orientalist. But the others, they ruled artistic Paris. Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, and a few brave men had exhibited at the Salon des Refuses in 1867 an invention of the Emperor, who, stunned by the clamour, instituted this gallery of 240 STEEPLEJACK the refused, as a sop to the cerberus of rebellion. In 1877 there had been another show that had scandalised Paris. Manet deliberately defied criticism with an exhibition of his own canvases for which he wrote a catalogue and a challenge. Whistler later imitated him. Official art frowned. Traces of this frown I found when I visited Julian s school, or the ateliers of Gerome and Bonnat. The way I found myself in the very thick of art student life was through the good graces of Milne Ramsey, a young Philadelphia painter, in the atelier, I think, of Bonnat. He had married Miss Ruff, a daughter of my father s old friend, General Ruff, and it was at his hos pitable studio that I met some of the young artistic Americans in Paris. Edwin Blashfield, W. H. Lippincott, Charles Sprague Pearce, Herman Hynemann, Henry Thouron, Van der Kempf, a sculptor, Thomas Healy who at Rome had painted Liszt Frank Moss, Loomis, and Helen Courson, who painted animals. Not Manet, but Bonnat was my man, and, with Gerome, seemed to be the acme of vital progressive art. The portrait of Thiers is a solid work, after all, beside which the febrile, hasty, abridged statements in the Manet portraiture appeared thin and shallow. Yes, I confess it without a mea-culpa that the Impressionists repulsed me by their glaring, striped brush work, ugly subjects (I fancy that it was there the shoe pinched, my eye having been fed with the beauties of the Italian schools) and their boastfulness. Manet in particular was an object of curiosity. His colour appealed; but his faulty technique, after the neatly finished surfaces of Meissonier or the creamy nudities of Lefebvre ! I see it all now. The official painting of that time was not so bad as the new crowd pretended it to be. Other days, other palettes. Bonnat was THE WHIRL OF THE TOWN 241 not a genius and Gerome should have begun with model ling instead of ending his career chisel in hand. His talent was more sculptural than pictorial. Nevertheless, there was plenty of power, felicity of ex pression, and genuine craftsmanship in this much abused group. After thirty years, and after revisiting the Louvre or the Luxembourg, I find the Impressionists as old- fashioned as the Fontainebleau group; yes, even the Pont-Aven School, headed by Gauguin and Van Gogh, is dating. The truth is that the time factor is grossly overestimated. Good art in 1500 or 1830, or 1867 or 1918, remains good art. A Corot is a thing of beauty, particularly his much-neglected figure pieces. The natu ralistic movement had for its true father Gustave Cour- bet a romantic canvas is his " Funeral at Ornans," ro mantic and black as a Muncaczy. Monet was the first Impressionist. Nietzsche said the first Christian and only Christian died on the Cross. Claude Monet was the original Impressionist, notwithstanding his debt to Turner and Watteau; the Watteau of the "Embarkment for Cythera" in the Louvre. The rest patterned after this individual painter whose myopia made him see his landscapes blurred. Manet, much influenced by Velas quez and Goya, followed Monet, while Edgar Degas, strictly speaking, did not belong to this group, which had been given the unhappy title of the BatignoIIes School. Atmosphere was the valuable contribution of the Im pressionists to art. I didn t know enough forty years ago to feel the current of fresh air that swept through Parisian ateliers. And the gorgeous hues of the new painters. What courage they had, and how they were jeered at. I remember going to a minor show by major 242 STEEPLEJACK artists on the Boulevard Clichy somewhere, in company with William Lippincott and Pearce. What fun we had with the comical smears of Pissarro, Renoir Mon Dieu ! think of it, Renoir, a painter of genius Sisley the most exquisite of them all and Monet. I blush as I write this. I liked Boudin, one of Monet s earlier masters, yet couldn t trace the logical development of his pupil. It was not till the spring of 1885, an( ^ at tne exhibition held in the Durand-Ruel Galleries then on Fifth Avenue at Thirty- sixth Street, that a great light broke in upon me. No doubt my eyes had been unconsciously trained by the first pictures seen in Paris. Now, the Caillebotte gallery in the Luxembourg seems antiquated. The men of 1830, too, are for the most part stale. Theodore Rousseau the biggest of the group is blackening, Jules Dupre is greasy in colour and sloppy in sentiment. Diaz is sen suous in colour, Monticelli in his best estate is richer, while Daubigny, despite the high prices he fetches, is often obvious. Corot has lasted. The followers, Har- pignies, Breton, Jacque, and the rest need not concern us. Painting has its fashions and fluctuations. I am chiefly concerned with the fact that Meissonier seemed then a more finished painter than Manet; perhaps he was so finished that he was lifeless, his metallic style crushing the vitality of his figures. Manet gave his generation a new opera-glass with which to view the pass ing show. He was the great colourist of his epoch, though not so big a personality or temperament as either Dela croix or Courbet. I fear that I have always been a re actionary, witness my present admiration for such dear old-fashioned classics as Stendhal, Ibsen, Strindberg, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and George Shaw. Archaic ? Yes Noaharchaic. THE WHIRL OF THE TOWN 243 Carolus-Duran made a deep impression on me, with his velvet jacket, lace collars and cuffs, dark, handsome head, and eyes sparkling with diabolic verve. He looked as he painted, a much more unusual combination than is believed brilliant and attractive. I know now that he plays second fiddle to Alfred Stevens of Brussels, in quality and design, but he did knock us out with his virtuosity, which his pupil, John Singer Sargent, inherited. Gandara among living painters has the same clever knack, the drawing-room touch; never great art. Gerome was a severe man, chary of speech, interested in paint- problems. Bonnat I liked, hail - fellow - well - met, yet always the dignified master, a rather difficult pose to maintain. Thomas Couture I saw in his home at Villiers- le-Bel, on the road to Ecouen. The admired painter of "The Romans of the Decadence," with its baccha nalian attitudes, its official scheme of composition and hot colouring, was then failing in health. He had outlived his reputation. An amiable invalid, happy with his wife and daughters in his villa and generous gardens, he told me some things of his contemporaries. He despised Manet, "a painter without talent, vain of his missing tail, like the fox in the fable." Couture painted some pretty pictures, notably the boy blowing soap bubbles, hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; but he was obsessed by the grand manner. He longed to be a second J. L. David. And he was not. He died shortly after in 1879. My passion for the land scapes of Claude Lorraine and J. B. Poussin was justified by the architectural design of Poussin, and the tender ness of tone still surviving in Claude. They are masters despite the newcomers. VI BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST I went often to the Cafe Guerbois on the exterior boulevard, where I saw Manet, Degas, Desboutins, but not Monet. My acquaintance with the visionary Villiers de Flsle Adam began at this cafe. Writer of prose tales, an improvisor at the keyboard as well as before a table, he fascinated me. I have written of him at length in the first chapter of The Pathos of Distance, called The Magic Lantern, and critically considered him in Icono clasts. Villiers was a fabulous creature. Dream and reality were so closely woven in his consciousness that he never seemed quite awake or sleeping. Whether he drugged or not I can t say, but he was the greatest liar I ever met, and I have met many being a newspaper man. Only Villiers was an artistic liar. He told im probable stories, always figuring as the hero, that would have made Baron Miinchausen blush. His magic lan tern, for instance, which I recorded, is one of his splendid inventions. He was an accomplished monologuist, and needed but a vinegar-cruet as an audience, his fellow- man failing; but fellow-man seldom failed. When Villiers had money he paid for the entertainment, and if poor, which was the rule, he still paid for others food and drink by improvising stories which were promptly gobbled up by his good friends, who lost no time in pawn ing the stolen goods at the nearest newspaper office. He was a gold-mine, this marvellous magician, Villiers de I lsle Adam. But Joris-Karel Huysmans and a few 244 BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 245 intimate friends had to look after his funeral expenses. Perhaps there are a few Americans who remember his tale, The Torture by Hope, as Poesque as The Pit and the Pendulum. He loved Poe, and wrote a novel with Thomas A. Edison as hero. The Eve of the Future, it is called, and is the grotesque story of an artificial woman made of steel springs, who loves a man. Perhaps if he had heard an Edison phonograph with all its horrors, he might not have put the inventor in a book, for he was a fanatical lover of music and an intimate friend of Richard Wagner. He it was who told me of Manet s famous witticisms. Manet before a picture of Meis- sonier, "The Charge of the Cuirassiers." "Good, very good," exclaimed the painter of Olympia not then in the Louvre. "All is steel except the breastplates." Meissonier was furious when a kind friend carried the mot to him. Alfred Stevens had said that Manet "drank the beer of Haarlem" after seeing his "Le Bon Bock," which is unmistakably derived from Frans Hals, and Manet waited for his revenge and got it when he saw a picture by Stevens portraying a fashionable young woman in street dress standing before a portiere, which she is about to push aside to enter the next room. Manet noted an elaborately painted feather duster- Stevens was a master of still-life which lies on the floor at the feet of the lady "Ha," he ejaculated, "she has a rendezvous with the valet-de-chambre ! " Villiers wrote a five-act play entitled "The New World" for which he won a prize of ten thousand francs, and a medal of honour. The prize was offered to the French dramatic author "who would most powerfully recall in a work of four or five acts the episode of the proclamation of the Independence of the United States, the hundredth 246 STEEPLEJACK anniversary of which fell on July 4, 1876." It was hissed at its production in 1883. There were only six presenta tions at the Theatre des Nations. It is unreadable a second time. The poet was not a playwright. He was of noble family, an ardent Roman Catholic, and a Dia- bolist; one of those Catholics like his friends, Barbey d Aurevilly and Paul Verlaine, of whom their coreligion ists were not precisely proud despite the devotion ex pressed in their writings to the church. One of the witty epigrams of Villiers is worthy of Voltaire. After a character of his Bonhomet goes to heaven the Almighty greets him: "Well, Bonhomet, when do you propose to drop the mask?" "After you, Seigneur!" responds the cynical Triboulet, slayer of swans at midnight and pro fessional idealist at large. I have spoken of Franz Liszt and the almost irresistible influence his legend had upon my youthful imagination. He was like the mountain in the Arabian Nights; all the ships with their little musical Sinbads were dragged out of their course and ended by clinging to him as does iron to a magnet. I had no plan, only to meet him, hear him play. I have elsewhere related of pursuing an old man with white hair, groggy nose and warts in abundance; it was on the Rue de Rivoli. He was sitting in a fiacre. I chased it for the length of that very long street. Was it Liszt? I couldn t take my affidavit that it was. There were many old, w r hite-haired men in Paris; also groggy noses Liszt was a celebrated cognac absorber and wearing warts all over their faces. I haunted the Exposition, especially the Austro-Hungarian section. I never saw him, but one evening in the concert hall, I heard Nicolas Rubinstein play the first Tschaikovsky BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 247 piano concerto, the very composition he had derided under the nose of Peter Illitsch a few years previous at Moscow. It was not a novelty for me as I had heard von Billow play it in the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, either in the autumn of 1875 or early in 1876. B. J. Lang, of Boston, conducted the orchestra and things were soon at sixes and sevens; the solo performer was white with rage. The playing of Nicolas, the brother of the mighty Anton, did not stir me, but it was of crystal line purity and impeccable as to technique. His style was more finished than Anton s. But the passion, and that nameless something we feel, rather than call, genius, he did not possess. Poor Tschaikovsky, who had been abused by both brothers for the workmanship of this B flat minor concerto would have smiled if he had heard the interpretation of Nicolas. Rafael Joseffy was at this time associated with Tschaikovsky in the Moscow conservatory, of which Nicolas Rubinstein was director. He it was who first told me of the mysterious taking-off of Nicolas, who did not die from too much wine-drinking, but was murdered by a jealous husband, and with a sand club, in the same manner as L. M. Gottschalk in South America. The piano virtuoso, Emil Sauer, a pupil of Nicolas, hints at the occurrence in his autobi ography, My Life, but Joseffy gave me the details. Struck in the milt by a sand club, which leaves hardly a perceptible bruise, the unlucky pianist agonised for weeks; he even was transported to Paris, but he failed to get relief, and died stupefied by morphine. There are many matters that never get into the newspapers. Tschaikovsky s death was another. Cholera or suicide? I was refused at the Paris Conservatoire de la Musique, then in its old quarters, Rue du Faubourg Poissoniere. 248 STEEPLEJACK Ambroise Thomas was musical director, a soured man whose "Mignon" remained his one success. "Hamlet," even with Lassalle singing the title-role, was a joke, Shake spearean and otherwise. My examination was set down for November 13, and I had been prepared for its rigours by going to church daily for a week. Old man Lefevre saw to that. But if, as Napoleon said, God is on the side of the heaviest battalions, he must have sided on that par ticular day with the greatest technique. I didn t have a show. I was too frightened to play a scale evenly. My entrance on the stage, before the jury, was greeted by an exclamation from Madame Massart, nee Masson, "Quelle barbe!" alluding to the blond fleece on my sawney chin. I had a sweet fluffy beard. Was I not a Bohemian in Paris? Velveteen coat, Scotch cap, open shirt. Oh ! what a guy I must have been. Once I at tracted the attention of a distinguished visitor in Paris, though no stranger there, Albert, Prince of Wales. He stood in a jeweller s shop on the grand boulevard, exam ining something sparkling. It was near the door. I stared in. No doubt I looked like a hungry person. I wasn t, but the Prince didn t know it, and putting 1 a spray of diamonds in a case into his coat pocket he came out of the place broadly smiling at me, and his sole com panion, a handsome young chap, joined in. I did, too. Later at Marienbad (in 1903) I saw the same equerry of King Edward, the Hon. Captain Ponsonby. But the Conservatoire ! To tell the truth I am tired of retelling that old tale. Suffice to say that with all my "pull" I was turned down. I had asked Lucy Hamilton Hooper to get me a letter from General Fairchild, who was either the American Minister or Consul General. I ve for gotten which. Mrs. Hooper had been Paris correspon- BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 249 dent of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and was the wife of Robert Hooper of our consulate. This letter, so graciously given me, was presented and did something, for it got me admission to the piano class of Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin, not indeed to play, but to listen, a very important act in the study of music. I became "auditeur" for a short period, and also had the advice in private of M. Mathias, a charming old gentle man, who told me more about the personality of Chopin than all the books on the subject. Chopin was a human being, after all, and neither an angel of light nor a demon of darkness. Like many another man of genius or business he was very irritable. His tuberculosis and neurasthenia made him impatient, poor suffering man. The Sand affair was over when Mathias had studied; Chopin did not die from the parting with Sand, but from the liaison itself. Sand never spared youth. Yet she, too, must have had tempestuous times. Her invalid had his daily tantrums. She loved her liberty. He didn t like the idea that she entertained men even at her home also his during his absence. That was the chief cause of the rupture with Liszt. I hinted at it in my book on Chopin. The worst side of the brief adventure was that Sand piloted Liszt to Chopin s own apartment, who, on his return, found the place in dis order. He never forgave either Liszt or Sand. It was an ignoble episode. To my surprise, I learned that Frederic was fickle. He had a new affair every day. His parting from George was partly brought about by indifference on her side, and wholly through the devilish intriguing of her sweet daughter, Solange, who made open love to Frederic, so as to give her mother pain. Most writers balk at this too Gallic situation (to be 250 STEEPLEJACK found in novels, and in Maurice Donnay s play "L Autre Danger"). But Madame Waldemar Karenine, Sand s Russian biographer, does not. The combination of con sumption and George Sand would have killed Casanova. It must not be supposed that the seamy side of Paris interested me. I never worked under such a forced emotional draught as in those few years. I felt that my parents might send for me at any moment, and I didn t waste time. I had set high standards for my self. It was to be a crucifixion on the cross of art. Goethe s advice, which I had read in Carlyle, to live in the good, the true, and the beautiful, did not seem too difficult. Walter Pater, who owes more to the sage of Weimar than is generally supposed, had assured us that success in life was "to burn always with this hard gem- like flame, to maintain this ecstasy," a counsel of perfec tion, but one that might also lead to a mad-house. "Failure is to form habits . . . not the fruit of experi ence, but experience itself is the end." Well, I failed to form habits, yet I am no nearer success, hedonistic or worldly. And William Blake with his suggestion that the road to wisdom is through the valley of excess, did not work wonders with me. Havelock Ellis points out that spiritual excess is meant by the great English poet, mystic, and designer. Perhaps. In either case, head aches, moral and physical, are bound to follow. I was aflame with enthusiasm that like stubble burnt out in a trice. I never climbed so many perilous steeples as in Paris. I wished to be shown all the splendours of earthly wisdom. I longed for the glory that was Liszt s, and the grandeur that was Rubinstein s. After eating horse meat while waiting for the arrival of heavenly consigned parcels from the infinite, I became a cultivator of "res- BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 251 taurant fat," as Robert Louis Stevenson says; and R. L. S. was at Grez, near Fontainebleau in 1879. I had rather have met that uncanny Scotch youth or George Moore than Flaubert or Turgenev. But fate willed otherwise. I was a regular frequenter of the Pasdeloup Sunday afternoon concerts in the Cirque d HJver, also of the Cha- telet concerts. Jacques Pasdeloup conducted the Winter Circus affairs. His real name was said to be Jacob Wolfgang. But he was Parisian born, he wore whisk ers and waved a wand, that is all I recall of his person ality. Colonne and Lamoureux drove him out of the concert field a few years after I heard him. As an or chestra the Pasdeloup could never compete with the band at the Conservatoire, technically the most polished in Paris. I listened to much new music at the Sunday popular concerts, amongst the rest Rimsky-KorsakofPs symphonic legend, "Sadko." And heartily hissed it was. A minority in the audience, to be exact, the students in the top gallery, applauded, and fisticuffs ensued. I usually left the Boulevard des BatignoIIes after my mid day breakfast, traversing the Quartier de P Europe, till I reached the Rue de Rome, down the slope of which I swiftly descended to the Gare St. Lazare, where I switched through the Rue St. Lazare, to the grand boulevard, via the Rue de la Chausee d Antin, and down the boulevard to the Cirque d Hiver, a long walk, there and back, even for my young legs. Invariably there was a battle to reach the gallery fifteen cents admission and secure front-row seats. Once on the Rue de Rome I saw the blond-bearded Manet with Stephane Mallarme; both lived in the European quarter; in fact, the Latin quarter was not so popular with painters or writers then as the 252 STEEPLEJACK more commodious, better-lighted studios along the boule vards des BatignoJIes or Clichy really the same broad street. The last time I was in Paris 1914 I walked up the steep Rue de Rome and visited my old home on the Rue de Puteaux, expecting to find another building. But there it stood, shabby, like the entire block, while across the narrow street was the yellow wall enclosing the forlorn garden with the same dusty trees. I asked the lady of the house, the concierge, if she remembered Papa Bernard. I risked the question because she was over eighty, and evidently an old inhabitant of the quarter. Miraculously, she remembered him. She had been in his service before my time, and later lived in the same street. He had remained at No. 5 for a few years, then he had moved up the Boulevard Clichy. After that a shrug of the shoulders. And his wife, the estimable sage femme ! ah ! that predacious beak of hers, and her prowling ways ["Monsieur," responded the brave woman, "he had so many wives." Feeling as if I had peeped into a dark, dirty, old well, I tipped her and resumed my excursion down the boule vard. Even that deformed dwarf had his compensations. At the Comedie Frangaise, I saw a revival of "Ruy Bias." "L Assomoir" was dramatised and produced early in 1879. The actor who originated the role of Coupeau, the drunken roofer and husband of Gervaise, actually died in delirium tremens. He had become abnormally thirsty playing the role of a drunkard. The winner of the grand prize in the lottery, 125,000 francs, was a tanner named Aubriot. Clotilde Kleeberg s piano play ing charmed me. She was a cousin of the painter, Her man Hynemann, of Philadelphia, I met her again at Baireuth, in 1896. She remembered her debut at the BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 253 Pasdeloup concert. I heard Miolan-Carvalho at the grand opera, also the tenor, Talazac. Camilla Sivori, one of the rare pupils of Paganini, played at the Pas deloup matinee. He was very old, and his tone was small, but he was an artist. He had appeared in Phila delphia, as had Henri Vieuxtemps, and while the mem ory of the Belgian master is vivid, I can t clearly recall Sivori there. The original Carmen, Galli-Marie, I heard, but not in the Bizet opera. I don t think the work was given at the Opera Comique while I was in Paris. It was not the enormous failure generally supposed. Philip Hale has dispelled that myth; nor did Georges Bizet die of a broken heart over the supposed fiasco. Like Alfred de Musset, he died from too much absinthe. Zola I saw and Daudet. There was no thought of Paul Cezanne in those days, but Barbey d Aurevilly still promenaded, lace cuffs, clouded cane, corseted, and hair flowing like the mane of a Barbary mare (I never saw a Barbary mare, but suppose the animal has a mane). Anna Bock was another debutante in 1879. She came from New York and had studied with Liszt. I heard her at the Salle Pleyel, where, in company with Leonard, she played Beethoven s Kreutzer Sonata for piano and violin; also some Chopin. Frederic Boscovitz, another Liszt pupil, a Hungarian and cousin of Joseffy, gave several concerts at the Salle Erard. He was familiar to me as I had attended his daily recital at the Centennial Exposition, where he had charge of the Steinway section. The Marie Tayau string quartet numbered among its members an American girl from New Orleans, Jeanne Franko, the sister of the conductors and violinists, Nahan and Sam Franko. She is still playing in New York. Marie Tayau was a violin talent. Miss Franko 254 STEEPLEJACK took the second violin in the quartet. Louis Diemer played the E minor Chopin piano concerto. I didn t admire it. It was like most French Chopin interpreta tions, precise and chilly. Only Slavs play Chopin to perfection. Think of listening to Berlioz, his "Romeo et Juliette" at a concert du Chatelet ! Colonne con ducted. At the opera the director was Halanzier. During one week I heard "Der Freischutz," a ballet, "Yeddo," "Faust," and "Robert le Diable." Catho licity in taste ! "Fatiniza" was also produced. I chiefly remember it with Jeannie Winston at the old Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia. Honore Daumier died in 1879 at tne advanced age of seventy-seven. He must have been pickled in alcohol, but, unlike Monticelli, that evoker of gorgeous land scapes, the great caricaturist, still greater painter, did not touch absinthe. He loved brandy. It didn t hurt his art, nor did absinthe hurt the art of Ziem, who lived to be ninety, but the poison killed Monticelli. It was sim ply a survival of the fittest tank. Daumier s modesty was proverbial. He was a close friend of Corot and Daubigny. One day Daubigny introduced him to a rich American picture dealer (are there any poor ones?) and warned him not to ask less than 5,000 francs for the first picture. This he did. The American paid the price, then begged for more. Daumier showed him another canvas. How much? The artist was perplexed. Dau bigny had said nothing about a second picture. Em barrassed, he replied, "500 francs." "Don t want it," said the other. "I don t like it as well as the first; be sides, I never sell any but dear pictures." Daumier delighted in repeating this rather doubtful story. But a witticism of his was afterwards appropriated by Jemmy BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 255 Whistler. Emboldened by his encounter with the Ameri can dealer, Daumier had asked a wealthy amateur 50,000 francs for a beautiful picture. The man looked around the shabby atelier and then at the artist as if he had been an escaped lunatic. "What, Monsieur! for that little canvas, 50,000 francs?" "My posthumous price, Mon sieur!" proudly responded Daumier. The picture was one of his Don Quixote and Sancho Panza compositions, and its posthumous price was double what the painter had asked for it. One afternoon as I was leaving my palace in the BatignoIIes an open carriage drove to the door and out jumped my old friend, the scarecrow of the steerage on the steamship Canada. He really had a rich uncle living on the Rue de Provence, and had learned my ad dress at Drexel s. He carried a large bouquet which he effusively offered to me, as if I were a prima donna. Naturally I was embarrassed, but the concierge was impressed. The young man was again on Easy Street and no doubt had wheedled his banker relative into a grand generosity. What could I do but accompany him, breakfast with him at "Les Trois Freres Proven- aux," still on the boulevard, and take a ride to Auteuil? There were other items, too, but I ve forgotten them; suffice to add that I never saw him again, my friend with the rhetorical rags. He had called merely to dazzle me; and he did. At a benefit for the yellow fever sufferers in New Or leans (September, 1878), I heard Camille Saint-Saens at the piano for the first time. In company with his pupil, Madame Montigny-Remaury, he played his own arrange ment of the trio from Beethoven s E flat Sonata, opus 31, 256 STEEPLEJACK No. 3, for two pianos. He also gave with finesse his G minor concerto for piano and orchestra. Josefiy alone outshone him in the scherzo. In this hall of the Troca- dero, and in 1896, I heard Harold Bauer play the work. And in that same season I went to a concert in the Salle Erard which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first public appearance of the composer, who refuses to become venerable, even in 1919. He played in public there in 1846. I have listened to much of his or chestral music in Paris; too much, for his range is lim ited, though his resourcefulness is remarkable. With the years his playing has become dry; in 1878 it was scintillating. A piano touch, like a voice, loses its fresh ness, its tactile sensibility. Von Billow was always dry, but his intellectual power dominated his audience. Saint-Saens, a protege of Liszt, wrote interesting music, significant, though not original music. He is an eclectic. His "Deluge" at the Pasdeloup proved a deluge of notes without a Mt. Ararat of a melody to perch upon. His opera, "Etienne Marcel," produced at Lyons, met with fair success. Patti and Nicolini were at Nice. Nicolas, her second husband, better known by his stage name Nicolini, won favour in America. I heard them in "Ai da." Aunt Adelina wasn t Ai da for a moment, but how she warbled in the Nile scene. Her trusty com panion, Mile. Bauermeister not Mathilde of Metro politan Opera House memory wasn t an admirer of Nicolini. Too many husbands spoiled the vocal broth, she grumbled. One night when the tenor was on the scene, Patti asked the faithful Bauermeister his where abouts. "He is out there whimpering before the foot lights," she grimly replied. Not such an unfair criticism, as Nicolini did indulge in the " voix larmoyante, " BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 257 so beloved of Italian tenors. Fancy my hearing Alfred Jaell, the fat pianist, who gave up playing because his arms could no longer reach the keyboard when his stomach became a balloon. He played with neatness and musically. His wife, Marie Jaell, composed. Her piano playing was broader than her husband s waist; withal lacking in unction. Colonne conducted the "Damnation" of Berlioz as well as of "Faust" and I wondered why people went to hear Miolan-Carvalho, as Marguerite Gabrielle Krauss was more impressive. There was a composer in vogue named Leon Vasseur. "La Timbale d Argent" made Offenbach sit up, but "Le Droit du Seigneur" did not, though the book was naughty and mediaeval, setting forth a certain immemorial right of the lord of the manor (see Blackstone on Free- Soccage and Knight Service). Theodore Ritter, then cher ami of Carlotta Patti, was a popular favourite. He boasted a technique that made him king-pin of Parisian pianists (his real name was Bennet). Only Frangois Plante excelled him in polish. Plante to-day is over eighty, yet gives the illu sion of youth. His photograph was sent me recently by Isidor Phillipp, the director of the Conservatoire piano classes. How he could play the Mendelssohn Concertos ! Alkan was another technician. Terrifying are his studies. I never heard anyone play them except Charles Jarvis and Edward McDowell. Ritter at the keyboard playing the slow movement of the Beethoven "Kreutzer Sonata" with the first violins of the Pasdeloup orchestra, twenty in number, was more novel than artistically stimulating. But the pianist was always sure of a recall after he had played his own arrangement of the Bizet Minuet from "L Arlesienne." At the Academic des Beaux- Arts, Mas- 258 STEEPLEJACK senet was nominated to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Francois Bazin. Massenet won favour with his "Les Erinnyes," music for the antique tragedy. He was adored by the pretty ladies. Sybil Sanderson was not yet in Paris, and his fashionable operas not born. Theo dore Dubois and his "Le Paradis Perdu " was well spoken of; Dubois is a genteel composer, politely saluting the classics. I liked much better Benjamin Godard. Laura Donne played with the Tayau quartet. "The Youth of Hercules," symphonic poem by the clever Saint- Saens, was produced at the Pasdeloup matinee. Novelty, as it was, it was not hissed. Et patiti et patita! I might go on for years and not exhaust my reminiscences of musical Paris. But there is a time for all things, so let us talk about Worth, the emperor of dressmakers. M. Lefevre, an old customer of the famous master of confections, introduced me to M. Worth at his historical atelier in the Place Vendome. He was an Englishman aged forty-five or fifty years. His procedure when "com posing" a toilette has been imitated by every male dress maker in the business. I didn t see him in action that might have made me uneasy, as his fair and fashionable clients were often forced to imitate the humble onion as to peeling but he was amiable enough to give a list of the gowns composing the trousseau of her Imperial Transparency the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia. (Where are those virginal Muscovites of yesteryear? In Siberia?) And I printed the contents of this trousseau in my weekly letter to The Evening Bulletin. Imagine me writing: "A ball dress of pink tulle, satin trimmed with garlands formed by a fringe of orange blossoms." It was fair reporting and served to train my eye for the op eratic stage, where costume counts more than sing- BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 259 ing. After Worth, I was ready to interview the Pope which I actually did in 1905. Benjamin Godard s new Symphony-Drama, "Tasso," was liked. Victorien Jon- cieres had a not too flattering reception with his grand opera, "La Reine Berthe." This Bertha, though royal, had big feet, which in comic opera might have been en joyed. In April, 1879, Emma Thursby made an unan nounced debut at the Pasdeloup and achieved an Adelina Patti triumph. She had sung at the Chatelet between acts in "Le Desert" by Felicien David; but it was at the Cirque d Hiver that she caught the ear of the town. She sang the well-known introduction and aria from Mozart s "Escape from the Seraglio," followed by the Proch Variations. The critics called her "the American Nilsson." In Mozart and Bellini she was mistress. Her voice was pure, she sang in tune, and her musical taste was admirable. The American colony rallied around her. Thursby was celebrated for a month, and then it rained or snowed. Paris forgets as easily as New York or Buxtehude. I saw Charles Gounod at a Clotilde Kleeberg concert. An interesting, romantic head. A young barytone, Jean Lasalle, appeared in Massenet s "Le Roi de Lahore," and won his audience. His voice was fruity in its rich ness, his presence picturesque. The next time I met him was twenty years after in New York and with the two De Reszkes. He made one of that celebrated trio of male singers at the Metropolitan Opera during the vocally splendid consulship of Maurice Grau. David s Ode- Symphony, The Desert, was revived by Colonne at the Chatelet in March, 1879. It was m y fi rst hearing and the Orientalism was delightful, that same colouring which 260 STEEPLEJACK has since become cloying in so many compositions from Meyerbeer to Bloch. In painting it is become an abomi nation. Even Fortuny, that incomparable master of sunshine and jewelled apparel, palls because of it. Mo- scheles called David s "Desert" "Frenchified," but the Bohemian virtuoso was not a judge of the exotic. I found it fascinating. The stormy fugue in the Simoon episode, the chant of the Muezzin from the mosque minaret, and the tone-painting in the departure of the caravan, chorus and orchestra, was then the last word in musical realism. What was my surprise to learn that "Le Desert" had been sung by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia a quarter of a century or more before I heard the work in Paris. Poor slow old Philadelphia ! The churches of Paris often saw me in their interiors. I scoured the left bank as well as the right of the Seine, looking for them. Across the river I first heard Plain- Chant sung as it should be; better sung, in fact, than at St. Peter s in Rome, as I was to find out in 1905. St. Marie des BatignoIIes was my parish, but I went often to the services at St. Augustin or the Trinity. I at tended a genuine midnight Mass at St. Augustin on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve, the compensation was the little feast of wine, rilettes, bread and butter, which fol lows in the household of any self-respecting Parisian; he does not have to be pious. Rilettes, minced pork, I liked. It tasted like scrapple, that Pennsylvania product so ancient that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. I was too busy, also too poor, to experience the Parisian "vice" in quest of which good Americans travel thousands of miles. Of all the deadly dull spec tacles, commend me to the Moulin Rouge or the Bal BuIIier. When one is young it s another matter; but one BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 261 must be very young to enjoy the high kicking by a lot of plain Janes, deficient alike in art or underclothing. The French girl "on the loose" is not lovely, though Paris orders that sort of thing better than in London where the halting march of the female mob in Piccadilly Circus is the dreariest picture in the world. There was more fun in the impromptu dances at the barriers in the suburbs. Poor working girls, clerks on a lark, workmen in their shirt-sleeves, art students and their Mimi or their Aglae, all furiously footing in the abandonment of a dance the elementary music made by a screeching cornet, a rasping fiddle, with the brassy sonorities of a piano as a background there was a joy of life not to be found at such mournful professional gardens, the Jardin de Paris, the Folies Marigny, those slaughter-houses of love, where, as Huysmans wrote, love is slain at a stroke. Yet the American, green as grass, whether he hails from Man hattan or Manitoba, accepts the stencilled humbuggery of the boulevards and Montmartre as the "real thing." Life has its terrible revenges on those who flout her in youth. One of them is vice for the middle-aged in Paris. I studied with commendable diligence. My daily average of piano practice was seldom less than six hours, and it often ran up to the ridiculous number of ten and more. No wonder my neighbours complained. No wonder they manifested their irritation by throwing solid objects against my door. Unmoved, I played on. What did I find to play during so many hours? Whence came all the music? I practised innumerable finger exercises. I had Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin; Brahms was to be in the foreground years afterwards. I need not add to this list. It is sufficient to fill a man s waking hours till his last croak, isn t it? I have been 262 STEEPLEJACK warned about my refusal to play cards. I can t play, I don t like cards, nor yet billiards, chess or checkers. What will you do with yourself when you grow old if you don t play cards? I m old now, though hardly tottering, and I never touch cards and I have plenty to occupy my mind; Nor do I golf; that last refuge for the afflicted on whom old Uncle Uric has left his acid visiting card. I play Bach in the morning. I read Brown ing before breakfast (to cheer me up, a poetic fillip) and I play other music whenever leisure allows. Piano play ing, modern, not the old-fashioned finger touch-and-go- method, employs every muscle in the body. It is also an intellectual exercise of the highest character, besides liberating an appreciable quantity of emotion. To play the instrument in even a mediocre manner a medi ocrity like myself demands a lifetime. Hence if health, wealth, and the neighbours permit, I hope to keep at my music for at least a half century more. Horse flesh is dynamic food; it was still eaten in hum ble households, but it finally proved unpalatable. I knew it was horse because of the taste and colour, and as it was cheap, though not nasty, I ate it, glad that it wasn t dog. I became restless. Spring was with us, a French spring, not the rainy, blustering weather which invariably appears in America at the beginning of the vernal solstice. The sun flooded the boulevards. Birds sang in the Pare Monceau. The little tables in front of cafes overflowed into the street. At street corners violets made their debut of the season. The caressing air, the sparkling humour of Parisian life had never seemed so delectable. Yet all beckoned me to the country. While my attendance at the classes of the Conservatoire had been punctual, the place was stuffy and the conglomera- BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 263 tion of noises that assailed the ears as we entered the courtyard made my nerves revolt. M. Mathias was kind, but my admission must have been irregular. I was not an "official" pupil, nor yet an "official" auditor. I called on Theodore Ritter at No. 13 Rue Taitbout, but after playing for him the Bizet Minuet, his simplified version, he sent me to Leopold Doutreleau, whose home was on the Boulevard Clichy, No. 34, as my address book tells me. I studied with M. Doutreleau, both piano and harmony, and as my lessons were bi-weekly I struck my tent, shipped my piano, and with my inconspicuous baggage went to Villiers-Ie-Bel, nine and a half miles from town on the Northern Railway. You pass St. Denis en route. This village of Villiers rambles over the countryside and was about three hundred years old, and contained two thousand inhabitants. It is now an important sub urb, rich in villas. In the adjoining Ecouen there is the Chateau of the Montmorenci, built during the Renais sance, given to the Conde family by the original owners, and later sold to the Prince de Joinville. The Revolution transformed the historic edifice into barracks. A law suit followed after the Restoration, which resulted in the Joinvilles getting the worst of it. They removed the stained-glass windows and the altar from the private chapel to their other residence at Chantilly. But in the church near the chateau there is still to be seen a beau tiful window which, so I was told by the village cure, was whitewashed during the Revolution to hide it from the iconoclasts of 89. The Montmorenci castle was in ex cellent repair when I visited it in 1879, an< ^ ** was a P~ proached through a superb park avenue of trees a half- mile long. This chateau and the villa of Thomas Cou- 264 STEEPLEJACK ture, the painter on the Ecouen highroad, were the chief attractions. The station of the Northern Railroad is two miles from the village and, like many French stations, bears two names: Villiers-Ie-Bel-Gonesse. A tram brought you to the main street. There was a Mayor, a little fat fellow, probably the grocer, and the only place of refreshment for man and beast was kept by a peasant named Bouty. I lodged with him, one flight up, in a long, low building, cool during the hottest days, as the floors were flagstone and the walls whitewashed. A bar did not exist beyond a sideboard. There were a few tables, and the establishment literally shone with cleanli ness. My piano was ensconced in my bedroom, which was also my living-room. It was barn-like in dimen sions. Therein I slept, played, read, ate my meals, when I didn t eat in the cafe on the ground floor. The cooking was good, the fare abundant, claret of quality only cost eight sous a litre. Remember this was forty years ago. Life was gay and I was satisfied. I recall the late afternoon I arrived as if it were etched on my brain-cells. There was a careless sky with a few large clouds rhythmically clustered. The sun, possibly tired of staring at our mud-ball, endeavoured to evade the cosmic time-table and set before its hour. Gentle veils of mist were accomplices in this surreptitious re treat, yet on the clock second our parent-planet vanished. Bands of birds flew nestward in palpitating triangular patterns, and oh ! the melancholy draperies of the willows. You looked for the harps of Babylon. The air grew chilly. I was glad to reach the hospitable doorsill of the Bouty auberge. The immense presence of the moon was like a silver porthole in the sky. My first sunrise BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 265 was memorable. In the east, it was a fanfare of brass; it fairly filled the heavens with its furious rever berations. My habits were exemplary. (I escaped to Paris twice a week.) The Lefevre family lived hard by in their villa. As I have already related, I saw the master Couture, and struck up an acquaintance with a pupil, John Dunsmore, a young painter from Cincinnati. There was an artistic couple in the neighbourhood, the Shearers from Reading. When I met Shearer we dis cussed Lauer or Barbey and their wholesome home brews more than we did the Barbizon School. But the name of Millet was one to conjure with. Couture, who naturally would admire the Poussins, had said that Millet was a genius, unschooled, yet a genius. Isn t it lamentable, this "unschooled"? I never heard from his lips an opin ion on Corot. The forest of Montmorenci was near, but the country was not so interesting as Grez-sur-Loing, or the Fontainebleau forest. However, I was more devoted to music than landscape. I accompanied Dunsmore on sketching tours, but the events of the week were my weekly visits to Paris. I had relinquished the lecture course at the Sorbonne. Outdoors beckoned me, and I loafed and invited my soul to drink and smoke. I was a cigarette-smoker, cigars came much later, and the pipe is still to come. Coffee, too, was a dissipation. I drank it in bowls, black and strong. It never kept me awake. To-day I work on tea without cream, and it is the most propulsive stimulant to writing. De Quincey called it the beverage of the intellectual, but that is a vain saying, so is the much despised barley and hop brew. But beefsteaks, omelettes, chickens where do they taste better than in the French provinces? Not forgetting the generous wines! Was I homesick? Not in the 266 STEEPLEJACK least. Philadelphia was a penumbra on my conscious ness. No doubt I should return, letters were hinting at the horrid probability, but I determined to put off the tragedy as long as I dared. The professor who lectured in the philosophy classes at the Sorbonne was a mild, hairy, absent-minded man who reminds one now of Monsieur Bergeret in the four novels of Anatole France s Histoire Contemporaine. His name I ve forgotten, but his philosophy, a rehash of Victor Cousin, an eclectic thinker, I do remember. It was harmless and antiquated, the thought of this school, quite in key with the precepts of art inculcated at the Beaux- Arts, or the venerable pedagogic methods of the Con servatoire. Official art and literature in Paris are, of necessity, antipathetic to novelty. Yet Balzac and Zola tried to enter the French Academy; Balzac for the glory, Zola, as he naively confessed, because the coveted chair and palms would increase the sale of his books. These contradictions puzzle. Certainly a central and invested authority in matters artistic and literary is to be com mended. Matthew Arnold believed in the Institute; but so many wild flowers of genius bloomed in the field and never could have been transplanted to the dry prim-pots of the Academy that one s belief is confused when confronted by such a cloud of witnesses. The big men in French literature and art were not officially welcomed; even there within the walls they would have prospered the same if they had not knocked for admission. Genius comes not by compulsion. In the Salon of 1879 were pictures worth visiting. There were Degas, and his pupil, Mary Cassatt one of the distinguished painters of America, a Philadelphian, and the sister of A. J. Cassatt. There were Raffaelli, and BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 267 the sculptor, Bartholome, whose monumental tomb in Pere-Lachaise, was a starting point for Saint-Gaudens, and the tomb he executed near Washington. I first saw Mesdag s marines, that cordial old Dutchman whose gallery at The Hague is so rich in modern French art. Fantin-Latour was hung; Whistler owes much to him. Gustave Moreau, whose alembicated art so fascinated me at the Moreau Museum in 1900, showed several canvases. Flandrin I disliked. Puvis de Chavannes, his "Prodigal Son" and "Jeunes filles au bord de la mer" were on view. Gustave Dore was a disappointment, his "Orpheus" re vealed his incompetency as a painter, original as are his designs (and a word might be said for John Martin, the English mezzotinter, whose apocalyptic imagination in his biblical plates influenced Dore). Jean Gigoux, a painter who was in intimate converse with the wife of Balzac, when he was dying in another room you think of George Sand with Alfred de Musset and her Pagello at Venice exhibited several mediocre canvases. (Read Choses Vues, prose by Victor Hugo, as to the Balzac scan dal, since vigorously denied by Gigoux.) Cabanel s " Birth of Venus * picture not the easel at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts an allegorical panel with nudes. The Venus looked like an inflated balloon. Roll, Lefebvre, Bouguereau, Duez, Van Beers his portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, then in the plenitude of her power, a golden voice at the Frangais and the entire official list were represented. Around the corner, figuratively speaking, were Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Berthe Morizot the greatest woman painter of France and probably the greatest in history, for what were Judith Leyster or Vigee- Lebrun in comparison? and the sister-in-law of Manet. Guillaumin, Caillebotte, and Zandomenechi 268 STEEPLEJACK were painting, but not recognised which was the luckiest thing that could have happened to their art. Degas was in the official Salon because of the rectitude of his design, but not because of his original vision or his disconcerting subjects; chiefly race horses, ballet-girls, and ugly women washing in attitudes both batrachian and serpentine; of the operatic voluptuousness of Caba- nel there was no trace in his work. Like Flaubert, Edgar Degas had the eye of a surgeon; he dissected, did not comment. We look in vain for a suggestion of the prurient, or the diabolic lustfulness of Felicien Rops. The humans of Degas are vital charts created by an analytical intellect. Cerebral, not emotional. And he was a master painter, a classic before he died. At the Salon des Independants, in 1880, the revolution ists had their revenge. Impressionism reigned and Paris sniggered. The Durand-Ruel Galleries were a rallying- point for the rebels. Caillebotte was a difficult dose to swallow, but you had to or offend the others, just as to-day Cezanne must be accepted, else you are an ob scurantist. But there can be no comparison made be tween the patient genius of Aix-en-Provence and the amateur who bequeathed to the Luxembourg that precious acorn of impressionistic canvases which finally grew into a towering tree; now a tree whose shade is become bale ful to students, as is the poisonous Manchineel tree in " L Africaine." Forain and Raffaelli in the first flush of their exciting and truly Parisian art were a treasure- trove. Forain had studied with Gerome, but soon left him for Manet, where his satirical talent burgeoned in a congenial atmosphere. Mary Cassatt was a force. I saw the portrait of Edmond de Goncourt, brushed by Bracquemond, which had the hard relief of a Holbein. BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 269 (I was present at the obsequies of the subtle French prosateur and amateur of exquisite art in Paris, 1896.) What prose-master has, in a style, deliberate and per sonal, pinned to paper such ephemeral sensations, and the most fugacious of nuances, as the Goncourts ? Degas is their antilogue in painting. And compared with Claude Monet, what official painter of his time could touch his Mozartean serenity of mood, or his landscapes drenched in rainbow mists! His "Gare des BatignoIIes," after wards hung in the Luxembourg, was the first attempt to deal with a certain joyless phase of life. The yawning mouth of the railroad station, the rails slippery with wet, shunting of many cars, plumes of steam, the myriad of facts put before us synthetically abbreviated, and en veloped in an atmosphere that you could see, smell, taste, this canvas was a contribution to modern art as important in its intentions as in its omissions. I have always envisaged Claude Monet as the only Impressionist, as I believe that Charles Baudelaire was the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century Victor Hugo excepted, and only Hugo and that the su preme realistic novel is L* Education Sentimentale by Flaubert. But the chief body of criticism rules other wise. Baudelaire is "immoral" what has morality to do with art? (don t ask this question of a literature "professor"). The public reads the vulgarisation of Flaubert and Manet in Zola. Oh ! Manet is already old- fashioned. Zola himself speaks of "le bonapartisme sentimentale" which precipitated the downfall of the Second Empire, the Bonapartism which had proved the undoing of a generation patterned after his lurid writings. The daylight clearness of Flaubert, and the delicate 2 7 o STEEPLEJACK arabesques of the De Goncourts, was followed by the sooty extravagances and violent melodrama of Zola and his disciples. It is all dead and forgotten in Europe. The Russians : Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Gorky, and Artzibachev intervened. The art of fiction has become finer, and more spiritual, especially in Eng land, where the influence of Henry James is more potent than in his native land. But dear progressive America is still in the throes of a naturalism which died at the birth of Zola s vilest offspring, La Terre. Mr. Howells set the fashion of realism, a tempered realism, though he stemmed from Jane Austen and Turgenev. His is the art of the miniature painter. Frank Norris followed him, and Stephen Crane, both at a long distance, preceded by Henry B. Fuller (in his With the Procession and The Cliff-Dwellers). Zola was not a realist merely be cause he dealt with certain unpleasant facts. He was a myopic romanticist writing in a style both violent and tumefied, the history of his soul in the latrines of life. Life as a whole he never saw steadily; it was for him more like a succession of lurid lantern-slides. If, in the Court of Realism, Flaubert is king, then Zola ranks only as an excavator But I must vault back to my early Paris; Paris which is now, as it always was, the reservoir of spiritual and artistic certitudes. I spoke of Degas, and Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and the other Impressionists. I must not forget two names, each important in his own depart ment, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, the first a rare mas ter, the second an incomplete genius but one whose im print on the art of the generation succeeding him has been marked. Auguste Renoir still lives; old, semi-crippled, an octogenarian, yet painting every day pictures that BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 271 are astonishingly strong. No need to pardon their weaknesses, there are none. Vivacious, lyrical, happy, his work never betrayed a hint of the bitter psychology of his friend, Edgar Degas. His nudes are pagan, child- women, full of life s joy, sinuous, animal, unreasoning. His genre tableaux are personal enough, the luminous envelope, the gorgeous riot of opposed tones, and delicious dissonances literally transfigure commonplace themes. In his second manner his affinities with Claude Monet, and Impressionism generally, are easily noted; but his land scapes are more atmospheric, division of tones invariably practised. Everything swims in an aerial bath. His portraits are the personification of frankness. The touch is broad, flowing. He was the first of the Impressionistic portrait-painters to apply unflinchingly the methods of Manet and Monet to the human face Manet, while painting in clear tones (what magic there is in his golden brush) seldom employed the hatchings of colours, except in his landscapes, and only after 1870, when he came under the influence of Monet. In his third manner, Renoir combines his two earlier techniques, painting with the palette-knife and divided tones. Flowers, barbaric designs for rugs, fantastic, vibrating waters, these appear in the long and varied series of canvases in which we see Paris enjoying itself at Bougival, on the Isle Puteaux, dancing near the heights of Montmartre, strolling among the trees at Armenonville; Paris quivering with holiday joys, Paris in outdoor humour; and not a vicious or dis cordant note in all this lucid psychology of sport and love. The lively chap who, in shirt-sleeves, dances with the jolly plump sales girl, the sunlight dripping through the vivid green of the leaves, dazzling the edges of profiles, nose-tips, fingers, this human pair are not the sullen work- 272 STEEPLEJACK people of Zola or Toulouse-Lautrec, nor are the girls akin to the "Soeurs Vatard" of Huysmans or the " human document" of Degas. Renoir is not abysmally profound; to him life is not a curse or a kiss, as we used to say in the days of Swinburne. He is a painter of joyous surfaces, and he is an incorrigible optimist. He is also a poet. The poet of air, sunshine, beautiful women shall we ever forget his protrait of Jeanne Samary ? A pantheist, withal a poet, and a direct descendant in the artistic line of Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane grace superadded. In a private collection near Overbrook, Pa., there may be seen the finest group of Renoirs in this country. To a gloomier tune goes the art of Count de Toulouse- Lautrec. In it is the perverse genius of an unhappy man, who owes allegiance to no one but Degas and the Japanese. At Paris I visited the first exhibition devoted to his work. His astonishing qualities of invention, draughtsmanship, and a diabolic ingenuity in sounding the sinister music of decayed souls, never before had been assembled under one roof. Power he has and a saturnine hatred of his wretched models. Toulouse-Lautrec had not the impersonal vision of Zola, nor the disenchant ing irony of Degas. He loathed the crew of repul sive nightbirds which he pencilled and painted in old Montmartre before the foreign invasion diluted its native spontaneous wickedness. Now a resort for easily bam boozled English and Americans, the earlier Montmartre was a rich mine for the artistic explorers. Raffaelli went there, and Renoir, but Raffaelli was impartially Impres sionistic, and Renoir was ever ravished by a stray shaft of sunshine flecking the faces of the dancers and recorded in charming tints. Not as these men was Toulouse- BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 273 Lautrec. Combined with chronic pessimism he possessed a divination of character that if he had lived longer and worked harder might have placed him near Degas. He is savant. His sensitive line proclaims the master. Unlike Aubrey Beardsley, his Japanese predilections never seduced him into the decoratively abnormal. We see the Moulin Rouge with its parasites, La Goulue and her vile retainers. The brutality is contemptuous, a blow struck full in the face. Vice is harshly arraigned. This Frenchman s art makes of Hogarth a pleasing preacher, so drastic is it, so deliberately searching in its insults. And never exaggeration or burlesque. These brigands and cutthroats, pimps and pickpurses are set before us without bravado, without the genteel glaze of the sentimental painter, without the attempt to call a prostitute a cocotte. His sitters with their cavernous glare, their emaciated figures and debauched expression are a commentary on the life of the region. Toulouse- Lautrec is like a page torn from Ecclesiastes. With the years the arts have become too explicit, all except the art of music; even tonal dramas of Verdi and Wagner tell their story without the consoling veils of ambiguity. In literature, Browning was never obscure in intention; he tried to send a multiple message over a single wire, he packed too many ideas in a line; but Stephane Mallarme deliberately wrought a poetic art hermetic, like a flash seen in a mirror at midnight, charged with subtle premonitions of music unheard, the "silent thunder afloat in the leaves," faint adumbrations of a dream-prose or verse for those ten superior persons scat tered throughout the universe, as Huysmans said. I have yet to meet any one of this sacred ten, this spiritual legion 274 STEEPLEJACK of Thebes. As Arthur Symons has shown us, even Mal- larme is not wholly cryptic. He has more than ten readers, scattered between two or three clubs in this city. Whistler was once an enigma. His evasive art when finally cornered proved to lack substantiality, robust vision, a vigorous brush. But a musically elo quent painter. In orchestral music alone do the secrets of the gods remain inviolate almost, for we are become gods ourselves and we have learned to interpret their tone-language. Claude Debussy was the newest com poser to take refuge in a lovely symbolism. What are the Cubists but searchers after an abstract that ordinary representation makes crudely obvious. Dancing in its highest estate is winged metaphysics. Sculpture and architecture are the most cruelly exposed of the arts; yet in an archaic symbolism such as Epstein s, or in the cold polished logical ferocity of Brancusi, sculpture evades the inexorable linear law. Rodin shivered the syn tax of stone, only to replace it with his ow r n sensuous rhetoric. Acting has its plasticity in attitude and ges ture; occasionally we see a soul emerge from that prison house of the theatre, more ineluctable than the canons of the Medes and Persians. We seldom encounter a Duse, a Booth, a Salvini, a Modjeska, Sada-Yacco, or a Sarah Bernhardt who were supreme because they incarnated the poet s creations and not because of their professional technique. When we saw, heard them, the acceleration of our interior life became almost intolerable because of its poignancy. To comprehend and feel, as in a blinding simultaneous vision, a synthesis of the senses, what French psychologists call " multanimity " (as opposed to unanimity), is the dream of a few advanced artists. Nevertheless, mystery in art is its chief virtue. Is such BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 275 an ideal to be compassed? How unhappy people would be if they were really happy. Supreme art, always about to be, but never is quite achieved. . . . Later, when in Italy, I went to Bologna, to see a pianist, conductor, composer, Giuseppe Martucci, the director of the Conservatory there. For this Neapolitan musician I entertained much admiration after hearing him play the piano part of his own B flat minor concerto in true vir tuoso style, and also old Italian music by Scarlatti. I determined to seek his advice. His concerto with his own changes and special fingering, I have preserved. It is very difficult. Runs of double-sixths abound. As a pianist he was the only one who could play double- sixths like Rosenthal. A brilliant, rather than an emo tional artist, he was a conductor of high rank. I pre ferred Sgambati, of Rome, in chamber music, but I have pleasant souvenirs of Martucci. Returning to Paris by a roundabout route, I crossed the lovely Lake Con stance on a cool, clear September morning. This lake is as green as fabled Erin, so green that the bellies of birds hovering about its bosom are tinged with emerald tints. The distant prospect of the Alps is enlivening, but it is the colour of the water, its soothing smoothness, and the pink mist garbing the base of the mountains that woo the eye. The transition to Geneva is easy. Three days in this city by the lake bred dreams of Italy. The weather was warm, the sky soft, and the River Rhone a celestial blue. I went to Ferney, saw the house of Voltaire; to the Saleve, and wondered if Mount Blanc touched the tall stars; to the villas of Byron, Josephine, and Lola Montez; to Rousseau s birthplace, to the island with his statue; to the cathedral where Calvin preached, and 276 STEEPLEJACK finally to Montreux, passing Noyon, Merges, where Paderewski lived afterwards, Evian, Ouchy, Vevay, Clarens; then I found myself again in Paris. I proceeded to Auteuil, dear, old, delightful, restful Auteuil. There, said I to my soul, I shall find the rest which passeth all understanding. " Vance," I wrote to the poet Thompson, "find me a poetic spot near the house of Goncourt, where I may sit on the balcony and hear the frogs parse the more irregular verbs in their sweet mother-tongue." He found it, did Vance Thompson. Never shall I forget my first night in historic Auteuil. From my window I heard and saw the trains of the Chemin de Per of the Ceinture which girdles Paris. They run every five minutes and make more noise than may be heard at Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway. If I tried to sleep I was awakened by rude petulant voices which desperately wrangled choice phrases, "Cochon" "Cornichon" "Homard," and again Cornichon (as if one should say, pig, pickle, lobster), were wafted to my en raptured ears. I was in the "pickle" the other blind drunk. Then the climax most telling, an excerpt from municipal orchestration. A brutal machine, a steam roller, marched to and fro for six hours, horridly crunch ing the stones and gravel prepared for its midnight luncheon. It settled my hash. I dressed, descended, went across the street to the police station on Boulevard Exelmans and talked cigarette French to the amiable officers on duty. The next day I told Vance that his frogs were railroad frogs, and he retorted by taking me over the district and filling me to the eyes with local anecdotes. He lived there in the Hameau Boileau, a retired hamlet, heavily wooded, containing a half-dozen villas. His own was the original Boileau house bought BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 277 by the poet for 8,000 livres in 1685. On the Rue Singer, Benjamin Franklin lived; further down there is a street named after him. Madame Helvetius lived there. Franklin as well as Turgot wanted to marry her. A perfect nest of artistic memories is Auteuil; Lamar- tine, Victor Hugo, Proudhon, the philosopher-economist he only died in 1861 at No. 10, Rue de Passy, Balzac, Jules Janin, Spontini, and Rossini, who founded a home for old musicians, Maison Rossini, lived in the neighbour hood; Sandeau and George Sand once kept house at Passy. De Musset lived in Auteuil; Gavarni, Halevy, the famous actress, Sophie Arnould, were there, and the Goncourts lived at 67 Boulevard Montmorenci in the same park where Vance Thompson was. There, too, is the Pool of Auteuil, a most poetic spot with willows weeping over its green waters. Hugo, Turgenev, Flau bert, Maupassant, George Sand, Zola, and Goncourt sat at its triste borders, and no doubt wondered when dinner would be ready. Poets and artists are dreamers, but not on empty stomachs. It was Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson who said of Henry Thoreau that he loved and led a lonely life, but he never went beyond hearing of the dinner-bell. Rossini s ashes are not in Pere Lachaise or in Florence; a joker to the last he had requested that they should not bury him in a Jewish cemetery. Naturally I often went to Pere Lachaise. There lies my beloved Chopin his heart is in the Church of the Holy Cross, Warsaw, and his statue and house that stood in his birthplace, Zelazowa- Wola, Poland, were destroyed during the great war by Russian Cossacks. The Paris cemetery is a most inter esting place for one with a historic imagination. I was never carried away by the graceless Clesinger memorial 278 STEEPLEJACK to Chopin. The tombs of Abelard and Heloise do not mean much to the present generation, but the composer of "Carmen" is there, and the Countess D AgouIt, the mother of Liszt s three children, and Bellini, and Moliere; but let us go to Montmartre, where Heine sleeps and the Goncourts, Henry Beyle better known as Stendhal Ernest Renan, Theophile Gautier, prince of marmoreal prose, Carlotta Patti, and Dumas fils. The grave of Ada Isaacs Menken, poet, actress, bareback rider, the greatest of Mazeppas, is there. Among her various marriages was a brief alliance with John C. Heenan, the prize fighter. I think Ada hailed from New Orleans, and was not a Jewess despite her Jewish name. Her letters to the American writer, Hattie Tyng-Griswold, published after the death of the notorious and unhappy woman, revealed another side of her temperament. Extracts were printed in the newspapers. She was a Mazeppa doubled by a Sappho. Her slender volume of verse entitled " Infelice," was credited in part to Swinburne, but that is nonsense. The poet of Anactoria, while he sympathised with Les bian ladies, never wrote bad poetry. But he knew her well enough to be photographed on the same plate. I have a copy. I have also a photograph of Ada sitting on the luxurious lap of the elder Dumas. She was as versatile in her affections as in her talents. A strikingly handsome woman according to the report of her day, her figure being the "envy of sculptors." I confess it is difficult to see the beauty in her photographs. A tor mented, morbid soul, a virile soul in a feminine body, she led a stormy passionate life, and, like Lola Montez, died neglected by the world. On her tomb are the words "Thou Knowest!" The real Paris is not the city of junketing visitors, BOHEMIA S SEA-COAST 279 the Paris that clusters or once clustered about the grand boulevards, Maxim s, the hill of Montmartre all mem ories, for Paris was spiritually reborn in 1914 and other absurd places. No, the real Paris is the Louvre, with its glorious marbles and canvases, the Luxembourg, its palaces and cemeteries, above all its noble churches. If ever I became religious to Paris I should flee. It is a city where they worship artistically. Religion is poetic in Europe. VII AT MAXIM S I spoke of Maxim s on the Rue Royale. It wasn t in existence when I first went to Paris. Much later I spent one of the jolliest nights of my life there, and notwith standing Constable, the English landscapist, who declared that a good thing can never be done twice, I propose now to retell the story which is in The Pathos of Distance, but this time I shall give the true names of the dramatis personae; some are reverend, grave, and bearded signers, perhaps married; and one at least is dead, and his death was a loss to American literature, for he had the voice and vision of an authentic poet. I mean George Cabot Lodge, the son of Henry Cabot Lodge, United States Senator. It would be hardly fitting to prelude a rake-helly anec dote by dwelling upon the virtues of this lamented young man s poetic art. That I shall attempt later on. His friend, Joseph TrumbuII Stickney, another gifted youth, also at the Sorbonne, and a prize winner. He was with us. The affair came about in this fashion: in company with a friend from Boston, who was studying organ con ducting and composition, Wallace Goodrich, by name, we heard a fair performance of "The Valkyre," at the opera where I had earlier "discovered" the barytone, Maurice Renaud, a vocally gorgeous Wolfram in "Tann- hauser" and naturally we were thirsty. Behind the opera house at the junction of the streets called Gluck and Halevy was the Cafe Monferino. It was directed by an Italian and a Frenchman who had been a head- 280 AT MAXIM S 281 waiter at Delmonico s, New York. The cuisine was Italian and French, and you could get Viennese pastry. Pilsner beer of the purest made the Monferino a paradise for artists and writers. The Figaro s office was around the corner, and I often saw the editorial staff, for the most part bearded and wearing silk hats during the dog-days, sitting for hours, sipping the blond brew, ges ticulating and violently thinking aloud. Here it was I interviewed an ex-King of Servia; more of him anon. I asked Goodrich if he, too, was athirst. Yes, he was. Soon the tempo became swifter. We drank from huge mugs for several hours while discussing Wagnerian lead ing-motives. It was midnight long past when Goodrich exclaimed: "Let s go to Maxim s!" "To any spot in Paris," I answered, "where recollections of a French opera can be drowned in amber, as is the fly of the fable." We drove to Maxim s, which, as any church- going American knows, is not far from the Place de la Concorde. As we forced our powerful personalities through a mob of men, women, waiters, and crashing furious music I said: "Lo! art thou in Arcadia?" Goodrich soon spied a table surrounded by a gang of young fellows howling: "Constant! Constant!" I wasn t foolish enough to interpret this combination of imprecation and cajolement as an adjective; yet I couldn t at first see Constant. I was speedily introduced to six of my countrymen, mostly hailing from New York, and after solemnly bowing and suspiciously staring at their friend Goodrich, they quite as solemnly shook hands one with the other, then yelled in unison: "Constant." I rejoiced. My heart told me that I was with the right crowd. Constant appeared, and as he bowed his round, sleek head for the "commande," I tried to untangle the 282 STEEPLEJACK fritilant delirium encompassing me. A red-haired woman, who looked like a big, salacious Cheret poster, furiously waltzed and sprawled and slid as the gypsy band vertig inously played. She had in tow a little chap whose eyes bulged with joy and realised ambition. He possessed the largest lady in the building; what more could he ex pect ! The band was wonderful. It ripped and buzzed with rhythmic rubato rage, and tore Czardas passion to ragtime tatters. It leered, sang, swooned, sighed, snarled, sobbed, and leaped. Its leader, a dark gypsy, with a wide, bold glance, swayed as he smote the strings with his bow, and I was shocked when he collected coin, plate in hand. At the tables sat women and men. The moral weather was scarlet, the toilettes admirable. Occasionally there strayed in British tourists, but if they had their women folk with them they fled; if not, they remained. I saw nothing objectionable; the establishment simply overflowed with good-humoured deviltry. The tone was unmistakably scarlet, and as the night wore apace it became a rich carmilion a colour said to be a com pound of carmine and vermilion; also lobster, cham pagne, and rouge. Wallace suddenly cried : " Constant! Constant!" The singing ceased at our table. "Let s get a room with a piano." "Constant ! Constant !" we screamed and soon the active Constant conducted us up-stairs into an apartment with a shabby upright piano. Beer had become a watery nuisance, champagne was or dered, and my voice trembled as I gave the order, for I knew the ways of young America when in Paris. We had already absorbed enough to float a three-masted schooner. Constant left us after making a piteous appeal not to awaken Napoleon in his stony lodgment across the Seine. AT MAXIM S 283 Then Master Goodrich sat down before the shaky in strument, and without preluding began playing what do you suppose? Old-time negro melodies, and those boys started to sing and dance with frantic and national emotion. It s a curious thing, but syncopation must be in our blood. Joe Hunt, the architect, and son of his famous father, Richard Hunt he wore his hair and whisk ers a la Victor Capoul sang Irish songs with an enviable accent. He was a pupil of the Beaux-Arts, but it was his Saturday off, and he proposed to spend it in a reason able fashion. Two young men studying at the Sorbonne "said" some cold, classic words from Racine, but broke into a wild jig when were sounded the stirring measures of that sweet old darky lyric: "My gal, My gal, I m goin for to see!" We fought double-handed. We impro vised tugs of war with a richly brocaded table-cloth. We pranced, we galloped, we upset furniture, and every time a blue-eyed lad exclaimed in a fragile voice, "Oh ! I want to dance with a nice girl!" we smothered him in the richly brocaded table-cloth. It was not the hour for girlish blandishments, but for stern masculine rioting. Accordingly, we rioted. Since, I have marvelled at the endurance of Wallace who braved the ivory teeth and cacophonous bark of a peculiarly vicious piano. When I asked him to resign his post and give my aching fingers a chance he refused, but he was pulled from the stool and a magnum poured down his neck. Then I sat down and started in with the Revolutionary study of Chopin. Darkness supervened, as I was lassoed by that revenge ful table-cloth, and dragged over the floor by the strong arms of a half-dozen Yankee boys. I long nursed three violet-coloured bruises, a triple testimony to the Chopin- hating phalanx from the Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne. 284 STEEPLEJACK We relaxed not for a second our endeavours to chase merriment around the clock. After more big cold bottles a new psychical phase manifested itself; for raging and war s alarums was substituted a warm, tender senti- mentalism. We cried to the very heavens that we were all jolly good fellows, and that no one dared deny. Con stant came up to deny it, but corks, crackers, napkins and vocal enthusiasm drove him below stairs. Only when the two young men from the Sorbonne went out upon the balcony and in stentorian tones informed the budding dawn and a lot of sleepy coachmen that it was the Fourth of July, and that America was God s own country, did the counsels of the trusty Constant prevail, and order was temporarily restored. But the glimpse of awkward daylight began to tell on our nocturnal nerves. Our inspiration flagged as a beer thirst set in, and beer meant dissolution; among us were some who were no lovers of the barley fruit that grows in breweries ; besides, the pace had been killing. Maestro Goodrich came to the rescue. Tossing off a celery glass of bubbles, he re sumed his seat at the dog-house meaning the piano and began those mystically intense measures of the Prelude to " Tristan and Isolde. " Another psychical tempest set in. The romping, justing hullabalooing ceased, and a melancholy madness prevailed. For some temperaments the music of Tristan is emotional catnip. We wriggled and we chanted and submitted to the spell of the opium-charged harmonies. Wagner proved our Waterloo. Maxim s will stand anything but Wagner in the cruel early morn. Good rich was a musical trance-medium, and as six o clock sounded from adjacent belfries we tumbled down-stairs AT MAXIM S 285 into the crude daylight. Six, or was it eight? American citizens blinked like owls as a small mob of coachmen hovered around them. A lovely Sunday morning. Huge blocks of sunlight, fanned by the soft breezes, slanted up the Rue Royale from the Place de la Concorde. A solitary woman stood in the modulated shadow of a doorway. The fantastic dream-flowers on her wide- brimmed hat clouded her features. Her costume was rich, her style Parisian. She waited in the cool shade. Her sullen, crimson mouth affrighted us. Her jaw was animal, and I detected in her countenance a blending of two races. Ah ! how sinister she seemed. " It is the Morocco Woman," whispered one of the boys. "It is the Woman from Morocco," we shudderingly acquiesced as we moved across the way. I never discovered the identity of this mysterious Morocco Woman. Probably some nurse-girl going to early Mass. But we saw things melodramatically at that hour, and a vampire she surely was. After two of the crowd escaped arrest while trying to steal a sentry-box, we rented carriages and told the drivers to seek beer-land. The Madeleine looked grey and classically disdainful as we turned into the grand boule vard, where, in the gleaming current of sunshine, we lifted up our voices and told Paris how happy we were. At Julian s we stopped. Up two heavily carpeted stairways we mounted only to find banality. There were a few belated nighthawks who preened as we entered, but we were Sons of Morning, and sought not the Avaries of the Night. No beer, but lots of coffee ! We promptly scorned such chicory capitulation and once more touched the sidewalk. Our coachmen, who had been with us since we left the Cafe Monferino, began to show signs of wear and tear. They had celebrated our national holi- 286 STEEPLEJACK day with a drink every fifteen minutes. Yet they did not weaken, only swore that every place except the churches was bolted. We had melted in number. Two traitors fled. Cowards ! we jeered, for we hated to give in to sleep. After meditation the drivers uttered strange calls to their rusty horses and then I lost my bearings. We drove up side streets into back-alleys leading into other alleys, through tortuous defiles, and into open clattering squares. At last we reached a cafe, a rendez vous for coachmen. Alas ! it was too late to pick our company; our withers were still unwrung, and the general sentiment was that the devil could catch the hindmost. Oh ! we were lucid enough; it was our parched gullets that spurred us on to new conquests. We pell-melled into the building and found a choice gathering. Coachmen, cocottes, broken- down foreigners, the rag-tag and bob-tail, the veriest refuse of Parisian humanity. Our entrance was received with a shout. They knew "a good thing." They were disappointed. We were exclusive. Of course, we "treated" every lost soul in the place, that was only our chivalry. But the beer sobered us. One scion of American industrial wealth casually remarked: "I never knew Paris held so many thirsty people." It sounded like an echo from the Tenderloin. We squared financial matters, and, after fighting off the manoeuvring of some shady persons, we escaped. Our coachmen, who had almost succumbed, managed to introduce to us an aged bootblack from Corsica who had fought and bled with the First Consul ! We believed all he said for ten cen times, and with a last View Hallo ! we drove down anony mous lanes cheered by the most awful crew of blackguards outside a Balzac novel. AT MAXIM S 287 The hot sun set us to thinking of life and its respon sibilities. One man spoke of his mother "way back in Kansas, and as his voice broke the landscape was blurred by our unshed tears. Another blurted out that he had a dejeuner promised to an impossible cousin. Him we rallied. But we were all positive that we must appear midday at the American Embassy, there to hear the Declaration of Independence read by our Minister. Was it not the glorious Fourth? Were we not brethren and citizens? It was only eight o clock, an easy engagement to keep ! Wallace Goodrich left us, and his departure made a profound cavity in our united consciousness. The party was thinning. The Lord knows what might happen in an hour. Perhaps solitary confinement in my bed. I was foolish enough to confess that I had with me a letter of introduction to a young architect living in the Latin quarter. "Name, name!" was cried. "AI- drich. He is the brother of my friend, Richard Aldrich, the music-critic, of New York." A chorus of roars was the response. "Why didn t you say so before? He lives in our house. We ll drive you there." We were now four; the others had melted into the middle-distance. We forgot their names. But never shall I forget the introduction when we reached that house. On the fifth floor there lived sixteen architects, students all at the Beaux- Arts; that is, they seemed that number. I swear that two young men bearing the name of Aldrich arose from his bed to salute me. I laughed. "I didn t know Dick Aldrich had twin brothers in Paris," I expostulated. He was perfectly angelic, considering that he had been aroused from an enviable Sunday morning slumber. Perhaps my obliquity of vision was the result of atmos pheric refraction, a liquid Parisian mirage. It never 288 STEEPLEJACK happened to me but once before, and then, may the gods give me joy ! the victim of my optical illusion was a girl. Can you conceive anything more delightful than finding two girls you love where there was one before? I say "that you love"; otherwise the experience must be blood-curdling. But the young devils in whose com pany I found myself were not satisfied with this tame climax. They went from room to room, bed to bed, shouting: "Hello! old son, here is a man from New York with a letter from your brother," and many pairs of pyjamas, drugged with dreams, politely arose, bowed, shook hands, and, cursing us heartily because not one boasted a brother, they would fall into bed again. All perfect things must end, and without remembering the modulation to the street I found myself alone in front of the Care Montparnasse. I was cold sober. I knew this because of the way the passing citizens gazed at me. Presently I engaged in a discussion with a rail road employee about the comparative wage-earning of Paris and Philadelphia. An hour later I enjoyed the hallucination of sitting at a little table in the Cafe Mon- ferino drinking white wine (said to be superior to the hair of the dog that bit you), with a bearded and friendly stranger who spoke fluently about the psychic life of micro-organisms. The proprietor told me afterwards that it was the illustrious scientist, Alfred Binet. How I deplored my lost chance to ask him a lot of questions ! I was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences on Logan Square and had regularly attended the Tuesday- night meetings, and heard lecture such giants as Leidy and Cope, the paleontologist, not to mention the Rev erend McCook, on bee-hives. At eleven o clock I knew the game was up and in a dignified though not chas- AT MAXIM S 289 tened mood, I rode over to the Impasse du Maine, where I lived in a studio once occupied by Bastien Lepage when he painted the portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, and where he coughed in company with that brilliant consump tive Russian girl, Marie Bashkirtseff. I threw myself on the bed for a brief snooze. I awoke feeling refreshed, and as the blinds were down I scratched a match and looked at my watch. Just twelve o clock. I had no time to lose. Brushing my hair, changing linen, I went into the corridor. It was black as pitch. No wonder. Midnight, and my "nap" had consumed a dozen hours. I unfortunately missed the celebration at the American Embassy, but I had dispensed much patriotism during the night before. I learned that all of the boys were at the Embassy. Other things equal, I didn t regret our evening at Maxim s on the Rue Royale. VIII I INTERVIEW THE POPE Perhaps Rome at a superficial glance affects the Ameri can visitor as a provincial city, sprawled to unnecessary lengths over its seven hills, as it did Taine more than a half century ago, and, despite the smartness of its new quarters, it is far from suggesting a World-City as do mundane Paris and London. But not for Rome and her superb and imperial indifference are the seductive spells of operatic Venice or the romantic glamour of Florence. She can proudly say "La Ville, c est moi!" She is not only a city but the city of cities, and twenty- four hours submergence in her atmosphere makes you a slave at her eternal chariot wheels. The New York cockney, devoted to his cult of the modern hotels, baths, cafes, luxurious theatres soon wearies of Rome. He prefers Paris or Naples. See Naples and die of its odours ! I know of no city where you formulate an ex pression of like or dislike so quickly as in Rome. You are its friend or foe within five minutes after you leave its dingy railway station. It is hardly necessary to add that the newer city, pretentious, hard, and showy, is quite negligible. One does not go to Rome to seek the glazed comforts of Brooklyn. I went there in 1905 to interview Pope Pius X. I am ahead of my story, but as we are in Europe we had better remain there till I tell it. Philadelphia is looming again with increasing distinctness on the skyline, and soon we shall be back again. The usual manner of approaching the Holy Father is to visit 290 I INTERVIEW THE POPE 291 the American Embassy and harry the good-tempered secretary into promising an invitation card, if you are not acquainted in clerical circles. I was not long in the city before I discovered that both Monsignor Merry del Val and Monsignor Kennedy were at Frascati enjoying a hard-earned vacation. So I dismissed the ghost of the idea and pursued my studies in pagan sculpture at the Museo Vaticano. The pictures at Florence are more varied, but at Rome there are only masterpieces. If I admired the Raphael of the Stanze, how much more did I admire his portraiture. Not in the Madonnas but in the portraits of his contemporaries is to be found the true artist of Urbino. Michelangelo is so massive in his grandeur that at first he stuns. In the end I forget the "Last Judgment" for his sculpture. I recalled what Boucher said to Fragonard who was going to Rome: "If you take those people over there seriously, you are done for." Luckily for us, Fragonard did not take the Italian school seriously and remained his own charming Gallic self. Velasquez did not like Raphael. His opinion is recorded. How could he and be Velasquezy, the great est painter of them all, with the possible exception of Jan Vermeer, of Delft? Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Rem brandt were great visionaries, yet the Spaniard was their master in brushwork, and he, too, possessed supreme vision, not nocturnal, but daylight vision; not a poet, seer, philosopher, nevertheless he recreated every-day life with the intensity born of veritable hallucination. Go to the Museum on the Prado in Madrid and see "Las Meninas," "Las Hilanderas," and the noblest bat tle picture in the world, "The Surrender at Breda, " and if the Dresden Madonna and "The Transfiguration" still win your suffrage then your taste is to be commended 292 STEEPLEJACK for its childlike piety, but not for artistic reasons. After the electric vitality of Velasquez s line, after his tonal magic, versatile characterisation, and atmospheric veri similitude, few other painters there are who in compari son do not seem flabby, insipid, incomplete. Yet I love Raphael s portraits of Pope Julius II, Pope Leo X, and his two cardinals. These portraits are in the Pitti Pal ace, Florence. The heavy hoofs of three hundred pilgrims invaded the peace of the Hotel Fischer up the Via Sallustiana, where I lived. They had come bearing Peter s Pence and wearing queer clothes. The third day after their arrival I got wind of a projected audience at the Vatican. Big- boned Monsignor Pick daily visited the hotel, and when I saw him in conference with Signor Fischer, I asked the proprietor if it were possible. Anything is possible in Rome," responded the wily Fischer. Wear evening dress? Nonsense! That was a custom in the more exacting days of Leo XIII. Pope Pius X is a democrat. He hates vain show. Possibly he has absorbed the English antipathy to seeing evening dress on a male dur ing daylight. But the ladies must wear lace veils in lieu of hats. I was in high spirits. I was to see the Pope. The morning of October 5, 1905, the hotel was crowded with Italians selling veils to the female pilgrims. Car riages blocked the streets and stretched around the Palazzo Margherita (from my windows I often saw the Dowager- Queen with her ladies of honour, slowly walking under the palm and cypress trees on melancholy autumn evenings). There was much noise. There were explosive sounds as bargains were made. Then, after the vendors of saints pictures, crosses, rosaries chiefly gentlemen of Jewish I INTERVIEW THE POPE 293 persuasion, comical as it may appear we drove away in high feather, nearly four hundred strong. Through the offices of my amiable host I had secured from Monsignor Pick a parti-coloured badge with a cross and the motto, "Cologne Rome, 1905." It was as exciting as a first night at the opera. The rendezvous was at the Campo Santo dei Tedeschi, which, with its adjoining church of Santa Maria delta Pieta, had been donated by Pius VI to German residents as a burying-ground. There I met my companions of the hotel and, after an interrogation regarding my religion by a priest, I was permitted to join the procession. In Rome any road may lead to the Pope. It was for me a matter of life or death. After standing above the dust and buried bones of the forgot ten dead, we went into the church and were chilled by a worthy cleric, who, in a long address, told us that we were to meet the Vicar of Christ, a human being like ourselves. He emphasised the humanity of the mighty Prelate before whom we were bidden that gloomy after noon. We intoned the Te Deum and filed out in pairs, first the women, then the men, over the naked stones, till we reached the end of the Via della Fonda- menta. The pilgrims wore their every-day clothes. Short cloaks and Swiss hunters hats prevailed. We left our sticks and umbrellas in the garderobe, which did a thriv ing business. We mounted innumerable staircases. We reached the Sala Regia. I had hoped it would be the more spacious Sala Ducale. Three o clock was the hour set for the audience, but His Holiness was closeted with a French Eminence and there was delay. We spent it in staring at the sacred and profane frescoes of Daniele da Volterra, Vasari, Sal- viato, and Zucchero, and then in staring at one another. 294 STEEPLEJACK The women, despite their Italian veils, looked hopelessly plain, the men clumsy and ill at ease. They made un couth and guttural noises. Pious folk, but without man ners. Conversation proceeded amain. Some pilgrims were heavily laden with crucifixes and rosaries for which they desired the blessing of the Holy Father. One young priest from America was bedecked with pious emblems. It is against the rule to bring such things into the Pope s presence, consequently every one breaks the rule. A "pia fraus," as we said at the law school. The guilty feeling which had assailed me as I passed the watchful gaze of the Swiss Guard was dissipated. The Sala Regia wore an unfamiliar aspect, though I had been haunting it and the Sistine Chapel for a month past. At last a murmur : His Holiness ! The nervous tension was be come unpleasant. We had been waiting over an hour. We were ranged on either side of the Sala, the women to the right, the men to the left of the throne, which was an ordinary tribune. It must be confessed that the noisy sex were vigorously elbowed to the rear. In America these women would have been well to the front, but the polite male pilgrims evidently indulge in no such ideas of sex equality. They usurped the good places by sheer strength. A tall man in evening clothes solitary in this respect, with the exception of the Pope s personal suite patrolled the floor followed by the Suisse (a murrain on Michelangelo s taste if he designed such hideous uni forms!). I fancied this major-domo was no less than a prince of the royal blood, so haughty his bearing. When I heard that he was a Roman correspondent on some foreign newspaper my respect for the power of the press increases He comes ! I INTERVIEW THE POPE 295 This time it was not a false alarm. From a gallery facing the Sistine Chapel entered the inevitable Swiss Guard, followed by the officers of the Papal household, a knot of ecclesiastics wearing purple; Monsignor Pick, the Papal prothonotary and a man of importance; then a few stragglers anonymous persons, stout, bald officials finally Pope Pius X. He was attired in purest white, even to the sash that encompassed his plump little per son. A gold cross depended from his neck. He held out his hand to be kissed in the most matter-of-fact way. I noted the whiteness of the nervously energetic hand tendered me, which bore the ring of Peter, a large square emerald surrounded by diamonds. Though seventy, he looked ten years younger. He was slightly under medium height. His hair was white, his face dark, red, veined, and not healthy. He needed more air and exercise. The great gardens of the Vatican Palace were no com pensation for this man, homesick for the sultry lagoons and stretches of gleaming waters in his old diocese at Venice. If the human in him could have called out, it would have voiced Venice, not the Vatican. The flesh of his face was what painters call "ecclesiastical," that is, coarse in grain; his nose broad, unaristocratic, his brows strong and harmonious. His eyes may have been brown, but they seemed black, brilliant, piercing. He moved with silent alertness. I saw with satisfaction the shapely ears, musical ears, their lobes freely detached. A certain resemblance to Pius IX there was, but not so amiable looking. I found another than the Pope I had expected. This, then, was the man of sor rows, the exile, though in his native land, a prisoner within sight of the city over which he was the spiritual ruler, a prince of all principalities and dominions. Withal 296 STEEPLEJACK a feeble old man whose life would have been imperilled if he had ventured into the streets of Rome. The Pope finished the circle of pilgrims and stood at the other end of the Sala. With him were his chamber lains and ecclesiastics. Suddenly from a balcony came a voice which bade us come nearer. I was amazed. This was going back to the prose of life with a vengeance. However, we obeyed instructions. A narrow vista was made, with the Pope in the middle perspective. The voice, which issued from the mouth of a bearded parson behind a glittering camera, cried in peremptory and true photographer accents, "One, two, three! Thanks, Your Holiness !" And so we were photographed. In the Vat ican and photographed on the same plate with the Pope of Rome. It seemed incredible. Old Rome sometimes has surprises for patronising visitors from the New World. Then His Holiness mounted the throne and received the director of the pilgrims. I had my turn, being introduced by Monsignor Pick, who informed him that I was an American music-critic in search of Plain-Chant. The Pope at once was interested, as he had recently inaug urated reforms in the church choirs of the world. He asked me how I liked the music in Rome, and then and there I expected excommunication, for I told the whole truth. The previous Sunday I heard a Mass which was sung with much satisfaction by the Sistine choir of male soprani and contralti in St. Peter s; I had been informed that the eunuch singer no longer existed, nevertheless, I heard a male soprano deliver with art and elegance the roulades, trills, scales, and flourishes generally, which no masculine throat could have achieved. The timbre of the artificial soprano is agreeable, boyish, yet with an ambigu ous quality. In a word, sexless. His Holiness didn t rel- I INTERVIEW THE POPE 297 ish my news. He said something in Italian to a secretary, who immediately jotted down the instruction on his tab lets. We conversed in French. The accent of the Pope was Italian. I stood after the preliminary kneeling. But when I answered his question concerning the recep tion in the United States of the new law affecting church music I was poked in the ribs by Monsignor Pick, who didn t think my answer sufficiently diplomatic. Perhaps it wasn t, but again my naivete compelled me to say that Gregorian chant was hardly popular in my native land. Feeling that I was lost, I fell on my knees and kissed the magic ring and the interview was at an end. The Pope addressed his audience in a ringing bary tone. He blessed us, and his singing voice proved rich, resonant, and pure for an old man. The pilgrims thun dered the Te Deum a second time with such fervour that the historical walls of the Sala Regia shook with the vibrations of their lungs. Then the Papal suite trailed after the Pontiff and the buzzing began among the pil grims. The women wished to know, and indignant were their inflections, why a certain lady dressed in scarlet, hats and gloves the same worldly colour, was permitted within the sacred precincts ! No one knew. The men hurried to the garderobe and jostled the keepers for their umbrellas. Laden with their holy objects, unconsciously blessed by the Pope, the owners of rosary-beads, pictures, medals, and scapulars were envied. We broke ranks and outside we found sunlight. A happy omen. I waited for Monsignor Pick, a man and a brother. I took him in my carriage and on the wings of thirst we flew to the Piazza Santi Apostoli, which spot, notwithstanding its venerated name, has amber medicine for sore throats. The worthy Monsignor hailed from the land of the Czech, 298 STEEPLEJACK a giant in size, with the heart of a child. He related anecdotes of the Pope, who was a democrat and easy of access. He was musical, proud of his singing, and played the piano. I asked Monsignor if he had ever heard Pius IX, nicknamed Pia Nina, by Cardinal Antonelli, because of his love of music and friendship for Liszt. Pius X did not care for Liszt s religious music, always referring to the Hungarian composer as "il compositore Tedesco," which would have pained the Abbe, for he was proud of his nationality. The Graner Mass has never been sung at St. Peter s, although Liszt was so friendly with Pius IX. I made Monsignor laugh when I retailed that venerable tale about Liszt s repentance and withdrawal from the world to the Oratory of the Madonna del Rosario on Monte Mario, an hour from Rome. Pope Pio Nono conferred upon the Magyar pianist the singular honour of personally hearing his con fession and receiving the celebrated sinner into the arms of Mother Church. (Perhaps the delightful old Pope was curious.) After the first day and night, Liszt was still on his knees, muttering into the exhausted ears of the unhappy Pontiff the awful history of his life and loves. Then, extenuated, Pio Nono begged his penitent: "Basta! Caro Liszt. Your memory is marvellous. Now go to the piano and play there the remainder of your sins." Liszt did so and for another day the sacred precincts of the Vatican echoed with the most extraordi nary carnal and enchanting music. The wailing of damned souls, the blasts of hell, and the choral singing of cloistered cats were overheard. Liszt had never played so intimately, so epically. Not only was the spellbound Pope shaken by the thunder of the Apoca lypse, by the great white throne and Lucifer in chains, I INTERVIEW THE POPE 299 but he had visions of the Mohammedan Paradise, with fountains, gazelles, and, quite worn-out, he fell asleep, and when he awoke the following week Franz Liszt was made an Abbe and a deacon in third orders. It is said, I told Monsignor Pick, that he never touched a key board after that in the Vatican. "Se non e vero e ben Trovatore," hummed the cleric. And it was my turn to laugh. I must not forget that next day the Syrian ped dler descended upon our hotel with photographs for sale. I bought three copies; one I still possess. Why not? A man doesn t often get a chance to appear in the same picture with a Pope. And I still hear the summons: "Uno, due, tre!" of that too familiar Roman photog rapher. IX ON THE TRAIL OF THE EARTHQUAKE Several weeks previous to the interview with the Pope, I was living at Sorrento on the Bay of Naples. Marion Crawford, the novelist, in whose company I crossed from New York, lived not far away, at Cocuemella. There I visited the celebrated author of Mr. Isaacs and A Roman Singer, and saw the tower in which he wrote; it stood on a hill some distance from his villa which overlooked the Mediterranean. His yacht was usually anchored off the Hotel Vittoria and daily I swam out and around it. Not till later did I dis cover that it had served as a New York harbour pilot boat owned by Pilot Brown, the father of the young pastor, Father George Brown, of Morristown, N. Y. But the craft had an Italian crew, it was no wonder I didn t recognise its American origin. The summer of 1905 was a hot sultry one in Southern Italy. Mount Vesuvius in eruption through August and September was a magnif icent spectacle from the esplanade of the Vittoria at Sorrento. In the daytime the crater lost its infernal lustre, yet it glistened; at night lava streamed down the mountainside. No one seemed nervous in Naples. Nor for that matter at Torre del Greco, in the direct path of the molten river. But the most enchanting spectacle was after sunset, when the black column of smoke, ex panded at the top like the palm-tree, the classic shape de scribed by Pliny, became a tremendous pillar of fire, showering sparks and huge incandescent masses over 300 ON THE TRAIL OF THE EARTHQUAKE 301 the landscape. The booming, as of distant artillery, was incessant, and it became so alarming that I asked the porter of the hotel if danger was to be expected. Being an expert liar he answered that every summer Mount Vesuvius shot its fireworks for the benefit of foreign visitors, and that the principal noise I heard was merely the gun practice of an Italian navy fleet anchored off Castellamare. Now, as several oldest inhabitants in Naples had informed me that such an eruption was a novelty they carried open umbrellas in the streets when pulverised dust or ashes became too thick I knew I was enjoying a rare and operatic performance conducted by impresario nature. Auber s "Masaniello" and its erup tion scene was childish in comparison; but Bulwer s de scription in The Last Days of Pompeii struck the right keynote. The grand finale was to follow. I had been in Naples all day and a muggy day it was. I had taken luncheon at the "Gambrinus," a pleasant cafe on the water s edge kept by a fat Italian. He had smiled when I expressed my astonishment at the unconcern of the Neapolitans. They were used to the caprices of their beloved mountain. Even the inhabitants at its base returned to their devastated farms and calmly re sumed work after an outburst. I took the afternoon boat to Capri which stops at Sorrento, and as I saw the gorgeous pyrotechnics from the upper deck, I congratu lated myself on my luck. People have gone to Naples for years, yet missed a real Vesuvian blow-up. The next morning I saw with some surprise that plaster had fallen from my ceiling. A storm during the night, no doubt. But when I went to the portier s lodge for my mail I found a mob surrounding the poor man, whose wits had deserted him. He could only ejaculate "very 302 STEEPLEJACK bad, very bad," and it took me ten minutes to pluck out the heart of his mystery, and then he pointed in the direction of Naples. I eagerly looked. To my aston ishment Vesuvius was normal. A hazy cloud of vapour issued from its centre, the metallic booming had ceased. I was mystified. I had seen Mount ^Etna in Sicily, and Mount Stromboli on the Lipari Islands, and it was thus they had appeared, although the lighthouse of the Medi terranean was luminous after dark. "Very bad/ re peated the portier. "Batuishka," I said, firmly grasp ing him by the neck I forgot to tell you that he was a Russian " Beloved brother, speak, make yourself clear or by the holy name of Rurik, PII choke the beloved son of your venerated mother." He spoke. It was very bad indeed. At about three A. M., a shock had started from the fiery mountain, traversed the country, and de veloped into a frightful earthquake in Calabria near Reggio; the eruption stopped as the quake began. Vesuvius had shot its bolt. In the cataclysm which oc curred several years afterwards, Reggio was destroyed and across the Strait, Messina, too. But the 1905 catastrophe was severe enough. It had lightly shaken Sorrento and the household climbed down the steep in cline or went on the lift to the strand where they prayed and screamed till daylight. My neighbour in the next room had been thrown violently from his bed. I had peacefully slept. The portier regarded me with suspicious cynical eyes. What? A man could sleep through such a shock ! Oh ! those Americans. Then he winked at me with the sly wink of a little Russian. Ah ! yes ! the foreign-born Barin had been over the gulf at Naples. No wonder he slept soundly ! But I was too busy getting my kit ready and scouring ON THE TRAIL OF THE EARTHQUAKE 303 Sorrento for a conveyance to take me to Calabria. There was a fat newspaper story down there, and I didn t propose to miss it. The King and Queen of Italy had motored from Rome that morning; at last I hired a miserable old machine and a gay young chauffeur. To the Evvivas ! of the hotel guests led by the portier now quite overseas from excitement and a subtly dangerous liqueur called Strega I went off on the job, though with an uncomfortable feeling that we should smash up before we reached Amalfi. We did. Worst of all was the be haviour of the driver. He was a thirsty soul and insisted on pointing out every trattoria on the route. He drank but kept sober. What I particularly disliked was his hospitable way of inviting a friend at each wine house to ride and keep him company. Those friends of his sat on the front of the car, and to have some dirty rascal blot out the view and let me enjoy his evil odour no, it was too much ! Halt ! I finally cried, after we had dropped a woman with a dirty brat at a wayside inn, halt Antonio ! I hired this motor, I continued, and you are renting the front seats to every newcomer. It must stop "subito!" I explained, and added "caramba!" and then remembered that it was not Italian. I ll get out if you take on another passenger. He smiled, showing ivory that an elephant might have envied. My threat didn t disturb this ingenuous youth. He knew. So did I. The road was hilly, dusty, and perhaps dangerous. But when I told him that he would not receive a tip he weakened and promised to be good. We proceeded on our winding way. Nevertheless, we reached our desti nation two days late, but I saw the desolated villages, saw the misery which those truly charitable souls, the royal pair, did so much to relieve, and saw the little girl 304 STEEPLEJACK with her nanny-goat who was rescued after being penned up in the ruins of her house. The continuous bleating of the kid and her feeble wails led to their discovery. When, covered with dirt, she came blinking into the daylight, her arm about that blessed goat, she cooed "Babbo! Babbo!" Her mother had died before she was old enough to remember the loss, so there was no one but "Babbo" left, and he was buried under the debris in his cellar. The child was pacified with candy, and the last I saw of her and the goat was as she stood talking to the Queen, who was alternately weeping and laughing. She is a stranger born, the Queen, but the Italians adore her because of such pity for the afflicted. I had seen the havoc wrought by the earthquake after sleeping through its primal shock. X I TREAT A KING I have mentioned the name of Milan of Servia. In 1896 he was an ex- King, simulacrum of royalty, and unworthy descendant of the Obrenovitches, originally O Brians of Antrim, I could take an oath. Swineherds and Servian Kings. One torrid August afternoon I was writing at the Cafe Monferino, Paris, where I did much of my work (I tried to be very Parisian then). A furious gabbling at the table next to me caused me to curse the interruption. A dark, wiry chap was quarrelling with a fat, swarthy, whiskered personage in an unfamiliar speech. They became so noisy that I protested, using, I am sorry to say, violent language. But they paid no attention. It was evidently a dispute over money for they held up fingers, counted in the air, and took out wallets. I summoned the proprietor. He whispered: "Cher ami, it is the Milan King of Servia, and with him is his ex-Prime-Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Chamberlain, First Lord of the Bedchamber and Bot tle holder." This fact altered matters. Ten minutes elapsed and I found myself sitting with the royal house hold and interviewing the King. He was a charming blackguard. His first question was: "Do you already know the families Vanderbilt, Astor, and Rockefeller? My son would like to make a rich alliance. He is King of Servia. His mother, Queen Natalie (Milan had the impudence to mention the name of that sainted and cruelly abused woman), will be happy if he marries an American." 305 306 STEEPLEJACK I thanked him for the honour and confessed that while I was not precisely hand in glove with the people he mentioned "But I will make it worth your while, young man," he importuned. I am not a business man, much less a Shatchen, a marriage-broker, as they say in Yiddish, yet I found something so comic about this diplomatic offer that I burst out laughing. The royal household took umbrage. I apologised. In the mean time the sun had vanished behind the opera-house and we went out on the terrace. The household could boast a thirst. They swallowed vast "doubles" of Pilsner, and soon the porcelain stands which also serve as tallies began to pile up. At midnight we were still discussing the tremendous question: Would a female member of the prominent American families aforesaid be induced to wed the scion of the Obrenovitches? If so how much? By this time I could only see their faces, so high were piled the tallies. Parisian waiters easily forget, and this is a safe method for keeping the account before your eyes. I went indoors to select some cigars. When I came out no royal household was to be seen. I made in quiries in a sad voice. Arcades ambo ! I said, and con soled myself with the thought that the story I had ex tracted from them would amply repay me for the out lay. I asked the garcon for his addition. At fourteen cents a "double" and with about one hundred "doubles" to be reckoned up ( in less excited condition I volun tarily knocked off one-half of this number), I saw that there would be no excess profits left from the article. And so it came to pass. I paid the bill and when I met the same scamps a few evenings later, I told them what we do to such pikers in the land of the free. They shrugged indifferent shoulders, explaining that I had in- I TREAT A KING 307 vited them besides I was only a correspondent, an American, and because of the honour conferred by their company I moved away. The poor son of a poor father married Draga and made her his queen, and with her was foully murdered in 1903. Peter Karageorgovich, the legitimate King, did not know of the conspiring that put him back on the throne, yet he was clairvoyant enough to reach Belgrade from Paris in surprisingly short time. XI HOME AGAIN I returned to Philadelphia. I loved Paris but my parents loved me more. There was no fatted calf killed on my arrival. I came over on the Red Star line and my last bright memory was Antwerp and a September Ker- messe. I was despondent when I went aboard the steamer and didn t dream that Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels would see me years afterwards as a regular summer in habitant. My home city was shrunken. Paris is a dangerous criterion. It was the only criterion I had at the time. If I had come via Brooklyn the modulation would have been less painful. If I had landed at New York instead of on the Delaware I should never have gone further. Of that I am sure. Why the sudden dis taste for Philadelphia? The only answer is Paris. That magic vocable filled my horizon. I was more hope lessly homesick for the city than before I saw it. But why explain? I came to consciousness as painfully as the moment when the balsam apple liniment burned into my flesh after my accident at the Baldwin locomotive shop. My family behaved beautifully. Not a reproach, but my friends were uncomfortable when they met me. I was like a man who is reported missing in an accident and is mentally disposed of by his acquaintances and then embarrasses them by appearing safe and sound. I should have stayed away longer. The prodigal son is always a bore. I went about my business as usual but teaching no longer appealed to me. A foreign corre- 308 HOME AGAIN 309 spondent and a piano teacher ! I moped. I studied, in fact, for several years read enormously. A few cultured families opened their doors to me. I saw that one could live in Philadelphia and yet enjoy art and literature. With Franz Schubert I resumed the old-music-making. Max Heinrich and his brood had gone South. I met Theodore Presser and we persuaded ourselves that we must have the superciliary tendon of the ring-finger on the left hand liberated by cutting. Pianists are ham pered by this tendon, one of those survivals in the human anatomy like the appendix, the pineal gland, and moral scruples. Bravely we went arm in arm to Dr. Forbes, a well-known surgeon, then on Locust Street west of Broad. We took our punishment without complaint or cocaine. The little snip of the steel hurt, but that night I played as usual at an exposition in West Philadelphia, where my old employer, William Dalliba Dutton, had an exhibition of pianos. I think I should have accepted an invitation to a lunar voyage so weary was I of my life. I suffered from the ordinary hypersesthesia familiar to neurologists. Paris, I believed, was my "patrie phy sique," and I said so much to the disgust of sensible people. In my revolt against my environment I even went so far as to plan a society for the aesthetic and moral regeneration of society. It was to be called "The Chil dren of Adam" after the chastest and most odouriferous section of Wicked Walt s Leaves of Grass. I drafted the formula of the scheme. It was comprehensive and pagan enough to have aroused even the interest of the police, if known. I found some disciples, intellectual, artistic girls, who saw the ideal through a hole in the millstone. There were plenty of windmills in the vicinity, but this particular group didn t wear bonnets, so nothing 3 io STEEPLEJACK came of the enterprise. It languished and died of inani tion. The chief trouble lay in the fact that I was to be grand Panjandrum, Pooh-Pah, and Brigham Young com bined. No other males but I were admitted to member ship. In such circumstances "The Children of Adam" could not have long endured. Nor I. It was the ideal of a happy chicken-coop. The consolation I had after a week of study was the long walk on Saturday afternoon in company with Professor Roth, Dr. E. J. Nolan, and Frank Cunningham. The professor, as my friend and only schoolmaster, felt called upon to exercise from time to time his classic prerogative of putting me through my paces. He knew of my passion for music, and at the beginning of the promenade he held me up on the river just where the boathouses stand. "James," he asked snapping his thumbs and forefingers, an ominous sign that made me shiver, emancipated as I was from the schoolroom, "James, man, what is rhythm?" The finger snapping increased, sure sign of repressed impa tience. Bravely I stuck to my definition, "Professor Roth, the simplest formula is measured flow. Rhythm derives from the Greek " He interrupted, "Greek or no Greek ! Thunder and mud ! For the last time, what is rhythm, James?" Dr. Nolan and Frank showed anxious interest. But I was not to be shaken. Mea sured flow, that s what rhythm is when we get to Straw berry Mansion. "Professor, I ll prove to you that rhythm can also become measured flow." I winked. The professor cordially shook my hand. The others laughed and I felt relieved. I knew his puzzling tactics. At the most inopportune moments he would pop out questions to rattle his old pupils not even the presence of a bishop could prevent from asking. "What is the HOME AGAIN 311 origin of the mitre?" or, "If there are four synoptic gospels, how many rejected gospels were there?" Which was embarrassing. Edward Roth withal crochety had a very human disposition, and his old pupils are faithful to his memory. When they meet he is the first person they discuss. Our walks seldom varied. We would meet at the Academy of Natural Sciences, proceed up Twentieth Street, occasionally cut into Pennsylvania Avenue, but usually followed Fairmount Avenue to the park entrance; thence along the west drive and sauntering, chatting, smoking, we enjoyed the loveliest natural park of them all. Strawberry Mansion achieved, we halted; Levy would play on his golden cornet he had a French horn tone, this plump little Jew, born in Dublin and we sat at table and didn t eat strawberries. I think that Rob ert Tagg, of Maennerchor Garden, was the manager of the cafe. The park then was not under dusty puritanical rule, and I can t for the life of me see any improvement in our civic virtues or human thought and activities. Roth was a well-read man, a linguist, and a classical scholar; Dr. Nolan, strong on the natural sciences with a bias towards modern literature, possessed the wittiest tongue in the town. He could scarify an opponent as quickly as a farmer s wife can wring the neck of a fowl. Battles royal were fought between Nolan and Roth; Frank Cunningham and I anticipated blood flowing, but the only thing that flowed was beer. At nightfall we returned tired and pleased with our outing. There weren t as many clubs as there are nowadays. The park was our summer club. The old-fashioned hospitality of New Year s Day was 3 i2 STEEPLEJACK beginning to disappear. How well I remembered the closed windows, lights burning at midday, the punch bowl and the appearance of sundry young men more or less speechless though fervently polite. It had its draw backs, this immemorial custom, but the girls liked it. The punch bowl has gone into the limbo of discarded things and the world wags on. The same good old Dr. Landis "lectured to men only." Don t be a clam! was an advertising slogan. The Chestnut Street Opera House was for me the wickedest place on the globe. Startling posters revealing stoutly built "British Blondes," with grand-piano legs, stirred my curiosity, whatever they were called, the Lydia Thompson or the Emily Soldene burlesques. With the exception of Alice Dun ning Lingard, I thought Lisa Weber the most attractive woman on the boards. Years after I had seen Lydia, I went to Her Majesty s theatre in the Haymarket, Lon don, then under the direction of Beerbohm Tree. Francis Neilson was stage manager, and "Twelfth Night" was truly a gorgeous revival. Tree played Malvolio, one of his most convincing assumptions, for, despite his much praised versatility, his range was extremely limited. I sat in the front row, a guest of the management, and next to a very old but active lady, who took the greatest in terest in the performance. The Maria was Miss Til bury Zeffie, and she was so arch and charming that we applauded her. Simply beaming with joy, my neigh bour asked: "She is very good, is she not, sir?" I praised the girl. "She is my daughter," she proudly informed me. The entr acte found me behind with Neilson. He smiled. "Do you know the lady next to you?" "Yes, Miss Tilbury s mother; she told me so." "True," replied Frank, "but do you realise that she is HOME AGAIN 313 Lydia Thompson?" Good Lord! The years at once telescoped and I saw the handsome blonde Lydia of my boyhood, now a little old lady still interested in the stage and in her daughter s career. At a little midnight supper I related to my host, Beerbohm, not then Sir Herbert, Tree, the story, and he told me a dozen better ones. To Neilson and myself he said: "They say the Beerbohms have Jewish blood. True, I was born in Berlin and my father, Julius Birn- baum, was a Russian, but if I had a few drops of what George du Maurier called the precious essence, I should be a richer man." Tree made money but spent it in costly production. He followed in the footsteps of Henry Irving. His "Darling of the Gods" was almost as elaborate as David Belasco s. I thought of a possible Jewish strain in the family when I was with George Moore on the esplanade of the Baireuth Opera House in 1901. We had been speaking of humour, and I spoke of Jewish humour. "What do you call Jewish humour?" said Mr. Moore in his most disinterested manner. I re plied: "Heine, Saphir, Beaconsfield, Zangwill, Max Beerbohm." "I didn t know that Max was a Jew," exclaimed the novelist, Max is a half-brother of Her bert. "He may not be Jewish, but he has that deli cate ironic touch which is Hebraic." It abounds in Hebraic literature. Then the trumpets from their bal cony sounded the fate-motive, and we all trooped in to the last act of "The Valkyries." You can t always tell from physiognomy. Sitting one afternoon on the beautiful Marina at Naples, after visit ing the devil-fish and other extraordinary sea-monsters in the Aquarium, perhaps the choicest collection in exist ence, I was surrounded by a lot of little beggar boys. 3 i4 STEEPLEJACK Half dressed, dirty, impudent, and several of them as beautiful as the Infant Jesus, I saw that it was a hopeless hold-up. I shook my stick at them. Some ran away. I looked about me for the police; not one in view; it was the hour of the siesta. "Clear out, you scamps," I threatened. The leader of the gang must have been twelve years old. He never budged, though he kept beyond the reach of my stout cherrywood stick. He remonstrated and did my ears play a trick? New York, East Side English: "What for you rich Yankee come to Napoli and no give money to poor Italian boy?" That settled it. "Here," I cried, giving him a handful of copper. "Where did you learn English?" "I came from New York; I was born there." "Born where?" "Mulberry Street," he answered, and with his band scooted towards the Santa Lucia quarter. He looked like the future chief of a black-hand blackmailing organisa tion. Then, Naples was in the temporary clutches of the notorious Camorra, who made themselves very un popular with visitors. "Rich man," the boy had said, and at the very moment I was counting my wealth to see if I had enough to get as far as Genoa; if not, I should be compelled to ship at Naples on my return-trip ticketo XII ETERNITY AND THE TOWN PUMP Let us rest now for a little gossip about Eternity and the Town Pump. I pause to recover my second wind. I ve told you some things I remember about Old Phila delphia and the Paris of the seventies and eighties, there fore it might be a holy and wholesome thought to catch my breath and, incidentally, examine my conscience. I warned you at the beginning of these papers that I pro posed to make a clean breast of everything (of course, I wouldn t dare all for fear the police would intervene), else how can you judge my estimates of music, painting, acting, literature? Out of the hodge-podge which I call my life I had to distill some sort of philosophy. I was never an agnostic. I always believed in something, somewhere, somewhen as Emerson has it. In fact, I believe, and still believe, in everything. I am a " Yes- Say er" to life. Any extravagance, but the denial of reality. The "vicar of hell" is he who teaches the nega tion of things. Man is a vertical animal. True. But he is also mobile, an animal that adapts. Because of his numerous aptitudes he is differentiated from his fellow- animals. His "fall" was when he went on all-fours and worshipped ignoble sticks and stones as gods. The ges ture was well-meant, but the attitude undignified. It was a throwback to the anthropoids. It savoured of a return to animalism. Yet it is better to be a polytheist than an atheist. The gods are ever moving through the heavens to remoter constellations. Nothing endures but 315 316 STEEPLEJACK mobility, changeless change. Nevertheless, we speak of stability, permanence, immortality, the absolute when nature abhors an absolute. The Eternal Return is now, it is the eternal recommencement. Hope of a future life is the aura thrown off by young healthy cellular tissue. The sap is mounting. Youth alone is immortal. With advancing decay the fires of the future pale and burn out. But we must believe, the very affirmation of belief say in free-will puts courage into actions. Words worth, in his famous sonnet, after deploring that the world is too much with us, late and soon getting and spending we lay waste our powers exclaims with noble indignation: " Great God! I d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn. . . ." Then he could believe in old Triton and all the gods of the waters. Plato called Time "a moving image of eternity," be lieving that God was unable to make the earth eternal? To each man his mysticism. Everything that is to be has already happened; the tiny segment of the curve of events we call the Present is not the best vantage point from which to grasp the mighty wheel of life. Even the norm of our existence may not have been the norm of remotest ages past. As Ibsen said, perhaps two and two make five on the planet Jupiter. Our reason is the crystallisation of ancient experiences. The constancy of the human intellect proclaimed by Remy de Gourmont may be one more metaphysical illusion. Historical per spective is too limited to permit any but vague general isations. As for fatalism, what else are those who write and speak of Free-Will, Immanence of the Deity, but fatalists? If the exterior world is a mirage of our inner- self then the lack of continuity, the fragmentary attempts, ETERNITY AND THE TOWN PUMP 317 the disjoined thinking without sequence or import, are not all these things natural for the reason that they are? The queer being that peers at us over the back wall of our consciousness, our phantom twin, our true self, the wanderer and his shadow, the old man of the sea, Sinbad s unwelcome burden, our sublimal consciousness, as the psychoanalysts call it what is this mocking devil doing there, sneering at our pretenses, and laughing when we fall and skin our mean little souls? Is he Brother Death? We carry this companion from the cradle to the coffin. We appease him with our heart s blood and with our flimsy lies and sometimes succeed in stifling his importu nate and accusing voice. What if the neighbours should hear him scolding in the reaches of the night ! What a scandal that would be ! Most men and women die disappointed with life, which they think has played them a scurvy trick. And it has. Its chief function is to illude and then dis appoint our false hopes. The majority of humans die of spiritual arterio-sclerosis, the result of a too high blood pressure, caused by vain imaginings. Your doctor detects the danger with his sphygmograph, your spiritual director also employs his sphygmograph; examination of the conscience. It is often efficacious. The chief thing it shows you is that life, at first a feast planned by the almighty Barmecide host, proves to be a succession of appearances; his guests never taste essences, only yearn for them from afar. Our five senses play the immortal game to perfection. The efferent nerves carry from our centre a filament message to the exterior; our afferent nerves return to us the message of the world without. Literally we are imprisoned for life, with the privilege of 318 STEEPLEJACK telephoning our cerebral central to ask it to phone us the news of outer existence. It s the greatest fairy-tale imaginable, our life. But it is not free oh, no! In a physical sense we are the grandchildren of vegetables which live by solar heat; and of the so-called lower ani mals query: why lower? Like them we, too, are au tomatons, ruled by the same rigid laws; we borrow vitality from the vegetable kingdom, and we are nourished by this triple-distilled solar energy. Nature is not always coherent, and De Vries, the Dutch scientist, showed me, when I visited his garden at Amsterdam in 1912, that nature can create by leaps, as well as by orderly prog ress. This philosopher-physicist actually produced new species of flowers overnight. Our nervous system is the whole animal. And these nerves may be so finely spun that they receive messages from the Fourth Dimension of Space. Life, asserts Bergson, is a division, a dissocia tion, not association, not an addition of elements. And at the end the philosopher knows as much as the peas ant. But the philosopher doesn t believe this. Personal liberty is another chimera. To be sure, man is born with a skin, not with a carapace like a tortoise, nor is he unwieldy like the elephant. He is the lord of the soil only for a certain period. Napoleon, the super man of modern times, remarked: "Liberty is the neces sity of a small and privileged class, endowed by nature with faculties higher than those of the mass of mankind; it may, therefore, be abridged with impunity. Equality, on the contrary, pleases the multitude." He practised what he preached. Of fraternity he said nothing, prob ably because there is nothing to say, even if you call it by such a high-sounding name as altruism. It is like ETERNITY AND THE TOWN PUMP 319 one of those ornamental banners that hang out in fine weather, but when it rains it is quickly folded and brought indoors. And it usually rains in the land of fraternity. I began my "dark saying on the harp" and I fear it is ending in obscurity. What am I trying to prove? Nothing. In life nothing can be proved, except dis illusion, and that may be escaped by self-study, as does an entomologist a formidable bug; and by the same token anything may be proved, even the victory of Zeno s tortoise over the swifter-paced Achilles. The sea lives without the approval of man, collaborating only with the winds. But we live by a parallel of our sensa tions, so we worry if the tide and weather are not pro pitious. Hence the priest, hence the ruler in the scheme of civilisation. Voltaire was short-sighted when he said that mankind would not be free until the last king was strangled by the bowels of the last priest. Religion and government were not invented by priests and kings to enslave us. Our organic needs evolved them. What a cosmical joke it would be if, after the inhabitants of this planet had forsaken all gods, one really existed; a god of irony, smiling within the walls of some unknown dimen sion, the Nth of mystic mathematicians, a Moloch of the ether spying his hour to drop, as drops a boa-constrictor from a tree, upon deluded mankind. Perhaps, suspect ing some such celestial denouement, Pascal made his wager with himself the celebrated "pari de Pascal" in which he demonstrated himself a more subtle Jesuit than the Order of Jesus he so denounced in his cruel, brilliant Provincial Letters. His bet was a bit of theological sophistication. If, he said, you make your peace with God before you die you are on the safe side whether 320 STEEPLEJACK there is a paradise or not. Pascal, a master of the iron certitudes of geometry and the higher spatial dimen sions, has always been to me a giant intellect that could believe and disbelieve with equal ease. There are such anomalies in the fauna and flora of the human soul. PART III NEW YORK (1877-1917) I I CAPTURE THE CITY I was forced to drain my dree. My sudden little enthusiasms were beginning to pall. Stung by the gad fly of necessity, I had to follow my market: all news paper men must. I was to learn that versatility is not heaven sent, but is largely a matter of elbow-grease. Some one has written that genius is mainly an affair of energy, which puts the blacksmith, Theodore Roosevelt, and the baseball player in the same category. If it were only so, then the man of genius would rub elbows with mediocrity. I have always had the courage of my friendships. Not to envy some particular person for his accomplishments is to proclaim yourself hopelessly self-satisfied; nevertheless, I ve never met anyone with whom I would change places, except a dead man. You may have the desire of the moth for the star and remain a happy insect. It demands something more than tech nical heroism to write your autobiography. The life of Samuel Johnson, that ranks its author among the greatest of the world s biographers, canny James Boswell, a por trait-painter without parallel, has also presented us with a self-portrait that matches his masterly delineation of the great Cham. Who reads Rasselas nowadays, or consults the once celebrated dictionary? I confess to liking the Tour to the Hebrides by this most perfect of John Bulls. But BoswelPs Johnson! After all, auto biography is superior fiction. Nietzsche has warned us 4 STEEPLEJACK against accepting the confessions of great men meaning Wagner. Writing one s history is a transposition of the embalmer s art to the printed page. Like the Egyp tians we seek to preserve our personality. The Egyptian way has lasted longer. We think of the mighty Milton when he modestly confessed: "For although a poet, soar ing in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him, might, without apology, speak more of himself than I mean to do; yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a mortal among many readers of no empyreal conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of myself, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me." And leaning heavily on the illustrious John, as must all soul- spillers, I shall proceed with these avowals of a personal pronoun. Did you ever hear the story of the man who proposed remarriage to his divorced wife? She was one of the old guard who sighs but never surrenders. A skinny girl with guilty eyes, her soul had become a slumbering forest. But she was faithful to her alimony. There fore, when her husband became imprudent, she calmly answered: "You always were so impetuous!" He was one of those men to whom "God has given a forehead" as Russian peasants say of the bald. Her pent-up cas cades of tenderness not freely flowing he went away in a huff and remarried his other divorced wife. But the first lady s bank-account knew no husband. She re mained single and an alimonist in perpetuity. It was certainly the end of an imperfect day. The moral is not afar to seek. I had been unfaithful to my birth place. I had hankered after the flesh-pots of Paris. These failing, I had returned to my lawful first love, I CAPTURE THE CITY and discovered that she was indifferent to me. I deter mined on another alliance. A third attack of that brief epilepsy called love had begun. I was in the doldrums of despair. I might have reproached Philadelphia as De Quincey did " stony-hearted step-mother Oxford Street." Anywhere, anywhere out of the town. I had not even the consolation of those new cults, unscientific, unchristian, and absurd, that elevate religion to the dig nity of a sport. I dreamed of becoming a writer, but I realised that splendour of style without spiritual elevation is like a gewgaw in a pawnbroker s window. And the sacrifices one must make are enormous. A leading- motive in Faust, "Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce !" sounded for the first time in the symphony of my ego. Suddenly one night I sat up in bed and thought: To morrow ! New York ! In the morning I packed my bag and slipped away on an afternoon train without a godspeed save from one faithful soul. I was to take another bath of multitude. The month was February, the year 1886. It was nearing dusk when from the ferry-boat I saw my new home, but unlike Rastignac in Balzac s fiction, I did not shake my fist at the imposing city nor mutter: "A nous deux maintenant !" I never even thought of that duel with Paris in which no man was ever victor. I only wondered where I should sleep. I soon decided. I landed at Twenty-third Street ferry, caught a crosstown car, alighted at Broadway and walked down to Four teenth Street; there to get a lodging for the night in the old Morton House. The room cost one dollar, the win dow was on the square, and from it I could see the Ever ett House, the Union Square Hotel, and the statue of Lincoln. That section of the town was to become my 6 STEEPLEJACK happy hunting-ground for over twenty-five years, and New York my home for three decades, with the excep tion of excursions to Europe. A new Avatar ! My brother, Paul, had warned that if I became a resident of Gotham then I should have no place to go to: an epigram that has since been appropriated without due credit. "J y suis, j y reste," said I in the immortal phrase of Marechal MacMahon. Besides, after Paris, the modu lation to New York was simple and no city, not even Philadelphia, is so unlike Paris as New York. I didn t feel in the least provincial. Paris had lent me aplomb, had rubbed off my salad greenness. Thirty years ago the sky-line from Jersey City was not so inspiring as it is to-day, but from the heights of the Hudson the view was then, as now, magnificent. Above Wall Street, on Broadway, and east of it, was a congested business district. A few spires, Trinity Church, the Tribune Building, the Times Building, were conspicuous objects from the bay. Now you search for Trinity between cliffs of marble, while in New Jersey you catch the golden gleam of the World s dome. The Wool- worth Building, among many, has distanced it in the race skyward. What a difference, too, there was lower down. The Battery, a clot of green, was surrounded by a few imposing buildings, to-day mere impediments for their loftier neighbours. Walt Whitman s Mast- hemmed Manhatta had an actual meaning then; now Manhattan is funnel-encircled, and in a few years it may be the nesting spot of bird-men. You could see churches then. Here and there a spire like a sharpened lead-pencil protruded from the background. To-day, one makes pilgrimages to them through stony canyons. The city was torn up, as it had been fifty years earlier when I CAPTURE THE CITY Dickens visited it, as it is in 1919. New York thrives best amidst excavations. That first night is still vivid. A February thaw had set in. The evening was mild. I sauntered from my hotel, if not captain of my soul, anyhow of my slender purse. Leaving so unexpectedly I had not prepared for the inevitable. I had a few friends, but I preferred not troubling them. It was to be bareback riding for the future. But I had to eat my supper. I had dined at the unfashionable hour of i p. M. I went straight to a cafe; I had been there the previous summer. It stood on Fourteenth Street, east of Fourth Avenue, and faced Steinway Hall, a prime magnet for me. The cafe was kept by an old couple, the Lienaus, and was the head quarters of the musical aristocracy. The men sat below stairs in the cafe, and watched Mother Lienau count the cash or scold George, the fat bartender. She called him "Schorch," and he was simply a treasure, an adipose angel of amiability. To hear him address the irritable old woman as "Mamma" was touching, especially as he al ways winked at us when she asked for a drink. Up stairs was the drawing-room of the establishment, and there Papa Lienau reigned. He was as tall and massive as his wife was short and pudgy. His rule was clement. Not to raise a row over anything, that was the one law. And no one ever did. A room in the rear held a piano and from it I have heard music made by Joseffy, Friedheim, Mills, Neupert, Sternberg who can do more amusing stunts on the keyboard than any pianist Ansorge, and the herculean Rosenthal. But no one was present when I entered the cafe that evening and ordered a humble meal. Later in the evening I met nearly every man 8 STEEPLEJACK that later was to have a finger in my personal pie. I took a walk and got as far as Liichow s, a few doors below. There I was introduced to Otto Floersheim, the editor of The Musical Courier. Hugh Craig introduced me. Hugh was a cultivated Englishman I had met at the "Keg" on Broad Street. I had sold my first story for five dollars to the editor of the West Philadelphia Telephone, and I promptly spent the money with that jolly chap, whose name I have forgotten. While doing this in strolled Hugh Craig and a friendship began that ceased with his death, twenty years afterwards. Craig was that ideal person, a scholar and a gentleman. A university man he was also a man of the world, of gentle breeding, and he was never in a hurry. No newspaper in, which he worked needed an encyclopaedia. He seemed to know everything, and could write without preparation on any topic. A linguist, he could speak no language fluently but his own, though he could translate from a dozen. He always had a cigarette in his mouth, and there was a slight burr on his speech, which may have argued a Scotch strain. He was a good friend, and like Sam Johnson, he was ever ready for a "frisk." He was of a dusty, in definite age, about twenty years my senior. Otto Floer sheim made no impression on me, except that he was fat, rather pompous, good-humoured, and perspiring. We went back to Lienau s, there to meet the senior editor of The Musical Courier, chunky, shrewd, and with the most piercing and brilliant eyes I ever saw in a human s head. They were jewelled, gleaming, and as hard as agate. I had met Marc Blumenberg the summer of 1885 at the Academy of Music, New York, where a meeting of the Music Teachers National Association was in session. Theodore Presser, of the Etude intro- I CAPTURE THE CITY duced me. I had liked the plump little Hebrew, and I continued to like him till the day of his death. He it was who gave me my first leg up over the fence in New York, and I shall never forget his kindness. We chatted. I can see him, napkin tucked under his chin, preparing to eat; he was a solid trencherman. He took me in with his cool, measuring glance, and when I told him that I wrote about music, he bade me drop into the office of The Musical Courier, then at 25 East Fourteenth Street. It was a year or so before I accepted that invitation. What Craig and I did that night has slipped me. The next morning I was up and doing, for I had slept well, thanks to my bad conscience. I went in search of a more suitable residence, and a cheaper. Jacques Reich, the engraver, had an atelier at Fifth Avenue and Four teenth Street, and to him I explained my wants. He had lived in Philadelphia and I think did my father s head in crayon. He proved obliging. Soon I found a comfortable room, top floor, at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. In the row of houses with porches standing well away from the sidewalk, on Seventh Avenue, is No. 40. The row may be still seen looking as it did thirty-two years ago. Across the street was the Fanwood. S. B. Mills, a famous pianist, lived in the block, composed for the most, of boarding-houses. Mrs. Genevieve Ferris was my landlady, and the most motherly of women. She was handsome, and had a masterful way, which came natural as she was a custom-house in spector, and on the steamship docks every day. The boarders were only five or six young men. We paid eight dollars a week, and complained if we didn t get beefsteak at breakfast. O, the blessed time ! No wheat- less, meatless, heatless, sinless, thirstless days then. I io STEEPLEJACK shook down at once in a tub of butter. But how to put in my time was the problem. At noon, after my belongings had been transferred and I could look a policeman in the eye, feeling a home less vagabond no longer, I crossed Fourteenth Street to University Place, then to the right and found myself at the hospitable cafe of Billy Moulds . It should not be forgotten that in New York, as in Paris, the cafe is the poor man s club. It is also a rendezvous for newspaper men, musicians, artists, Bohemians generally. It is the best stamping-ground for men of talent. Ideas circulate. Brain tilts with brain. Eccentricity must show cause or be jostled. If there is too much drinking, there is the compensation of contiguity with interesting personalities. In those abodes of prim dulness, so-called religious clubs for young men without a thirst, I never saw any signs of life except the daily newspapers. I am not concerned with the salvation of my brother s soul, having my hands full of my own, but if hedging a growing youth about with moral wire- fences will keep him "straight," then his intellectual growth is not worth a copper. At the first puff of reality, of the world as it actually is, he will collapse. Until mankind changes which it hasn t since the tertiary geological epoch or something better is de vised than the cafe, that institution will continue to form and develop the adolescent male. Clubs are too expen sive for the majority of us. The present interlude of hypocrisy and bigotry from which our nation is now suffering will surely be followed by a violent reaction, and like such reactions, the pendulum will swing too far in the opposite direction. Mankind can stand just so much and no more. Recall the Restoration after the reign of dreary Puritanism in England; and what were I CAPTURE THE CITY 11 the Puritans of those days compared with our oppressive breed ! Heaven bless their bones ! those roundheads consumed tankards of ale and plenty of beef. Their worst offence was their chronic howling of hymns, and their forbidding a man to covet his neighbour s wife on Sundays; also forbidding a man to embrace his proper spouse on the Sabbath; an edict that may have found favour with overworked husbands. But those Puritans with their "scarecrow" sins were also pious politicians. Beware a pious politician. He is more dangerous than one in petticoats (sometimes he is in petticoats). As to their droning, heaven, like hell, is paved with pious vocal intentions; otherwise how can the choir angelic, not to mention the Great White Throne, endure the ear-splitting bawling wafted upward from here below? Their deity must be very patient, or else as tone-deaf as his unmusical worshippers. Their sincerity is no excuse for sounds like a dog s cough, or the cackling of a hoarse parrot. God can t be worshipped beautifully enough. Little cause to wonder if a man with sensitive ears prefers the cafe to the church. The first man I met at the Moulds Cafe was Francis Saltus, poet, wit, raconteur, and as brilliant as his brother, Edgar Saltus. With the solitary exception of Oscar Wilde, I never heard a human discourse so eloquently as Frank, nor have I ever known such a perfect Bohemian. William Dean Howells has told us of the group that gathered at Pfaff s several decades before; Fitz- James O Brien who wrote the most horror-breeding short story since Poe, "What Was It?" or some such title, a story that is as vivid as de Maupassant s Horla, and one that furnished Ambrose Bierce with the motive for his best 12 STEEPLEJACK tale; Walt Whitman, who probably drank buttermilk, as he neither smoked nor touched alcoholic beverages, and a lot of chaps, Arnold among the rest, whose names are writ in water. The Moulds contingent was not so celebrated, but the actors, singers, painters, poets, news paper men, and politicians were so numerous that a li brary might be filled with the recital of their accomplish ments. Frank Saltus had lived the major part of his life in Paris. He was a member of the Theophile Gautier circle, and a protege of "le bon Theo," whose polished technique and impassible attitude towards life and art he had assimilated. When I hear the frantic clamourings made by uncritical critics over some newly-arrived free- verse bard whose "poetry" is a jumble of Whitman and falling bricks, I wonder if they ever have read Francis Saltus. He was a poet, a pagan, therefore immoral. Now the "immorality" is taken as a matter of course by the young poetasters, but the poetry is left out. We have in this year of grace many "poets," but no Poet. (I must resort to obvious capitalisation.) Frank Saltus carved sonnets from the solid block. He wrote epigrams at fifty cents apiece for Town Topics, he composed feu- illetons that would have made the fortune of a Paris boulevardier. His habits were irregular, though he got up earlier than Willie Wilde, Oscar s brother, who had married Mrs. Frank Leslie for a bedroom so he said. And Frank Saltus was fond of absinthe, another imported habit and a deadly one. But I never saw him drunk, and I never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth. He usually arrived about noon and wrote and talked till the last trump, which was at two A. M.; sometimes later. The classic type of Bohemianism that has quite vanished. He was a ruin, and a gentleman, who had evidently been I CAPTURE THE CITY 13 very handsome. The photographs taken in Paris re vealed him as a Greek god; but when I knew him his good looks were historical. Edgar Saltus was handsome in a different style, dark, Italian, petit-maitre, a prose- master and a philosopher. There was a sufficing cause for the punctuality of Frank, and the rest of us at Moulds . Free-lunch ! Up at the Hoffman House you could eat a regular course dinner on one drink, but you had to tip the waiter a quarter; at Moulds there were no tips, nor was there an assortment of dishes. The glory of the establishment was its bean soup, hot, savoury, plentiful. Oh ! that bean soup. How many famished stomachs it soothed and nourished in the days that are no more ! Pardon me if I shed a lyric tear over its memory. Billy Moulds retired years ago to darkest Brooklyn, and when I meet him I speak of the fabulous soup. His invariable an swer is: "It saved some of you fellows lives, didn t it? But do you remember Otto and his razzle-dazzle?" I did. He meant Otto Floersheim, who had devised a mixture of brandy, ginger ale, and absinthe, that was warranted to knock a horse down. It never fazed Floer sheim, who introduced the concoction to Albert Niemann, the Wagnerian tenor, a drinker that would have pleased Pantagruel. To see this pair of monsters guzzle the poison made shudder a sensitive and beer-absorbing soul. Niemann could booze all night till next midday, and then sing Siegmund that evening in a marvellous manner. But not marvellous, vocally speaking. His acting, the assumption of the character, was the chief interest. His voice had gone before he visited us. In fact it was be ginning to go at the first Baireuth Festival in 1876. That bean soup was a mainstay for us when the weather 14 STEEPLEJACK was unfavourable to our pocketbooks. And there were plenty of rainy days. The critical business is a precarious one. Writing of any sort still is unless you manufacture a "best-seller," and that is what we all try for. The cashier at Moulds was a brother of the boss and had been a keeper at the Trenton State prison. Need I add that Tom Moulds was judge of human nature ! Smiling, sympathetic, he would take my proffered check not a bank cheque and "hang it up" on my always growing account. "I see it s not Delmonico s to-day, bean soup, eh? Well, it s healthier and more filling and it s on the house, like a tin-roof." He jested, but he had a warm heart and an open purse. I could fill pages with the names of illustrious actors who patronised Moulds . Visiting English actors went there instinctively, it was homelike, quiet, few quarrels (before midnight), and good-fellowship was never absent. The old-timers I met were Frank Mordaunt, Frank Evans, J. B. Studley, Walter Turner, and an Englishman named Liston. I ve seen Booth, Barrett, McCuIIough, and, once only, Lester Wallack, there. The musical crowd were unfail ing visitors. I met, every evening, Augustus Brentano, the senior brother of the well-known book-sellers, whose big store was on Union Square next to Tiffany s. Joseffy and Franz Rummel who married Leila Morse, the daughter of S. F. B. Morse Sauret, Ovide Musin, Ysaye, Gerardy, Max Heinrich. Who didn t go to Moulds ? Many the commission to write I got in its shadowy back room. The music trade-journalists congregated there. In those days trade- journalism had not been standardised; the same with the weekly sheets devoted to theatricals. Each editor was a sharp-shooter and often a free booter on his own account. Their pens knew no brother. I CAPTURE THE CITY 15 Dickens would have been delighted with the pages of personal vituperation that were published and without bloodshed ensuing. The vilest abuse was bandied. "If the bug-juice editor who was found by the police-patrol wagon early last Sunday morning as he sat on the curb stone with his watch dangling in the gutter, near the M ds Cafe" (a subtle difference indeed) "does not abandon his worship of Bacchus" this would be fol lowed by a column devoted to the general habits of the aforesaid "bug-juice editor," who never turned a hair, but would report the following week as follows: "Our readers should not listen to the piteous appeals of a poor, decrepit barnstormer, bad actor, fugitive bankrupt, who is after the money of gullible piano manufacturers to keep his rotten little sheet from perishing. As the original pirate in the trade we have a portrait of him in top- boots, big hat, waving the piratical black flag which we would only be too happy to show our readers in case they drop in (and pay their new subscriptions) which accurately places him on the map." The pot calling the kettle black. II MUSICAL JOURNALISM Theatrical journalism was even more personal, fisti cuffs being the last resort. To-day musical journalism is greatly improved. It must always encourage medi ocrity, else perish. And the same may be said of the daily press. The music-critics when I came to New York were Henry T. Finck, of The Evening Post; H. E. Krehbiel, of The Tribune; William J. Henderson, of The Times; this was 1887; later Mr. Henderson followed me as music editor of The Sun, a position he still holds. John T. Jackson, of The World; Bowman, of The Sun; his wife, Mrs. Bowman, succeeded him; Albert Stein berg, of The Herald, then a real force in the musical world, and other men on the afternoon newspapers, such as Willy von Sachs, Edgar J. Levey, both dead. Jack son is dead, so is Steinberg, but the rest are alive, vigor ous, and still "kicking." It is the function of a critic to "kick," otherwise he is considered moribund. Add Richard Aldrich to the list for when I became dramatic editor of The Sun in 1902, there was quite a displacement in our frog-pond; Henderson left The Times for The Sun; Aldrich, the assistant music-critic of The Tribune, went to The Times, Edward Ziegler, my colleague, took over my job on Town Topics where for years I had more fun than in a circus and also assumed the musical editorship of The American and afterwards The Herald. And Leonard Liebling followed me on The Musical 16 MUSICAL JOURNALISM 17 Courier. To-day Ziegler is a young chap who dyes his hair iron-grey in order to appear older. At the Metro politan Opera House he is closely allied to Director Gatti- Casazza. All these men Ziegler excepted I worked with from the beginning and they are still my friends. Something to boast about if you realise that the "artistic temperament" pervades the soul of the music-critic; that a more "touchier" set of humans would be difficult to find except actors; a critic is thinner-skinned than his victims and hates to be criticised. We had our little tiffs but no serious embroilments. Albert Steinberg was the disruptive force. With a wit that was posi tively malignant he would place his surgical steel on your sorest place, and your vanity bled. He had a musical ear, much experience, sound taste, and his guesses were often as telling as riper knowledge. But he was lazy, a race-course gambler, though not a drink ing man. When he was cremated at Fresh Pond a telegram from the De Reszke brothers, then on tour, was the only intimation that the dead man had once occupied a commanding position in the metropolis. Musicians, like actors, have a short memory. Steinberg was a powerful aid to Lillian Nordica at a time when she needed friends. Maurice Grau told me this. I knew it already; nor was Madame Nordica ungrateful. She possessed a big heart. Yet, there was Steinberg dead with no one to tender his remains a last salute except Theodore Stein who, like Madame Frida Ashforth, took care of him through a long illness and a few faithful friends, for the most part strangers to me. However, Steinway and Sons sent a representative. As for his absent colleagues, it must be said that Steinberg had estranged them by his savage tongue. But it was all 1 8 STEEPLEJACK desperately sad, this ending of a brilliant, cultivated, if wayward critic. Music-criticism as a profession c est du cimetiere ! Or the crematory. An ill-omen for me, this funeral. I had attended one of the Music Teachers National Association meetings at Indianapolis in the summer of 1887. These M. T. N. A. affairs were interesting to pro vincial professionals and, no doubt, useful; for New Yorkers, they smacked much of the local festival that blooms in the spring. But I was too young to be hypercritical and enjoyed myself with the rest. Frank Van Stucken, of Belgian stock, born in Texas, conducted the orchestra, and I again met Marc Blumenberg. We became more intimate. When I returned to New York, I visited his office and saw much of him and his partner, and presently I was writing for The Musical Courier, only for the fun of the thing. I didn t get salary till 1888. As my father often remarked, my specialty was working for other people at reduced rates. But I had nothing to complain of in regard to Blumenberg s gen erosity, nor Floersheim s either. Otto was improvident, an enraged gambler, plundered by the bookmakers, with a childlike credulity in "tips"; he was also the sort of friend who would take off his coat to help you. I judge these two men as I found them. I was a stranger to them, and they took me in. No doubt I was useful. Blumenberg was a pragmatic Jew, yet no more prag matic than the average Gentile business man. Both had a certain reputation, like most trade-journalists; yet during my fifteen years connection with The Musical Courier I was never asked to do anything that smelled queer, nor write anything but what I saw fit. Once only Blumenberg attempted to coerce me and, oddly enough, MUSICAL JOURNALISM 19 it concerned The Sun and not his own journal. I have saved the letter in which he told Driggs, the manager, that if I didn t cease praising Gadski in The Sun he would get Krehbiel, of The Tribune, to write my depart ment, entitled "The Raconteur." This was such a joy ous crack that the little editor had to laugh himself when I shrieked at the suggestion. Krehbiel smiled, too, for "The Raconteur" was a rag-bag, an olla-podrida page which I wrote from 1887 to 1902. Not only would Krehbiel have indignantly rejected the offer, but try as he might have he couldn t manufacture such a mess as my columns of gossip, crazy fantasy, and whirling comment. And that was the only time I had a dis agreement with Marc Blumenberg. The joke of the matter lay in the fact that the season or two previous I had criticised Madame Gadski in The Sun, which news paper I joined in 1900, and Blumenberg protested. The reason? Ask me not in gentle numbers, life is such a dream ! Well, for fifteen years I ran amuck in The Courier. Occasionally Hugh Craig, his literary taste outraged at my lack of method, would complain he edited the "copy" of the staff and an indignant subscriber would protest that "The Raconteur" should not be tolerated in a family where there were girls Oh! what a lot of girl readers I had then. I know, because I received so many letters from them but neither Blumenberg nor Floersheim bothered himself about me. I was "Crazy Jim, the Idealist" let him have his fling. The truth was that musical journalists lived only because of the rivalries of piano manufacturers. The subscription list didn t much matter; indeed, the greater the number of subscribers the higher the bills for paper and printing. 20 STEEPLEJACK One piano house could support a trade-journal. And logically the editorial policy of attacking the music- critics of the daily press was inexpugnable. There could be no rapprochement. They were the enemy ! Crush them! "Get thee gone, girl, but the girl wouldn t get thee gone" as Hughey Dougherty, or Lew Simmons, used to sing at the minstrel shows. The critics contin ued to write what they believed to be the truth, and they were attacked. Who was to blame for this system? The mediocrities who wished pleasant things written of them in the trade-journals, or their editors? As an ethical question, I fancy there isn t much doubt as to the answer, but as a business proposition there is some thing to be said for the musical journals or the box- office. Business is such a ripe-rotten affair no matter where you go that these editorial gentlemen had their self-justification. I never judge, fearing judgment, so I can only say that to-day conditions are different. Music- trade editors ride in their motor-cars, are heavy bond holders and don t bother about the music-critics, who are the same ill-paid pariahs they were thirty years ago. Who loves a critic? Once a music-critic, always a pau per; that is, if you don t marry a rich girl, or are not born to the purple, as was Reginald De Koven. The world takes no interest in the quarrels of rival editors. We were up to our necks in scandals and libel suits. The Musical Courier was sued by Fred Schwab, former music-critic of The Times and Town Topics, for uttering a libel. Poor foolish Floersheim had picked the chestnuts out of the fire for other people, smarting under Schwab s attack on them in Town Topics, and he picked them so clumsily that The Courier had to retract its sen- MUSICAL JOURNALISM 21 timents, or heavily suffer. The venerable owner of The Times, Mr. Jones, was subpoenaed, but turned so deaf in the witness-chair that he never told the jury why Schwab had been discharged, or allowed to resign from The Times. The musical town sniggered. The Musical Courier did not. Then I advised Blumenberg to engage Schwab to write criticism on the opera, and he did so. Fred Schwab, a practical man with a sly sense of humour, consented, and behold ! the quarrel was forgotten. Krehbiel, Hen derson, Finck, Irenseus Prime-Stevenson, and Edgar J. Levey were at one time contributors to The Courier, and their names were printed at the top of the editorial page. This was as early as 1887 or 1888. The collab oration didn t last long. Blumenberg and Floersheim waxed rich, but I didn t. If there were "ill-gotten gains" they were scrupulously concealed from me. I got a plain living for my work, and I worked hard, the dreariest kind of labour, going to every tenth-rate concert, tramping out every night, wind or weather never deterring me, to Chickering Hall, to Steinway Hall, to the Academy, to the Metropolitan Opera House. Carnegie Hall was not built, nor was Aeolian Hall; we went to Mendelssohn Hall, or Madison Square Garden Concert Hall. In the nineties, when Floersheim definitely retired to Europe, I had a freer hand, and I edited the musical section in an easy-going fashion. I was mildly reproved once a week for men tioning the names of the other critics, and as I was with them day and night, I didn t heed the advice. "You are advertising these people throughout the country," Marc would say, but he didn t interfere till years had passed and the enmity became uglier. The quarrel seemed childish to me then, a tempest in a tin can. 22 STEEPLEJACK Blumenberg got the notion that I could with training be made useful in the trade department of The Courier, and for many months he took me with him from Harlem to Brooklyn, interviewing piano manufacturers and dealers. I wrote grotesques and burlesques. I "created" fictitious firms. There was a certain Mr. Diggs, of Pilltown, whose adventures were chronicled weekly and, I dare say, amused or else saddened some readers. But I didn t have any flair for business. I was frivolous when I should have been solemn, and Blumenberg would look at me reproachfully or giggle he was a grown-up boy. A man of musical talent, he possessed a well-lined intellect. He was a student of history and a patriot. One morning too bright and too early, for we had been up all night, we went over to the Ernest Gabler piano manufactory and there I was introduced to the head of the house, after being duly warned to be careful. I was very care ful. In my lightest manner I said, after I shook hands: "Mr. Gabler, you make me think of an aunt of mine we always called an earnest gabbler." The man s face clouded, then turning to Marc he grimly said: "Bloomy, this young fellow would make a better piano-tuner than a trade-journalist, don t you think so?" We left in a few minutes and around the corner Blumenberg ex ploded. I was nervous, but when I saw him holding his sides and roaring with glee I felt relieved. The silly pun had tickled his risible rib, and even if he had lost the advertisement, he would have laughed. He was that kind of a man. He was also another; he gave much in charity; he lent money to the music-teachers he was sup posed to bleed. I know this. I didn t go to piano-tuning. I was already a tuner of criticism. The ending of Marc Antony Blumenberg was not without that touch of irony MUSICAL JOURNALISM 23 inherent in matters mundane. Although he was up to his ears in criminal libels and lawsuits, he died at Paris in the odour of sanctity. The American colony, headed by the American Minister and musical Paris, honoured the bier of the dead man; the newspapers had naught but praise for his unselfish devotion to art. Even his most ferocious enemies in America would have been silenced by such an imposing demonstration. His faults no doubt, were many, but he boasted virtues that some of his opponents could not. Above all, he was not a hypocrite. If he called the kettle black he cheerfully admitted the sootiness of the pot. I never came in con tact with a more agile intellect, nor with a cheerier nature than his. He was a politician born who had the misfor tune to operate in a restricted field. Some of his schemes and dreams which seemed extravagant and Utopian at the time for example, a piano manufacturers trust are to-day a commonplace. He had as many friends as enemies, and he raised merry hell his life long. I remember speaking of a few cultivated families in Philadelphia which were my solace during the dark inter val between my return from Paris and my hegira to New York. One of these families was the Houghs, on South Sixteenth Street. Mrs. Hough, before her marriage to Isaac Hough, was Mrs. Amelia Thibault, and the mother of three sons, my closest friends. They were all musical, and with their cousin, John T. Boyd, we were a phalanx of enthusiasms. The Thibault boys, Frank, Fritz, and Carow, were of French descent on the paternal side; Fritz died from fatigue and exposure in the Spanish War. Mrs. Hough was a fountain of affection. She was a benign influence in her circle. Dr. Thomas H. Fen- 24 STEEPLEJACK ton and his wife, born Lizzie Remak, was another musical family. Mrs. Fenton is an excellent pianist. Dr. Fenton, a singer and member of the Orpheus. The Mawsons, on Arch Street, were well known. Mrs. Mawson, an Englishwoman of the old cultured school, had an evening at home where you would meet artistic people worth knowing. Her children have made a name for themselves. Harry Mawson, playwright; Edward Mawson, actor, who was a man with a lovable personality; the young women were musical and intellec tual. Lucie Mawson, a concert pianist, resides in Lon don, where she plays in public and is well-liked. Through the good graces of this family I was introduced to the Garrigues, of New York. In the middle eighties they lived on Seventeenth Street, near Union Square. To say " 109 East" sufficed for the musical elect. It was a cen tre of sweetness and light. The father, Rudolph Gar- rigue, a dynamic Dane, was president of an insurance company. His daughters played, sang, and wrote. As their mother said to me: "I never see them except at meal-time, but I hear them day and night." This with a gesture of mock despair; she belonged to a generation less strenuous, a generation that did not take the kingdom of heaven by assault. Several of them have attained distinction as musical instructors. The eldest daughter married Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, of Prague, just now in the public eye as first president of the Czecho-SIovaks. In this household I was gently encouraged in my vari ous mild lunacies. The pianist, Eleanor Garrigue Fer guson, married to Henry Ferguson, a landscape-painter, had advised me to come to New York; like most New Yorkers she considered Philadelphia a pent-up Utica. MUSICAL JOURNALISM 25 In 1885 I had witnessed the debut of Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, at the old Academy of Music she played Rubin stein s D minor piano concerto with such fire and brilliancy that the conductor and orchestra pantingly followed her impetuous lead and I met so many artistic people at the Garrigues that I then and there renounced the city of my birth. I breathed an atmosphere ozone-charged. The idols of my youth were to be seen perambulating Irving Place, Union Square, Fourteenth Street. At Lienau s you might see William Steinway in the flesh, an immense political influence, as well as a musical. Theo dore Thomas lived on East Seventeenth Street, opposite the Garrigues. William Mason would alight from the little blue horse-car, which ran across Seventeenth Street, at Union Square. He lived in Orange, N. J., and always stopped at Brubacher s, where he met S. B. Mills, before beginning his lessons at Steinway Hall. A polished pianist, delightful raconteur, Mr. Mason could discourse by the hour about Franz Liszt, with whom he had studied. And then there were to be seen at Lienau s, Anton Seidl, Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Tretbar, Nahum Stetson, Joseffy, Sternberg, Rummel, Scharwenka, Lilli Lehman, Van der Stucken, Krehbiel, Mr. and Mrs. Victor Herbert, Rosen- thai, Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand von Inten, Charles H. Steinway, the present head of the house, and, of course, Max Heinrich. A few doors down the block was Augustus Liichow s restaurant which outlived Lienau s, and a host of other hostelries. Ill IN THE MAELSTROM After I left the quaint Seventh Avenue house I had swarmed up a column from the second-story piazza to the third, and though it was a warm night my absence of superfluous attire and the general row that ensued (it was because of a bet) made me seek lodgings elsewhere. A small family hotel at the northeast corner of Irving Place and Seventeenth Street, kept by an elderly couple, was noted for its cooking and cheerfulness. Werle s, too, was an artistic rendezvous, and its table-d hote dinner saw many celebrities. There were always entertaining companions. It was one of those houses where at any time before midnight the sound of pianos, violins, violon cellos, even the elegiac flute might be heard, and usually played by skilled professionals. There was also much vocal squawking. Across the street was, still is, the pretty Washington Irving house, and at another corner lived Victor Herbert. From the vine-covered entrance of Werle s I often heard string music made by Victor Herbert, Max Bendix then concert-master of the Thomas Orchestra, and a Philadelphian and others. I occupied on the ground floor a room about as big as the one I had lived in at Paris. It held a bed, an upright piano, a trunk, some books, and music. It had one ad vantage, it was easy of access, and one disadvantage I never knew when I would be alone. Friends knocked on the window with their sticks at all hours of the night. 