"And now for the second movement. My boy, you always had a marked gift for the lyrical. Give us your romanza--the romanza, I should say, born of your good lady!"
He answered me shortly: "There is no romance, I"ve subst.i.tuted for it a scherzo. You know that"s what Saint-Saens and all the fellows are doing nowadays, Scharwenka too."
I fancied that there was a shade of eager anxiety in his explanation, but I said nothing and listened.
The scherzo--or what is called the scherzo since Beethoven and Schumann--was too heavy, inelastic in its tread, to dispel the blue-devils. It was conspicuous for its absence of upspringing delicacy, light, arch merriment. It was the sad, bitter joking of a man upon whose soul life has graven pain and remorse, and before the trio was reached I found myself watching the young composer"s face. I knew that, like all modern music students, he had absorbed in Germany some of that scholastic pessimism we encounter in the Brahms music, but I had hoped that a mere fashion of the day would not poison the springs of this fresh personality.
Yet here I was confronted with a painful confession that life had brought the lad more than its quantum of spiritual and physical hardship; he was telling me all this in his music, for his was too subjective a talent to ape the artificial, grand, objective manner.
Without waiting for comment he plunged into his last movement which proved to be a series of ingenious variations--a prolonged pa.s.sacaglia--in which the grace and dexterity of his melodic invention, contrapuntal skill and symmetrical sense were gratifyingly present.
I was in no flattering vein when I told him he had made a big jump in his work.
"But, Arthur, why so much in the Brahms manner? Has your wife turned your love of Sh.e.l.ley to Browning worship?" I jestingly concluded.
"My wife, if she wishes, can turn Sh.e.l.ley into slush," he answered bitterly. This shocked me. I felt like putting questions, but how could I? Had I not been one of the many who advised the fellow to marry Ellenora Bishop? Had we not all fancied that in her strength was his security, his hope for future artistic triumphs?
He went on as his fingers s.n.a.t.c.hed at fugitive harmonic experimentings: "It"s not all right up town. I wish that you would run up some night.
You"ve not seen Ellenora for months, and perhaps you could induce her to put the brake on." I was puzzled. Putting the brake on a woman is always a risky experiment, especially if she happens to be wedded. Besides, what did he mean?
"I mean," he replied to my tentative look of inquiry, "that Ellenora is going down-hill with her artistic theories of literature, and I mean that she has made our house a devilish unpleasant place to live in."
I hastily promised to call in a few days, and after seeing him to the door, and bidding him cheer up, I returned to the portrait of Mrs.
Beacon, and felt savage at the noisiness of color and monotony of tonal values in the picture.
"Good Lord, why will artists marry?" I irritably asked of my subject in the frame. Her sleek Knickerbocker smile further angered me, and I went to my club and drank coffee until long after midnight.
II
If, as her friends a.s.serted, Ellenora Vibert"s ugliness had softened I did not notice it. She was one of those few women in the world that marriage had not improved. Her eyes were colder, more secret; her jaw crueller, her lips wider and harder at the edges. She welcomed me with distinguished loftiness, and I soon felt the unpleasant key in which the household tune was being played. It was amiable enough, this flat near Mount Morris Park in Harlem. The Viberts had taste, and their music-room was charming in its reticent scheme of decoration--a Steinway grand piano, a low crowded book-case with a Rodin cast, a superb mezzotint of Leonardo"s Mona Lisa after Calmatta, revealing the admirable poise of sweetly folded hands--surely the most wonderful hands ever painted--while the polished floor, comforting couches and open fireplace proclaimed this apartment as the composition of refined people.
I am alive to the harmonies of domestic interiors, and I sensed the dissonance in the lives of these two.
Soon we three warmed the cold air of restraint and fell to discussing life, art, literature, friends, and even ourselves. I could not withhold my admiration for Ellenora"s cleverness. She was transposed to a coa.r.s.er key, and there was a suggestion of the overblown in her figure; but her tongue was sharp, and she wore the air of a woman who was mistress of her mansion. Presently Arthur relapsed into silence, lounged and smoked in the corner, while Mrs. Vibert expounded her ideas of literary form, and finally confessed that she had given up the notion of a novel.
