In what is abstract in Russian music there is human blood. It does not plead and implore like Wagner's. It is more somber, less carnal, more feverish, more unsatisfied in the desire of the flesh, more inhuman, than the ballet music in Parsifal. Even in that music, though shafts of light sometimes pierce the soul like a sword, there is none of the peace of Bach; it has the unsatisfied desire of a kind of flesh of the spirit. But in Tchaikovsky's music the violins run up and down the scales like acrobats; and he can deform the rhythms of nature with the caprices of half-civilized impulses. In your delight in finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome him without reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not necessarily a great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist, he is not a quite satisfactory man of genius.
When I heard his music in The Enchanted Princess I was struck by the contrast of this ballet music with the overture to Francesca da Rimini I had heard years before. The red wind of hell, in which the lovers are afloat, blows and subsides. There is a taste of sulphur in the mouth as it ends, after the screams and spasms. Scrawls of hell-fire rush across the violins into a sharpened agony; above all, not Dante's; always hell-fire, not the souls of unhappy lovers who have loved too well.
Lydia Lopokova is certainly a perfect artist, whose dancing is a delight to the eyes, as her miming appeals to the senses. She has passion, and of an excitable kind; in a word, Russian passion. She can be delicious, malicious, abrupt in certain movements when she walks; she has daintiness and gaiety; her poses and poises are exquisite; there is an amazing certainty in everything she does. A creature of sensitive nerves, in whom the desire of perfection is the same as her desire for fame, she is on the stage and off the stage essentially the same; and in her conversations with me I find imagination, an unerring instinct, an intense thirst for life and for her own art; she has la joie de vivre.
Her technique, of course, is perfect; and, as in the case of every artist, it is the result of tireless patience. Technique and the artist: that is a question of interest to the student of every art. Without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration in any art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect in technique before he appears on the stage at all; in his case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death perhaps; his art begins when his technique is already perfect. Artists who deal in materials less fragile than human life should have no less undeviating a sense of responsibility to themselves and to art. So Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off.
Lubov Tchernicheva is a snake-like creature, beautiful and hieratic, solemn; and in her aspect, as in her gestures, a kind of Russian Cleopatra. Swinburne might have sung of her as he sang of the queen who ruled the world and Antony:—
Her mouth is fragrant as a vine,
A vine with birds in all its boughs;
Serpent and scarab for a sign
Between the beauty of her brows
And the amorous deep lids divine.
And it is a revelation to our jaded imaginations of much less jaded imaginations. These may be supposed to be characters in themselves of little interest to the world in general; to have come by strange accident from the ends of the world. Yet these are thrown into chosen situations, apprehended in some delicate pauses of life; they have their moments of passion thrown into relief in an exquisite way. To discriminate them we need a cobweb of illusions, double and treble reflections of the mind upon itself, with the artificial light of the stage cast over them and, as it were, constructed and broken over this or that chosen situation—on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion is balanced!
II
Apart from the loveliness of Manfred—the almost aching loveliness of Astarte—and the whole of the Carnival, Kreisleriana, and several other pieces, I have never been able to admire Schumann's music. When I wrote on Strauss I said that he has many moments in which he tries to bring humor into music. Turn from the "Annie" motive in Enoch Arden to the "Eusebius" of the Carnival, and you will readily see all the difference between two passages which it is quite possible to compare with one another. The "Annie" motive is as pretty as can be; it is adequate enough as a suggestion of the somewhat colorless heroine of Tennyson's poem; but how lacking in distinction it is, if you but set it beside the "Eusebius," in which music requires nothing but music to be its own interpreter. But it is in his attempts at the grotesque that Schumann seems at times actually to lead the way to Strauss. It is from Schumann that Strauss has learned some of those hobbling rhythms, those abrupt starts, as of a terrified peasant, by which he has sometimes suggested his particular kind of humor in music.
Schumann, like Strauss, reminds me at one time of De Quincey or Sydney Dobell, at another of Gustave Moreau or of Arnold Bocklin, and I know that all these names have had their hour of worship. All have some of the qualities which go to the making of great art; all, in different ways, fail through lack of the vital quality of sincerity, the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty. All are rhetorical, all produce their effect by an effort external to the thing itself which they are saying or singing or painting.