26 IN THE MAELSTROM 27 They also sang concerted noises. Finally, I stayed out on purpose till dawn to escape their intrusions. The dining-room was in the basement, a New York institu tion. I was soon introduced to my neighbour, the Red Countess, Madame Von Shevitch. Her husband, a pleasant Russian nobleman, was editor of a radical news paper. She was a large, rather stout woman with red hair of the rich hue called Titian. Her face was too fleshy for beauty, but there were forms and accents that told of its past; the fine, harmonious brow, the intense ex pression of the eyes, still splendid of hue and delicately set like precious jewels, the pallor of her skin, sulphur-white; her aristocratic bearing and the contours of her well- moulded head attracted me at once. She spoke fluently a half-dozen languages. I didn t know who she was, as the name Von Shevitch was just one more Slav in this abbreviated map of Europe. But when Mother Werle whispered to me: "The Red Countess, otherwise the Golden-crested Serpent, otherwise the Princess Raco- witza, otherwise Helena von Doenniges" "Stop," I cried. "You mean Clotilde Riidiger, the heroine of George Meredith s novel, The Tragic Comedians." The moment was almost historic. It sent me back to Mere dith and this exasperating clever fiction, written in his most crackling, incendiary style. This woman opposite me at table who ate suet dumplings as she discoursed art, philosophy, fiction, and politics, was the direct cause of the death of Ferdinand Lassalle, of whom Bismarck had said: "When he goes into the field I ll shut up shop." He said this in the fifties. Lassalle was a fol lower of Karl Marx acharne, though he soon set up a rival socialism, a democratic socialism with a new brand, of which he was the agitator. This handsome, 28 STEEPLEJACK audacious Jew, brilliant as to attainments, an orator who could wind a mob around his voice, had made love to Helena Von Doenniges, the daughter of a rich, aristo cratic Munich family, one of those blown-in-the-glass fam ilies that exist to make plain people foam at the mouth. Not only did she win the homage of this leader of men, but Richard Wagner had admired her too much for the peace of Cosima von Billow, afterwards his wife, Cosima Wagner. But the haughty Von Doenniges family showed Lassalle the door. They also set a cousin on him, the Rumanian Prince, Yanko Racowitza. A duel followed, and Ferdinand Lassalle, the one great force of the Social Democrats, one apparently born to lead the German people from the jungle of absolutism Heinrich Heine proclaimed this was killed. Worse followed. She mar ried the poor Prince, and when he died of galloping con sumption five months later (a form of her revenge), she married a handsome actor, Friedmann, but soon divorced him. Two prima donnas in one family ! Then she mar ried Serge Von Shevitch, who had fled from Russia after some revolutionary enterprise. Although an aristocrat he was a liberal, too liberal, like Prince Krapotkin, for the autocracy on the Neva. She had lived what is called "a full life." Her published recollections of Lassalle fell into the hands of George Meredith. The Tragic Come dians followed. She was bitter over that book, a libel, she told me, of her relations with the grand Democrat. She had known intimately Bulwer, Dickens, Liszt always philandering after girls Napoleon and Eugenie, Bismarck, and a forest of other celebrities. She came to America in 1877, and remained till 1890, when she re turned to Munich, and after sundry vicissitudes she com mitted suicide in 1911, a few days later than her hus- IN THE MAELSTROM 29 band s self-murder. Truly a Tragic Comedian. I sup pose I was influenced by her version of the case and wrote of her as a woman abused, but Mr. Meredith stuck to his guns and amicably informed me that some day I might be brought to his way of thinking. Frank Swinnerton in his authoritative work on George Meredith treats of the matter and wonders whether I am a Jew ! Possibly be cause I had quoted the word "Chutzpe ponem," applied to Lassalle by some of his co-religionists meaning im pertinent Mr. Swinnerton jumped to the conclusion that a driver of fat oxen must himself be fat. Lassalle had been known as "The Social Luther," and his fight ing motto was: "State Support for Co-operative Produc tion." He was not in sympathy with "passive resist ance" as a weapon against the government. A fallacy, he said. "Passive resistance is the resistance which does not resist. And this "citizen of the world," as he called himself, fell before "The shaky pistol of the unhappy Danube Osier," Prince Racowitza, though himself a dead shot and a professed anti-duellist. To show you that Mere dith had sounded the insincerity of Helena, when I asked her why she hadn t eloped with Lassalle, she calmly re plied that she had enjoyed a brief elopement. He was at Righi-Kaltbad for his health, and she slipped away from her parents at Geneva and went to her lover. At the age of nearly sixty-eight she wrote another volume of memoirs. Unblushingly she admitted this passionate intermezzo. Perhaps it accounts for the tragic ending. Something happened incompatability of temperament may be discovered in five minutes and the lovers never met again. I asked her whether her family had disliked Ferdinand Lassalle merely because of his Jewish blood, 30 STEEPLEJACK and she smiled. "My grandmother was a Jewess and secretly aided our affair. No, he was a social firebrand feared by Bismarck, hated by Richard Wagner, and then that Countess Hatzfeldt affair" he had been very friendly with this woman, "and many other things, also his im petuous manner of wooing." I have her picture, after the celebrated portrait by Von Lenbach, which she sent me in the keeping of Frida Ashforth. Her beauty in youth must have been exquisite, for exquisite in this pale transcription are her features and eyes. I saw in life the glory of her hair. Why did the Von Shevitch pair kill themselves. Poverty for one reason, self-disgust and boredom for another. They had lived in their flush times like nabobs. The decadence began in New York. Werle s house was not precisely palatial, though for lean purses a paradise. A few days before their death Madame Ashforth who is, I need hardly add, a famous vocal teacher in New York saw the couple. Naturally she assisted them after frantic telegrams had reached her. Helena begged her not to give Serge Von Shevitch money. "He spends it all on the girls!" What an ending ! Meredith could have written a still more tragic coda to his story if he had known it. I am now making amends to his clairvoyance, and for presumptuously chal lenging his intuitions. But I was young, and believed what women told me; and was she not the Red Coun tess ! What childlike faith a clever woman can arouse when she plays the role of the misunderstood; especially when she confides her "misery" to a young fool! The fascination of a story set to music, sung by men and women in a picturesque setting, is as ancient as the immemorial hills. In America our passion for opera is IN THE MAELSTROM 31 divided by our love of baseball; yet we are a musical nation. (I preach this when optimists deny it after hearing so much "canned music.") And in music we are neutral (I am writing of pre-war times.) No particular nationality may claim exclusive dominion in the tone- art, though roughly set down the order of historical pre cedence is this: Italian, German, French, English and the rest somewhere in the field. I have heard opera in Yiddish, in Czech, and doubtless opera in some sort of volapiik will be sung some day. I mention these vari ous tongues as the tide of fashion has again set towards Italy. In my youth it was Italy. Then for a period came Germany; then Italian and French, followed by German, and now Italian. All of which proves nothing or everything. (When in doubt consult Brother Kreh- biePs Chapters in Operas.) I do not always follow my own advice and occasionally come to grief, for I am not a date-monger. The impresarios in my early days were Max Maretzek, the Strakosch brothers, Maurice and Max one of them married Amalia Patti, but don t ask me which Maurice was an accompanist of merit. I heard him at the keyboard supporting the rich voice of Parepa- Rosa. Elsewhere (in Unicorns) I have spoken of Vieuxtemps, fat Brignoli, Rubinstein and Wieniawski. Opera has been going to the "demnition bow-wows" since Noah criticised the tone-production of the first soiled dove in the ark. And from Mount Ararat to Broad way there has been one prolonged wail of protest against "prevailing methods" in contemporary opera; in a phrase, from Genesis to Giulio Gatti-Casazza. My father, a half century ago, informed me that opera was heading for the dogs; that Brignoli who sang like an angel and looked like a macaroni baker was nothing compared to who 32 STEEPLEJACK was it? Some by-gone operatic Johnnie. Oh, yes, Mario. I never saw a better actor-tenor than Cam- panini, though I ve seen as good acting by voiceless tenors. (No names, please !) But opera was a mixed affair then. It still bore the circus stamp of the seventies. Before he could play in symphony in one evening s programme, Theodore Thomas was forced to placate his audiences with dance tunes, single movements from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, or arrangements of piano pieces, such as Schumann s "Traumerei." In opera the cheap spec tacular ruled. Singers were advertised like freaks, and managers always a half step from ruin. That manager is become an extinct type. Only the pen of Charles Dickens could have characterised the late Henry Maple- son, the Colonel, as he was affectionately named. Com pared with him the florid personality of Sir "Gus" Harris was a silhouette. A perfect flowering was Colonel Maple- son, bluff or tactful, roaring or ingratiating, as occasion demanded. He was the most successful lion-tamer vocal lions I ever encountered. He could make a blank cheque sing with potential wealth. A prima donna, rage in her heart and a horse-whip under her coat, has been seen to leave him placated, hopeful, even smiling. The particular artistic ointment used by the Colonel as a cure-all for irritated "artistic" vanity was antique flattery. If promises were rejected he applied, and with astonishing results, the unguent of fat praise; he literally smeared his singers. Then, conscious that another night had been saved, that Signorina Pugnetto or Signor Niente were conquered, the Colonel would exclaim in that pro digious voice of his: "My boy! I say! What about a cold bottle?" (His nephew, Lionel Mapleson, is libra- IN THE MAELSTROM 33 rian of the Metropolitan Opera House, a post he has held for over thirty years.) The truth is that clumsy methods were to blame in those antediluvian days. Opera from the financial view-point was as much a fly- by-night affair as the veriest theatrical barnstormer before the perfecting of the managerial machine by Froh- man and Hayman. Now, w T hen opera production is safely standardised we are confronted by the undeniable fact that the grand manner in singing has vanished, and. that few plays are worth the paper on which they are typewritten. Nor is this a dyspeptic opinion. So true is it that managerial foresight, abetted by shrewd composers, dis counted long ago the possibility. It is an age of medi ocrity the world over. As first-class singers are rare, the operatic mills grind out something that demands neither superlative vocal art nor superior acting; just that flying- fish known as a singing-actress, or singing-actor. For one Olive Fremstad, one Matzenauer, we are given a flock of young men and women who neither act nor sing convincingly. Instead of the glorious voices we heard at the Academy or Metropolitan Opera, we are offered more placid entertainment; a better ensemble, better stage productions, the splendor and variety of the scene- painter s art; and at least some compensation a larger, more balanced orchestra, and greater conductors. There were no Seidls, no Toscaninis in the long ago. Signor Arditi, bald, rotund, self-complaisant, waved his white gloved hand and Adelina Patti sang the wooing measures of his "II Bacio." As for the stage management it was the abomination of desolation. Because a gauze curtain misses at the opera now, there are columns of protest in the newspapers. What would our captious young 34 STEEPLEJACK scribes have written during the mighty regime when SeidI conducted, and Lilli Lehmann, Marianne Brandt, Niemann, Fischer, Robinson, and Alvary were in the company; when the singing was interrupted by refrac tory scenery; when the Rheingold was like a natatorium of frogs legs; when that great artist and instinctive housewife, Brandt, stooped to pick up the potion vial as she sang Brangaene it had rolled under the couch of the Irish Princess and with Isolde and Tristan writhing in ecstasy hard by? Yet the stage manager, Theodore Hablemann made an envious reputation. The truth is that grand opera is like a table-d hote dinner. The pub lic expects each course to be a miracle, but ends by accept ing the good, bad, and indifferent. It s a cheap meal at any price, with music thrown in. Vogue la galere ! I am not particularly interested in the evolution of the operatic machine, but I do remember the golden days they were usually leaden ones for the singers and man agers. Both the Pattis I heard, lima di Murska, called by her manager the Hungarian Nightingale; Parepa-Rosa, Brignoli, Campanini. What Carmen performances were given: Minnie Hauk, Del Puente, Campanini and Clara Louise Kellogg-Strakosch, Anna Louise Gary-Raymond, Galassi, starry- voiced Christine Nilsson it would need li braries to house stories of those artists. Adelina Patti when I last heard her in Albert Hall, London, was a young ish old lady with a blonde wig, her voice with an occasional strand of gold in it, and it was one of the most beautiful organs since Catalani (why drag in Catty? Because she is always mentioned by some critical Struldbrug in con nection with Aunt Adelina; like Dean Swift s horrid old man of Laputa, music-critics never die; they dry up and blow away.) Brignoli ate too much and died. lima di IN THE MAELSTROM 35 Murska married too much and died; and to my surprise her manager, Signor de Vivo died. But his ghost keeps company with the spirit of SeidI in the lobbies of the Opera. De Vivo was a character. He had a memory that stretched back to Gluck, or to the early Florentine opera reformers. He could relate the most moving tales of managerial mishaps. We christened him the Ancient Mariner. He was a kindly soul, and for young reporters of music a treasure-trove. At that time our night school was held on the Thirty-ninth Street side of the Opera House. The critical chain-gang were not so comfortably situated as now. Maurice Grau had recognised that music-critics are almost human and his press-room be came an institution, instead of a bleak barn; I say bleak because in the old days critical comment was mostly written in noisy cafes. With the advent of the press room and messenger service, criticism was put on a rea sonable basis. The picturesque character of the old-time operatic manager was missing in the firm of Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau. Those business men were devoid of the free booter spirit. Maurice Grau had experimented with French opera of the lighter variety. He had served his apprenticeship under the watchful eye of his uncle, Jacob Grau. With Henry E. Abbey I seldom came in contact. He was not musical, though a managerial Czar. I be lieve he admired Lillian Russell more than any of his imported prima donnas, with the exception of Nellie Melba. Mr. Krehbiel has told us of Abbey s belief that Melba would outshine Calve; but Maurice Grau knew better. Maurice, I found charming, companionable, and willing to judge a case fairly. We met in the old Hotel 36 STEEPLEJACK St. James, at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-seventh Street, in company with the Dorvals, Joly, Steinberg, and Julian Story. Now all dead except the two Dorvals, who manage the park Casino. Walter Damrosch with Charles A. Ellis gave a season of German opera which proved its recrudescence. Like his father, Leopold Damrosch, he brought back Wagner to a city sick with musical frivolities and futilities (as Sir Thomas Beecham is doing now at Drury Lane, London). He also permitted us to hear Ma- terna, Klafsky who looked like a cook but sang like one of the choirs of Cherubim and Gadski. Materna, Winck- lemann and Scaria we had heard and seen they were palpable, physically speaking in concert at the beginning of the eighties. Shrewd as they were, Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau were more than once confronted by bankruptcy. No wonder. What company before or after could boast such a lyric firmament? Think of the names a "gal axy," a "constellation," as the "passionate press-agent" Philip Hale s phrase wrote in those "halcyon" days. Imperious Lilli Lehmann, who had come over from the Stanton forces for a period; the greatest dramatic so prano, in Italian as well as German roles, of them all; Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Scalchi she had four dis tinct tone-productions Melba, beautiful Emma Eames, Nordica, Calve, Victor Maurel, Plangon, Lassalle and in one season ! My brain positively goes giddy at the sight of "Les Huguenots" all stars programme. Luigi Manci- nelli, among other conductors, held his own. The consulship of Heinrich Conried was not during rny critical bailiwick. He will go down in musical his tory as the man who defied the fulminations of Baireuth and produced "Parsifal" for the first time outside the sacred precincts of the Thuringian Graal. His "Salome" IN THE MAELSTROM 37 production, with Alfred Hertz conducting and he is a sympathetic conductor of Richard Strauss would have been a musical event of importance had it not been for the notoriety of the affair. Our music-critics, all sober, God-fearing men, with imaginations devoid of the mor bid or salacious, were thrown into a tumult by Philip Hale, who called their attention to the fact that Salome was a degenerate, suffering from a rare and "beautiful case" as the diagnosticians say of necrophilia. No one ever heard of the disease except madhouse doctors or readers of Krafft-Ebing and the poetry of Maurice RoIIinat. The conjunction of Oscar Wilde s name com pleted the havoc. A scandal ensued. Unhappy Olive Fremstad never sang so overwhelmingly as at that Sun day morning s full-dress rehearsal. Her apostrophe to the papier-mache head of John the Baptist, on a "prop erty " charger, set moralists gloating. Here was a chance to get back at haughty Richard Strauss, who had dared to flout local criticism. The opera was withdrawn. Anne Morgan, the daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, was shouldered with the responsibility, although she has fre quently disavowed the soft impeachment, always going to hear "Salome" when Oscar Hammerstein revived it with wonderful Mary Garden as the sweet-scented hero ine. Philip Hale must have smiled more than once at the effect on our unsophisticated souls of his verbal fire brand. There is no more "degeneracy" in the magnifi cent outburst of savage exultation and poignant passion of Salome over the head of the Baptist than in Isolde s loving lament over Tristan his, too, is a dead skull. The real neurotic in the sloppy little play a parody of Flaubert s "Herodiade" is the King. Since then Sa- Jome has become a commonplace. But that last song 38 STEEPLEJACK is the most intense in all musical literature. When he wrote it not without the aid of Richard Wagner Strauss was a genius. I came to New York in 1886 and found the American Opera Company in full swing, with Jeannette M. Thurber on the managerial side-saddle and Theodore Thomas at the musical helm. And that is history, a history full of heart-burnings, bankers, Charles E. Locke, and other "bobos" inseparable from operatic infancy. That Theodore Thomas, by all odds the most satisfying con ductor of symphony that America then had, and our supreme educational force, was at his happiest in opera I can t say. Like Toscanini, he was a martinet with his forces, but unlike the great Italian conductor, he was too rigid in his beat for the singers. My darling recollection of the Metropolitan Opera House is that of the first " Tristan and Isolde." I pawned my winter overcoat to buy a seat in the top gallery it was the first seat, first row, to the right. But it was worth a hundred coats to hear Lehmann, with SeidI conducting. When I told Maurice Egan, our Ambassador to Denmark for many years, then an editor, always a poet, of the episode, he was in despair, saying that people don t do such things even for art s sake. At his home I met Henry George, and played for him a "Single Tax March" on the theme of his then celebrated book (with the assistance of Chopin; it was a funeral march) . Earlier at the opera I had heard Patti in "Carmen" not any worse than Lehmann s gyp sy and Signer Perugini, Johnny Chatterton in private life, as Alfredo in"Traviata," his solitary appearance, I believe. With the advent of German opera the now familiar head of Victor Herbert popped up among the violoncelli in the IN THE MAELSTROM 39 orchestra; he was then the husband of Theresa Herbert- Foerster, a handsome Viennese woman, who sang with a sumptuous voice in Goldmark s " Queen of Sheba." Marcella Sembrich I had first heard in Paris and after wards in Philadelphia about 1884. She belongs to the great and almost vanished generation of vocal goddesses. Milka Ternina, an Isolde and Brunhilde without parallel, has left the lyric stage. Calve still sings. I heard her in vaudeville. I swear that my eyes were wet. There were holes in her voice, but the "magnetism" as of old. What a night was that first Carmen of hers ! She chucked tradition to the winds, also her lingerie. Some of the elder critics are still blushing. I recall a certain hot morning in August, 1892, when I was hurriedly sum moned by Manager Edmund C. Stanton to the Metro politan rather to an eruption of fire, for the stage and the rear of the house were burning. Otto Weil, now with the present management, stood with Rudolph and Albert Aronson on the roof of the Casino and watched the flare-up. I was luckier. After the worst had passed I stood in a parterre-box with Mr. Stanton and looked at the blazing pit which had been the stage. Tongues of flame, yellowish-red, still licked the edges of the prosce nium, and I expected to hear the magic fire-music of the Valkyries. Wo tan was fire chief, but Loki had fairly vanquished him. Where the Knickerbocker Theatre now is was Luehr s Cafe, and with a few of the house- staff, Thomas Bull among the rest, we discussed the de pressing outlook for the forthcoming operatic season. There was none; 1892-1893 was a closed season, not the first that had gone up in smoke. The Luehr s hostelry saw many musical faces during the Stanton regime. 40 STEEPLEJACK Report hath it that Isolde Lehmann "rushed the growler" from the hotel across the street; I think she was then the wife of the tenor, Paul Kalisch. I was Mr. Stanton s private secretary at the National Conservatory of Music, where he was Mrs. Thurber s Secretary (I spelled my job with a small "s") and as two hired men we hit it off capitally. He was first and last the typical clubman. Tall, distinguished in bearing, he never lost his equilibrium even when verbally assaulted by irate lyrical ladies. Once, at a rehearsal, after Lehmann had protested in an eloquent manner about the dusty stage, and said that it was like a latrine, he calmly replied in his homespun German: "Frau Leh mann, Sie sind nicht sehr lady-like." This drove her to fury and her retort froze my blood. It was both an invitation and a menace. Stanton never winced. Sa luting the prima donna, he left the auditorium. Even the imperturbable SeidI smiled. But Stanton was not the man to lead a forlorn operatic hope. If Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau couldn t, who could? Certainly not Conried. Gatti-Casazza seems to have solved the prob lem. But he has subventions and Caruso. He also had Arturo Toscanini, who, I am sorry to say, is in Italy. He belongs to the Brahmin conductors; to the company of Richter, Levi, SeidI, MottI, Mahler. A more poeti cally intense "Tristan" than his reading with the lovely Olive Fremstad as the impassioned Isolde, I have seldom heard. Toscanini is a superman. In that frail frame of his there is enough dynamic energy with which to cap ture Gehenna. He is all spirit. He does not always achieve the ultimate heights as did SeidI, as does Arthur Nikisch. While his interpretation of " Tristan" is a wonderfully worked-out musical picture, yet the elemen- IN THE MAELSTROM 41 tal ground-swell, which Anton SeidI summoned from the vasty deep, is missing. But what ravishing tone-colours Toscanini mixed on his orchestral palette ! I saw much of SeidI. His profile was sculptural. So was his manner. But a volcano beneath. He was a taciturn man. He smoked to distraction. I ve often seen him with Antonin Dvorak, the Bohemian composer, at the old Vienna Bakery Cafe, next to Grace Church. There the coffee and pastry were the best in town. The conductor and composer would sit for hours without speaking. It was SeidI who introduced the New World Symphony by Dvorak. Nahan Franko told me that SeidFs hair was originally red till he dyed it; and Fred Schwab asserted that he was a Jew. I only know that SeidFs hair was iron-grey, and that he had studied for the priesthood at Budapest. His expression was emi nently ecclesiastical. He never seemed a happy man to me. His wife in the eighties was pretty and fresh-col oured, a Teutonic blonde, also an admirable singer. As Seidl-Krauss she was a member of the Metropolitan Opera House and I recall her Eva in "The Master- singers" with pleasure. It was rumoured that the great Hungarian conductor had been in love with an equally celebrated Wagnerian singer in the Neumann company years before. His Gothic head I ve seen in mediaeval tryptichs, as a donator at Bruges or Ghent or else among the portraits of Holbein. His shell was difficult to pierce, but once penetrated his friends found a very warm-hearted human. Of Rafael Joseffy I can only say this: I loved the man as well as the artist. He was that rara avis, a fair- minded musician. He never abused a rival, but for pre- 42 STEEPLEJACK sumptuous mediocrity he had a special set of needles steeped in ironic acid. Pst ! A phrase and the victim collapsed, the wind escaping from his pretensions like a pricked toy-balloon. His touch, his manner of attack on the keyboard spiritualised its wiry timbre; the harsh, inelastic, unmalleable metallic tone, inseparable from the music made by conventional pianists, became under his magic fingers floating, transparent, evanescent. His plastic passage-work so different from Liszt s wrought- iron figuration, or the sonorous golden blasts of Rubin stein his atmospheric pedalling and gossamer arabesques you ask in desperation if Joseffy played the piano, what instrument then did his contemporaries play? With a few exceptions he made the others seem a trifle obvious. De Pachmann, Godowsky, Paderewski were his favourite artists. To him alone may they be compared. Chopin s style must have been, according to reports, like the pianissimist Vladimir de Pachmann s. That Russian was extraordinary, though his playing never had the intellect nor the brilliancy of Joseffy s. Ah ! the beauty of Jo- seffy s hands, with their beautiful weaving motions, those curved birdlike flights symbolic of the music. One night at Liichow s, sitting with Ed Ziegler, August Himself Joseffy and De Pachmann, an argument was started. De Pachmann, who had been especially irritable, turned vi cious and spitting out his rage he was a feline person he called Joseffy an unprintable name. Before Joseffy could answer the villainous attack, I, with a recklessness un usual for me, let the Chopinzee have the contents of my glass full in the face. If I had been sitting closer I would have slapped his mouth; as it was, the wetting might cleanse it. Sputtering, he was led away by a waiter and presently returned, smiling as if nothing had happened. Joseffy was disgusted with me, as well he might be. It IN THE MAELSTROM 43 was unpardonable, my conduct, and I promptly apolo gised. Then De Pachmann explained it was jealousy, as I had mentioned Joseffy s name seven times more he gave the exact figure than his in my Chopin book. It sounded childish but it dissolved the disagreeable business into laughter. After all had gone away except Ziegler, Jo- sefFy turned to me and severely reproached me but ended his sermon thus: "And you, of all men, wasted such a lot of good beer!" I can recall the diabolic twinkle in his eye yet. I always had a strong affection for the Poles and Poland. I fancy it was the Celtic streak in me which spells romantic. If Poland and Ireland and women were "free" what a dull world this would be (excuse the metre), although you may well ask free for what? Jane Porter s sentimental hero, Thaddeus of Warsaw, was my first introduction to the Sarmatian theme, Chopin my next, and Joseph Conrad is the latest incarnation, though he seems less Polish than his compatriots because his fiction deals with exotic countries; yet rightfully under stood he is au fond, as Polish as Mickiewiez or Pader- ewski. For a decade and more three Polish singers, Marcella Sembrich, the De Reszkes, a Polish actress, Modjeska, and a Polish piano virtuoso, Jan Ignace Pad- erewski, ruled here in their respective spheres. When Jean de Reszke left us his admirers believed he would never be replaced; nor has he been. There is but one Jean. Not being born with a tenor voice he, "midway in his mortal life," made himself one. He thought tenor as an indispensable proceeding in transforming his bary tone into tenor. It was not merely an affair of altitudi- nous tones, but of timbre. To be an emerald the jewel must first think itself one. This is not Transcendental Mysticism pardon the seeming tautology but a trait 44 STEEPLEJACK well understood in biology, for, while a man cannot add one cubit to his stature, the giraffe elongated its neck to get its daily nourishment, and with the will-power and genius of a Jean de Reszke, a barytone might presumably become a tenor. There was, naturally, material to work upon. Jean had vocal wealth in his throat, though not a multi-millionaire like Enrico Caruso, and he had vocal brains, an artistic intellect. He, born a barytone with a high range, will be remembered in operatic history as the most fascinating tenor in French or German opera. As voice, and little else, is demanded in the old-fashioned Italian repertory, he did not shine with the same lustre, but as Faust or Tristan, Romeo or Siegfried, Raoul, Jean of Leyden, Don Jose, Romeo, Lohengrin, who has left in the memories of his auditors such lovable images? The nobility of his attitude towards art, his dramatic assumption of the various roles, his personal pulchritude, these were important factors, but beyond all these was the enigmatic, the magnetic fluid that envelops certain men and women, an aura one word is as useless as another in explaining this and also enveloping the audi torium. Jean de Reszke possessed the nameless quality in such abundance that he had only to appear and there was light! His entrance in "Lohengrin," the arrested attitude and without opening his mouth he became the Swan Knight in our imagination. There is the word; Jean was the most imaginative operatic singer of our times, poetically, tenderly, exquisitely imaginative. This supersubtle Pole employed the entire battery of his forces; he was not one of those distressing tenors who tickle the ear of the groundlings. He invested a character with all its attributes. Oh, yes ! he could take a high C, he often did in "Faust" and "Siegfried," but such tricks did not appeal to him. Once, at the Albemarle Hotel, I IN THE MAELSTROM 45 heard him sing in the trio from "William Tell" with his brother, Edouard, and Jean Lassalle. Jean sang a high C sharp from the chest without straining. I tell you, he "thought" C sharp, for singing, of all musical achieve ments, is primarily thought. He was one of the rare tenors who was both virile and musical. Does Wagner write "vocally"? That question be came superfluous after hearing the De Reszkes, Leh- mann, Ternina, Fremstad, Fischer, Nordica, Eames, and Plangon. Wagner would have died of enthusiasm if he could have heard his essentially melodic line brought into high relief by these artists. The ancient Baireuth vocal tradition did not quite satisfy the composer, mighty as were its effects. Niemann, almost voiceless, was an in comparable Siegmund and Tristan; in Meyerbeer, despite his histrionic genius, he could not gloss over his vocal deficiencies. And there was a long list of large ladies, barrel-shaped, with iron lungs and a method of acting which consisted in waddling and brandishing aloft their pudgy fists, only that and nothing more. One, we re member, I christened the "Foghorn of Hoboken," because, if the wind was propitious, an easterly wind, and all s well ! you could hear her in the heart of Hobo- ken. Her husband, too, had a Hoboken thirst. The last time I saw the unfortunate couple was at Baireuth. I asked Schumann-Heink the news of the husband-bary tone. Madame Ernestine never minces her words: "Last night they were fished out of the gutter, fighting." It was true. The barytone once sang Hans Sachs at the Metropolitan to an obbligato of hiccups. Poor chap, he went down on a steamer off the Hook of Holland. He was doomed to a liquid death. I mention this particular case not as representative but as illustrative of certain characteristics in the old-fashioned Wagnerian school of 46 STEEPLEJACK singing and acting. These singers had tradition, under standing, and musical ability, but they sang by main strength, as the Irishman played the fiddle. Seldom was there plangency in their tones. Lilli Lehmann had first mastered Italian music; she had been a coloratura soprano, singing in such roles as the Queen in "Hugue nots," or Filina in "Mignon." (We actually heard and saw her as Filina.) So she brought to Wagner s music vocal perfections, though she never altogether cured herself of that glottis-stroke (coup de glotte) which, however, she could at certain moments make so dramati cally effective; her imploring accents when on bended knees Brunhilde asks her father, Wotan, if her disobedi ence is irrevocably unforgiven. This mannerism and a certain hardness in style, are the only defects I can pick out in the dazzling artistic cuirass of her career. She was too stormy in the first act of "Tristan" oh ! that desper ate invocation after the curtain rises, when Wagner steals the thunder of Chopin s C minor, Revolutionary Etude and she was not voluptuously tender in Act II. But in the last scene Lilli was glorious, precisely at the point where Milka Ternina, her superior in the previous acts, failed to reach the vocal summit. Fremstad s Isolde is largely modelled after her teacher s, but it is more tender and womanly, and in the garden more poetic and lov able. There was always a little of the remote goddess Brunhilde in Lehmann s impersonation of Isolde, though, curious to relate, her scene with Wotan in the third act of "The Valkyrs" was most human, most moving. In consistencies are the very web of an artist s conception. Max Alvary looked a Siegfried, but sang it in a harsh, pinched voice. That didn t hinder him from becoming IN THE MAELSTROM 47 a matinee idol, like Caruso to-day. There was a tug-of- war between mobs of girls when he left the Thirty-ninth Street door of the Opera House. The son of an Achen- bach, one of the Diisseldorf school of glazed oil-cloth painters, he was personally a man of breeding, and hand some. But he could eat more at a sitting than Michael Cross, or the huge basso, Lablache, whose feats as a trencherman were Brobdignagian; yet Alvary kept his figure, though I don t doubt that his appetite caused the stomach cancer from which he died. Among the men of the Grau regime, Edouard de Reszke, Plangon, and Vic tor Maurel were pre-eminent. I don t suppose there is to be found in musical annals a versatility in aptitudes as that displayed by the French barytone, Victor Maurel. Or if this claim is lacking in historical perspective, then I shall put the question this way: Is there an actor on any stage to-day who can portray both the grossness of Falstaff and the subtlety of lago? Making necessary allowance for the different art medium that the singing actor must work in, and despite the larger curves of pose and gesture, Maurel kept astonishingly close to the char acters he assumed. His Falstaff was the most wonderful I ever saw; Billy Burton and the elder Hackett were not in my time. Tree s Falstaff was a Jack-pudding in an inflated life-saver. I think that Mr. Wenman s he came here with Irving Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch were the best assumptions, for I can t recall my old friend, George Giddens, in these parts, which he must play superlatively well. But Maurel from what school or schools is he the crystallised product? His voice, worn and siccant, nevertheless could take on any dramatic colouring desired. In Verdi s " Falstaffo" it was bullying, blandishing, defiant, tender and gross; charged with an 48 STEEPLEJACK impure suggestiveness, and as jolly as a boon compan ion s. When he sang the scherzo, "Quand ero paggio del duca di Norfolk," the lightness of touch brought back boyish horizons. And the soliloquy what eloquence! And this fat knight whose corpulence and lechery and unction were conveyed to us not by such obvious sym bols as padding or leering, or belching, but were in the very larynx of Maurel, would, without the wave of an enchanter s wand, become overnight the sinuous, lean and treacherous lago. The two most satisfying lagos I remember were Henry Irving s and Edwin Booth s and the first shall be last. Victor Maurel s paralleled them at every point. Admitted that the singing height ens the impression, but in reality weakens the characteri sation, yet Maurel s lago never betrayed a tendency towards the melodramatic; he held a middle course, as difficult as treading on eggs without crushing them, and was both a picture and a dramatic happening. Malig nant he was, that is the "fat" of the part; but he under lined the reason for his sinister actions. lago is begin ning to be less the "spirit that denies" than a human with a sound motive for revenge. I know you will re mind me that critical "whitewashing" is become the fashion, that Nero, Simon Magus, Judas Iscariot, Bene dict Arnold are only getting their just dues at the hands of various apologists. De Quincey, you remember, said that without Judas the drama of Jesus crucified would not have occurred; Nero was a much abused monster, though Renan believes him to be the Beast mentioned in the Apocalypse it seems now there were no "atroci ties" during the fabulous persecutions of the Jews and Christians; and Arnold well, he was of British descent; that may have accounted for much. But in the case of IN THE MAELSTROM 49 I ago there is something to be said. A pure devil, as we conceive devils to be, he was not. A rough, hard- drinking soldier he admits he is, and to call his "put money in thy purse" cynical is to contravene all worldly wisdom. No, Othello had wronged him, and he hated him for it, hated his wife for her infidelity; therefore, his revenge is credible. It is its method that revolts; lago is a Machiavelli in action, and Desdemona, perfectly innocent, is crushed between the upper and lower mill stones of inexorable destiny. This is not meant to be an essay on the esoteric meanings of Shakespeare, but merely the result of studying MaureFs conception, who painted the portrait of Othello s Ancient not all black, but with many gradations and nuances. We used to make fun, Steinberg and I, of what was called the "psychological crook of lago s left knee," yet not a movement but meant something. Maurel was economical in gesture. His was true objective characterization. His Don Giovanni was another finely painted character. He was the live, courtly, quick to take offense, amorous, intriguing, brave, cruel, and superstitious. His drinking song was vocal virtuosity in its best estate. And there is a catalogue of other roles, such as De Nevers, Amonasro, which need not detain us. Suffice to say that Verdi entrusted to him the task of originating such widely sundered roles as lago and Falstaff. Tall, handsome, athletic, a boxer of skill, Maurel in private life was not unlike his Don Juan of the footlights. Innumerable are the anecdotes related of his conquests. Women in society deserted hearth and husband for him. If there were Elviras there were Annas and Zerlinas; also Merry Wives. Once these merry ladies plotted a surprise for Falstaff in St. Louis. Letters brimming with 50 STEEPLEJACK passionate protestations were sent to the Fat Knight and fairly drove him to distraction as they all made a ren dezvous for the same hour, though in different parts of the city. He drove from spot to spot, but the merry wives failed to keep their appointments. They saw him. They were in ambush and their laugh was longer than at Herne s Oak. But the Knight never roared, nor betrayed a sign of defeat. Perhaps he knew. Had Eames, Scalchi, Melba, or Calve hatched the conspiracy against his happiness? I ll never tell. One thing I do know Maurel interested women, even those who de claimed loudest against his philandering. I saw a pho tographic nude of him posed as a boxer. It was as Greek as if the figure had been modelled by some classical sculptor. A picturesque figure of a man. In his best years, Maurel was an inspiring swell. On Fifth Avenue of a fine day he was to be seen with his retinue. He swaggered. He was the Great Lover to the life. Sur rounded by his secretaries, his pugilist, his fencing-master, his pianist, and a lot of singers he was an event on the Avenue. One could have said some fantastic Italian Prince of the Renaissance who had strayed into the nine teenth century. To-day at three score and ten, he is still the Grand Seigneur, and seldom misses a first night at the Metropolitan. A friend of mine, a young American painter, first saw the object encircling the robust throat of Victor Maurel at the opera. Standing in the auditorium during the entr acte, talking to the French portraitist, Theobald Chartrain, the great singer faced the audience. He wore evening clothes, did Maurel, like any other private citizen. It was his collar that riveted the glance of my friend, the painter. Such a collar! Such a shape; IN THE MAELSTROM 51 archaic, mediaeval, exotic, altogether fascinating for stu dents of costumes of historic periods. It was a low turnover collar, the points close, its height inconsiderable; indeed, so low that the throat of the singer was exposed. Nearer, the observer noted that two gold pins were care lessly thrust into either side of the linen. These pins evoked Byzantine luxury. Puzzled by the odd architec ture, yet fearful of appearing rude, the painter devoured this collar with hungry eyes. Then retreating to the lobby he made a pencilled sketch from memory, upon his cuff. But he questioned his memory. Where had he seen just such a cryptic pattern? From what storehouse of pictures had the barytone drawn his model? The Prado, the National Gallery? The Louvre? And from whom? There is a Bronzino there a warrior in black armour over the hauberk of which flows a point lace creation. No, not Bronzino. Botticelli, Da Vinci, Ve lasquez? Aha! He had it. A Hyacinthe Rigaud, also the simulacrum of an armoured warrior, from whose neck peeps a low, reversed collar, with close points, two jewelled stick pins speared through the sides. He had his Maurel now. He, too, could command his phoenix among col lars. And he did. He continued commanding for years. He spent his inheritance on shirt-makers. He dissipated the considerable legacy of an aunt. He went abroad. He became known to London haberdashers. In Paris he was called "M. le Col." He was the King of Collars. But his pursuit of the infinite was in vain. Though he dragged an artist, skilled in the facture of collars before the Rigaud portrait at the Louvre, yet did he fail to ex tort from his plastic genius the desired perfection. The collar ! The collar ! Almost beggared he dragged his weary soul back to New York. His brush for want of 52 STEEPLEJACK practice had lost its cunning and he was forced to earn a living by photography. One day he saw M. Maurel on the Avenue. With a rapidly beating heart the painter feverishly stared at the neck of the Frenchman. He fled, despair counselling suicide. The singer was wear ing a high-standing monstrosity, with flaring points. No gold stick pins. A life had been wasted in search of an impossible ideal. The tragedy is all the more poig nant because the unhappy young fanatic for "significant form" did not know that whenever Maurel changed the style of his neck linen he was traversing a new psychic emotional tempest, the symbol of which he bravely dis played to curious impertinents. Ah ! the collar, the very subtle collar, of M. Maurel. IV THE DE RESZKES AND PADEREWSKI Edouard de Reszke was a splendid man, yet not the finished vocal artist that was Pol Plancon. That French man, despite his mincing gait and meticulous methods, could melt the heart of a wooden Indian; naturally he was best in French and Italian roles, though it was a pleasure to hear him deliver with faultless finish the music of Wagner. He, like the De Reszkes, was an imposing figure on and off the boards. But virility was absent, though in "La Navarraise," that noisy little piece of Massenet and in company with Emma Calve, he was a soldier every inch of him. And his Mephistos, Gounod s and Boito s, were masterpieces of characterisation. Edouard, however, had dramatic temperament. With what sonorous abandon he sang the "Veau d or" or the "Piff-Paff." The first night of "Romeo and Juliet" he was the Friar Laurence, Fames, with Jean de Reszke, as the lovers. The music is sentimental pastry the French from Voltaire to Gounod have never grasped Shakespeare but with such singers even the sloppy music did not veil the poetry and pathos of the interpretation. Jean often sang the role with Nellie Melba as the Juliet, yet, for me, Fames seemed the ideal Juliet. Edouard was a big, good-natured Mephisto, and a satisfying King Mark. When the brothers lived at the old Gilsey House, I occa sionally visited them and witnessed some performances of Edouard in the eternal Italian opera called " Spaghetti." 53 54 STEEPLEJACK Living as they did so many years in Italy their favourite cuisine was the Italian. "Why should I fill up on soup?" Edouard would ask. "A dinner should begin with a pasta," and his always did. Eating nothing before they sang, their midnight meal was a spectacle that would have driven a dyspeptic frantic. The spaghetti was lit erally wheeled into the room and disappeared like snow under the rays of a mellow sun. Years later at Warsaw, I met their brother, Victor de Reszke, who owned one of the principal hotels in the Polish city. He boasted a genuine tenor voice, a lyric tenor, and, being a De Reszke, also a musical temperament. He told me, inter alia, that a singer should not eat much, but, he added, they always do. He meant Edouard; even Jean became too stout; when he abandoned opera his voice was far from being worn. He could have lasted ten years but that spaghetti ! In Paris, I heard Josephine de Reszke, his sister, at the opera. She sang with consummate taste. The advent of Paderewski was the most sensational since Joseffy s and Rubinstein s. He took the town by storm. His first rehearsal occurred one afternoon in 1891 at Carnegie Hall. He was slender, orchidaceous, and resembled the drawing by Edward Burne-Jones. He was the very flowering of the type beloved of the Pre- raphaelite painter. He played with orchestra the C minor concerto of Saint-Saens musically empty work, but a favourite warhorse of Leschetizky pupils, why, I can t say; the G minor concerto is of more musical value. I attended that rehearsal, not only because I was curious to hear the young Polish virtuoso, but for the reason that I had to write two criticisms of the concert, which was to take place the evening of the next day; one for The THE DE RESZKES AND PADEREWSKI 55 Musical Courier, the other for the New York Recorder, a new-born daily newspaper, of which I was musical editor. Of course, I raved over "Paddy" and wrote a prose- poem, A Study in Old Gold, or some such affected title. I was suffering from "preciousness" and a rush rhapsody to the pen. I was earnest, however, in my admiration of Jan Ignace, who painted with a golden romantic brush, whose style was poetic, manly, musical. In Paris he had, unannounced, made a deep impression with the Schumann concerto. He had "substituted" for his friend and preceptor, Annette Essipova, one of Leschetizky s wives, and a pianist of the first rank. She was indisposed quite conveniently and the unknown youth had his first hearing and pleased a critical audi ence. His subsequent triumphs are history. I may add that as a man, artist, and patriot, Premier Jan Ignace Paderewski is altogether remarkable. His general cul ture is wide, his modesty most engaging, and he has heart enough to free Poland, if heart alone counted. Not witty in the sense that Rosenthal or Joseffy were witty, his is the profoundest nature of the three. The "mag netism" which overflows the auditorium when he plays is the same in his impassioned appeals for the succour of his unhappy land. He is the reincarnation of Thaddeus of Warsaw, or the "Pan Tadeusz" of Mickiewicz. In certain Chopin compositions, I have never heard his peer notably in the F minor concerto; but then he plays all schools with amazing versatility. But Schu mann and Chopin are his favourites. I have preserved a telegram he sent me bearing the date February 19, 1900, and from Memphis, Tenn. It reads: "Will you kindly do me the favour to act as judge in prize competi tion for American composers in April? Please reply to 56 STEEPLEJACK Vendome Theatre, Nashville." I accepted, and that was the last I heard of the matter, evidently he hadn t apprised the other judges I ve forgotten who they were and I ve also forgotten the winners of the prize. I fancy my connection with The Musical Courier did not please the members of the jury, and I confess I wasn t sorry. Such competitions seldom bring forth fruit; nevertheless, I told Paderewski, but he only smiled in Polish. At one period I saw much of him, heard him play fragments from his unpublished Polish Fantasy for piano, and he made me the proposal for me to edit a projected musical journal in London. He was to furnish the capital. I refused. I was too much enamoured of New York, in 1892, and its multitudinous attractions. This refusal I now regret. I asked Paderewski about the Burne- Jones sketch. He said that when he first visited London, probably in 1889 or 1890, he was riding in a bus and facing him was an elderly artistic-looking man, who stared at him in a most embarrassing fashion. When the pianist alighted the other followed and, asking his pardon, gave him a card. It was Sir Edward Burne- Jones, then celebrated, and Paderewski with his accus tomed amiability accepted the invitation of the painter to pose for him. It is the one head of his that I like. The flaming locks, the intense spiritual life that marked the mask of the Pole, must have been an inspiration to the Englishman, who has in a large composition shown us Vivien and Merlin, and, for the enchanter, enchanted by the "woven paces" of the siren, he took Liszt as the model. Paderewski s head fascinated him. NORDICA AND FREMSTAD Nordica never impressed me as a genius, as did Leh- mann, Ternina, and Fremstad. She had not much emo tional draught. She was not temperamental in their sense. Her voice, too, sweet as it was, never thrilled. She was not a Brunhilde born nor could she sound all the notes of Isolde s tragic octave. But she had charm, and before she entered the Felia Litvinne class of operatic heavy-weights, she was pleasant to gaze upon; towards the end of her career she looked like a large, heavily upholstered couch. She was a "slow study" but stub bornly industrious, and underwent the torture of one thousand piano rehearsals before she ventured to sing Isolde. At the last one her faithful accompanist became so enthusiastic over her singing that he expressed it in unmistakable masculine style. A furious chase ensued and Nordica, after dodging her adorer, finally slipped out of the room. She told me the story with such realism that I asked her why she troubled herself about such a little thing as a kiss, and her reply was truly feminine: "He had been eating garlic." And "he" was not an Italian nor a Frenchman. Of Olive Fremstad I may only say that whatever critical reservations one may make as to her performance of Isolde or Brunhilde, her Brangaene and Sieglinde were the most satisfying to the eye and ear I ever experienced. Her Brangaene was a dazzling young witch, and not the plain maid-of-all-work 57 $8 STEEPLEJACK we usually see and hear; her Sieglinde was a creature compact of love and pathos and vocally wonderful. When Fremstad as a girl sang in a Valkyrs chorus, led by SeidI at a concert hall, Madison Avenue, corner Fifty-ninth Street about 1890 she was very pretty and her blonde hair an aureole; you recalled the exclamation of that Pope, who, on seeing some English youth, pris oners, said: "Non Angli, sed Angeli." At Baireuth the American girl was one of the Rhine Daughters, this was 1896; and in 1901, a developed artist, she sang Brangaene to Nordica s Isolde at the inauguration of the Prince Regent s Opera House, and she is my only agreeable artistic memory in a performance that was enlivened by the Isolde, Nordica, falling across the Tristan in the garden scene, and as both were corpulent, there was a silent scramble watched with immense sympathy by a corpulent audience. Madame Fremstad s artistic career has been all her early critics prophesied. I spoke a moment ago of Felia Litvinne. She was the sister of Edouard de Reszke s wife, a Canadian born, I believe; and the sister of Willy Schutz. Madame Litvinne was an excellent operatic soprano. She sang Isolde to Jean de Reszke s Tristan. She was also blonde, and very stout. Edouard said that it was mere turn of the wrist for her to eat a two-pound box of sweetmeats at a single sitting. He remonstrated with her, so did her women friends, but to no avail. Her brother, Willy, was indignant when he related his struggles with her. She always swallowed the chocolates before he could grab them; she said that he wanted them for himself. It may have been so. Willy was a joyous character. He would have made the ideal prima donna s husband, NORDICA AND FREMSTAD 59 the kind that hunts the Metropolitan lobby during en tr actes, who, conducting you to a corner, whispers: "Hein ! Now what you think ! My wife she knocks fifty hells out of that stupid Museria!" The stupid one is the rival prima donna, of course. If you cheerfully acquiesce you are immediately piloted across the street to the chop- house. On account of such husbands of prima donnas both Max Hirsh and William J. Guard acquired their grey hair. Willy Schutz never attempted to conceal his admiration and love for Nordica. He must have pro posed to her at least twice a week. I was in his company on the terrace of the Monferino Cafe, Paris, when the startling news reached us that Nordica had married the Hungarian, Zoltan Doeme whose real name is Solomon Teitlbaum. He sang Parsifal at Baireuth only once. I was present. So was Nordica. Yet she married him. This marriage proved almost fatal to Willy. He had fetched from New York the pet French poodle of Madame Nordica. It was a fetish for Willy. He and the dog dis appeared for a week, after the news from America, and when next he turned up, the pup, which had been snow white, was dyed black, and around its woolly neck it wore a huge crepe bow. On its tail another emblem. It was the palpable expression of Willy s sorrow. The cocottes on the terrace set up a wail of commiseration: "Oh! la belle Toutou, he has lost his maman!" The history was pretty well canvassed and with the senti mental sympathy of their class. That night Willy Schutz was a hero who had been jilted by a heartless coquette. He positively sobbed as he looked at the canine in mourn ing; but the dog didn t seem to mind it. Poor Willy, he was not very strong above the eyes, but he was tender hearted and he meant well, but his waistcoat was so 60 STEEPLEJACK heavily paved with good intentions that he waddled. His dog, Nordica s forsaken animal, reminds me of the epitaph I made for a Mexican hairless pup, one of those shivering tiny brutes that yaps and snarls at every stranger. It was prized by Adelina Patti, who forced her visitors to kiss its snout. When it passed away dur ing some ineffable indigestion I wrote this for its tomb stone: " Requiesdog in Patti." Henderson, then of The Times, said my Latin was faulty, but you can t write "requiescat" when it s a dog, can you? VI OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN Well I remember the first day that the late Oscar Ham- merstein entered The Musical Courier office and intro duced himself. He told Marc Blumenberg that he was worth a million dollars, made by some patent cigar-cutting machine. He was also the editor of a trade-journal de voted to the tobacco industry. Blumenberg looked at me and shook his head. "Meshugah! You think I am," said the future impresario; "I ll show you I m not crazy." He produced proofs. A millionaire he cer tainly was, and Marc became interested. Who wouldn t? Oscar was dreaming of opera in English. The failures of the American opera had only blazed the trail for him. He saw that cheap prices and good singing in our native language would solve the problem. There was much pow-wowing which didn t intrigue me as the less I under stand of operatic speech the more I enjoy the music. Yet, as Harry B. Smith has truthfully remarked: "When the opera is a success the composer gets the credit, when a failure, the blame is inevitably saddled on the librettist." As the librettist of "Robin Hood" and a string of De Koven successes, Mr. Smith knew what he was talking about. W. S. Gilbert was in the same rocking boat with Arthur Sullivan. Later, Oscar Hammerstein was to set tle the question by writing the words and music of his opera "The Kohinoor." But at first he was rather timid. I don t believe he took Blumenberg s advice, or the advice 61 62 bTEEPLEJACK of anyone. Opera at the Harlem Opera House followed. It was not enlivening. I recall the burning mountain in Auber s " Masaniello or the Dumb Girl of Portici!" and the various burning thirsts of i2^th Street. Naught else. But Oscar was not a man easily discour aged. He played the game with energy and recklessness. Strictly speaking, he was a gambler born. Organising opera companies, vaudeville shows at the old Victoria, for example erecting opera houses in New York and Philadelphia and London, playing with men and millions, what were the achievements of Henry E. Abbey or Col. Jack Haverly compared with this shrewd, ever witty, good-tempered Hebrew, who was as prodigal with his own money as the others were with the capital of strangers ! Hammerstein s original operetta was as celebrated as the Hammerstein hat. It was the result of a wager made between Oscar and Gustave Kerker, the composer of "The Belles of New York," "Castles in the Air," and a dozen popular operettas. " Gus," an excellent musician, was skeptical concerning the ability of Hammerstein. At a table in the cafe of the old Gilsey House sat Hammer stein, Kerker, the late Charles Alfred Byrne dramatic critic of The Journal and librettist of "Castles in the Air," which employed the talents of De Wolf Hopper, Tom Sea- brooke, and Delia Fox Henry Neagle, dramatic editor of The Recorder, and myself. Oscar, becoming excited, offered to compose an opera, words and music, in forty- eight hours. Kerker took him up. The thing became serious. Rooms were engaged on the top floor of the Gilsey, an upright piano installed, and, cut off from the outer world, Hammerstein began fingering out his tunes, writing words, putting them all on paper. I forgot to add that Gus Kerker agreed to arrange the music for OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN 63 orchestra. We had lots of fun. Louis Harrison engaged a relay of hand-organs to play under the composer s windows, but Oscar never winced; plates of sinister ham sandwiches were sent to his room accompanied by cock tails. And the tray was returned empty with many thanks. I ve forgotten all the pranks we played to no purpose. Complaints were made by sundry guests at the office that a wild man was howling and thumping the keyboard; again uselessly, for, barricaded, the stub born composer refused to give up the fort. Exhausted, but still smiling, he invited the jury on awards to listen to his music. It proved a tuneful hodge-podge, as might have been expected, and Kerker threw up the sponge. The opera was actually produced at the New York Theatre a few months later, reinforced by extra numbers and considerably edited, and it met with suc cess. That first night of "The Kohinoor" was a notori ous one; also side-splitting. The audience, of the true Tenderloin variety, laughed themselves blue in the face. I remember that the opening chorus consumed a third of the first act. Oscar knew the art of camouflage before the word was invented. Two comic Jews, alternately for a half-hour sang: "Good morning, Mr. Morgenstern, Good morning, Mr. Isaacstein," while the orchestra shifted the harmonies so as to avoid too much monotony; I fancy that was a Kerker device. Oscar "composed" a second operetta, but it never achieved the popularity of the first. During a certain period the Hammerstein hat was without a duplicate except that worn by William M. Chase, the painter. However, the Hammerstein hat was unique, not alone for the grey matter it covered, but be cause of its atmospheric quality. It was a temperamental 64 STEEPLEJACK barometer. When the glass had set fair the tilt of the hat was unmistakable. If storm-clouds gathered on the vocal horizon the hat felt the mood and righted itself like a buoy in agitated waters. Its brim settled over the eyes of the impresario. His people scurried into anonymous corners. Or the hat was pushed off his forehead; unbut toned then his soul. You could approach and ask for seats. A weather gauge was Oscar s hat. What a brim ! Oh ! the breadth and flatness thereof. How glossy its nap, in height, how amiable. To have described Hammerstein without his hat would be to give the ring without Wotan. Shorn of it the owner would have been like Alberich sans tarnhelm. As an Irishman would say: his hat was his heel of Achilles. He was said to wear it while sleeping, if he ever slept. Inside was stencilled the wisdom of Candide: "II faut cultiver notre Jardin" (Mary, of course). Many painters have yearned to portray that hat on Oscar s dome of action. The Impressionists would paint its comple mentary tones: the late William M. Chase would have transformed it into a shiny still-life; George Luks would make it a jest of Hades; while Arthur B. Davies would turn it into a symbol the old Hebraic chant, Kol Nidrei, might be heard echoing about its curved surfaces, as echoes the Banshee on a funereal night in Tipperary. It was a hat, cosmopolitan, joyous, alert, both reticent and expansive. It caused a lot of people sleepless nights, this sawed-off stovepipe with its operatic airs. Why did Oscar Hammerstein wear it? For the same reason that the miller wore his hat, and not for tribal or other reasons. VII ANTONIN DVORAK It was Rafael Joseffy who introduced me to Mrs. Jeannette M. Thurber. This energetic and public- spirited lady, who accomplished more by her failures than other people s successes, met with an enormous amount of critical opposition when she started the Ameri can opera movement. Some of her opponents would have liked to mount the "band wagon," and, failing, abused her audacity. But she had the right idea which was the French one. She first founded a National Con servatory in 1 88 1, where musical talent was welcomed and tuition free. There was a "theatre d application," with Emy Fursch-Madi, Victor Capoul, Emil Fischer, M. Dufriche, Jacques Bouhy, and other famous opera sing ers and teachers, wherein the rudiments of acting and vocal delivery could be mastered. What a list of artists the faculty comprised ! Antonin Dvorak, the great Bo hemian composer, in his prime, was musical director; Rafael Joseffy and Adele Margulies a fine pianist and founder of the Margulies Trio headed the piano de partment; Camilla Urso, greatest of women violinists, Victor Herbert, then a leading solo violoncellist, Leopold Lichtenberg, formerly of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and one of the most brilliant American talents I recall although John F. Rhodes, of Philadelphia, had an im mense technical gift Anton SeidI, Otto Oesterle, the flutist of the Thomas Orchestra and the Philharmonic 65 66 STEEPLEJACK Society, conductor Frank Van der Stucken, Emil Paur, C. P. Warren, organist, Bruno Oscar Klein, Horatio Parker, Wassili Safanoff, Gustav Hinrichs, John Cheshire, the harpist, Sapio, Fritz Geise, great Dutch cellist of the Kneisel Quartet, Leo Schulz, first cellist of the Philhar monic, Julia Wyman, all these and others were teachers at this institution, which was then located on Seven teenth Street, east of Irving Place. Well I remember the day that I begged Harry Rowe Shelley, the Brooklyn organist, to submit his compositions to Dvorak; later he became one of the pupils of that master; some of the others were Rubin Goldmark, nephew of the famous composer, himself one of the most gifted among our younger Americans. Harvey W. Loomis, Henry Waller, Harry T. Burleigh, the popular coloured barytone, now a composer of repute, and William Arms Fisher. Henry T. Finck, the faithful, still lectures in the National Con servatory at its new building on the West Side. I taught piano classes twice weekly for ten years, and in addition was the press representative of the Conservatory and secretary to the Secretary, Mr. Stanton, and after he died, I was a secretary to Mrs. Thurber, my chief duty being a daily visit at her residence, where I sat for an hour and admired her good looks. She was a pic turesque woman, Gallic in her "allures," but more Span ish than French in features. She spoke French like a Parisian, and after thirty years I confess that her fine, dark, eloquent eyes troubled my peace more than once. But I only took it out in staring. Curiously to relate, Mrs. Thurber has changed but little, a grey lock or two, which only makes her more picturesque than ever. Old Borax, as Dvorak was affectionately called, was handed over to me by Madame Thurber when he arrived. ANTONIN DVORAK 67 He was a fervent Roman Catholic, and I hunted a Bo hemian church for him as he began his day with an early Mass. Rather too jauntily I invited him to taste the American drink called a whisky cocktail. He nodded his head, that of an angry -looking bulldog with a beard. He scared one at first with his fierce Slavonic eyes, but was as mild a mannered man as ever scuttled a pupil s counterpoint. I always spoke of him as a boned pirate. But I made a mistake in believing that American strong waters would upset his Czech nerves. We began at Goerwitz, then described a huge circle, through the great thirst belt of central New York. At each place Doc Borax took a cocktail. Now, alcohol I abhor, so I stuck to my guns, the usual three-voiced invention, hops, malt, and spring water. We spoke in German and I was happy to meet a man whose accent and grammar were worse than my own. Yet we got along swimmingly an ap propriate enough image, for the weather was wet, though not squally. He told me of Brahms and that composer s admiration for Dvorak. I agreed with Brahms. Dvorak had a fresh, vigorous talent, was a born Impressionist, and possessed a happy colour sense in his orchestration. His early music was the best; he was an imitator of Schubert and Wagner, and never used quotation marks. But the American theory of native music never appealed to me. He did, and dex terously, use some negro, or alleged negro, tunes in his "New World Symphony," and in one of his string quar tets; but if we are to have true American music it will not stem from "darky" roots, especially as the most original music of that kind thus far written is by Stephen Foster, a white man. The influence of Dvorak s Ameri can music has been evil; ragtime is the popular pabulum 68 STEEPLEJACK now. I need hardly add that the negro is not the original race of our country. And ragtime is only rhythmic motion, not music. The Indian has more pretensions musically as E. A. MacDowell has shown in his Suite for Orchestra. This statement does not impeach the charm of the African music made by Harry Burleigh; I only wish to emphasise my disbelief in the fine-spun theories of certain folk-lorists. MacDowell is our most truly na tive composer, as an Alsatian-born is now our most potent American composer. His name is Charles Martin Loeffler, and he shared the first desk of the violins in the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Franz Kneisel, a noble artist. I mention Loeffler lest we forget. But Borax ! I left him swallowing his nineteenth cocktail. "Master," I said, rather thickly, "don t you think it s time we ate something?" He gazed at me through those awful whiskers which met his tumbled hair half-way: "Eat. No. I no eat. We go to a Hous ton Street restaurant. You go, hein? We drink the Slivavitch. It warms you after so much beer." I didn t go that evening to the East Houston Street Bohemian cafe with Dr. Antonin Dvorak. I never went with him. Such a man is as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon is to a shipwrecked sailor. And he could drink as much spirits as I could the amber brew. No, I assured Mrs. Thurber that I was through with piloting him. When I met Old Borax again at Sokel Hall, the Bohemian resort on the East Side, I deliberately dodged him. I taught one class which was nicknamed "in dark est Africa" because all the pupils were coloured. I con fess a liking for negroes, possibly because of my child hood days spent in Maryland. They are very human, very musical, their rhythmic sense remarkable. I had ANTONIN DVORAK 69 a talented pupil named Paul Bolin, who also studied organ with Heinroth; and another, Henry Guy, whose piano talent was not to be denied. I had the pleasure of hearing this pupil play Mendelssohn s "Cappriccio Brillante" in B minor with an orchestra conducted by Gustav Hinrichs, well known to Philadelphians for his pioneer work there in opera. Both these young men are now professionals, and like the many hundreds educated at the National Conservatory, are earning their living in a dignified manner. What Mrs. Thurber has done for the negro alone will, I hope, be credited to her account in any history of the coloured race. Her musical activi ties are still unabated. In 1891, Congress granted her school a charter, and the privilege of conferring the degree of musical doctorship. With the war over, the National Conservatory should by right of precedent, and by reason of the vast good accomplished in the mu sical world since 1881, be made a national institution, So mote it be. VIII STEINWAY HALL Old Steinway Hall on East Fourteenth Street, where it is at present, was my favourite rendezvous. It was the musical centre of the city. William Steinway, high in political councils, was a genuine philanthropist. He assisted struggling talent. He had his hand, a charitable one, in every enterprise of musical moment. A generous, hearty, forthright man. His chief aid was Charles F. Tretbar, in charge of the artistic section of the hall. Mr. Tretbar managed visiting pianists, and helped to organise such orchestral concerts as those given by Theo dore Thomas and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was in Steinway Hall that I first heard the band from Boston, Gericke, conductor, and Kneisel, concert-master. I was fresh from the orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire, but it couldn t hold a candle to Boston s pride. One rival it had, still has, the Vienna Philharmonic, which I last heard in 1913 under Felix Weingartner. As for piano recitals, they rained on you; even in those days every body played the piano well, as Felix Leifels has truthfully observed. It was there I heard Karl Klindworth play Chopin, but I preferred his masterly edition of the mas ter s music to his personal performance. A giant then was Edmund Neupert, the Norwegian, to whom Edvard Grieg dedicated his A minor concerto, because it is said Neupert composed for it that massive cadenza in the first movement. Certainly no one before or since inter preted the work as did Neupert, and I heard Grieg him- 70 STEIN WAY HALL 71 self in London. Neupert s eyes were so large, liquid, and luminous that Madame Alice Garrigue-Mott hinted a sum mer chalet might have been built on their edge. (Come on in, the water s fine !) He had an orchestral style, and he was to be found nightly at Maurer s or the Hotel Liszt. Think of a Liszt Hotel on Fourteenth Street ! Truly a musical neighbourhood. Later it reminded me of the hotels and apartment houses in the vicinity of the Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park, founded by Archer M. Huntington. At every turn you read such names as Velasquez, Goya, Murillo or El Greco. Steinway Hall was once the resort of our crowd com posed of Harry Rowe Shelley, Harry Orville Brown, Henry Junge, John Kuehl, Joseffy, Fiiedheim, Max Bendix, Victor Herbert, and, when in town, the witty Moriz Rosenthal. It was in Steinway Hall, at a Thomas concert, I heard JosefFy strike a false note for the first and only time in my life, and of all concertos the E minor was the one he played the best. The arpeggio after the opening chords, he rolled to the top, but didn t strike the E. I remember Theodore Thomas staring at the back of the little virtuoso as if he thought him insane. If burning glances could have slain, JosefFy would have died on the stage that afternoon. But it didn t disturb him. I heard Rubinstein make a slip at one of his his torical concerts, but with magnificent nonchalance he took as a point of departure the false note at the top and rolled down the keyboard, only to roll up again in the correct tonality. But he wasn t playing with or chestra. IX A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY About 1888 the general character of New York began to change. The foreign influx had become accelerated. Barn-like structures invaded the residential section; along the Avenue strange tribes crowded the native off the sidewalk. And that was thirty years ago ! To-day we are living in an Asiatic metropolis; New Cosmopolis I have called it. As the "old Knickerbocker families" have sold, still are selling, their birthright no fault need be found with the present conquerors. The melting-pot, which doesn t always melt, is rapidly dimming hopes. Irving Place at that time was not the street of tall build ings it now is ; rows of modest three-story dwellings from Fifteenth Street to Gramercy Park were occupied, for the most part, by their owners, and interspersed with comfortable lodging or boarding houses. The only thing that hasn t suffered a change is the sky-line at either end of the street; the park on the upper side, and the familiar facade of the restaurant at Fourteenth Street are still there. Unchanged, too, is Washington Irving s pretty cottage at the corner of Seventeenth Street. A block away is Union Square. Old Moretti gave you perfect spaghetti in his original home on Fourteenth Street, and Italian opera was heard at the Academy of Music. The golden age of the cuisine, music, art, and letters in the old town are gone, never to return. For daily exercise I usually walked around Union Square; the park railings 72 A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 73 had been removed, but the square was not yet spoiled by tramps or disfigured by shanties. There were trees, shady seats, and the sound of fountains. Gloomy busi ness lofts did not hem in this park, and on summer eve nings it was a favoured promenade for residents in the vicinity. Several seasons I had noticed a ponderous dame of certain years, and fantastically attired, escorted by a tall elderly man with a grizzled beard, and had been informed that the lady was a well-known singing-teacher, Madame Miramelli, or to give her full title, Miramelli- Mario. The soldierly looking man was M. Mario, ex- barytone, and the manager of his wife s affairs. She had a studio on Irving Place, one flight up; the basement was a Turkish bath. On the two door-plates you read the rather confusing legend: "Miramelli: Vocal Instruc tion"; and "Baths: Turkish and Russian. Downstairs." However, the numerous singing pupils that streamed in from eight A. M. to six P. M. didn t seem to mind this jumbling of music and manners, and "Madame" was too busy to bother about it. Curiously enough, whenever I passed the house her husband was either entering or emerging. He was a busy man. I did not meet him personally till later at the old Belvedere House, Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street now only a pleas ant memory. It was during luncheon, and, as we shared the same table, I spoke to him about the excellent coffee. He elevated his shoulders, and in his reply I found less of the Italian and more of the Slav than I had expected from one of his appearance. He explained to me that he had spent twenty years at the Royal Opera, Petrograd. We slipped into an easy-going acquaintance, and met, now at Riccadonna s on the Square, or at Morelli s on Fifth Avenue, also at Lienau s and Maurer s; at the 74 STEEPLEJACK last named resort for the sake of the excellent wines. The taste of M. Mario was cosmopolitan. But no matter his whereabouts, at seven o clock every evening he could be seen piloting his heavy wife around Union Square; she, fatigued, though voluble, he taciturn and melan choly. They did not create the impression of a well- mated couple. One day, when I had occasion to call upon him, the little maid who opened the door shrew- ishly, responded to my question "Is M. Mario at home?" with "You mean the husband of Madame? " That threw some light on their domestic relations, and when I saw him shovelling snow, carrying bundles and market bas kets, or running errands, I realised his subaltern position in the artistic partnership. I was then a music-critic, and possibly the friendly advances made by M. Mario were prompted by professional reasons. Yet he never hinted that his wife gave annually a concert at which her pupils were supposed to distinguish themselves. He possessed tact, was educated, and a linguist. His clothes, while not of a fashionable cut, were neat and clean. Perhaps M. Mario did take a drop too much and too often, though I vow I never saw him the worse for it. He seldom appeared at any of his daily posts after seven o clock, so I set him down as an early bird, till one night returning late from the opera I saw him sitting on a Union Square bench, his face buried in his hands. It was moonlight. I hesitated, fearing he did not wish to be disturbed. Then I suddenly changed my mind. I called out: "Hello, my friend! What are you doing up so late?" He instantly arose and I saw that he had been weeping, but was sober. I joked and invited him to Liichow s. He gravely refused. "It is this way," he said in his strangely streaked accent. "I was warm A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 75 and didn t sleep. I sometimes worry. I " he stopped, hesitated a moment, then asked: "Couldn t you come to Madame s to-morrow morning, say about noontime? I promise you a surprise. A young voice, bell-like, with velvet added to the crystalline quality" he was strangely excited, as are all artists when a rare talent is discovered. I promised, though I dislike hearing novices, especially when the affair smacks of reclame. But the agitation of M. Mario was unmistakable, his interest sincere, and, thinking that there had been a family row, and I could do him a favour, I said yes, and at noon the next day I passed the office of the Turkish bath on the first floor and reached the studio of Madame Miramelli. She was at her piano, a battered instrument still ser viceable, and she only inclined her head on my entrance. Evidently I was not too welcome. In the middle of the room stood a young girl of seventeen or eighteen. She was blonde of complexion and dressed her hair in foreign fashion. She was indifferently clad. To tell the truth, I was taken by her face, not so pretty as attractive. Her features were irregular, her nose snub, but her large blue eyes the clear eyes of a congenital liar blazed with intense feeling and her mouth quivered. No wonder. Madame Miramelli had been scolding her. "Lyda," she screamed a long name followed, Slavic in sound, be ginning with the letter Z "Lyda, you sing like five pigs ! If you sing thus to the gentleman, I believe a critic"- she lifted her savage old eyebrows sardonically -"you will drive him away. As for my beloved husband" more pantomime "he thinks you are to become a second Gerster or Nilsson. Don t disappoint him, for he is the greatest living ex-barytone and a wonderful judge." She would have continued this nasty railing tone if M. Mario 76 STEEPLEJACK hadn t entered and seated himself near the girl. His wife stared at him and his eyes fell. Shrugging her fat shoulders she cried: "Again! Skip the introduction, begin at the aria." She struck a chord. The girl looked entreatingly at the husband, who literally trem bled; his expression was one of mingled fear and ad miration. His eyes blazed, too; he folded his arms and his whole being was concentrated in his hearing. The girl sang. He had not boasted, her voice was like a velvet bell. She sang with facility, though her musical conception was immature, as might have been expected. Without doubt a promising talent. When she finished M. Mario shook her by the hand, which limply fell as he released it; he led her to a seat and to my pity and astonishment, I saw that she was lame, sadly lame, her gait was waddling, almost ludicrous, so distorted was the hip movement. My gaze collided with the eyes of the old woman at the keyboard, and if there is such a thing as infernal malice blended with hateful jealousy, it was expressed by her face. She held her silence and feeling the unbearable tension, I said some pleasant, conven tional words to the timid girl, bowed to Madame, and left the room. M. Mario accompanied me to the street, but did not ask for further criticism, though thanking me for my kindness in giving so much of my "valuable time." I cut him short and escaped, not without notic ing the tears in his eyes. Decidedly an emotional man or an old fool, too easily affected by a pretty voice. But the lameness ! maybe that had aroused his interest; also disgusted him with his wife s sharp tongue and un- amiable demeanour towards the poor girl. Ah ! these ancient prima donnas and the tyrannical airs they as sume for the benefit of their pupils and their superflu- A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 77 ous husbands. The husband of Madame ! It was a tragi-comedy, his; yet, why should he become so tearful over the lame girl with the lovely voice and plaintive