My Friend, the Incurable
VI.
Choleric Comments on Cacophonies
On the G String
We are sailing in a gondola along exotic shores. Crystal castles, dewy meadows, weeping cypresses, glowing craters.... We pass through the dreamy regions of Shelley and Keats, we envisage the gigantic cosmos of Shakespeare, of Dante, of Milton, of Goethe, we perceive in a haze the purple-crimson crucifixion of Nietzsche, the cruel gloom of Dostoyevsky, the dizzy abysses of Poe, the all-human chaos of Whitman....
We sail on—but ah, our picturesque gondolier! He is so excited, so restless, so loud—we are forced to turn our eyes from the grandiose landscape and follow bewildered our conscientious cicerone. In his anxiety lest we fail to notice the passing “places of importance,” our industrious guide shrieks and yells, wriggles and gesticulates, beats upon our senses, pricks and tickles, and all this he performs to the accompaniment of a mellow mandolin, so sweet, so touching, so exasperating.
We are weary.
With some apprehension I looked forward to Mr. Powys’s book of “Literary Devotions,”[4] for I had the good luck of listening to his lectures. They are unforgettable, those bewitched moments in the darkened Little Theater, where we sat hypnotized by “the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light of the stage,” invoking the spirits of the Great. How will those invocations appear, I worried, when congealed in the static book-form, minus the catacomb-atmosphere, minus the serpent-like, mesmerizing cant of the meteoric sorcerer, minus Raymond Johnson’s light-effects? “And, ah! sweet, tender reader,” to use Mr. Powys’s style, my fears came true: the book is a libretto, sans orchestra, sans singer. I know that many of the lecturer’s devotees, especially the worshipping young ladies, will find little difficulty in mentally supplying the libretto with the dynamic personality of the performer; but my imagination is dewinged at the sight of the motionless symmetric lines, and I fail to vocalize the legions of exclamation-marks, the innumerable capital-letters, the profuse superlatives. With a kaleidoscopic velocity the author displays his personal reflections upon the greatest minds of the world; he bends them, he liquifies them, he moulds them, recreates them according to his whim—good, bravissimo! I am the last person to depreciate subjective criticism; I am tolerant enough to digest even such a statement as that Goethe was typically and intrinsically German, or that Nietzsche was thoroughly Christian. It is not Mr. Powys’s What that nauseates me, but his How, his butaforial Grand Style, his monotonous tremolo, his constant air of discovering new planets, his Pateresque worship of beauty which lacks Pater’s aristocratic calm and reservedness, his Oscaresque paradoxicalness deprived of Wilde’s chiselled wit, his continuous ruminating of a limited stock of long, high words, of dizzying adjectives, of saccharine adverbs.
Pray, “sweet, tender reader,” how long could you endure Mischa Elman playing the Minuet in G?
[4] Visions and Revisions, by John Cowper Powys. [G. Arnold Shaw, New York]
And Pippa Dances
Yet there are some who complain about the lack of musical devotion among Americans. Nay, music is getting absolutely too popular—witness the crowded concert-halls, especially the ten-cent-Sunday-concerts arranged by philanthropists for the uplift of the masses. It is significant to observe that the so-called Submerged have learned not only to applaud, but also to hiss, not only to accept with gratitude any sort of “divine” music, but to demand a certain kind of music. And, surely, they well know what they want.
Hauptmann’s Huhn, the personification of the mob, wants the fragile Pippa, the symbol of beauty, to dance for him. She is forced to obey, and is of course crushed to death. And Pippa dances. That omnipotent Huhn who can call down all the muses to come and entertain him, to amuse him, to serve him, to degenerate or to perish! Watch that wonderful creature, the amalgamated American Huhn, making love to music, hugging and caressing her; I shudder at the thought of what will become of gentle Pippa in the choking embrace of her boorish suitor.
Yes, Huhn knows what he wants. He expects of music the same service that he gets from illustrations in popular magazine novels. He comes into an ice-cream parlor and orders Banana-Split plus William Tell on the victrola—so digestible and understandable. Last Sunday I observed a crowd at a ten-cent concert enjoying the Meditation, good-humoredly assisting the soloist by humming and whistling the familiar tune, their faces expressing the satisfaction of victors. And the night before I witnessed the thousands at Orchestra Hall, the Huhns in sweaters and in décolleté-gowns and in dress-suits, going mad over that vulgarity, Mr. Carpenter’s precise reproduction of barking dogs and of a policeman’s heavy walk. Huhn demands music which he is capable of interpreting in every-day terms, which transparently reflects his little emotions, his petty joys, his sirupy sorrows, his after-meal dreams. Is it to be wondered that Huhn hisses and grumbles when the conductor hesitatingly smuggles in such a risky novelty as Scriabin’s Prometheus? What is to Huhn the Poem in Fire, the emerging of a dazed humanity out of Chaos, the collision of gloom and light, the birth of the Winged Man? What is Hecuba to him! And since Pippa must dance, the obliging conductor hastens to appease the growling Huhn by the taffy of Bruch’s concerto.
In recent years some inspired rebels among painters and sculptors have striven towards the elevating of their arts to the highest level, that of music, the noblest medium for the expression of aesthetic emotions, nobler than words or brush or chisel. Recall Kandinsky’s color-symphonies. Alas, music is not any longer a daughter of Olympus; she has been dragged by Huhn from the pure atmosphere of the mountain summit down into the damp valley. Wagner began the prostitution of music by making it subservient to words; he has won the sanction and acclamation of the crowd. Then followed the orgy of Program-music, those wood-cut illustrations, those rich gravies that were invented to sweeten Mr. Huhn’s meals. Now an enterprising Chicago merchant, Mr. Carpenter, has presented us with an apotheosis of vulgarity to the hilarious triumph of the appreciative crowd, to the delight of our “independent” music-critics—“that strange creature, the American music-critic,” to quote a naive English journal.
And Pippa dances.
Ibn Gabirol.