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.
THE PROFESSOR
The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon in our contemporary life.”
In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships. The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the scholar and the gentleman.
The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars. With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America. He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated “Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too. And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world of poetry.
His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him. His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.”