eyes? Madame was jealous and the girl wouldn t be treated any too well because the husband was sentimental. The musical season had set in, and on the wings of song and symphony I was whirled away from memories of Irving Place and the pupils of Madame Miramelli- Mario. But as the winter modulated into spring, I occasionally thought of these people, though one warbler in the present is worth a dozen in the future. It was May before I again saw M. Mario. He pretended not to know me; at least, it looked so. I was offended. I knew his odd habits. In the evenings I resumed my old walks about the square, more as an appetiser than a diver sion. Precisely at seven o clock the musical couple slowly moved through the park. I avoided them. They seemed, as ever, bored, and I noted that Madame was no longer loquacious. These walks continued for a month, when one afternoon I found M. Mario at the fountain gazing at the water. I saluted him and was shocked by his altered exterior. He had thinned, was neglected looking, his linen not too new, and he had a desperate air. In a stately style he bowed, and to my inquiry as to his health he did not reply. "Come and have a drink," I bade him, "it will cheer you." We went across to Brubacher s cafe, where they played chess in those times, and I asked M. Mario: "And that girl with the splendid soprano is she improving?" His eyes filled. "She is no longer with us," he answered. "Too bad," I commented. "She had talent, though I fancy her lameness would hurt her career; still, there was 78 STEEPLEJACK Carlotta Patti" he raised his hands with a gesture of supplication. "No," he whispered, "she was driven out- of-doors by Madame Mario." I was utterly taken aback. Driven away because of petty jealousy. Then the hu morous side struck me. "I fear you are a Don Juan, my friend. Can you blame your good wife? Such a handsome chap as you, and still dangerous, you know" He stopped me. "Say no more, caro amico, the sub ject touches me too closely. Yes, Madame Mario is jealous. That girl that girl how shall I say it? My first love, she is dead. She was a great dramatic soprano, a Russian, and that girl she is my daughter, she ..." I was tremendously excited. :< Your daughter! Now I see it all." You see nothing," he tersely replied. I persisted. "But does your wife know the girl is yours?" He shook his head and took a sip of wine. I was puz zled. After all, it was not polite to put such personal questions. "Pardon me, M. Mario, but I can t help feeling interested." He pressed my hand. We sat in silence, then he exclaimed: "I was crazy to bring the girl to her, I hoped for a magnificent artistic future. No, Madame Mario doesn t know; she shall never know. She is jealous of the girl s youth, jealous of me, of my own daughter I hastily interposed. "Well, why didn t you tell her?" "Why? Why? Because the girl doesn t know it herself. Because I am a miserable coward, afraid of my old she devil. Because ..." He went away without saying good-by, leaving me in a stupefying fog of conjecture. That evening for the first time the husband of Madame did not keep company with her in their promenade around old Union Square. I possess an indifferent sense of time; the years pass and leave little impress on my spirit. Nevertheless, I m A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 79 sure I felt older when on a certain evening at Carnegie Hall I awaited without undue impatience the debut of a much advertised Russian soprano, Zelocca, or some such name. It was to be one of those tiresome mixed con certs in which a mediocre pianist, violinist, or tenor with bleating voice, or an impossible buffo-basso, participate. The only missing element of horror on the bill of fare was a flute virtuoso; but flutists and harps as solo instru ments were no longer in mode. However, as a seasoned veteran I settled in my seat prepared for the worst. It came in the shape of a young woman who gave her audi ence a dislocated version of the Chopin Ballade in the ingratiating key of A flat. I regret to add that she was applauded, but concerts of this sort are the joy of the encore fiends, who were out in force that evening. The tenor sobbed his aria, and then came the bright star of the entertainment. A blonde woman of some distinc tion, at least twenty-eight years old, hobbled over the stage, leaning on the arm of her accompanist. It was Madame Zelocca, "the greatest living exponent of col oratura singing." I confess I was neither intrigued by this managerial proclamation, nor by the personality of the singer. What did interest me, however, was the idea that perhaps Carlotta Patti might have a successor. Zelocca sang the Bell Song from "Lakme," a mild, pre paratory exercise to "warm" her fluty tones. Yes, it was a marvellous voice, wide in range, of extraordinary agility, and the timbre was of a fruity richness. And she sang as only an accomplished artist can sing. When she limped away, after applause hearty enough to awaken even the critics, a compartment in my memory flew open and out popped the past Irving Place, and the white, hard light of a shabby music-room, a lame girl singing in So STEEPLEJACK the middle of the room, a sour-faced foreign woman accompanying her; and the most vivid impression a middle-aged man devouring the girl with a gaze in which was equally mixed pride and humility. It was the protege of Madame Miramelli-Mario. Why had I not immediately recognised this lame singer? And what was the use of my musical memory if I couldn t recall the colour of this brilliant voice. But a decade and more had passed since I first heard the girl Lyda, now Madame, or was it Signorina Zelocca? Much music had filtered through the porches of my ears since then. Was I to blame for my short memory hush ! here she is once more. For her second number Zelocca sang, and with astound ing bravura, the famous aria from "The Magic Flute," followed it with Rossinian fireworks, and threw in "The Last Rose of Summer," and "Home, Sweet Home" as crumbs of consolation for a now frantic audience in a word, she played at ease with the whole bag of prima donna tricks. It needed no prophet to tell us that she was not only a great singer, but also a money-maker of superlative possibilities. Pardon my cynical way of put ting things. The practice, year in, year out, of musical criticism doesn t make a man an idealist. This young woman, with the opulent figure, lark-like voice, and homely, though intelligent face, would surely prove the successor of Carlotta Patti, lima di Murska, and other song-birds with gold-mines in their throats. But only in the concert room; in opera her lameness would be deplor able; she floundered rather than walked. Yet, such was the magnetism of her voice. . . . I pushed my way to the corridors, leaving a mob of lunatics clustered about the stage clamouring for more, A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 81 like true daughters of the horse-leech. As the front of the house was impassable, I tried to go out by the Fifty- sixth Street artists entrance, but before I reached the door, I was in a midst of babbling humanity. Some sinister magic must lurk in music that can thus trans form sensible men and women into irresponsible beings. It is called temperament, but I think it is our quotidian sensual souls out of the loose. Pushed and shoved as I was, I felt my arm grabbed. I turned. It was Mario, but aged a quarter of a century, so it seemed to me; per haps it was the uncertain light, the excitement of the moment, perhaps because I hadn t seen him for years. His face was full of gnarled lines, his hair and beard white; his large, dark eyes alone hinted at their former vitality. They burned with a sombre fire, and if ever a man looked as if he was standing on the very hub of hell it was poor old Mario. Why hadn t I thought of him earlier in the evening as the father of Zelocca? I whis pered vague congratulations. He didn t hear me, his face was that of a gambler who has played his last and lost. Gradually I fought my way through a phalanx of half-crazy humans, Mario tugging at my arm. We found ourselves on Fifty-sixth Street, and I hastened to tell him the pleasure I had experienced, adding: "And you, aren t you proud to be her father?" "Yes, I am proud." His toneless voice surprised me. I continued: "What did she say when she saw you, for you were her first in spiration?" "I was her first inspiration." This echo annoyed me. Was the poor chap too feeble to realise the triumph of his daughter? "Wasn t she glad to see you?" I persisted. He stopped under an electric light and gave me a bewildered look. Then more explicitly: "No, she wasn t glad. I went in after her first aria, 82 STEEPLEJACK which Madame Mirainelli-Mario, God rest her soul" he piously crossed himself "taught her, and" "Well, well?" I impatiently interposed. "Well, she didn t know me, that s all." His voice trailed into ghostly silence. I became indignant. Such abominable ingratitude ! " I tell you the truth," he reiterated. "She had forgotten me, my face, my name, and, as she never knew I was her father . . ." He paused. To the heavens I whistled my rage and incredulity. "Much must have happened to her in ten years. She forgot, sh^ forgot, she is not to blame only she forgot me. . . / He slowly moved down Broadway, this debris of a greal artist, this forgot ten father of a famous singer, with a convenient memory. That night, at the office, I wrote a critical notice about his daughter, Zelocca, which bristled with techni cal terms, and was bejewelled with adjectives. Was she not the only living successor of Carlotta Patti ! I moaned as I thought of the "inside" story, of the newspaper "beat" I had burning at the tip of my tongue. But I had to play fair and write about her singing, not of her wretched behaviour to the man who had forwarded her on her career. The Welsh rabbit I ate at the Arena later did not console my palate. I went to bed in a wretched humour. To go or not to go? For hours I argued the case before I decided to accept the prettily worded invitation of La Zelocca to visit her some afternoon, or, to be pre cise, the afternoon following the arrival of her note. I dislike informal little calls upon prima donnas at hotels, where you usually find a chain of adorers, managers, press-agents, and anonymous parasites. Nevertheless, I went up to the Plaza, the Lord only knows why. Per- A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 83 haps my curiosity, now aflame, would be gratified, per haps the young woman might make an excuse for her cold-blooded behaviour to her abandoned father. Who knows? Some such idea was in my mind when, after the pompous preluding of my presence, I knocked at the door of her suite in the hotel. She was sitting in a com fortable room and gazing upon the still green park. I begged of her not to derange herself as she made a feint of rising, and saluted her with the conventional kiss on the hand I m bound to acknowledge a finely articulated, well-kept hand and in return was warmly welcomed. At close range, Zelocca was handsomer than on the stage. Her robust figure was set off in a well-fitting street cos tume, and her shapely head had evidently been handled by a discriminating hair-dresser. We conversed of the weather, of the newspaper criticisms (mine in particular) and I ventured to ask her about the box-office. Yes, it had pleased her, better still, it had pleased her manager a jewel of a man, be it understood. She spoke in a silvery voice, with the cool assurance of a woman who fully recognised her financial worth. We drank tea in Russian fashion. I saw my opening. "So you were in Russia before taking the western world by storm?" "Ah, yes, cher maitre" (I always bristle with importance when thus addressed). "I studied hard in Petrograd, and benefited by my intimacy with the great Zelocca." (I was puzzled.) "I am a relative of hers, you know. I took her name by her kind permission. My mother gave me a letter to her when I left New York. She was a friend of an early friend of my mother s husband." Her mother! Who the deuce is her mother? I asked myself. My face must have betrayed me, for she looked at me pensively (her eyes were truly glorious with their 84 STEEPLEJACK deceptive frankness) and murmured: "Of course, M. Mario must have told you of mother s death." I under stood. She meant old Miramelli-Mario, and should have said stepmother. I nodded as sympathetically as I could music-critics are sometimes better actors than the singers they criticise and replied: "Yes, yes, M. Mario told me. But you say Zelocca still lives. He said to me, if I remember aright, that she was dead years ago." She seemed startled at this news. "He told you that ! Ah ! the miserable !" I jumped at the chance. "But, my dear lady, he is, after all, your father, and if I guess the truth, your mother in Russia has proved your best friend. I mean your real mother." She harshly interrupted: "My real mother was a she devil." This sounded like the daughter of Mario. "And," she angrily pursued, "she treated me as if I were a kitchen-maid." The dramatic manner in which this speech was delivered left no doubt as to its sincerity. Again I was at sea. She poured a torrent of words into my ears. "My father, that old drunken beast my father? If you only knew the truth. How an artiste must suffer before she drags herself out of the mire ! It was a vile swamp, that home of mine on on She paused for want of the name. "On Irving Place," I interposed. "Yes, Irving Place. That Mario was not my father, he was only the husband of Madame and she she was, I m ashamed to say it, my true mother." La Bella Zelocca covered her face with her eloquent hands, while her shoulders sobbed if her throat did not. I was flabbergasted by this unexpected, this absurd, revelation. What sort of a deviPs dance had I been led, what kind of a sinister impasse had I reached? She con- A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 85 tinued, her face still hidden: "A cruel, unnatural mother, a still crueller stepfather ... he never ceased his per secutions. . . . And I was too young, too timid, too much in fear of my jealous mother who soon found out what was going on. That s why she was so disagreeable the day you called. She got rid of me soon after that I was packed off to Russia, to her sister. Oh ! didn t I tell you that the other Zelocca is my aunt? No? She is, and a kinder woman than was my mother. Now you know why I wouldn t see the old rascal who expected to live on me as he had lived on the bounty of two sisters why why " But I felt that my presence was becoming indecorous in this close atmosphere of family scandal. I arose, seized my hat. She sat bolt upright, stiff as a votive candle; her expression was one of annoyed astonishment. "Surely you are not going so soon, and not going with out a word of sympathy ! You, I feel, are one of my oldest and truest friends" at these doleful words my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth "and to whom should I appeal but you?" I wriggled but saw no way of escape. Then I burst forth. "In God s name, Ma dame, what can I say, what can I do for you? This is the third time I ve seen you in my life. I only knew that venerable scamp, Mario, superficially. Your mother, great heavens ! your mother I ve seen often enough too often." She beamed on me and became so excited that she, too, got on her feet, supporting herself with a gold- topped stick. "Ah!" she triumphantly cried, "I knew it, I knew it. You are the man I thought you were. You hated my mother. You despised her husband and you will, I m sure, help me in my search, my search " 86 STEEPLEJACK The room began to spin slowly around; the grand piano seemed to tilt my way. Possibly Zelocca saw the hunted look in my eyes, a man and a critic at bay, for she ex ploded the question: "You will look for him, find him, bring him to me?" I wavered in my walk towards the door, fearing heat apoplexy, yet I contrived to stammer: "Find find whom shall I find for you?" "My real father," she fairly chanted, and her face was as the shining face of an ardent neophyte at a tremendously mystical ceremony. As I left the room on a dead run, I swear that an aureole was foaming about her lovely head. I didn t stop sprinting till I reached the ground floor, ran across Fifty-ninth Street into the park, and, finally, at the Casino I threw myself into a seat and called for oh ! it wasn t water; after such a display of drab family linen one doesn t drink water. Any experienced social washerwoman will tell you that. By Jove ! I was posi tively nervous with their crazy-quilt relationships. I pondered the situation. Was Zelocca an artistic liar, a wonderful actress, or simply a warm-hearted woman, too enthusiastic, in search of a father? I couldn t make up my mind. I haven t yet. She may have suspected that my critical notice of her forthcoming second concert might not be so fervid as the first because of Mario s tale regarding her cruelty. I ve known singers to tell worse lies for a smaller reason. But then, she had won her press and public; her next appearance was bound to be a repetition of the premiere, as far as success went. No, I give it up. I knew I should go to all her concerts and write sweet words about her distinguished art. And I did. (Later she married her manager and ever after wards lived unhappily.) I m beginning to regret I left A PRIMA DONNA S FAMILY 87 her so hurriedly that afternoon. Perhaps she might have given me a clue. What a liar she was ! Or a crazy woman ! Her father, I believe, was M. Mario, the hus band of Madame, and her aunt Oh ! hang her Rus sian aunt. X NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES The daily newspapers I worked for while in New York City were not many. In 1891 The Recorder was started with heavy financial backing, and it ran a half-dozen years, losing much money for its sponsors. In a way it was a pioneer journal, late-comer as it was. Novelties were to be found in its columns, which nowadays are part of the equipment of every newspaper. A woman s page, a children s page, a daily column devoted to theatre and music and art criticism of a human sort; the "ChoIIy Knickerbocker" column in which fashionable folk were written about John W. Keller wrote it and, last but not least, old Joe Howard s column of gossip and com ment, ranging in subject from a dog-fight to the person ality of the President. These three columns were to be found on the editorial page. General Howard Carroll was editor-in-chief, John W. Keller managing editor. My first Sunday editor was Julius Chambers, formerly of The Herald and now with The Brooklyn Eagle; my second was Winfield Scott Moody, later the editor of The Lamp, a literary monthly published by Charles Scribner s Sons. Mr. Moody, who is now in the editorial department of The Evening Sun, is the husband of that pioneer in women s journalism, Helen Watterson Moody, author of The Unquiet Sex (gorgeous title). At the suggestion of W. J. Henderson, John W. Keller engaged me as music- critic on the newly founded journal. Then I became NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES chums with Harry Neagle, dramatic editor, who planned and conducted the daily column to which I contributed. Neagle roved about the theatre district and captured the good stories. I did much of the writing. The depart ment was called "The Prompter." It was not the first of its kind, for Alan Dale wrote a daily column in The Evening World; but "The Prompter" was full of life and made readers. Those were the flush times of theatrical weeklies. Editors punched each other, wrote terrific in sults, and started libel suits, which usually ended before the bar but not of justice. Charles Alfred Byrne, after an exciting career as editor of The Dramatic News and Truth, was dramatic critic of The Morning Journal, then edited, and ably, by Joseph I. C. Clarke, Irish poet and patriot, Byrne had a positive genius for getting in and out of scrapes with men and women. He was a pictur esque Irishman, who had been educated in Belgium, and his knowledge of the French language and dramatic lit erature enabled him to "import" some ideas for his pro ductions. Dion Boucicault turned the same trick more profitably; indeed, some of that remarkable man s "adap tations" were as good, if not better, than the originals. Byrne was a born fighter. The up-town Recorder dra matic office was next to Daly s Theatre, and Byrne and Neagle had desks in the same room. Thither I repaired every afternoon from The Musical Courier, then at No. 19 Union Square. One day Byrne and Joe Arthur, the playwright, quar relled, and agreed to fight to the finish; but I m not certain as to the battle-field, as I wasn t present. I think that Harry Neagle was bottleholder. Byrne re turned to the office in a bad condition, both eyes black and blinking, but his Celtic spirit was undaunted. "You QO STEEPLEJACK ought to see poor Joe," he cried to me. Arthur looked all right when I saw him the next day; he made the usual formal call of condolence. There was no bad blood between the men, though Byrne had been badly whipped in the encounter. Leander Richardson was another mili tant editor. He is said to have knocked out the irre sistible John L. Sullivan in a bar-room brawl, though Sullivan must have been under the alcoholic weather. Richardson was a powerful man, a bruiser, and would have proved a formidable opponent at any time. He edited The Dramatic News, and his editorial notes were racy. I saw him attack John T. Sullivan in the lobby of the old Madison Square Theatre, then managed by Frank McKee for Charles Hoyt, the playwright. Sullivan, an amiable actor, was the husband of Rose Coghlan. That same night Leander Richardson, who was looking for trouble, found it in the person of Louis Massen and was thrashed in the cafe of the Knicker bocker Theatre, then called Abbey s. But he was about next day, alert and smiling. Harrison Grey Fiske, husband of Minnie Maddern, vivacious in soubrette roles, later the serious Mrs. Fiske of Ibsen fame, was editor and proprietor of The Dramatic Mirror. I men tion all this to show you that in the theatrical world con ditions were worse than in the musical. Ugly phrases, such as "blackmail" and "revolver-press" were freely used. Not edifying, these rows, but typical. Vance Thompson was dramatic and literary critic on The Commercial Advertiser, and he introduced me to Foster Coates, the editor. As The Recorder had gone the way of all mishandled enterprises I was glad to be come dramatic and music-critic of The Morning Adver tiser at what seemed a fabulous salary, $75 a week; this, JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER (1890) NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES 91 with my stipendium from The Musical Courier, enabled me to live luxuriously and work like a dog. Many were the sentimental abysses into which I peered, many the angry, tearful partings why angry, why tearful, I can t say now. Why young people take such things seriously, I wonder. I also wondered why The Morning Advertiser, which was in a palpably decrepit condition, paid me such a high salary. To be sure, I was working double-tides, driving two or three horses abreast, as Daniel Frohman said to me. I was both dramatic and musical critic and still found time to write for Town Topics, Vanity Fair, and The Courier. No bed-spring-chicken I, but a hustler. I had to be. There were other mouths to feed, and to use the expression of Vance Thompson, the mortgages were so tame that they fed from my hand. And a tame mortgage is more dangerous than a wild; it gets too familiar by half. And then a man must pay alimony to his divorced ideals. "Ain t it fatuous, " as the old lady said when she first saw a hippopotamus. I was fatuous in my belief that I could succeed where others fail, just as later it took the writing of fifteen books, not only to get my hand in Balzac s phrase but also to get my hand out. One day the office phoned me; good old Major Clowes it was who told me that I needn t come down-town, there was no longer a Morning Advertiser. Mr. Hearst had bought it for the Associated Press fran chise and paid, so it was said, $600,000 for the privilege. That accounted for the altitude of my salary. Behold me, with only two or three positions to fill. I filled them, yet longed for new worlds to conquer. On The Recorder the work had been severe, on The Advertiser much lighter. I didn t care. Scribbling came easy, and as I had no sol emn "message" to deliver to an expectant world, I 92 STEEPLEJACK sunned myself on the right side of the street and took little heed of the future. George Washington Turner, the manager of The Re- corder, was a versatile man. His energy drove the ma chine of his frail little body at too high a pressure. Chockful of ideas, he made the wheels of his newspaper hum for a while. I shall not forget the afternoon when, in company with Edward A. MacDowell, the composer, and brilliant pianist, I went to the Everett House on Union Square a delightful hostelry kept by old Mr. Bates, and where it stood is now an ugly fortress of brick. G. W. Turner showed us a complicated invention of his, all spools and ribbons and wires, a rudimentary forerun ner of the self-playing piano, one of those diabolic un musical machines that lend a new terror to life. Why didn t Turner gain millions from his idea and it was one of many? A Yankee genius, his, but he succeeded in nothing but failures to make an Irish bull. While on The Recorder staff I was asked by Editor Keller if I should like to interview Annie Besant, the- osophist, radical agitator, and at one time associate of Charles Bradlaugh. She had arrived from London that morning and was at the house of friends. Fortunately, her friends were my friends: Mr. and Mrs. August Nere- sheimer, cultivated and musical folk with whom I be came acquainted through Max Heinrich. Mr. Nere- sheimer sang Schumann and Brahms with taste and in telligence, and was interested in the New Paths. A hard- headed man of business and a mystic. The conjunction is not uncommon. I had taken a dive into that shining pool, whose waters are so deceptively clear and deep. I knew Helena Blavatsky in the flesh, and I had read NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES 93 some of the effusions of Mrs. Besant. I related these facts to Mr. Keller. "Good!" he cried, and away I went to the faraway region of Lenox Avenue there were no subways, and north of I25th Street seemed the coun try. When I reached the Neresheimer residence, I found myself in company with a dozen other reporters, one of whom quickly informed me that he also represented The Recorder I was surprised. So was he when I told him that Mr. Keller had sent me. "But there mustn t be two stories!" he expostulated. "There won t be," I replied. " I m not going to pump Mrs. Besant as to her political rows." She had experienced trouble with the British authorities over birth-control pamphlets, and Bradlaugh s religious opinions were hardly orthodox, though now they seem as innocuous as Bob IngersoII s. My friend pricked up his ears and suddenly became con fidential. "Say," he whispered, "does she read your palm? Cross the gypsy s hand with silver, eh?" After that I didn t bother with him, and presently Mrs. Nere sheimer beckoned to me. I followed her, and in the morning room I met a little lady with a shy manner, her soul concentrated in her eyes. Such latent energy ! She had just gone over, or was going, to Roman Catholicism, but of this she said little. She had broken several years before with Madame Blavatsky, but was interested in what I had to say of that extraordinary lady. I came away with mixed impressions of Mrs. Besant. Like Helena Blavatsky she was one of those reservoirs of spiritual forces that nature creates from time to time. She was almost spirit, a strange soul shone from her eyes. In her various incarnations in the earthly plane, as our theosophical friends say she had wavered from 94 STEEPLEJACK faith to faith as wavers a candle in the wind. That she would not long abide in any house of the flesh was written on her candid brow. She soon seceded from Mother Church as she had earlier fled from the raw agnosticism of Charles Bradlaugh. She is now, I hear, a petticoated Grand Panjandrum in India irradiating the wisdom of the ages. She never possessed the profound animal magnetism of Blavatsky it is the only phrase that de scribes her nor her intellect, nor yet the firm grasp on affairs displayed by the "Purple Mother," shrewd Kath- erine Tingley, of Point Loma, California. There, I think, the Neresheimers are, having renounced the world and all its pomps to follow the Inner Light. When I had finished the interview so graciously accorded me by Annie Besant, I found a grumbling gang, my associates, impatient, and blaming me for blocking their plan; it was to be a joint interview, cried the chap from The Recorder with a taste for palmistry. I didn t ex plain. Why should I have done so? If not an Adept, was I not a Neophyte? Shoo! I said, and to the office I went and wrote an article on Theosophy and the claims of the Ideal I capitalised every other word and ended with a glowing description of soulful eyes. It was duly printed. But my more practical colleague had suc ceeded in coaxing the lady into definite statements, and Mr. Keller liked his interview better than mine. When I explained that Mrs. Besant had told me many things in confidence the mighty John he was a giant roared: "Then why the blankety blank didn t you print them? It s the strictly confidential confessions that the public likes." It was a lesson in the art of interviewing that I never forgot. Nowadays I print everything. The public, as the late Mr. Barnum insinuated, is fond NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES 95 of mystification. Phineas knew. I never read modern mystics without some such feeling. Just as the mob always demands "miracles" so a certain class of readers must be fed with oracular phrases, else perish from spiritual inanition. I had read, not without considera ble misgivings, Isis Unveiled what a title to whet the appetite of the curious ! and the Key to Theosophy, by Helena Blavatsky; indeed, these books are still in my library ranged next to the Koran and the Revela tions of the Mormon Apostle, Joseph Smith. Yet com pared with Science and Health, I prefer the dark sayings of the Russian woman. She, at least, had a great litera ture to tap, Eastern philosophy; and she tapped it to good purpose. When I went to New York the Theosoph- ical movement was in full blast. Like the dilettante philosophy of the subtle Bergson in our day, the doc trines of Blavatsky and her disciples were a fashionable diversion. Madame Blavatsky held seances in which participated society people and "literati," the mild and hairy authors of that epoch James L. Ford called them the "Century School" and avowed mystics. William Q. Judge, Col. Olcott, the Munroes, and other lumi naries were much mentioned in the newspapers, and we spoke of Karma as if it were a breakfast food. I knew Edwin Bjeeregaard, Swedish mystic and librarian at the Astor Library, then on Lafayette Place (now Lafayette Street), and he introduced me to the writings of the Theos- ophists. I swallowed them all, but I confess I found little new or stimulating in them. My reading in the Eastern wisdom had been extensive and these restatements and attenuations, modulations, and modern transpositions, cleverly as they were fashioned, did not impress me as the "Real Thing." Why not take the Zend-Avesta, or the 96 STEEPLEJACK Triple Baskets, unadulterated by Russian mysticism? The trail of Helena Blavatsky was over the crystal-pure precepts of the ancients. But the woman herself! That was another thing. I visited her one rainy afternoon at a house not far from As tor Place. Never mind how I secured my invitation, except to say that it was not easy to get one. She was only for the elect. I have met many outlandish, eccentric, and many interesting people; anarchs of art, society, literature, but Blavatsky left the profoundest image of all in my memory. I say, profound, advisedly. Dostoievsky or Joseph Conrad, would have fathomed her and painted a deathless por trait of her in prose; but at twenty-five I was gullible, and my brain whirled with her cryptic and sonorous phrases more sound than sense, I suspect and I was but another bird lured by the pipe of this fowler. She was a short, fat woman, with sensual lips, without per sonal distinction, and as she wore a turban, I couldn t make out plainly her head. Her eyes ! The eyes ! The eyes ! cried Bill Sykes. If Bill had ever seen the eyes of Helena Blavatsky he would have abandoned burglary and gone into retreat at Simla, India, there to await his next Karma. I think now of what Joseph Conrad did with the Princess in Under Western Eyes. From Bla vatsky he would have carved another masterpiece. I have never but once seen such a pair of orbs in a human s head, and those belong to Margaret Mat- zenauer, the opera-singer. The eyes of Blavatsky were not so radiantly electric as Matzenauer s, but they had the same hypnotic effect. They were slightly glazed as if drugged by dreams of smoky enchantments. They englobed you in their slow, wide gaze. I felt like.a rab bit in the jaws of a boa-constrictor. I literally was. NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES 97 Fascinated, I watched the oracle on her tripod blow circles of cigarette smoke through her flattened Kalmuck nos trils. The room was dim. There were divans. Too many. Exotic odours pervaded the lifeless air. Queen Helena "she who must be obeyed" murmured wisdom which I gulped without a word. An idol enthroned. She was amiable. She asked me if I wrote, and if I were a believer. I swear that I could have believed anything then, only to escape the aura of intolerable suspense in the atmosphere. What was it? The celebrated mes merism must have been at work, else how account for my rapidly oozing vital force ! I once attended a Black Mass in Paris, a blasphemous travesty, stupid, obscene, yet I did not feel as enervated as when I kissed the pudgy and not too white hand of Blavatsky, and got into the open under God s blue roof. Pouf! I inhaled huge breezes, and tried to forget the Isis I had seen Unveiled. If I remember my Oriental studies the wisdom of the East is not tainted with sex; sexuality, the keystone of our world, is purified. It becomes Idea. But Oriental wisdom when passed through the sieve of the Occident, takes on a more earthly aspect; it is even fleshy. I had expected astral messages, showers of roses from the ceiling, the mango and rope-ladder miracles, perhaps levitations. But nothing happened except that Helena Blavatsky gazed at me with her sombre, fanatical gaze, and my foot slipped at the edge of her optical pool and I fell into the crystal-clear lake of wisdom, which was Nirvana, and I lived a trillion aeons until the Greek Kalends, and, the great bell of destiny sounding through the Corridor of Time, I awoke on Astor Place, rubbing my eyes and wondering whether it hadn t been a night mare. Maya ! The Mother of Illusion ! But her eyes, 98 STEEPLEJACK the eyes of this prophetess of esoteric tidings ! What of her eyes ? They weren t dreamed ! Whenever I smell a Russian cigarette I recall her eyes. She smoked day and night and I can t remember a word she said to me. I should make a grand theosophist, shouldn t I? XI MONTSALVAT A few years later another strange adventure befell me. It s a queer yarn, but it s true. As it is in the same key of the pseudo-mystic, I ll tell it now. We were sitting, my friend and I, in the smoking-room of the old Vienna Cafe. The long apartment was almost deserted; it was too late for luncheon, too early for tea. In a corner were Anton SeidI and Dr. Antonin Dvorak, their heads bent over a manuscript score; the Slavic conductor was show ing the Hungarian conductor the music of his " New World Symphony." Happy folk ! thought I. They have an interest in life, while here is Oswald, one of the greatest violinists, an unhappy, sulking wretch, and for no pos sible reason that I could discover. When he had reached the age of seven, his passion for the violin was so strong that he was allowed to have his way, and the schooling the lad received was mostly on four strings. Five years later he attracted the attention of some wealthy amateurs and was sent abroad. Another five years and Oswald had become the favourite pupil of Joachim, and was hailed as the successor to Wieniawski. Never had there been such brilliant, daring talent, seldom such an interest ing personality. In his play there was the tenderness of woman, and the fire of hell. His technique was supreme, and when he returned to New York, his audiences went mad over him. I say mad, because I saw the madness. It was Paderewskian. It was Jascha Heifetzian. I was an old friend and his handsome face glowed when I 99 ioo STEEPLEJACK called at his hotel in my capacity of music reporter. Oswald was a man who never drank. His one dissipa tion was coffee. He smoked cigarettes, but not furiously. The women who sought him were treated with distin guished courtesy, but he contrived to evade entangle ments. I don t think he was ever in love. Then came the change. At first I noticed it in his playing. At the last Boston Symphony Concert in Steinway Hall he had interpreted the Brahms Concerto in a listless, tepid man ner, and his phrasing was not faultless. It was the ab sence of the inner spirit, the fire, that set buzzing critics and public. What ailed the man? Was he worn out by the labours of a strenuous musical season? I sus pected a reason more dangerous. After months of de spondencies and disappearances, I had caught him at the Vienna Cafe, and put the question to him. He impatiently pushed aside his coffee. "Of course, if you will insist on preaching, I must leave you. It s a new role for you." "Oswald, you needn t take me up that way. I m not preaching, I m playing the part of a friend in a case of this kind, and "The only kind you can play," he interrupted. "That s right, my boy. Flaunt your virtuosity under my nose. I m not a bull when I see red." "Go on," he answered in a resigned manner, reconsidering his rejected coffee. "What s the matter with you, Oswald? Come, be frank with me! You haven t touched your fiddle for months. You don t show yourself to your friends. Are you in debt, are you in trouble, are you in love? Stop a moment :> for he had begun to scowl "I don t wish to pry into your pri vate affairs, but you owe your most intimate friend some sort of explanation as to your odd behaviour, besides, old man, you are looking very bad. Your skin is like MONTSALVAT 101 the Yellow Book, and your expression suggests Aubrey Beardsley s most morbid manner." I stopped for want of breath. Oswald smiled, rather contemptuously, at my stale similes, but held his peace and drank his coffee, ordered a fresh one, and over the third cup he brightened and slowly rolled a cigarette. I watched him. His face looked worn and wan, his colour was leaden, and his eyes lacked intensity. His handsome nose, purely Greek in line, was pinched, his mop of curls disordered. Evi dently he had been having a hard time; but his was no common form of dissipation. At last, rousing himself, he gazed at me, almost piteously. It was the silent cry of a man going under, the cry of a man whom none could save. Involuntarily I caught at his arm; so unpremedi tated was it, and he so easily read the meaning of the gesture that he turned away his head. For some minutes the silence lay thickly upon us, then I spoke to the stricken man: "Your face recalls to me one of those damned souls that Dante, the dreamer of accurst visions, met midway in his mortal life." "And I am a damned, irrevocably lost soul, and because of my own perverse temperament. Why does music lead us into such black alleys My God! Why?" He was keyed up to a dangerous pitch, I forebore further questioning. We aimlessly drifted out of the cafe and, I going towards theatre-land, we separated for the night. Naturally, I thought much about Oswald. Evil he was not. There was no love-affair. The idea of hypnotic obsession suggested itself, but was at once dismissed. The curious part of the affair was his refusal to play either in private or in public. He never went to concerts and had an absolute horror of music. Long absences from his house alarmed me. I made up my mind that some one 102 STEEPLEJACK was leading him astray. I determined to find out. Several months after our meeting at the cafe I met him again. He was gaunt, yellow, almost shabby. Another solution of the problem presented itself; perhaps, like other ardent temperaments, he had tasted of that deadly drug admired of the Chinese. A drug eater! I taxed him with it. As we slowly walked down-town we had stopped under an electric light; it was a dismal Novem ber night, a night of mists and shadows. Oswald spoke, faintly: "You accuse me of the opium habit. If I were a victim, I would be a thrice-blessed man. Alas ! It is much worse." Completely mystified, I took the arm of the unfortunate violinist in mine, for he seemed feeble, and asked him if he had eaten that day. He nodded. I did not believe him. We left Union Square behind us and soon reached Astor Place. I clung to him and only when we turned down the long, dark street, where the library then stood, did I notice our whereabouts. My companion moved with the air of a man to whom things corporeal no longer had meaning. When we arrived at the lower end of the ill-lighted avenue, I called his attention to the fact that we were drifting into strange quarters. He gave me a sharp glance, seized my elbow and guided me up the steps of a low building in semi-obscurity. He did not ring, but rapped with something metallic; at once the door was opened, and I saw a hallway filled with the violent rays of a lamp. I experienced a repugnance to the place. I would have gone away but Oswald barred the passage, regarding me with such sad eyes that I seemed to be dealing with a deranged man. "Welcome!" he said, "welcome to Montsalvat." Then I noticed over the door an incomprehensible musical motto, which I did not MONTSALVAT 103 at first recognise. But I followed my friend into a com fortable library warmed by a fireplace, in which hissed and crumbled huge lumps of cannel coal. In all faith, I had to confess that the apartment was homelike, though the tragic expression of Oswald recalled to me that I might discover his tormenting secret. "And what," said I, sitting down and lighting a cigar, "is Montsalvat? And what in the name of all that s fantastic means the fearsome motto over the door? Is this a suicide club, or is it some new-fangled aesthetic organisation where intense young men say sweet things about art? Or is it a singing society, or" and here the humour of the situa tion broke in on me "mayhap it is a secret college of organists wherein pedal practice may be continued dur ing late hours, without arousing refractory neighbours?" Oswald, with his glance of anxious rectitude, did not smile at my foolish speech. "Montsalvat is not any of those things," he softly replied. "True, it is a club which oc casionally meets, but not for recreation or discussion. You have read the poet, Baudelaire, have you not, dear friend? Then you may remember those profound lines beginning: J ai vu parfois au fond d un theatre banal . . . une fee allumer dans un ciel infernal. ..." "It sounds like Poe done into French," said I, wondering at Oswald s suppressed excitement; "like a more malign Poe. John Martin, the English mezzotinter, could have translated this poem of sombre bronze into his art of black and white you, yourself, Oswald, remind me of that artist s vis ion, Sadak Seeking the Waters of Oblivion." I felt I was talking for effect. His actions puzzled me. Why in this lonely house should he become emotional over a verse of Baudelaire? Why should the Redemption theme from "Parsifal" be placed across the door-top? (I had io 4 STEEPLEJACK recognised the music.) Suddenly voices aroused him, and he started up, crying: "They are here!" Folding doors, heavily draped by black velvet, were pushed asunder, and I found myself staring about me in a large chamber with a low ceiling. There were no pic tures, two busts were in a recess and seemed to regard with malevolent expression the assemblage. I noticed that they were plaster heads of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. Conversation was languidly progress ing. We sat, Oswald and I, in a corner. No one paid attention to us. I studied the people about me. They were the faces of cultured men, a few dissipated, but the majority were those of dreamers, men for whom the world had proved too strong, men who were striving to forget. I saw several musicians, one poet, a half-dozen painters. No evidence of opium was to be seen, no one drank, all smoked. As we entered Chopin s name had been mentioned, and a big, lazy, blond fellow said: "Oh ! Chopin. We are, I hope, beyond Chopin or Poe. Debussy is our music-maker now as Browning did not say." "Why?" asked a pianist. "Why have we got beyond Chopin? For me the Pole has an invincible charm." "That s because you are a pianist," came the retort. "You know I never play any more," was the sulky rejoinder. For a time the conversation halted. "What does it all mean?" I whispered. Oswald shook his head. " Montsalvat, my friends," said a grave, measured voice, "is the ultimate refuge for souls resolved to abjure the illusion of happiness. Our illustrious masters and inspirers, Schopenhauer and Wagner, declared that only the saint and the artist may attain to Nirvana in this MONTSALVAT 105 life. But we hold that the artist is ever the victim of the Life-Lie, of the World-Illusion. Wagner, when he wrote Parsifal, revealed his hatred of art, of the very root of life. Full well he knew the evils brought into this world by music, by sex. Immobility, the supreme ab negation of the will, the absolute suppression of the pas sions better, the state of non-existence are they not worthy of attainment? To live in the Idea! Ah! my friends, I fear that we are still too worldly, that we will stamp with too much vehemence on our inner nature; renounce thou shalt, shalt renounce! Surely by this time we should have attained psychic freedom. Oh ! for a cenobite s life. Oh ! for a crust and a hut in some vast wilderness ! The blood burns hotly in cities, life thrusts its multi-coloured grin upon you there; you cannot es cape it. To live on one tone, yourself to be the pedal- point over which life s jangling harmonies pass your soul-suspension to do this is to live, not play, music; to do as did the Knights of Montsalvat that is existence. Wagner knew it when he created his Parsifal, for all Time a perfect mirror of the souls of pure men who re volted at the banality of quotidian life. A new mo nastic ideal is our Modern Montsalvat." In wonder I gazed at the speaker, not a hoary-headed Pundit, but a youth of perhaps twenty-five summers. His strained expression, his sunken cheeks, lent him a detached, even fantastic appearance. In what manner of company was I? What the aims of this strange crew? Men in the heat and prime of their youth discoursing Schopen hauer, Wagner, Chopin, Verlaine, as if the last keen joy were a denial of self almost depraved. I was bewildered. The voice of Oswald broke in: "J aime les nuages . . . les merveilleux nuages." " There you go again with STEEPLEJACK your Baudelaire !" cried some one. "Oswald, I fear that you still love life. It s consuming you. You delight in reciting verses beginning: J aime. You have no right to love anything, not even dream-tipped Baudelairian clouds. I suspect that you still yearn for your fiddle, and read that apostle of damnable Titanism, Nietzsche." At the name of the arch-heretic of brutal force, of bar baric energy, the others shuddered. Oswald seemed crushed. The voice of the new speaker was toneless and depressing. I felt mentally nauseated. What club of hopeless wretches had I encountered? Robert Louis Stevenson, when he invented his Suicide Club, had apparently reached the bottom of the vicious. But here was something more infernal, a darker nuance of pain, a club of moral suicides living, yet dead; slaugh terers of their own souls; men who deliberately withdrew from all commerce with the world; men who abandoned their ambitions, successes, friends, families, to plunge beyond hope of redemption into a Satanic apathy, a slavery worse than drugs; yet gleaning a fearful and ex quisite joy in the abstention from joys; an intellectual debasement, a slow strangling of the will, coupled with the sadistic delight that comes in dallying on the for bidden edge of pain and pleasure. Morose delectation is the precise name given to this lustless lust by wise Mother Church, greatest of psychologists. Surely Bud dhism in its birthplace, cannot work such evil as I saw before me. These men had not the absorbed air of de- voutness and interior exaltation I have caught on the faces of certain East Indians. Nor were they lotus- eaters. Eastern mysticism grafted on Western faiths may result unfavourably. In the weary faces around me, in the agonised eyes of Oswald I saw the hopelessness of MONTSALVAT 107 such moral transplanting. Oswald was dying by infini tesimal degrees, dying withal. His violin was his life. His music was dammed up in him. The struggle against his deepest instincts was an unequal one; he must go mad, or perish. And these men enjoyed the spectacle of his ruin. To their jaded brains his pitiable condition was as absinthe. They were Manicheans. They wor shipped Satan ; saying, Evil be thou my Good ! Oswald with his youth, his genius, his once brilliant career, had been drawn into this maelstrom of Nothingness. "His life," I thought, "his life has not yet been lived, he is not ruined in body, his soul is not yet a thing of dust and darkness like the others. What a sacrifice is his I" My face must have been an index of my agitation, for the same voice sardonically continued: "Oswald, I fear, has a Philistine with him to-night. Oswald cannot break from earthly ties. My dear vio linist, you had better return to your Bohemia, with its laughter, its wine, its silly women, and to your fiddle, with its four mewing strings. Such toys are for boys, the illusion of love, women s soft bodies, and other gross nudities. Return, Oswald, with your friend to your old life. Make empty, useless noises, call them art, and forget the lofty heights of serene speculation, the pure, ravishing vision of a will subdued. Go, Oswald, and do not remember the Life Contemplative or Montsalvat and its Knights in search of the Holy Grail of Renuncia tion. Instead, go join the modulating crowd." The voice grew more silvery, but it pleaded as it menaced. In the hazy atmosphere I saw with apprehension the altered expression of my poor friend. His eyes closed, accentuating the violet bruises beneath them, his body became rigid. A living corpse, he only obeyed the will io8 STEEPLEJACK of the Master. With an effort he roused himself, and taking me by the arm, muttered: "Come!" Silently we walked through the library and into the hall. The busts were more malevolent than before. The street door was opened for us, but I alone went into the mist and darkness. "The waters of the river have a saffron and a sickly hue; and they flow not onward to the sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river s oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh one unto the other." Edgar Poe wrote that in his "Silence." Poe, too, had tarried in the House of the Ineffectual. Oswald, I never saw again. His case is an image of the sinister consequences of uni versal egoism, so powerfully expressed in the lines of the French poet, Alfred de Vigny: "Bientot, se retirant dans un hideux royaume, la femme aura Gomorrhe et Phomme aura Sodome; Et se jetant de loin un regard irrite, les deux sexes mourront chacun de leur cote , XII I AM A FREE-LANCE It was at the invitation of Paul Dana that I joined the staff of the New York Sun in 1900. There was no music-critic, and Mr. Chester S. Lord had read my Chopin, hence the engagement. The great race of edi tors was a thing of the past, Charles A. Dana, the noblest Roman of them all, was dead about three years when I had the luck to become an humble member of the insti tution created by him. I remained with The Sun fifteen years, writing for it until April, 1917, when our entrance into the war automatically stopped discussion of aesthetics. I was away several years in Europe, so I can claim a connection of fifteen years. For the columns I wrote musical, dramatic, art, and literary criticism. I wrote editorials, and for years I was on the much envied edi torial page with articles principally on art, but often every other subject under the heavens save politics. I fenced with William James at the time pragmatism was spelled with a capital "P." He did me the honour of writing me most interesting letters on the subject, which letters are now in the possession of his son, Henry James, and probably will be published when Mr. James has the leisure to give us his long-expected study on his great father. I also attacked single-handed that subtle sophist, Henri Bergson, who was called by me "The Playboy of the Western World." But my proudest day on The Sun was when I had five columns in one day on its edi- 109 i io STEEPLEJACK to rial page. That was a "stunt." If I may recall them, they were devoted to a study of Botticelli seen with mod ern eyes, a story of the Emma Bovary, the real name of the unhappy heroine and her village being given, and the sources from which Flaubert drew his immortal portrait; finally a column devoted to the genius of Rodin, the French sculptor. When Franklin Fyles, for years dra matic editor, became ill, I took his position, and not without misgivings. But my first assignment was the reappearance of Eleanora Duse in the D Annunzio plays, "La Gioconda," "Francesca da Rimini," and "La Citta Morta," and as I had already made a study of her and knew the plays in the original, I came off creditably enough; and then my six years of laborious theatrical apprenticeship counted for something. But somebody always was after my job on The Sun. And I was too amiable. I went to Europe, wrote about theatres from London to Budapest, via Paris, Rome, Vienna. When William M. Laffan bought the news paper I relinquished my position as dramatic editor to John Corbin. I began writing of art and succeeded in pleasing Mr. Laffan, himself an art critic, an authority on porcelains and a collector. At his suggestion I went to Spain for five months and saw the Velasquez pictures at the Prado, Madrid, and lived to write a book about him and other "moderns" Velasquez is still the most modern of all painters. A man of force and enamelled with prejudices, Mr. Laffan had his likes and dislikes, usually violent. After a study of George Woodward Wickersham had appeared on the editorial page I think I called it a cabinet picture because Mr. Wickersham had just become Attorney-General in President Taft s Cab inet Mr. Laffan sent for me and I expected a raking, I AM A FREE-LANCE in but it was quite otherwise. While in Paris I wrote for him a review of an Independent Salon, and a few months later on my return a notice of the Comparative Exhibi tion at the Academy of the Fine Arts. These articles led to my writing art criticism till 1917, with the excep tion of the years of my absence. Thanks to the editor-in-chief, Edward Page Mitchell, I wrote signed and unsigned book reviews on the page made famous by Hazeltine. Edward P. Mitchell is an editor in a thousand. To work with him is a privilege and a pleasure. He always gets the best from a man. Sympathy is the keynote of his character. Chester S. Lord, for so many years managing editor, I knew before I wrote for The Sun. We had foregathered with Edward A. Dithmar, dramatic critic of The Times, and Mont gomery Schuyler, Lawrence Reamer, and other prime spirits in Perry s old drug store. Not without warrant was Mr. Lord rechristened the "Easy Boss." Beloved by his "young men," as he called them, though some were grey, he also had the disagreeable task of lopping- off heads, which task he accomplished in a humane manner. I lost my "official" head once some friction between the upper and nether millstones in which I was ground to powder and no executioner could have been more "easy"; besides, he knew I would return. I was always returning to The Sun. It is a superstition. Just to encourage struggling "journalistic" talent, I may tell out of school that I was paid the highest salary in town as a dramatic critic, $125 a week, and I still cherish the little pay envelope on which I wrote as Finis, "The last of the Mohicans." This was in 1904. But I earned much more when later I wrote art criticisms, edi torials, book reviews, and travel-notes for Mr. Mitchell. ii2 STEEPLEJACK Those were the palmy days when the handy all-round man had his innings. Now each department is "stan dardised." Newspapers have lost their personal flavour. Huge syndicates have taken the colour and character and quality from daily journalism. I am quite sure that if ever a comprehensive history of The Sun is written my name will be absent simply because I would be consid ered a myth, the figment of a fantastic imagination. Much of my Sun work appeared, duly expanded, in Iconoclasts, Egoists, and Promenades. I have told you how I interviewed Pope Pius X, and visited Calabria after the earthquake for the New York Herald. That was in 1905. A year later, and for the same newspaper, I made little journeys to certain eastern watering-places, from Bar Harbor to Cape May, not forgetting Newport, Long Branch, and Atlantic City. As I had often visited Ostend, Brighton, Scheveningen, Blankenberghe, Zandvoort, Trouville, and a dozen other European vacation beaches, I had opportunities to make comparisons. I made them, wondering why, despite the millions annually spent "over here," we have so little to show for them that is substantial. Atlantic City is an honourable exception. I have yet to see its duplicate. But the solid stone of the Brighton and Ostend and Scheveningen sea promenades we have not. And our cuisine. And the absurd prohibition. Europe is our master in the art of making life pleasant at summer re sorts. I wrote music criticism for Town Topics when such men as C. M. S. McLellan, Percival Pollard, Charles Frederic Nirdlinger were making its columns attractive. When Nathan Straus, Jr., bought Puck with the idea of transforming it from a barber-shop comic weekly to an artistic revue, I conducted a page, "The Seven Arts," I AM A FREE-LANCE 113 but the times were not propitious. War was the only interest, and the arts could go hang. They did. Despite the money spent on illustrations, Puck did not fulfil its new mission, and was sold to Mr. Hearst in 1917, and is now non-existent. For the New York Times I wrote much in 1912 from European cities. A mania for travel set in. I lived in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Bruges, Vienna; I ate spaghetti in Milan, drank dark beer in Munich. I saw midnight suns and daughters of the dawn. I loved Prague in Bohemia, deeming it a fit companion for Toledo, Spain; one of the most fascinating cities on the globe. I loved Rome. Who doesn t? And found Venice too florid and operatic. But my beloved Holland and Belgium came first; especially Bruges. The Low lands always appealed. Rodin spoke of the "slow" landscapes of the Dutch country. It is an illuminating phrase. The grandeur of the Alps left me rather un touched. I quite appreciate their frosty sublimities, also feel their lack of human interest, The flatlands of Holland with their processional poplars, their silvery shining network of canals, the groups of patient cattle, egotistic windmills, and the low friendly skies all these went to my heart like a rich warming cordial. The home like life, the treasure houses of art at Amsterdam, The Hague, and Haarlem, win the imagination, and there is an abundance of good music. The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam listens to symphonic music and the best of European singers and players with Willem Mengelberg as conductor, and a brilliant one he is. I had settled in 1914 at Utrecht for the remainder of my days I thought; but destiny had something to say, and I found myself once more in Manhattan. In the quaint Dutch town J vainly sought for the peace of Utrecht, which is purely ii 4 STEEPLEJACK historic, as it is for its size as noisy as Naples. Rug- beating there is raised to the dignity of a peace treaty. I heard under Conductor Mengelberg compositions by three Dutchwomen, Cornelia Van Oosterzee, Anna Lasu- brecht Vos, and Elizabeth Kuypers, that gave me plea sure. Miss Van Oosterzee s symphony is an "impor tant" work. With such a world-renowned genius as Hugo De Vries at Amsterdam, and such a profound neurologist as Doctor C. U. Ariens Kappers, of the Cen tral Institute of Brain Research at Amsterdam, or Pro fessor Dubois, who discovered in Java the "missing link" Pithecanthropus Erectus at Amsterdam, Hol land, is not soon likely to fall out of the fighting line in science. I saw our remote and distinguished collat eral at the Amsterdam Museum. He has been recon structed by Dubois and I confess I ve encountered far more repulsive specimens among his human cousins, but the Piltdown skull dug up in England in 1912 is more in the key of Homo Sapiens. Thanks to the courtesy of Doctor Kappers, I met Hugo De Vries in his own "ex perimental garden" at the Amsterdam Botanical Garden ("Hortus Siccus" is the legend over the gates). Professor De Vries he is a professor at the University of Amster dam looked very well after his long visit to the United States, where in New York he was invited by President Butler to join the faculty of Columbia College. He wisely declined the honour, notwithstanding the horti cultural temptations of Bronx Park; but, a canny Dutch man, he hammered this offer into the heads of the Dutch Government and was given a new and more commodious building in which to work out his famous doctrine of plant and flower mutation. He admires Luther Burbank, and I AM A FREE-LANCE 115 thus summed up the difference in their respective experi ments: "Burbank crosses species, I seek to create new ones." He does create new species, does this benevolent- looking Klingsor, with the flowers of his magic garden. But his is white, not black, magic. He lets nature fol low her capricious way, giving her from time to time a hint. A sort of floral eugenics. I saw eight-leaved clovers and was told that many more leaves would bud, as originally the clover was a stalk full of buds. For the superstitiously inclined there are three, four, five, six, and seven-leaved varieties. The evening primrose (^Eon- thera lamarckiana) was then the object of the De Vries experiments. Certainly this yellow flower means more to him than it did to Wordsworth s Peter. The pro fessor ties up its petals in tiny bags, and thus protected from marauding birds and bees, and no doubt bored by solitude (though pistil and stamen remain), the flower begins to put forth a new species. I witnessed the "miracle" of a half-dozen flowers coming into the world that were not in existence the season before. It reminded me of Professor Jacques Loeb and his "creative evolu tion" with sea-urchins. That is "creating" life, and even Sir Oliver Lodge would give his assent to the statement. But when I spoke later in London to Sir E. Ray Lankester, a distin guished disciple of Huxley, and a hardened Darwinian, he rather pooh-poohed the De Vries experiments. And now Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, is inclined to minimise, not so much the value of the De Vries dis coveries, but their philosophical inferences. He writes in his magisterial volume, The Origin and Evolution of Life, that "the essential feature of De Vries observa- ii6 STEEPLEJACK tions ... is that discontinuous saltations in directions that are entirely fortuitous ... a theoretic principle which agreeing closely with Darwin . . . such mutations are attributable to sudden alterations of molecular and atomic constitution in the heredity chromatin, or the altered forms of energy supplied to the chromatin during development/ (Chromatin is another term for the germ-plasm of Weismann.) But, according to De Vries, his discovery is the reverse of Darwin s theory that evo lution is slow, orderly, progressive, and without jumps; nature never leaps, there are no sudden miracles. De Vries proves the opposite; the miracle takes place over night in his experiments; nature strikes out blindly, swiftly, apparently without selection. The new flower is a "constant," though it struggles to revert to its old pupillaceous state. I was shown what he calls a rosette, a green plantlike production, a new birth of the com monplace primrose. In Alabama, Professor De Vries gathered his parent flower. He was interested when I told him that I had seen Leidy and Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and he praised their genius. He tramped Fairmount Park and knows the Bronx Botanical Garden. His American travels and ex periments are published in a big volume, but I balk at Dutch, notwithstanding its relationships to the German and English languages. His great work on Mutation is translated. The author speaks and writes English flu ently and idiomatically. I was loath to leave this man, who, in the Indian summer of his life, looks like a bard and philosopher, summoning strange and beautiful flowers from the "vasty deep" of nature. He is an exalted member of the most honourable profession in the world a gentle gardener of genius. Hugo De Vries is one of I AM A FREE-LANCE 117 the few significant figures in the history of science since Darwin. A brief connection with another journal gave me much satisfaction, though less cash than kudos. It was The Weekly Critical Review, devoted to literature, music, and the fine arts, and was published at Paris. Founded and edited by Arthur Bles, a young Englishman of Dutch descent (his grandfather was a Dutch genre-painter, David Bles, but whether of the Herri Met de Bles stock, the old-time painter with the white lock sported Whistler fashion, I know not) and far-ranging in his ambition. The Review was bi-Iingual, and boasted such contribu tors as Paul Bourget, Jules Claretie, Francois Coppee, Gustave Larroumet, Jules Lefebvre; Henri Roujon, di rector of the Beaux- Arts; Alfred Capus, dramatist; Ca- mille Chevillard, conductor; Remy de Gourmont, J.-K. Huysmans, Hugues Imbert, Vincent d Indy, composer; Charles Malherbe, CatuIIe Mendes, Auguste Rodin, Tony Robert-FIeury, J. H. Rosny, Havelock Ellis, Theo dore Watts-Dunton, Laurence Housman, Ernest New man, John F. Runciman, Arthur Symons, and W. B. Yeats. In this list my name "also ran," and next to that of Huysmans . Was I flattered ! As I have al ready said, there are no modest authors. Mine was the Higher Snobbery, and I m not in the least ashamed to admit it. You, if you wrote, would be proud in such company, and I felt "some pumpkins" and exclaimed: "Lawks, how these apples do swim!" after Huysmans had addressed me as "confrere." Arthur Bles translated part of my book on Chopin and it appeared in the col umns of The Review as Chopin: PHomme et sa Musique, dedicated to Jules Claretie, director of the Theatre Frangais. I was specially "featured" and my study of n8 STEEPLEJACK Maeterlinck s play, "Joyzelle," brought me letters from the poet and from Huysmans and De Gourmont. This was in June, 1903. Joris-Karel Huysmans his bap tismal names were George Charles, but as a pen-name he used their Dutch equivalent was a disagreeable man to interview if you were not fortified with letters of introduction; even then he proved a "difficult" man of gusty humours. He was, however, amiable to me after I told him I was a Roman Catholic, but frowned when I said that I was not particularly pious. "Mais, mon cher confrere," he groaned, "vous etes un imbecile. Quoi?" No half-way epithet for him. I admitted my imbecility and shifted the subject to Rops, the etcher of Satanism. He contemptuously waved the artist away. With Maurice Maeterlinck it was different; for the Bel gian he had a predilection, yet that poet is not particu larly pious. I sometimes suspect the piety of Huys mans, unhappy man who died a horrible death cancer in the throat. But I never suspect his sincerity, which, as Abbe Mugnier wrote, is a form of his genius. Will iam James abominated the writings of Huysmans, espe cially En Route, and in one of his letters to me distinctly doubted the sincerity of the Frenchman s conversion; but when I pointed out to him that Huysmans, strictly speaking, was not "converted," but had only returned to the faith in which he had been baptised, and when I assured him that not even St. Augustine or John Bun- yan, the saintly tinker, were more sincere, then Pro fessor James, with his accustomed charity to all varia tions of religious belief, acknowledged that the array of arguments almost persuaded him. But the erotic prepossessions of Huysmans had evidently set his teeth on edge. In the summer of 1896 I attended the funeral I AM A FREE-LANCE 119 of Edmond de Goncourt, the last of the famous brothers. I saw contemporary men of letters, painters, and musi cians at the church, but I did not see Paul Verlaine, the maker of music as exquisite, as ethereal as Chopin s or Shelley s; also Paul Verlaine, the poetic "souse" and lyric deadbeat. He had died in January of the same year, 1896. I had often gone to Leon Vanier s book shop on the Quai de Notre Dame, with the hope of meet ing the most extraordinary poetic apparition since Bau delaire, but without success. Unsuccessful, too, were my visits to the Cafe Francois Premier on Boulevard St. Michel (usually called by pasteboard Bohemians of Greenwich Village and Washington Square "BouF Miche," because they never were near the establish ment). I saw, but not there, some of the younger group of French poets, also the Americans who wrote beautiful poetry in that language; Viele-Griffin, and Stuart Merrill who occasionally wrote me from Forest, near Brussels, till a few years before his death. But I never met Paul Verlaine. Indeed, I may boast that I am the only living writer who didn t lend money to that poet. Maeterlinck s "Joyzelle" was produced at the Gym- nase temporarily renamed, Theatre Maeterlinck in May, 1903. This "Conte d Amour" had as heroine Georgette Leblanc. Veiling her temperament, this singer of songs of Isolde, of Melisande, became gentle, nai ve, poetic; but she was also feline and passionate. A curious artiste, at times a woman who seems to step from a page of Georges Rodenbach, that exquisite Belgian poet, the poet laureate, one might say, of Bruges have you read his "Bruges-Ia-Morte," with its Poe-Iike legend of the dear, dead woman, and her golden strangling hair? 120 STEEPLEJACK % and then she is metamorphosed into the double of the old-time Sarah of the siren voice. Oddly enough, this earlier wife of Maeterlinck is the sister of Maurice Le- blanc, the fabricator of the "thrilling" tale of "Arsene Lupin." In his admirably designed cabinet Maeterlinck gave Arthur Bles and myself a welcome. He then lived on the Rue Reynouard, in a house the garden of which overlooks the Seine from the moderate heights of Passy. To reach his apartment we had to traverse a twisted courtyard, several mysterious staircases built on the corkscrew model, and finally we were ushered into an antechamber full of fans, screens, old engravings, orna mental brass, and reproductions from pictures by Man- tegna, Rossetti, Burne- Jones, and symbolistic painters. Symbolism was going out, Cubism coming in. (The King is dead, damn the Pretender !) But we were not allowed to abide there. A maid with doubting eyes piloted us across a narrow hallway, through a room where sat a tirewoman altering theatrical costumes, and at last we were in the presence of Maurice Maeterlinck? Not yet. Down another courtyard where he loomed up in cycling costume, handsome, grave, cordial, with big Flemish bones, a round head, with wavy hair dappling at the temples. Past forty, a pensive man, he didn t look like his present photograph, for his mustaches were un- shaved. He was older, more vigorous than I had pic tured him. His head was that of a thinker, his eyes those of a dreamer. Grey-blue, with hints of green, they were melancholy eyes, with long, dark lashes. He was modest, even diffident, but touch on a favourite theme and he readily reacts. He would not speak English, though he has all English literature stored in his skull. His genera! race characteristics are Flemish. He .also I AM A FREE-LANCE 121 suggests the solid Belgian beef and beer. Like some mystics he believes in the things that cheer and nourish. He told me that in composing "Monna Vanna" he read Sismondi for a year to get historical colour. He was frank as to the conception of the play: "I wrote it for Madame Maeterlinck," he said, which disposed of my theory that the piece was written to prove he knew how to make a drama on conventional lines. "Nat urally I read Browning; who does not? Luria I have known for a long time, but it is not a stage play." He spoke of Shakespeare as other men speak of their deity. I was interested in what he thought of "The Tempest/ for he had been accused by some critics of studying that immortal fantasy before he wrote "Joyzelle." "Cer tainly I did. I simply used Shakespeare as a point of departure. Could I do better? And, then, how can any one speak of plagiarism, who has read The Tempest* and has seen my little piece?" M. Maeterlinck is open- minded. We spoke of other things, of Poe s vague, troubled beauty; of Emerson, upon whose aphoristic phil osophy he sets a great store, and of the contemporary theatre. Fearful of tiring the poet, we went away, again across courtyards, down spiral staircases. Seemingly a recluse, Maeterlinck is the most active of men. His translation of "Macbeth" into French is the best I have read. Later I may quote from some of his letters to me. XIII CRITICISM For at least five years in London, 1890-1895, I wrote for the London Musical Courier, a page or two weekly entitled the " Raconteur." It was signed. Through it I came to know many musical and literary people there. I was slowly discovering that to become successful, a critic can t wait for masterpieces, but must coddle medi ocrity. Otherwise, an idle pen. Big talents are rare, so you must, to hold your job, praise conventional patterns. And that way leads to the stifling of critical values. Everyone criticises. You do, the flower that reacts to the sun, your butcher, the policeman on the block, all criticise. It is a beloved prerogative. The difference between your criticism and mine is that I am paid for mine and you must pay for yours after you hear music or see the play. In his invaluable studies, Criticism and Standards, William Crary Brownell does not hold with the Brunetiere nor with the Anatole France oppos ing schools of criticism He detects the doctrinaire and pedagogue in Brunetiere, and he rightly enough fears the tendency towards loose thinking in the camp of impres sionistic criticism, of which Anatole France is the recog nised head. Mr. Brownell believes in central authority. Yet, he is not a pontiff. He allows the needful scope for a writer s individuality. It s all very well to describe the boating of your soul among the masterpieces if you pos sess a soul comparable to the soul of Anatole France, but 122 CRITICISM 123 yours may be a mean little soul dwelling up some back- alley, and your pen a lean, dull one. Will your critical adventures be worth relating? The epicurean test of the impressionist is not a standard, says Mr. Brownell, "since what gives pleasure to some, gives none to others. And some standard is a necessary postulate, not only of criticism, but of all discussion, or even discourse." He asserts that criticism is an art. "One of Sainte-Beuve s studies is as definitely a portrait as one of Holbein s." The "creative critic" of Wilde is hardly a reality. There are no super-critics. Only men, cultured and clairvoyant. Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Nietzsche, Arnold, Pater, Benedetto Croce, Georg Brandes and this Dane is the most cos mopolitan of all are thinkers and literary artists. It is perilously easy to imitate their mannerisms, as it is to parody the unpoetic parodies of Whitman, but it ends there. A little humility in a critic is a wise attitude. Humbly to follow and register his emotions aroused by the masterpiece is his function. There must be standards, but the two greatest are sympathy and its half-sister, sincerity. The schoolmaster rule of thumb is ridiculous; ridiculous, too, is any man setting up an effigy of himself and boasting of his "objectivity." The happy mean be tween swashbuckling criticism and the pompous academic attitude, dull but dignified, seems difficult of attainment. But it exists. To use the personal pronoun in criticism doesn t always mean "subjectivity." I don t believe in schools, movements, or schematologies, or any one method of seeing and writing. Be charitable, be broad - in a word, be cosmopolitan. He is a hobby of mine, this citizen of the world. A novelist may be provincial, parochial as the town pump, that is his picture; but a critic must not be narrow in his outlook on the world. i2 4 STEEPLEJACK He need not be so catholic as to admire both Cezanne and Cabanel, for they are mutually exclusive, but he should be cosmopolitan in his sympathies, else his standards are insufficient. The truth is, criticism is a full-sized man s job. I was amused some years ago to read the edict of some young Johnny who writes hogwash fiction for bone- heads, in which he proclaimed that essay writing and criticism were for women. I don t deny they are, but our uncritical hero whose name I ve forgotten, but who probably turns out five thousand words a day on a type writer meant the statement in a derogatory sense. The literature that can show such a virile essayist as Hazlitt, as exquisite as Lamb and Alice Meynell, to men tion only three, is hardly a literature that needs justifica tion. And what of Coleridge, De Quincey, and Ruskin? I wrote for the London Saturday Review. But I was growing tired of music and drama from the critical standpoint. Books, too, were getting on my nerves. There is a lot of nonsense written about the evil that a book may accomplish. Books never kill, even their vaunted influence is limited; else what vases of iniquity would be the reviewers. I confess I even doubt the value of so-called "constructive criticism." Interpreters of music, drama, paint, marble poetry and prose write nice little letters to critics, assuring them that such and such a critique changed their conception of such and such a work. I am sceptical. You tickle an artist in print and he flatters you in private. (I have known of prima donnas that send flowers to the wives of critics, but that is too obvious a proceeding, also too expensive.) The reason I don t believe artists of the theatre, opera, or the plastic arts ever alter artist s schemes of interpreta- CRITICISM 125 tion is because they couldn t do it if they tried. I don t mean that he or she doesn t broaden with experience; polish comes with practice; but I doubt those radical changes which some critics pretend to have brought about with their omniscient pens. In the case of no bodies or mediocrities, who never make up their mind to a definite conception, it may be different. Great artists are secretly contemptuous of what amateurs meaning critics may say of them, no matter the thickness of the butter they spread on the critic s bread. A book review didn t kill John Keats. Criticism is an inverted form of love. The chief thing to the public performer whether in the pulpit or politics is neither blame nor praise, but the mention of their names in print. The mud or the treacle is soon forgotten. The name sticks. There is a large element of charlatanism in everyone who earns his living before the footlights of life. Ah ! the Art of Pub licity. In his peculiarly amiable manner, George Bernard Shaw once reproached me with being a hero-worshipper of the sort who, not finding his idol precisely as he had pictured him, promptly tweaks, pagan-wise, his sacred nose. George probably thought of me as a pie-eyed youth who was all roses and raptures, one who couldn t see through the exceedingly large rift in the Shavian mill stone. He changed his mind later. But I am a hero- worshipper. I have a large fund of admiration for the achievements of men and women, and I can admire Mr. Shaw simply because he so admires his own bright, par ticular deity, Himself. But I can t go off half-trigger if the target is not to my taste. Many times I have been dragged to the well and couldn t be made to drink; not because of the water therein, but that I wasn t 126 STEEPLEJACK thirsty. I have with all my boasted cosmopolitanism many "blind" spots, many little Dr. Fells, the reason why I cannot tell. It was with difficulty I read Arnold Bennett, notwithstanding the joy he gave me in Buried Alive, yet I couldn t swallow Old Wives Tale the hiss ing lengths of s s nor that dull epic, Clayhanger. Mr. Bennett, whose touch is Gallic, who is first and last a trained newspaper man, is out of his depth in the artistic territory of Tolstoy and Hardy. He is not a literary artist like George Moore or John Galsworthy. But Mr. Bennett enthralled me with his The Pretty Lady, an evocation, artistically evoked. So thus I had to reverse a too hasty judgment upon Arnold Bennett, whose re sources are evidently not exhausted. When Mr. Wells writes a new book, I always take down one of his earlier ones. I can t believe in those silhouettes that he pro jects across his pages with the velocity of moving- pictures. They are not altogether human, those men and women who talk a jumble of Meredithese and social science. But how the wheels whiz round ! I don t be lieve in them, I don t believe in Machiavel, or Tono- Bungay, or Mr. Britling, or that absurd Bishop; above all, I don t believe in the god with a lower-case "g" of Mr. Wells. A vest-pocket god, a god to be put in a microbe phial and worshipped, while sniffed through the nostrils. As prophet Herbert Wells touches the imagina tion. He foresaw many things, and if his heat-ray in vented by his Martians could be realised, war would be forever banished from the solar cinder we inhabit and disgrace with our antics. The Wells of The First Man in the Moon, of The Isle of Dr. Moreau, of The Star, what prodigies of invention ! His lunar insects are more vital than the machine-made humans of his newer fie- CRITICISM 127 tion. No one, not even his artistic progenitor, Jules Verne, is comparable to him when his fancy is let loose. One living writer only is his match, J. H. Rosny, Sr. The Frenchman, a member of the Goncourt Academy, has recently written The Enigma of Givreuse, a war story which deals with a dissociated personality, physi cally double, and remarkable for its skill and fantasy. His Death of the Earth should be translated because it is a literary masterpiece. Mankind dies when water vanishes from our planet, and a ferro-magnetic organ ism follows him as master. We know nothing about the twist life may take to-morrow or a trillion years hence, so it is useless to predict that, with mankind, the most ferocious devastator of life man mystically wor ships the shedding of blood, he is sadistic at his roots, murder is a condition of life the creation of other vital forms will cease. Quinton, the French physicist, declares that birds followed man in the zoological series. Per haps he means birdmen. XIV WITH JOSEPH CONRAD One afternoon, years ago, Stephen Crane sat in the Everett House dining-room. We looked out on Union Square. The author of The Red Badge of Courage asked me if I had read anything by Joseph Conrad, a friend of his, a Polish sea-captain, who was writing the most wonderful things in English. That was the first time I heard Conrad s name. When I went to see him in England I found a photograph of Stephen Crane on his desk. The Conrads loved the American writer, who had often visited them. I thought of Crane when I left London one foggy morning to go down to Kent, invited by Conrad, and I also thought of Mr. Shaw, for Joseph Conrad had become the object of my hero-worship; nor has the worship waned with the years; quite the contrary. His "royal command" to visit him stirred my imagina tion. The mirror of the sea, master of prose, though writing in a foreign language; possessing a style large, sonorous, picture-evoking, as microscopic in his analysis as Paul Bourget, as exotic as Pierre Loti, without the egotism of that essentially feminine soul; withal a Slav when he most seems an Englishman, Joseph Conrad is the unique weaver of magic variations on that most tre mendous theme, the sea. I was summoned, as I say, to his country home in Kent and in the most cordial fashion. I had not expected a typhoon blast in the form of an invitation, nevertheless 128 WITH JOSEPH CONRAD 129 from the writer of The Nigger of the Narcissus, I had looked for something more nautical, something like this: "What ho! luff -to and run your miserable little writing yawl into my harbour, and don t be slow about it, blast your buttons!" But I had forgotten that I was about to visit Joseph Conrad, and not the merry Mr. Jacobs and his many cargoes. Kent is charming. Kent is hospitable. But it consumed all of two hours to reach a remote station called Hamstreet, after changing at Ashford. A motor-car met me. I thought again of Mr. Shaw. If it had been a hydro-airplane or a steam launch, I shouldn t have been surprised, but a motor car and Conrad didn t modulate; which proves the folly of preconceived notions. I had seen protographs of Mr. Conrad, mature, bearded, with commanding eyes, a master-mariner as well as a master-psychologist. Would he resemble his portraits? Of course not, and I prepared for the worst. I was delightfully disappointed. At the door of his "farmhouse," as he calls it, I met a man of the world, neither sailor nor novelist, just a simple- mannered gentleman, whose welcome was sincere, whose glance was veiled, at times far-away, whose ways were French, Polish, anything but "literary," bluff, or English. He is not as tall as he seems. He is restless. He paces an imaginary quarter-deck, occasionally peers through the windows as if searching the horizon for news of the weather. A caged sea-lion. His shoulder-shrug and play of hands are Gallic or Polish, as you will, and his eyes, clouded or shining, are not of the Anglo-Saxon race; they are Slavic, even the slightly muffled voice is Slavic. One of the most beautiful sounding of languages is Polish the French of the North. When Mr. Conrad speaks English, which he does swiftly and with clearness of enun- 1 30 STEEPLEJACK elation, you may hear, rather overhear, the foreign cadence; the soft slurring of sibilants characteristic of Polish speech. He is more "foreign" looking than I had expected. He fluently speaks French, and he often lapsed into it during our conversation. And like other big men he asked more questions than he answered, supersubtle Sarmatian that he is. But his curiosity is prompted by boundless sympathy for things human. He is, as you must have surmised, the most lovable of men. He takes an interest in everything, save bad art, which moves him to vibrating indignation, and he is sympathetic when speaking of the work of his contem poraries. What a lesson for critics with a barbed-wire method would be the opinions of Mr. Conrad on art and artists. Naturally, he has his gods, his half-gods, his major detestations. The Bible and Flaubert were his companions throughout the years he voyaged in southern seas; from holy writ he absorbed his racy, idiomatic and diapasonic English; from the sonorous, shining prose of the great French writer he learned the art of writing sen tences, their comely shape and varied rhythmic gait, their sound, colour, perfume; the passionate music of words, their hateful and harmonic power. He studied other masters; Balzac and the Russians. Henry James has written of the effect produced on his French fellow- craftsmen by Ivan Turgenev. His Gallic side, a side frequently shown by Russians, they appreciated; his philosophical German training they understood; but the vast mysterious reservoir of his Slavic temperament was for them non-existent. So close a friend as Flaubert was unresponsive to the rarest in Turgenev. At this juncture I can t help thinking of Conrad. No prophet has been more envied out of his own country. His fellow- WITH JOSEPH CONRAD 131 artists, Hardy, Kipling, Galsworthy, Arthur Symons, the late Henry James, and the younger choir, were and are his admirers. His critics are sometimes extravagant in their praise of his art; yet, I haven t thus far read a critique that gives me a sense of finality. They miss his Slavic side, else are repelled by it. And irony ... an unforgivable offence. Mr. Shaw found out that fact early in the game, and always uses a bludgeon; that is why he is called subtle in England and America when he is drawing blood with the blunt edge of his razor. Conrad is nothing if not ironical. His irony is an illu minating model for the elect, but it has not endeared him to the public and to certain critics. What havoc was wrought on the appearance of Under Western Eyes, which might have been written by Turgenev so far as its verbal artistry, and planned by Dostoievsky, because of its profound characterisation and mystic power; yet it is unlike any book by either of the two Russians. Its almost malign, ironical mode has been seldom noted; we were only informed by the pens of presumptuous young persons principally in petticoats that Under Western Eyes is a copy of The Crime and The Punish ment, when it is the most searching arraignment of Rus sian tyranny, Russian bureaucracy which is the same thing ever written. But in the quiet inferential Con rad key. A Pole, he hates Russia, as hated its miserable Czar-crowned rule, Frederic Chopin. And like Chopin, Conrad buries his cannon in flowers. That is the clue to this great fiction a Dostoievsky reversed, a contemner, not an apologist of the Russian Government. I have told you that I loved Polish art, and Joseph Conrad is another of my idols. He is pre-eminently versatile, and in the back garden 1 32 STEEPLEJACK of his culture, in the enormous storehouse of his experi ences, there flits betimes an uneasy shadow, an ogre that threatens; it is his Slavic temperament. He would not be Polish and a man of genius if the Polish ZaI was not in his writings, in his gaze and speech; that half-desire, half-melancholy, that half-yearning, half-sorrow, a divine discontent, not to be expressed in a phrase, unless it be in the magical phrase of his countryman, Chopin. The existence of Conrad has been too close to the soil not to have heard the humming of the human heart and its overtones. The elemental things are his chief con cern, not the doings of dolls. He is not a propagandist. He never tries to prove anything. He is the artist pure and simple. He has followed the ancient injunction to look into his heart and write he the most objective of artists, with the clairvoyance of a seer. Nevertheless, his true happiness lies nearer the core of his nature the love of his family. For certain young writers this hu man trait may seem banal. Any butcher or policeman can love his wife and children. Art is a jealous mistress, we are told by pale youths who wearily look down upon a stupid world from their ivory towers. It was the un happy Marie Bashkirtseff who said that her washer woman could breed children, so there was nothing to boast about maternity. Mr. Conrad thinks otherwise. He is not only a great writer, but a loving father and husband that classic obituary phrase ! There is no paradox here. It is because he is so human that helps him to be so masterful a writer. He can pluck the strings of pity, terror, irony, and humour, and draw re sounding music from them. But if you speak of him as a "literary" man, he waves you an emphatic negative. He admires literary virtuosity but does not often in- WITH JOSEPH CONRAD 133 dulge in it. He admires Anatole France, but in the prac tice of his own art he is the opposite of that velvety sophist. He takes pride in his profession, yet is free from vanity or self-seeking; indeed, he is far from being a practical man. This worries him more than it does his friends, and the fact that he is not a well man is another thorn in his flesh. For months at a time he is tortured by rheumatic gout, which illness keeps him from his desk; thereat much wrath and many regrets. However, the optimistic spirit of the great artist shines through the mists of his pessimism. In his reminiscences you will find a veracious account of his childhood and his early passion for the sea. Later in the afternoon of my visit he astonished me by transforming himself into an Englishman. He sported a monocle and his expression was haughty as he drove his car over the smooth Kentish roads. The Slav had disappeared. He spoke no more of art, but dwelt on his gout, his poor man s gout, as he smilingly called it. Too soon, I was standing on the platform of Ashford station en route for London. Conrad is only one of his names, his family belongs to the Polish nobility, but the mag netism of the waters drew him to the sea in ships, and only accidentally did he become a writer. Accident ! Chance ! It is a leading motive of his fiction. One night sitting in a cafe in Ghent, Maurice Maeterlinck con versed with his friend, Charles Van Lerberghe, a Belgian writer of originality, and that same conversation proved a springboard for the art of the younger man. Van Lerberghe indicated; Maeterlinck developed. Chance, again, or divination ! Joseph Conrad is of the company of Flaubert, Turgenev, and Dostoievsky. "Not yet is Poland vanquished/ XV BRANDES IN NEW YORK When I saw Dr. Georg Brandes at the Hotel Astor a few months before the outbreak of the war, I told him that he resembled the bust of him by Klinger. It was the first time that I had seen the famous Danish author to whom I dedicated Egoists. Past seventy then, as active as a youth, I saw no reason why he shouldn t live to be a centenarian. An active brain is lodged in his nimble body. I had made up my mind to ask him no questions about America. I found him in a rage over the manner in which he was misrepresented by his interviewers. It should be remembered that primarily he is a cosmopolitan. He writes in English, Danish, French, and German with equal ease. As to the provinciality of our country in the matter of art and literature he has definite opinions, but he was polite enough not to rub them in on me. He was accused by some rough-rider cub reporter of finding his favourite reading in the works of Jack London ! That amused him. Poe, Emerson, and Whitman inter ested him, though not as pathfinders or iconoclasts. The originality of this trinity he failed to recognise; made-over Europeans, he called them; Emerson and German transcendental philosophy; Poe and E. T. W. Hoffman; Whitman and Ossian. Even Walt s rugged speech is a parody of MacPherson s and Ossian himself is a windy parody of the Old Testament style. Brandes is an iconoclast, a radical, a born non-conformist, and oftener a No-Sayer than a Yes-Sayer. The many-headed 134 BRANDES IN NEW YORK 135 monster has no message for him. As he was the first European critic to give us a true picture of Ibsen and Nietzsche, I led him to speak of Nietzsche. Once at Baireuth, where I went many times to hear the Wagner music-drama at the fountainhead and often muddy was the music-making, I am sorry to say I was shown the house of Max Stirner by a friend, who said: "When the name and music of Wagner is forgotten, Stirner s will be in the mouth of the world." I pricked up my ears at this. I knew Stirner s extraordinary book, The Ego and His Own, knew his real name, Johann Kaspar Schmitt, a poor school-master half-starved in Berlin, and in 1848 imprisoned by the Prussian Government. This intel lectual anarch, rather call him nihilist for compared with his nihilism Bakunine s is revolutionary rhetoric- was to become the mightiest force in civilisation ! I couldn t believe it. This was in 1896. But in 1919 I re call my friend s prophecy when I read of the Bolsheviki in Russia. Not Nietzsche, but Max Stirner has been the motor-force in the new revolution. No half-way house of socialism for the Reds. That is the lesson of Artzi- bachev s Sanine, which most critics missed, partially because of an imperfect English translation whole key note chapters suppressed and also because they did not note the significance of the new man, who, while continu ing the realistic tradition of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, was diametrically opposed to their sentimental Brother hood of Man humbug, and preached the fiercest indi vidualism while repudiating Nietzsche and his aristo cratic individualism. Dr. Brandes sets more store by Nietzsche than Stirner, and was the first to apply to Nietzsche the appellation of "radical aristocrat." He did not think that Nietzsche 136 STEEPLEJACK had access to Stirner s The Ego and His Own. I believe the opposite. I know he had, and there is a brochure published by a learned Swiss which proves the fact. However, the man who called the Germans "the Chinese of Europe" wasn t Stirner. It was Nietzsche. When we switched to August Strindberg, of whom I wrote at length in Iconoclasts, Dr. Brandes remarked: "Yes, he was mad. Once he visited me and related how he had called at a lunatic asylum near Stockholm. He rang the bell and asked the physician if he (Strindberg) were crazy, to which the doctor replied, My dear Mr. Strind berg, if you will only consent to stay with me for six weeks and talk with me every day, I promise to answer your question." After that Brandes had no doubts. And, then, Strindberg s wild ideas about Ibsen he was convinced that Ibsen had taken him for the model of Ekdal, the erratic photographer in The Wild Duck. Brandes considers Miss Julie the best play of Strindberg. I amused him by telling how I had gone to Stockholm sixteen years ago to interview the Swedish poet and dramatist. I saw him once, for two minutes. It was after midnight and he stood in his lighted window and cursed me, cursed the lady with me, who had aroused him by throwing gravel at his bedroom window, and then he disappeared in a blue haze of profanity. It was gently explained to me that one reason for his bad humour, and for the rift in the matrimonial lute he had three or four such lutes was the knowledge that his third wife had played Nora, in "A Doll s House," the night I had called on him. Which was unfortunate for me. Strindberg hated Ibsen, which hatred was not returned; quite the contrary; Ibsen is said to have admired Strind berg s versatility and bursts of dramatic power. BRANDES IN NEW YORK 137 Brandes is not alone the discoverer of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, but he is himself a re- valuer of old valua tions. Therein lies his significance for this generation. He wrote to Nietzsche in 1888: "I have been the best hated man in the North for the past four years. The newspapers rave against me every day, especially since my last long feud with Bjornson, in which all the * Moral German newspapers take sides against me. Perhaps you know Bjornson s insipid drama, The Glove/ and have heard of his propaganda for the virginity of men, and his league with the women advocates who demand moral equality/ In Sweden the crazy young things have formed themselves into large societies promising to marry only virgin young men. I presume they will get them guaranteed like watches, but there will be no guar anteeing for the future." There, you have a specimen of the hitting out from the shoulder by this Dane. He be lieves in the vote for women, but dislikes the moral hum- buggery and sentimental flimflam, which everywhere per meates the movement. He knows as all sensible women know, that the vote will not prove a panacea for the "wrongs" of their sex, the chief one seeming to be in their eyes the fact that they are born women, and not men; nor will it add one cubit to their physical or men tal stature. Dr. Brandes is an uncompromising indi vidualist. Men or women must work out their moral salvation, and "movements," "laws," "majorities" will not help, in fact, will impede personal development. The affections of Brandes have always been bestowed on the literatures of England and France. Consider his Modern Spirits, studies of Renan, Flaubert, Turgenev, Goncourt, or his work on Shakespeare, or his Main Cur rents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century, of 138 STEEPLEJACK which a French critic, Maurice Bigeon, has said that Brandes did for his century what Sainte-Beuve did for the seventeenth century in his History of Port-Royal. And how many flies, large and small, there are imbedded in the amber of the Brandes style ! He is of Jewish origin, and like his parents, not orthodox. Christians call him a Jew, while orthodox Jews will have none of him. He little cares, no doubt crying a plague on both their houses. But he fights for his race; he repeatedly attacked Russia for its treatment of the Jew, and he has always been disliked in Germany for his trenchant ar raignment of the Schleswig-Holstein incident. He has combated the eternal imbecility of mankind, fighting like all independent thinkers on the losing side. The war with Prussia in 1 864 made a deep impression on the young man. (He was born in 1842.) It opened his eyes to the fact that the Latin genius was more akin to the Danish than the Germanic. In 1866 he visited Paris, and fell under the spell of French culture. When the war of 1870 began he went to London, later to Italy. At this time his mind, mirror-like, reflected many characteristics of contemporary thinkers. He had already met John Stuart Mill, and translated him into Danish. The hard positivism of the Englishman he was never wholly to lose; luckily it was tempered by his acquaintance with Taine and Renan. What is vital, what makes for prog ress, what has lasting influence in social life? he asks in his Main Currents. With his Hebraic irony he stung the intellectual sloth of Denmark to the quick. His life was made unpleasant at the Copenhagen University, but he had the younger generation behind him. He knew that to write for the entrenched prejudiced class would be a waste of ink. He exploded his bomb beneath the na- BRANDES IN NEW YORK 139 tional ark and blew sky-high conservative ideals. He not only became a national figure, but a world-critic. Not the polished artistic writer that is Sainte-Beuve, not the possessor of such a synthetic intellect as Taine s, Georg Brandes is the cosmopolitan thinker par excellence, and on his shoulders their mantles have fallen. He will re main the archetype of cosmopolitan critics for future generations. It is of him I think when I preach breadth in criticism, and while he is not a specialist in art or music, his culture is broad enough to embrace their values. A humanist, the mind of Brandes is steel-col oured. When white-hot it is ductile, it flows like lava from an eruptive volcano, but always is it steel, whether rigid or liquefied. It is pre-eminently the fighting mind. He objected to being described as "brilliant." He must hate the word, as I m sure Bernard Shaw does. When all other adjectives fail, then " brilliant " is lugged in to do duty at a funeral, or a marriage, and no doubt at "bril liant" obstetrical events. The model of Brandes as a portrait-painter of individuals and ideas is Velasquez, because "Velasquez is not brilliant but true." Yet he is brilliant and steel-like and lucid, whether writing of Lassalle or Shakespeare or Poland. His Impressions of Russia barred him from that country. If the powers that be had listened in 1914 to the denunciations and warnings of Brandes and Israel Zangwill, certain dis asters might not have come to pass in Russia. An ardent upholder of Taine and the psychology of race, he con tends that in the individual, not the mob, is the only hope for progress. He is all for the psychology of the individual. Like Carlyle he has the cult of the great man. The fundamental question is can the well-being of the race, which is the end of all effort, be attained 140 STEEPLEJACK without great men? "I say no, and again, no !" he cries. He is a firm believer that every tub should stand on its own bottom, and in this earthly pasture where the sheep think and vote to order his lesson is writ clear: To thyself be true ! the lesson set forth with double facets by Ibsen in Peer Gynt and Brand. And also by Emerson. For mob and mob-made laws Georg Brandes has a mighty hatred. He is a radical aristocrat, whose motto might be: "Blessed are the proud of spirit for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth !" Agitated as he is by the Great War his letters to me were full of it he was philosopher enough to plunge into philosophical work, and he has written since 1914 two profound works on such divergent themes as Goethe and Voltaire, both of which will be given an English garb when a more pro pitious period arrives. XVI THE COLONEL I was not precisely "summoned" to Oyster Bay on election day early in November, 1915, but I took Colonel Roosevelt s invitation in the light of a "royal command" and went down in company with John Quinn, who had arranged the affair and Francis Heney, formerly public prosecutor in San Francisco. I had received several let ters from the Colonel of Colonels, of which I recall two sentences. One was: "What a trump John Quinn is!"; the other: "I have just received New Cosmopolis; my son Kermit, whose special delight is New York, would probably appreciate it more than I do, for I am a coun tryman rather than a man of the pavements." Now I had always thought of Theodore Roosevelt as a "man of the pavements," despite his delight in rough-riding over Western prairies. Personally, I found him the reverse of either; a scholarly man, fond of the arts he has a num ber of pictures by the late Marcius Simons, a young American painter, who had been influenced by Turner. He has an excellent library of Colonial literature and is fond of digging out pregnant sentences from early preach ers and statesmen. He showed me some of the trophies he had acquired in Europe while on his Grand Tour. One was a photograph of the late Andrew Carnegie taken in Berlin during military manoeuvres. Both Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Carnegie were guests of Kaiser Wil- helm. On the photograph the Kaiser had politely scrib bled: "That old fool, Andrew Carnegie," probably allud- 141 142 STEEPLEJACK ing to the projected Peace Palace at The Hague. Young Philip Roosevelt was visiting his uncle that day. I had previously met him. War was discussed by the Colonel with the zest he displayed to the last. I told him that I had been present at the formal opening of the Peace Palace in September, 1913, at The Hague, and that the day was so hot that all Holland fled to the beach at Scheveningen, adding that I believed the palace would eventually be turned into the finest cafe in Europe. And I printed this prophecy (?) in the New York Times in my reporting of the hollow mockery. One question I permitted myself: "Colonel, would the Lusitania have been sunk if you had been in the White House?" Snap ping that formidable jaw of his he exclaimed: "I don t think there would have been a Lusitania incident if I had been President." I believed him. John Quinn, to whom he referred, is, I need hardly tell you, an art collector and a well-known barrister in New York. His collection is rich in modern pictures, from Puvis de Chavannes to Augustus John and Picasso. I saw Henry Ward Beecher once on Fulton Street, near the ferry. He had the mask of a tragic actor, the jowls heavy, the eyes wonderful in expression. This virile clergyman and patriot has a statue erected to his memory in Brooklyn. Which is just. Setting aside his services for the cause of liberty during the war of emancipation, did he not enrich English speech with such racy phrases as "nest-hiding," "on the ragged edge," and "the parox ysmal kiss"? With the solitary exception of Walt Whit man no man has come out of Brooklyn who could write such powerful words. Henry James I only saw once, and then as he stepped on the lift he saluted me as "Good- by, Mr. Scribner!" It was at the publishing house of THE COLONEL 143 Scribners, then on Fifth Avenue below Twenty-second Street. My shaven face and glasses must have deceived him. Still, for a poor devil of an author to be taken for one of his publishers was, after all, achieving something in literature. Another great man that I saw and only once was the poet, Swinburne. It was during a Channel- crossing. I had encountered Heinrich Conried, not then manager of our Opera House, in Dieppe, and he was so seasick that I was alarmed, fearing he would collapse. Swinburne did not look cheerful himself, and for a poet who so rapturously celebrates the sea, I fancied he felt rather seedy; certainly he hugged the rail. The water was very rough. I should like to have gone closer, to have touched his hand and cried, Thalassa ! but his eyes were distraught, his locks dank, and, with a shawl around his slim shoulders, he was far from a heroic spectacle. Swinburne looked less like a poet than Arthur Symons, who in the old days was poetical in appearance. XVII DRAMATIC CRITICS When I began writing about the theatre, the principal critics of the drama were William Winter, of The Tribune ; "Weeping Willie," as Charlie McLellan nicknamed him because of his lachrymose lyrical propensities; Edward A. Dithmar, of The Times, who literally made Richard Mansfield; "Nym Crinkle," of The World, in private life Andrew C. Wheeler, an able writer; "Alan Dale" (Alfred Cohen), of The Evening World, later with The Morning Journal, now The American ; Steinberg, of The Herald ; Franklin Fyles, of The Sun; Willy von Sachs, of The Commercial Advertiser; John Ranken Towse, then, as now, dramatic editor of The Evening Post; Charles Dil- lingham and Acton Davies, of The Evening Sun. Mr. Dillingham soon graduated into the managerial ranks. C. M. S. McLellan was the wittiest of all and his theatri cal column in Town Topics was worth reading, though it stabbed some one in every sentence. I have told you of The Recorder and its fortunes. Lawrence Reamer, who has been with The Sun for a quarter of a century, wrote with equal ease musical and dramatic criticism. As I have already told you, I followed Mr. Fyles in 1902 as dramatic critic of The Sun. William Winter was the most poetic and erudite of critics. For years he wrote with un flagging vivacity English undefiled and musical to the ear. He was unfair to visiting artists unless of English origin. He nearly strangled Henry Irving that worst of great actors with undeserved praise. But if actresses came 144 DRAMATIC CRITICS 145 from the continent, such as Bernhardt, Duse, Rejane, Segond- Weber, Mr. Winter poured a volley of abuse into them, riddling their private life, ridiculing their art, alto gether behaving like a "hen-minded" and "highly moral" man. His unfairness has had no equal before or since, notwithstanding his vast knowledge and experience. "Foreign strumpets" was no unusual expression to be found in his reviews. He notoriously overpraised Ada Rehan, who couldn t hold a candle to Helena Modjeska; not that he was unfair to that subtle and charming Polish actress, but that Augustin Daly and Miss Rehan had won his critical suffrage. He used to be called the House Poet of Daly s, not without warrant. One morning he published a nasty attack on Maurice Barrymore, not because of his acting, but his morals. Maurice, who lived a Bohemian life, didn t see what his doing off the boards had to do with his artistic capacity. I was with him at the Arena when he wrote the following brief letter to Mr. Winter: "Sir, in your column of The Tribune this morning you allude to me as an immoral actor who should not be allowed to blister the gaze of the theatre-going public. Sir, I never kissed your daugh ter. Maurice Barrymore." I was aghast. "But, Her- bie," I remonstrated, "people don t write such letters." He gave me one of his swift dagger glances and coolly rejoined: "But they do, Honey, they not only write them but they mail them," and he did mail the letter, and then turning to me he winked. "Of course, you know the old hedgehog has no daughter." (But he had.) "I shouldn t have written it if he had one." This was characteristic of Barrymore. Another of his bon-mots was made to me early one morning as we went up the steps of the Lambs Club, then on Thirty-fifth Street, opposite 146 STEEPLEJACK the Garrick, formerly Harrigan and Hart s Theatre. We had been on the loose since the afternoon before, though not off the list of the living by a long shot. Barrymore had conceived the queer notion that a glass dog was fol lowing him, and being of a fanciful turn he speedily found a glass chain for the fragile animal. At Moulds , down on University Place, he explained the invisibility of the dog by the fact that light passed through it and cast no shadow. He fought one unfortunate man to a finish Barry was a fighter of science, he had been suc cessful in the prize-ring and when he grabbed the doubter by the scruff of the neck he led him to the bar and bade him drink, adding: "Now, next time you ll know a glass dog when you see one ! " The man assented. Well, we led the mythical canine to the Lambs, and there it occurred to me that dramatic critics were not admitted within its sacred enclosure. "Oh, come in, come in, you are not a dramatic critic," said Maurice. The witticism is ancient, but the instance was modern. I went in, the glass dog tinkling after us on crystal paws, and as \ve found Victor Herbert and Victor Harris, we didn t go home till breakfast. Dear old Barry ! What an Apollo he was. Rather slack in his acting, a careless "study," he seemed the ideal Orlando and Benedick. I say "seemed" because he was not. Charles Coghlan was his superior at every point save virile beauty and personal fascination, though Coghlan had enough of both. Alan Dale is still amusing us with his criticisms, in which always lurk kernels of truth despite his flippant manner. Nym Crinkle was more brilliant than safe, and after forty years I still find myself reading Mr. Towse in The Evening Post, and agreeing with him. Sane and DRAMATIC CRITICS 147 scholarly he did not yield to the Ibsen or Shaw movement, but to his book, Sixty Years in the Theatre, I turn when I wish to learn something of an actor or actress, their act ing, their personalities, and not to Winter s more polished literary performances. Mr. Towse is the sounder critic of the two. We often wondered how Mr. Winter con trived to turn out such a prodigious amount of "copy" in his morning columns. He would usually stay to the end of the play, then go to the Tribune Building and down-stairs in the public office would write standing at a desk; then he would go to his home on Staten Island. And for fifty years or more. It was puzzling till some one saw him working on his voluminous essays and the mystery was partly explained. So varied had been his experience, such a trained journalist was he, that he could write several thousand words about a play before the performance especially Shakespeare s leaving spaces for interlineations chiefly dealing with the acting. In the case of Daly s productions he attended rehearsals and had leisure to file his Augustan prose. A perilous example for a lesser talent. But what classics he wrote. When he and Henry Krehbiel during the early Wagner seasons and Royal Cortissoz were together on The Trib une the combination was difficult to beat. In fact, it wasn t beaten. Mr. Cortissoz was literary editor in those days, and art writer, too. He is a ripe scholar and master of coloured prose. I plodded. I did much reading in the Elizabethans, but I saw I could never hope to meet such a master as William Winter on equal terms; besides, I was interested in the moderns Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Suder- mann, Schnitzler, Strindberg, all the new Paris crowd, Henri Becque first, and also the nascent dramatic 148 STEEPLEJACK movement in England. For D Annunzio I had a hearty admiration, though his poetic drama is not for this epoch in the theatre where vulgarity and frivolity rule. But as interpreted by that rarest of all contemporary act resses, Eleanora Duse, the works of the Italian are an aesthetic joy. Not only is D Annunzio the greatest liv ing poet, but as prose-master he has matched the rhyth mic and "numerous" prose of Ruskin, Swinburne, and Pater. His "eroticism" barred all hope of fair critical judgment here and in England which is piddling hypoc risy. But his themes, aesthetic and ever poetic, would have prevented him from the glaring badge of "popular ity." The most virile poet of Italy since Carducci, Ga- briele D Annunzio, is uncrowned poet-laureate, but crowned by the love and admiration of his fellow- countrymen as patriot-poet. His most significant novel is not translated. It deals with aviation. It is magnifi cent, and is entitled Forse che Si Fors che No. (Perhaps Yes, Perhaps No.) How I did rave over Duse, when she called for reticence in criticism, the golden reticence of her mysterious and moving art ! With Duse her first season was a remarkable actor, Flavio Ando. The first play I saw in New York coincided with my first visit to the city, May, 1877. With my brother, John, I went to Wallack s Theatre, then at Broadway and Thirteenth Street, and enjoyed Lester Wallack in "My Awful Dad," not a prime work of dramatic art but amusing. Wallack was in his prime. Later I saw him in his repertory, "Rosedale" among the rest. But I admired Charles Coghlan the more. In "Diplomacy" with his sister, Rose Coghlan, you couldn t get anything better. John Brougham, John Gilbert, and Madame Ponisi had seen their best days. Edwin Booth enthralled DRAMATIC CRITICS 149 me; Lawrence Barrett and John McCuIIough did not. William Thompson was beginning his versatile career, and Irving and Terry were considered the wonders of the world. The first night at Philadelphia of the English actors I was with my father. After Hamlet s entrance my father nudged me: "As cold as Macready, without the elocution"; which simply meant that like Macready, Henry Irving was cerebral; as for his speech and gait, they were distracting to ear and eye. It was a pity that Richard Mansfield went to London at a time when his style was unformed. He never outlived the mannerisms he borrowed from Irving, a deadly example for him. Mansfield was a dynamic actor. His German blood and breeding, his cosmopolitan culture made him totally un- American in his methods. He was born on the island of Heligoland when it was British. His mother, Madame Rudensdorff, I knew when she lived at the Belvidere House and smashed the furniture in her periodical rages. She had been a Wagner singer in her day. From her, Dick inherited his irritable temper, his megalomania, and from her he acquired his skill in music. His father? Gossip gave him several, Jordan in Boston, Mansfeldt and Signor Randegger, a fashionable singing-master in London. I saw Randegger in the Co vent Garden Opera House one afternoon in 1901, when Hans Richter conduct ed "The Ring." I asked my friend: "Who does that old gentleman with the bald head, with his back to the orches tra, look like? " The answer promptly came : " Like Rich ard Mansfield s father." The resemblance was startling but who shall say ! With such artistic parents he was doomed to be either an actor or a singer; he was both. He could sing Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, with finish. Max Heinrich had coached him. His speaking voice was 150 STEEPLEJACK resonant and varied. Irving never had such range of vo cal dynamics, apart from the fact that he was born with an indifferent organ. Richard Mansfield and voice ! all the rest was scowling and wire-drawn mimicry. Yet he possessed pathos, and was effective in a powerful cres cendo. He reminded me of Friedrich Haase without that excellent actor s range. Nevertheless, Mansfield has not yet been replaced in our theatre. First heard in New York in 1897, and again in 1904, we welcomed the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson as a revela tion. Henry Irving s more intellectual reading was almost forgotten, and comparisons with Mounet-SuIIy s Gallic fanfaronades were out of the question. The Hamlet of Salvini had been magnificent, only it wasn t the Prince. Willard was too phlegmatic, Beerbohm Tree too fantastic, and E. H. Sothern too staccato. Edwin Booth s Hamlet alone outranked Robertson s; finished as was the art of Rossi, his interpretation was Italianate, not of the North. However, for the younger generation, which knew not Booth except as a ghost of himself surrounded by a third-rate company, shabby scenery, and costume, the performances of Mr. Robert son proved to be in the nature of a charm. He was a gentle Danish Prince, never truculent, seldom militant. The swiftness and wholly modern quality did not conceal the inexorable fact that no man has ever played in its entirety the Prince that Shakespeare drew; that an ex perienced artist knowing this, is forced to compro mise; that in the case of Robertson, temperamen tal bias led him into the only path for himself. Of the melancholic type, in facial expression sensitive, a scholarly amiable man, perhaps by nature somewhat of DRAMATIC CRITICS 151 a pessimist he was, above all, an actor endowed with imagination. These qualities pressed into service by a loving devotion to his art and an exalted sincerity of purpose lifted his work to a high plane. He had at his command a supple mechanism. And he was first the elocutionist, then the actor. Never electrifying his audi tors, he managed his transitional passages smoothly, without robbing them of variety or emphasis. He modu lated his effects without abruptness or violence. Sweetly morose, ever luminous, and in style largely moulded, never staccato nor colloquial, most musical, most melancholy, and of rare personal distinction, the Hamlet of Forbes- Robertson was the most appealing since the day of Booth. Mr. Robertson was not the mad Prince, not the histrionic maniac nor the pathologic case fit for the psychiatrist s clinic, which some players have made Hamlet. He was sane, so exquisitely sane, that while the rude buffets of a cruel and swirling fortune at times shook his spiritual nature to its centre, yet they never quite toppled it over. This Hamlet knew a hawk from a hernshaw. I may add that there is much nonsense in the statement that Ham let cannot be altogether badly acted, that it is self-play ing, when in reality it is the most abused character in the Shakespearean gallery. As for Kipling s sentimental "The Light That Failed," while Mr. Robertson exhibited technical skill and tender emotion, the role was beneath his powers. Yet in that and the sloppy Jerome play he made fame and fortune. I have mentioned Kipling. I came up from Paris to Rouen one morning with him. I was about to pay a visit to the tomb of Saint Flaubert. When I alighted Mr. and Mrs. Kipling had taken their seats in the dining- car for the midday dejeuner. The window was open so 1 52 STEEPLEJACK I said: "Mr. Kipling, you should have stopped at Rouen and made a propitiatory pilgrimage to the tomb of Flaubert in the Monumental Cemetery, if for nothing else but to expiate your literary sins." Mrs. Kipling smiled her brother, Wolcott Balestier, was an old friend of mine when he was on The Sun but Rudyard of the Clan Kipling, preserved a stony mask. The train moved. No doubt he took me for a harmless lunatic, and perhaps he was right. I tried to stir his artistic conscience, and I knew of nothing more efficacious than a humble prayer pronounced before the Flaubert commemoration tablet in the Pare Solferino or at the grave of the Holy Gustave. A trip down the Seine to Croisset, where is the Flaubert Museum, would give the finishing touch. In The Pathos of Distance I made a little study of the Violas I had seen, beginning with Adelaide Neilson in 1877, down to Wynne Matthison. At the Arch Street Theatre, Miss Neilson was supported by Eben Plympton, the Sebastian; Walcot, Malvolio; McDonough, Sir Toby; Howard, Sir Andrew; Hemple, the Clown; Miss Barbour, the Maria. At the Fifth Avenue Theatre, Mr. Daly revived "Twelfth Night" in 1877, with Miss Neilson as Viola, Charles Fisher, Malvolio. Barton Hill, George Clarke, Harry Dixey have played Malvolio, and can we forget Irving? Charles Walcot was my first Malvolio. The Violas were Mrs. Scott-Siddons, Ellen Terry, Fanny Davenport, Ada Rehan, Marie Wainwright, Helena Modjeska most poetic, after Neilson s Viola Allen and Julia Marlowe. In her early days, Mrs. John Drew played Viola. It was at a reading that I heard Mrs. Scott-Siddon s Viola. She was beautiful to gaze upon. Miss Marlowe was charming and Miss Matthison a Viola in the mode minor. Her voice was noble, though not so DRAMATIC CRITICS 153 caressing as the organ of rare Julia Marlowe. Ah ! the pathos of distance. Through the avenue of my memory there silently passes a throng of names. The members of the Union Square Stock Company, of Wallack s, of the Madison Square during the auspicious reign of Daniel Frohman of Daly s, of the Empire. I suppose the complaint of grumbling after forty is chronic with critics. The palmy days ! we sigh, and some day the present generation will do the same Ah ! those were the palmy days of George Cohan, Sam Bernard and Louis Mann ! When the Har- rigan and Hart company dissolved, we thought no one could replace Annie Yeamans or Johnny Wild and no one has. The Charles Hoyt regime set in, and it was amusing enough; after a lapse, George Cohan appeared on the scene, and seizing the Time-Spirit by the horns brought the beast to its knees. There is a divining sense given to a few lucky mortals, and clever George possesses it. The hour was ripe for vulgarity, and as there is noth ing so catching as vulgarity, presently the theatrical world is wholly given over to it. The flim-flam film theatre completed the downfall of the drama. Yet, the theatre was as vulgar thirty or forty years ago, though the saving clause was the superior actors and actresses. The comic-opera stage, too; where are the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and their interpreters? Where the Bos- tonians? Think of "Robin Hood" in its pristine glory: Henry Clay Barnabee, Tom Karl I remember him in opera during the early Pappenheim-Charles Adams days on Broad Street McDonald, George Frothingham, one of the best low comedians in the country, Eugene Cowles, Jessie Bartlett Davis she sang "Genevieve" at Opertis Garden in 1876, and her admirers were Governor Bunn, 154 STEEPLEJACK and Will Holmes, the barytone. "Oh Promise Me" came later. Marie Stone-McDonald was a favourite. And let us not forget good old Sam Studley in the con ductor s chair. Victor Herbert and his sparkling Gallic music is still with us. Yet we had great fun in the days of the McCauII Company with Delia Fox, Camille D Ar- ville, Pauline Hall, Jeff De Angelis, De Wolf Hopper, Digby Bell, Laura Joyce, Mathilda Cottrelly, Marie Geistinger, and many others ! Mary Anderson never profoundly touched me. I re call Laura Burt, Mrs. John T. Raymond (Marie Gordon), Rose Wood, dainty Madeline Lucette, afterwards mar ried to J. H. Ryley, and Nate Salsbury. Jacques Offen bach conducted his music at the Broad Street Garden. A genius! Did you hear Hughey Dougherty s story about inviting a friend over the telephone to a drink, and going down Eleventh Street, found the whole fire de partment in front of the bar? "If I had spoken louder," said Hughey, then the funniest "burnt cork artist/ "I would have had to set em up for the entire City Govern ment." Joe Emmet was on the rampage those days. The death of Miss Neilson at Paris made the world wonder. But it was not suicide, Edward Compton told us. A blood-vessel burst in her intestines. The iced- milk had nothing to do with the death. Dion Boucicault filled the papers with his plays and matrimonial adven ture. Agnes Robertson left him and sued for divorce. Charles Backus, of Birch, Wambold and Backus, died in 1883. What a crowd he could draw! The Hanlon-Lees dazzled us. Minnie Palmer attracted us. Minnie Hauk painted her naked legs green, said Parisian newspapers, DRAMATIC CRITICS 155 when she couldn t get tights to fit her. It was in Auber s "Carlo Broschi," and she had a male part. It s too bad to be true. Clara Morris had power, pathos, but a queer pronunciation. Caroline Richings Bernard and her opera company were much admired. Emma Abbott and her famous "kiss" did not impress me. Harry Richmond was a capital comedian. Maude Harrison, Charles Thorne, Frank Mayo, Lotta, Sara Jewett, Kate Claxton, Agnes Leonard, Frank Bangs, Estelle Clayton, Stella Boniface, Admiral Tom Thumb, and Commodore Nutt; (Lilliputians we call them now, then they were "dwarfs") Sadie Martinet, Katherine Lewis, Minnie Maddern, May (not Fay) Templeton, Marie Prescott, Harry Beck ett, Jennie Hughes, Jeffreys-Lewis, Cora Tanner, Effie Ellsler, Louis and Alice Harrison in "Photos" stop! I could go on for hours reeling off a litany of names. Wil liam Warren was a sterling comedian; Kate Castleton, Vernona Jarbeau and the French group, Aimee, Judic, Rhea, Theo, Paola Marie sister to the celebrated Galli- Marie Angele and Victor Capoul "Count Johannes" had just died. The star of Maurice Grau was ascend ing. Madame Frida Ashforth, in opera then, tells me that she was engaged to Antonio Barili, the singer and half-brother of Patti. She was a chum of Adelina from 1855 to 1860. The Barili-Patti household lived next door to Frida Ashforth on Broadway at Fourth Street. Caterina Barili, who had been celebrated in her day, led her daughters an unhappy dance. She was tyrannical and bad-tempered. Adelina, after missing her vocal practice, would be chased over the house into the back yard by the terrible old woman, and when she evaded her, Addie would wriggle derisive fingers, her 156 STEEPLEJACK thumb at her nose. Charming idyll of childhood ! Her sister, Amelia Strakosch, was, according to the high vocal authority I have quoted, not much of a singer. On West Twenty-fifth Street there was a French boarding-house kept by a couple, M. and Madame Felix. The guests were mainly theatrical folk, with a sprinkling of musicians and writers. The table was good, the wines cheap, and always was there a little poker game in the private apartment of M. Felix. I lived there for years. It was in the heart of theatre-land, and thus I made the acquaintance of David Belasco, who, with his lovable family, occupied a suite on the same floor as I. I verily believe that Balzac would have wished for noth ing better to describe than the Maison Felix. The com pany was lively, there were pretty women, jolly men. Occasionally but not too often, or too openly a basket containing letters would be let down from an upper story on a string. There were few ructions, nevertheless, the atmosphere was worthy of De Maupassant. I got into the habit of taking midnight walks with David Belasco. He was stage producer then for the Frohmans, and I was writing about the theatre. D. B., as we called him, could think of nothing but the stage. As he drank his milk he would urge me to play-making; but I hadn t the vocation, and heeded him not. Have I written poetry? Yes, waste-basket. Have I written plays? Yes. Locked in the secrecy of my desk. However, Mr. Belasco was right. One successful play and the author is on Boulevard Easy. I have a half-dozen friends, old newspaper men, who bother themselves with cutting coupons, not producing "copy." Successful playwriters, and sensible humans they are. A funny affair at the Maison Felix was a farewell dinner given by his friends DRAMATIC CRITICS 157 to a singer about to launch himself into the perilous sea of matrimony with a celebrated singing actress. With the exception of myself probably every man Jack at the table had been on friendly terms with the bride. Speeches were made. Toasts were drunk. The bridegroom was overwhelmed by emotion. Did he guess the truth? I never made after-dinner speeches, but urged by strong hands, I got on my legs and began: "Brothers, I might say brothers-in-law"! was ejected. Luckily the bridegroom was slightly deaf. Talk about De Maupas sant ! Plays and fiction have one gripping theme : Did she? It is the only theme that interests. I was so im pressed by the evening that I wrote a "prose-poem" about it. It makes me think of the two young women in Paris who found themselves at a monkey cage in the Zoo. They were experienced members of a very ancient profession, and as the agile and grotesque animals were playing all sorts of silly tricks, one girl said to the other: "Give them clothes with money in their pockets and they would be real men." Did I ever tell you the witticism of Maurice Barrymore concerning a fiasco made by a foreign-born actress of a certain reputation at the Man hattan Opera House? Barry supported the lady, whose voice was not powerful enough for the big auditorium. I asked him how she succeeded I was at another theatre. "Obscene but not heard," he answered. I have told you that I knew Willie Wilde, Oscar s brother. He was a companionable pagan. Every ten minutes he would light a fresh cigarette, every fifteen ask for another drink. He invariably preluded with "I have a zoological feeling that I may be thirsty." Getting up at five in the afternoon finally got on the nerves of his wife, Mrs. Frank Leslie, and she divorced the poor chap, who did 1 58 STEEPLEJACK hate to work. I saw much of Edward MacDowell, an admirable friend, and I wear on my watch-chain a medal of Franz Liszt, dated Weimar, 1880, and given to Ed ward by the master. After his death Mrs. MacDowell presented it to me. XVIII EARLY IBSEN I have always detested propagandists while admitting their usefulness. I loathe "movements," cliques, cen- acles, anarchs who don t "anarchise," but only bellow. I wrote about Nietzsche as early as 1888 and Ibsen still earlier, yet I was not an Ibsenite. The two Ibsen pioneers here were Professor H. H. Boyesen, of Columbia Univer sity, and William Morton Payne, then editor of The Dial. Mr. Payne translated and finished Jaeger s Life of Ibsen. In England, Edmund Gosse and William Archer were the sponsors of Ibsen. But I fought in the critical trenches for the new art from the Land of the Midnight Whiskers. And it was a hard battle as the entire press was dead against him. We took our the atrical fashions from England and great was the name of Clement Scott. An honourable exception to the preju diced critics was Charles Henry Meltzer, who had trans lated Hauptmann s "Hannele," and for the Sotherns "The Sunken Bell." To-day I find Ibsen rather trying. "A Doll s House," "An Enemy of the People," for in stance. Problem plays soon stale. Consider the twaddle foisted on an unsuspicious public by Shaw "Mrs. War ren s Profession" sounds as if written for the kindergarten. And "A Doll s House" the best Nora I saw was Agnes Sorma, with Rejane a good second. Mrs. Fiske and the Russian, Nazimova, are well remembered. The play is dating. Nowadays no woman would leave her children in that dreary door-slamming coda. I wrote of it thirty 159 i6o STEEPLEJACK years ago that the slamming of that front door by Nora was heard the world over. It was the tocsin of female revolt. What nonsense! As young men are getting scarcer owing to the war, it would be Helmer who might go away, not his wife. There are always plenty of women waiting outside. Duse asked Ibsen s permission to change the original ending, and after considerable grumbling the Norwegian dramatist consented. The new ending was thus : Helmer stunned by his loss is won dering if the "miracle" will ever take place. Time elapses. Suddenly Nora enters, radiant, a bundle in her hand. "Torvald ! Torvald !" she cries. "The mir acle! Didies for baby are marked down half-price. The miracle !" Quick curtain. The late E. A. Dithmar, critic of The Times, wittily named "A Doll s House" and "Margaret Fleming" by Herne "The Didy Drama." It was unfortunate for Henrik Ibsen that the Ibsenites discovered him. In this misfortune he keeps company with Browning and Meredith. There are dark places in the heart of every poet, yet these obscurities should not be hailed as illuminations. Long ago Daddy Ibsen s plays were seized by the propagandists; at first by the socialists, then the individualists, then by the women in search of a message. Now the women have cooled off a little in their devotion. Ibsen at a banquet in Christiania told the ladies present that their place was in the home. Shades of Nora Helmer ! He said that he was primarily interested in them as human beings, not in their sex or their "wrongs." But the mystery-mongers found him too tempting a subject for their busy exegetical pens, hence the huge and absolutely useless literature that has accumulated dealing with the "meanings" of his EARLY IBSEN 161 works, when his chief significance is as a creator of characters and in his dramatic construction. Techni cally he stems from France; the influences of Scribe and Dumas fils are not to be denied. But the unhappy man fell into the clutches of the college professor and exegesis slew him. To-day he is played with the vivacity of an undertaker at a preacher s funeral. Every phrase is packed with esoteric meaning, and the itching to dis cover strange symbols in his dialogue causes an atmos phere of gloom and apathy; instead of a brisk tempo, the players utter their lines as if the earth was on the edge of dissolution. Ibsen s dialogue is natural or noth ing. He is a reader of the human heart. And when he is in the roster of all stock companies, as he is on the continent, then he may be appreciated. But I doubt it. He makes you think as well as feel. Not with impunity can genius benefit mankind, has slyly remarked Rodin. XIX PICTURES After writing about art on The Sun for a year I made pilgrimages to the principal art shrines of Europe. I had a brief passion for the gorgeous canvases of Monti- celli, and while it would be impossible to see them all he painted one a day for his absinthe I saw the best. I went to the south of France as far as Marseilles, and discovered some notable pictures. Then a reaction, I fancy I fell in love for the hundredth time with Ver- meer. I actually saw thirty of his thirty-three or four masterpieces, missing only one "important" example, somewhere in Scotland, a Christ composition. The Rembrandts are not easily traced, but when I got as far as the Hermitage self-portrait at Petrograd I called a halt. In New York I wrote much of the so-called Washington Square School Lawson, Glackens, Sloan, George Luks, and the group that followed them. They had a hard battle but they "arrived." The group named u The Ten," which gave annual exhibitions at the Montross Gallery, had some strong painters: the late William M. Chase, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, and Alden Weir. Arthur B. Davies is to my way of thinking the most individual artist we have to-day in this country. He has vision, and is a master of his material. When Alfred Stieglitz opened his little Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue he practically inaugurated a new movement in art. The exhibitions of Independents that I had been visiting at 162 PICTURES 163 Paris for ten years were suddenly transplanted to New York. We were shown Matisse, Picasso, Picabia, Bran- cusi, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh. Their artistic im pact on the younger generation was marked. We had John Marin, Rockwell Kent, Samuel Halpert, Marsden Hartley, Weber, Jo Davidson, and Walkowitz. Robert Henri held aloof from the movement; he was self-con tained and influenced more by Goya. The mystic, Albert P. Ryder, has passed away but his spirit lives. Not to go back to the deluge, there was a time when Bouguereau occupied a pedestal in New York, and his worshippers went to the Hoffman House bar to stare at his meretricious "Nymphs Pursued by Satyrs. * AH manners of schools have had their little hour of triumph. Fortuny and Meissonier, Corot and Millet, Troyon and Turner, Whistler, too; and after the Barbizons, Manet, Renoir; also Bastien-Lepage. Even in New York as late as 1906 I found, to my amazement, that Manet was con sidered terribly audacious; that he was neither an expert draughtsman nor a colourist. Stupendous ! And then the deluge: Cubists, crazy clowns, Futurists, Neo-Impres- sionists, and a swelling host of other charlatans and medi ocrities. Paul Cezanne had intervened. He became the rage. Spry collectors pursued him (in the haunt of every collector there is a bargain counter). Dealers yearned for him. Elderly painters execrated his name. Guileless folk pronounced him "Suzanne" and secretly wondered why he is so ugly. And though not "the greatest painter of all," nevertheless his was a philosophic temperament. The chiefest misconception of Cezanne is that of the theoretical fanatics who not only proclaim him chef d ecole which he is but also declare him to be the greatest painter that wielded a brush since the Byzan- 164 STEEPLEJACK tines. The nervous, shrinking man I saw years ago at Aix-Ia-Provence would have been astounded if he had known that he would be saluted by such uncritical rhap sodies. If ever an axiom is contradicted in practice it is that there is no disputing tastes. As if we don t spend part of our existence battling with other people s preju dices. Note, also, that the other fellow is always "prej udiced" in favour of his own opinions, usually considered by us as stupid or narrow. Our judgments are well- nigh infallible, and our special mission is to set our neigh bour right. This conflict is perpetual. It makes life bearable. In matters of art I find the same intolerance. Because I like Henri Matisse, I am told that I suffer from optical degeneration. The same was said of me when I admired Manet, Monet, Degas. Matisse has confessed: "I condense the signification of the body by looking for the essential lines," which is slightly different from the cockney Cubists and their chatter about "sig nificant form." Mr. Berenson has pronounced Matisse to be "a magnificent draughtsman and a great designer." The Chinese are his masters, also the masters of the world in art, though we are only beginning to find it out. Japan, which originates nothing, borrowed its art from the older kingdom. I don t care whether Matisse is a Poster-Impressionist, a sensitivist, expressivist, or a snark, but I do know that he is a master of line that, as Frank Mather, Jr., asserts, has had no superior since the time of PoIIajuolo and the Florentines. What if the concu binage of his colours screams in rhythms that make the flesh creep? There is power, profound sophistication, subtle rhythm, all couched in novel terms. He can be suavely harmonious. He is sometimes as sunny and simple as Mozart or Monet. Since the death of Ce- PICTURES 165 zanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, Matisse is the master of the field. But Cezanne is the enthroned pontiff of the modern pantheon. It was at Saratoga I met a man who called himself "a common gambler/ In reality he was uncommon. Sel dom was one in his "profession" as cultivated. A pagan, he was refreshing in his freedom from hypoc risy. Clerical in appearance, so clerical that James Whistler, who painted his portrait, and the artist he most admired and cherished among the moderns, had nicknamed him "His Reverence." The portrait bore that title when exhibited. He had no illusion as to his social position, nor was he a snob among sports. When he alluded to his calling he was neither shrinking nor vainglorious. He maintained that his was the next old est of professions. Place aux dames ! He asserted that a man had a run for his money when he gambled; at least he could see his cash planked down on the green, see it swallowed by the turn of the wheel, or rapt away by an unlucky card; whereas on the "Street" you sel dom see the colour of your bank-notes after they leave your hands. "And," continued my friend, "the game on Wall Street is not always as fair as at Saratoga, New port, or Forty-fourth Street." Yet this hardheaded money-getting man was soft-hearted at the proper time. In 1906, during the palmy days of his Casino, I saw him send away a young fool who had whimperingly confessed that the money he had staked at roulette was not his; in a word, stolen. The gambler said: "Here is your money, young man, return it to the bank," adding with an ironical smile, "Go, and sin no more!" But when a sporting millionaire wished to play, then the wheel 1 66 STEEPLEJACK whizzed its merriest. A Robin Hood of the Green was our gambler. His love of pictures and old furniture became a veritable passion. His taste was impeccable, his judgment seldom at fault. His chief god in art was Velasquez. We always called him The Spaniard. He bought Whistlers at a time when it was a courageous act. I often crossed with him to Europe and his good graces introduced me to Whistler, who was exceedingly uncertain in likes and dislikes. He liked the gambler and was not rude to his friends. When the Whistler collection was shown at the Metropolitan Museum, we were amazed at its quality, yet he had no illusions concerning Butterfly James. "He will live by his etch ings, not his pictures," an opinion I had heard from the mouth of William M. Laffan, an expert who predicted that owing to his poisonous paint the canvases were doomed to blackening and desiccation. This prophecy is, I am sorry to say, being fulfilled. Charitable and, ac cording to his lights honourable, my gambling friend was a complex of confusing and contradictory traits. A psy chologist would have enjoyed as I did unwinding the tan gled skein of his character. When his wonderful Whistlers were sold, and with them his prized Sheraton furniture I studied them at his Madison Avenue home, and also at his house across the street from the St. Regis the art world was aflame with curiosity. He died of a fall in the subway, and left more friends than he knew. His name was need I tell you? Richard Canfield. While writing of old-time theatrical topics, I forgot to relate a story about Adelaide Neilson and her man ager, Frederick Schwab. There had been some gossip PICTURES 167 when the "star" went to San Francisco. A report of their matrimonial engagement was circulated. As Miss Neilson was not on the best of terms with Schwab, she threatened to discharge him if he didn t contradict the rumour. He answered: "I don t know who ought to get most angry about the gossip. If you feel yourself disgraced by it, what should I feel?" Which was the retort courteous. Miss Neilson was fond of Schwab be cause he was the first man to greet her on her arrival in New York. Years afterwards when he was manager for Vladimir de Pachmann, the slightly eccentric pianist I think in 1890 he had a trying time to keep the little artist in order. One morning at Schuberth s music store on Union Square, Fred Schwab entered. De Pachmann (his right name is Waldemar Bachmann without the "De"), who had been playing, rushed to his manager cry ing, "I love you so much I must kiss you!" He kissed Schwab on the neck, not a kiss of peace, but a bite, so nasty, indeed, that the manager had to wear a silk scarf to hide the teethmarks. He did not have de Pachmann arrested for mayhem surely a Chopinzee then but, so it was whispered, made an iron-clad contract for the next season, by the terms of which the manager would not be altogether the loser. At the time I remarked of de Pachmann that his "Bach was worse than his bite." At a piano recital in old Chick- ering Hall, given by his wife and pupil, Margaret Okey now the widow of the French advocate, Ferdinand Labori, counsel for Dreyfus de Pachmann after up roariously applauding her, became censorious when she finished a Henselt etude (Thanksgiving after the Storm). A sharp hiss was heard in the auditorium. It was from i68 STEEPLEJACK the lips of her husband. Oscar Hammerstein, I remem ber, had hissed a performer in his Manhattan Opera House, but for a husband to hiss his wife in public we must go to the pages of "Wives of Artists," by Alphonse Daudet. XX NEW YORK IN FICTION Anyone with good red blood in his veins has made in London and Paris fascinating pilgrimages to the fic titious abodes of Dickens and Thackeray, Balzac, Zola, and De Maupassant. Even the less popular Flaubert has become an object of veneration, and the places men tioned in his Sentimental Education a vast reconstruc tion of Paris in 48, or the tomb of the real Emma Bo- vary, are visited by pious people. New York, noisy, dirty, politics-ridden, her mighty flanks gashed by greed is daily reborn in the imagination of her admirers. Walt Whitman sang her praises, Charles Dickens registered her defects. But there she stands. Take her or leave her, it is all the same to our Lady of Towers. Love her as did O. Henry, and from that love something is bound to result. Magic, mud, moonlight, money, misery, and multitudes may be discovered as befits the temperament of each wooer of her favours. Such men as Poe and Sydney Porter (O. Henry) found her a "stony-hearted stepmother," yet contrived to weave from their defeats magical carpets that transport their readers on the wings of fancy. When the town was young, Washington Ir ving, Cooper, Poe, and their contemporaries recall to us Battery Park, Bowling Green, and old Wall Street. There is the later Wall Street of Edwin Lefevre, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton in Custom of the Country. Wall Street was also visited by Robert W. Chambers, David Graham Phillips, George Barr McCutcheon, Rex 169 1 7 o STEEPLEJACK Beach, Owen Johnson, Samuel Merwin, and Thomas Dixon. It is the most alluring lane in the world. Many writers who enter it emerge without spoils literary or otherwise, yet not shorn of their desire for it. More than one painter has succumbed to its golden glamour; witness the canvases of Childe Hassam and Colin Camp bell Cooper. How much fiction there exists in which the young protagonist views the frowning battlements of the city from the decks of an incoming ferry-boat. He may not shake his fist at the Woolworth tower as did Rastignac, Balzac s sorry hero, when watching Paris from the heights and melodramatically muttering: "The fight s between us two now!" But some spirit of antagonism blended with ambition must fill the bosom of adventuring youth as he beholds what may be the home of realised hopes, that is, unless he comes by way of the Hudson Tubes, and then the old ferry-boat is no longer a stage set for his noble gesture. In Arthur Bartlett Maurice s The New York of the Novelists, may be found invaluable material for the curious student. The author slowly works his way up-town, not overlooking "The Big Canyons of the Money-Grubbers." That journalistic Bohemia, Park Row, of which wrote Jesse Lynch Williams, Richard Harding Davis, Graham Phillips, and Stephen Whitman like Davis, a Philadelphian is not slighted. And when we reach the name of Edward W. Townsend, we exclaim: "Wot t ell ! Chimmie Fadden." Chimmie still lives in the memories of his readers, though the dis reputable Five Points has vanished. Mr. Townsend, an old Sun man, added to the civic picture-gallery a strongly individualised and amusing type. Potash and Perlmutter are definitely localised, and " Wasserbauer s NEW YORK IN FICTION 171 Cafe" is still in existence. Police headquarters, which ever intrigues the fancy of newspaper writers, and Pon tons, wherein knotty legal problems are discussed across tables, are not missed. The mysterious East Side always has been a drab cloud by day, but a pillar of fire by night. Julian Ralph, Davis, Rupert Hughes in his exciting Empty Pockets and a host of other novelists have explored this region, and like pearl-divers, the deeper they dove the more precious the treasure they brought to the surface. In the Ghetto, "Sidney Luska," the pen-name of Henry Harland, was the pioneer. As It Was Written, The Yoke of the Torah, and Mrs. Peixada are yet to be bettered. Sidney Rosenfeld, Abraham Cahan, James Oppenheim, Bruno Lessing, Rupert Hughes are names that occur to one as the pearl-fishers in those dusky waters. Such artists as George Luks, Jerome Myers, Glackens, John Sloan, Eugene Higgins have portrayed the East Side with sympathetic pencils. The East Side of O. Henry is set before us: The Cafe Maginnis, The Blue Light Drug Store, Dutch Mike s Saloon, and No. 12 Avenue C. He whimsically calls New York "Little Old Bagdad on the Subway/ Among the forerunners of the present generation were Henry James, William Dean Howells, Marion Crawford, Brander Matthews, H. C. Bunner, Thomas A. Janvier, Edgar Fawcett, Frank Stockton, and Edgar Saltus. PfafFs, where Mr. Howells met Walt Whitman and Fitz- James O Brien, was then the Bohemia; Washington Square the Belgravia. What a playground for dazzling antithesis ! Henry James visited the Square in his earlier novels and Saltus and Edith Wharton. That brilliant and compelling fiction, The Truth About Tris- trem Varick is laid in Gramercy Park, in the old house 1 72 STEEPLEJACK of Stanford White. During the eighties Edgar Saltus played the role of social secretary to the fiction of the Four Hundred; and not always to the satisfaction of the people he painted. He told the truth. Mrs. Wharton told the truth. Never tell the truth in fiction if you wish to repose sweetly upon the breast of your readers. It may be confessed without contradiction that the majority of our fiction writers are sadly given to sickly senti mentalising. 0. Henry was a prime sinner. Our drama and novels must be lined with pink cotton because of the sensitive epidermis of the man and woman in the subway, who, nevertheless, digest without shock the "tough" facts of life in the newspapers. That apocalyptic genius, Benjamin De Casseres, once divided our native fic tion-mongers into four groups: Punk, Junk, Bunk, and Bull. Punk includes the ladies with triple-barrelled names there are plenty with two; Junk, all the writings on so-called social-science, pollyannas, new-thoughters, and pseudo-psychologists; Bunk is the fashionable novel; and Bull applies to the Jack London School; ramping, roaring, robust rough-riders and heroes from the wild and woolly West; bastards of the Bret Harte fiction. It is a just classification. We needs must have our "art" dosed with saccharine. War fiction for a period will destroy this syrup, but it will be in evidence again. Several of Theodore Dreiser s novels deal with New York, The Genius in particular; a book moral to the sermon ising point, it is full of the sights and sounds of the city. Mr. Chambers fashioned the scene of A King in Yellow from the neighbourhood of Washington Square. He sails through Society in most of his work. Sister Carrie fled to New York. Predestined, by Stephen Whitman, one of the few well-written stories on this day of vulgar NEW YORK IN FICTION 173 diction and typewritten rubbish, depicts with a vivid brush certain sections not far from Second Avenue, and pugilist Sharkey s (Sailor Tom) old place on Fourteenth Street. Irving Place and Liichow s have often figured in tales of the town. Van Bibber and his pranks showed Richard Harding Davis at his most entertaining. The heart of O. Henry was in Irving Place, not far from Gramercy Park, the Hotel America, Old Munich, and Little Rhein- schlossen. His readers will recall these places. Scheffel Hall is still open. It has been a resort for Bohemians nearly fifty years. But O. Henry did not see it in its glory. Thanks to his friend, Gilman Hall, I met Sydney Porter at the Hotel Seville. The pace was beginning to tell on him. He was a hard worker and a furious candle- burner. Humorous and emotional, he was like a hero in one of his own stories. He never had the leisure to polish his anecdotes. New York was his magnetic rock. He became a cockney of the cockneys. But when he is called the American De Maupassant and Davis our Balzac, then criticism should go hide its head. After Madison Square another marking spot is Gramercy Park: In What Will People Say? which is Rupert Hughes at his best, we catch glimpses of "tea, tango, and toperland." About the Metropolitan Opera House the mists of memory have not yet mounted; it is not old enough to have its legend, as has the Academy of Music. But William J. Hender son has not passed it by in his The Soul of a Tenor. Mrs. Wharton s The House of Mirth plays near it. F. Hopkinson Smith knew the city and its outlying dis tricts. How we followed his trail to "Laguerre s," its cheap wine and innocent diversions. A city passed out i 7 4 STEEPLEJACK of existence while "Hop" Smith wrote and painted. Fickle, shifting, protean New York ! You cross the bridge to Brooklyn in the morning and on your return at night you may find a big hole blasted through the house you had left intact. Anything is apt to happen in Man hattan except monotony. The department stores have not been overlooked by the younger tribe of purveyors the "new" short-story, as far as structure is concerned, is amorphous, invertebrate. Montagu Glass, Edna Fer- ber, Samuel Merwin are diverting. There are mushroom Bohemias springing up overnight, canned mushrooms; compared with them the Sixth Avenues, Bohemias, Mou- quins and Jacks seem eternal. Like the queer little resorts off South Washington Square and its vicinage, these serve as a file upon which budding genius sharpens its teeth. The wine, too, sets your teeth on edge. Old Delmonico s has gone forever, and a few months ago Sherry s followed suit. No longer may we lounge with Van Bibber in the Fifth Avenue windows and ogle passing petticoats. With a sigh we admit that dear old intimate New York, the city that once contained Ameri cans, has been submerged by an anonymous mob from across seas. The prophecy has come to pass: The East has conquered the West Side. Manners, like good cook ery, have gone the way of all flesh. Soon the last Ameri can will disappear. I wager that his name then will be either Smithowski, Brownstein, or Robinsonio. Yet the cry will always be New York Redivivus ! In a moment of discouragement I said that American fiction was largely written by imbeciles for the delectation of idiots. This was not only uncritical, it was unfair. I should have reversed the order and included the playwright and pub lic. NEW YORK IN FICTION 175 Just now the right of free speech is not so important as free speechlessness. Old Joe Howard used to tell the newspaper boys of my time that the man wasn t yet born who could write a column of wit and wisdom every day of the year. If he had lived to read Don Marquis in the New York Evening Sun (a charming poet) and Frank lin P. Adams (F. P. A.) in The Tribune he might have revised his opinion; furthermore, he would have been forced to add to his category the art of poetry. Despair ingly, I wonder how those two clever chaps manage to keep the machine running. Day after day they throw off verse and prose suffused with humour, fancy, and com mon sense the last is not the least negligible. And such verbal virtuosity ! Thinking over the problem the in exhaustible conjuror s bottle comes as an analogy, but filled with ideas, not water I blew up the other morning immediately after breakfast, making a noise like a "blurb," and Gelett Burgess has defined a " blurb" as a noise like a publisher. Now, my meal had been light, tea and cereal. The ancient maxim runs thus: Grape fruit for brilliancy, for profundity sip chocolate. I don t believe it. Yet it wasn t the tea, it must have been the "pent-up aching rivers," as Walt Whitman says, of accu mulated reading and a mild mania of imitation. I sat down at my writing-table, as wide as a well. Jamming on full speed I manufactured phrases. Aphorism or epi gram? Or just plain hot-air, a windy reflex from other men? Note the lack of continuity, a dangerous symp tom of senility. Some people lose their ideals when their teeth begin to go. (What retrogression is here, my friends?) Ac cording to Havelock Ellis the basis of love is tumescence and detumescence. Tolerance is often a virtue of seep- 176 STEEPLEJACK tics but is it a virtue? Good art is never obscene; the only obscene art is bad art. After the war is over, it would seem that the Almanach de Gotha will have to be changed to Almanach de Ghetto especially in the land of the Muscovite. Envy is only a form of inverted ad miration. Joseph Conrad speaks of pity as a special form of contempt. Stupidity is the great humourist, says George Moore. We live too much on the surface of our being. A philosopher has said that we live forward and think backward. Sorrow is the antiseptic of sick souls. Woman, declared the Fathers of the Church (shrewd psychologists), is the most potent engine of dolour that God has given Man. The French Revolution only de stroyed ruins; the social edifice had been tottering for a century. Who was it that so proudly boasted: My knowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge thou cov- etest? Peace on earth to men of good-will and fixtures (above all, the latter). Intimate friends are, as a rule, disasters. Mythomania is a malady that spares few. Its real name is religion. Walt Whitman may have been a yellow dog, but he had a golden bark. Truth is always original. But what is Truth? Happiness is an eternal hoax. Only children believe in happiness; as well say that the wise are children. A delightful masculine con vention is the virtue of woman. (George Meredith said this better.) Be virtuous and you will be bilious. (Ven erable Hindu proverb.) She was old enough to gossip frankly about her new upper-set, but had not reached the age when she would admit that she was out of the marriage market. The average author is not unlike the average father: his first, his second book, he is interested in as is the father of a newly-born baby; but after that he regards his growing family with indifference, often NEW YORK IN FICTION 177 with dismay. There is always a silent corner in the most sincere confession of a woman. If you closely study a man you will discover that his marriage resembles him (what many-sided men must be polygamists). In the chateau of chimeras nothing is insignificant. Suspicion of the beloved one is like apoplexy; you may be cured after the first attack, but the second is always fatal. (This sounds like Paul Bourget.) After forty a man survives himself; which is a companion to the impolite epigram of Labouchere that all women over forty should be slain except the suffragettes. What is all modern literature but a reek of regret that we are all but bubbles on a stream? (George Moore.) I pause for breath. Most politicians are patriotic vegetables. Man is more significant than his creed. The heart has only one season. Books never kill. In music the cadenza is a parenthesis, except with Franz Liszt, who composed cadenzas with orchestral accompaniment and called them concertos. Charles Dickens said: "We are all going to the play, or coming home from it." "Since they can only judge, who can confer?" wrote Ben Jonson. The meaning of life is just the living of it. German fresco- painting is the white of an egg dipped in frigid ennui. One of the finest things in Hazlitt is his lusty yeoman in The Fight, who impatiently cries: "Confound it, man, don t be insipid." A philosophy in a sentence. Insipid ity is the cancer of modern art. Men change, mankind never. The woman who goes about with a chastity chip on her shoulders i. e., aggressively boasting of her virtue should be suspiciously viewed; she is painted fire. A Polish proverb tells us that you must kiss the hand that you wish not to sever. It s the severed head that makes the seraphim, wrote poet Francis Thompson. Do you i 7 8 STEEPLEJACK remember the old story, so old that it is new, about Mrs. Bloomfield H. Moore and her titled visitor? She was entertaining him, probably talking about the Keely motor, when another visitor was announced. The Baron politely arose. "Don t disturb yourself, my dear Baron," sweetly remarked the hostess, "it s only my architect." This architect happened to be a member of the Furness family. Apochryphal or not, this anecdote tickled Phil adelphia s rib in the early eighties or late seventies. The essence of music is silence. Hamlet said the rest is silence, thereby proving that he was a musician. The rest is always silent. Alice Meynell, essayist unique, wrote that it is not the eye but the eyelid that is impor tant, beautiful, eloquent, full of secrets. The eye has nothing but its colour, and all colours are fine within fine eyelids . . . expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul; there are only curtains . . . the eyelids confess, and refuse, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things since man was man. She also said that Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness. Truly a subtle distinction. She also said that Man is Greek without and Japanese within. Our face and figure; our insides. Symmetrical and asymmetrical. And in her Hearts of Controversy, she says, "the note commonly called Celtic, albeit it is the most English thing in the world." . . . This is enough to startle the staid ghost of Mat Arnold. The Celtic note English! Alice, where art thou? Matthew Arnold averred that in America the funny man was a national calamity. British humourists have ever since made careful note of this warning. XXI A VOCAL ABELARD I had always liked the old man. I met him first at a dingy little table d hote just off Fourteenth Street, a quiet, retired place where the spaghetti smoked, the wine was cheap, and not too nasty, and the tariff very low. Understand me, I didn t spend much money on food, preferring to invest it in books, books easy to procure if one only has the price. I care little for black-letter editions; I would even allow an Aldus or an Elzevir to pass me if a copy of Flaubert s Temptation were nigh, or the music of Mallarme s poetry available. I actually did give my watch to one of those gentlemen who lend money at high per cent., on account of a first edition. Ah ! but what a copy. With illustrations by Manet. But I m forgetting about Agnani. Ettore Agnani, to give him his full name, was one of those operatic waifs cast up by the ocean of music and stranded in the city with only the shreds and shards of a bass voice. He was a musty-skinned, high-nosed Italian, with some evi dences of gentility still hovering about his person, a lover of Italian sauces and an inveterate raconteur. In those days the table d hote was a hobby of mine. I have discovered many good places and remained with them till their inevitable decadence, and would then begin my search anew. I have eaten at an Irish table d hote where "Saucissons Patrique" were served, and at Rumanian restaurants where pepper reigned and beef was a side issue. Finally, I discovered Varsi s and was 179 i8o STEEPLEJACK satisfied. Soup that savoured of cockroaches was hardly to be commended, but the spaghetti ! For forty cents I dined royally, drank Chianti from Hoboken Heights, and waxed fat and lusty. Chance one evening brought Agnani to my table and the aristocratic deliberation with which he placed his eye-glasses on the bridge of his skinny nose as he scanned the menu pleased me. His hands were lean, brown, withered, and he sported one ring, a blood-stone, as antique as its owner. Agnani was a character. We became friends, for, while I am not much of a lover of music, I like its literary side. I am enamoured of gossip, memoirs, recollections which concern distinguished people and otherwise and Ag nani as he ate his fritto would ramble through the mists of his past and occasionally dig up something of inter est. How the old rascal laughed as he slashed a woman s reputation, and with what zest he recounted his early operatic triumphs. He had a little dog to which he was devoted. I simply loathed it. It was one of those shrewish rat-terriers not big enough to make a meal for an honest Newfoundland, and it always bared its tiny gums at me in the most malignant manner. Agnani was crazy over the beast, and I ll never forget the night when in a stifled voice he said: "Nina is dead." Nina was the name of the little animal, and I hadn t the heartlessness to let him know how glad I felt at the news. Agnani seemed the most frank of men till his private life was touched upon, and then his soul flew behind bars and bolts, and he would become unapproachable. I am not too curious but I have an aching nerve called by the psychiatrists "a craving for psychical insight." To believe that this brain-barren Lombard had "soul- states" would be rather ridiculous, for his greatest con- A VOCAL ABELARD 181 cern in life had seemed the tomato sauce on his spaghetti and Nina. After the little dog died he would work him self up into a green rage with Pietro, the one-eyed garcon, when the sauce was scorched. Otherwise, an acid smile lurked under his dyed and gummed mustachios, and his laugh was crackling. He wore a red necktie and I have heard that he had achieved his greatest artistic success as a buffo-basso. He baffled me, did this broken- down singer, to whom I frequently extended dinner in vitations with the hope of getting a story a rich, live story which would repay me for my trouble. (This may sound cruel, but I am a newspaper man, and ink, not blood, circulates in my veins.) I took Agnani to a Chinese table d hote and fed him on bird s-nest soup and chop-suey. I took him to old Martin s where they breakfast like epicures. I dined him at the Maison Felix, but even the artistic dinner in that rare spot failed to warm the cockles on his soul. At last one warm June night, I met him tottering up Third Avenue, looking ill and dogless; his scarlet tie had less of its flamboyancy and the man was meek and dusty. The hour must have been ten and his eyes plainly im plored: "Give me to drink." I brought the old chap to Scheffel Hall and bade him drink beer, and to my sur prise he drank it greedily. Italians are not fanatical beer drinkers. They are more given to cordials, which they sip after a river of oily eloquence. Not so Agnani. He developed a colossal thirst, and about the twelfth or thirteenth glass light broke at last. He was drunk, serenely so, after the manner of the family Agnani. Then it all came out. He was the second son of a Lom bard family whose name made me blink when he told it. You will never know as I ll go to the crematory with his 1 82 STEEPLEJACK secret. Besides, what does a name amount to except it be at the bottom of a certified cheque? He must have been a wild spendthrift and had "bonnes fortunes"; but of the inchoate mass of reminiscences he hurled at me I recall only one story a story so improbable that it set me to dreaming of the loves of Abelard and Heloise, and for the moment transformed the faded features of Agnani into the stern lineaments of the implacable Canon Fulbert. Here is the anecdote: The Milan Opera Company which had left that capital to go on tour in the provinces, comprised as its personnel Rosati, prima donna, soprano; Lahn, a Swiss, contralto; Dimali, tenor; and Agnani, basso. There were others, of course, but these were the principals, and with the impresario, Negri, and the Conductor Pinuti, dined at the first table and travelled second-class. The rest of the company went "au troisieme." The real artist in the troupe, Dimali, was a tenor of the robust type, with a voice like steel, and a determined lover of women. The soprano and contralto were mediocre, but hand some and close friends. "I liked them both," said Agnani in a quavering voice, "because they were good-looking women, and I always had a weakness for female beauty." This was so in geniously accented, and he looked such a crumbling ruin even as he boasted that I ordered two more beers. He drank both by mistake, I fancied. Then he continued: "I was never on very good terms with Dimali. He was so conceited; he was a fine -looking man; no one could gainsay that, but he made eyes at every petticoat, and no chambermaid was ugly enough to keep him at bay that is, if there were no prettier women around. And how that fellow could drink! He fairly swilled, A VOCAL ABELARD 183 always took a treat and never stood one. Ah ! he was a mean rascal, but before the footlights he was superb." Agnani rolled his eyes and lighted another cigarette. Its thin, cool smoke curled above his shining pate and straightway I forgot the clangour of Third Avenue, and my fancy lit up the stage of some shabby opera-house in a second or third rate Italian city, as on its boards moved to tones the passionate puppets of transpontine opera. "Dimali never knew when to stop," pursued the basso, his ancient jealousy of the man favoured by women breaking forth when his feet were treading, one might say, the very edge of his grave. "He was aware of his artistic superiority and always impressed you with it. He disdained the two women principals, and while en route usually devoted himself to some pretty chorus girls, riding third-class, and only turning up at meal times. We sang with varying success in many of the smaller cities and in a few of the larger ones, and our life was one of the customary cheap triumphs, cheaper lodg ings, and general depression. Rosati and Lahn kept together; the manager, conductor and I played our dom- inos after the performance. The conductor, Signor Pinuti, was the most cold-blooded wretch I ever met. He had formerly been a surgeon in Ravenna, but want of practice drove him into the musical profession for which he had a marked talent. He would, in his drawling tone, recite damnable stories of surgical operations till I shivered my nerves were a woman s, and I feared the sight of blood. I hadn t been much with Pinuti before I discovered that, despite his harsh, frigid nature, he was passionately in love with Rosati, the big blonde 1 84 STEEPLEJACK soprano, who, apparently, cared for no one. It was in Ravenna, Pinuti s native city, that I first noticed Di- mali s queer behaviour with the contralto, Lahn. Out of bravado he began to make love to her, desperately, without shame, and when a man like this tenor becomes earnest he may prove dangerous. He fairly haunted Lahn, and the pretty, silly brunette showed she was conscious of the handsome singer s wooing. Rosati sul lenly watched the game, but was she indifferent? Our conductor had apparently ingratiated himself into her graces, and they became inseparable. Thus we split into three camps, for I associated with the manager, Negri. We watched the conductor and soprano, and they in their turn spied upon the contralto and tenor. Pinuti by this time was crazy in love, and the once cold Rosati seemed to favour him. Ah ! my boy, how little do we know of women and their tricky ways. One morning after rehearsal, I overheard Pinuti speaking with Dimali, rather arguing. I was in my dressing-room, and every word came to me clear cut. Of course, I listened. Let her alone, I beg, I command you ! cried the conductor. "Ah! Ah! Am I poaching on your property? asked Dimali in his most irritating style. There was a significant silence, then Pinuti said in a hollow, strained voice : You insult Lahn. As for me I am betrothed to Signorina Rosati. "Perhaps the shoe pinches there, responded Dimali, laughing villainously. Then I heard no more. Later I could see that the Rosati had become Dimali s enemy. A VOCAL ABELARD 185 Evidently Pinutf had told her of the tenor s nasty speech, for she never noticed Dimali except when singing with him. Lahn seemed conscious of a change in the moral temperature and avoided her former chum; beyond doubt she was succumbing to the fervour of the tenor. Things couldn t go on this way much longer. I told Negri so. He only laughed and said I had too much imagination, at the same time bidding me not to mix up in the affair. Each day Pinuti grew gloomier, and when not conducting was scheming. He was constantly with Rosati, and they watched the other pair of lovers like detectives. These were aware of the espionage, yet never acted as if they wished to be alone. Like true Italians they made love in public and parted every night after a public embrace that made Rosati wince and Pinuti turn pale. What extraordinary reasons had these people for objecting to the love of the tenor and contralto? Was Pinuti also in love with the brunette? Or, perhaps the soprano was really in love with the tenor and jealous of the coquettish Lahn. I couldn t make it out. Suddenly to my amazement, happiness reigned in our little circle. The conductor threw off his dark mood and sparkled with jests and cheerfulness. Rosati, too, forgot the two lovers, and peace once more unfolded her wings above us. " What did I tell you, old Grandmother Goose? jocosely remarked the manager to me; but I held my tongue. I am a Lombard and the Lombardians are naturally suspicious. Soon Pinuti and Dimali became thick as sheep at pasture and continually drinking and pledging each other in strong wine. Dimali was a rois terer who always drank too much while Pinuti, the man 1 86 STEEPLEJACK from Ravenna, was too cool-headed to be affected by his potations. The two women were once more on good terms, and I was simply a bewildered looker-on in how do you say it? Si ! in Vienna. I knew it couldn t last, but I was not, I swear to you, prepared for what followed. One night, after the lovers had literally torn them selves apart, Dimali went with Pinuti to the wine-house. I was soon off to bed, for we had been singing Rigoletto, and I was tired. It must have been long after midnight when the sound of footsteps awoke me, followed by a noise as if some one were lurching from wall to wall. A moment later, I heard Dimali s voice, thick with wine, lustily trolling. A muttered exclamation from Pinuti and the song ceased. Doubtless a hand had been clapped over the tenor s mouth to prevent him from arousing the sleeping household. I arose and opening my door ever so little saw by the dim lamplight the two men careening along. Only Pinuti did not seem to be very drunk, for he easily supported his companion. He led him, much to my surprise, to his own room, and after a few minutes came out into the corridor and, passing me unsuspectingly, went directly to Rosati s door and knocked three times. I counted those knocks, they were like the knocks at the gate in your Shakespeare s Macbeth. In a moment he was admitted, and I smiled at myself for my silly suspicions, sillier fears. "I was turning to my bed when my attention was once more caught by the sound of a door softly closed. I instantly tiptoed to my old post and saw with a sur prise that merged into horror the conductor and the soprano moving towards Pinuti s room wherein lay the drunken Dimali. As he passed under the lamp Pinuti A VOCAL ABELARD 187 paused, put his hand in his pocket and brought out a black oblong box. "This sinister drama so upset my nerves that I fell on my bed incapable of motion, above all incapable of raising my voice in alarm. But my brain was excru ciatingly alive. I suffered ten thousand hells as I laid there, and years seemed to pass, though I dare say it couldn t have been more than ten minutes before the guilty couple emerged from the blood-stained chamber of crime. Pinuti silently conducted to her room the wretched soprano, Rosati. As they passed me in the semi-darkness they looked like the Scotch family yes, like the Macbeths." The old man trembled at the ghosts his memory had dug up. "And did they murder the tenor?" I interrupted in agitated accents. Agnani hiccoughed, the strong beer was beginning to tell on his venerable brain. He re sponded in mumbling tones. "No, they didn t kill poor Dimali. Worse. He went away in a few weeks. Pinuti was heart-broken when he at last realised that he had been used as a handy tool by the soprano she, too, disappeared soon after. The manager failed, the company broke up, and I" I be came impatient with his drolling evasiveness. "But what became of Dimali?" The now thor oughly intoxicated old ruffian regarded me with his cynical, disconcerting gaze. He asked with a leer: "Have you ever heard Popelli s opera, Abelardo e Eloisa?" "Never." You have missed much. It is a beautiful score. Dimali made the hit of his career in it." I was puzzled. 