"You see, the novel is overdone to-day. The short story ended with de Maupa.s.sant. The only hope we have, we few who take our art seriously, is to compress the short story within a page and distil into it the vivid impression of a moment, a lifetime, an eternity." She looked intellectually triumphant. I interposed a mild objection.
"This form, my dear lady, is it a fitting vehicle for so much weight of expression? I admire, as do you, the sonnet, but I can never be brought to believe that Milton could have compressed "Paradise Lost" within a sonnet."
"Then all the worse for Milton," she tartly replied. "Look at the Chopin prelude. Will you contradict me if I say that in one prelude this composer crowds the experience of a lifetime? When he expands his idea into the sonata form how diffuse, how garrulous he becomes!"
I ventured to remark that Chopin had no special talent for the sonata form.
"The sonata form is dead," the lady a.s.serted. "Am I not right, Arthur?"
"Yes, my dear," came from Arthur. I fully understood his depression.
"No," she continued, magnificently, "it is this blind adherence to older forms that crushes all originality to-day. There is Arthur with his sonata form--as if Wagner did not create his own form!"
"But I am no Wagner," interrupted her husband.
"Indeed, you are not," said Mrs. Vibert rather viciously. "If you were we wouldn"t be in Harlem. You men to-day lack the initiative. The way must be shown you by woman; yes, by poor, crushed woman--woman who has no originality according to your Schopenhauer; woman whose sensations, not being of coa.r.s.e enough fibre to be measured by the rude emotion-weighing machine of Lombroso, are therefore adjudged of less delicacy than man"s. What fools your scientific men be!"
Mrs. Vibert was a bit pedantic, but she could talk to the point when aroused.
"You discredit the idea of compressing an epic into a sonnet, a sonata into a prelude; well, I"ve attempted something of the sort, and even if you laugh I"ll stick to my argument. I"ve attempted to tell the biological history of the cosmos in a single page.... I begin with the unicellular protozoa and finally reach humanity; and to give it dramatic interest I trace a germ-cell from eternity until the now, and you shall hear its history this moment." She stopped for breath, and I wondered if Mrs. Somerville or George Eliot had ever talked in this astounding fashion. I was certain that she must have read Iamblichus and Porphyry.
Arthur on his couch groaned.
"Mock if you please," Ellenora"s strong face flushed, "but women will yet touch the rim of finer issues. Paul G.o.ddard, who is a critic I respect, told me I had struck the right note of modernity in my prose poem." I winced at the "note of modernity," and could not help seeing the color mount to Arthur"s brow when the man"s name was mentioned.
"And pray who is Mr. Paul G.o.ddard?" I asked while Mrs. Vibert was absent in search of her ma.n.u.script. Arthur replied indifferently, "Oh, a rich young man who went to Bayreuth last summer and poses as a Wagnerite ever since! He also plays the piano!"
Arthur"s tone was sarcastic; he did not like Paul G.o.ddard and his critical attentions to his wife. The poor lad looked so disheartened, so crushed by the rigid intellectual atmosphere about him, that I put no further question and was glad when Mrs. Vibert returned with her prose poem.
