To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
—Translated by John Addington Symonds.
Have not all great composers been anarchs—from Bach to Strauss? At first blush the hard-plodding Johann Sebastian of the Well-tempered Clavichord seems a doubtful figure to drape with the black flag of revolt. He grew a forest of children, he worked early and late, and he played the organ in church of Sundays; but he was a musical revolutionist nevertheless. His music proves it. And he quarrelled with his surroundings like any good social democrat. He even went out for a drink during a prosy sermon, and came near being discharged for returning late. If Lombroso were cognizant of this suspicious fact, he might build a terrifying structure of theories, with all sorts of inferential subcellars. However, it is Bach’s music that still remains revolutionary. Mozart and Gluck depended too much on aristocratic patronage to play the rôle of Solitaries. But many tales are related of their refusal to lick the boots of the rich, to curve the spine of the suppliant. Both were by nature gentle men, and both occasionally arose to the situation and snubbed their patrons outrageously. Handel! A fighter, a born revolutionist, a hater of rulers. John Runciman—himself an anarchistic critic—calls Handel the most magnificent man that ever lived. He was certainly the most virile among musicians.
I recall the story of Beethoven refusing to uncover in the presence of royalty, though his companion, Goethe, doffed his hat. Theoretically I admire Beethoven’s independence, yet there is no denying that the great poet was the politer of the two, and doubtless a pleasanter man to consort with. The mythic William Tell and his contempt for Gessler’s hat were translated into action by the composer.
Handel, despite the fact that he could not boast Beethoven’s peasant ancestry, had a contempt for rank and its entailed snobberies, that was remarkable. And his music is like a blow from a muscular fist. Haydn need not be considered. He was henpecked, and for the same reason as was Socrates. The Croatian composer’s wife told some strange stories of that merry little blade, her chamber-music husband. As I do not class Mendelssohn among the great composers, he need not be discussed. His music was Bach watered for general consumption. Schubert was an anarch all his short life. He is said to have loved an Esterhazy girl, and being snubbed he turned sour-souled. He drank “far more than was good for him,” and he placed on paper the loveliest melodies the world has ever heard. Beethoven was the supreme anarch of art, and put into daily practice the radicalism of his music.
Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be none the wiser. Suppose that some Russian professional supervisor of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaïkowsky preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty, preaches anarchy, puts into tone, words, gestures, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated from the convention of authority, from what Bernard Shaw would call the Old Man of the Mountain, the Government.
I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another revolutionist like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt, bitten by the Socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, a rank hater of conventions in art, though in life a silken courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky, who buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon among roses or Bakounine with his terrible prose of a nihilist. Years ago I read and doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis’s interesting “1849,” with its fallacious denial of Wagner’s revolutionary behavior. Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime inspirer. His very ringing of the church bells during the row is a symbol of his attitude. And then he ran away, luckily enough for the world of music, while his companions, Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured and imprisoned. Wagner might be called the Joseph Proudhon of composers—his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of Misery (a subtitle, by the way).
And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors, prosateurs, journalists, and musicians might not be included under the roof of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium, whose powerful bass hurls imprecations at the present order; Georges Eckhoud, Maurice Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier, whose eloquent bronzes are a protest against the misery of the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin, William Blake, William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrès, the late Stéphane Mallarmé, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Félicien Rops, the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose men and women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to discern across the frame of his pictures febrile visions of terror; and the great Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon, Huysmans, Heine, Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,—is not the art of these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal expression of anarchic revolt?
Przybyszewski asserts that physicians do not busy themselves with history; if they did, they would know that decadence has always existed; that it is not decadence at all, but merely a phase of development as important as normality: Normality is stupidity, decadence is genius! Is there, he asks, a more notable case of the abnormal than the prophet of Protestantism, Martin Luther?
They are all children of Satan, he cries, those great ones who for the sake of the idea sacrifice the peace of thousands, as Alexander and Napoleon; or those who spoil the dreams of youth, Socrates and Schopenhauer; or those who venture into the depths and love sin because only sin has depth, Poe and Rops; and those who love pain for the sake of pain and ascend the Golgotha of mankind, Chopin and Schumann. Satan was the first philosopher, the first anarchist; and pain is at the bottom of all art, and with Satan, the father of illusions! It is wise to stop here, else might we become entangled in a Miltonic genealogy of the angels. I give the foregoing list to show how easy it is to twist a theory to one’s own point of view. The decadence theory is silly; and equally absurd is Przybyszewski’s idea that the normal is the stupid. This Pole seems anything but normal or stupid. He now writes plays in the Strindberg style; formerly he lectured on Chopin, and played the F sharp minor polonaise—he was possessed by the key of F sharp minor, and saw “soul-states” whenever a composer wrote in that tonality! Audition colorée, this?