1 88 STEEPLEJACK "As Abelardo?" "No, in the role of Eloisa." I commanded two more bocks. When he left the cafe he was giving an excellent imitation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, only more dignified. XXII "M LLE NEW YORK" Vance Thompson is a Caveman. Don t be deceived by his books on Woman, Drink, Eat and Grow Thin, or by his activities in Europe with the Y. M. C. A. where Cavemen were needful. He is a Caveman, des pite his poetry and prose. I first met him at the old Eden Musee on Twenty-third Street, in 1893, where he put on a pantomime of his own with his wife, Mile. Severine, and Pilar Morin in the cast. He was writing for The Commercial Advertiser; later he joined the staff of The Musical Courier. Then he went to France as cor respondent. He published his French Portraits while on The Musical Courier. But it is of his Mile. New York that I would speak. Modelled after some of the Paris weeklies, audacious, fearing neither God nor man, nor the printer, yet this fortnightly was unlike any publica tion I have ever seen. To-day collectors know it; a complete set is hard to come by and the price is high. The first series comprises eleven numbers, the second four. Vance Thompson, Thomas Fleming, illus trator, Thomas Powers, illustrator, and myself comprised the staff. There was no office except under our hats, and the publisher mailed the copies. Frankly, I wonder how we escaped Anthony Comstock. Perhaps our "precious" prose saved us. But the illustrations! Simply gorgeous. The "mighty line" of Fleming, the tricky humour and skill of Powers still a force among New York caricaturists the wicked attacks of Editor 189 1 90 STEEPLEJACK Thompson on society and government and women, all these made Mile. New York unique. The make-up, too, of the sheet was unusual. Printed in colours, with wide margins, there were tiny pictures across the letter-press, and impertinent marginal comment. In a word, Mile. New York was more Parisian than Paris. It cost us a lot. We had to dive down "into our jeans" to pay the printer and paper-man. But we had lots of fun. It was a safety-valve for our rank egotism and radi calism. Every institution was attacked save the church. Philip Hale wrote a masterpiece in miniature about Jack the Ripper, entitled "The Baffled Enthusiast." We had a Philip Hale cult then. No wonder. An artist in prose, he literally educated Boston in the gentle art of paganism. Why, even in such a deadly task as invent ing analytical notes to the Boston Symphony Orchestra programmes he brings a touch that lightens the inherent dryness of the subject. Papa Krehbiel, as each number of Mile. New York appeared would run his fingers through his blond curls and desperately exclaim : "What are you boys up to?" We didn t know ourselves. Possibly to startle people. We didn t succeed either in startling or in making the enterprise a paying one. Mile. New York faded from the news-stands. Marc Blumenberg gener ously came to the rescue. At a loss he published the last section of four issues. We gave up, and after the shouting was over, rather the wailing of the mourners, the casualty list was depressing. Eventually all in debtedness was cancelled. We had the experience and fifteen copies of a costly literary and artistic experi ment. And Mile. New York was both literary and artis tic. When the young chaps nowadays talk about Free Verse, I mind me of the verse we printed twenty-three "M LLE NEW YORK" 191 years ago. (We began in 1895.) When a clever literary hoax is discussed I recall the poetry, personality, above all, the ferocious portrait of Lingwood Evans, an Aus tralian rough-neck, writing decadent verse that alter nated between the muffled morbidities of Verlaine and the roaring free-verse of Verhaeren. It was one of the most successful of hoaxes. From editors and librarians came pouring in queries as to the new man. His poetry was copied, praised, and decried. Anarchist, libertine, mystic he was. " The Father of Livor " and "The Avenue of Farthingales," the terrific and sinister parody on "My Country, Tis of Thee" made people sit up. If an I. W. W. boasted such a poet to-day, he would get short shrift from the government. Yet it was pure fun- making of a fine quality. Vance Thompson was Ling- wood Evans, Tom Fleming made the woodcuts, so vital and original in design. Vance introduced European writers and painters who since have become celebrated. Knut Hamsun, the Pole, Stanislaw Przybyszewski not a fiction, this name, but the author of Homo Sapiens, which has been trans lated Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Verlaine, Verhaeren, and the entire lyre of the younger French, Italian, Spanish, and Belgian poets. Edvard Munch, a powerful Norwegian artist, and Strindberg, the Swede, probably had their names printed for the first time in America in the pages of Mile. New York. Rupert Hughes wrote his most brilliant short -story for us, When Pan Moves to Harlem, in which he relates a nocturnal adventure of Slab-sided Sal told in purest Americanese. (O. Henry is insipid compared with this tale, a forerunner to many.) I looked after the new names in music. Thompson wrote some musical verse and in all sorts of free-rhythms. 192 STEEPLEJACK He had been class-poet at Princeton, but that stony fact did not prevent him from developing. His slender volume, Verse, I have by me and read. My favourite is his Ego Book, replete with charm and wisdom. Drink and Keep Sober the original title is amusing, and like his brochure on Woman is stuffed with fallacies. Except in Dickens and in Zola (Doctor Pascal, the taking- off of Uncle Antoine Macquart by spontaneous com bustion), there is nothing to equal the explosion of a young Philadelphian on the terrace at Monte Carlo. It is simply joyous. Rum did it. And at table sur rounded by his family, who were spattered with the re mains of the unhappy drunkard. I wonder how this "awful warning" escaped the eagle eye of Billy Sunday. As for the woman question, I can only quote a few sen tences from Mile. New York (an editorial, first fortnight in November, 1898). Mind you, a man has a right to change his mind, but he should not leave behind him an armoury of arguments to refute himself. He did this. I was then the "Gynolatrist." How he mocked my old- fashioned attitude towards Woman ! Among other things this is what he wrote: "Here in the United States the worship of Woman is carried to ludicrous lengths. . . . And perhaps in these days when the hens hold conventions and their fritinancy disturbs the ears of thoughtful men, it may not be super fluous to iterate the old truth that woman is physically, mentally and morally inferior to man. She bears a cer tain resemblance to the masculine type. She is, indeed, an undeveloped man. Her place in the scale of human life is midway between the adolescent and the viril. As a matter of fact, her entire physical constitution fine skin, frail, bony structure, beardless face, feeble "M LLE NEW YORK" 193 voice is nearer to that of the boy than the man. This is no place for the consideration of the physiological proof of the statement. The proportion of red and white cor puscles, the caudal vertebrae, resembling those of the embryo or the ape; her very method of breathing, which is thoracic and not from the diaphragm ; the shape of the head, like that of a child or a Kaffir, the grey substance of the brain, lighter than in man on all these points and a dozen others the craniologists, biologists and an thropologists have spoken with authority. Woman s physical inferiority to man is a fact beyond question. . . . She is indeed an interesting study, this adolescent animal with the great white (not grey) brain, the phleg matic senses, and the dulled finger-tips. But what a damnable noise she makes at this century s end ! . . . In letters, painting, science, music, sculpture nothing. When with simian the feminine is nearer the simian than the masculine ease they imitate the gestures of an artist one must always look in the background for a man. Behind George Sand loom the pitiful figures of Jules Sandeau, De Musset, Chopin; behind George Eliot one sees the bearded face of Lewes; and so when a fe male novelist deteriorates or improves, takes up a new subject or dons a new manner, one need but lightly say: Eh bien! She has taken a new lover. . . . Sorotic women argue that man and woman started equal; that it is only man s tyranny which has degraded woman in the scale of life. So be it. Perhaps this is as good a way as any other of satisfying the feminine mind. It begs the question by acknowledging the very inferiority at issue. And when will woman overtake man in his ascent? A and B start from a given point. A travels at a speed of ten miles a day; B travels at a rate of six i 9 4 STEEPLEJACK miles a day; when will B overtake A? ... The hen has a right to cackle only on one occasion when she lays an egg; she never has a right to crow, and by reason of imperfect thoracic development she never can crow. . . . Dear God ! the crowned and laurelled eunuchs of American literature professors with dandruff on the coat-collar, and bearded ladies, and the chaste, pantel- leted spinsters, and the little, hairy poets, all hungry and timid and all bought and sold A man may alter his views twenty times, as a snake sloughs its skin, but when he writes such words, words like the virile ring of crossed blades, then he is primarily a Caveman. Who knows whether as a sexagenarian he may not doff the garb of civilisation and emerge hairy, rugged, in a bearskin, and over his virile shoulders a mighty club ! Beware Woman ! Even in his Woman, the old masculine condescension peeps forth. He al ludes to her as "little woman." In Vishnuland what Vance? I wrote many, so-called prose-poems, seduced by the examples of Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Huysmans. They are to be found scattered through Mile. New York and Melomaniacs. Here is one, never before reprinted, from Mile. New York: "She lay in the Hall of the Mirrors where, repeated in evanescent gestures, her person moved with processional precision. She had disrobed to the accompaniment of soft, hidden music, and to the unconscious miming of the mirrors; something of fear and something of shame were in her heart as she pulled to her pretty chin the royal counterpane. It was the first time she had ever Iain in a palace, and the night seemed to hum with a "M LLE NEW YORK" 195 thousand harps. It was the music and the beating of her heart that she heard, and she wondered most at the heavily scented atmosphere, and smiled at the face that smiled down at her from the shining ceiling. Her plump body sank in relaxing curves; the very couch seemed to embrace her. Then she heard footsteps and dared no longer gaze into the ironic mirror overhead. As the prince approached love loomed nigh. There was no tenderness in his eyes, and his young forehead was slightly wrinkled. It was his nuptial night; for him was waiting a fair girl, whose pulses leapt to the sound of his voice. But he had no words for her when he reached the royal bed that stood in the Hall of the Mirrors. His troubled gaze drove the blood to her heart, when he sat beside her and the music ceased and the mirrors grew grey and misty. She had waited for this moment since her birth; their souls had been woven together by im perial decree, yet now they circled about each other like two tall stars in interstellar depths, bound for eter nity to tread in the stately dance of the spheres, aeons apart, and destined never to embrace. With out stretched, despairing arms she welcomed her image in the air above her, and her impassioned, sorrowful glance married her to her own soul. The prince told her in falsetto tones of his desire for rest, and she welcomed him as one would a pet poodle; beside his sleepy escaping soul she lay in the Hall of the Mirrors, where, repeated in evanescent gestures, her person moved in processional sadness." What does it mean? Do you remember the story I told you of that farewell stag dinner given at the Maison Felix to a certain tenor by his friends principally 196 STEEPLEJACK brothers-in-law before he married an operetta soprano? My cryptic prose is the sequel of that marriage, which was speedily dissolved, because it was not consummated. But no one would know this from my tortured style. I was very "precious" then, and suffered, though briefly, from the green-sickness of too ambitious writers. I tried my hand at all sorts of imitations. I was practising my scales in public. I imitated Maupassant in a tale, Fog, my first and last essay in that genre of demi-monde; imitated Zangwill in The Shofar Blew at Sunset, which brought from him a very pleasant letter; imitated myself in Music, the Conqueror, and in Frus trate, both of which appeared in Melomaniacs. How we rioted in extravagant comparisons ! I was mad over Maggie Cline and in pompous prose I saluted her as A Brunhilda of the Bowery, I wrote of her, and Apollo, forgive me ! "As Whitman was a great natural source, an impulsive in our native literature, so Maggie Cline, the exponent of muscularity in song, is in the musical world. ... At the magic of her voice the sights and sounds of the present fade and you are straightway transported to Eldridge or Hester Street and witness with beating heart and brain on fire the downfall of that good man and true, the doughty Donovan, or the epical fracas at McCIoskey s ("Throw him down, McCIoskey !") I treated her as if she were a Lilli Lehmann or a Sarah Bernhardt. It was saluted as a "new note" in criticism. Yvette Guilbert didn t escape. I plastered her with epi thets until her own mother wouldn t have recognised her. "She is a singing Zola, this Yvette Guilbert. She sings of the rogues, beggars, outcasts, drunkards, the shards and estrays of life, the human offal, the gutter s refuse. She is a singing Zola, this Yvette Guilbert; a porno- "M LLE NEW YORK" 197 graphic Zola, a realist Zola, a Zola of bestiality supreme, a Zola of the love that lies in wait and supplicates with a grimace." It must be remembered that Yvette then was not the sweet singer of old French lyrics. She was the "modern" Yvette, a wonderful "diseuse," and thrice as fascinating as in her latest incarnation. XXIII MY DREAM-BARN About this time I began to suspect myself. My spiritual axis had shifted. There was somewhere a leakage of moral gas on my premises as Henry James remarked of D Annunzio. I had become dissatisfied with my life. Why all this interest in the work of other men ! Couldn t I play off my own bat? Vance Thomp son encouraged me to write a book. So did Philip Hale. (I must blame my subsequent crimes on some one.) Why waste hours every day hearing music, seeing pic tures, and worse, writing of them? What s Hecuba to me? I was becoming neurotic. I could sympathise with Berlioz when he sneered at the Sonata. Why just a sonata or a symphony? Why music-drama or Shake speare? Why not rum and rebellion, or gals and galli vanting? I knew by that time I couldn t have all these things. What shall it profit a man if he gains his soul but loseth love? I was seizing the shadow for the sub stance, like the dog in the fable. I couldn t marry more than one woman at a time because of certain social prejudices. And sometimes a man s wife won t let him marry the girl he likes (women are so unreasonable). What was I to do? Which way to turn? Sensibly, for the first time in my life, I concluded that my only hope was a philistine life. Poor old bourgeois, always getting pounded by poetical Bolsheviki; in reality the bourgeois possessing horse-sense. Flaubert warned his pupil, Guy de Maupassant, that to achieve masterpieces he must 198 MY DREAM-BARN 199 be peaceful in his life that he might be violent in his art. Zola swears that Flaubert led the life of a bourgeois, writing instead of selling groceries; Flaubert, who his life long pursued the bourgeois with gibes ! Vance Thompson used to say that an artist, whether poet or painter, musician or sculptor, should marry the feather bed type of woman. She protects and consoles; also cooks a good dinner. When artist mates with artist then comes the tug of tongues. No family can harbour two prima donnas that is, not without fur flying. The artistic temperament is "catty," whether male or female. Hence these tears. Therefore, I steered a middle course. It was in 1895 I began to study hard. Again I drew up a formidable manifesto for my private use. I assailed my laziness (of course, I ve never been lazy. I ve never had the time. It is my spiritual sloth I mean.) Goaded by my self-admitted mediocrity, I determined to be a contemporary, if nothing more. There was leaking gas, and my moral meter had failed to register it. If I had gone down on my shin bones, and echoed DurtaPs de spairing prayer in A Rebours, by Huysmans, it would have been better for the health of my soul. Do you recall it? "Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on^the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient faith." It has a liturgical ring, this invocation. But, as I wrote of Baudelaire, I had patiently built up my soul as a perverse bird builds its nest: bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray of roses, a pebble s sparkle, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of incense and verdigris, and for a ground- 200 STEEPLEJACK tone, the abomination of desolation. My soul was a cemetery of the seven sorrows. I had rented an Ivory Tower, but I had lost the latch-key. When She beckoned to me from the topmost cell, my Princess of Mirrors and melancholy, I could only shrug despairing shoulders. I was a steeplejack but there were no step-ladders where with to climb to her. A man can t be both a steeplejack and a carpenter. I could only whistle down to the wind and the Ideal never comes in answer to whistling. I even mixed moral values by quoting what Coleridge attrib uted to Sir Joshua Reynolds: "The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it." As I hadn t the power to form the taste of my neighbour, much less that of a nation, I proceeded to corrupt my own. I muddled the Seven Arts in a grand old stew. I saw music, heard colour, tasted architecture, smelt sculpture, and fingered per fume. A mad carnival of the senses. I sympathised with Des Esseintes in La-Bas, though I didn t care for his "mouth-organ" of various liqueurs. But I believed that an art could be interpreted in the terms of another. I read a book by Suarez de Mendoza, L Audition Coloree, to relieve my anxiety. It is a search ing study in false secondary sensations, and deals with "colour-hearing," or "pseudo-photoesthesie." This re sults from association of ideas early established. We have, most of us, been reminded of some far-away hap pening, usually sentimental by the odour of faded flowers. The sense of smell plays a commanding role in all sex manifestations. The Fathers of the Church knew this: hence their stern admonitions to women using heady sensual perfumes. Certain musical tones evoke certain colours. And if you investigate you will discover that the aesthetic terminology of painting resembles that of MY DREAM-BARN 201 music. I believed in employing the whole keyboard of analogies, so my criticism often proved trying to my readers, but not to me. I needs must educate them. The arts are separate, yet, as Walter Pater says, all aspire to a condition of music, as our sun and planets travel towards a central sun in some remote constella tion. But I abused the scheme, and I am not sorry. "You write of music as if it were a living thing," said Arthur Symons to me in a memorable letter. Music is a living thing for me, as living as any vital organism. It lives when it enters the porches of my ears, and it is a living memory. To write about it is quite hopeless. You can describe a picture, a statue, a cathedral, and quote a poem; but you may not describe a symphony. The best way out of the dilemma is to follow in the foot steps of the music-reporter. Tell me a news story. If you attempt a subjective explanation, you run the risk of not being intelligible. The technical method has its perils; it is understood only by musicians. None the less did I persevere in my endeavour to achieve a syn thesis of the arts. The result may be foreseen. Yet, I have heard music that gave me the illusion of light, of air, music that was as diaphanous as the spider s web in the gold of the setting sun; music as keen as a Damascene blade that halves a lace veil, as melancholy as the thoughts of a woman in travail but it demands high courage to make one s self ridiculous, and to write in such a style would be grazing the fatuous. Chopin and Shelley are alike to me, as are Wagner and Browning, Raphael and Mozart, Beethoven and Shakespeare. I lived at the corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy- sixth Street for fifteen years in the CarroIIton, one of the first tall apartment houses in that section of the city. 202 STEEPLEJACK Big old-fashioned rooms, high windows, stone balconies on the tenth floor, gave me plenty of light, air, and a view that was inspiring. There were few obstructions in 1899 between my Dream-Barn and Staten Island. I could sweep all the East River and the Hudson, too. I could see the harbour maculated with craft, see the bay, the Statue of Liberty, steamships going and coming. From my wide windows facing Central Park, I caught the copper gleam of the erect synagogue at Seventy-sixth Street and the Avenue; beyond was the placid toy lake with its rim of moving children ; the trees smoothly swept in a huge semi-circle, at their verge was the driveway. The glow of summer afternoons, the purity of the air, and the glancing metal on the rolling cars and carriages made a gay picture for me. My studio was rather bare. I hate cluttered-up rooms. The severe line of the low bookcases was relieved by the curves of my beloved Steinway grand. A few pictures, Ernest Lawson land scapes, a head by George Luks, a study by Thomas Sully completed the ensemble. Add a desk, once the property of Thaddeus Stevens, and the inevitable cast-iron lamp depending from an oak beam, and you may realise that it was not a difficult task to write a dozen books amid such surroundings. Only those skylights ! The roof was almost composed of glass. There was an excellent northern light for artists old-fashioned enough to believe in any particular lighting; and during a rain-storm the patter and swish kept me awake. I ve heard sentimental persons say: "Oh! to be here as the rain gently drips. What an inspiration !" But it seldom dripped, it usually cannonaded, and during a thunder-storm the lightning flashes were too intimate for nervous people. I recall one night when Rafael Joseffy was there. He looked MY DREAM-BARN 203 under the pianoforte, saying it was the one spot where he could escape the blaze of the electric tempest. Francis Hackett, the critic, came in, and Edward Marsh, of Mac- millan s, and Frederick James Gregg, of The Evening Sun, but we could not persuade Joseffy to stay. He said that we might as well be on the deck of a ship, which was true, and when the building rocked in a hurricane, the illusion of being afloat was strengthened. I loved my old Dream-Barn, and, as one chap remarked, a news paper man lives on views, and I had from my windows not one, but a dozen. Life and letters, pictures and music ! They were woven into a close strand. I read, I wrote, I played. An excel lent epitaph. I was forced to create my own atmosphere, else grow stale and perish in the vacuum. The artistic roots of our life are not deeply bedded in the national soul. I was, and still am, a lover of the new Irish litera ture. I wrote much of Yeats, George Russell, and Synge, later of James Stephens and James Joyce. I believe that George Moore on his native soil is better than he is in England, or even France, which is saying a lot. Ireland not only has produced her greatest novelist in Moore, but her most alluring lyric poet in Yeats. I met Yeats at the home of John Quinn. Synge, with his Maeterlinc- kian atmosphere, which modulates into the melancholy mists of the Quid Sod, created a new thrill. James Stephens and his rich fantasy, squeezing golden wine from leanest grapes, a genuine Irish genius in whose heart bubbles fantasy and tears; and Joyce, a gloriously bitter Banshee, wailing Ireland and the Irish in a voice all his own these and many of the minor lyrists quite overflowed our horizons. Contemporary English litera ture has nothing to equal these men in originality, raci- 204 STEEPLEJACK ness, spiritual depth, or magic. Edgar Saltus always has been one of my pet authors. He is elect among lovers of style. Setting aside his fiction, what writer, with the exception of William James, can make such charming and conclusive expositions of philosophy as Mr. Saltus? And without pretensions as a professional metaphysician. We must go to France for his counterpart. I possess, thanks to him, one of the rare impressions of his Oscar Wilde: An Idler s Impression, which fairly sums up the personality and gifts of that unhappy Irishman. Mr. Saltus writes as a coda: " Apart from that, it" he is speaking of morality "has nothing whatever to do with the arts, except the art of never displeasing, which in itself is the whole secret of mediocrity. Oscar Wilde lacked that art, and I can think of no better epitaph for him." This is Wilde in an epigram. But Saltus is our most brilliant writer, and epigrams may be expected from him. I have no grievances. I am what I made myself, therefore, I blame myself for my shortcomings. As I loathe the brand of any particular school or movement in art, so I detest the fellow who lays the blame of his troubles on some one else usually his wife. Friends have praised me, but I don t deserve that praise. I never aimed at anything and if I anticipated others in "discovering" presumptuous word certain of the new men in Europe and America, it was because of my critical curiosity; also because a newspaper man has a scent for news. I mention "America" as some critics believe me to be on my knees before European culture. The late Percival Pollard, a capital critic, devoted a chapter to me in his book, Their Day in Court. He said that I neglected Americans, when, as I told him, I gained my MY DREAM-BARN 205 living by writing about the painting, composing, litera ture, and modelling of my fellow-countrymen, in The Etude, Musical Courier, Recorder, Commercial Advertiser, Sun, Times, and the Philadelphia Press. For nearly four decades I have done little else but praise or blame our native talents. Many a swan has turned goose, but I ve had white swans also. American painters and sculptors in particular have I studied, from Arthur B. Davies and George Grey Barnard to the fledgling illustrator or clay modeller of yesterday. I leave the American composers to tell my tale. Nor do I fear that I shall be accused of tepidity concerning the merits of our literature. Hum bug I hate. And one venerable humbug was punctured when our new school of landscape in this form America is eminent proved triumphant. I quite agree with Willard Metcalf when he declared that the further back we go in the history of American art, the worse we find the painting. This is not only true of the Hudson and kindred schools, but it holds good in the case of our por trait-painters of the past century. Such leathery effi gies ! I never could understand the superstitious ven eration entertained for second-rate painters like Gilbert Stuart, Copley, Peale, and the rest of the imitators of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence. One brush stroke of Raeburn is worth the lot of them. A Sargent or Chase portrait can t be mentioned in the same breath with them. They manufactured historical por traits, like the wooden heads of Washington by Stuart, and it is as historical painters only that they possess ar tistic justification. Mediocrities all. And mediocrities were the mid-century Landscapists. Imitators of Con stable and Gainsborough and Claude. George Inness is an example of over-rated merit. He was an amiable 206 STEEPLEJACK mediocrity who saw our native scene through English spectacles. Yet he fetches big prices. The mystic vision of Albert Ryder, the grim power of Winslow Homer, or the sumptuous paint quality of Lawson are absent from his work. Our new landscape-painters have used their own eyes, and paint from a personal palette. Their pre decessors are bogies for the art dump in auction-rooms. It must be nearly twenty years ago, anyhow eighteen, that I entertained Vladimir de Pachmann in my Dream- Barn on Madison Avenue at Seventy-sixth Street. The tenth floor, a room as big and as lofty as a cathedral. Alas ! where are such old-fashioned apartments to-day ? After eating a duck, a kotchka, cooked Polish fashion, and borsch, beet soup, with numerous Slavic side dishes, preceded by the inevitable zakuska those appetite- slaying bonnes bouches de Pachmann fiercely demanded cognac. I was embarrassed. Not drinking spirits, I had inconsiderately forgotten the taste of others. De Pachmann, who is a child at heart, too often a naughty child, cried to heaven that I was a hell of a host ! He said this in Russian, then in French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, English, and wound up with a hearty Hebrew "Raca!" which may mean hatred, or revenge, certainly something not endearing. But the worst was to come. There stood my big Steinway concert grand piano, and he circled about the instrument as if it were a dangerous monster. Finally he sniffed and snapped: "My contract does not permit me to play a Steinway/ I hadn t thought of asking him, fearing Chopin s classic retort after a dinner-party at Paris: "Madame, j ai mange si peu!" Finally I saw the hole in the mill stone, and excused myself. When I returned with a MY DREAM-BARN 207 bottle of abominable cognac, the little man s malicious smile changed to a look of ecstasy, and he was not a drinking man ever, but he was accustomed to his "petit verre" after dining, and was ill-tempered when deprived of it. Such is human nature, something that puritans, pro hibitionists, and other pernicious busybodies will never understand. And then this wizard lifted the fall-board of my piano, and, quite forgetful of that " contract/ began playing. And how he did play ! Ye gods ! Bac chus, Apollo, and Venus, and all other pleasant celestial persons, how you must have revelled when de Pachmann played ! In the more intimate atmosphere of my apart ment his music was of a gossamer web, iridescent, aerial, an seolian harp doubled by a diabolic subtlety. Albert Ross Parsons, one of the few living pupils of Tausig, in reply to my query : How did Joseffy compare with Tausig? answered: "Joseffy was like the multi-coloured mist that encircles a mighty mountain; but beautiful." So Pach- mann s weaving enchantments seemed in comparison to Godowsky s profounder playing. And what did Vladimir, hero of double-notes, play? Nothing but Godowsky, then new to me. Liszt had been his god, but Godowsky was become his living deity. He had studied, mastered, and memorised all those transcen dental variations on Chopin studies, the most significant variations since the Brahms-Paganini scaling of the heights of Parnassus; and I heard for the first time the paraphrase of Weber s "Invitation to the Valse," a much more viable arrangement than Tausig s; also thrice as difficult. However, technique, as sheer technique, does not enter into the musical zone of Godowsky. He has restored polyphony to its central position, thus bettering in that respect Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. I have 208 STEEPLEJACK called attention elsewhere to Godowsky s solo sonata, which evokes images of Chopin and Brahms and Liszt Liszt only in the scherzo. Instead of exhuming such an "ungrateful," unpianistic composition as Tschaikovsky s Sonata in G, pianists of calibre might more profitably introduce the Godowsky work. He is too modest or else too indifferent to put it on his programme. It "lies" so well for the keyboard, yet there is no denying its difficul ties, chiefly polyphonic; the patterns are intricate, though free from the clogging effects of the Brahms sonatas. De Pachmann delighted his two auditors that night from 10 P. M. to 3 A. M. It is safe to wager that the old CarroIIton never heard such music-making before or since. When he left, happy over his triumph I was actually flabbergasted by the new music he whispered: "Hein! What you think! You think I can play this wonderful music? You are mistaken. Wait till you hear Leopold Godowsky play. We are all woodchoppers, compared with him!" Curiously enough, the last is the identical phrase uttered by Anton Rubinstein in regard to Franz Liszt. Perhaps it was a quotation, but de Pachmann meant it. It was the sincerest sentiment I had heard from his often insincere lips. We were all three surprised to find a score of people camping out on the curved stairway and passages, the idealist, a coloured lad who ran the elevator, having succumbed to sleep. This impromptu Godowsky recital by a marvellous pian ist, for de Pachmann was a marvel in his time, must have made a hit with my neighbours. It did with me, and when Godowsky returned to New York I had last heard him in the middle nineties of the previous century I lost no time in hearing him play in his inimita ble manner those same works. A pianist who can win MY DREAM-BARN 209 the heartiest admiration of such contemporaries as de Pachmann and Joseffy and Josef Hofmann I could adduce many other names must be a unique artist. And that Godowsky is. Among the younger American poets I find one of genuine importance, not alone because of his potentiali ties, but because of his actual performance. George Cabot Lodge, son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, died in the very harvest time of his undoubted genius. In his Introduction to the two volumes of the Poems and Dramas, Theodore Roosevelt has never written with such a mingling of perspicacity and tempered enthusiasm. Young Lodge was a poet and his versatility may be noted in these books. In his sonnets and lyrics he paid the ac customed tribute of youth to influences such as Milton, Wordsworth, Meredith, Browning, Tennyson, and Swin burne. He could mimic Walt Whitman, and he early succumbed to Schopenhauer and Baudelaire. In at least one of his dramas, I find the cosmic ecstasy of Nietzsche, the doctrine of the Eternal Return. But Lodge had assimilated a half-dozen cultures, and had passed far out to sea the perilous rocks of imitation upon which so many lesser talents have come to grief. When we consider as an achievement his "Herakles," we are amazed. The poet, the Maker is before us, and in re- clothing the antique and tragic myth in his own lovely garment of speech, he is, nevertheless, a modern of his own times. I know few poets with this sense of the vital present, added to a divination and an evocation of "old unhappy far-off things, and battle long ago." His figures are not fashioned with scholastic black magic, but are living beings, loving, hating, suffering, and in conflict 210 STEEPLEJACK with ineluctable destiny. He had the lyric art and also the architectural. He was a singer and a builder of the lofty rhyme. George Cabot Lodge had voice and vision. His Life, by Henry Adams, proves him to have been a young man beloved by his friends, among whom were Langdon Mitchell and the late Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. I can only add here my humble mite of admiration and affection to the names of the vanished genius. "Men need not be common because there are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what dulness in their future! . . . more piece meal pictures, more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up its voice in a boast, or promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility. He promised the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just built. But what the new ness is he cannot tell." Ponder these words. They occur in an essay by Alice Meynell, entitled "Decivilised," and contained in a slender volume called The Rhythm of Life. Most of us dislike, as did James Russell Lowell, a "certain condescension in foreigners," yet the mellow wisdom of this Englishwoman should not be missed. The deadly hand of vulgarity is upon the Seven Arts. Never have the lowlands so overflowed their ooze and muddied waters above the level of our once aristocratic highlands of taste. Music alone has thus far resisted the invasion of low ideals, but in opera the edifice is already tottering. Poetry, fiction, the theatres Alas ! But I am opti mistic withal. No nation boasting such high heroisms, no nation after such a baptism of blood and fire can long dally in the swamp of the banal or the vulgar. And I MY DREAM-BARN 211 know that I am not alone in my hope of an approaching renascence of the arts in our beloved America. New York, like London, is a city where you can dis appear from the view of your own little world by simply crossing to the other side of the street. When I left the theatres for art, I also left Broadway and patrolled Fifth Avenue, which is picture-land. I was reported "missing" by my friends the actors, dramatic critics, and managers. When I ceased writing about music and musicians and devoted my time to literary criticism, I was supposed to be in Europe. Curious vast city, where you are dead if you stay away from your usual haunts a day! (I fancy the wish is father to the thought.) Yet I never was idle, not even in Europe. I was breasting in another current; that s all. There were rumours that I had re tired to a monastery. I read this in a musical journal. "What a recluse our erstwhile ubiquitous friend, James Huneker, has become." I was not a recluse, I merely stayed away from Carnegie Hall and the Opera House, where musical folk mostly do congregate, hence the hasty inference. It is true, the story that one family can live next door to another for years and not know names. That is a little trait of Gotham. We are not neighbourly, and while I remember Yorkville and Harlem when people sat on their "stoops" of summer nights, that time has gone. New Cosmopolis is no place for provincial customs. I mention this "recluse" story because I have been often teased by my friends on the subject. When I turned up at the opera, I would be greeted with "Hello, Farmer!" I begin my morning with Bach, end with Bach. Bach the Alpha and Omega of music. But en joyable as it is to read the charming fiction of an un known listener, an inscription in one of his books by 212 STEEPLEJACK Arthur Symons is still more gratifying. It runs: "To James Huneker in memory of the night when he played Chopin at Lauderdale Mansions. May 31, 1905." I had played there in May, 1903, when I first met the dis tinguished Englishman, one of the few critics since Walter Pater who writes criticism as if it were a fine art and not a "dismal science." I love the high places of our world. I am never giddy when standing on balconies, or looking over precipices, or swooping aloft, in an airplane. Possibly fifteen years on a tenth floor accustomed my eyes to vast perspectives. But, contrariwise, when I am in a small room, or under ground, or in a cave, even though it be the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, I feel that death is not afar. Once in the catacombs at Rome I nearly suffocated, more from the idea than the reality, of being buried alive. I believe the name of this aversion to enclosed space is Claustro phobia, and I am convinced that in my case it is a pro drome of apoplexy. Important, if true. Yet the trait may have influenced my mental attitude towards the arts. I shan t say that I have no prejudices, for then I should be a colourless monster. It is his prejudices that makes vital a critic s work. George Moore has rather horridly suggested that a critic is always remembered by his mistakes which are his prejudices expressed. Catholicity in taste and judgment has been my aim, sometimes my undoing. The half is better than the whole, but for me the too much is too little. Again a case of personal temperament. XXIV MY ZOO In my artistic and literary Zoo there are many queer creatures, but it is a mistake to suppose them all freaks. Brahms and Stendhal are not freaks, though, with the innate perversity that lurks in the heart of critics, I was asked why I didn t write of Beethoven when I had made an elaborate study of Brahms, or about Balzac, when I revived the name of Henry Beyle. My answer is simplicity itself: because at the time I preferred Brahms and Stendhal. Not that I placed them near the thrones of Beethoven and Balzac, but as worthy of the sincere attention of a critic; besides, Beethoven and Balzac, like Shakespeare, have been the themes of the master minds of criticism: Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Georg Brandes. It was the same when I defended Ibsen, and "discovered" Strindberg. I suppose that my titles aroused the notion that the talented men and women of whom I wrote were semi-lunatics. Nietzsche died a melancholy invalid, but he was never mad; neurasthenic, I should say. Maeter linck is the sanest of men. So was Liszt, so Chopin. However, I am not setting up an alibi for the sanity of my favourite artists and writers. It is not necessary. There is, take it by and large, more madness among medi ocre persons. A little madness is a necessary ingredient in the composition of genius. Nor do I claim that my apes, peacocks, unicorns, egoists, visionaries, melo- maniacs and steeplejacks are all geniuses. Again, medi ocrity is to the fore, a mediocrity tempered by eccen- 213 2i 4 STEEPLEJACK tricities. There is no bigger humbug than the fellow who sports the insignia of "genius," the long hair and doubtful linen, the alcoholism and the boresome boast ing. As Charlie McLellan said of one man who thought he looked like Shakespeare because he had a high, bald forehead, and hair worn as in the Chandos portrait "I dare him to keep his hat on !" The shining dome exposed the man, and made an impression on the unthinking; his hat on and he became Mr. Everyman. Shave some of the Shavians and naught remains. But I never bothered with the externals of such "geniuses." My most successful book was Iconoclasts (1905). It is my "best seller," though Chopin is a close second. My favourite book is Egoists, consequently, it has been the most assailed. I have never attempted the didactic, not even in my various educational editions of Chopin, Brahms, Tschaikovsky, or Richard Strauss. I collabor ated with Rafael Joseffy in the new Schirmer edition of Chopin, but confined my analysis to non-technicalities, though in my Chopin, two-thirds of the volume is purely technical. In the case of Egoists, I let the grouping sig nify its individualistic tendency. William James in one of his letters complains that the book lacked "conse- quenz," to which I cheerfully agreed. I prefer to sug gest rather than explain; it is an oblique method, but so am I constituted. That is why I am, in a minor degree, a symbolist. The majority of critical writings, here and in England, are as insipid as a bald hoarding. In France criticism is an art, and I have long worshipped at the shrines of Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Anatole France. But my favourite books, because they were despised and rejected, are my Melomaniacs and Visionaries. Mr. H. L. Mencken, brilliant and individual critic, to whom I owe MY ZOO 215 more than a lakh of metaphorical rupees for his interest in my work, wrote that I hadn t much talent for fic tion. And it was the one thing of which I had hoped he would say the reverse; not that I think I have, but when you possess a weakness it is always nice to be coddled. But Mr. Mencken is no coddler. Furthermore, he best likes a little volume of parodies, entitled Old Fogy, which first appeared in The Etude. None the less, I shall not lose courage. One of my stories, The Lord s Prayer in B, is in three foreign languages. It was written while musi cal tones drove me frantic. Hence the leading-motive; torture by tonal reiteration. Octave Mirbeau used the same theme in his Le Jardin des Supplices ; a bell is tolled over the head of a criminal in China, who dies from the noise. My Lord s Prayer in B first appeared in The Musical Courier, March, 1896; later it headed the tales comprised in Melomaniacs. Therein I tried to bottle my chimeras. After the book came out, I met Jeannette Gilder, and she reproached me: "You of all men, from you I expected the real fiction about music." I replied: "It is not only about music, but it is music itself," and then wondered what I meant. I had avoided the senti mental raptures of the Charles Auchester and The First Violin type of musical novels, endeavouring to make music the hero. That is why Arthur Symons said that I wrote as if music was a living thing. I know of no other book of musical fiction, that is, music dealt with imaginatively, like Melomaniacs. It derives a little from E. T. W. Hoffmann and his grotesques, and it leans a lot on Poe, who with Chopin was my earliest passion. But the treatment is my own. The trouble is that these stories demand both a trained musical reader and a lover of fiction not a combination to be found growing on 216 STEEPLEJACK grapevines. Visionaries is less novel. In it The Third Kingdom is the best invention, and that may have un consciously stemmed from that golden casuist, Anatole France. But enough of this gossip about my step children, my paper hostages to fortune. I have referred to my writings for one reason: I believe such references will help my publishers up the steep and stony path of their profession. One s publishers should be encour aged. By giving your precious ideas between covers to a world eager for them they also, after infinite pains, may earn an humble competency. You have done a good deed. XXV MY BEST FRIEND Enemies are sometimes friends in disguise. Listen ! When I heard the news I was writing a letter to John Quinn, my legal counsel, in which I exposed with merciless logic and rhetorical emphasis the deceit and villainy of Fulbert. The thing was as plain as daylight. Not a link in my chain of wrathful accusations seemed weak or misplaced. The man was a liar; perhaps worse; in any case, a cold-hearted wretch. Had he not said in public print and under a flaring, a vulgar head-line that an aunt had been the muse of Ibsen, hence my admiration for the Norwegian and his work. It was pure falsehood. My aunt probably read Tupper and Felicia Hemans, and while she had been in Norway she was the wife of a sea-captain, a Norwegian, Thrane by name she may have seen the poet, but that she played the flattering role of his muse is doubtful. His own wife s sister, Camilla CoIIett, was one for a brief period. It was the way Fulbert put the thing that had infuriated me. And as I paused in my writing, Tarver rushed in with the evening paper. Fulbert was dead. Yes, Fulbert, my chief foe, the foe that had watched and blocked every move in my career, had dropped dead after leav ing his office, where, no doubt, he had written another of his vile attacks upon my new book. But Fulbert dead ! I turned towards the window so as to keep from my friend the emotion that wrinkled my lips. Fulbert 217 218 STEEPLEJACK dead. At last. Had I even longed for this consumma tion? How often had I not prayed to the gods, prayed in the night that the malicious devil who boldly signed himself Fulbert, would, when besotted by drink, drug himself into imbecility. And now he was dead, the venomous dog. "Fulbert dead?" I said in almost a jocular tone. "What in the world will I do for an enemy? You know, Tarver, he was mine ancient enemy, and I hold as a theory that a man s enemies do him less ill than his friends, and " "For heaven s sake, stop your cold blooded chatter and let the poor devil rest/ 1 When we reached the street Tarver proposed a drink, but I refused. I did not feel in the humour. He lifted cynical eyebrows. "Oh, very well, if you expect the same fate as your friend Fulbert. I ll leave you to your meditations. I suppose you will send a wreath to the funeral." And this from the man who a moment before had called me cold blooded. I was glad to be alone. What beastly wit. No, I wouldn t send flowers, nor would I write to the widow. I had known her long before her marriage to Fulbert. Poor Fulbert. Well, why not? The fellow was dead, and as Helen had married him, it was her affair pshaw ! He had never wanted her really. Only Fulbert. Why that particular man? Why Fulbert? I walked rapidly, unconsciously frowning. Several ac quaintances passed, but I pretended not to see them. They smiled. Decidedly they took me for a queer bird. All writers are queer. One man familiarly hooked my arm with his stick: "Hello there, old chappie. I see your friend has passed in his chips. Going to wear crepe?" "Oh! for God s sake!" my humour was black; "don t mock at death." "Phew!" was all I heard as I turned MY BEST FRIEND 219 into a side street, ruminating on that already old yet ever new text: Fulbert dead. At the end of a fortnight I began to suffer from a certain inquietude. Some poison was fermenting in my veins. My nerves played me tricks. I could not work. Instead, I stared at the city, streaked like a map, beneath my tenth-floor apartment. I could see the two cities meet at the Battery, and I watched the white, fleecy cloud-boulders, vanguard of a thunder-storm, move in processional splendour across the lower bay. I could not read, I could not write. My new book had appeared and a glance at the press-clippings told me that it was being praised. Not a club stroke from hostile critic, not an acid stab from an enemy. Had I enemies no longer? Had they been concentrated in the person of Fulbert, that Fulbert who was dead and cremated? I pondered the idea. My own careless words like curses were coming home to roost in my skull. Without an enemy, I had often said, a man of talent is like unploughed soil. What an infernal paradox. An enemy why, I had them by the score. Yet not such a master-hand as Fulbert. Fulbert it was who had eagerly awaited my first book and, with a devilishness almost feminine, had praised it, pouring into every phrase a double-distilled corrosive flattery that withered all it touched. The poor little volume soon shrivelled up and died. In the face of such diabolic appreciation all other criticism must perforce pale or seem fatuous. This had been a favourite method of the dead man. He alone possessed the subtle syllabic tact for such critical assassinations. And my first fiction ! That had succumbed to the trumpet-blasts of laughter; consummately Rabelaisian; ventral laughter permeated by false bonhomie. Focussing the strong 220 STEEPLEJACK light of ridicule upon my ideas, perverting my intention, and caricaturing my heroics, Fulbert slaughtered my book so merrily withal that no suspicion attached to the butcher; the butchery itself had been irresistibly comical. So it had gone on for years; book after book had been attacked in the same surprisingly cruel and original fashion. The ingenuity of Fulbert was Satanic. He always bowed pleasantly to his victim. Once, at a friendly board we met. Mrs. Fulbert was in the com pany, and her husband, as if to show off his critical paces, cried across the table to me: "Ah! my old friend the writer. Are you going to give us your accustomed * improvisation on the piano this evening? Mrs. Ful bert turned her head so as not to smile in my face. The others laughed. So did I. But I almost strangled in the effort. I felt sorry for the widow. Of course, the critic had died without leaving her a penny after a manner of most critics and the poor woman in an unin teresting condition, was forced to move from the city. Did it concern me? I couldn t gloat over her trouble. I couldn t revenge myself by asking her hand in marriage. I am not of a melodramatic turn. Fulbert was dead. And I would follow him in a few years; perhaps sooner than I expected. I gazed across the East River. The bridges with their gaunt framework evoked the image of some archaic heaven-storming machine, some impious Babel built by God-hating men seeking to emulate the secret of the skies. Without knowing why I sighed. Life seemed empty. My old ambitions relaxed and fell away. Wasn t my hatred only a surface irritation, an author s lacerated vanity? Hadn t Fulbert s attacks stung my sensitive epidermis forcing me to fight, urging me to finer work, to wider conquests? Would indis- MY BEST FRIEND 221 criminate praise have accomplished a like result? In a grim mood, I again turned to the window and launched my gaze towards Long Island. Over there, over at Fresh- pond, what was once Fulbert now lay enclosed in an urn. I could not keep my thoughts from that urn. In it were the burned bones of my adversary. Mechanically I picked up my hat and went down into the street. Presently I was riding across Williamsburg bridge. The approach was like the road to any cemetery. Little one-story edifices with black gaping entrances, displayed mortuary ornaments, metallic wreaths, hideous emblems, banners of supreme ugliness, marble shafts pointing dirty white digits to the sky, botched carved angels perched on shapeless lumps of granite all invit ing the sorrowing, sentimental poor to purchase, and at bargain prices. Opposite the cemetery was a huge hostelry for man, beast, and mourners, which funeral parties frequented, there to enjoy the baked meats and copious fluid refreshment. Oh ! the desperate jollity of those gatherings at which the bereaved were inwardly strengthened and helped by their friends to bear their burden of woe in an unfeeling world. No matter the doleful faces coming, on departing they were flushed and bore an expression of specious comfort. Every day there was a sepulchral comminglement of black-robed women, children, men, hurrying to and fro, gabbling, excitedly swallowing the food hastily set before them; while the waiters, accustomed to this bedlam of gluttony and grief, rushed in and around the groups, seated or stand ing, frantic because of conflicting orders, glad to pitch anything on the table, hardly waiting for their fees, and never thanking guests for tips. From the adjacent crema tory, a veritable mausoleum, came the sound of solemn 222 STEEPLEJACK music. And from a tall chimney could be seen a clear flame, the essence of some burned body winging its way to the infinite inane. I hastily passed this melancholy banquet hall and found myself in the Columbarium. It was an impressive chamber. No hint of furnace. The architecture with its calm classic touch was thrown into relief by the severe tones of an organ, hidden from view. A service had con cluded. Some lingered to watch their precious dead consigned to the purifying fire. With reverential feel ings I saw the speedy end of a fellow human, contrasting this antique mode with a ghastly open grave, clods of earth harshly falling upon the coffin. The music ceased. Questioning an attendant I was directed to an upper gallery. There, after a short search, I found a compart ment in which was lodged a new urn. It bore the name of my enemy. A great loneliness invaded my soul. There was Fulbert dead, and forever dead. No one had so hated me. No one had taken such an interest in me. When I had felt this critical surgeon s knife in my inner most fibres, I realised that the surgeon had performed his task with a loving hatred. He knew every line I had written. He had read me, studied me, gloried in me as a field on which to display his wit and cruelty. What if he did wound the victim? Does the life-saver hate you when he scientifically carves your leg from your body? Are you not merely a subject for his technical skill? Did Fulbert ever hate me? Did I not serve him as an excuse to exhibit his pen prowess? Who had so faithfully kept my name before the public? Who would ever take the same interest? He was my spiritual run ning-mate. I was made to go in double-harness with him; created by the ironical gods on high who mock at the MY BEST FRIEND 223 teased destinies of suffering humanity. With blurred eyes, I spied upon the urn. I read the inscription: " Henry Fulbert. Aged 45 years." Nothing more. And then leaning heavily against the enclosure, my cheeks feverish, I spoke aloud: "He was my best friend. I am lonely without Fulbert." XXVI AUTOGRAPH LETTERS Yes, and autographed pictures, how many? My correspondence with famous men and women, well- known writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, clergymen, and men in political life would make a fat volume, especially if I included their signed photo graphs. Many of my correspondents I never met, never even saw. Yet truly I could borrow Browning s title: "How It Strikes a Contemporary," as a caption for copious comment on interesting people. In 1884 or 1885, I received a letter, undated, from Friederich Nietzsche, written in French. I believe that, setting aside the late Karl Knortz, of Tarrytown, a poet, I was one of the first American correspondents of this poet and phi losopher, who has written the most savage attacks against his fellow countrymen since Heine and Schopenhauer. His hatred of the Prussian regime is openly expressed. He said at a time when Richard Wagner was giving lip- service to the conquerors of France, that war had brutal- ised Germany, with a consequent deterioration of its culture; and remember that despite his delicate health, Nietzsche had served in the ambulance section during 1870. Yet he is quoted by uncritical persons as a fo- menter of war, though he has defined Prussia as "long- legs and obedience." His doctrine of the superman should be taken in a spiritual sense only. I saw his sister at the Nietzsche Archive, Weimar, where I went after data for my Liszt book ten years ago. Elizabeth 224 AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 225 Foerster-Nietzsche is a good-looking intellectual lady, de voted to the memory of her brother and writing much about him. She told me that his Polish blood was a delusion. There is no Polish blood in the family. The father was a God-fearing, old-fashioned pastor, and I recognise in the son much of the evangelical spirit. I saw the piazza on which he looked from upper Weimar over the Thuringian landscape. There he would sit and read the book usually upside down and when his sister wept he would say: "Don t cry, little sister. We are happy now." Nietzsche s nervous breakdown was caused in part by the contumely of German critics. He was forced to earn his living in Switzerland, at Basle. Ma dame Foerster-Nietzsche didn t mince words when tell ing me of the neglect and insults he had been subjected to. A Dane discovered him to the world, Georg Brandes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that the Germans are the Chinese of Europe. His own culture was Greek and French. And in France he first w r as wel comed with open arms by the Intellectuals. The French translation by M. Albert was the first and is the best. Poor, persecuted, unhappy, misunderstood poet and philosopher, what a shock it would have been for him to have heard his name coupled with such mediocre pedants as Bernhardi or Treitschke, he the foe of militarism, of tyranny. He had never been persona-grata at Potsdam. Like Goethe s the genius of Nietszche is universal. Nearly twenty-five years ago I received from Tolstoy a postcard on which he wrote in English: "Sir, I do not like the story of the Devil you sent me. I cannot see a fair future for your sinister and ennobled talents. Lief Nicoleivitch." Mobled Queen is good ! cried Polonius. But why "sinister"? The story was in M lle New York. 226 STEEPLEJACK The letters I have from Georg Brandes are personal, and there is many a gleam of humour and philosophy in them. He writes with equal fluency in four languages, and in each tongue not only the precise idiom, but the essential character are present. "Alas! the two-thirds of my writing all that regards Scandinavian literature, and some other books are not translated. I have even a volume of verse to my account. And I always try to give my Danish style a certain melody . . . which is impossible to render in translation. You do not know how happy you are to be read in your own language, and to have a language spread over the earth. My old book on Russia was not the cause that barred me from Russia in 1913. I have lectured in Russia many times since I wrote it in 1888. But the Minister of the In terior feared the enthusiasm of the young students in Helsingfors. ... I have made many attempts to help the poor oppressed Jews in Russia, Poland, Finland, but I have always found rich Jews in my way; they own the newspapers, are in business relations with the oppress ing government, and print nothing that would prove dis agreeable to it." This was written in English from Copenhagen, dated July 14, 1914. Since the war Brandes has had one thought after his own land France. His hatred of Russia, like ZangwilFs, is easily comprehended. In despair, he wrote me, he took up his big book on Goethe, begun twenty-six years ago, and as we know, had the courage to finish it. In 1909, after the publica tion of my Egoists, he wrote from Copenhagen congratu lating me, though he objected to the inclusion of the name of Anatole France. Yet the gentle Anatole is an individualist notwithstanding his socialistic tendencies; the general tone of his writings gave me that impression, AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 227 For Barres, Georg Brandes holds no brief of admiration. He disliked his Dreyfus activities, naturally, but how long ago that seems. He speaks with extreme cordiality of our former Minister at Copenhagen, Maurice Egan, an old friend of mine and a Philadelphian born. I never saw George Moore till 1901, and then at Bai- reuth. Mr. Moore, I need hardly tell you, belongs to the old Wagnerian guard. His Evelyn Innes is the best novel about operatic singers that I know. The August afternoon I spoke with this remarkable Irishman he wasn t aware that I wrote about music. My name, usu ally mispronounced (Ah ! the delightful little Amy Hop- pin, who in 1875 translated my long booming name into French as "M. Mielcoeur" literally Honey-Heart) had not been clear, and when he later wrote from Dublin he spoke of my Chopin, and regretted that he hadn t known it at the time. In a letter also from Dublin, dated April 2, 1904, Mr. Moore wrote: "In The Confessions of a Young Man I give a description of a servant-girl in a lodging-house, but I did not think of her at the time as a heroine of a novel. It was some years after that I con ceived the idea. I was walking down the Strand reading a newspaper. It contained an article on servants, and in the article the following sentence occurred: We often speak of the trouble servants give us, but do we ever think of the trouble we give servants? The sentence was illuminating. Of course, I said, we give servants a great deal of trouble. I wonder if a novel could be written about a servant. A lady in love with her foot man? No/ I said, that is very common, very obvious. A cook has a trade to learn; some one who learns a trade a cook-maid. Now what could happen to her? Sooner or later she would be seduced; she would have a 228 STEEPLEJACK child; she would be sent away. If she did not kill the child, she would have to bring it up on her wages. Her wages would vary from fourteen to sixteen pounds a year; on fourteen she could not rear her child, on sixteen she could. A human being s life dependent on two pounds a year. These thoughts passed through my mind in the space of fifty or sixty yards, while walking from Surrey Street to the Temple. And the writing of the book is as unlike Goncourt as anything could be. I had written in Overtones that, no doubt, in a general way, Germinie Lacerteux suggested Esther Waters; but Mr. Moore gave the genesis of that very human story in his letter. He continued: "I admit I was influenced by Zola in the writings of my three first books, A Modern Lover, A Mummer s Wife, and A Drama in Muslin. But Evelyn Innes was not suggested by Huysmans s book; it was conceived and planned before Huysmans s book was printed. Mary Robertson, the poetess" (Mr. Moore means A. Mary F. Robinson, the widow of Professor James Darmesteter, and later the wife of Professor Duclaux), "told me of some little French actress who had scruples of conscience about her lovers and went into a convent, but she could not remain there because the nuns were so childish; she was three and twenty and most of the nuns were sixty, but they seemed to her like children. What a wonder ful subject for a novel, I said. I must write that. I made the actress a singer, she couldn t act in a convent and as I was under the spell of Wagner (I heard the story in Paris on my return from Bayreuth) I made her a Wagner singer. Huysmans writes of the convent from the outside, I write of the nuns from the inside. There fe no faintest resemblance between me and Huysmans. AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 229 I have a word to say about the paragraph at the bottom of the page in which you say, From this the reader will be able to judge of Mr. Moore s knowledge of music/ My knowledge of music is the very slightest, but it was sufficient to save me from the mistake which you thought I fell into. When I wrote, The last composer who had distinguished between A sharp and B flat/ perhaps I should have written, The first composer who ceased to distinguish between the two notes, and tuned his instru ment by semi-tones and wrote forty-eight Preludes and Fugues/ My meaning would have been clearer, and I remember when I saw the words on the proof I thought of altering them, and I m sorry I did not, as you misread them. ... I have just returned from London; I went over to hear the Elgar Festival, but was so much bored by Gerontius* that I did not go to hear The Apostles/ He seems to me quite a commonplace writer. Some excitable ladies leaned over to ask me what I thought of the music, during the interval, and I said: Holy water in a German beer barrel." That s a capital criticism. In the first edition of Evelyn Innes he made another witty epigram when he called Parsifal a "stuffed Christ." Who dare say that Mr. Moore is not a humourist? Not "the funny man in a boarding-house," which he said was Bernard Shaw, but a humourist whose humour permeates his writings through out. As to the convent scenes in Sister Teresa, Pearl Richards Craigie, "John Oliver Hobbes," told me in New York that she had supplied Mr. Moore with "local colour." She wrote a convent novel. I ve forgotten its title, but I remember "Sister Teresa," which is a case of ^fiction being stranger than truth. A human ass, whose 230 STEEPLEJACK tribe grows no less, said to me many years ago that the reason he didn t like Dickens was because of the novelist s predilection for low company. And someone, it must have been a college professor that Eternal Sophomore wrote long ago that George Moore preferred low company; witness Esther Waters, A Mummer s Wife, Mike Fletcher by the way, his most virile, original per formance. I much prefer Mike to De Maupassant s Bel Ami. Now what sort of a mummy mind has such a critic ! I can quite understand people not liking George Moore. With Baudelaire, his books are a touchstone for imbeciles. No man of his time in or out of England has written with such imaginative sympathy in his fic tion, or with such critical insight. His versatility is re markable, his culture sound. And what an artistic writer. Vance Thompson has spoken of college profes sors with dandruff on their coat collars. The one I allude to and I ve forgotten his name and habitat may sport an immaculate coat, but the dandruff is inside his skull. John Quinn wittily calls them professors of Comparatively Literature. In 1906 (October 26) Mr. Moore wrote from Dublin: "You say that Ibsen s technique is entirely French. Will you allow me to disagree with you on this point? No writer since the beginning of the world invented a technique so original as Ibsen s. It seems to me to have fallen from the moon. First quality : the omission of any statement regarding his subject-matter; every other dramatist states his subject in the first act, Ibsen never, in any of the important plays. Second quality : his man ner of telling a story backwards. Rosmersholm is all told backwards, and the difficulty of this form is enor mous. I experienced it in the first fifty pages of The Lake; AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 231 to write fifty pages in the past participle is no easy task, and Ibsen did that in dialogue without anybody perceiv ing that the characters were asking and answering ques tions." I suppose I had said something about Ibsen s debt to Scribe in Iconoclasts; and he did owe a lot on the purely technical side. As stage-manager at Christiania or Bergen he adapted many plays from the French reper toire, Scribe s in particular. Scribe is a wonderful tech nician, despite the emptiness of his "ideas." From him you may learn the playwright s trade. But Ibsen bene fited from many sources, Scribe and Dumas fils among the rest. The Greek dramatists have written plays back wards. There is no new thing behind the footlights. Ibsen is like a clear still pool of icy water in the ultimate Scandinavian pine forests; a pool mirroring the sky and stars, and the stately shapes of tree; also the shapes of the men who go to his waters as on a secret errand to dip their little pails therein, and later assert that they had drawn from their own private artesian wells. Oh ! St. Bernard of Cork, not Clairvaux ! Like Brandes, Mr. Moore is not an admirer of Maurice Barres. He writes: "Barres is not a great favourite of mine. I have always found him very antipathetic, and his literature always seemed to me ineffectual; a well out of which a dry bucket is always coming up, a clock that never strikes the hour." That I do not agree with this damning dictum is known to readers of Egoists. Another time he writes: "It is extraordinary how interesting you Americans make your writing; you never produce the stodgy mess that Englishmen do; they write reviews that interest nobody." Mr. Moore doesn t know that over here we smoke the opium of optimism. He is an avowed 232 STEEPLEJACK admirer of Edgar Saltus, telling an interviewer that Poe, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Saltus were our best writers. Walt s superiority, he maintains, is because he writes with his whole body, not alone with the head. (I am quoting from memory.) There are some of us who be lieve that W. W. never used his head at all; only his body from the waist down. In 1909, I told Mr. Moore that I was contemplating a monograph on Franz Liszt. The news filled him with enthusiasm: "You know that I am such an egoist, such a dog in the manger, that I envy you that subject, though, of course, I could not write it myself. To write a life of Liszt must be a charm ing thing to do; much better than writing a life of Wagner. Oh, much ! He was so many-sided, so quaint a person ality his mistresses, and his music and his friendship with Wagner, and a hundred other little turns in his character. It is a book I hope you will spend a good deal of time upon; not rewriting it as I write my books, for that is madness. Never do that!" No, I never re write my books. The "dog returns to his vomit" when an author reads his proof. That is bad enough. But I didn t enjoy writing my Liszt. The subject required too much research, and research requires time, and time is money; ergo: I had to hurry the book through in a year. Moore is a rich man, and he has always had leisure, which, I am happy to say, he never wasted. Poor Dostoievsky, the profoundest of the Russian novel ists, and that means the profoundest of all, Balzac ex- cepted, was harassed by poverty and could not write his powerful fiction in the artistic way he wished. It was a tragedy in the life of a tragic soul. Tolstoy and Tur- genev were rich. Flaubert till he was fifty had ample means, and he had not wife or children. I repeat it AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 233 needs a competency to write books. My Liszt was not what I had wished for. I dislike it but then I dislike all my books; "detritus of me," as Whitman yawps. None the less it is a handy volume of reference. Before I finished it the subject had ceased to interest me. Liszt and the ladies ! There Mr. Moore was clairvoyant. It is the major motive in the Abbe s life, crowded with incident and the tragedy of being a transitional com poser. Moore would have handled the woman side of Liszt better than I. Mr. Moore was excited when I told him of a rumour that The Lake was to be dramatised. Why not? he asked, and he wrote me a long letter from London- dateless, only "105 Marylebone Road" which is prac tically a scenario of the novel. It is too lengthy to transcribe now. He once wrote a full-fledged comedy, and a very readable one, which I fetched to Daniel Frohman. Nothing came of it. When I last saw this Irishman of genius he didn t look his age by ten years. He was born in 1857. The Marquise di Lanza who was born Clara Hammond, and daughter of Surgeon- General Hammond wrote me that George Moore was born in 1852. He told her in 1889 that he was then thirty-seven. Madame Lanza still has the letter. Oscar Wilde told her on his visit to America that he was twenty- six. He was really twenty-nine. Not that it matters. A man is as old as he writes I mean a writing man. And I ve noticed that men are as vain and "tetchy" as women on the subject of their age. Why not? Cock-a- doodle-doo ! crows the chanticleer at dawn. I have related my impressions of Joseph Conrad the man: His letters resemble him; our letters usually do re- 234 STEEPLEJACK semble us. As is the case with the majority of great writers, Mr. Conrad is the most human of humans. His unfailing kindness, and politeness in recognising other men s work is very comforting to writers who are swarm ing around the base of his mountain. I had compared him with Flaubert, and he wrote me (1909) that "when you overwhelm me with the mantle of Flaubert, it is an ominous garment to put on a man s shoulders. Yet there is one point in which I resemble that great man; it is in the desperate heart-breaking toil and effort of the writing; the days of wrestling as with a dumb devil for every line of my creation. . . . Mais laissons cela ! . . . I must go back to my MS. on a page (just like this one) bearing the No. 890 of the novel I have been at for the last sixteen months. And the end is not yet ! And that end also does not bear thinking about." I believe that the novel he mentions is Chance. In another letter he speaks of Flaubert. It was written from Kent the same year, 1909: "I, too, began my communion with Flaubert by Salammbo. I might have seen him but in 1879 I was somewhere at sea, au diable boulli, Kerguelen Land, I think, or thereabouts. It was another life I re member with much tenderness, as a transmigrated soul might be supposed by a miracle to remember its previous envelope." What is more fascinating than a peep into the laboratory of a great artist s mind! Involuntarily you exclaim: "O rare Joseph Conrad, who has wisely written that Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life ! While I was speaking of Nietzsche, I should have quoted a striking remark made by Edith Wharton in a letter from Paris some years ago (1909). She had read his auto biography Ecce Homo, and she found that it held more AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 235 of the philosopher than any of his other works, and she added: "The farther I go the more I feel that Goethe contained most of him (Nietzsche) and most of every thing else! He was the most Super-est of them all." Mrs. Wharton could have joined to Goethe s name that of Dostoievsky. I have been rereading The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed (Englished by Constance Garnett; Besi is the Russian title of The Possessed. It means, aptly enough, Devils) and my opinion is strength ened that from the great Russian novelist, Nietzsche ab sorbed much of his mysticism; the Eternal Return, the Superman. In these books, also^f he Idiot, may be found some of the most significant utterances of the German philosopher the most un-German thinker of his epoch. In all modern literature, dating from Dante and I called Dostoievsky the Dante of the North in an essay to be found in Ivory Apes and Peacocks there is no such grandiose vision as the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. When I spoke of my Zoo and its queer inmates, I was probably thinking of what Paul Elmer More wrote in 1915: "How in the name of heaven do you have the will power to read all those eccentrics and maniacs whom you seem to know by heart? A week of them would kill me with ennui. After all, there is nothing that really lasts and maintains its interest but the sane and the reticent." Words of wisdom. But sane genius also has its crazy wards, its padded cells: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe; besides, my "maniacs" are a pretty sane lot. Some drank. Some murdered sleep, yet Chopin, Stend hal, Anatole France, Richard Strauss, Pater, Wagner, Baudelaire, Manet, Brahms the list is long and far from insane, for I take it neither Poe nor Chopin were quite 236 STEEPLEJACK mad. Drugs and alcohol did for Poe. Mad, naked William Blake was rather peculiar, to say the least. Yet a god-intoxicated man. No, I don t hold with the eminent critic that is Mr. Moore, and I yield to no one in my admiration of Wordsworth, of the Lake School, of the placid and delightful eighteenth-century essayists. A chacun son poison ! Richard Mansfield I never personally met, but I wrote about him critically from his "Prince Karl" days on. I have several letters from him, undated, but written dur ing the stress of the " Peer Gynt " production. He invited me to dine at his home, No. 316 Riverside Drive, and when I gave my reason for