She read it to us and it was called
FRUSTRATE
O the misty plaint of the Unconceived! O crystal incuriousness of the monad! The faint swarming toward the light and the rending of the sphere of hope, frustrate, inutile. I am the seed called Life; I am he, I am she. We walk, swim, totter, and blend. Through the ages I lay in the vast basin of Time; I am called by Fate into the Now. On pulsing terraces, under a moon blood-red, I dreamed of the mighty confluence. About me were my kinsfolk. Full of dumb pain we pleasured our centuries with antic.i.p.ation; we watched as we gamed away the hours. From Asiatic plateaus we swept to Nilotic slime. We roamed in primeval forests, vast and arboreally sublime, or sported with the behemoth and listened to the serpent"s sinuous irony; we chattered with the sacred apes and mouthed at the moon; and in the Long Ago wore the carapace and danced forthright figures on coprolitic sands--sands stretching into the bosom of the earth, sands woven of windy reaches hemming the sun.... We lay with the grains of corn in Egyptian granaries, and saw them fructify under the smile of the sphinx; we buzzed in the ambient atmosphere, gaudy dragon-flies or whirling motes in full cry chased by humming-birds. Then from some cold crag we launched with wings of fire-breathing pestilence and fell fathoms under sea to war with lizard-fish and narwhal.
For us the supreme surrender, the joy of the expected....
With cynical glance we saw the Buddha give way to other G.o.ds. We watched protoplasmically the birth of planets and the confusion of creation. We saw horned monsters become gentle ruminants, and heard the scream of the pterodactyl on the tree-tops dwindle to child"s laughter. We heard, we saw, we felt, we knew. Yet hoped we on; every monad has his day.... One by one the billions disintegrated and floated into formal life. And we watched and waited. Our evolution had been the latest delayed; until heartsick with longing many of my brethren wished for annihilation....
At last I was alone, save one. The time of my fruition was not afar. O! for the moment when I should realize my dreams.... I saw this last one swept away, swept down the vistas toward life, the thunderous surge singing in her ears. O! that my time would come. At last, after vague alarms, I was summoned....
The hour had struck; eternity was left behind, eternity loomed ahead, implacable, furrowed with Time"s scars. I hastened to the only one in the Cosmos. I tarried not as I ran in the race. Moments were precious; a second meant aeons; and crashing into the light--Alas! I was too late.... Of what avail my travail, my countless, cruel preparations? O Chance! O Fate! I am one of the silent mult.i.tude of the Frustrate....
When she had finished reading this strange study in evolution she awaited criticism, but with the air of an armed warrior.
"Really, Mrs. Vibert, I am overwhelmed," I managed to stammer. "Only the most delicate symbolism may dare to express such a theme." I felt that this was very vague--but what could I say?
She regarded me sternly. Arthur, catching what I had uttered at random, burst in:
"There, Ellenora, I am sure he is right! You leave nothing to the imagination. Now a subtile veiled idealism--" He was not allowed to finish.
"Veiled idealism indeed!" she angrily cried. "You composers dare to say all manner of wickedness in your music, but it is idealized by tone, isn"t it? What else is music but a sort of sensuous algebra? Or a vast shadow-picture of the emotions?... Why can"t language have the same privilege? Why must it be bridled because the world speaks it?"
"Just because of that reason, dear madame," I soothingly said; "because reticence is art"s brightest crown; because Zola never gives us a real human doc.u.ment and Flaubert does; and the difference is a difference of method. Flaubert is magnificently naked, but his nakedness implicates nothing that is--"
"As usual you men enter the zone of silence when a woman"s work is mentioned. I did not attempt a monument in the frozen manner of your Flaubert. Mr. G.o.ddard believes--" There was a crash of music from the piano as Arthur endeavored to change the conversation. His wife"s fine indifference was tantalizing, also instructive.
"Mr. G.o.ddard believes with Nietzsche that individualism is the only salvation of the race. My husband, Mr. Vibert, believes in altruism, self-sacrifice and all the old-fashioned flummery of outworn creeds."
"I wonder if Mr. Vibert has heard of Nietzsche"s "Thou goest to women?
Remember thy whip"?" I meekly questioned. Ellenora looked at her husband and shrugged her shoulders; then picking up her ma.n.u.script she left the room with the tread of a soldier, laughing all the while.
"An exasperating girl!" I mused, as Vibert, after some graceful swallow-like flights on the keyboard, finally played that most dolorously delicious of Chopin"s nocturnes, the one in C sharp minor.