“Talking of a court-martial that was sitting upon a very momentous public occasion, he (Dr. Johnson) expressed much doubt of an enlightened decision; and said that perhaps there was not a member of it who in the whole course of his life had ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities.”
On the other hand, I remember someone saying at the time that although the decisions of court-martials were nearly always wrong, technically, in their form, they were nearly always right in substance.
Most English people whom I saw during this period believed in Dreyfus’ innocence, but not all. Among the fervent believers in his guilt was Arthur Strong, then librarian in the House of Lords.
I had made Arthur Strong’s acquaintance at Edmund Gosse’s house, and he was from that moment kind to me. In appearance he was like pictures of Erasmus (not that I have ever seen one!)—the perfect incarnation of a scholar. He knew and understood everything, but forgave little. And the smoke from the flame of his learning and his intellect sometimes got into people’s eyes. I frequently saw him in London, and once he came to see me in Paris. I remember his looking at the bookshelf and the pictures on my walls, photographs of pictures by Giorgione and Titian.
He approved of Dyce’s Shakespeare; Dyce’s, he said, was a good edition. He disapproved of Stevenson; Stevenson, he said, had fancy but no imagination. Giorgione, he said, was to Titian what Marcello was to Gluck. Talking of the Dreyfus case, he said if English people would only understand that the Dreyfusards are the same as pro-Boers in England they would talk differently. He said the French were supreme critics of verse. They were like the Persians, they stood no nonsense about poetry. To them it was either good or bad verse. He used to say that there had never been since Johnson’s Lives of the Poets a critical review of English literature as big and as broad. We might find fault with some of Dr. Johnson’s judgments, but there had been nothing to replace it.
He admired Byron as much as my father did, and in the same way. He thought him a towering genius. Shelley likewise, but not Wordsworth. Wordsworth, he said, was like Taine and Wagner. They were all three just on the wrong lines, each one of them on a tremendous scale, but wrong nevertheless.
We used to have fierce arguments about Wagner. Wagner’s work, he used to say, was not dramatic but scenic. He invented a vastly effective situation but left it at that; neither the action nor the music moved on. He thought Mozart was infinitely more dramatic. He said that Wagner could not write a melody, and that if he did, with the exception of the Preislied in the Meistersinger, it was commonplace and vulgar. The “Leit-Motivs” were not complete melodies.
I was at that time a fervent Wagnerite, and used to contest his points hotly. Curiously enough, six years later, his ideas on Wagner found an echo in a letter which I received from Vernon Lee, after she had been to Bayreuth. This is what she wrote:
“About Bayreuth. Although I expected little enjoyment, I have been miserably disappointed. It is so much less out of the common than I expected. Just a theatre like any other, save for the light being turned out entirely instead of half-cock only, and the only beautiful things an opera ever offers to the eye, namely the fiddles, great and small, and the enchanting kettle-drums, being stuffed out of sight. The mise en scène is more grotesquely bad than almost any other opera get-up. What is insufferable to me is the atrocious way in which Wagner takes himself seriously: the self-complacent (if I may coin an absurd expression) auto-religion implied in his hateful unbridled long-windedness and reiteration; the element of degenerate priesthood in it all, like English people contemplating their hat linings in Church, their prudery about the name of God… Surely all great art of every sort has a certain coyness which makes it give itself always less than wanted: look at Mozart, he will give you a whole act of varying dramatic expression (think of the first act of Don Giovanni) of deepest, briefest pathos and swift humour, a dozen perfect songs or concerted pieces, in the time it takes for that old poseur, Amfortas, to squirm over his Grail, or Kundry to break the ice with Parsifal. Even Tristan, so incomparably finer than Wagner’s other things, is indecent through its dragging out of situations, its bellowing out of confessions which the natural human being dreads to profane by showing or expressing. With all this goes what to me is the chief psychological explanation of Wagner (and of his hypnotic power over some persons), his extreme slowness of vital tempo. Listening to him is like finding oneself in a planet where the Time’s unit is bigger than ours: one is on the stretch, devitalised as by the contemplation of a slug. Do you know who has the same peculiarity? D’Annunzio. And it is this which makes his literature, like Wagner’s music, so undramatic, so sensual, so inhuman, turn everything into a process of gloating. I had the good fortune (like Nietzsche) of hearing Carmen just after the Ring. The humanity of it, and the modesty also, are due very much to the incomparable briskness of the rhythm and phrasing; the mind is made to work quickly, the life of the hearer to brace itself to action.”
I think Arthur Strong would have agreed with every word of this.