refusing his hospitality also my regret he fairly exploded. A European born and European in culture, he couldn t understand my attitude. In London and Paris there are clubs where actors, artists, writers, and critics meet and mingle, and no harm comes of it, indeed, good results. But in New York the dra matic critic is taboo. If he dines with an actor, or an actor takes luncheon with him, then the alarm-bells are rung all over town. "Mansfield has bought up Mr. X." I didn t say this in my letter, but the sensitive Mansfield understood. He had wanted to talk over "Peer Gynt" with me, because he had read what I wrote of Ibsen s tragi-comedy. They were then rehearsing at the New York Theatre and Will McConnell had instructions to admit me. I didn t go. I now regret it. The produc tion qua production was picturesque, but the spirit of Ibsen missing. Mansfield was nearing the close of a bril liant career. He was exhausted by work. He had few intimate friends, I mean genuine friends, who could advise him. Edward A. Dithmar was one, but to him Ibsen was repugnant. He was sincere in this his dislike and I AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 237 respected his sincerity. Yet, what an Ibsen interpreter Richard Mansfield might have been. What an Oswald, what a Rosmersholm. When Orlenev, an extraordinary Russian actor, played here with Alia Nazimova, we saw for the first time the possibilities of the Master-Builder. Mansfield was made for the part, and for many other modern roles. But fate willed otherwise, and he went on year after year, wasting his dramatic powers in such tawdry stuff as "Parisian Romance," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"- crude melodrama and the silly "Prince Karl." For Shakespeare, neither by temperament nor training, was he suited. In "Rodion the Student," Charles Henry Meltzer s admirable adaptation of Dos toievsky s The Crime and the Punishment, Mansfield was in his element. But to his letter: "Here is another grudge I have to record against the unfortunate choice of a profession that debars me from the more intimate acquaintance with brilliant men. . . . In this city, in this country, one is forced to eat one s own heart Garrick and the rest of them had better luck they had the stimulus of fine minds, their opinions, their encouragement. . . . Still, I feel that we could have discussed "Peer Gynt," and I could have got from you a lot of points that I may miss even at a sacrifice to yourself and of yourself. ... I can t begin to enu merate the essentials. I should have to talk it act by act, scene by scene, the necessary cuts, my appearance (my looks), et cetera. Scribners should have published our (acting) cut edition. . . . Chicago will probably d n it, the Associated Press will do the rest. ... As to Anitra" (a character in the play), "being the Eternal- Womanly, I have my doubts. We have Solveig the one is no more eternal than the other, or the other than 238 STEEPLEJACK the one on earth; if it had not been for Solveig, I should not have undertaken to do Peer, but, of course, the much esteemed author I know only meant that the Eternal- Womanly, all of them, write these days. I shall not allow the dread passenger to refer to midmost of Act V because that is one of Ibsen s mistakes in good taste. It is hard enough to drag the people off the earth without knocking them back to it of a sudden and reminding them that after all we are in a theatre and only actor-folk. But Lord, I could write on forever. Throw it in your waste-basket and let it go at that. Don t write about it and me, but come and talk to me; the public would be the loser, but I shall be the gainer and perhaps in the end the public too." This letter shows what Mansfield s friends knew that the actor was not only a charming man but amenable to reason. He was often caricatured by irresponsible writers. The biography by Paul Wilstach demonstrates that. It was my loss, not meeting the gifted and musical man. And what a lot he did for Shaw, for he literally gave "Arms and the Man" and "The Devil s Disciple" their first artistic production in America. Mr. Shaw was charac teristically "grateful," judging from the letters that passed between actor and author. But could "Peer Gynt" have been possible here? I saw it in its entirety somewhere in Europe, and it took two nights to play it. A crumbling letter written in London (July 8, 1895) is signed Kyrle Bellew, and what memories that name evokes. Mr. Meltzer had made an adaptation of the Dumas Collier de la Reine, in which Mrs. Potter wore the largest hat I ever saw on a woman s head. Incident ally, Bellew speaks of Mrs. Pat Campbell. "She is the AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 239 vogue, the real thing is not there. She must be written around. It is the skittishness of her personality that has set London crazy" (he is referring to Mrs. Campbell s memorable impersonation of Paula Tanqueray in the Pinero play; all said and done, her best dramatic assump tion). "As an artist she is impossible as a producer of a certain kind of suggestion she is immense. She will never be a great actress. She is Pat Campbell, and she will never be anyone else. Nethersole has killed herself playing The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith in London. She has challenged reigning favourites and got hopelessly sat upon, or ignored/ Kyrle Bellew then goes on to speak of Barney Barnato and Albert Beit, who were splurging in London with their millions. A single letter from the beautiful Mary F. Scott-Siddons is dated from Berlin, February, 1896, and chiefly deals with the troubles she was undergoing in producing an opera composed by her protege, the English pianist and pupil of Liszt, Henry Waller. " Fra Francesco " was its title, and Arthur Sullivan had approved of the music. I dimly remember that it was given in Germany. But by far the most in teresting part of the letter is the account of her Shake spearean reading before the Kaiser and Court at Pots dam. Oddly enough some selections from American humourists best pleased the HohenzoIIerns. Other days, other ways. My correspondence with Remy de Gourmont covered several decades. It is chiefly literary, and there is so much in it about my books that my well-known modesty estops me from reproducing these letters. Senator Lodge made a happy quotation at the close of a certain letter: "I look with amazement at the flood of books that I see pouring over the news-stands and counters. It is 2 4 o STEEPLEJACK not that they are meretricious or immoral, but they seem to me so feeble and so full of weak sentiment. I think constantly when I look upon them of Carlyle s phrase that they are intended for immediate use and immediate oblivion. Your George Sand" (in Unicorns) "brought back distant memories. She was still a con spicuous figure, still writing when I was a boy and a young man. She had a great reputation then. I remember that I tried to read her books and they bored me . . . it seems to me as if the years in their movement had justified my original attitude. On the other hand she has, as you say, immense interest as a personality." Of the so-called, and still-unborn "Great American Novel," William Dean Howells wrote: "We all have to have our shy at that monstrous misconception, that grotesque impossibility, and I like to see you bang it about. But we shall never bang it out of the heads that have so little in them." One of my treasured letters is dated May 8, 1902, and signed Frank Norris. Well I remember his earnestness when he asserted that poor or mediocre books were for the mass of the people better than none at all. "Only get them to read anything," was his plea. Of my Melomaniacs he wrote some words that pleased me, for Norris was a craftsman: "You cer tainly have attained what has always seemed to me the most difficult of all achievements. I mean originality without grotesqueness." I was tickled to death over that. You see, even professional critics have feelings. It was as long ago as 1893 that I began corresponding with Israel Zangwill, for whose work I have genuine es teem. When he visited the United States in 1898, I met him in New York. I had imitated him in such AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 241 stories as The Shofar Blew at Sunset, and in The Cardinal s Fiddle, and he was duly amused. Like most Englishmen, he can t understand that I am tired of Whitmania, probably, as Lawrence Gilman sug gested, because I had suffered from a bad attack in my youth and had recovered. What I chiefly resent is the implication that Whitman voices our national feeling, or even pictures us as we are. He does neither. We are not Camerados, closely knit, as the war has made us. Mr. Zangwill finds in him the "real insight of a seer." Granted. And still one swallow doesn t make a summer. "These States," as John Jay Chapman pointed out years ago, are not peopled by Walt Whitman characters. The Lord forbid! Max Nordau, for example, doesn t agree with Mr. Zangwill in his estimate of Walt, calling him a rotten sensualist, as may be noted in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, and of patriotic yawps he has this to say: "In his patriotic poems, Whitman is a sycophant of the corrupt American vote-buying, official- bribing, power-abusing, dollar-democracy, and a cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit." (Degeneration, English translation, page 23 1 .) How Max admires us ! John LaFarge, the critic, interested me more than John LaFarge, the painter. He is called an eclectic, which simply means an artist who lacks originality. His pictures never attracted me, not even the South Sea examples. Paul Gauguin, not LaFarge, is my man for exotic art. But an extraordinary raconteur was the American according to Royal Cortissoz. I never met him, although I went to his Tenth Street studio to see his stained glass, which I liked. I have a stack of letters from him. They are of equal interest. I quote a few sente ices showing the curiosity of the thinker concern- 242 STEEPLEJACK ing art and life. In 1907 he writes: "I want to tell you what always interests me, because I cannot tell myself how it is done though it is very well known, that is, how a painter can carry out the enormous mass of detail of a painting from Nature, in the few minutes that make an hour, or two or three hours. Several of the pictures you mention the water colours in the South Seas, are only a couple of hours work, and the big one, which you may remember, is an afternoon s work. . . . You your self, if you ever have the chance, ought to go down and live in those wonders of light and air. But what I wished to write to you about was your paper on the etchings of Rembrandt and Whistler" (it appeared in The Sun). "What you have said is, to my mind, very much needed. Some excellent people confuse the limit of things, and in their enthusiastic admiration for Whistler, put him where it is unjust to be. ... I have never been exactly a Stendhalist" (I had quoted Stendhal), "but I remem ber Henry James, who, himself, of course, admired him more or less, was interesting in his expression of dislike when we were in Italy together. In Paris some fifty odd years ago, I met people who had known Stendhal (Beyle). You may remember that my grand-uncle, Paul de Saint- Victor, was a successful rival in some one of the love affairs of your man. . . ." John LaFarge was one of the first American artists who "went in for * the Japanese, for Blake, for Goya. His mural composi tions are pasticcios. W. B. Yeats wrote me in 1903 that John Quinn had told him I wrote the article in The Sun on the Irish movement in two hours; which was true. Yeats adds: "That seems to me a wonderful feat, for it is precisely what journalism is not detailed and philosophical and AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 243 accurate. ... Of course, my critic in The Evening Post was right in one sense in calling me decadent. We are all decadent, our sins are the sins of our forefathers. But I am struggling against it, always trying to get the fire to the centre, not to the circumference. I don t think this critic knew that Lionel Johnson, who is his type of classic health, never got up till dark or went to bed till daylight, wrote poems to absinthe, and died, poor man, of a fall he got when intoxicated. Of course, this isn t the same thing as literary decadence, but I imagine it would have seemed so to him. I have a notion that everybody has been decadent since Shakespeare, and the reason for it is partly a question of language but that is too big a question for a letter." Mr. Yeats might have recommended his critic, all critics, to read the masterly exposition on the theme of decadence in Affirmations, by Havelock Ellis. After the Nordau humbuggery the word "decadence" was used as a club to smash an author s reputation. Nowadays, it s a joke for Washington Square Bohemia. Paul Hervieu is another writer with whom I came in contact at Paris. His dramas are still in the repertory of the Theatre Frangais; "Les Tenailles" ("Nippers"), "Le Reveil" with Julia Bartet, Bargy, and Paul Mgunet-SuIIy the brother of the tragedian, and "The Enigma." These pieces were poorly interpreted in New York "The Awakening," with Olga Nethersole, hardly a substitute for Julia Bartet, whose exquisite art is for me an exquisite memory. I spent a pleasant hour with M. Hervieu at his apartment on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne No. 23. He was a reserved man with an Eng lish bearing, which I set down to his fondness for things 244 STEEPLEJACK English; he informed me that he spent his summers on the Isle of Wight. He impressed me as a man suffering from secret chagrin; perhaps an unhappy love-affair. His artistic successes were numerous. I was all the more surprised when he advised me not to give way to cyni cism; irony he detested, he, the skinner of souls, whose surgeon s scalpel was deeply dipped in irony; he, the novelist, whose use of the so-called "cruel terms" was as disconcerting as Henri Becque s. Doubtless because of his abuse of verbal corrosive-sublimate he sought to restrain younger men from his mistake. His letters, a dozen, are full of technical gossip about his plays. The tall, slanting handwriting of Alia Nazimova recalls the time when she made her debut here in company with Orlenev at a little theatre off the Bowery, East Third or Fourth Streets. Emma Goldman was the press-agent, and called herself Emma Smith, on account of her numer ous tiffs with the police. I can go back still further to the days when Emma was a disciple of Johann Most, the anarchist. It was not the law that ended Johann s days but John Barleycorn. He was a thirsty dreamer. Nazi mova afterwards played Grushenka wonderfully in a dramatisation of "The Brothers Karamazov," at the Lex ington Avenue Theatre, near Forty-second Street. Or lenev was the Dmitri, a half-crazy drunkard falsely ac cused of parricide. The company generally was excellent; the intellectual aristocracy of the town present. Miss Nazimova s career since then has been confined to the English-speaking stage. But she was at her artistic best when playing in Russian. A note that I received from William M. Laffan, then proprietor of The Sun (1907), exhibits his native decision and Celtic humour. "Yes, sir, I am, or more rightly, AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 245 I was, an etcher; and none of your damned amateurs, either, I want you to understand. Twenty -five years ago I converted sheets of otherwise blameless copper into bread and butter. I don t know how many I did, but I don t mind telling you that the art of them was on a high plane, a very high plane, indeed; a fact which is not necessarily impugned by my having been able to sell them. There is nowhere, thank God, a proof extant (I think I possess only one), so that I may say what I like about their quality and run no measurable danger. The bad proofs that a man pulls will always come home to rocst; but I am the exception that proves the rule. I will read your article about Rops with pleasure. Why not have a go at Meryon? There s provocation for you." I did. The study appeared on the editorial page of The Sun, and later was included in Promenades of an Impressionist. William Laffan was too modest. I have seen a woodcut of his representing a covey of birds, which betrayed observation and knowledge of technical process. His handwriting is etched. With the excep tion of W. C. Brownell s pen-and-ink miniatures, I never saw such tiny lettering allied with such diamond clear ness. Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie, as she signed herself, was not in private life like her masculine pen-name, "John Oliver Hobbes." She was shy, feminine, sympa thetic. I only saw her once and at the Hotel Nether lands. She spoke of her favourite writers, of George Moore and Bernard Shaw evidently not her favourites and she confessed to being an anti-Wagnerian. Her handwriting, too, in the half-dozen letters I have saved, is small and clear. Another human being who made me unhappy in her presence because of her inquietude. Her last communication is dated April 24, 1906, and was 246 STEEPLEJACK written at her home, Steephill Castle, Ventnor, Isle of Wight. In reading some of the letters Havelock Ellis sent me during the past fifteen years, I note the same quality of charm and wisdom that informs his published writings. Now, to write a book that is both wise and charming seems a task beyond the powers of most of our young authors. They are in such a hurry, tumbling head over heels to court the favours of the Great God Success, that they give us hardly the bare ribs of literature. Charm isn t it a lost art? And haste and charm are mutually exclusive. You can t be charming on a type writing machine. Worst of all, few miss the quality. The reading public takes its literature dished up with advertisements, and only asks that the story be told with cinematographic velocity. To concentrate one s intelligence on a phrase is inconceivable; to linger over an idea or a prose cadence that way folly flies. Hurrah for the Movies in print ! Yet there are some serene souls left, with brains and art to interpret them; a few who refuse to mingle with the vast mob of tripe-sellers in the market-place. One of these elect is Havelock Ellis, known as a psychologist, nevertheless a literary critic of singular charm and acuteness. His New Spirit made a sensation twenty-five years ago; Affirmations was another revealing book, with its studies of such disparate per sonalities as Zola, St. Francis, Casanova, Nietzsche. The note of catholicity sounds throughout the fluid prose of this master s pages. Recall The Soul of Spain, the most sympathetic book on modern Spanish art and literature that I have read; Velasquez and Goya are not overlooked. His Impressions and Comments is charged AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 247 with kindly wisdom, garnered from a life rich in experi ence and thought, not more than a page or two in length, on a thousand-and-one themes, saturated with the toler ant Ellis philosophy, which he once defined as the diffi cult art of holding on and letting go. But I must brisk up my tempo, else I ll be rambling on till next summer. A Homeric catalogue of names would be the quickest way to dispose of my letters. There is a hastily written scrawl from the English painter, Augustus John, whose canvases are among the jewels of the John Quinn collection. There are letters galore from that witty and erudite New York barrister who the older he grows looks more like Cardinal Man ning Quinn, the avowed friend of the Irish literary movement, of Synge, and Moore, Yeats, Stephens, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, and also a friend of Arthur Symons and Joseph Conrad. He is not so ascetic as he looks; but a letter-writer born. The name of Jules Gaultier is at the bottom of a finely written page. Of this brilliant philosopher I wrote years ago; I even introduced his books to William James, but the American thinker was just then absorbed in Henri Bergson, and Pragma tism, and he never expressed an opinion of Gaultier, for me the superior thinker of the pair; above all, one with out a trace of sentimental charlatanism. You can t say the same of Bergson, that weaver of glittering specious phrases. In his letter Gaultier deplores the death of Remy de Gourmont. That writer did much to spread the ideas of Jules Gaultier. As I have told you, my friendship with Maurice Maeterlinck dates back to 1903. His letters are personal. I have only one letter from James Joyce, a man of genius. His play, "Exiles," has the same poignant quality we find in "The Master 248 STEEPLEJACK Builder," or in some of Strindberg s one-act dramas. The same intensity, oppressiveness, and lurking tragic terror. I couldn t help thinking of Strindberg s "Credi tors"; but Joyce is individual and Celtic to the back bone. A bitter brew, but stimulating is his play. From the master, Paul Bourget, I had a letter in 1909 saying pleasant things about my study of Stendhal, in Egoists. M. Bourget it was who revived the cult of Stendhal in the early eighties of the past century, and so timed that he fulfilled the great writer s prediction that he would be understood about 1880. Bourget is not much read by the present generation in America, though he was popular when The Disciple and Cruel Enigma were trans lated. Why hasn t someone translated his Duchesse Bleu, one of his most charming fictions? Bernard Berenson, art critic, Jean de Reszke, Jules Lefebvre, Isidor Phillipp, Paul Adam who was called by De Gourmont "a magnificent spectacle," and a mag nificent writer he is Auguste Rodin, glorious sculptor; Ignacio Zuloaga, Spanish painter, the biggest since the death of Goya; a post-card signed Strindberg but not addressed to me Yves Guyot, French economist; Florian Parmentier, critic; a cordial greeting from W. W. Mesdag, the Dutch marine artist, whose collection of French art at The Hague is one of the many attractions in that lovely, tranquil city; of his wife, also a painter, I have a small water-colour; Fourcaud, Viardot, Widor, the or ganist of St. Sulpice, Paris; J. H. Rosny, Sr., the novelist; Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet these autograph letters were given me by Brander Matthews out of sheer kind ness, Jules Claretie, CatuIIe Mendes need I tell you, the incomparable writer and once son-in-law of Theophile AUTOGRAPH LETTERS 249 Gautier, himself surnamed the impeccable Camille Saint- Saens, Conductor Felix Weingartner; the composer of "The Attack on the Mill," Alfred Bruneau, and last, not least, a card from Madame Franklin Grout, dated 1909, Villa Tanit, Antibes. She thanks me for the Flaubert study in Egoists. Madame Grout was formerly Carolina Commainville, the favourite niece of Gustave Flaubert, who, supposedly egotist, gave up his personal fortune when the husband of his niece became embarrassed in business. As you already know, I am an enraged Flau- bertian, and have been spreading his gospel for thirty years. The very name of her villa, Tanit, has a touch of Salammbo. Her second husband, Dr. Grout, was one of the physicians at the private sanatorium of Dr. Blanche, where unfortunate Guy de Maupassant was confined and died. Henry Labouchere wrote in London Truth at the time of De Maupassant s death that Guy was a natural son of Flaubert s, and that he told his own story in his best novel, Pierre et Jean best after Une vie. There is not a scintilla of evidence to support this romantic yarn. Flaubert formed the talents of his pupil, Guy a mere child in comparison with his mighty master, and one who was grateful enough to testify to that fact, a fact sometimes overlooked by young writers, who prefer his elaborately carved cherry-stones to the Mas sive figures chiselled from the solid marble. My auto graphic treasure of treasures are three pages of a manu script in the handwriting of Flaubert, corrected for the printer, exceptions and errors noted. Madame Bovary one of the glories of French literature, as Henry James has said in a moment of unusual expansion (he alternately admired and disliked Flaubert) in the making. I re produced one of these pages in Egoists. I also possess 250 STEEPLEJACK a letter of the Master, probably addressed to his lady love, Louise Colet, the woman whose epitaph was written by Maxime Ducamp thus: "Here lies the woman who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous, calumniated Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr. Requiescat in pace." A reader of the heart of woman, poor Flaubert, never theless, stumbled in his judgment of the spitefully shrewish creature who had tried to rob George Sand of her literary laurels. Robert Browning said: "God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures boasts two soul- sides, one to face the world with, one to show a woman when he loves her." Flaubert, one of nature s noblest, showed his love for a worthless woman by facing the shrugs and sneers of the Parisian literary world. XXVII MID-VICTORIAN MAX I never believed in criticising a criticism, i. e. 9 a criticism concerning myself. That way lies confusion of spirit; besides, it s a waste of time. Because a critic doesn t like your work and says so, he is not necessarily in the wrong. He is often right. I mention this as a mild preparation to the pleasing story of a verbal war fare indulged in once upon a time by Mr. Shaw and Mr. Huneker. No blood was spilt, no bones were broken. Our native bad tempers only peeped out at intervals; as the Colonel would say, we had a bully time. But first I must begin with Max Beerbohm, whose too few books have been a source of joy to me as they are to lovers of prose as palatable as dry sherry. In Unicorns I ranked Mr. Beerbohm with the stylists who produce slowly and with infinite pains an astringent liqueur for connoisseurs. "Precious?" Yes, at times, but as irony is his happiest medium, his form and utterance are condi tioned by it. Max is a born classic, as readers of the delightful Works and Zuleika Dobson need not be told. Well, in 1903, on the appearance of my Iconoclasts, which had a fair measure of critical and public success in London Mr. G. K. Chesterton wrote appreciatively of the book a copy fell into the hands of Mr. Beerbohm, then writing for The Saturday Review. Result: one of the old-fashioned critical scarifications. My unfortunate group of Iconoclasts were bowled over by a pen, so often languid and affected, but become vigorous, ferocious, 351 252 STEEPLEJACK possibly because I was a Yankee. It was a page of bril liant, destructive criticism. It did the book much good as far as sales were concerned adverse criticism is better than none and Bernard Shaw wrote me a letter con gratulating me on the honour of being slashed in The Saturday. I didn t precisely see the honour, though I understood the kindly interest displayed by Max. Over here the review attracted the attention and the late Harry Thurston Peck tried to "sic" me on the English critic. He said that the Beerbohm style was constipated, mine copious; therefore, we must be antipathetic to one another. This reasoning did not appeal to me, and I refused to be drawn into controversy. Two exceptions I did take to the article, mentally, of course, and without impugning the general conclusions of the writer. One was being called a "yellow journalist" when everyone knew that my colour was "purple." I wrote "purple panels" then, or tried to; the other exception was being described as writing like a "drunken helot." That struck me as a contradiction, for helots, drunk or sober, did not write at all, not even on the tablets of their memory. However, that is a mere scratch, and I did not explain it to Mr. Beerbohm, knowing how busy he was at the moment demonstrating to his cockney read ers what a great dramatist Mr. Shaw was; infinitely greater than Arthur Pinero. As for the demerits of Iconoclasts, I have naught to say, except that it has sold better than any of my books, possibly an ominous sign in the eyes of Mr. Beerbohm, who has, no doubt, forgotten all about his clever review. That other critics did not agree with his verdict has nothing to do with the case; notably Remy de Gourmont who also gave me the opening review in the Mercure MID-VICTORIAN MAX 253 de France, a long article on "Chopin," now included in a volume of his Epilogues. That absence of "tendenz" which William James complained about in my Egoists, a refusal on my part to indulge in so-called "general views," in any neat little theory or "problem," met the approval of Remy de Gourmont, who detested phrases and empty formulas. I am speaking now of Icono clasts. But in La Plume (July 15 to August i, 1905) Paul Hyacinthe Loyson the son of the one time famous priest and orator, Pere Hyacinthe Loyson seemingly agreed with William James. He wrote, inter alia: "Pauteur est un fin gourmet des belles-lettres . . . je ne sache pas de plus beau sujet pour un these de doctorat es-Iettres. M. Huneker auquel il ne manque plus que la Sorbonne, le trouvera en latence dans chaque page de son livre vivant. Ce qu il manque, c est une preface d ensemble que Tediteur dramatique est fort capable de nous brosser a traits larges et drus. . . . Precieux vade- mecum, le livre de M. Huneker leur offre je le repete, un repertoire analytique et critique . . . son essai sur Ibsen, qu il faut mettre hors pair, est inestimable a cet egard." We are here far from the "yellow and drunken helot" of Mr. Beerbohm. Nevertheless, I did not write a "preface d ensemble" as suggested by the French critic. I preferred letting the title, Iconoclasts, serve as the "tendenz" of the book; in it all are image-breakers save, perhaps, the cynical Paul Hervieu, who strayed in by mistake. (To-day I loathe the book.) Now for a little elliptical escape: Here is a post-card dated 9th May, 1905, 10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W. C., and signed by Himself "G. Bernard Shaw." (He is fond of using post-cards and has 254 STEEPLEJACK written some memorable things on them.) He wrote: "John Bull is not yet published" (he means John Bull s Other Island), "I am too busy rehearsing and producing to attend to my publishing business for the moment. I proposed to Brentanos that they should get you to edit a selection from my musical feuilletons in The World, etc. They said it was an excellent idea to get you to edit my dramatic feuilletons and that they had bought up the old numbers of The Saturday Review accordingly. Knock the difference into their heads if you can. My sister in Germany is furious because you have compro mised her social position by describing me in Success (which has reached Germany) as a peasant lad/ The Shaw peasants ! Good God ! You know not what you say. Why did you give me the slip last fall? G. Bernard Shaw." The "peasant lad" I shall presently deal with; of the Dramatic Opinions I would speak first. The late Volney Streamer, literary adviser of the Brentanos, had collected all the critical articles of Mr. Shaw from The Saturday. I was asked to write a Prelude to the book, which con tains some of the author s always engaging and often fallacious criticisms. In my preface or introduction, rather, impertinence, I happened to speak of Mr. Beer- bohm as "Mid- Victorian Max." If I had tried to be funny and had written "Mud-Victorian" for London was clogged with literary mud during the Yellow Book period of the nineties or even "Max- Victorian," I might have understood what followed in the pages of The Saturday. Max went up into the air. Another page of loving invectives followed, worse than the first review, and I began to feel famous. He informed his readers that he was proud of the ascription, Mid- Vic- MID-VICTORIAN MAX 255 torian. If he were, why so hot, little man? as Emerson asked. If I wrote the precise phrase that pleased him, why should he foam at the mouth, metaphorically speak ing? In classic parlance I "got his goat/ and also a lot of free advertising. That was better than my publicly objecting to his "purple helot," wasn t it? I suspect that Mr. Shaw was not overjoyed with my preface, as later he wrote one for the English edition. The pro jected collection of his musical criticisms did not appear a good thing, as Shaw, whether writing of pictures or the tone-art, is distinctly amateurish. Glittering generali ties are his, but not backed up by technical training, wide experience, or genuine musical temperament. John Run- ciman told me that he had a poor opinion of Shaw as a music-critic. The "peasant boy" caused all the trouble, and al though I tried to explain to Mr. Shaw that the head-line in Success Magazine was none of my making, he would not listen to me. Robert Mackey, then associate editor of Success, wrote that head-line, and he has since deplored doing so. However, his sorrow is about as deep as mine. Why should Mr. Shaw heartily dislike the "peasant"? Scratch a socialist and you come on a snob. Max Beer- bohm has said in effect that socialism will never succeed till snobbishness ceases. He is right. Mr. Shaw is not of peasant origin though he has written that most Irish men originally came over from Liverpool on cattle-boats; he is middle-class Cork (with a Cork soul), and his family was not rich. He was a poor youth when he went to London, and he is none the worse for his struggle. The newspapers created the Shaw legend; that he was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, anti-vaccine, anti-vivisection, anti-evening clothes, wearing Jaeger flannels, anti-every- 256 STEEPLEJACK thing except notoriety. Yet for repeating in my article what was common talk, thanks to his own self-propa ganda, St. George who has slain so many dragons fell foul of me in a certain letter, calling me the short, ugly word on every count. XXVIII G. B. S. My main offence, however, was the "peasant lad"; that rankled. I met his cousin, Robert Shaw, a news paper correspondent for the New York Sun and some London journals in Berlin. He had not seen Success, and I suspect Mr. Shaw s sister did not see it then. The foolish part of the affair was that Mr. Shaw didn t believe my story of the mistake; he fancied a lurking insult when none was intended; indeed, I could only plead ignorance of another s error. So when he wrote me, August, 1905: "My dear Huneker: You really must come over here and have your mind properly trained; you will never be anything but a clever slummocker in America," I knew that further argument was useless. And who was I to succeed where the only Shaw had so signally failed? I wrote a weekly column for years in the London Musical Courier; I had lived in London and I loved the city, not evidently to no purpose, for if thirty years residence couldn t change Shaw from being a clever Irish slummocker, what chance had I for spiritual redemption? I remained in America the America that first recognised him, thanks to Richard Mansfield. I was the first to write of him as early as 1888. In 1890 I persuaded Marc Blumenberg to buy an article of Shaw s for The Musical Courier, which he did. It was printed in June or July of that year, though I shan t swear as to the year, as I have not kept my files of that journal; it may have been 1891. But it was the first 257 258 STEEPLEJACK musical "story" by Bernard Shaw to appear in an Ameri can publication. What was it about? If I remember, it preached the superiority of the forerunners of the pianoforte over the modern instrument. I have often noticed with amusement that literary persons usually like tinkling music. They speak of dulcimers, harpsi chords, clavichords, they prate of cymbaloms, harps, and lutes, but for full-blooded, highly-coloured composi tions for the keyboard, whether by Bach or Beethoven or Chopin, they have an abhorrence. The subdued light of Chinese lanterns, the Bohemian studio atmos phere, the tinkle-tinkle of music made by young men wearing bangles Ah ! that is lofty art. George Moore in Evelyn Innes goes into the matter heart and soul. So did Shaw; and recently I read in Ezra Pound s Pavan- nes and Divisions a fresh eulogy of Arnold Dolmetsch and his old instruments. We had Dolmetsch over here many years ago. He is all right, so is the antique and charming music he plays, but when Shaw begins abusing the modern concert grand pianoforte, I can t help re calling his other article, amusing enough, in an English monthly or fortnightly, in which he tells how he studied the piano. He unblushingly gives his reason for mildly abusing me, which reason corroborates my claim as being his "discoverer" over here. Under date i6th September, 1905, he writes: "The reason I call you a slummocker and heap insults on you, is that you are very useful to me in America, and quite friendly; consequently, you must be educated or you will compromise me." The blind leading the blind ! I don t think his allusion to my usefulness cynical. What else is a critic good for but to make himself useful? What is still more amusing G. B. S. 259 was his communication on music in a letter dated I3th August, 1905, from Cork. It is, like the others, in his small, distinct handwriting. "Some day I shall talk to you about music. I haven t the time to write now. Last winter I heard Liszt s Faust symphony played for the first time in London old-fashioned before it was born an obsession, with the new chords of the fifties!" We had been listening in New York to the "Faust" sym phony for how many years? How shallow is Shaw s judgment may be noted in his neglect to study Liszt in a proper historical perspective. "The chords of the fifties" were Liszt s original harmonic inventions, not to speak of his themes, some of which were utilised by Wagner in "The Ring," "Tristan," and "Parsifal." I ll go further: Without Liszt "Parsifal" would not be as it is. Liszt contributed much to the mystic "atmos phere." So much for George, the clever musical slum- mocker! He continues: "I know a lot more than you do, especially about music. What I said about Liszt s music is exactly accurate. Go and study the operas of Cornelius (delightful music) if you want to understand that particular moment." But George, dear old son ! It was not necessary for me to study the music of Peter Cornelius as I had listened to his masterpiece, season after season in the Metropolitan Opera House as conducted by Anton SeidI, sung by Emil Fischer. And don t you know that Cornelius was a pet pupil in composition of Franz Lizst during your famous "fifties"? That "The Barber of Bagdad" was produced in 1858 at Liszt s suggestion in Weimar? You probably do know more than I; you know more than anyone, living or dead; like the little girl in the play, 260 STEEPLEJACK for you the King is always naked; but you didn t know about the "Faust" symphony and the important part it played in Wagner s music-drama because you never read with understanding the Wagner-Liszt correspondence; and you didn t know about Cornelius and his acknowl edged indebtedness to Liszt though his is individual and truly "delightful music"; yet you know more about music than I ? Very well, then take the trouble to read my "Liszt" study (1911), and in the future you will make no such absurd "breaks." George was annoyed because I had challenged him to play the first movement of Chopin s E minor concerto, but as he was a one- fingered virtuoso he now works a mechanical piano, bless his musical soul! and he answered me as above. I had studied the Chopin concerto with Rafael Joseffy my copy is full of his pencilled fingering and phrasing and with that incomparable master at the second piano forte, I had played the allegro. At least I can play it better than the Aged Mariner of Adelphi Terrace (isn t all this lovely and childish, our "daring" and boasting?). I had answered a letter from Shaw, August, 1905 (i3th inst.), in an equally abusive key. It was at Sorrento, Italy, and I had been drinking the hot, heady, generous Capri wine, which primed me for retort; I must have made such a judicious person as G. B. S. grieve. I dared him to take off his shoes and show the world the web-foot of a bog-trotter. This charming remark I had remembered in some Lever novel. Uncle George must have smiled, but he never turned a hair. His reply was characteristic Shaw: "Your chest being now relieved, we can resume cordial relations." What is there to be said to such a saintly man who can thus turn the other cheek in so diplomatic a manner? G. B. S. 261 I forgot to tell you that after the "peasant lad" epi sode he wrote an article for the New York Metropolitan Magazine, in which he briefly alluded to my supposed slip. (Ah ! the honour of the Shaw family was at stake; Shaw the socialist !) He ended with a denial of the "fic tion" that I was trying to pass off as truth, and after rallying me came to an abrupt close with: "Now, James I" It was very funny to me and to my friends, who sent me numerous clippings of the sly little coda. Mr. Shaw is as dangerous as an army with brass bands to argue with, especially in public, and the only reason I am telling all these highly unimportant things is because someone else may do so and get the facts muddled. I am now convinced that Shaw was grooming me as his future biographer; hence the hint about being "useful to me." But I was not a bird of his feather and could not be per suaded to alight on his twig, there to be snared. Pro fessor Archibald Henderson fell into the trap, and what he endured while spinning his yarn fancy writing the life of a man not dead ! really the "autobiography," for he worked with Shaw he alone can tell. The mean est part of the thing is that recently Mr. Shaw said that Mr. Chesterton was the only man who understood him. gratitude, where is thy Shaw? O Shaw, where is thy Archibald? I have been told that another of my offences was what 1 had printed in the chapter devoted to "The Quin tessence of Shaw." I asked there if Mr. Shaw is brilliant on bran, what would he not be on beef and beer? This question angered Mr. Beerbohm; possibly I might have asked that Mid- Victorian if his imitation of the essay style of Charles Lamb did sometimes turn out cold mutton. 262 STEEPLEJACK Perhaps Bernard Shaw does furtively eat roast-beef sandwiches, and at midnight; perhaps he does secretly sip Shandygaff not Kit Morley s hippocrene draught, but the garden variety of half ale, half porter. Perish the proposition ! Shaw eating meat would cause more of a row than did the revelations of Anna Seuron, the governess in the Tolstoy household, who had caught old man Tolstoy in his bare feet and at the pantry gobbling raw beef. And the hour was midnight. That beef lead ing-motive resounded the world over. In a roundabout fashion, I heard that one morning while at Lady Gregory s, Mr. Shaw came down to breakfast in a truly masculine mood. He must have glanced cannibalistically at the cutlets, for Mrs. Shaw warningly exclaimed: "Now, George." He is said to have uttered Banshee curses and to have pitched in and eaten a pound of meat or was it hog and hominy? Ochone ! And he may have smoked a pipe in the hidden gardens of Coole Park ! But I shan t vouch for the respectability of the anecdote, nor am I violating confidence, as it was told me without restrictions, though not by Lady Gregory. I met Mr. Shaw at Baireuth, in 1896, on the esplanade of the Wagner Theatre, where he informed me of the whereabouts of John Runciman, music-critic of The Saturday Review. I liked the looks of Shaw tall, weedy, a bearded man, with a gangling gait. I liked him better in 1903 when I saw him coming from a per formance of his travesty in blank verse, "The Admirable Bashville, or Constancy Rewarded," at the Imperial Theatre. Reformers are usually dyspeptic. When I speak to them I always turn rny head the other way, especially if I am dose to a man who doesn t drink or smoke. That sort is pestiferous. But Bernard, the G. B. S. 263 Shaw, is eupeptic. He may have a weak stomach, irrita ble nerves, like most thinkers, but personally he is as sweet and wholesome as John Burroughs or Edwin Markham. He has magnetism when he chooses to turn on the current. He looks like Everyman. He is far from handsome, and his brogue is Corkonian. Careless as to dress, he is extremely courteous. He is said to be a physi cal coward, but boasts the rarer quality of moral heroism. He wrote at the time of McKinley s assassination that Czolgoz was the bravest man in America because he stood alone. Shaw proved that he didn t lack moral bravery when he bearded ex-Premier Asquith and his ministry amid the execrations of the press in England and America. Lloyd George owes his fellow-Celt a candle. Yet this dauntless ink-slinger once ran away as fast as his long legs could carry him from a socialistic gathering in Hyde Park. He didn t propose to dodge brickbats and dead cats, realising the truth that he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day. He did. William Morris, magnificent man and poet, would always roar when he related this anecdote. Daddy Long-legs, he called Shaw. In the deep and earnest eyes of Mr. Shaw are humour and kindliness. He begged me not to write anything more about his charitable disposition, "else," he added, "I ll be having all the beggars in London at my back door." And a mighty good thing it would have been for the beggars, though they might have got more advice than ha pence. ("Keep it up, Shamus, keep it up!" I can hear George muttering as he reads this. You are again advertising me, again being useful. ") XXIX HIS LETTERS An extract from letter dated August 13, 1905: "You are quite right in saying that I lead the life of a saint; that is my trade. But a saint is not what you allege me to be. There is a convention that saints are disin terested and ascetic, just as there is a convention that sailors are frank and generous and unsuspicious. . . . When you try to make out that I pose as Diogenes (I don t), that I am at the heart just the same sloppy, maudlin, coward making a metre of it as the feeblest of my readers, I fly at you promptly for debasing the moral currency." (The spectacle of Preacher George accusing anyone of debasing the moral currency after his successful efforts at the game is enough to make poor old George Eliot sit up on her eternal gridiron.) "I am really a coward speaking with authority of the dangers of cowardice, a sort of conceited prig who has found out the weakness of the current morality by practising it, a voluptuary who finds himself not on the infinite illu sions of a monastic imagination, but on a sufficiency of actual adventures, and a dozen other things that I have not time to enumerate." Far be it from me to insinuate that the spirit in my "Quintessence of Shaw" was an ironical spirit, and that both Beerbohm and Shaw missed it, whether wilfully or not, I can t say; but the fact remains that the entire chapter was written in the key of irony, extravagant irony, and that a professional ironist like "Max" and a 264 HIS LETTERS 265 Brummagen-Englfshman like Shaw did not see this is another confirmation of the suspicious hatred entertained by Europeans generally towards our playful American manner. I did call Shaw a saint jestingly. I did ad dress him as St. George or St. Bernard. I did say that, secretly, he was a sloppy sentimentalist. And he, of all men, became enraged at my very palpable fooling. Really, I am beginning to believe in Paul Hervieu s re mark to me: that indulgence in the mode ironical steril ises the sense of humour. Nevertheless, I cling to my superstition that Shaw is a wingless angel with an old maid s temperament, but one who can t take a joke. John Quinn is right: the Irish are witty but lack the saving sense of humour. Shaw never had an original idea, but decorated him self with tall feathers pulled from Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Sudermann, even Maeterlinck, in his stage directions ; above all with the feathers of Marx, Nietzsche and Samuel Butler. He made a fortune out of the Nietzsche philosophy, and his native Irish wit and im pudence imposed on a public innocent of the sources of his knowledge. But oh ! the box-offices of this "peasant lad" from Cork, who sold his Celtic birthright for a golden mess of British pottage. Neither with Synge and Yeats, nor with George Moore, Joyce, or Stephens, will he be ranged, though he had talent for fiction, wit ness his clever novels. And now after lecturing on the evil of being Bernard, let me say that the more I write about him the more I love him; as Oscar Wilde said according to Vincent O SuIIivan in reply to the ques tion: "Do you know George Moore?" Yes, I know George Moore, know him so very well that I haven t spoken to him for ten years." I revere Mr. Shaw the 266 STEEPLEJACK man, though I dissemble my love, and I admire the writer who succeeded in England where Ibsen and Nietzsche did not, while exploiting their genius to his own uses. But the letters of George Bernard Shaw! Master pieces, some of them. Superman Billingsgate, also. We had another tiff over a letter he had sent me relative to "Candida," in which he confided to my "discreation" to use what I wished, and from which I extracted just one paragraph, to be found on page 254 of Iconoclasts. He had, this St. Bernard, the cheek to accuse me of print ing his letters without his permission, he, all the while hoping and praying I would print them in their entirety; for notoriety is the breath of his nostrils. He even per suaded several critical friends in London that I had been indiscreet and I was duly reproved for my "blithe" beha viour in the newspapers. You shall see that he not only gave me permission but that I only reproduced one para graph. Possibly he feared that again I might write of his sporting genealogy that he was "W. S. Gilbert out of Ibsen" and an extravagant compliment at that. Nor have I been the only victim in this respect of his caprice. There were several of his "disciples" who could tell the same tale. He assured me that I had picked up my philosophy from the gutter, meaning that he hated individualism; but his socialism has always been either a joke or a puzzle to his friends and socialists alike. In reality Shaw is the perfect flowering of the individualist, the moral anarch in action. Just as Henry James ex pressed his dislike of Stendhal, without whom he and the entire modern school of psychologists in fiction would not have been as they are this includes Bourget, Mere- HIS LETTERS 267 dith, even Tolstoy, who has handsomely acknowledged his obligations to the author of La Chartreuse de Parme so Shaw practically admits that he is as much of an anarch as Max Stirner. Karl Marx he long ago repudi ated. He would set up a pontifical throne of his own. But he is only a condiment in the stodgy stew of British socialism, a flavour, nothing more. He mocks at my in corrigible romanticism, but if the wages of sin is death, the wages of goodness may be insipidity. Dostoievsky has profoundly said that "One must be really a great man to be able to make a stand even against common sense." Shaw is too sensible. He thinks more of a drain-pipe than a cathedral; socialism is only another name for drain-pipes, and while modern man cannot live without them, by them alone he cannot live. And he has paid the penalty. It is vision, not open plumbing, that counts. Vision Bernard Shaw has not; in his heart is a box-office. He, the champion of liberty, is a philistine. Little wonder I sent him a post-card from Sorrento in answer to his rakehelly letters, and with this inscription: a tomb, and on it the words: "Ci-git, the first of the Sha vians." But I was not exact. There is only one and last Shavian, G. B. Shaw. And if the whole is better than the half, then a half-Shaw is better than no bread. Let us begin with his post-card dated 12 August, 1904, somewhere in Rosshire: "This is well. I shall be back in London in October, where we can foregather at our ease. Meanwhile, give my compliments to the genial sweet-mouthed Ibsen" (I was then en route to Norway). "Of Strindberg I have a high opinion, possibly because I have read very little of him chiefly a story called Memoirs of a Madman, or something like that, but ought 268 STEEPLEJACK to have been called The Truth About My Confounded Wife." (Probably this meant Strindberg s autobiogra phy, Inferno.) "The truth about Candida is useless; no body will believe it; and my letter will be scouted as an obvious invention of your own. I am writing a play about Ireland and England study of national characteristics. Are you going to Vienna by any chance? My German translator, Trebitsch, can put you on to all the advanced spirits there. G. B. S." His kind offer I didn t take advantage of, as I had lived in Vienna and knew all the modern crowd, Schnitzler, von Hofmansthal, and the rest. My translator, Madame Lola Lorme, lived there. I was even accorded a Huneker-Chopin Evening in the Bee thoven Saal, so George was fetching coals to Newcastle. From London under date of 4 January, 1904, he sent me a very interesting communication, from which I give an excerpt: "Dear Huneker: I was sorry not to see more of you on your visit here, as you struck me as being a likable old ruffian. My wife, since your review of Man and Superman/ will not allow that you have a spark of intelligence, but you must come and mollify her in person when you are over next. It always amuses me to see Candida stirring up oceans of sentiment. I think I see you wallowing in it. Your writing always interests me; but you will never really master the English drama until you study English life and character. I speak as an Irish foreigner who has had to learn it as one learns Chinese. My first play, though performed in a crude version in 1892, was not completed as it stands at present until I had been more than twenty years in London; and a great deal of the complaints made of it and other works of mine by Scotch literary men in London (you know that the literary life is lived in a vacuum) and by HIS LETTERS 269 Yankees, by yourself, is explained by the fact that Eng lish life, as I present it with a vestryman s and politician s knowledge of it (to say nothing of my private adventures) , is irritatingly unnatural and repugnant. When I am on the general human nature plane, they are delighted with me. When I am on the English plane, they become soreheaded at once. They love Candida; she might be an American, an Irishwoman, a Scotchwoman, any woman you please. But take my specifically Englishwomen Blanche in Widower s House (only one remove from her grandmother s washtub), Vivie Warren, Lady Cicely Waynflete in that excellent Christian tract, Captain Brassbound s Conversion, and, above all, Ann White- field and Violet Robinson in the Superman drama (Ann being my most gorgeous female creation; you can no more appreciate these from the other side of the Atlantic, clever as you are, than you could write Anthony Trol- lope s novels). The men annoy you in the same way; you can see the fun of Brittannus in Caesar and Cleo patra and perhaps of the American captain in Brass- bound and young Malone in the Superman, where national types are openly made fun of; but the Hooligan in Brassbound, the chauffeur Straker in the Superman, the whole gang in Widower s House arouse your instinc tive anti-English prejudice almost as if they had been done by Thackeray, who was so stupidly English that, being a man of genius, he wasted his life for gentility s sake, on silly tittle-tattle relieved by occasional maudlin drivel." Note: Mr. Shaw forgot that London is not far from New York, forgot that the characters he believed to be incomprehensible and irritating to Americans are old 2 7 o STEEPLEJACK friends from a half-hundred fictions previous to his; and as for his notion of our "national types," yes, we did laugh over them because they were such caricatures, from the Shavian shadow-land. Abandon all reality, ye who enter here ! might be a motto for his fantastic plays. There is no "instinctive anti-English prejudice" among Americans, unless they happen to be professional Irish-Americans. Curious, though, the "instinctive" Irish prejudice against Thackeray that endures. They have never forgiven him his stupid strictures on the people and customs of Erin. Shaw continues in the same vein: "I tell you, you don t appreciate the vitality of the English; you see nothing but their stupidity, their moral cowardice, their utter lack of common sense, their nai ve acquisitiveness, their brainless cruelty to children and criminals, their uncritical obtuseness or idolatry (as the case may be), their childish unscrupulousness, their in sensibility to, and disbelief in, any means of persuasion except intimidation and coercion, and all the rest of it. And the stupidity, peculiar to the Englishman, which prevents him from knowing what he is doing, is really a stroke of genius on his part and is far more voluntary than the bright American thinks. Cromwell said that no man goes further than the man who doesn t know where he is going; and in that you have the whole secret of English success. What is the use of being bright, witty, subtle, genial, if these qualities lead to the subjec tion and poverty of India and Ireland, and to the political anarchy and corruption of the United States? What says my beautiful, vital, victorious odious-to-all-good- Americans, Miss Ann Whitefield? The only really simple thing is to go straight for what you want and grab it. How disgusting! How cynical! so say you; HIS LETTERS 271 and so also say the Filipino and the Red Indian of you and yours." (Note: To us the chief characteristic of Ann was peculiarly Yankee.) "Would you like to see what the English think of the Americans? Read Algernon Casterton, by Lady Sykes, a recent English novel. There you will see the English conception of the American woman as a cold-blooded sexless prostitute, who sells herself without scruple and without affection to the men who can give her the best time in London society, and who makes her husband pay for her favours as if he were a stranger. This is a revolting notion to an Englishman, whose chief concep tion of a wife is a woman who will not only keep house for him in return for her board, but will allow him the use of her person gratuitously. "Some day I will write a play showing the good side of this American sexlessness of which London complains so much. However, the moral for you is, study the Eng lish. There is much to be learnt from them; and I, who have been struggling for more than a quarter of a century with their knavish brainlessness, lose patience often enough; but I get on with them very well personally; find them enormously interesting; have got a good deal of training from them; and, in short, intend to stay here, and be one of the glories of literature. What is this tom fool story about my objecting to Mansfield s Bluntschli? ( Arms and the Man. ) I never saw it never objected to it. All these Mansfield stories are fudge. They are not exaggerations; quite the contrary. Richard s repu tation is a feeble, vulgar, blundering attempt to suggest an outrageous but actual truth. But we are on excellent terms. He tells me that the American public will not stand me that The Devil s Disciple was played by 272 STEEPLEJACK him to empty houses out of sheer devotion to art. On the other hand, I call him Pompey and revile him as an obsolete barnstormer because he funked Caesar, and would not even condescend to notice my alternative offer to let him play the waiter in You Never Can Tell/ But these passages leave no bad blood, because I have in my desk the returns showing that the American public spent about $150,000 to gloat over his Richard Dudgeon; and he considers Cassar and Cleopatra an imbecile bur lesque. So we both remain, each perfectly pleased with himself, and perfectly friendly. Who is Arnold Daly? Is he anything to the late Augustin? Talking of Augus- tin, Miss Marbury showed Ada Rehan Captain Brass- bound s Conversion, thinking she would jump at such a part as Lady Cicely. But alas ! Ada shared opinion that Brassbound is rot could see no point in it at all. Does not this make you ashamed of yourself? This is a Christmas-holiday letter, hence its length. I spend the whole slack holiday time in a mad race to get abreast of my correspondence. Yours ever, G. Bernard Shaw/ Note: As to the "sexlessness of the American woman," some disgruntled males over here believe that female suffrage is the logical outcome of oversexed women. How long ago seems 1904! Mansfield gone, charm ing Ada Rehan gone, Arnold Daly "nothing" to the late Augustin grown up, having made his reputation in Shaw comedies, Forbes-Robertson, with Mrs. Robert son in "Caesar and Cleopatra"; Grace George in "Cap tain Brassbound s Conversion" Mr. Shaw must sigh for new actors to conquer. He called me an "inconti nent naive sort of big baby" this nearly fifteen years ago adding apropos of that quotation about Candida: HIS LETTERS 273 " I know the risk I ran, and even foresaw as an agreeable possibility that you would blurt the thing out and give me a chance to lecture you." No ! George didn t set a trap for me with his smooth phrase "at your discretion," did he? And he didn t wish me to print it, did he, so that he could contradict me? Oh! No! Not to-day, baker, call to-morrow with a crusty cottage ! as we used to say in the dear old days at Dulwich. Follows the fatal paragraph, the one I quoted in Iconoclasts (in 1905): "Dear Huneker: Don t ask me conundrums about that immoral female Candida. Observe the entry of W. Bur gess: You re not the lady h used to typewrite for him. Prossy is a very highly selected young person indeed, devoted to Morell to the extent of helping him in the kitchen, but to him the merest pet rabbit, unable to get the smallest hold on him. Candida is as unscrupulous as Siegfried: Morell himself at least sees that; that no law will bind her. She seduces Eugene just exactly as far as it is worth her while to seduce him. She is a woman without character in the conventional sense. Without brains and strength of mind she would be a wretched slattern and voluptuary. She is straight for natural means, not for conventional ethical ones. Noth ing can be more cold-bloodedly reasonable than her fare well to Eugene: All very well, my lad; but I don t quite see myself at 50 with a husband of 35. It s just this freedom from emotional slop, this unerring wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her so completely mis tress of the situation. Then consider the poet. She makes a man of him finally by showing him his own strength that David must do without poor Uriah s wife. And then she pitches in her picture of the home, the onions and the tradesmen, and the cosseting of big 274 STEEPLEJACK baby Morell. The New York hausfrau thinks it a little paradise; but the poet rises up and says: Out, then, into the night with me Tristan s holy night. If this greasy fool s paradise is happiness, then I give it to you with both hands; life is nobler than that. That is the poet s secret. The young things in front weep to see the poor boy going out lonely and bareheaded in the cold night to save the proprieties of New England Puri tanism; but he is really a god going back to his heaven; proud, unspeakably contemptuous of the happiness he envied in the days of his blindness, clearly seeing that he has higher business on hand than Candida. She has a little quaint intuition of the completeness of his cure; she says, he has learnt to do without happiness. "As I should certainly be lynched by the infuriated Candidamanics if this view of the case were made known, I confide it to your discretion. I tell it to you because it is an interesting example of the way a scene which could be conceived and written only by transcending the ordinary notion of the relations between the persons, nevertheless stirs the ordinary emotions to a very high degree, all the more because the language of the poet, to those who have not the clue to it, is mysterious and bewildering, and, therefore, worshipful. I divined it myself before I found out the whole truth about it. "Blank is a very decent fellow; but he persists, like most intellectuals, in dictating conditions to a world which has to organise itself in obedience to laws of life which he doesn t understand any more than you or I. Individualism is all very well as a study product; but that is not what is happening. Society is integrating, not individualising; and it is better to lay hold of what is doing and make the best of it than to sit complaining HIS LETTERS 275 that it won t do something else. Trusts are most excel lent things as superior to competitive shopkeeperism as symphonies are to cornet solos; but they need more careful scoring and longer rehearsals and better conduct ing. The only individualism worth looking at now is breeding the race and getting rid of the promiscuity and profligacy called marriage. "Is there such a thing in America as a decent pub lisher one whom I could trust, in reason, to sell my books on commission if I manufactured them myself? I am tired of wasting time negotiating with fools who are afraid to publish the Superman, and rogues who want to get too soft a bargain over it. It is copyrighted all safely; but it lies there dead whilst McClures and Harper s and the like funk it, and others want to grab it forever and each. Yr. G., Bernard Shaw." Thus Shaw on Shaw. Doubtless he changed his mind many times since 1904. Candida may have become to him charmless. She was transferred from Ibsen s Lady of the Sea with the charm and poetry omitted. Ibsen, too, can be charmless, but his small-town frumps are often vital, intense. Both Ibsen and Nietzsche were butchered to make a Shavian holiday. In Iconoclasts .1 have paid my tribute to the brilliant gifts of Mr. Shaw, to his in vincible courage, love of his fellow beings for if he chides us it is only to correct our weaknesses his detestation of cruelty and injustice, his splendid sincerity and super abundance of normal sense also to his sublime capacity for distorting facts if it suits his mood. With his cos- mical intellect he should not be a mere playwright amusing an inconstant public with his profound japes and jests; he should be Premier, Pope, or Kaiser. I 276 STEEPLEJACK proffer no apologies for quoting him so freely; indeed, I think he should feel indebted to me for my generous spirit. But I m quite sure he won t. Yet, as I have said before, I have no grievance against Mr. Shaw. He is, or was, my most distinguished "enemy." I must add that he has most graciously given me permission to re print in part the foregoing letters. The query about a publisher was soon answered. I went to my old friend, Arthur Brentano, and within a week Mr. Shaw was provided with the best of publishers. Since then all his books and plays have been handled by this enterprising house, and I think the unsentimental socialist has had no cause to complain over the arrange ment. I need hardly say that as I am not a "literary agent," I was not "interested" in the transaction except as a friend of author and publisher. It was another case of being "useful" to Mr. Shaw, and he was duly grateful. I should not have resurrected these memories if I had not been delving into the past, as I think it prudent to let sleeping Shavians lie, but when he is naughty he has to be rebuked even if he is a naughty grandfather, on whose banner is inscribed the strange device: Equality, Envy, Indigestion. Ah ! if you had only come over here years ago, Master, we might have civilised, made something out of you, if only a Sachem in Tammany Hall. XXX A HALF-HAMLET I It is lucky for a man that he doesn t marry his first love; luckier for the woman. Some Russian has said Dostoievsky, I think that man is unhappy because he doesn t know he is happy. Most men live in a state of in nocence till they marry. Then they awaken and remorse sets in. Women don t believe this because woman is as a rule incapable of remorse. Let me relate the story of my most interesting sentimental hesitations; a story in which the heroine is a half-Hamlet and also plays the r6Ie of real protagonist. I was in love, yet an onlooker. But what an enchantment of the heart 1 It happened in Rome, years ago. I was young, green as a green apricot, and overflowing with belief in woman, and a constitutional distrust of myself. That is the beginning of wisdom. An October sun slanted its yellow glory from the west ern sky as I entered the narrow gate of the Protestant cemetery, which I had achieved after a dusty walk from my apartment at the top of the Spanish Stairs, by way of the Porta San Paolo. I was warm and craved repose : palms, pines, willows, olives, aloes, and flame-shaped cypresses in shaded alleys promised a pleasing haven. It was my favourite spot. Summer afternoons when Rome was a faded photograph of herself I would read, sitting on the grassy mounds above the bones of the buried. Keats and Shelley touched my imagination 277 278 STEEPLEJACK here as nowhere. I had become selfish about the place and resented the appearance of strangers, odious tourists carrying red books, who talked loudly, whispered, gig gled, or stared condescendingly. So sensitive was I that invariably I questioned Angelo, the smiling guardian of the doorway, as to the number of foreign invaders. On this occasion Angelo held up two fingers. I sighed my relief. A pair of humans I could avoid. Up the gentle slope which leads to the tombs of Shelley and Trelawney I slowly passed. To my annoyance, I saw a man and woman before the altar of the dead. The woman was on her knees. Even that appropriate attitude did not mollify me. They were intruders. I hurried down-hill and went to the grave of Keats. There, at least, was grief made more classic by the appearance of the Cestius pyramid. But again I was disappointed, for the appeal ing voices of beggar-boys came to me through gratings in the nearest wall. I shook a threatening head at these importuners and strode away. It was one of my gloomy days when all the poetry stored up in me mingled with my spiritual spleen and caused dolorous hours. I was then of a receptive temperament without an outlet for peri odical crises of emotion. I would joke about this con dition, calling it a congestion of the poetic centres, yet I was bitterly chagrined when I realised my inability to relieve myself in creative verse. Suddenly my shoulder was brushed and a contralto voice asked a pardon in English. It was the lady I had seen kneeling. She was garbed in green and carried flowers which she placed on the grave of Keats, not for getting his beloved friend, John Severn, who lies hard by in the ground. She again knelt and, her face in her ungloved hands, she seemed more in meditation than A HALF-HAMLET 279 prayer. Her fingers, pressed against her eyes, were thin and white, yet suggested nervous force. When she re moved them and arose to rejoin her companion, I saw the features of a young woman which attracted because of their purity and intense expression. But I could not conceive how anyone could thus sorrow after a dead poet. I love Keats, revere his resting-place, but this this was something more personal. Perhaps, I mused, as I looked at the woman s slender figure, she is some sentimental girl who had especially visited Rome to stand at the tomb of one whose name is not "writ in water," but on imperishable marble. For a moment I was stirred by the image of the act, and then felt a wave of irrita tion mount within me. She had reached her former position and I noticed that the man with her was big of frame, expansive in his movements, and dressed like an Englishman abroad. At once I instinctively disliked him. My nerves told me that I was unstrung, and I wondered whether I had made a mistake by remaining in Rome all summer; the notion that I was suffering from a mild attack of malaria was more grateful than the con viction that it was hypersesthesia. This feeling prompted me to walk boldly towards the couple as I lifted my hat. Otherwise, why should I, shy and slightly supercilious, risk a snub from strangers? They cordially received me, and the man said in a booming bass voice: "Really, it s joyous to meet a countryman in this lonely cemetery. I was telling Mrs. Saint-Hilary "But, Lewis, how do you know the gentleman is English?" interposed the lady. I made a nervous gesture of dissent. "I am an American, but I adore your poets." She glanced her gratitude and would have spoken but for the jarring laughter of her husband. "After this," he effusively 2 8o STEEPLEJACK exclaimed, " I ll never go by clothes. At all events, you have an English tailor." Annoyed, I bowed, yet without the acrid feeling I had smothered a few moments before; so sudden was the revo lution of my mood. Bearded, imposing in girth, with the head of a fighter, of a master of enterprises, Saint-Hilary had made an immediate impression. Either one liked him or got out of his pathway. He was given to elbowing his way through the crowds of life and I realised the animal force and attractiveness of this new acquaintance. Presently I was engaged in analysing the charm of Mrs. Saint-Hilary. She was one of those rare women whose air is captivating in its candour. I set her down as a poet and then I remembered in a flash. Of course ! She was the wife of the robust correspondent of a promi nent English newspaper. I smiled. "I think we ought to know each other," I ventured. "There is at least one drawing-room in Rome where we may meet some day." The girl clasped her hands, crying: "I knew it. The Bernervilles. And you are James Huneker who reads poetry on the tombs of Keats and Shelley and transposes their poetry to the key of Schumann and Chopin. What did I say, Lewis? What did I say?" She was all en thusiasm, and my perplexity increased as I recalled her earlier elegiac expression. The nonsense about Shelley and Chopin ! Mrs. Bernerville must have been in one of her exaggerated gossipy moods. The husband took my hand. "I liked you from the first. Old Bernerville told me about you. You are very solid over there." He nodded in the direction of Rome. "Yes, I some times read here, oftener dream my afternoons away. In fine, I m a dilettante, and that s why I love Rome of A HALF-HAMLET 281 all cities it is the one where you can be the laziest with most dignity." We talked of our friends, of our preferences in art and literature, of our beloved poets. Saint-Hilary proposed departing. "We live up in the Ludovisi Quarter, on the Via Sallustiana, and darkness soon comes these autumn days. Let us walk as far as the Porta San Paolo and take & carriage there." "And I am at the Trinita de Monti." "Our neighbour, practically," said the Eng lishman. "Come, we must be going, Dottie." I felt resentful. Dottie ! What a name ! And how little suited to her spiritual personality was her good-natured, tiresome husband. In the carriage facing Mrs. Saint- Hilary, I studied her face. Her eyes reflected the slaty grey-green of the sky. For me she was like a harp that vibrated, yet had never sounded the eternal music within her. II When a young man wishes to resolve the enigma of a strange woman, to evoke her submerged music, he is likely to push his curiosity beyond its province, his virtu osity beyond its power. I remembered this as I slowly walked along the Via Sistina. The weather was chilly, one of those damp evenings in which sounds a cheerless autumn, the leading-motive of a rapidly approaching winter. I did not feel in a resilient humour; if at that precise minute I could have avoided visiting the Berner- villes, I should have been almost content. I knew that the Saint-Hilarys were to be there. Mrs. Bernerville had written me a brief, breathless note full of underlined adjectives and enthusiastic gasps. O what an impres sion I had made on her dear friends ! Mrs. Saint-Hilary 282 STEEPLEJACK had not minced her words I looked like an artist while her husband, dear, old, bluff Saint-Hilary a rough diamond and a man of importance in the literary world he, too, likes you; a good fellow, he calls you, very different from the average critic ! I sniffed. She was impossibly delightful, cette dame ! Why had I given her my books? I reddened at the ascription "average critic." What impertinence ! What a patronising tone ! I regretted my promise. I loathed strange people. For me success in life meant avoiding new faces. Even the memory of Mrs. Saint-Hilary s face, vaguely silhouetted in the twilight, did not touch me. Her mystery evap orated in the flabby phrases of Mrs. Bernerville; besides, the Bernervilles were too rich; the possession of much money results in grossness. I had reached the Piazza Barbarina and its rococo Bernini Tritons. Soon I was shaking hands with my hostess, wondering why I had come. "It s good to see you" were her welcoming words. "I ve asked no one but the Saint-Hilarys. Bernerville expects his old pirate, as he calls him, the Prince Abbazia" that stupid old bore, I thought "but let us go to the fire. What disagreeable nights we are getting. I recall Rome when its Octobers were like the Mays of Florence." Mrs. Bernerville was in the fading fifties, small, alert, her face like a wizened pear. She said she was from Boston, but in moments of mockery her husband would mention the name of a small Western town as her birth place. She always endured this sarcasm with placid humour; under the severest strain her temper always was admirable. Dressed in black lace, wearing a collar of black pearls, she appeared to me a richly evolved beetle, including its celerity she would circle about a A HALF-HAMLET 283 room, about her husband, or a victim with an accompany ing loquacity that compelled rather than charmed. The Salon was empty, save for our presence. Sitting opposite the fireplace I forgot my irritability as I listened to her budget of gossip about people we knew. I longed to put a few questions concerning the Saint-Hilarys. Who was the wife? Had they been married many years? But my companion pursued a zigzag monologue in which she exposed with touching innocence the troubles of Count O Ragan and his pretty spouse. She had her own theory concerning the course of this unfortunate marital squab ble it was not altogether the fault of the Count and his passion for gambling. Oh ! no. If she dared why, yes, certainly the Saint-Hilarys were happy. Whoever doubted it, Dottie is Irish, her husband, need one ask, English. He is a trump, his wife a bit of humbug. Dottie a humbug ! For me such familiarity bred frost. "And," continued Mrs. Bernerville, "she is a poet, like yourself." I raised deprecating hands. "Dear lady, I am not a poet only a dreamer. Pray do not say any more about my books. My poetry goes into the waste- basket. After all the praises you have heaped on my ineffectual head, I fear Mrs. Saint-Hilary will find me a sad disappointment." "Praise! I! Why I really told her you were an inarticulate Milton, or was it Browning? If you would only fall in love and be jilted, you might possibly overwhelm us with a masterpiece. But don t fall in love with our Dottie it would be a waste of time. Ah ! there you are, Bernerville." Glad of the interruption, I cordially greeted the old man. The Miltonic allusion had put my politeness to the straining test. Oh ! for a vast wilderness from which the tactless would be forever barred. "How axe you feeling, young man? Why don t we 284 STEEPLEJACK see you oftener? If I m not in, there s the Madame, who can discourse Shakespeare and the musical glasses. And then don t forget, I have some wonderful Burgundy in my cellar. What you miss!" The short, apoplectic Bernerville, with his brilliant, Oriental eyes, his whee dling red lips, and old-fashioned side-whiskers looked more like a Wall Street banker than an American who had lived in Italy thirty years. "Oh! let s talk of music," impa tiently broke in his wife. "We were talking of Sgambati and Liszt." I closed my eyes resignedly. I was accus tomed to her foreshortenings of the truth. She would talk of Sgambati, with whom she had studied ten or twenty years earlier, and of Liszt and the Princess Sayn- Wittgenstein, before the end of the evening. It was one of my particular tortures to hear from her rapidly mov ing lips the secret reason why Cardinal Antonelli had in terfered with the projected marriage of Liszt. She even insinuated that Liszt had asked the Cardinal to refuse his consent, as the pianist-composer wished somehow to wriggle out of his promise to marry that formidable bluestocking, the Princess. I had been retold that in cident at least a hundred times. "I say, where are our guests? It s nearly ten o clock. No Saint-Hilary, no Dottie, the passionate pilgrim, no Abbazia ! I wonder where that old pirate is ?" Berner ville held his wrath in his pudgy white hand and wickedly smiled. His friends often boasted that he could shatter any reputation with a gleam of his shining teeth. The sound of a remote door closing, then approaching foot steps it must be the Saint-Hilarys. Unannounced they entered, the lady on gliding feet, Saint-Hilary following with his amiable shuffle. Mrs. Saint-Hilary did not seem A HALF-HAMLET 285 too cordial, while her husband with his air of false bon homie was intolerable. These people, who had been so desirable the other day, at close range were average folk. With pessimistic fancy I immediately saw everything drab. She had not removed her wraps in the anteroom she was a privileged person; there was a touch of fur on her shoulders, and the round Astrakhan hat on her shapely head gave her an exotic air. A Russian princess fresh from the Neva, a driver of snow-sledge and rein deers ! I saw the light from the blazing logs reverberate from the deep grey eyes. Then she went into the apart ment of Mrs. Bernerville, and I wondered why such a trivial happening as the reflection of fire in a woman s eyes, sweet-cupped and dark-lashed, should so trouble my soul. "Come into the den and have something decent before you begin to slop tea," growled Bernerville to the two men. "I will that," was the ready response of Saint- Hilary. I shook my head. I preferred staring into the flame, hoping that it might evoke her glance. As the ladies returned, the expected Prince arrived. He stiffly bowed and looked in the direction of the smoking-room. Mrs. Bernerville laughed. "We will excuse you, Ab- bazia. They are in there." "I m thirsty," he curtly replied and disappeared. "Bernerville has odd cronies, hasn t he?" asked his wife. "You ve been coming to this house for years. Tell me, have you ever met an intimate of my husband s you could converse with over a minute?" I replied: "Frankly, no." "Have you written much?" asked, in her modulated tones, Mrs. Saint-Hilary. I forgave her the brusqueness of her salutation. At one swift leap all my early interest re vived. It was her voice that held me; it was as tender 286 STEEPLEJACK as the green of newly put forth leaves. "You are a poet," she gaily asserted; "what image held your tongue in check then? Come, give us the fresh vintage of your fancy." Her husband away, she fairly warmed. the Celt in her eyes and their melancholy setting ! I stam mered. My conceit deserted me. An inward necessity bade me keep silent, though I longed to respond in lyric phrase. The first man who compared a woman with a rose was a poet, Voltaire averred, but the second a fool. So I did what infatuated poets have done before me I kept my peace and drank my tea hot. Not only did I feel like a fool, I know I acted one. The two women chatted over their work. Mrs. Bernerville politely in quired if Mr. Saint-Hilary would soon finish his book on Celtic Antiquities. "He is a desperately lazy man, my husband, notwithstanding his bigness. He thinks he has laboured like a galley-slave when he has finished his daily stint for his newspaper. Aren t men naturally slothful?" She turned to me. "I am, if I may reason from the general to the particular?" "Yes, but you are a poet." "I am not. I love poetry as much as music, but I never write it." "You know what dear Mrs. Bernerville says of you?" "That I m an inarticulate " I flushed. "I don t believe it. You will write when the time comes. Some friendly soul should stir you." "Ah, but where is she?" My tone was so mocking that the two women rallied me. The elder vivaciously ex claimed: "If you are going to talk like that, I ll leave you alone and go see what mischief those men are up to. Esthetics bore me." She scampered away. The silence endured several minutes. Mrs. Saint- Hilary went to the fire. Her eyes were dark, her face A HALF-HAMLET 287 flushed I thought I detected a certain fatigue in them; the face with its decidedly irregular profile was without distinction at this moment. Perhaps she was not so happy as her friends believed. She spoke: "I think I recognise in you a trait of our time. Every generation produces its share of souls disillusioned. All sorts of in genious, also silly, theories are put forth to explain those souls. Some say decadent." "Poor, overworked word," I hazarded. "True, but handy for the phrase-makers." I interrupted: "Candidly, I can t complain of my health. And if I ve published no verse, that s no reason why you should suspect me as a pessimist." "You are not a pessimist," she gravely said. "You might be summed up as a half-Hamlet one who dares not but may." I was flattered, and wondered with the fatuity of youth why she took so much interest in my case. She read my mood. Then, with a burst of gaiety: "Now don t let us become morbid discussing your hidden ambitions. I know your sort" "Saint-Hilary?" "Good heavens! He is a steam-engine. And what a gift of expression." She paused, and lightly adjusting with her slim fingers an ornament in her hair, she rapidly moved around the dimly lighted room. I followed her with my eyes, my envy of her husband revived by her warm praise. Yet a few moments before she had called him lazy. Logic from such a temperament! "You are very Celtic," I declared, "very ! You ascribe to me a Hamletic quality; half-Hamlet, I think you ironically remarked, but I am an observer enough to ask you whether among your own sex there are not half-Hamlets, quarter-Hamlets. You have known so many among mine?" She smiled. "There speaks the wounded vanity of the man, of the poet. You remember what Heine said about man being 288 STEEPLEJACK the