FERGUS
My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney, its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.
The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future. His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school. The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.
Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory, but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music, somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two, and he could not grasp or control it.
When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest of his pastoral day for writing music.
Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum, discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him. Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his own historic galleries.
When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather as one who had been bereft of all these things.
Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.
He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and he gave the work up.
All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater. Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him, but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined to engage him.
After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach, and that his training had made him a professional musician. His personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs.
Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life. His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly to the classics—Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven.
Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him an artist.
But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of otium cum dignitate, calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies. On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like Fergus, a work of art one’s self.