vainest animal, and the poet the vainest among men?" Yes, but you haven t answered my question. Are you, too, a half-Hamlet?" "Alas, to be a woman with a nomad s heart in me," she quoted. "Do you know who sang that? Dora Sigerson, loveliest of Neo-Irish poets. I, a feminine half-Hamlet? Never! I m a nomad. I must wander or suffocate. I hate the stuffy life of my sex. The indoor sex, I have named it. Oh ! if I had been born a man a man. The history of heroes is the history of youth. That s Disraeli." "What would you do if you were a man?" I eagerly questioned. "Make love to pretty women, like all of them?" "Pouf ! Is that the only ideal of man? No, I should write great poems." Her voice, usually muffled in timbre, rang out: "Where is the nomad you spoke of a moment ago? To be a poet means charming one s spirit to the ink-well." "To live my poems, of course." She was almost pettish. Then with a gust of laughter Saint-Hilary entered, followed by the others. His face was red and his enor mous frame slightly swayed. Evidently Bernerville had something stronger than Burgundy. "Ah! there you are again, my boy." (He sees two of me, I muttered.) "And no doubt entertaining Mrs. Saint-Hilary. I sup pose you swapped verses. She is a poet, you know. Now, Dottie, put on your singing-robes and say some thing nice in your sweet Irish voice. Recite one of your own poems, girlie." Mrs. Saint-Hilary coldly looked at him but did not reply. The giant went to her, sliding across the highly polished floor, and laughingly took her by the wrists. Everyone was amused at his persistence except myself. The party broke up. Saint-Hilary, his high spirits slain by the disdainful countenance of his wife, bade the Bernervilles a glum good-by, and the A HALF-HAMLET 289 Prince was helped down-stairs to his carriage by polite servants. Mrs. Bernerville wasn t shocked, whispering that it was his regular evening performance. Suave and mysterious Bernerville was fresher than all of us. I slipped away. What people ! What a misspent night ! And Mrs. Bernerville had not failed to drop a last depre catory word about Dorothea Saint-Hilary. I slowly went home by a familiar route. In my chambers I found a fire, dressing-gown, a supply of tobacco, and a decanter of sherry carefully arranged by the housekeeper. "Now," I ejaculated, "is the time to enjoy myself." I made myself comfortable, and getting pen and paper I proceeded to manufacture an inventory of my platonic soul, a practice I never omitted before re tiring. Many ideas crossed my mind. She had said some memorable things. Why did she manifest such interest? And the husband ! Happy with such a man? Au grand jamais ! I looked behind me in the shadows. Despite my agnosticism, I experience "mystic fear" when alone after midnight. What joy in the reaches of the gloomy hour when the vitality is at its lowest ebb, and the hobgoblins of conscience are stirring, to have the image of a sympathetic companion beside you. De cidedly some men don t deserve their happiness. And lighting a cigar I resolutely began to rewrite the eleventh line of an original sonnet in French. Ill Early the second morning I went out. I had not left my rooms since my return from the Bernervilles. The success of my sonnet I had finished the remaining lines before I went to bed gave my muse a boost. In one 2 9 o STEEPLEJACK evening I had actually written three sonnets, the work manship of which was not indifferent; already buzzed in my head the scheme of a sonnet-sequence. But the sharp, glorious blue of the sky that saluted me this second morning speedily drove rhyming from my thoughts. Hastily swallowing my coffee, I was soon striding through a leafy avenue of the Pincio garden, wondering whether life was not, after all, worth while. The sweep of the picture, Rome beneath, the misty dream of a poet, spurred my nerves from their languor. I traversed the outer path of the garden as far as the Piazza del Popolo, and was hesitating when a hand was placed on my arm. "Good morning, Sir Poet." "Mrs. Saint-Hilary ! What luck ! Only a moment ago I was thinking of you." " What a fib ! Your eye is too clear for a man that has been indulging in retrospection. No ! No ! You thought what a wonderful morning it is. You said to yourself you were glad to be alive." :< You read my mind like a gypsy like the gypsy you are!" "I feel like a gypsy this morning. And you?" "Not like a half-Hamlet." "Ah! That phrase sticks." "It doesn t fit. I m for action. Let s walk over Rome." "Merci! I have a breakfast engagement with Mr. Saint-Hilary." I must have looked so displeased that she smiled one of her smiles of half-pity. I winced. I was a mild mark for her wit. What did she think of me? And to betray my jealousy like a raw boy fresh from school ! I stiffened my spine. The crisp sunshine painted her as a most desirable picture. "If we are to be friends," she soberly suggested, "let us not mind the pebbles in our own shoes. Because you feel like a freed balloon to-day, you fancy that the cityful should rejoice with your joy. How like a poet. What if I told you that I came out here A HALF-HAMLET 291 to be alone, so utterly miserable am I. What would you say?" "That I don t believe it, my dear Mrs. Saint- Hilary. I ask your pardon for my selfishness. I feel well this morning, and, manlike, I wish you to feel the same." Then in tremulous anticipation I gazed at her. What had operated on my spirits to liberate such emotions? Compared with this minute, my life had been a-slumber- ing. To my scrutiny she seemed more buoyant than the other night at the Bernervilles. I endeavoured to grasp the secret of her fleeting expression; but her eyes were the guardians of mute treasures, they had no message for me. I suppressed my eagerness. I determined not to be cajoled into self-betrayal. We walked in the direc tion of the Villa Medici. We did not enter; instead, turned into a road that follows the curves of the bridle path, and if we did not speak, our brains were busy build ing what? I don t know. So little had happened to me, so little of value, that I could not help pondering the possibilities of my companion s career. There was she walking, almost touching me, and I knew no more about her soul than if she hailed from a neighbouring planet. I had grown to distrust my early belief that women were easy to read because of their being more instinctive than men, and therefore wore their hearts exposed. But no one is easy to read, men no more than women. Each human is an isolated complex of organs. The greatest readers of the human heart are those who more fully than others interpret themselves. Humility itself in the presence of my new friend, I asked myself whether I could seal my lips so effectually that she might seek in vain for my secret. I firmly believed it to be a secret. Suddenly I spoke: "Let us talk of your Celtic poets. I 292 STEEPLEJACK read them. I love but I can t always understand them." She turned moist eyes towards me. She moved my heart like the faint sound of nocturnal fountains. "Ireland is all my life. When I m there, I m unhappy. That s because I m Irish. But when I m away, I m unhappy, and that is Irish, too." Everything about her seemed to live; the flower in her hair was faded in comparison with the sparkle in her flower-like eyes. Her smile was as tricksy as the new moon seen through flying cloud-scud. I was delighted. I had come out with an unusual fund of good humour, and here I was expending it upon my companion. I hardly thought of myself. Truly a novel, refreshing experience for an egotist. She was conscious that she puzzled me, for she stopped and in her cheerful every-day voice commanded: "About face! march!" My heart beat heavily; though it was mid day and the sun blazing hot for October, the air seemed cooler. Obeying, I kept in rhythm with her impetuous gait. We soon passed out before the Piazzo Margherita. She signalled a negative. Then, at last, to the Piazza Barberini? No ! She would say good-by at the church. I looked at her so earnestly that she coloured. Nothing was said about a future meeting. I became doleful. "Ah! half-Hamlet," she teasingly protested. And she quickly walked along the Via Sistina. "Celt!" I cried, as I watched her graceful, swaying figure. I then went indoors, drank tea, and smoked till dinner-time. Oh ! if only I had the courage at the moment when most needed. To be a thunderbolt in action that was my unrealised ambition. But a half-Hamlet ! A HALF-HAMLET 293 IV That night at the Teatro Costanzi I saw a play by D Annunzio, a violent tragedy related in the golden voice of the poet, but not akin to my mood. I wished myself far away from this huge theatre, sonorous with applause. I left before the culminating act and paced the streets. The moon had blotted out the stars and, like a silver- white pyx, swung in the firmament; there was a cloud- shine on the fleecy boulders that nimbly accompanied it through the blue. This sky incited me to vague hero isms, yet I was more curious about the look of Rome in the moon-rays so ingrained my romantic imagination. It was not long before I turned off the Corso. The Piazza de Spagna was deserted; not even a carriage disturbed its august emptiness. The moon transposed the trees of the Pincio into ebon music and the Spanish Stairs were streaked with bars of light. As I neared the top I discerned the figure of a woman, closely hooded, who recklessly ran down the steps. If she had not recoiled as she passed me I should not have paused to look at her. "Mrs. Saint-Hilary!" She went on, taking two steps at a time. So swift was her flight that instinctively I gazed above for her pursuer. I saw none. I followed her, but not far; the encounter had unnerved her. She stopped at the bottom of the steps. I could not distin guish her features. I took her hand and found it icy. "Dear, dear lady, what troubles you so? Are you ill?" She did not reply. I could feel that she trembled. "Let me bring you home. You are frightened. I ll ask no questions. It is not well for you to be out alone at this hour/ I sought to lead up the stairs. She snatched her hand from mine. "No, no, not that way! 294 STEEPLEJACK Good God not home!" I was appalled by the ex travagant misery of her tone. Here was the last act of the drama I had not sat out, and one infinitely more poignant than the fiction of the Italian poet. Without artifice was the soul of the woman bared to me. I was dumb with the horror of my imagining. What else could have driven this gentle creature out on the streets of a strange city what else but ! I ground my teeth in rage. My phlegmatic ego dissolved in the fire of her sorrow. Like a flash it came upon me. I loved her. I had loved her from the first. And she had been driven from her husband by reason of some nameless outrage at his hands. Brute ! I uttered a hoarse cry and gripped her. "Come," I whispered. "Come. I ll not trouble you with a single question. I understand everything. Come with me up the stairs. There is refuge for you at the hotel. I ll not worry you with my company." She regarded me with blank eyes I caught their inter mittent glint. When she spoke, her voice was toneless. "I ll go with you, but you must take me to my home. In the Ludovisi Quarter. You ve brought me to my senses. Don t, dear friend, set me down as a mad woman. I was crazy. There was provocation. It s past. I ll go back. Forget all about this when we part." I felt moonstruck, my personality evaporating. This was our farewell, the end of my brief romance. She would go back to the man she loved despite his bru tality. The reason for this love ! Whistle down the wind for the answer. I brought her to the door of her hotel and went away without a word. Twice she had sent me from her once playfully and now in sorrow. Celtic she was. She had the cruel heart of the Celt. . . . Was the music in her worth the hearing? A HALF-HAMLET 295 My ill-luck pursued me to Venice. When it rains in Rome there are the palaces, the picture-galleries, the marbles, the churches; but at Venice the meeting of the waters proves doubly monotonous. The wet of the canal enters the soul. The drippings of the sky are as the eternal tears of the banished gods. In the Ducal Palace sombre dampness dowers with humid eyes immemorial portraits. Along the waterways the wind howls as it transfixes the wanderer with lance-like thrusts. I exe crated life when I stepped into the hotel gondola at the station, and sat shivering and propelled through the desolate darkness of narrow waterways where murder and mystery might lurk under mean, flickering gas-jets. The melancholy challenge of my gondolier failed to evoke poetic visions of nocturnal Venice. I was glad to gain the steps of my hotel. Everyone was congealed by the cold, everything saturated with the rain. I did not long remain in my apartment. Without, the storm- drums of the Adriatic were ruffling; the shape of the gale was lost in the wrack of spilt mist. At Bauer-Grunwald s it was cheerful, the most cheer ful cafe on the lagoons. Crowded with tourists, eating, drinking, smoking, talking, the picture appealed to me because of its human quality. Nevertheless, I was home sick for Rome, for the hospitable, if tiresome, Berner- villes the Madame with her teasing chatter, her hus band with his malicious wit. Sick, too, though in another way, for the sight of a woman s face. . . . "What an ass I am ! Very well, garcon, I ll sit at this table. First give me the wine-card." I had not immediately quitted Rome after that night. But I avoided my friends. 296 STEEPLEJACK I wished to hear no gossip. I could surmise without being boldly told that unhappiness camped in the house hold of the Saint-Hilarys. After a week the city became intolerable and I fled to Venice where it rained, where it would rain forever. I ordered some cold meat, a salad, a bottle of Bordeaux. Then, relieved of the head waiter s presence, I looked about me. Yes, those visitors from the world over were practical; bad weather didn t daunt them. And then my roving eye took in a man who sat smiling opposite me. Affrightedly, I clutched my knees. Was I dreaming? No, the vision was too real, too burly, too much of the flesh. His big red fist ex tended, Saint-Hilary crossed the aisle. "You here! What luck ! I thought I d be forced to put in an inter minable evening drinking and talking to the waiter." I tried not to see the offered hand, but I felt it as it squeezed with unaffected vigour my thin fingers. I loathed the monster. I had expended my nervous en ergy for a week damning him, and here he was but why in Venice? And alone. More ill-luck. "I ve been drinking a lot for the last ten days," Saint- Hilary confessed in a husky voice. "You won t mind, will you? You re a good chap; hard to make out. I m in a heap of trouble. Let me bother you. I m alone. Here, waiter ! Fetch my glass to this gentleman s table. Hurry up!" The order was given with charac teristic energy as he dropped into a chair beside me, bidding me go ahead and eat my supper. "I ll be all right soon." Sick at heart, I swallowed the food, saw dust and ashes to my taste. After some wine, I plucked up wit enough to ask Saint-Hilary what he was doing away from Rome. "Doing? I ll just tell you, my boy. I m up here looking for Mrs. Saint-Hilary, for my wife. A HALF-HAMLET 297 What are you doing here, may I ask?" The question, though put without ill-temper, made me pale. "Why, Mr. Saint-Hilary, I only arrived an hour ago on the morning train from Rome." I stammered, actually feeling guilty. " I know it, my boy, I know it. You are on the safe side, but a little soft on Dottie all the young painters, poets, composers are. I m not blaming you for her running away from me. She vamoosed the ranch after you brought her back from the Spanish Stairs." "She told you?" I struggled not to appear embarrassed. Yes, and told what a trump you were. You behaved like a gentleman. I acted like a brute. Don t scold. I am a brute. When I accused her of taking too much interest in you say, man, don t get up so suddenly, my nerves are all taut from brandy ! I meant no offence why, she turned on me like a tigress. Oh ! She has a sweet temper. She is poetic. Such a talent! I honestly think she has used you for copy. Sit down ! You can t go away now and leave me alone. I ll go nutty. All right, I promise to say nothing more. I m to blame entirely. No, I m not jealous of you. There s always a lot of chaps hanging around her skirts. I wonder how she keeps from mixing up their schedules. I simply couldn t let the brandy alone Do you see this book? Have you read it?" He handed me a little volume bound in gold and green. I recognised it. "Yes," I answered. "I read Meryona on the train. It s ex quisite. Who wrote it? Who is this Rosa Mystica? She might belong to the new group of Irish writers of whom your wife Mrs. Saint-Hilary is so fond. I was puzzled by faint echoes of Keats, George Russell I was only too glad to lead the conversation into a different channel. But my heart was a lump in my bosom. I 298 STEEPLEJACK longed to hear more news of her, to learn the cause of her trouble. And her whereabouts. "You ll never learn from me who Rosa Mystica is," replied Saint-Hilary. His expansive mood had vanished. In a halting manner he read paragraphs from the book, paragraphs of rich meanings, of richer prose. Nervous as he was, he exposed in trained voice the densely woven patterns of this new prose with its undertones of Celtic sorrow, its veiled passion, rhythmic pathos, mystical overtones, and its wild call from the heart of Erin. . . . Meryona ! The title was an evocation. And surely no man could have written it. "Yes, my boy, that s great art, great soul. Do you know," he whispered, "they have saddled me with the authorship? Even Dottie has asked me the question, asked me, this good old news paper hack. Have a drink." He paused. I paid my score and arose. "Not going ! Listen to the rain on the roof. Stay a bit. I return to Rome early in the morning. I think PII find Dottie at home. Lord, what a face you pull Well, good night to you. I m glad I met you. If you ever publish anything, send me a copy and I ll give it a good review. Where are you stopping?" I hurried away. I would have struck him in another minute that is what I said to myself as I went over the bridge across Campo St. Moise into the hotel. But I did not sleep that night. I found a pencilled card in the morn ing. It told that he hoped to see me in Rome soon. No more. I tore it up and went for coffee. It still rained, ferociously. "I ll go up to Milan to-night," I planned. "At least I can hear Duse. Here!" I asked for a railway guide and marked down my train. It would leave in the afternoon. I breasted the wind A HALF-HAMLET 299 shrieking through the Piazzetta and stumbled along the Riva degli Schiavoni. I could hardly see Santa Maria della Salute for the grey rain that came obliquely across the lagoon, titillating the shallow waters into foam. The Guidecca was a nebulous patch. And the sharp, salty odours that were abroad in the air set me dreaming of mid-ocean. Turning off the unprotected Riva I walked at hazard, arriving on the Rio della Picta. There I found the Church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, and entered more for protection than from piety. In front of Carpaccio s "Saint George and the Dragon" I saw her. At once the poorly lighted church was flooded as if by a Turner sunburst. Forgotten the wet, forgotten Venice, forgotten Saint-Hilary with his odious confidences. She stood there, in devotional attitude, before the mas terpiece. I almost expected her to kneel in prayer as she had knelt that first day in the cemetery. Then the lame cicerone, who sews when he is not explaining the pictures to Ruskin-bewildered tourists, spoke to me. Would the Signor Inglese care to look? My threatening expression silenced him. But it was too late to retreat; attracted by the voices, she turned. I could have called her Blessed as in an unconcerned manner she crossed to me. She saved me a wilderness of explanations. "Suppose we go to the hotel," she remarked in her accustomed cool tones. The wind twisted our umbrellas and beat rain into our faces so that an exchange of words was not easy. An idea overtook me; as we passed the gondolas at the Piazzetta I shouted in her ears: "The Giardino Reale ! Let s go." In a few minutes two barelegged men were fighting as inch by inch they slowly paddled their craft through toppling seas. It was a daring excursion; the little steamer would have carried us more safely; but then 300 STEEPLEJACK we could not have sat so intimately as in the gondola. Drenched, we entered the picture-gallery in the Royal Gardens and stopped to breathe; we soon found a cafe, where I ordered something. I did not attempt to ask questions. Her grateful eyes rewarded me, but the events of the past few hours were telling on my nerves, on my imagination. I felt bolder than in Rome. The woman I adored was with me, apparently contented in my com pany. And how lovely she looked. The damp air had set burning her rich Irish complexion. Her grey eyes, enlarged by sorrow, did not avoid my gaze. Subtle curves were in her smile. She was more radiant than I had ever seen her at Rome. Emboldened by the old Chianti, I exclaimed: "I m so happy, Dorothea." She wider opened her eyes. I placed my hand in hers. "I m so happy. O to be in Venice! And with you. I " "Hadn t we better return to the hotel?" she asked. I hesitated. The man who hesitates is sometimes saved. "I hope you will pardon my crazy tongue. I m only telling you the truth. How I supposed since that night " She interrupted: "But you are too nervous to talk. You have not said anything, told any truth and you must not. I am alone. Be my friend. A woman alone is always in the wrong. Here is the waiter. Pay him and let me go. Please!" Despairingly, I settled. We went into the gale and walked, crossing slippery marble bridges, deserted quays, and to the howling tune of the wind. When we at last reached the Hotel Danieli, she bowed her head and entered. This was too much. I followed, and in the salon called to her. I felt myself wilting under her piercing gaze, but I would not be A HALF-HAMLET 301 silenced. "Listen to me Mrs. Saint-Hilary. I may be the victim of an artistic vivisection, yet in Rome when you were with your husband, I held my tongue. But this is Venice. I refuse to be tortured any longer. Last night I saw him, saw Saint-Hilary " She started, then blushed hotly. "Last night here?" "Here," I persisted. "He told me all," I defiantly continued, though I knew I was becoming melodramatic in my manner. "He told me all. I know who wrote Meryona, that beautiful book. Oh ! Dorothea, you wonderful poet, how can you endure your life?" "He said I wrote Mery ona?" "No, not exactly. He said that he had been credited with the book." "He is the author, do you hear me? My husband is the author of the books signed Rosa Mystica." She was a blazing sunset. She fairly glit tered in her wrath. "I don t believe it I don t believe it." "You must believe it," and then her humour changed. "Now, sit down and be quiet. Let us think the matter out." Bewildered, I followed her movements. For five minutes she paced the room. I could hear the thumping of my heart. "I ll go back to Rome with you," she gravely announced, her eyes narrowed to slits, her voice filed to a provocative murmur. Joyfully I sprang towards her at last the violin had vibrated to my key-note. "No, no not yet!" The silky smile of her set me crazy. " Do you return to your hotel. Come for me in an hour. I ll be ready." Happily dismissed, I rushed back to my room, packed, paid my bill, and before the sixty minutes had passed I was again at the Danieli. The portier solemnly looked at me. The lady had gone away half an hour ago. "Gone! Why, I had an engagement with her." "A big gentleman called a few minutes after you left," soothingly replied the 3 02 STEEPLEJACK fellow as he held out his hand. "Her husband!" I mechanically cried but in a chilly rage, determined to wear a brave face. "Oh, yes, her husband thank you, Signor." With women the unexpected rules, I rumi nated. When they pipe, men must dance, and once I had believed the contrary. Life is very different from books. As the train traversed the interminable bridge, I looked at Venice storm-begirt, sea and sky in watery embrace, and, my throat choking, I tried to hum: "Oh, to be a woman and a nomad s heart in me!" But I was only a sentimental comedian, and soon my eyes were wet, like Venice. VI What had I done, what had I said? I often asked my self. I had loved a woman with a lyric bird nesting in her bosom, neglected by a coarse husband, one who smirkingly had taken upon himself the honours due his wife. (I have since noted that the husband of the woman you desire is always "coarse," though on closer acquain tance he is very nice; nicer, perhaps, than his "misunder stood" spouse; and I have known more than one case where a man has regretted the lost friendship of a man in exchange for the doubtful favours of the woman who betrayed him.) Who breaks, pays. And I had not been allowed to tell her of my sincere affection ; under the sting of her husband s indirect revelations, and the wine and the weather (curse that Chianti!), I had whimpered and she had left me. Had she not throughout our brief acquaintance always sent me away from her ? Oh ! what an ass was I ! The woman had never ceased loving her husband not even when ill-treated. And I fancied I understood the uneasy sex. Oh ! what a dolt ! And A HALF-HAMLET 303 to seek her love in such a hurried style like a train that must be overtaken. . . . One day in Paris I read of the sudden death from apoplexy of the noted writer Lewis Saint-Hilary; and the chronicles were full of the past doings of this robust worthy, who, in addition to having been a journalist of experience, unexpectedly proved to be the author of Meryona, that prose epic of Erin, the first impulse to the Neo-Celtic renascence. I rubbed my eyes and returned to Rome. There I did not find the Bernervilles. They had gone to Egypt, taking with them Prince Abbazia, whose health was far from reassuring the sympathetic Cameriere added that Burgundy and brandy were poor props to a long life. And Madame Saint-Hilary ! Ah ! He threw out his skinny hands, palms upwards; she never came now to the Palazzo Barbarini. She is the widow of a distinguished poet addio, Signor, addio ! . . . Another October sun slanted its yellow glory from the western sky as I entered the narrow gate of the Protestant cemetery, which still wore its air of delicate desolation. One year earlier I had here encountered my fate, the first woman, I am certain, who understood me. My step was heavy as up the slope I went to the remains of my poets. Was it a trick of memory or hallucination that pictured for me a kneeling figure; but at a newly made grave, not Shelley s this time ! Increasing my speed, I sprang up the incline. She did not turn as I came to the tomb. It was, indeed, the widow of Lewis Saint- Hilary, garbed in green, and so immersed in her medi tations that I feared to disturb her. For minutes I kept silence, then my temperament mastered my tongue 304 STEEPLEJACK besides, the colour of her hair worried me; it had been black, now it was blonde, a true Botticellian blonde. The change made me doubly curious. "Dorothea," I softly called. "Dorothea." She did not move. "Do you know who is speaking, Mrs. Saint-Hilary?" I con tinued, my courage oozing through the very cadences of my voice. "I know yes." "Won t you see me again?" This imploringly. She sternly replied: "No." "Is this is this all?" "All," and compressed in the answer was the Venice of our last day cold, rainy, charmless. Stung to the centre of my dearest vanity, I left her. For me she was a cracked fiddle. She was married to the memory of her dead: a spiritual Suttee. With a final gesture I bade my hopes take flight. It was the first brave act in my irresolute life. As I passed through the portal of the cemetery, I felt like a man who had at last escaped the burdens of a corroding conscience. If marriage depended alone on woman, how long would the institution endure? For years the literary world was startled by posthumous works of the late fecund and brilliant Lewis Saint- Hilary. His widow proved an admirable editor of the deceased man s manuscripts. Epical and dramatic, lyric, pathetic, saturated with patriotism and wistful poesy, the note of the Gaelic race, these books in verse and prose set us all wondering why we had so underestimated the powers of Saint-Hilary. Even his wife had called him lazy. Parallel cases may be remembered with the widows of a celebrated French historian, and of an Englishman who wrote so significantly about Gaelic lore; both the wid ows edited posthumous works, and the Frenchwoman s devotion was so great, so it has been rumoured, that she outran her prudence and wrote some books herself but A HALF-HAMLET 305 that s stale literary gossip. Certainly Mrs. Saint-Hilary did not write Meryona. She told me so. And yet I often think that if Dorothea had but realised the golden opportunity she lost when she refused to transform a half- Hamlet into a singing poet and do for the living what she accomplished for the dead, perhaps I might have mastered my emotional reticence; perhaps. . . . But why, psy chologically speaking, did she become a Botticellian blonde? Did she have the feminine thirst for a second submission ? That is a more provocative and fascinating enigma than the disputed authorship of Meryona. CODA And now it is time to ring down the final curtain on the show. I might go on tapping new levels of energy, to use the striking phrase of William James, but to what purpose ! Life is like an onion. You may peel off layer after layer until you reach the core and then there is nothing. So could I skin my little symphony, in which there has been more dissonance than har mony, and enumerate my leading-motives; my medi ocrity; my resigned attitude as a contemporary; my steeplejackism I am still an impenitent steeplejack and hope to die with my boots on; my disgust with Barmecide banquets; my vanity, selfishness, and ego tism; my mannerisms, limitations; my many sins of omission and commission, including my regrets for girls unkissed; my garrulity, discursiveness, and vice of allusiveness; the list might be made much longer, only you must be weary of the personal pronoun stitched in the palimpsest of my adventure. The truth is seldom amusing, and my velleities too often graze the fantastic. But you may put your hand in this rag-bag of mine and pull out a quotation worth remembering; indeed, this may be critically judged from the protasis to the catas trophe as a book of beautiful quotations. Fancy, if I had followed the pattern of Dostoievsky and devoted several hundred thousand words to one day s happenings in life ! It is at least a negative virtue that I did not do this. Other ears, other songs. I forgot my belief in a personal devil as a leading-motive, that devil who could say in jocular accents, for he is a sound Latinist, even if 306 CODA 307 he likes to twist a text to suit his diabolic purpose: "Sathanas sum, et nihil humanum a me *K B i"" puto." After that Terence may go bug. And don t forget the devil is a believer. The genesis of these avowals was simple gmwgfc- My editor wagered me that I could write them and I wagcicd him I could not. I lost, but as nothing was ft**"***, he, too, lost. It was galley-slave work, as not a line was written till May 15, 1918. Yet not altogether an un pleasant task. And finished in exactly fifteen weeks, written with a pen. As I once said to Theodore Presser: How happy we were in the days when we were starving I And the mighty maw of the printing-press engulfing "copy" by the mile! I often felt like that Russian peasant, who, chased by a bear, finally reached his house, swimming the last mile; happy, exhausted, but per spiring rivers. I have covered a period of at least fifty years. Need I tefl you that my cosmopolitan sin peeled off like dry paint from a cracked wall when President Wil son proclaimed our nation at war? I shall never forget the amazed expression of Colonel Roosevelt as I admitted that I was in Paris when I attained my majority, and did not cast a vote in our presidential election. And be was justified in his gesime of disapproval; cosmopoli tanism is all very well for the dilettante, but for a young man on the threshold of life h is sometimes deadly poison. Our country first. This is a fighting planet. Pacificism is a pipe-dream. The Lord is a man of war. Tofle, lege! After sixty a man s future lies behind him. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be. He dwells in memory-images. Yeais ago I lived in the Impasse du Maine, on the left bank, Paris. Every morning I was 3 o8 STEEPLEJACK annoyed because awakened by piano-playing, evidently that of a mediocre amateur (some amateurs are not mediocre). I asked that handy busybody of all work, the concierge, if he knew the name of the relentless pianist. "Ah, that is M. le Comte. He is very old and is spend ing his time pleasantly before he dies." Later I saw M. le Comte. White of beard, spry for an octogenarian, his muscles still capable of pounding, he seemed far from the end of every man s desire. The words of the con cierge now made their appeal to me: "He is spending his time pleasantly before he dies." Can you think of anything more reasonable? He played cards, no doubt, did M. le Comte, and went to his pet cafe to sip coffee, smoke, and read the newspaper, stuffed with his favourite prejudices. But the main business of the day was his hour at the keyboard. The music must have made his rusty old bones sweeter. I recall that he always finished with the Souvenir de Kiev, by a Bo hemian composer, a friend of Chopin, Jules Schulhoff. There was a prodigious amount of bang and clatter, and then the old nobleman, who probably remembered Louis Philippe, would saunter forth, in his buttonhole a rose, a malacca cane jauntily switching the earth. I envied this serene sunset of a long, useless, and no doubt troubled existence. Who wrote "It is wonderful what one ray of sunshine can do for the soul of man " ? Music was this old chap s sunshine. I can t play cards or billiards. I can t read day and night. I take no interest in the chess-board of politics, and I am not too pious. What shall I do? Music, always music ! There are certain compositions by my beloved Chopin to master which eternity itself would not be too long. That last page of the Second Ballade as CODA 309 Anton Rubinstein played it, in apocalyptic thunder- tones ! Or the study in double-thirds rippled off by the velvety fingers of de Pachmann ! I once more place the notes on the piano-desk. Courage ! Time is fuga cious. How many years have I not played that magic music? Music the flying vision . . . music that merges with the tender air ... its image melts in shy misty shadows . . . the cloud, the cloud, the singing, shining cloud . . . over the skies and far away . . . the beckon ing cloud. . . . FINIS INDEX Abbazia, Prince, ii, 282-285, 303 Abbey, Henry E., ii, 35, 62 Abbey, Schoeffel and Grau, ii, 35, 36, 40 Abbott, Emma, ii, 155 Academy of Music, i, 42 Academy of Natural Sciences, i, 79, 288 Adam, Paul, ii, 248 Adams, Franklin P., ii, 175 Adams, Henry, ii, 210 Agnani, Ettore, ii, 179-183 Albert, Prince of Wales, i, 248 Aldrich, Richard, i, 287; ii, 16 Alvars, Parrish, i, 39 Alvary, Max, ii, 34, 46, 47 American art, ii, 204-206, 210 American Opera Company, ii, 38 Anastasia, Grand Duchess of Russia, i, 258 Anderson, Mary, ii, 154 Ando, Flavio, ii, 148 Antonelli, Cardinal, ii, 284 Arch Street Theatre Stock Company, i, 68, 69, 7i-73 L 83 Archer, William, ii, 159 Arditi, ii, 33 Arnold, Matthew, i, 55, 121, 164, 185, 230, 266; ii, 12, 123, 178 Art students in Paris, i, 240 Arthur, Joe, ii, 89, 90 Artzibachev, i, 270; ii, 135 Ashforth, Madame Frida, ii, 17, 30, 155 Austen, Jane, i, 187, 270 Auteuil, France, i, 276, 277 Bach, Johann Sebastian, i, 148, 155, 262; ii, 211 Bachmann, Waldemar, ii, 167 Backus, Charles, ii, 154 Bacon, Francis, i, 129 Baird, Matthew, i, 77 Baker, Lewis, i, 66, 84 Baker, Dr. W. P., i, 47 Bakunine, ii, 135 Baldwin Locomotive Works, the, i, 77, 107-117 Baldwin, Mathias, i, 77 Balestier, Wolcott, ii, 152 Balzac, i, 266, 267, 277; ii, 6, 91, 170, 173, 213, 232 Barili, Alfredo, i, 41, 42, 185, 188, 206 Barili, Antonio, i, 41; ii, 155 Barili, Caterina, i, 41; ii, 155 Barili, Ettore, i, 41 Barili, Henry, i, 42 Barnabee, Henry Clay, ii, 153 Barnard, George Grey, ii, 205 Barres, Maurice, ii, 227, 231 Barrett, Lawrence, i, 80; ii, 14, 149 Barrymore, Ethel, i, 69 Barrymore, John, i, 69 Barrymore, Lionel, i, 69 Barrymore, Maurice, i, 68; ii, 145, 146, 157 Bartet, Julia, ii, 243 Bartholome, i, 267 Bashkirtseff, Marie, i, 289; ii, 132 Bastien-Lepage, i, 289; ii, 163 Baudelaire, Charles, i, 6, 16, 35, 40, 55-57, 100, 269; ii, 103, 106, 119, 194, 199, 209, 230, 235 Baudry, Paul, i, 239 Bauer, Harold, i, 256 Bauer-Grunwald s cafe, ii, 295 Bauermeister, M lle, i, 256 Beaconsfield, Lord. See Disraeli Beardsley, Aubrey, i, 273 Beck, James M., i, 200 Becque, Henri, ii, 147, 244 Beecham, Sir Thomas, ii, 36 Beecher, Henry Ward, ii, 142 Beerbohm, Herbert, i, 312, 313; ii, 47, 150 Beerbohm, Max, i, 7, 58, 313; ii, 251- 255, 261, 264 Beethoven, i, 155, 169, 255, 256, 261; ii, 201, 213 Behrens, Siegfried, i, 188 Belasco, David, ii, 156 Bellevue Hotel, Philadelphia, i, 82, 83 Bellew (the elder), i, 95 312 INDEX Bellew, Kyrle, ii, 238, 239 Bellini, i, 278 Bendix, Max, ii, 26, 71 Bennett, Arnold, ii, 126 Bennett, James Gordon, i, 94, 95 Berenson, Bernard, ii, 164, 248 Bergson, Henri, i, 8, 179, 187, 318; ii, 95, 109, 247 Berlioz, i, 199, 200, 254; ii, 198 Bernard, M. and Mme., i, 225, 227, 228, 230-234, 252^ Bernard, Caroline Richings, ii, 155 Bernerville, Mr. and Mrs., ii, 280-^289, 303 Bernhardt, Sarah, i, 267, 274, 289; ii, 145 Besant, Annie, ii, 92-94 Beyle, Henry. See Stendhal Bierce, Ambrose, ii, n Bigeon, Maurice, ii, 138 Binet, Alfred, i, 288 Birnbaum, Julius, i, 313 Bismarck, i, 134, 151, 236; ii, 27, 30 Bizet, Georges, i, 170, 253 Bjeeregaard, Edwin, ii, 95 Bjornson, ii, 137 Blackstone, i, 119 Blake, William, i, 195, 250; ii, 236 Bland, i, 105 Blashfield, Edwin, i, 240 Blavatsky, Helena, ii, 92-98 Bles, Arthur, ii, 117, 120 Bles, David, ii, 117 Blitz, Signer, i, 102, 103 Bloch, Ernest, i, 171 Blumenberg, Marc, ii, 8, 18-23, 61, 190, 257 Bochsa, i, 39 Bock, Anna, i, 253 Bohemia, i, 208, 209 Boileau house, the, i, 276 Boldt, George, i, 82, 83 Bolin, Paul, ii, 69 Bonfield, George, i, 44, 47 Bonnat, Leon, i, 48, 239, 240, 243 Booth (the elder), i, 37, 38 Booth, Edwin, i, 72, 80, 85, 274; ii, 14, 48, 148, 150, 151 Boscovitz, Frederic, i, 253 Bossuet, i, 51 Boston Symphony Orchestra, ii, 70 Boswell, James, ii, 3 Boucher, i, 291 Boucicault, Dion, ii, 89, 154 Boudin, i, 242 Boudreaux, Father, i, 55 Bouguereau, i, 45, 48, 239, 267; ii, 163 Bourdaloue, i, 56 Bourget, Paul, i, 203; ii, 117, 128, 177, 248, 266 Bournot, Otto, i, 166, 167 Bouty, i, 264 Bowers, Mrs. D. P., i, 85 Bowman, Charles, i, 21 Bowman, Elizabeth, Frances and Mary, i, 21 Bowman (music -critic), ii, 1 6 Boyd, John T., ii, 23 Boyesen, Professor H. H., ii, 159 Bracquemond, i, 268 Bradlaugh, Charles, ii, 92-94 Brahms, i, 146, 261; ii, 67, 213, 235 Brancusi, i, 274; ii, 163 Brandes, Dr. Georg, i, 165, 168; ii, 123, 134-140, 213, 225-227 Brandt, Marianne, ii, 34 Braslau, Sophie, i, 162 Brassey, Lord, i, 66 Brentano, Augustus, ii, 14 Brewster, Annie Hampton, i, 133, 194, 195, 202 Brewster, Benjamin Harris, i, 133 Brignoli, i, 42; ii, 31, 34 Brinton, Dr., i, 53 Bronte, Charlotte, i, 187 Brougham, John, i, 84; ii, 148 Brown, Father George, i, 300 Brown, Harry Orville, ii, 71 Brownell, William Crary, ii, 122, 123, 245 Browning, Robert, i, 262, 273; ii, 160, 201, 250 Brubacher s cafe, ii, 25, 77 Bruneau, Alfred, ii, 249 Brunetiere, ii, 122 Bryan, William J., i, 7 Bryn Mawr, i, 200 Bull, Ole, i, 38, 39, 185 Bulletin, Evening, Philadelphia, i, 198 200, 229, 258 Billow. See von Billow Bunn, Colonel William M., i, 82. INDEX Bunting, Mr., i, 199 Bunyan, John, i, 57 Burbank, Luther, ii, 114, 115 Burgess, Gelett, ii, 175 Burke, Father Tom, i, 95 Burleigh, Harry T., ii, 66, 68 Burne- Jones, Edward, ii, 54, 56, 1 86 Burrell, Mary, i, 167 Burton, William, i, 36, 38; ii, 47 Butler, Pierce, i, 38 Byrne, Charles Alfred, ii, 62, 89, 90 Byron, Lord, i, 94, 275 Byron, H. J., i, 72 Cabanel, i, 45, 48, 239, 267, 268; H, 124 Cafe, the, ii, 10, ii Caillebotte, i, 267, 268 Calabria, i, 303; ii, 112 Calve, Emma, ii, 35, 36, 39, 50 Campanini, i, 42; ii, 32, 34 Campbell, Mrs. Pat, ii, 238, 239 Canada, the, i, 206, 213-217 Candida, ii, 273, 274 Canfield, Richard, ii, 165, 166 Capoul, Victor, i, 283; ii, 65, 155 Carlyle, Thomas, i, 9, 125, 229, 230, 250; ii, 139, 240 Carncross and Dixey s, i, 64 Carnegie, Andrew, ii, 141 Carolus-Duran, i, 48, 239, 243 Carreno, Teresita, i, 95, 183 Carroll, General Howard, ii, 88 Carrollton, the, ii, 201-203, 2 6 Carter, Williams, i, 173 Caruso, Enrico, ii, 40, 44 Cary- Raymond, Annie Louise, i, 42; , 34 Cassagnac. See de Cassagnac Cassatt, Mary, i, 266, 268 Cellini, Benvenuto, i, 6 Centennial Exposition, 1876, i, 46, 121, 122, 195, 253 Cezanne, Paul, i, 253; ii, 124, 163-165 Chambers, Julius, ii, 88 Chambers, Robert W., ii, 169, 172 Chamfort, i, 4 Chapman, John Jay, ii, 241 Chase, William M., ii, 63, 64, 162, 205 Chavannes. See de Chavannes Chegaray Institute, the, i, 92 Chesterton, G. K., ii, 251, 261 Chestnut Street Theatre Stock Com pany, i, 84, 254 Chickering piano agency, the, i, 203, 204 "Children of Adam, The," i, 309, 310 Childs, George W., i, 222 Chopin, Frederic Francois, i, 40, 56, 139, 141, 143, 146, 154, 169, 188, 249, 254, 261, 277, 278, 283; ii, 38, 42, 46, 55, 70, 104, 193, 201, 206-208, 213, 215, 235, 253, 258, 260, 268, 280, 308, 309 Chopin: The Man and His Music, i, 105, 249; ii, 43, 109, 117, 214, 227 Claghorn, James L., i, 46 Claire, M lle, i, 221 Claretie, Jules, ii, 117, 248 Clarisse, i, 181, 182 Clarke, John Sleeper, i, 69, 84 Clarke, Joseph I. C., i, 32; ii, 89 Claude-Lorraine, i, 44, 54, 243; ii, 205 Cleveland, Grover, i, 137 Cline, Maggie, i, 170; ii, 196 Clothes, i, 125 Clowes, Major, ii, 91 Coghlan, Charles, i, 70; ii, 146, 148 Coghlan, Rose, ii, 148 Cohen, Alfred, ii, 144 Coleridge, ii, 124, 200 Colet, Louise, ii, 250 Collars, ii, 50-52 Collett, Camilla, ii, 217 Colonne, i, 251, 254, 259 Colour-hearing, ii, 200 Comet, The, i, 122, 123 Commainville, Carolina, ii, 249 Compton, Edward, ii, 154 Conrad, Joseph, i, 25; ii, 43, 96, 128- 133, 176, 233, 234 Conrad, Judge, i, 38 Conried, Heinrich, ii, 36, 143 Conservatoire de la Musique, Paris, i, 247-249 Constable, i, 65, 280; ii, 205 Constant, i, 281, 282, 284 Conway, Moncure D., i, 195, 197 Cook (magician), i, 103 Cooke, Jay, and Company, i, 124 Cooper, Francis, i, 21, 29 Cope, i, 288; ii, 116 Copley, ii, 205 3*4 INDEX Coralie, i, 231-235 Corbin, John, ii, no Cornelius, Peter, ii, 259, 260 Corot, i, 241, 242; ii, 163 Correggio, i, 47 Cortissoz, Royal, ii, 147, 241 Courbet, Gustave, i, 241 Courson, Helen, i, 240 Cousin, Victor, i, 266; ii, 250 Couture, Thomas, i, 243, 263, 265 Cowles, Eugene, ii, 153 Craig, Bob, i, 73, 83 Craig, Hugh, ii, 8, 9, 19 Craigie, Pearl Richards, ii, 229, 245 Crane, Stephen, i, 270; ii, 128 Craven, Mrs., i, 128 Crawford, Marion, i, 300; ii, 171 Crinkle, Nym, ii, 144, 146 Criticism, i, 198, 199, 207; ii, 122-127, 201, 213 Croce, Benedetto, ii, 123 Cromwell, ii, 270 Cross, B., i, 29 Cross, Michael H., i, 29, 42, 140-143, 148, 155-158, 199; ii. 47 Cunningham, Frank, i, 310, 311 Cushman, Charlotte, i, 42, 84 Czerny, Carl, i, 154, 204 Czolgoz, ii, 263 Dale, Alan, ii, 89, 144, 146 Dale, Richard, i, 120, 130 Daly, Arnold, ii, 272 Daly, Augustin, ii, 145, 147, 272 Damrosch, Leopold, i, 200; ii, 36 Damrosch, Walter, i, 200; ii, 36 Dana, Charles A., ii, 109 Dana, Paul, ii, 109 D Annunzio, Gabriele, ii, 148, 198, 293 Dante, i, 56; ii, 101 Darling, Mrs., i, 199 Darwin, ii, 116 Daubigny, i, 242, 254 Daudet, Alphonse, i, 238, 253; ii, 168 Daumier, Honore, i, 254, 255 d Aurevilly, Barbey, i, 246, 253 Davenport, E. L., i, 84, 85 Davenport, Fanny, i, 83, 85; ii, 152 David, Felicien, i, 259, 260 Davidge (the elder), i, 83 Davidson, Jo, ii, 163 Davies, Acton, ii, 144 Davies, Arthur B., ii, 64, 162, 205 Da Vinci, i, 291 Davis, Charles Belmont, i, 138 Davis, Jessie Bartlett, ii, 153 Davis, L. Clark, i, 138 Davis, Rebecca Harding, i, 138 Davis, Richard Harding, i, 138 Debussy, Claude, i, 274; ii, 104 de Cassagnac, Paul, i, 231, 239 De Casseres, Benjamin, ii, 172 de Chavannes, Puvis, i, 267; ii, 142 Degas, Edgar, i, 241, 244, 266, 268- 273; ii, 164 de Goncourt, Edmond, ii, 119 de Goncourts, the, i, 269, 270, 277, 278 de Gourmont, Remy, i, 191, 316; ii, 117, 118, 239, 247, 248, 252, 253 de Guerin, Eugenie, i, 56, 128 de Guerin, Maurice, i, 56 de Joinville, Prince, i, 263 De Koven, Reginald, ii, 20, 6l Delaunay, i, 239 de Maupassant, Guy, i, 239, 277; ii, 169, 173, 196, 198, 230, 249 de Mendoza, Suarez, ii, 200 de Musset, Alfred, i, 267, 277; ii, 193, 250 de Pachmann, Vladimir, i, 142, 143; ii, 42, 43, 167, 206-209, 309 De Quincey, i, 100, 265; ii, 5, 48, 124 de Reszke, Edouard, i, 259; ii, 17, 36, 45, 47, 53, 54, 5 de Reszke, Jean, i, 259; ii, 17, 36, 43- 45, 53, 54, 58, 248 de Reszke, Josephine, ii, 54 de Reszke, Victor, ii, 54 de Swetchine, Madame, i, 56 de Vay, Leonard, i, 147, 148 de Vigny, Alfred, ii, 108 de Vivo, Signer, ii, 35 De Vries, Hugo, i, 318; ii, 114-116 Diaz, i, 242 Dickens, Charles, i, 14, 58, 121, 126, 197; ", 7, 32, 169, 177, 192, 230 Dickson, Samuel, i, 87, 90, 91 Diemer, Louis, i, 254 di Lanza, Marquise, ii, 233 Dillingham, Charles, ii, 144 Dimali, ii, 182-187 di Murska, lima, i, 41; ii, 34, 35, 80 INDEX Disraeli (Beaconsfield), i, 165, 166, 313; ii, 288 Dithmar, Edward A., ii, in, 144, 160, 236 Dobson, Austin, i, 185 Doeme, Zoltan, ii, 59 Dohan, Michael, i, 138 Dollard, Philip, i, 82 Dolmetsch, Arnold, ii, 258 Don Quixote, i, 57 Donne, Laura, i, 258 Dore, Gustave, i, 56, 57, 267 Dorvals, the, ii, 36 Dostoievsky, i, 92, 175, 270; ii, 96, 131, 133, 135, 232, 235, 277, 306 Dougherty, Charles, i, 137 Dougherty, Daniel, i, 120, 134, 136, 137 Dougherty, Hughey, i, 85; ii, 20, 154 Dougherty, William, i, 47 Doutreleau, Leopold, i, 263 Dowden, Edward, i, 56 Dramatic critics, ii, 144-147 Dreiser, Theodore, ii, 172 Drew, Georgia, i, 68 Drew, John, i, 66, 68, 73 Drew, Mrs. John, i, 68, 71, 73, 84; ii, 152 Drews, Arthur, i, 163 Drexel, Harges & Cie., i, 220, 230 Dreyfus, i, 168 Dubois, Professor, ii, 114 Dubois, Theodore, i, 258 Ducamp, Maxime, ii, 250 Duffy, i, 21 Dumas, Alexandre, ii, 238 Dumas (fils), i, 278; ii, 161, 231 du Maurier, George, i, 169, 313 Dundreary (the character), i, 69, 70 Dunsmore, John, i, 265 Dupre, Jules, i, 242 Duse, Eleanora, i, 274; ii, no, 145, 148, 160 Dutton, William D., i, 204, 309 Dutton, William H., i, 204 Dvorak, Dr. Antonin, ii, 41, 65-68, 99 Eames, Emma, ii, 36, 45, 50, 53 Earlom, Richard, i, 43 Edison, Thomas A., i, 245 Egan, Maurice, ii, 38, 227 Egoists, ii, 214, 253 Eliot, George, i, 187; ii, 193, 264 Ellis, Charles A., ii, 36 Ellis, Havelock, i, 57, 194, 216, 250; ii, 117, 175,243,246,247 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, i, 9, 55, 100, US, 197, 315; , 121, 134, 140, 255 Emerson, Mrs. R. W., i, 277 Engelke, Leopold, i, 64, 141, 199 English, Miss, i, 174 Epstein, i, 274 Ernst, William, i, 133 Essipova, Annette, i, 154; ii, 55 Etude, The, i, 202; ii, 215 Evans, Frank, ii, 14 Evans, Lingwood, ii, 191 Evelyn Innes, ii, 227-229 Everly, Adam, i, 83 Exposition of 1878, Paris, i, 237-241 Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, i, 86, 96-100 Falstaff (the character), ii, 47 Fantin-Latour, i, 267 Farnum, Peter, i, 108-112, 115, 116 Faunce, Miss, i, 21 Fechter, Charles, i, 71 Felix, M. and Mme., ii, 156, 157, 195 Fenians, the, i, 25, 30, 31 Fenton, Dr. Thomas H., i, 173; ii, 23, 24 Fenton, Mrs. T. H., ii, 24 Ferber, Edna, ii, 174 Ferguson, Eleanor Garrigue, ii, 24 Ferris, Mrs. Genevieve, ii, 9 Fetherston, Ferdinand, i, 138, 198, 229 Finck, Henry T., ii, 16, 21, 66 Finelli s, i, 52, 122, 158 Fischer, Emil, ii, 34, 45, 65, 259 Fisher, William Arms, ii, 66 Fiske, Harrison Grey, ii, 90 Fiske, Minnie Maddern, ii, 90, 159 Flandrin, i, 267 Flaubert, Gustave, i, 49, 129, 239, 268- 270, 277; ii, 37, i io, 130, 137, 152, 169, 179, 198, 199, 232, 234, 249, 250 Fleming, Thomas, ii, 189 Floersheim, Otto, ii, 8, 13, 18-21 Flower mutation, ii, 114-116 Foerster-Nietzsche, Elizabeth, ii, 225 Fog, ii, 196 Forain, i, 268 3 i6 INDEX Forbes, Dr., i, 309 Forbes- Robertson, ii, 150, 151, 272 Forbes- Robertson, Mrs., ii, 272 Ford, James L., ii, 95 Forrest, Edwin, i, 37, 84 Foster, Stephen, ii, 67 Fotterall, Fred, i, 82, 83, 118 Fortuny, i, 45; ii, 163 Fourcaud, ii, 248 Fowler, Professor, i, 136 Fox, Daniel M., i, 21, 88, 129, 155 Fox, Henry Korn, i, 21, 130 Fox, John, i, 21 Fox Sisters, the, i, 103 Fox, William H., i, 21 Fragonard, i, 291 Franct, Anatole, i, 168, 192, 266; ii, 122, 133, 214, 216, 226, 235 Franklin, Benjamin, i, 277 Franko, Jeanne, i, 253 Frematad, Olive, ii, 33, 37, 40, 45, 46, 57,58 Freshpond crematory, ii, 221, 222 Friedheim, ii, 7, 71 Friedmann, ii, 28 Frohman, Charles, ii, 33 Frohman, Daniel, ii, 91, 153, 233 Frothingham, George, ii, 153 Fulbert, Henry, ii, 217-223 Fulbert, Mrs. H., ii, 218, 220 Fuller, Henry B., i, 270 Fyles, Franklin, ii, no, 144 Gabler, Ernest, ii, 22 Gadski, ii, 19, 36 Gaertner, Carl, i, 140, 142-149 Gaertner, Carl, Jr., i, 145 Gaertner, Louis, i, 140, 145 Gainsborough, i, 47; ii, 205 Galli-Marie, i, 253; ii, 155 Galsworthy, John, ii, 126, 131 Gambetta, i, 238, 239 Gandara, i, 243 Garden, Mary, ii, 37 Garrigue family, the, ii, 24, 25 Garrigue, Rudolph, ii, 24 Garrigue- Mott, Madame Alice, ii, 71 Gasslein, Joseph, i, 80, 81 Gatti-Casazza, Giulio, ii, 17, 31, 40 Gauguin, Paul, i, 241; ii, 163, 165, 241 Gaultier, Jules, i, 8; ii, 247 Gautier, Theophile, i, 55, 120, 134, 278; ii, 12, 249 Geneva, i, 275 George, Grace, ii, 272 George, Henry, ii, 38 Gerardy, ii, 14 Gericke, ii, 70 Germon, Effie, i, 41, 84 Gerome, i, 48, 239, 240, 243, 268 Geyer, Benjamin, i, 167 Geyer, Ludwig, i, 166, 167 Gibbons, Cardinal James, i, 29, 60 Gibbons, James, i, 15, 23-33, 5*1 137 Gibbons, Susan, i, 52, 53 Gibson, Henry C., i, 45 Giddens, George, ii, 47 Gigoux, Jean, i, 267 Gilbert, John, ii, 148 Gilbert, W. S., ii, 61, 266 Gilder, Jeannette, ii, 215 Gilman, Lawrence, ii, 241 Glackens, ii, 162, 171 Glass, Montagu, ii, 174 Godard, Benjamin, i, 258, 259 Godowsky, Leopold, i, 143, 167; ii, 42, 207-209 Goethe, i, 55, 65, 187, 250; ii, 213, 225, 226, 235 Goldman, Emma, ii, 244 Goldmark, Rubin, ii, 66 Goncourt. See de Goncourt Goodrich, Wallace, i, 280-287 Gosse, Edmund, ii, 159 Gottschalk, Louis M., i, 38, 40, 247 Gounod, Charles, i, 259; ii, 248 Gourmont. See de Gourmont Goya, i, 241; ii, 71, 242, 246, 248 Grandjean, M. and Mme., i, 225, 226, 239 Grant, General, i, 115, 122 Grau, Maurice, ii, 17, 35, 47, 155 Greek church, the, i, 34 Green, Valentine, i, 43 Gregg, Frederick James, ii, 203 Gregg, Joshua, i, 152 Gregory, Lady, ii, 247, 262 Grevy, Jules, i, 238 Grieg, Edvard, ii, 70 Griffin, Martin I. J., i, 20 Gross, Haller, i, 118 Grout, Dr. Franklin, ii, 249 INDEX Grout, Madame Franklin, ii, 249 Guard, William J., ii, 59 Guerbois, Cafe, i, 244 Guerin. See de Guerin Guilbert, Yvette, ii, 196, 197 Guillaumin, i, 267 Guy, Henry, ii, 69 Guyot, Yves, ii, 248 Haase, Friedrich, ii, 150 Hablemann, Theodore, ii, 34 Hackett (the elder), i, 36; ii, 47 Hackett, Francis, ii, 203 Haden, Seymour, i, 45 Halanzier, i, 254 Hale, Philip, i, 253; ii, 36, 37, 190, 198 Halevy, i, 170, 277 Hall, Gilman, ii, 173 Halpert, Samuel, ii, 163 Hals, Franz, i, 86, 245 Hamilton, i, 47 Hammerstein, Oscar, ii, 61-64, *68 Hammond, Clara (Marquise di Lanza), ii, 233 Hamsun, Knut, ii, 191 Hancock, General, i, 15 Handel, George Frederick, i, 105 Handwriting, i, 87, 90, 92, 123 Hanlon-Lees, the, ii, 154 Harland, Henry, ii, 171 Harnack, i, 163 Harris, Victor, ii, 146 Harrison, Frederic, i, 230 Harrison, Louis, ii, 63 Harte, Bret, ii, 172 Hartley, Marsden, ii, 163 Hassam, Childe, ii, 162, 170 Hassler, Mark, i, 188 Hatzfeldt, Countess, ii, 30 Hauk, Minnie, i, 42; ii, 34, 154 Haverly, Colonel Jack, ii, 62 Hazeltine, ii, ill Hazen, i, 17 Hazlehurst, Harry, i, 130 Hazlitt, ii, 124, 177 Healey, Thomas, i, 240 Heenan, John C., i, 278 Heine, Heinrich, i, 168, 278, 313; ii, 28, 224, 287 Heinrich, Anna Schubert, i, 150-152, 156 Heinrich, Julia, i, 159, 160 Heinrich, Max, i, 148-154, 156, 158- 160, 199, 309; ii, 14, 25, 92, 149 Heller, i, 102 Helvetius, Madame, i, 277 Hemynge, Bracebridge, i, 121 Henderson, Archibald, ii, 261 Henderson, William J., ii, 16, 21, 60, 88, 173 Heney, Francis, ii, 141 Hennequin, i, 6, 206 Henner, i, 239 Hennig, Rudolph, i, 145 Henri, Robert, ii, 163 Henry, O., ii, 169, 171-173, 191 Henschel, George, i, 153 Herald, New York, ii, 112 Herbert, Victor, ii, 26, 38, 65, 71, 146, 154 Herbert, Mrs. Victor, ii, 25 Herbert-Foerster, Theresa, ii, 39 Hermann, S. L., i, 189 Herne, ii, 160 Hertel, "Pop," i, 88 Hertz, Alfred, ii, 37 Hervieu, Paul, ii, 243, 244, 253, 265 Hetherington, Albert J., i, 81, 158 Hewitt, William, i, 47, 49, 91 Hill, Barton, i, 73, 84; ii, 152 Hiller, Ferdinand, i, 41 Hinrichs, Gustav, ii, 66, 69 Hirsh, Max, ii, 59 Hobbes, John Oliver, ii, 229, 245 Hoffmann, E. T. W., ii, 134, 215 Holbein, i, 268 Holland, ii, 113, 114 Holland, George, i, 84 Holmes, Will, ii, 154 Homer, Winslow, ii, 206 Honyker, Mark, i, 20 Hooper, Lucy Hamilton, i, 194, 248, 249 Hoppin, Amy, ii, 227 Horace, i, 63 Houdin, Robert, i, 102, 103 Hough, Mrs. Isaac, ii, 23 Howard, Joseph, Jr., i, 6; ii, 88, 175 Howells, W. D., i, 270; ii, n, 171, 240 Hoyt, Charles, ii, 90, 153 Hueffer, Franz, i, 199 Hughes, Rupert, ii, 171, 173, 191 INDEX Hugo, Victor, i, 176, 238, 267, 269, 277 Hummel, i, 141, 143, 155 Huneker, John (father of author), i, 18, 35-40, 43-45, 47, 49, 53, 66, 68, 154, 173, 1 88, 202 Huneker, John (grandfather of author), i, 18-21 Huneker, John (brother of author), i, 20, 68, 176, 206, 213; ii, 148 Huneker, Mary Gibbons (mother of author), i, 13, 27, 51, 53, 54, 127, 154, 176, 177, 229; ii, 18 Huneker, Paul, i, 23, 83, 104, 205; ii, 6 Hunt, Holman, i, 186 Hunt, Joe, i, 283 Hunt, Richard, i, 283 Huntington, Archer M., ii, 71 Huxley, i, 192 Huysmans, Joris-Karel, i, 10, 127, 191, 244, 261, 273; ii, 117, 118, 194, 199-228 Hynemann, Herman, i, 240, 252 lago (the character), ii, 48, 49 Ibsen, i, 72, 204, 242, 316; ii, 135- 137, 140, 147, 159-161, 191, 217, 230, 231, 236, 265, 266, 275 Iconoclasts, ii, 214, 251-253, 266, 273 Impressionists, i, 186, 240-243, 268- 271 Ingersoll, Robert, i, 94, 95; ii, 93 Inness, George, ii, 205, 206 Irish literature, ii, 203, 204 Irving, Henry, i, 85, 313; ii, 48, 144, 149, 150, 152 Irving, Washington, ii, 26, 72, 169 Iturbide, Prince, i, 83 Jackson, John T., ii, 16 James, Henry, i, 78, 89, 121, 178, 209, 227, 239, 270; ii, 130, 131, 142, 171, 198, 242, 249, 266 James, Louis, i, 83 James, William, i, 187, 207; ii, 109, 1 1 8, 204, 214, 247, 253, 306 Jardin Mabille, the, i, 220-222 Jarvis, Charles H., i, 42, 140-143, 155, 156, 158, 198, 199 Jerrold, Douglas, i, 91 Jesuits, the, i, 55 Jewish humour, i, 313 Jews and Judaism, i, 164-172 Joachim, i, 145; ii, 99 John, Augustus, ii, 142, 247 Johnson, Andrew, i, 30 Johnson, John G., i, 133, 134 Johnson, Lionel, ii, 243 Johnson, Samuel, i, 94; ii, 3, 8 Joliffe, Mrs., i, 128 Joly, ii, 36 Jomini, i, 207 Joncieres, Victorien, i, 259 Jones, Arthur Henry, i, 73 Jones, Mr. (owner of the Times}, ii, 21 Joseffy, Rafael, i, 138, 143, 153, 165, 166, 185, 247, 256; ii, 14, 25, 41-43, 54, 55, 65, 71, 202, 203, 207, 214, 260 Joyce, James, ii, 203, 247, 248, 265 Julian s art school, i, 240 Junge, Henry, ii, 71 Kalisch, Paul, ii, 40 Kappers, Dr. C. U. Ariens, ii, 114 Karageorgovich, Peter, i, 307 Karenine, Madame Waldemar, i, 250 Karl, Tom, ii, 153 Karr, Alphonse, ii, 250 Keats, ii, 125, 277-280 Keene, Laura, i, 69 Keeton, A. E., i, 169 "Keg, The," i, 80, 81 Keller, John W., ii, 88, 93, 94 Kelly, Father, i, 58 Kelly, Jimmy, i, 60 Kemper, "Pop," i, 100 Kendrick, Beryl, i, 98, 99 Kent, Rockwell, ii, 163 Keppel, i, 44 Kerker, Gustave, ii, 62, 63 Kindler, Hans, i, 171 King, Katie, i, 103 Kipling, Rudyard, ii, 131, 151, 152 Kipling, Mrs. Rudyard, ii, 151, 152 Klafsky, ii, 36 Kleeberg, Clotilde, i, 252, 259 Klindworth, Karl, ii, 70 Kneisel, Franz, ii, 68, 70 Knortz, Karl, ii, 224 Kortwright, Mr., i, 121 Krehbiel, H. E., i, 152; ii, 16, 19, 21, 25, 31, 147, 190 INDEX Kriegelstein, i, 224 Kuehl, John, ii, 71 Kuypers, Elizabeth, ii, 114 Lablache, ii, 47 Labori, Ferdinand, ii, 167 Labouchere, Henry, ii, 177, 249 Lacordaire, Pere, i, 51, 56 La Farge, John, ii, 241, 242 Laffan, William M., ii, no, 166, 244, 245 Lagrange, Madame, i, 39 Lahn, ii, 182-185 Lake Constance, i, 275 Lamb, Charles, i, 43, 169; ii, 124, 261 Lambdin, Dr., i, 199 Lamenais, Abbe, i, 51 Landor, i, 94, 214 Lang, B. J., i, 247 Lankester, Sir E. Ray, ii, 115 Lassalle, Ferdinand, i, no; ii, 27-30 Lassalle, Jean, i, 259; ii, 45 Lassere, Henri, i, 237 Laurens, i, 239 Law, Ernest, i, 173 Law studies, i, 118-124, 129 Lawrence, Atkins, i, 70 Lawson, Ernest, ii, 162, 202, 206 Le Blanc, Georgette, ii, 119 Le Blanc, Maurice, ii, 120 Lecky, i, 222 Lefebvre, Jules, i, 48, 239, 240, 267; ii, 117, 248 Lefevre, M., i, 222-224, 2 4 8 > 2 58, 265 Lehmann, Lilli, i, 150; ii, 25, 34, 36, 38, 40, 45, 46 Leidy, i, 288; ii, 116 Leifels, Felix, ii, 70 Leighton, i, 186 Lepage, Bastien, i, 289; ii, 163 Leschetizky, ii, 54, 55 Leslie, Mrs. Frank, ii, 12, 157 Letters, autograph, ii, 224-250 Lever, Charles, ii, 260 Levey, E. J., ii, 16 Levy (cornettist), i, 97 Lewes, George Henry, i, 187; ii, 193 Liberty, personal, i, 318, 319 Lichtenberg, Leopold, i, 95; ii, 65 Liebling, Leonard, ii, 16 Lienau sj cafe, ii, 7, 8, 25 Lincoln, Abraham, i, 15, 28, 135, 178 Lingard, Alice Dunning, i, 312 Lippincott, W. H., i, 240, 242 Listen, ii, 14 Liszt, Franz, i, 143, 146, 147, 166, 205, 240, 246, 249, 250, 253, 298, 299; ii, 25, 28, 42, 56, 158, 177, 207, 208, 213, 239, 259, 260, 284 Liszt, Franz (biography), ii, 232, 233, 260 Litvinne, Felia, ii, 57, 58 Lloyd George, ii, 263 Locke, Charles E., ii, 38 Lodge, George Cabot, i, 280; ii, 209, 210 Lodge, Henry Cabot, ii, 239 Loeb, Professor Jacques, ii, 115 Loeffler, Charles Martin, ii, 68 London, Jack, ii, 134, 172 Longfellow, i, 100 Lord, Chester S., ii, 109, in Lord s Prayer in B, The, ii, 215 Lorme, Madame Lola, ii, 268 Lorraine, Claude, i, 44, 54, 243; ii, 205 Loti, Pierre, ii, 128 Lowell, James Russell, ii, 210 Loyson, Paul Hyacinthe, ii, 253 Lublinski, i, 163 Lucas, John and William, i, 138 Lucette, Madeline, ii, 154 Liichow s restaurant, ii, 8, 25, 42, 74, 173 Luehr s cafe, ii, 39 Luks, George, ii, 64, 162, 171, 202 Macaulay, i, 43 McCaull Company, the, ii, 154 McClellan, Charles, i, 195 McCloud, Richard, i, 30-32 McCook, Rev., i, 288 McCullough, John, i, 80; ii, 14, 149 McDonald, ii, 153 MacDowell, Edward A., ii, 68, 92, 158 McFadden, Jack, i, 158 McGowan, Dennis, i, 157, 158 McHale, Archbishop, i, 27 Mackay, F. F., i, 83, 85 McKee, Frank, ii, 90 Mackey, Robert, ii, 255 McKinley, William, ii, 263 McLellan, C. M. S., ii, 112, 144, 214 320 INDEX MacMahon, Marshal, i, 238; ii, 6 McMurtrie, Richard, i, 120 McQuirk, Michael, i, 32 Macready, i, 37; ii, 149 MacVeagh, Wayne, i, 134 M lle New York, i, 191 ; ii, 189-195, 225 Madox-Brown, Ford, i, 186 Maeterlinck, Maurice, i, 207; ii, 118- 121, 133, 147, 191,213,247,265 Magic, i, 102-106 Mallarme, Stephane, i, 208, 251, 273, 274; ii, 179, 194 Mancinelli, Luigi, ii, 36 Manet, Edouard, i, 48, 187, 239-245, 251, 267-271; ii, 163, 164, 179, 235 Mansfield, Richard, i, 70; ii, 144, 149, 150, 236-^38, 257, 271, 272 Mapleson, Henry, ii, 32 Mapleson, Lionel, ii, 32 Maretzek, Max, ii, 31 Margulies, Adele, ii, 65 Marie Antoinette, i, 169 Marin, John, ii, 163 Mario, M., ii, 73-87 Markart, Hans, i, 238 Marlowe, Julia, i, 71; ii, 152, 153 Marquis, Don, ii, 175 Marsh, Edward, ii, 203 Martin, John, i, 43, 45, 139, 267; ii, 103 Martucci, Giuseppe, i, 275 Marvell, Andrew, i, 99 Marx, Karl, i, no, 242; ii, 27, 265, 267 Marzials, Theophile, i, 185 Masaryk, Professor Thomas Garrigue, ii, 24 jVlaskelyne, i, 103 Mason, William, ii, 25 Massart, Madame, i, 248 Massen, Louis, ii, 90 Massenet, Jules, i, 258, 259; ii, 248 Materna, ii, 36 Mather, Frank, Jr., ii, 164 Mathews, Charles, i, 70, 84 Mathias, Georges, i, 40, 143, 249, 263 Matisse, Henri, ii, 163-165 Matrai Pista (Peter Matus), i, 147, 148 Matthew, Father, i, 27 Matthews, Brander, ii, 171, 248 Matthison, Wynne, ii, 152 Matzenauer, Margaret, ii, 33, 96 Maupassant. See de Maupassant Maurel, Victor, i, 72, 120; ii, 36, 47-52 Maurice, Arthur Bartlett, ii, 170 Mawson family, the, ii, 24 Maxim s, Paris, i, 280-289 May, Fred, i, 94 Meade, General, i, 138 Mediums, i, 103 Meehan, Patrick J., i, 25 Meissonier, i, 48, 239, 240, 242, 245; ii, 163 Melba, i, 41; ii, 35, 36, 50, 53 Melomaniacs, ii, 196, 215, 240 Meltzer, Charles Henry, ii, 159, 237, 238 Mencken, H. L., ii, 214, 215 Mendelssohn, i, 141, 165, 170; ii, 69 Mendenhall, Woody, i, 110-112 Mendes, Catulle, ii, 117, 248 Mendoza. See de Mendoza Mengelberg, Willem, ii, 113, 114 Menken, Ada Isaacs, i, 278 Mercantile Library, the, i, 185, 187, 188 Meredith, George, i, 185; ii, 27-29, 176, 266 Meredith, H. E., i, 73 Merlin, i, 208 Merrill, Stuart, ii, 119 Merwin, Samuel, ii, 174 Meryon, ii, 245 Mesdag, W. W., i, 267; ii, 248 Metcalf, Willard, ii, 162, 205 Metropolitan Opera House fire, ii, 39 Meyerbeer, i, 165, 166 Meynell, Alice, i, 196; ii, 124, 178, 210 Mezzotints, i, 43 Michel, Louise, i, 237 Michelangelo, i, 291, 294 Milan of Serbia, i, 305 Miles, George, i, 177 Mill, John Stuart, ii, 138 Millais, John, i, 186 Millet, i, 265; ii, 163 Mills, S. B., ii, 9, 25 Milton, ii, 4, 235 Miolan-Carvalho, i, 253 Mirabeau, i, 7 Miramelli-Mario, Madame, ii, 73-85 Mirbeau, Octave, ii, 215 Mitchell, Edward Page, ii, in Modjeska, Helena, i, 274; ii, 43, 145, 152 INDEX Monet, Claude, i, 187, 239, 241, 242, 244, 267, 269-271; ii, 164 Montaigne, i, 55, 129, 192 Montez, Lola, i, 275, 278 Monticelli, i, 242, 254, 272; ii, 162 Montigny-Remaury, Madame, i, 255 Montmartre cemetery, i, 278 Montmorenci Castle, i, 263 Montsalvat, ii, 102-108 Moody, Helen Watterson, ii, 88 Moody, Winfield Scott, ii, 88 Moore, Albert, i, 186 Moore, Mrs. Bloomfield H., ii, 178 Moore, George, i, 5, 24, 32, 126, 129, 182, 239, 251, 313; ii, 126, 176, 177, 203, 212, 227-233, 236, 258, 265 Moran, Peter, i, 47 Mordaunt, Frank, i, 84, 85; ii, 14 More, Paul Elmer, i, 127; ii, 235 Moreau, Gustave, i, 267 Morgan, Anne, ii, 37 Morin, Pilar, ii, 189 Morizot, Berthe, i, 267 Morning Advertiser, The, ii, 91 Morris, Clara, ii, 155 Morris, William, ii, 263 Morse, Leila, ii, 14 Moss, Frank, i, 240 Most, Johann, ii, 244 Moulds cafe, ii, 10-14, J 4-6 Mounet-Sully, Paul, ii, 150, 243 Mozart, i, 155, 169; ii, 201 Mugnier, Abbe, ii, 118 Munch, Edvard, ii, 191 Murger, Henri, i, 221 Murray, Sam, i, 141 Music, i, 189; ii, 201 Music-critics, i, 199; ii, 16, 17, 20 Music Teachers National Association, ii, 1 8 Musical Courier, London, ii, 122 Musical Courwr, New York, ii, 8, 9, 18-22, 89, 91, 215, 257 Musin, Ovid, ii, 14 Musset. See de Musset Myers, Jerome, ii, 171 Mystery in art, i, 274 Naples, i, 300-302, 313, 314 Napoleon I, i, 248, 318 Napoleon III, i, 48, 238; ii, 28 Natalie, Queen of Serbia, i, 305 National Conservatory of Music, ii, 40, 65-69 Nazimova, Alia, ii, 159, 237, 244 Neagle, Henry, ii, 62, 89 Negri, ii, 182, 184, 185 Negro music, ii, 67-69 Neilson, Adelaide, i, 80, 183; ii, I52 f 154, 1 66, 167 Neilson, Francis, i, 312, 313 Neresheimer, Mr. and Mrs. August, ii, 92, 93 Nethersole, Olga, ii, 239, 243 Neupert, Edmund, ii, 7, 70, 71 Newman, Cardinal, i, 47, 169, 230 New York, ii, 5-9, 25, 26, 72, 148, 162, 163, 169-174, 211 New York of the Novelists, ii, 170 Nicolini, i, 256 Niemann, Albert, i, 159; ii, 13, 34, 45 Nietzsche, Madame Foerster, ii, 225 Nietzsche, Friedrich, i, 5, 67, 241, 242; ii, 3, 106, 123, 135-137, 159, 209, 213, 224, 225, 234, 235, 246, 265, 266 Nikisch, ii, 40 Nilsson, Christine, i, 42; ii, 34 Nirdlinger, Charles Frederic, ii, 112 Nolan, Dr. E. J., i, 79, 310, 311 Nordau, Max, ii, 241, 243 Nordica, Lillian, ii, 17, 36, 45, 57-60 Norris, Frank, i, 84, 270; ii, 169, 240 Norris, G. Heide, i, 120, 125, 173 O Brien, Fitz- James, ii, n, 171 Offenbach, Jacques, i, 122, 221, 236; ii, 154 Okey, Margaret, ii, 167 Old Fogy, ii, 215 O Neill, John, i, 25, 31 Opera, i, 40-42; ii, 30-41, 44~47, 53, 57, 61-63 Operatic manager, the, ii, 35, 36 O Ragan, Count, ii, 283 Ord, George, i, 47 Orlenev, ii, 237, 244 Osborn, Professor Henry Fairfield, ii, H5 O Shaugnessy, Arthur, i, 185 Ossian, i, 198; ii, 134 O Sullivan, Vincent, ii, 265 3 22 INDEX Oswald, ii, 99-108 Ouida, i, 58, 125 Pachmann. See de Pachmann Paderewski, Jan Ignace, i, 166, 276; ii, 42, 43, 54-56 Paganini, i, 147, 166, 253 Palladino, Eusapia, i, 103 Palmer, Minnie, ii, 154 Parepa-Rosa, ii, 31, 34 Paris, i, 205, 218-229, 236-243, 250- 252, 260, 261, 278, 279; ii, 119, 307 Parmentier, Florian, ii, 248 Parry, William, i, 77, 108, 112 Parsons, Albert Ross, ii, 207 Pascal, i, 5, 319, 320 Pasdeloup, Jacques, i, 251, 253 Pater, Walter, i, 22, 55, 120, 125, 179, 185, 250; ii, 123, 148, 201, 212, 235 Patti, Adelina, i, 41, 42, 84, 94, 256, 259; ", 33, 34, 38, 60, 155 Patti, Amalia, i, 41; ii, 31, 34 Patti, Carlo, i, 41 Patti, Carlotta, i, 40-42, 278; ii, 78- 80,82 Patti, Salvatore, i, 41 Payne brothers, the, i, 79 Payne, Wiliam Morton, ii, 159 Peale, i, 48; ii, 205 Pearce, Charles S., i, 240, 242 Peck, Harry Thurston, ii, 252 Penn Square, Philadelphia, i, 78 Pepper, i, 103 Perdriaux, Emile, i, 83 Pere Lachaise cemetery, i, 277, 278 Perry, the magician, i, 105 Perugini, ii, 38 Philadelphia, i, 74-83, 87-90, 96-100, 140, 308-312; ii, 23, 24 Phillipp, Isidor, ii, 248 Phrenology, i, 135 Piano-playing, i, 184, 189 Piano-study, i, 154-157, 226, 249, 261- 263 Piano-teaching, i, 200, 201 ; ii, 66, 68, 69 Picabia, ii, 163 Picasso, ii, 142, 163 Pick, Monsignor, i, 292-299 Pinero, Arthur, i, 72 ; ii, 239, 252 Pinuti, ii, 182-187 Piranesi, i, 43, 139 Pissarro, i, 48, 242, 267, 270 Pius X, i, 290-299; ii, 112 Plancon, Pol, ii, 36, 45, 47, 53 Plato, i, 129, 316 Plympton, Eben, ii, 152 Poe, Edgar Allan, i, 10, 36, 38, 43, 55, 77, 100, 123, 245; ii, 103, 121, 134, 169, 215, 232, 235, 236 Poles and Poland, ii, 43 Pollard, Percival, ii, 112, 204 Pond, Major, i, 95 Ponisi, Madame, ii, 148 Ponsonby, Captain, i, 248 Pope Piux X, i, 290-299; ii, 112 Porter, Jane, ii, 43 Porter, Sydney, ii, 169, 171-173, 191 Portuguese Annie, i, 179, 180 Potter, Mrs., ii, 238 Pound, Ezra, ii, 258 Poussin, J. B., i, 243 Powers, Thomas, ii, 189 Pre-Raphaelitic movement, the, i, 186 Presser, Theodore, i, 201, 202, 309; ii, 8, 307 Price, Lizzie, i, 71, 73 Prime-Stevenson, Irenaeus, ii, 21 Probst, i, 123 Proudhon, Joseph, i, no, 236, 277 Prume, i, 147 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, ii, 191 Puck, ii, 112, 113 Pugh, T. B., i, 95 Quakers, the, i, 76 Quinet, Edgar, i, 208 Quinn, John, ii, 141, 142, 203, 217, 230, 242, 247, 265 Quinton, ii, 127 Rabelais, i, 55, 120 Raconteur, The, ii, 19, 122 Racowitza, Prince and Princess, ii, 27-30 Raeburn, ii, 205 Raffaelli, i, 266, 268, 272 Ramsey, Milne, i, 240 Randegger, Signor, ii, 149 Raphael, i, 47, 291, 292; ii, 201 Reading, a scheme of, i, 126-129 Realism, i, 270 INDEX 323 Reamer, Lawrence, ii, in, 144 Recorder, The, ii, 88-94 Reed, Roland, i, 84 Regnault, i, 239 Rehan, Ada, i, 83; ii, 145, 152, 272 Reich, Jacques, ii, 9 Reinach, Salomon, i, 164 Rejane, ii, 145, 159 Rembrandt, i, 45, 47, 48, 291 ; ii, 162, 242 Remenyi, i, 146-148 Remmertz, Franz, i, 150 Renan, Ernest, i, 168, 236, 278; ii, 48, 137 Renaud, Maurice, i, 280 Renoir, Auguste, i, 242, 270, 272; ii, 163 Reszke. See de Reszke Reynolds, Joshua, i, 47; ii, 200, 205 Rhodes, John F., ii, 65 Richards, Bernard, i, 168 Richards, W. T., i, 47 Richardson, Leander, ii, 90 Richmond, Harry, ii, 155 Rigaud, Hyacinthe, ii, 51 Rimsky-Korsakoff, i, 251 Ritter, Dr., i, 199 Ritter, Theodore, i, 41, 185, 263 Robertson, Agnes, ii, 154 Robertson, John M., i, 6 Robertson, Tom, i, 72 Robinson, A. Mary F., ii, 228 Rodenbach, Georges, ii, 119 Rodin, Auguste, i, 187, 274; ii, no, 117, 161, 248 Rogers, Ned (Montezuma), i, 82, 83, 118 Roggenberger, i, 140 Rome, i, 290-299; ii, 277, 293, 303 Roosevelt, Philip, ii f 142 Roosevelt, Colonel Theodore, i, 135; ii, 3, 141, 142, 209, 307 Rops, Felicien, i, 268; ii, 118, 245 Rosati, ii, 182-187 Roscoe, i, 19 Rosenfeld, Sidney, ii, 171 Rosenthal, Moriz, i, 275; ii, 7, 25, 55, 71 Rosny, J. H., Sr., ii, 117, 127, 248 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, i, 55, 185, 186 Rossetti, William, i, 195 Rossi, ii, 150 Rossini, i, 165, 166, 277 Roth, Professor Edward, i, 62-67, 105, 3io 3H Rothermel, Peter F., i, 47 Rousseau, J. J., i, 275 Rousseau, Theodore, i, 242 Rubinstein, Anton, i, 40, 142, 143, 169, 247, 250; ii, 25, 31, 42, 54, 71, 208, 309 Rubinstein, Nicolas, i, 153, 246, 247 Rudensdorff, Madame, ii, 149 Rudolph, Carl, i, 154 Ruff, General, i, 138, 240 Ruff, John, 138 Ruff, Miss, i, 240 Rummel, Franz, ii, 14, 25 Runciman, John, ii, 117, 255, 262 Ruskin, John, ii, 124, 148 Russell, George, ii, 203 Russell, Lillian, ii, 35 Ryder, Albert, ii, 206 Ryley, J. H., ii, 154 Sada-Yacco, i, 274 Saint Aloysius of Gonzaga, i, 60 Saint Augustine, i, 10, 64 Sainte-Beuve, i, 165; ii, 123, 138, 139, 213,214 Saint-Gaudens, i, 267 Saint-Hilary, Dorothea, ii, 279-305 Saint-Hilary, Lewis, ii, 280-305 St. Martin s Summer, i, 133, 194, 195 Saint-Saens, Camille, i, 142, 167, 255, 256, 258; ii, 54, 249 Saintsbury, Professor George, i, 56, 185 Salon des Independants (Paris), i, 268, 269 Salome, ii, 37 Salon of 1879 (Paris), i, 266-268 Saltus, Edgar, ii, ii, 13, 171, 172, 204, 232 Saltus, Francis, ii, n, 12 Salvini, i, 70, 85, 274; ii, 150 Sand, George, i, 249, 250, 267, 277; ii, 193, 240, 250 Sand, Solange, i, 249 Sandeau, Jules, i, 277; ii, 193 Sanderson, Sybil, i, 258 Sandier, Jacob Kopel, i, 162, 163 Sargent, J. S., i, 243; ii, 205 324 INDEX Sartain, John, i, 38, 47 Saturday Review, London, ii, 124 Sauer, Emil, i, 247 Sauret, ii, 14 Sautter s, i, 42 Sauvan, Madame, i, 190, 191 Scalchi, ii, 36, 50 Scaria, ii, 36 Scharwenka, ii, 25 Schechter, Solomon, i, 163 Schmiedel, i, 163 Schmitt, Johann Kaspar, ii, 135 Schmitz, Charles, i, 141 Schopenhauer, Arthur, i, 51, 55, 57, 203; ii, 104, 224 Schubert, Franz (violinist), i, 145, 153, 155, 158, 184, 309 Schulhoff, Jules, ii, 308 Schumann-Heink, Madame, ii, 45 Schutz, Willy, ii, 58, 59 Schuyler, Montgomery, ii, in Schwab, Frederick, ii, 20, 21, 41, 166, 167 Scott, Clement, ii, 159 Scott-Siddons, Mary F., i, 95, 183; ii, 152, 239 Scribe, ii, 161, 231 Sculpture, i, 274 Seabrooke, Tom, ii, 62 Second sight, i, 102 Segond-Weber, ii, 145 Seidl, Anton, ii, 25, 33-35, 38, 40, 41, 58, 65, 99, 259 Seidl-Krauss, Madame, ii, 41 Sembrich, Marcella, i, 41, 150; ii, 39, 43 Sentz, Carl, i, 144, 146, 1 88 Severine, M lle, ii, 189 Severn, John, ii, 278 Sgambati, i, 275; ii, 284 Shakespeare, ii, 49, 121, 137, 147, 201, 213, 214, 235 Sharswood, Judge, i, 120, 130 Shaw, Bernard, i, 73, 242; ii, 125, 128, 129, 131, 139, 147, 159, 229, 238, 245, 251-276 Shaw, Robert, ii, 257 Shearer, i, 265 Shelley, Harry Rowe, ii, 66, 71 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, i, 196; ii, 119, 201, 277, 278, 280 Sheridan, W. E., i, 84 Shofar Blew at Sunset, The, i, 170 Sigerson, Dora, ii, 288 Simmons, Lew, ii, 20 Simons, Marcius, ii, 141 Sisley, i, 48, 242, 267, 270 Sisters of Mercy, i, 55 Sivori, Camilla, i, 185, 253 Sloan, Charles, i, 125, 174 Sloan, John, ii, 162, 171 Smeaton, John, i, 49 Smith, F. Hopkinson, ii, 173, 174 Smith, Harry B., ii, 61 Smith, Joseph, ii, 95 Soldene, Emily, i, 312 Sonneck, O. G., i, 166 Sorma, Agnes, ii, 159 Sorrento, i, 300-303 Sothern, E. A., i, 69, 70 Sothern, E. H., i, 70, 71; ii, 150, 159 Sothern, Lytton, i, 69 Stamaty, Camille, i, 40 Stankowitch, Anthony, i, 189 Stanton, Edmund C., ii, 39, 40, 66 Stanton, Secretary of War, i, 29 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, i, 196 Stein, Theodore, ii, 17 Steinberg, Albert, ii, 16, 17, 36, 144 Steinway, Charles H., ii, 25 Steinway Hall, ii, 70, 71 Steinway, William, ii, 25, 70 Stendhal (Henry Beyle), i, 5, 15, 34, 35, 126, 174, 195, 214, 242, 278; ii, 213,235,242,248,266 Stephen, Leslie, i, 6, 202 Stephens, James, i, 25; ii, 203, 265 Stern, Simon, i, 140 Sternberg, Constantine, i, 145; ii, 7, 25 Stetson, Nahum, ii, 25 Stevens, Alfred, i, 243, 245 Stevens, Thaddeus, ii, 202 Stevenson, Robert Louis, i, 198, 213, 251; ii, 106 Stickney, Joseph Trumbull, i, 280 Stieglitz, Alfred, ii, 162 Stirner, Max, i, 4, no, 242; ii, 135, 136, 267 Stock company, the, i, 72, 73 Stokowski, Leopold, i, 171 Stoll, William, i, 140 Stone, Rev. Dr. Kent, i, 55, 56 INDEX 325 Stone-McDonald, Marie, ii, 154 Story, Julian, ii, 36 Strakosch, Amelia, ii, 156 Strakosch, Maurice and Max, ii, 31 Strauss, Johann, i, 236 Strauss, Nathan, Jr., ii, 112 Strauss, Richard, ii, 37, 38, 214, 235 Streamer, Volney, ii, 254 Strindberg, i, 242; ii, 136, 147, 191, 213, 248, 265, 267 Stuart, Gilbert, i, 47, 48; ii, 205 Studley, J. B., ii, 14 Studley, Sam, ii, 154 Sullivan, Arthur, ii, 61 Sullivan, John L., ii, 90 Sullivan, John T., ii, 90 Sullivan, Will, i, 177 Sully, Thomas, i, 47, 48; ii, 202 Sun, the New York, ii, 19, 109-112, 162, 242 Swinburne, i, 55, 130, 185, 187, 195, 196, 207, 272; ii, 143, 148, 209 Swinnerton, Frank, ii, 29 Sykes, Lady, ii, 271 Symonds, J. A., i, 195 Symons, Arthur, i, 71, 274; ii, 117, 131, 143, 201, 212, 215 Synge, ii, 203, 265 Tagg, Robert, i, 146, 311 Taine, i, 165; ii, 123, 138, 139, 213, 214 Talazac, i, 253 Tayau, Marie, i, 253 Taylor, Dr. John, i, 173 Teaching piano, i, 200, 201 ; ii, 66, 68, 69 Teitlbaum, Solomon, ii, 59 Ternina, Milka, ii, 39, 45, 46, 57 Terry, Ellen, ii, 149, 152 Thackeray, i, 5, 8, 58, 121, 126, 193; ii, 269, 270 Thalberg, Sigismund, i, 38-40, 102, 143 Theocritus, i, 205 Theosophy, ii, 94-98 Thibault, Mrs. Amelia, ii, 23 Thibault, Carow, Frank and Fritz, ii, 23 Thomas, Ambroise, i, 248 Thomas, Theodore, i, 122, 140, 185; , 25, 32, 38, 70, 71 Thompson, Francis, ii, 177 Thompson, Lydia, i, 94, 312 Thompson, Vance, i, 174, 276, 277; ii, 90, 91, 189-194, 198, 199, 230 Thompson, William, ii, 149 Thoreau, David, i, 179, 197, 198, 205, 277 Thorne, Charles, i, 83 Thouron, Henry, i, 240 Thrane, ii, 217 Thunder, Henry, i, 27, 188 Thurber, Mrs. Jeannette M., ii, 38, 40, 65, 66, 68, 69 Thursby, Emma, i, 259 Tilbury, Zeffie, i, 312 Time and the present, i, 179, 316 Times, the New York, ii, 113 Tingley, Katherine, ii, 94 Titian, i, 86 Tolstoy, i, 270; ii, 126, 135, 225, 232, 262, 267 Tornado, a, i, 16, 17 Toscanini, Arturo, ii, 33, 38, 40, 41 Toulouse-Lautrec, i, 270, 272, 273 Town Topics, ii, 112 Townsend, Dick, i, 82, 83, 118 Townsend, Edward W., ii, 170 Towse, John Ranken, ii, 144, 146, 147 Tragic Comedians, The, ii, 27, 28 Traubel, Horace, i, 196 Travel, European, ii, 113 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, i, 312, 313; ii, 47, 150 Tretbar, Charles F., ii, 25, 70 Trollope, Anthony, i, 125, 126 Troyon, ii, 163 Tschaikovsky, i, 246, 247; ii, 208, 214 Turgenev, i, 239, 270, 277; ii, 130, 131, 133, 137, 232 Turner, G. W., ii, 92 Turner, J. M. W., i, 43, 44, 241 ; ii, 163 Turner, Walter, ii, 14 Twain, Mark, i, 87, 100 Twitchell, i, 123 Tyler, ex-President, i, 28 Tyng-Griswold, Hattie, i, 278 Union Square, New York, ii, 72, 73 Urso, Camilla, ii, 65 Van Beers, i, 267 Van Buest, i, 134 326 INDEX Van der Kempf, i, 240 Van der Stucken, Frank, ii, 18, 25, 66 Van Gogh, i, 241 ; ii, 163, 165 Van Hook s restaurant, i, 157, 158 Vanier, Leon, ii, 119 Van Lerberghe, Charles, ii, 133 Van Oosterzee, Cornelia, ii, 114 Velasquez, i, 47, 291, 292; ii, no, 139, 1 66, 246 Venice, ii, 295-302 Verdi, i, 273; ii, 49 Verhaeren, ii, 191 Verlaine, Paul, i, 246; ii, 119, 191 Vermeer, Jan, i, 47, 291; ii, 162 Verne, Jules, i, 64, 122, 123; ii, 127 Vesuvius, Mount, i, 300-302 Viardot, ii, 248 Viele-Griffin, ii, 119 Vieuxtemps, Henri, i, 38, 40, 185, 253; ", 31 Villiers de 1 Isle Adam, i, 244-246 Villiers, France, i, 263, 264 Viola (the character), ii, 152 Visionaries, ii, 216 Vogrich, Max, i, 145 Voight, Harry, i, 21 Voltaire, i, 192, 275, 319; ii, 140 von Biilow, i, 142, 143, 154, 247, 256 von Blilow, Cosima, ii, 28 von Doenniges, Helena, ii, 27-30 von Inten, Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand, ",25 von Lenbach, ii, 30 von Sachs, Willy, ii, 16, 144 von Shevitch, Madame, ii, 27-30 von Shevitch, Serge, ii, 27, 28, 30 von Weber, i, 167; ii, 207 Vos, Anna Lasubrecht, ii, 114 Wagner, Richard, i, 23, 122, 134, 166- 169, 187, 273, 284; ii, 4, 28, 30, 38, 45, 46, 104, 105, 135, 201, 224, 228, 232, 235, 259, 260 Wainwright, Marie, ii, 152 Walcot, Charles, i, 70, 73; ii, 152 Walcot, Mrs., i, 70, 73, 84 Walker, General, i, 138 Walkowitz, ii, 163 Wall Street, in fiction, ii, 169, 170 Wallack, Lester, ii, 14, 148 Waller, Henry, i, 95; ii, 66, 239 Walnut Street Theatre Stock Com pany, i, 84 Walton, F. Theodore, i, 123 Walton, George E., i, 21 Walton, "Pud," i, 123 Warburton, Barclay, i, 173 Ward, Judge Henry Galbraith, i, 125 Ware, Billy, i, 141, 158 Warner, Massah, i, 199 Warren, William, ii, 155 Watering-places, ii, 112 Watteau, i, 241 Watts, i, 1 86 Waugh (the elder), i, 47 Weber, i, 167; ii, 207 Weber, Lisa, i, 312 Weekly Critical Review, The, Paris, ii, 117 Weil, Otto, ii, 39 Weingartner, Felix, ii, 70, 249 Weir, Alden, ii, 162 Weismann, i, 14; ii, 116 Wells, Herbert G., i, 123; ii, 126 Wenman, ii, 47 Werle s hotel, ii, 26, 30 Wesley, John, i, 192 West, Benjamin, i, 45 Western, Lucille and Helen, i, 85 Wharton, Edith, ii, 169, 171-173, 234, 235 Wheeler, Andrew C. (Nym Crinkle), ii, 144, 146 Wheeler house, the, i, 200 Where the Black Mass was Heard, i, 191 Whistler, James McNeil, i, 45, 240, 255, 267, 274; ii, 117, 163, 165, 166, 242 White, Willie, i, 174 Whitefield, Ann, ii, 270, 271 Whitman, Stephen, i, 83; ii, 170, 172 Whitman, Walt, i, 5, 56, 57, 90, 100, 117, 195-198; ii, 6, 12, 123, 134, 142, 169, 171, 175, 176, 232, 233, 241 Wickersham, Samuel George Wood ward, i, 130-132, 135, 138, 160, 182; ii, no Widor, ii, 248 Wieniawski, i, 147; ii, 31 Wilcox, Mark, i, 138 Wild, Johnny, ii, 153 INDEX 327 Wilde, Oscar, i, 125, 169; ii, II, 37, 123, 204, 233, 265 Wilde, Willie, ii, 12, 157 Wilhelmj, August, i, 145, 146 Willard, ii, 150 Williams, Isaac, i, 47 Williamson, Leander, i, 198-200 Wilson, Dr. Ellwood, i, 118 Wilson, Ellwood, Jr., i, 118, 123, 124 Wilson, President Woodrow, i, 22, 135; ii, 307 Wilstach, Paul, ii, 238 Wincklemann, ii, 36 Winston, Jeannie, i, 254 Winter, William, i, 195; ii, 144, 145, Winterbottom, i, 188 Wisler, Martin, i, 89 Wolfgang, Jacob, i, 251 Wolsieffer, i, 188 Wood, Archbishop, i, 60, 189 Woodward, Aubertine, i, 130 Woodward, George, i, 130 Wordsworth, i, 43, 316; ii, 115, 236 Worth, M., i, 258, 259 Wullner, Franz, i, 153 Yeamans, Annie, ii, 153 Yeats, W. B., ii, 117, 203, 242, 243 Ysaye, ii, 14 Zandomenechi, i, 267 Zangwill, Israel, i, 169, 170, 313; ii, 139. 196, 226, 240, 241 Zeckwer, Richard, i, 199 Zeisler, Fannie Bloomfield, ii, 25 Zelocca, Madame, ii, 79-87 Ziegler, Edward, ii, 16, 17, 42, 43 Ziem, i, 254 Zola, Emile, i, 5, 168, 253, 266, 269, 270, 272, 277; ii, 169, 192, 196, 228 Zuloaga, Ignacio, ii, 248 BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER What some distinguished writers have said of them : Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: "Do you know that Iconoclasts is the only book of high and universal critical worth that we have had for years to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It is at once strong and fine, supple and firm, indul gent and sure." And of "Ivory Apes and Peacocks" he said, among other things: "I have marvelled at the vigilance and clarity with which you follow and judge the new literary and artistic move ments in all countries. I do not know of criticism more pure and sure than yours." (October, 1915.) "The Mercure de France translated the other day from Scrib- ner s one of the best studies which have been written on Stendhal for a long time, in which there was no evasion of the question of Stendhal s immorality. The author of that article, James Huneker, is, among foreign critics, the one best acquainted with French literature and the one who judges us with the great est sympathy and with the most freedom. He has protested with force in numerous American journals against the cam paign of defamation against France, and he has easily proved that those who participate in it are ignorant and fanatical." "Promenades Litter air es" (Troisieme Serie), Remy de Gour- mont. (Translated by Burton Rascoe for the Chicago Tribune.) Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, 1909, of "Egoists": "I have browsed through the pages of your book and found that you touch in a sympathetic style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatment is extremely rare and courageous." Dr. Georg Brandes, the versatile and profound Danish critic, wrote: "I find your breadth of view and its expression more European than American; but the essential thing is that you are an artist to your very marrow." BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER LETTERS OF JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER These letters have all the brilliance of his essays, but a greater spontaneity and if possible a more vivid spirit. Among the people to whom they are written are Royal Cor- tissoz, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Aldrich, H. E. Krehbiel, Benjamin de Casseres, W. C. Brownell, Walter Pritchard Eaton, William Marion Reedy, Mrs. Gilbert, Elizabeth Jordan, Frida Ashforth, Emma Eames, Henry James, Jr., etc. Every page is alive with pointed comment, brilliant char acterization, and vivid portraiture. Bohemian and literary New York of the last several decades is mirrored in these letters. STEEPLEJACK ILLUSTRATED " Not only interesting because of its record of Mr. Huneker s career and philosophy, but because it gives an excellent idea of the developments in art, music, and literature, both in Europe and in America, during the last forty years." WILLIAM LYON PHELPS, Yale University. VARIATIONS "Hold your breath as you go through this book touring the universe with a man who takes all of life in its everlasting fecun dity and efflorescence for his theme." BENJAMIN DE CASSERES, in the New York Herald. BEDOUINS Mary Garden; Debussy; Chopin or the Circus; Botticelli; Poe; Brahmsody; Anatole France; Mirbeau; Caruso on Wheels; Calico Cats; the Artistic Temperament; Idols and Ambergris; With the Supreme Sin; Grindstones; A Masque of Music and The Vision Malefic. IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS "His critical tact is well-nigh infallible. . . . His position among writers on aesthetics is anomalous and incredible: no merchant traffics in his heart, yet he commands a large, an eager, an affectionate public." LAWRENCE GILMAN, in N orth American Review (October, 1915). BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER UNICORNS "The essays are short, full of a satisfying and fascinating crispness, both memorable and delightful. And they are full of fancy, too, of the gayest humor, the quickest appreciation, the gentlest sympathy, sometimes of an enchanting extravagance." New York Times. MELOMANIACS "It would be difficult to sum up Melomaniacs in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clear ness and obscurity." HAROLD E. GORST, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906). VISIONARIES "In The Spiral Road and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Haw thorne s Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering, and unblessed. But Hawthorne s splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker s stories." London Academy (Feb. 3, 1906). ICONOCLASTS : A Book of Dramatists "His style is a little jerky, but is one of those rare styles in which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence." G. K. CHESTERTON, in London Daily News. MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC "Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping strokes with a magnificent disregard for un important details. And as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and temperament a string that vibrates and sings in response to music we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable contribution to the world s tiny musical literature." J. F. RUNCIMAN, in London Saturday Review. BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER EGOISTS WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS " Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very shrewd." ROYAL CORTISSOZ, in the New York Tribune. THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE A Book of a Thousand and One Moments "The book is stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected brilliancy." Chicago Tribune. OVERTONES: A Book of Temperaments WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS "In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical." Academy, London. PROMENADES OF AN IMPRESSIONIST " We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the technical contributions of Cezanne and Rodin. Here Mr. Huneker is a real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways in art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, are such appreciations as the Monticelli and Chardin." FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR., in New York Nation and Evening Post. NEW ODSMOPOLIS "Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a craftsman of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He is intensely modern, well read in recent European writers, and not lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. He flings off his impressions at fervent heat ; he is not ashamed to be enthusiastic; and he cannot escape that large sentimentality which, to less disciplined transatlantic writers, is known nakedly as heart interest. Out of his chaos of reading and observation he has, however, evolved a criticism of life that makes for in tellectual cultivation, although it is of a Bohemian rather than an academic kind." London Athen&um (November 6, 1915). FRANZ LISZT WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS CHOPIN: The Man and His Music 138837 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES / N